Essays on the Gita

418 <strong>Essays</strong> on the Gitaexperience have an origin in the transactions of these two entities.They come from her, wear by her the outward chain ofcause and effect, doing and the results of doing, force and itsworkings, all that is here transient and mutable. Constantly theychange and the soul and Nature seem to change with them,but in themselves these two powers are eternal and always thesame. Nature creates and acts, the Soul enjoys her creation andaction; but in this inferior form of her action she turns this enjoymentinto the obscure and petty figures of pain and pleasure.Forcibly the soul, the individual Purusha, is attracted by herqualitative workings and this attraction of her qualities drawshim constantly to births of all kinds in which he enjoys thevariations and vicissitudes, the good and evil of birth in Nature.But this is only the outward experience of the soul mutable inconception by identification with mutable Nature. Seated in thisbody is her and our Divinity, the supreme Self, Paramatman, thesupreme Soul, the mighty Lord of Nature, who watches her action,sanctions her operations, upholds all she does, commandsher manifold creation, enjoys with his universal delight this playof her figures of his own being. That is the self-knowledge towhich we have to accustom our mentality before we can trulyknow ourselves as an eternal portion of the Eternal. Once that isfixed, no matter how the soul in us may comport itself outwardlyin its transactions with Nature, whatever it may seem to do orhowever it may seem to assume this or that figure of personalityand active force and embodied ego, it is in itself free, no longerbound to birth because one through impersonality of self withthe inner unborn spirit of existence. That impersonality is ourunion with the supreme egoless I of all that is in cosmos.This knowledge comes by an inner meditation throughwhich the eternal self becomes apparent to us in our ownself-existence. Or it comes by the Yoga of the Sankhyas, theseparation of the soul from nature. Or it comes by the Yogaof works in which the personal will is dissolved through theopening up of our mind and heart and all our active forcesto the Lord who assumes to himself the whole of our worksin nature. The spiritual knowledge may be awakened by the