Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/336

328 while we are subject to them, there can be for us no free- dom. Or it may be a sattwic action,and then we have the enlightene d personality which tries to live by reason or to realise some preferred ideal of good, truth or beauty; but thisreason is still subject to the appearances of Nature and these ideals are only changing phases of our personality in which we find in the end no sure rule or permanent satisfaction. We are still carried on a wheel of mutation, obeying in our circlings through the ego some Power within us and within all this, but not ourselves that Power or in union and communion with it. Still there is no freedom, no real mastery. Yet freedom is possible. For that we have to get first away into ourselves from the action of the external world upon our senses; that is to say, we have to live in- wardly and be able to hold back the natural running of the senses after their external objects. A mastery of the senses, an ability to do without all that they hanker after, is the first condition of the true soul-life; only so can we begin to feel that there is a scul within us which is other than the mutations of mind in its recept- ion of the touches of outward things, a soul which in its depths goes back to something self-existent, immutable, " tranquil, self-possessed, grandiose, serene and august, master of itself and unaffected by the eager runnings of our external nature. But this cannot be done sc long as we are subject to desire. For it is desire, the principle of all our superficial life, which satisfies itself with the “life of the senses and finds its whole account in the play of the passions. We must get rid then of desire and, that propensity of our natural being destroyed, the passions which are its emotional results will fall into quietude; for the joy and grief of possession and of loss,