Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/284

276 We speak of the soul being subject to Nature ; but on the other hand the Gita in distinguishing the proper- ties of the soul and Nature affirms that while Nature is the executrix, the soul is always the lord, Iskwara. It speaks here of the self being bewildered by egoism, but the real Self to the Vedantin is the divine, eternally free and self-aware. What then is this self thatis bewildered by Nature, this soul that is subject to her? The answer is that we are speaking here in the common parlance of our lower or mental view of things ; we are speaking of the apparent self, or the apparent soul,not of the real self, not of the true Purusha. It isreally the ego which is subject to Nature, inevitably because it is itself part of Nature, one functioning of her machinery ; but when the self- awareness in the mind-consciousness identifies itself with the ego, it creates the appearance of a lower self, an ego-self. And so too what we think of ordinarily as the soul is really the natural personality, not the true Person, the Purusha, but the desire-soul in us which is a reflection of the consciousness of the Purusha in the workings of Prakriti : it is, in fact, itself only an action of the three modes and therefore a part of Nature. Thus there are, we may say, two souls in us, the appar- ent or desire-soul, which changes with the mutations of the gunas and is entirely constituted and determined by them, and the free and eternal Purusha not limited by Nature and her gunas. We have two selves, the appar- ent self, which is only the ego, that mental centre in us which takes up this mutable action of Prakriti, this mutable personality, and which says “I am this per- sonality, I am this natural being who am doing these works,”—but the natural being is simply Nature, a