Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/283

Rh whom our night is day and our day night, not free will at all, but a subjection to the modes of Nature. He regards the same facts, but from the higher outlook of the whole knower,k7"itsna-vit, while we view it altogether from the more limited mentality of our partial know- ledge akr'itsnavidah, which is an ignorance. What we vaunt of as our freedom is to him bondage.

The perception of the ignorance of our assumption of freedom while one is all the time in the meshes of this lower nature, is the view-point at which the Gita arrives and it is in contradiggion to this ignorant claim that it affirms the complete subjection of the ego-soul on this plane to the gunas. ‘“While the actions are being entirely done by the modes of Nature,” it says, “he whose self is bewildered by egoism thinks that it is his ‘I’ which is doing them. But one who knows the true principles of the divisions of the modes and of works, realises that it is the modes which are acting and reacting on each other and is not caught in them by attachment. Those who are bewildered by the modes, not knowers of the whole, let not the knower of the whole disturb in their mental standpoint. Giving up thy works to me, free from desire and egoism, fight delivered from the fever of thy soul.” Here there is the clear distinction between two levels of consciousness, two standpoints of action, that of the soul caught in the web of its egoistic nature and doing works with the idea, but not the reality of free will, under the impulsion of Nature, and that of the soul delivered- from its identification with the ego, observing, sanctioning and governing the works of Nature from above her.