Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/302

294 only according to the possibilities of his becoming, can she act; she works out the becoming of his being. Her Karma is determined by Swabhava, the own-nature, the law of self-becoming of the soul, even though, because it is the agent and executive of the becoming, the action rather seems often to determine the nature. According to what we are, we act, and by our action we develop, we work out what we are. Nature is the action, the mutation, the becoming, and it is the Power that executes all these ; but the Soul is the conscious being from which that Power proceeds, from whose luminous stuff of consciousness she has drawn the vari- able will that changes and expresses its changesin her actions. And this Soul is One and Many ; it is the one Life-being out of which all life is constituted and it is all these living beings ; it is the cosmic Existent and it is all this multitude of cosmic existences, sarvabhiitin, for all these are One; all the many Purushas are in their original being the one and only Purusha. But the. mechanism of the ego-sense in Nature, which is part of her action, induces the mind to identify the soul’s consciousness with the limited becoming of the moment, with the sum of her active consciousness ina given field of space and time, with the result from moment to mo- ment of the sum of her past ﬁctions. It is possible to realise in a way the unity of all these beings even in Nature herself and to become aware of a cosmic Soul which is manifest in the whole action of cosmic Nature, Nature manifesting the Soul, the Soul constituting the Nature. But this is to become aware only of the great cosmic Becoming, which is not false or unreal, but the knowledge of which alone does not give us the true