Essays on the Gita

The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge 281to a higher nature and a higher law is to have the mind and thetemperament of the Asura. A first necessary step upward is toaspire to a higher nature and a higher law, to obey a better rulethan the rule of desire, to perceive and worship a nobler godheadthan the ego or than any magnified image of the ego, to become aright thinker and a right doer. This too is not in itself enough; foreven the sattwic man is subject to the bewilderment of the gunas,because he is still governed by wish and disliking, icchā-dveṣa.He moves within the circle of the forms of Nature and has notthe highest, not the transcendental and integral knowledge. Stillby the constant upward aspiration in his ethical aim he in theend gets rid of the obscuration of sin which is the obscuration ofrajasic desire and passion and acquires a purified nature capableof deliverance from the rule of the triple Maya. By virtue aloneman cannot attain to the highest, but by virtue 2 he can developa first capacity for attaining to it, adhikāra. For the crude rajasicor the dull tamasic ego is difficult to shake off and put belowus; the sattwic ego is less difficult and at last, when it sufficientlysubtilises and enlightens itself, becomes even easy to transcend,transmute or annihilate.Man, therefore, has first of all to become ethical, sukṛtī,andthen to rise to heights beyond any mere ethical rule of living, tothe light, largeness and power of the spiritual nature, where hegets beyond the grasp of the dualities and its delusion, dvandvamoha.There he no longer seeks his personal good or pleasureor shuns his personal suffering or pain, for by these things heis no longer affected, nor says any longer, “I am virtuous,” “Iam sinful,” but acts in his own high spiritual nature by the willof the Divine for the universal good. We have already seen thatfor this end self-knowledge, equality, impersonality are the firstnecessities, and that that is the way of reconciliation betweenknowledge and works, between spirituality and activity in theworld, between the ever immobile quietism of the timeless selfand the eternal play of the pragmatic energy of Nature. But2 Obviously, by the true inner puṇya, a sattwic clarity in thought, feeling, temperament,motive and conduct, not a merely conventional or social virtue.