Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/186

This page needs to be proofread.
178
ESSAYS ON THE GITA

falsify the stages and gradations of the ways I have hewn. The whole range of human action has been decreed by me with a view to the progress of man from the lower to the higher nature, from the apparent undi- vine to the conscious Divine. The whole range of human works must be that in which the God-knower shall move. All individual, all social action, all the works of the intellect, the heart and the body are still his, not any longer for his own separate sake, but for the sake of God in the world, of God in all beings and that all those beings may move forward, as he has moved, by the path of works towards the discovery of the Divine in themselves. Outwardly his actions may not seem to differ essentially from theirs; battle and rule as well as teaching and thought, all the various commerce of man with man may fall in his range ; but the spirit in whjch he does them must be very different, and it is that spirit which by its influence shall be the great attraction drawing men upwards to his own level, the great lever lifting the mass of men higher in their ascent.”

The giving of the example of God himself to the liberated man is profoundly significant; for it reveals the whole basis of the Gita’s philosophy of divine works. The liberated man is he who has exalted him- self into the divine nature and according to that divine nature must be his actions. But what is the divine - nature? Itis not entirely and solely that of the Akshara, the immobile, inactive, impersonal self ; for that by it- self would lead the liberated man to actionless immobi- lity. Itis not characteristically that of the Kshara, the multitudinous, the personal, the Purusha self-subjec-