Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/164

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ESSAYS ON THE GITA

and forms of the one great Existence in activity, means by which the action of the human being can be offered up to TRat of which his outward Existence is a part and with which his inmost self is one. They are ‘“ all born of work”; all proceed from and are ordained by the oie vast energy of the Divine which manifests itself in the universal karma and makes all the cosmic activity a pro- gressive offering to the one Self und Lord and of which the last stage for the human being is self-knowledge and the possession of thagdivine or Brahmic conscious- ness. “So knowing thou shalt become free.”

But there are gradations in the range of thcese various forms of sacrifice, the physical offering the lowest, the sacrifice of. knowledge the highest. Know- ledge is that in which all this action culminates, not any lower knowledge, but the highest, self-knowledge and God-knowledge, that which we can learn from those who know the true principles of existence, that by possessing which we shall not fall again into the bewilderment of the mind’s ignorance and into its bondage to mere sense-knowledge and to the inferior activity of the desires and passions. The knowledge in which all culminates is that by which “ thou shalt see all existences (becoiings, bAiitdini) without exception in the Self, then in Me”. For the Self is that one, immutable, all-pervading, all-containing, self-existent reality or Brahman hidden behind our mental being into which our consciousness widens out when it is liberated from the ego; we cometo see all beings as becomings, bhiitdni, within that one self-existence.

But this Self or immutable Brahman we see too to be the self-presentation to our essential psychological