Essays on the Gita

128 <strong>Essays</strong> on the Gitalies beyond; for the sacrifice done with knowledge is the highestsacrifice and that alone brings a perfect working. That can onlycome when he perceives that the self in him and the self inothers are one being and this self is something higher than theego, an infinite, an impersonal, a universal existence in whomall move and have their being, — when he perceives that all thecosmic gods to whom he offers his sacrifice are forms of oneinfinite Godhead and when again, leaving all his limited andlimiting conceptions of that one Godhead, he perceives him tobe the supreme and ineffable Deity who is at once the finite andthe infinite, the one self and the many, beyond Nature thoughmanifesting himself through Nature, beyond limitation by qualitiesthough formulating the power of his being through infinitequality. This is the Purushottama to whom the sacrifice has tobe offered, not for any transient personal fruit of works, but forthe soul’s possession of God and in order to live in harmony andunion with the Divine.In other words, man’s way to liberation and perfectionlies through an increasing impersonality. It is his ancient andconstant experience that the more he opens himself to the impersonaland infinite, to that which is pure and high and one andcommon in all things and beings, the impersonal and infinite inNature, the impersonal and infinite in life, the impersonal andinfinite in his own subjectivity, the less he is bound by his ego andby the circle of the finite, the more he feels a sense of largeness,peace, pure happiness. The pleasure, joy, satisfaction which thefinite by itself can give or the ego in its own right attain, istransitory, petty and insecure. To dwell entirely in the ego-senseand its finite conceptions, powers, satisfactions is to find thisworld for ever full of transience and suffering, anityam asukham;the finite life is always troubled by a certain sense of vanity forthis fundamental reason that the finite is not the whole or thehighest truth of life; life is not entirely real until it opens into thesense of the infinite. It is for this reason that the Gita opens itsgospel of works by insisting on the Brahmic consciousness, theimpersonal life, that great object of the discipline of the ancientsages. For the impersonal, the infinite, the One in which all