Essays on the Gita

272 <strong>Essays</strong> on the Gitathe absolute powers and values of the supreme Shakti and mustgo back to them to find their own source and truth and theessential law of their operation and movement. So too the soulor Jiva involved here in the shackled, poor and inferior playof the phenomenal qualities, if he would escape from it andbe divine and perfect, must by resort to the pure action of hisessential quality of Swabhava go back to that higher law of hisown being in which he can discover the will, the power, thedynamic principle, the highest working of his divine nature.This is clear from the immediately subsequent passage inwhich the Gita gives a number of instances to show how theDivine in the power of his supreme nature manifests and actswithin the animate and so-called inanimate existences of theuniverse. We may disentangle them from the loose and free orderwhich the exigence of the poetical form imposes and put themin their proper philosophical series. First, the divine Power andPresence works within the five elemental conditions of matter.“I am taste in the waters, sound in ether, scent in earth, energyof light in fire,” and, it may be added for more completeness,touch or contact in air. That is to say, the Divine himself in hisPara Prakriti is the energy at the basis of the various sensoryrelations of which, according to the ancient Sankhya system,the ethereal, the radiant, electric and gaseous, the liquid and theother elemental conditions of matter are the physical medium.The five elemental conditions of matter are the quantitative ormaterial element in the lower nature and are the basis of materialforms. The five Tanmatras — taste, touch, scent, and theothers — are the qualitative element. These Tanmatras are thesubtle energies whose action puts the sensory consciousness inrelation to the gross forms of matter, — they are the basis ofall phenomenal knowledge. From the material point of viewmatter is the reality and the sensory relations are derivative; butfrom the spiritual point of view the truth is the opposite. Matterand the material media are themselves derivative powers andat bottom are only concrete ways or conditions in which theworkings of the quality of Nature in things manifest themselvesto the sensory consciousness of the Jiva. The one original and