Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/282

274 name of free will ; but the Gita regards nothing as free- dom which is not a complete liberation and mastery.

We have always to keep in mind the two great doc- trines which stand behind all the. Gita’s teachings with regard to the soul and Nature,—the Sankhya truth of the Purusha and Prakriti corrected and completed by the Vedantic truth of the threefold Purusha and the double Prakriti of which the lower form is the Maya of the three gunas and the higher is the divine nature and the true soul-nature. This is the key which reconciles and explains what we might have otherwise to leave as contradictions and inconsistencies. There are, in fact, different planes of our conscious existence, and what is practical truth on one plane ceases to be true, because it assumes a quite different appearance, as soon as we rise to a higher level from which we can see things more in the whole. Recent scientific discovery has shown, that man, animal, plant and even the metal have essentially the same vital reactions and they would, therefore, if each has a certain kind of what for want of a better word we must call nervous consciousness, possess the same basis of mechanical psychology. Yet if each of these could give its own mental account of what it experiences, we should have four quite different and largely contradictory statements of the same re- actions and the same natural principles, because they get, as we rise in the scale of being, a different meaning and value and have to be judged by a diffetent outlook. So it is with the levels of the human soul. What we now call in our ordinary mentality our free will and have a certain limited justification for so calling it, yet appears to the Yogin who has climbed beyond and to