Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/238

This page needs to be proofread.
230
ESSAYS ON THE GITA

his mind remains without any stain or disfiguring mark from them, calin, silent, unperturbed, white and clean and pure. To do all in this liberating knowledge, with- out the personal egoism of the doer, is the first sign of the divine worker.

The second sign is freedom from desire ; for where there is not the personal egoism of the doer, desire be- comes.impossible ; it is starved out, sinks for want of 2 support, dies of inanition. Outwardly the liberated man seems to undertake works of all kinds like other men, on a larger scale perhaps with a more powerful will and driving-force, for the might of the divine will works in his active nature ; but from all his inceptions .and undertakings the inferior concept and nether will of desire is entirely banished, sarve samdrambhih kdmasan- kalpavarjitih. He has abandoned all attachment to the fruits of his works, and where one does not work for the fruit, but solely as an impersonal instrument of the Master of works, desire can tind no place,—not even the desire to serve successfully, for the fruitis the Lord’s and determined by him and not by the personal will and effort, or to serve with credit and to the Master’s satis- faction, for the real doer is the Lord himself and all glory belongs to a form of his Shakti missioned in the nature and not to the limited human personality. The human mind and soul of the liberated man does nothing, na kinchit kavoti; even though through his nature he engages in action, it is the Nature, the executive Shakti, it is the conscious Goddess governed by the divine Inha- bitant who does the work.

It does not follow that the work is not to be done perfectly, with success, with a right adaptation of means