Essays on the Gita

Beyond the Modes of Nature 231But man as the individual self, owing to his ignorant selfidentificationwith the work and the becoming, as if that were allhis soul and not a power of his soul, a power proceeding from it,is bewildered by the ego-sense. He thinks that it is he and otherswho are doing all; he does not see that Nature is doing all andthat he is misrepresenting and disfiguring her works to himselfby ignorance and attachment. He is enslaved by the gunas, nowhampered in the dull case of tamas, now blown by the strongwinds of rajas, now limited by the partial lights of sattwa, notdistinguishing himself at all from the nature-mind which alone isthus modified by the gunas. He is therefore mastered by pain andpleasure, happiness and grief, desire and passion, attachmentand disgust: he has no freedom.He must, to be free, get back from the Nature action to thestatus of the Akshara; he will then be triguṇātīta, beyond thegunas. Knowing himself as the Akshara Brahman, the unchangingPurusha, he will know himself as an immutable impersonalself, the Atman, tranquilly observing and impartially supportingthe action, but himself calm, indifferent, untouched, motionless,pure, one with all beings in their self, not one with Natureand her workings. This self, though by its presence authorisingthe works of Nature, though by its all-pervading existence supportingand consenting to them, prabhu vibhu, does not itselfcreate works or the state of the doer or the joining of the worksto their fruit, na kartṛtvaṁ nakarmāṇi sṛjati na karma-phalasaṁyogam,but only watches nature in the Kshara working outthese things, svabhāvas tu pravartate; it accepts neither the sinnor the virtue of the living creatures born into this birth as itsown, nādatte kasyacit pāpaṁ na caiva sukṛtam; it preserves itsspiritual purity. It is the ego bewildered by ignorance whichattributes these things to itself, because it assumes the responsibilityof the doer and chooses to figure as that and not asthe instrument of a greater power, which is all that it really is;ajñānenāvṛtaṁ jñānaṁ tena muhyanti jantavaḥ. By going backinto the impersonal self the soul gets back into a greater selfknowledgeand is liberated from the bondage of the works ofNature, untouched by her gunas, free from her shows of good