Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/239

Rh to ends : on the contrary a perfect working is easier to action done tranquilly in Yoga than to action done in the blindness of hopes and fears, lamed by the judg- ments of the stumbling reason, running about amidst the eager trepidations of the hasty human will: Yoga, says the Gita elsewhere, is the true skill in works, yogah karmasu kaugalam. But all this is done impersonally by the action of a great universal light and power operating through the individual nature. The Karma- yogin knows that the power given to him will be adapt- ed to the fruit decreed, the divine thought behind the work equated with the work he has to do, the will in him—which will not be wish or desire, but an impe:- sonal drive of conscious power directed towards an aim not his own,—subtly regulated in its energy and direc- tion by the divine wisdom. The result may be success, as the ordinary mind understands it, or it may seem to that mind to be defeat and failure; but to him it is always the success intended, not by him, but by the all- "wise manipulator of action and result, because he does not seek for victory, but only for the fulfilment of the divine will and wisdom which works out its ends through apparent failure as well as and often with greater force than through apparent triumph. Arjuna, bidden to fight, is assured of victory;but even if certain defeat were before him, he must still fight because that is the present work assigned to him as his immediate share in the great sum of energies by which the divine will is surely accomplished.

The liberated man has no personal hopes ; he does not seize on things as his personal possessions ;he re- ceives what the divine Will brings him, covets nothing, is jealous of none: what comes to him he takes without