Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/247

Rh when the self-knowledge within him is released from this dark envelope, that knowledge lights up like a sun the real self within him ; he knows himself then to be the soul supreme above the instruments of Nature. Pure, infinite, inviolable, immutable, he is no longer affected ; no longer does he imagine himself to be modified by her workings. By complete identification with the Impersonal he can, too, release himself from the necessity of returning by birth into her movement.

And yet this liberation does not at all prevent him from acting. Only, he knows that it is not he. who is active, but the modes, the qualities of Nature, her triple gunas. ‘“The'man who knows the principles of things thinks, his mind in Yoga (with the inactive Impersonal), “I am doing nothing”; when he sees, hears, tastes, smells, eats, moves, sleeps, breathes, speaks, takes, ejects, opens his eyes or closes them, he holds that it is only " the senses acting upon the objects of the senses.” He himself, safe in the immutable, unmodified squl, is be- yond the grip of the three gunas, frigundtita; he is neither sattwic, rajasic nor tamasic ; he sees with a clear untroubled spirit the alternations of the natural modes and qualities in his'action, their rhythmic play of light and happiness, activity and force, rest and inertia. This superiority of the calm soul observing its action but not involved in it, this fraigunatitya, is also a high sign of the divine worker. By itself the idea might lead to a doctrine of the mechanical determinism of Nature and the perfect aloofness and irresponsibility of the soul ; but the Gita effectively avoids this fault of an in- sufficient thought by its illumining supertheistic idea of the Purushottama. It makes it clear that it is not in