Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/236

228 best he can, by the light of the ideas of his time, the standards of his personality, his environment, or rather of many times, many personalities, layers of thought and ethics from many social stages all inextricably con- fused together, temporal and conventional amidst all their claim to absoluteness and immutable truth, empi- rical and irrational in spite of their aping of right reason. And finally the sage seeking in the midst of it all a highest foundation of fixed law and an original truth finds himself obliged to raise the last supreme question, whether all action and life itself are not a delusion and a snare and whether cessation from action, akarma, is not the last resort of the tired and disillu- sioned human soul. But, says Krishna, in this matter even the sages are perplexed and deluded. For by action, by works, not by inaction comes the knowledge and the release.

What then is the solution? what is that type of works by which we shall be released from the ills of life, from this doubt, this error, this grief, from this mixed, impure and baffling result even of our purest and best-intentioned acts, from these million forms of evil and suffering? No outward distinctions need be made, is the reply ; no work the world needs, be shunned; no limit or hedge set round our human activities; on the contrary, all actions should be done, but from a soul in Yoga with the Divine, yukiah krvitsna-karma-krit. Akar- ma, cessation from action is not the way; the man who has attained to the insight of the highest reason, per- ceives that such inaction is itself a’ constant action, a state subject to the workings of Nature and her qualities. The mind that takes refuge in physical imactivity, is