Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/305

Rh personality; he is not either merely impersonal or personal, but one and the same being in two aspects; he is the impersonal-personal, nirguno gunî, of the Upanishad, By him all has been willed even before it is worked out,—as he says of the still living Dhartrarashtrians "already have they been slain by Me" mayá nihàtah purvam eva,—and the working out by Nature is only the result of his Will; yet by virtue of his impersonality behind he is not bound by his works, kartâram akartáram.

But man as the individual self, owing to his ignorant self-identification with the work and the becoming, as if that were all his soul and not a power of his soul, a power proceeding from it, is bewildered by the ego-sense. He thinks that it is he and others who are doing all; he does not see that Nature is doing all and that he is misrepresenting and disfiguring her works to himself by ignorance and attachment. He is enslaved by the gunas, now hampered in the dull case of tamas, now blown by the strong winds of rajas, now limited by the partial lights of sattwa, not distinguishing himself at all from the nature-mind which alone is thus modified by the gunas. He is therefore mastered by pain and pleasure, hapinesshappiness [sic] and grief, desire and passion, attachment and disgust: he has no freedom.

He must, to be free, get back from the Nature action to the status of the Akshara; he will then be trigunátìta, beyond the gunas. Knowing himself as the Akshara Brahman, the unchanging Purusha, he will know himself as an immutable impersonal self, the Atman, tranquilly observing and impartially supporting the action,