Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/289

Rh avasddayet ; the latter is the control of the lower by the higher self, which successfully gives to those powers their right action and their maximum efficiency,—yogah karmasu kaugalam. This nature of samyama is made very clear by the Gita in the opening of its sixth chapter, “By the self thoushouldst deliver the self, thou shouldst not depress and cast down the self (whether by self- indulgence or suppression) ; for the self is the friend of the self and the self is the enemy. To the man is his self a friend in whom the (lower) self has been conquered by the (higher) self, but to him who is not in possession of his (higher) self, the (lower) self is as if an enemy and itactsas an enemy.” When one has conquered one’s self and attained to the calm of a perfect self-mastery and self-possession, then is the supreme self in a man founded and poised even in his outwardly conscious human being, samdhita. In other words, to master the lower self by the higher, the natural self by the spiritual is the way of man’s perfection and liberation.

Here then is a very great qualification of the de- terminism of Nature, a precise limitation of its meaning and scope. How the passage from subjection to mastery works out is best seen if we observe the working of the gunas in the scale of Nature from the bottom to the top. At the bottom are the existences in which the principle of tamas is supreme, the beings who have not yet attained to the light of self-consciousness and are utterly driven by the current of Nature. There is a will even in the " atom, but we see clearly enough that it is not free-will, because it is mechanical and the atom does not possess the will, but is possessed by it. Here the buddhi, the element of intelligence and will in Prakriti, is actually

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