Essays on the Gita

228 <strong>Essays</strong> on the Gitaentities, in the Gita they are two aspects, two powers of one selfexistentbeing; the Soul is not only giver of the sanction, but lordof Nature, Ishwara, through her enjoying the play of the world,through her executing divine will and knowledge in a scheme ofthings supported by his sanction and existing by his immanentpresence, existing in his being, governed by the law of his beingand by the conscious will within it. To know, to respond to, tolive in the divine being and nature of this Soul is the object ofwithdrawing from the ego and its action. One rises then abovethe lower nature of the gunas to the higher divine nature.The movement by which this ascension is determined resultsfrom the complex poise of the Soul in its relations with Nature;it depends on the Gita’s idea of the triple Purusha. The Soul thatimmediately informs the action, the mutations, the successivebecomings of Nature, is the Kshara, that which seems to changewith her changes, to move in her motion, the Person who followsin his idea of his being the changes of his personality broughtabout by the continuous action of her Karma. Nature here isKshara, a constant movement and mutation in Time, a constantbecoming. But this Nature is simply the executive power ofthe Soul itself; for only by what he is, can she become, onlyaccording to the possibilities of his becoming, can she act; sheworks out the becoming of his being. Her Karma is determinedby Swabhava, the own-nature, the law of self-becoming of thesoul, even though, because it is the agent and executive of thebecoming, the action rather seems often to determine the nature.According to what we are, we act, and by our action wedevelop, we work out what we are. Nature is the action, themutation, the becoming, and it is the Power that executes allthese; but the Soul is the conscious Being from which that Powerproceeds, from whose luminous stuff of consciousness she hasdrawn the variable will that changes and expresses its changesin her actions. And this Soul is One and Many; it is the oneLife-being out of which all life is constituted and it is all theseliving beings; it is the cosmic Existent and it is all this multitudeof cosmic existences, sarvabhūtāni, for all these are One; allthe many Purushas are in their original being the one and only