Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/285

Rh composite of the gunas,—and the true self which is, indeed, the upholder, the possessor and the lord of Nature and figured in her, but is not itself the mutable natural personality. The way to be free must then be to get rid of the desires of this desire-soul and the false self-view of this ego. “Having become free from desire and egoism,” cries the Teacher, “fight with all the fever of thy soul passed away from thee,”—mnirdshir nirmamo bhtitwd.

This view of our being starts from the Sankhya analysis of thedual principle in our nature, Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha is inactive, akartd ; Prakritiis active, kartri : Purusha is the being full of the light of conscious- ness ; Prakriti is the Nature, mechanical, reflecting all her works in the conscious witness, the Purusha. Prakriti works by the inequality of her three modes, gunas, in perpetual collision and intermixture and mutation with each other ; and by her function of ego-mind she gets the Purusha to identify himself with all this working and so creates the sense of active, mutable, temporal personality in the silent eternity of the Self. The impure natural consciousness, overclouds the pure soul-consciousness ; the mind forgets the Person in-the ego and the person- ality ; we suffer the discriminating intelligence to be carried away by the sense-mind and its outgoing func- tions and by the desire of the life and the body. So long as the Purusha sanctions this action, ego and desire and ignorance must govern the natural being.

But if this were all, then the only remedy would be to withdraw altogether the sanction, suffer or compel all our nature by this withdrawal to fall into a motionless