Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/292

284 blindly according to his impulses and passions, then the law of his being is not rightly worked out, swadharmah su-anushthitah, he has not acted according to the full measure of his humanity, but even as might the animal. Itis true that the principle of rajas or the principle of tamas gets hold of his buddh: and induces it to justify any and every action he commits or any avoidance of action; but still the justification or at least the reference to the buddhi must be there either before or after the action is committed. And, besides, in man saftwa is awake and acts not only as intelligence and intelligent will, but as a seeking for light, for right knowledge and right action according to that knowledge, as a sympa- thetic perception of the existence and claims of others, as an attempt to know the higher law of his own nature, which the sattwic principle in him creates, and to obey it, and as a conception of the greater peace and happiness which virtue, knowledge and sympathy bring in their train. He knows more or less imperfectly that he has to govern his rajasic and tamasic by his sattwic nature and that thither tends the perfection of his normal humanity.

But is the condition of the predominantly sattwic nature freedom and is this will in man a free will ? That. the Gita from the standpoint of a higher consciousness in which alone is true freedom, denies. The buddhi or conscious intelligent will is still an instrument of Nature and when it acts, even in the most sattwic sense, it is still Nature which acts and the soul which is carried on the wheel by Maya. At any rate at least nine-tenths of our freedom of will is a palpable fiction ; that will is created and determined not by its own self-existent action at a