Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/183

Rh The Indian social tendency has been to subordinate the individual to the claims of society, but Indian ~ religious thought and spiritual seeking have been always loftily individualistic in their aims. An Indian system of thought like the Gita’s cannot possibly fail to put first the development of the individual, the highest need of the individual, his claim to discover ~and exercise his largest spiritual freedom, greatness, splendour, royalty,—his aim to develop into the illu- mined seer and king in the spiritual sense of seerdom and kingship, which was the first great charter of the ideal humanity promulgated by the ancient Vedicsages. To exceed himself was their goal for the individual, not by losing all his personal aims in the aims of an organised human society, but by enlarging, heightening, aggrandizing himself into the consciousness of the Godhead. The rule given here by the Gita is the rule for the master man, the superman, the divinised human being, the Best, not in the sense of any Nietzschean any onesided and lopsided, any Olympian, Apollinian or Dionysian, any angelic or demoniac supermanhood, but in that of the man whose whole personality has becen offered up into the being, nature and conscious- ness of the one transcendent and universal Divinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self, has been divinised.

To exalt oneself out of the lower imperfect Prakriti, traigunyamayi Mdyd, into unity with the divine being, consciousness and nature,* madblidvam dgatih, is the object of the Yoga. But when this object is fulfilled, when the man isin the Brahmic status and sees no