Page:Essays On The Gita - Ghose - 1922.djvu/301

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BEYOND THE MODES OF NATURE
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can maintain it. Therefore it is evident that the Gita’s conception of the relations of the Purusha and Prakriti are not the Sankhya’s, since the same movement leads to a quite different result, in one case to cessation of works, in the other to a great, a selfless and desire- less, a divine action. In the Sankhya Scul and Nature are two different entities, in the Gita they are two aspects, two powers of one self-existent being ; the Soul is not only giver of the sanction, but lord of Nature, Ishwara, through her enjoying the play of the world, through her executing divine will and knowledge in a scheme of things supported by his sanction and exis- ting by his immanent preéence, existing in his being, governed by the law of his being and by the conscious will within it. To know, to respond to, to live in the divine being and nature of this Soul is the object of withdrawing from the ego and its action. One rises then above the lower nature of the gunas to the higher divine nature.

The movement by which this ascension is deter- mined results from the complex poise of the Soul in its relations with Nature ; it depends on the Gita’s idea of the triple Purusha. The Soul that immediately informs the action, the mutations, the successive becomings of Nature, is the Kshara,that which seems to change with her changes, to move in her motion, the Person who follows in his idea of his being the changes of his personality brought about by the continuous action of her Karma. Nature here is Kshara, a constant movement and mutation in Time, a constant becoming. But this Nature is simply the executive power of the Soul itself; for only by what he is, can she become,