Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/300

292 Nature, we shall have seen our subjection : but we shall not have seen the unborn self within which is above the action of the gunas ; we shall not have scen wherein lies our gate of freedom. Nature and ego are not all we are ; there is the free soul, the Purusha.

But in what consists this freedom of the Purusha ? The Purusha of the current Sankhya philosophy is free in the essence of his being, but because he is the non- doer, akartd ; and in so far as he permits Nature to throw on the inactive Soul her shadow of action, he- becomes bound phenomenally by the actions of the gunas and cannot recover his freedom except by dissociation from her and by cessation of her activities. If then a man casts from him the idea of himself as the doer or of the works as his, if, as the Gita enjoins, he fixes himself in the view of himself as the inactive non- doer, dtmdnam akartavam, and all action as not his own but Nature’s, as the play of her gunas, will not a like result follow ? The Sankhya Purusha is the giver of the sanction, but a passive sanction only, anumati, the work is entirely Nature’s ; essentially he is the witness and sustainer, not the governing and active consciousness of the universal Godhead. He is the Soul that sees and accepts, as a spectator accepts the representation of a play he is watching, not the Soul that both governs and watches the play planned by himself and staged in his own being. If then he withdraws the sanction, if he refuses to acknowledge the illusion of doing by which the play continues, he ceases also to be the sustainer and the action comes to a stop, since itis only for the pleasure of the witnessing conscious Soul that Nature performs it and only by his support that .she