Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/314

306 only within us but within all these existences, exists not only above and apart from all these universal happen- ings, but pervades them, contains them and is extended in them. Therefore by Nirvana in the Brahman must be meant a destruction or extinction of the limited separative consciousness, falsifying and dividing, which is brought into being on the surface of existence by the lower Maya of the three gunas, and entry into Nirvana is a passage into this other troe unifying consciousness which is the heart of existence and its continent andits whole containing and supporting, its whole original an eternal and final truth. Nirvana when we gain it, enter into it,is not only within us, but all around, abksto- vartate, because this is not only the Brahman-conscious- ness which lives secret within us, but the Brahman- consciousness in which we live. Itis the Self which we are within, the supreme Self of our individual being but also the Self which we are without, the supreme Self of the universe, the self of all existences. By living in that self we live in all, and no longer in our egoistic being alone; by oneness with that self a steadfast oneness with all in the universe becomes the very nature of our being and the root status of our active conscious- ‘ness and root motive of all our action.

But again we get immediately afterwards two verses which might seem to lead away ‘from this con- clusion. “Having put outside of himself all outward touches and concentrated the vision between the eye- brows and made equal the prana and the apana moving within the nostrils, having controlled the senses, the mind and the understanding, the sage devoted to liber- ation, from whom desire and wrath and fear have passed