Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/312

304 idea that the perfect release will come by a putting off of the body; a perfect spiritual freedom is to be won here upon earth and possessed and enjoyed in the human life, prâk çarira-vimokshanàt. It then continues, "He who has the inner happiness and the inner ease and repose and the inner light, that Yogin becomes the Brahman and reaches self-extinction in the Brahman, brahma-nirvánam." Here, very clearly, Nirvana means the extinction of the ego in the higher spiritual inner Self, that which is for ever timeless, spaceless, not bound by the chain of cause and effect and the changes of the world-mutation, self-blissful, self-illumined and for ever at peace. The Yogin ceases to be the ego, the little person limited by the mind and the body; he becomes the Brahman; he is unified in consciousness with the immutable divinity of the eternal Self which is immanent in his natural being.

But is this a going in into some deep sleep of samadhi away from all world-consciousness, or is it the preparatory movement for a dissolution of the natural being and the individual soul into some absolute Self who is utterly and for ever beyond Nature and her works, laya, moksha? Is that withdrawal necessary before we can enter into Nirvana, or is Nirvana, as the context seems to suggest, a state which can exist simultaneously with world consciousness and even in its own way include it? Apparently the latter, for in the suceeding verse the Gita goes on to say,"Sages win nirvana in the Brahman, they in whom the stains of sin are effaced and the knot of doubt is cut assunder, masters of their selves, who are occupied in doing good to all creatures, sarva-bhûtahite ratáh." That would almost seem to mean that to be