Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/310

302 of divine works which are urged by the motive power of divine love and constituted by a perfected divine Nature, it is the vision of the Divine in the world harmonised with a realisation of the Divinein the self which makes action and devotion possible to the liberated man, and notonly possible but inevitable in the perfect mode of his being.

But the direct way to union lies through the firm realisation of the immutable self, and it is the Gita’s insistence on this as a first necessity, after which alone works and devotion can acquire their whole divine meaning; that makes it possible for us to mistake its drift. For if we take the passages in which it insists most rigorously upon this necessity and neglect to ob- serve the whole sequence of thought in which they stand, we may easily come to the conclusion that it does really teach actionless absorption as the final state of the soul and action only as a preliminary means towards stillness in the motionless Immutable. It is in the close of the fifth and throughout the sixth chapter that this in- sistence is strongest and most comprehensive. There we get the description of a Yoga which would seem at first sight to be incompatible with works and we get the repeated use of the word Nirvana to describe the status to which the Yogin arrives.

The mark of this status is the supreme peace of a calm self-extinction, cintim nirvana-paramim, and, as if to make it quite clear that it is not the Buddhist’s Nirvana in a blissful negation of being, but the Vedantic loss of a partialin a perfect being that it intends, the Gita uses always the phrase brahma-nirvana, extinction in the Brahman ; and the Brahman here certainly seems