Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/105

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
SANKHYA AND YOGA.
97

of Prakriti, the source and light of the intelligence are actively contributed by the Purusha; he is not only the witness, but the Lord and Knower, master of knowledge and will, jnata ishvarah. He is the supreme cause of the action of Prakriti, the supreme cause of its withdrawal from action. In the Sankhya analysis Purusha and Prakriti in their dualism are the cause of: the cosmos; in this synthetic Sankhya Purusha by hisPrakriti is the cause of the cosmos. We see at once how far we have travelled from the rigid purism of the traditional analysis.

But what of the one self immutable, immobile, eternally free, with which the Gita began? That is free from all change or involution in change, avikarya, unborn, unmanifested, the Brahman, yet it is that “by which all this is extended.” Therefore it would seem that the principle of the Ishwara is in its being; if it is immobile, it is yet the cause and lord of all action and mobility. But how ? And what of the multiplicity of conscious beings in the cosmos? They do not seem to be the Lord, but rather very much not the Lord, anish; for they are subject to the action of the three gunas and the delusion of the ego-sense, and if, as the Gita seems to say, they are all the one self, how did this involution, subjection and delusion come about or how is it explicable except by the pure passivity of the Parusha? And whence the multiplicity? or how is it that the one self in one body and mind attains to liberation while in others it remains under the delusion of bondage. These are difficulties which cannot be passed by without a solution.

13