Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/141

The Yoga of the intelligent will and its culmi- nation in the Brahinic status, which occupies all the close of the second chapter, contains the seed of much of the teaching of the Gita,—its doctrine of desire- less works, of equality, of the rejection of outward renunciation, of devotion to the Divine ; but as yet all this is slight and obscure. What is most strongly emphasised as yet is the withdrawal of the will from the ordinary motive of human activities, desire, from man’s normal temperament of the sense-seeking thought and will with its passions and ignorance, and from its customary habit of troubled many-branching ideas and wishes to the desireless calm unity and passionless serenity of the Brahmic- poise. So inuch Arjuna has understood. He is not unfamiliar with all this ; it is the substance of the current teaching which points man to the path of knowledge and to the renun- ciation of life and works as his way of perfection. The intelligence withdrawing from sense and desire and human action and turning to the Highest, to the One, to the actionless Purusha, to the immobile, to the featureless Brahman, that surely is the eternal seed of knowledge. There is no room here for works, since works belong to the Ignorance; action is the very opposite of knowledge ; its seed is desire and its fruit 1s bondage. That is the orthodox philosophical doctrine, and Krishna seems quite to admit it when he says that works are far inferior to the Yoga of the intelligence. And yet works are insisted upon as part of the Yoga ;