Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/190

182 mirror by dust and which you must slay in order to live in the calm, clear, luminous truth of the spirit. The senses, mind and intellect are the seat of this eter- nal cause of imperfection and yet it is within this sense, mind and intellect, this play of the lower nature that you would limit your search for perfection! The effort is vain. The kinetic side of your natufe must first seek to add to itself the quietistic ; you must uplift yourself beyond this lower nature to that whichis above the three gunas, that which is founded in the highest principle, in the soul. Only when you have attained to peace of soul, can you become capable of a free and divine action. :

The quietist, the ascelic on the other hand cannot sec any possibility of perfection into which life and action enter. Are they not the very seat of bondage and imperfection? Is not all action imperfect in its nature, like a fire that must produce smoke, is not the principle of action itself rajasic, the father of desire, - a cause that must have its effect of obscuration of knowledge, its round of longing and success and failure, its oscillations of joy and grief, its.duality of virtue and sin ? God may be in the world, but heisnot of the world; he is a God of renunciation and not the Master or cause of our works ; the master of our works is desire and the cause of works is ignorance. 1f the world, the Kshara i$ in a sense a manifestation or a lila of the Divine, it is an imperfect play with the ignorance of Nature, an obscuration rather than a manifestation. That is surely evider‘from our very first glance at the nature of the world and does not the fullest experience of the world teach us always the same truth ? isit not