Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/208

200 blocked or limited in its movement or working and becomes helplessly subject to the controlling power, avagam vagdt ; Nature in this action becomes mechanic- al and its multitude of creatures are held helpless in the mechanism, not lords of their own action. On the con- trary the action implied in the word adhishthiya is a dwelling in, but also a standing upon and over the Nature, a conscious control and government by the indwelling Godhead, adhishtdtri devatd, in which the Purusha is not helplessly driven by the Prakriti through ignorance, but rather the Prakriti is full of the light and the will of the Purusha. Therefore in the norma) birth that which is loosed forth,— created, as we say,— is the multitude of creatures or becomings, bhitagrimam,; in the divine birth that whichis loosed forth, self- created, is the self-conscious self-existent being, dtmdnam ; for the Vedantic distinction between dima and bh#itdni is that which is made in European philoso- phy between the Being and its becomings. In both cases Maya is the means of the creation or manifesta- tion, but in the divine birth it is by self-Maya, dtma- mdyayd, not the involution in the lower Maya of the ignorance, but the conscious action of the self-existent Godhead in its phenomenal self-representation, well aware of its operation and its purpose,—that which the Gita calls elsewhere Yogamiya. In the ordinary birth Yogamaya is used by the Divine to envelop and conceal itself from the lower consciousness, so it becomes for us the means of the ignorance, Avidyd-maya ; but it is by this same Yogamay4 that self-knowledge also is made manifest in the return of our consciousness to the Divine, it is the means of the knowledge, Vidyd-mdya ; andin the divine birth it so operates—as the knowledge