Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/313

Rh thus is to be in Nirvana. But the next verse is quite clear and decisive, “Yatis (those who practice self-mastery by Yoga and austerity) who are delivered from desire and wrath and have gained self-mastery, for them Nir- vana in the Brahman exists all about them, encompasses them, they already livein it because they have knowled- ge of the Self.”” That is to say, to have knowledge and possession of the self is to exist in Nirvana. This is clearly a large extension of the idea of Nirvana. Free- dom from all stain of the passions, the self-mastery of the equal mind on which that freedom is founded, equality to all beings, sarvabhiteshu, and beneficial love for all, final destruction of that doubt and obscurity of the ignorance which keeps us divided from the all-uni- fying Divine and the knowledge of the One Self within as and in all are evidently the conditions. of Nirvana which are laid down in these verses ot the Gita, go to constitute it and are its spiritual substance.

Thus Nirvana is clearly compatible with world- consciousness and with action in the world. For the sages who possess it are conscious of and in intimate relation by works with the Divine in the mutable uni- verse ; they are occupied with the good of all creatures, sarvabhilta-hite. They have not renounced the experiences of the Kshara Purusha, they have divinised them; for the Kshara, the Gita tells us, is all existences, sarvabhitini, and the doing universal good to all is a divine action in the mutability of Nature. This action in the world is not inconsistent with living in Brahman, it is rather its inevitable conditionand outward result because the Brah- man in whom we find Nirvana,the spiritual consciousnes in which we lose the separative ego consciousness, is not

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