Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/260

252 the senses,”. vishaydn indriyaig chavan, but with senses subject to the self, freed from liking and disliking, that one gets into a large and sweet clearness of soul and temperament in which passion and grief find no place. All desires have to enter into the soul, as waters into the sea, and yet it has to remain immovable, filled but not disturbed : so in the end all desires can be abandoned. To be freed from wrath and passion and fear and attrac- tion is repeatedly stressed as a neeessary condition of the liberated status, and for this we must learn to bear their shocks, which cannot be done without exposing our- selves to their causes. ‘“He who can bear here in the body the velocity of wrath and desire, is the Yogin, the happy maun.” Titiksha, the will and power to endure, is -the means. “The material touches which cause heat and cold, happiness and pain, things transient which come and go, these learn to endure. For the man whom these.do not trouble nor pain, the firm and wise who is equal in pleasure and suffering, makes himself apt for immortality.” The equal-souled has to bear suffering and not hate, to receive pleasure and not rejoice. Even the physical affections are to be mastered by endurance and this too is part of the Stoic discipline. Age, death, - suffering, pain are not fled from, but accepted and van- quished by a high indifference.*Not to flee appalled from Nature in her lower masks, but to meet and con- quer her is the true instinct of the strong nature, purusharshabha, the leonine soul among men. Thus compellzd, she throws aside her mask and reveals to him his true nature as the free soul, not her subject but her king and lord, swardt, samvit.