Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/274

266 with one’s nature, maintained by a constant vigilance and control against its natural rebellions: it gives a noble peace, an austere happiness, but not the supreme joy of the liberated self living not by a rule, but in the pure, easy, spontaneous perfection of its divine being, so that “however it may act and live, it acts and lives in the Divine,” because here perfection is not only attained but possessed in its own right and has no longer to be maintained by effort, tor it'has become the very nature of the soul's being. The Gita accepts the endurance and fortitude of our siruggle with the lower nature as a preliminary movement ; but if a certain mastery comes by our individual strength, the freedom of mastery only comes by our union with God, by a merging or dwelling of the personality in the onte divine Person and the loss of the personal will in thz divine Will. There is a divine Master of Nature and her works, above her though inhabiting her, who is our highest being and our universal self ; to be one with him is to make ourselves divine. By union with God we enter into a supreme freedom and a supreme mastery. The ideal of the Stoic, the sage who is king because by self-rule he be- comes master also of outward conditions, resembles superficially the Vedantic idea of the self-ruler and all- ruler, swardt samrdt; but itis on a lower plane. The Stoic ~ kingship is maintained by a force put uponself and en- vironment; the entirely liberated kingship of the Yogin exists naturally by theeternal royalty of the divine nature, a union with its unfettered universality, a finallvunforced dwelling in its superiority to the instrumental nature through which it acts. His mastery over things is be- cause he has become one soul withall things. To take