Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/275

Rh an image from Roman institutions, the Stoic freedom is that of the lzbertus, the freedman, who is still really a dependent on the power that once held him enslaved; his is a freedom allowed by Nature because he has merited it. The freedom of the Gita is that of the free- man, the true freedom of the birth into the higher nature, self-existent in its divinity. Whatever he does and however he lives, the free soul lives in the Divine; he is the privileged child of the mansion, bdlavat, who cannot err or fall because all he is and does is full of the Perfect, the All-blissful, the All-loving, the All- beautiful. The kingdom which he enjoys, rajyam samr’ tddham, is a sweet and happy dominion of which it may be said, in the pregnant phrase of the Greek thinker, “The kingdom is of the child”.

The knowledge of the philosopher is that of the true nature of mundane existence, the transience of out- ward things, the vanity of the world’s differences gnd distinctions, the superiority of the inner calm, peace, light, self-dependence. It is an equality of philosophic indifference ; it brings a high calm, but not the greater spiritual joy ; it is an isolated freedom, a wisdom like that of the Lucretian sage high in his superiority upon the cliff-top whence he looks down on men tossed still upon the tempestuous waters from which he has escaped, —in the end something after all aloof and ineffective. TheGita admits the philosophic motive of indifference as a preliminary movement ; but the indifference to which it finally arrives, if indeed that inadequate word can be at all applied, has nothing in it of the philosophic aloofness. It is indeed a position as of one seated, above, but as the Divine is seated above,