Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/182

174 concerned much more with the present affairs of the world than ‘with any high and far-off spiritual possibility. sceks to interpret them, as no more than a philosophi- cal and religious justification of social service, patriotic, cosmopolitan and humanitarian effort and attachment to the hundred eager social schemes and dreams which attract the modern intellect. It is not the rule of a large moral and intellectual altruisma which is here announced, but that of a spiritual unity with God and with this world of beings who dwell in him and in whom he dweclls. Itis not an injunction to subordinate the individual to society and humanity or immmolate egoism on the altar of the human collectivity, but to fulfil the individual in God and to sacrifice the ego on the one true altar of the all-embracing Divinity. The Gita moves on a plane of ideas and experiences higher than those of the modern mind which is at the stage indeed of a struggle to shake oft the coils of egoism, but is still mundane in its outlook and intellectual and moral rather than spititual in its temperament. Patriotism, cosmopolitanism, service of society, collectivism, humanitarianism, the ideal or religion of humanity are admirable aids towards our escape from our primary condition.of individual, family, social, national egoism into a secondary stage in which the individual realises, as far as it can be done on the intellectual, moral and emotional level,—on that leve] he cannot do it entirely in the right and perfect way, the way of the integral truth of his being,—the oneness of his existence with the existence of other beings. But the thought of the Gita reaches beyond to a tertiary condition of our developing self-consciousness towards which the secondary is only a partial stage of advance.