Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/335

Rh psychological results and reactions within us. It cannot get beyond them because there is the principle of ego by which the reason differentiates the sam of the action of Nature upon our mind, will, sense, body from her action in other minds, wills, nervous organisms, bodies; and life to us means only the way she affects our ego and the way our ego replies to her touches. We know nothing else, we seem to be nothing else ; the soul itself seems then only a separate mass of mind, will, emotional and nervous reception and reaction. We may enlarge our ego, identify ourselves with the family, clan, class, country, nation, humanity even, but still the ego remains in all these disguises the root of our actions, only it finds a larger satisfaction of its separate being by these wider dealings with external things.

What acts in us is still the will of the natural being seizing upon the touches of the external world to satisfy the different phases of its personality, and the will in this seizing is always a will of desire and passion and attach- ment to our works and their results, the will of Nature in us; our personal will, we say, but our ego personality is- a creation of Nature, it is not and cannot be our free self, our independent being. The whole is the action of the modes of Nature. It may be a tamasic action, and then we have an inert personality subject to and satisfied with the mechanical round of things, incapable of any strong effort at a freer action and mastery., Or it may be the rajasic action, and then we have the rest- less active personality which throws itself upon Nature and tries to make her serve its needs and desires, but does not see that its ‘apparent mastery is a servitude, since its needs and desires are those of Nature, and