Essays on the Gita

The Three Purushas 437to being, from the personal to impersonality, from becoming tounalterable self-existence. This is the Akshara, the immutablein the mutable, the immobile in the mobile, the imperishable inthings perishable. Or rather, since there is only an appearanceof pervasion, it is the immutable, immobile and imperishablein which proceeds all the mobility of mutable and perishablethings.The Kshara spirit visible to us as all natural existence andthe totality of all existences moves and acts pervadingly in theimmobile and eternal Akshara. This mobile Power of Self actsin that fundamental stability of Self, as the second principle ofmaterial Nature, Vayu, with its contactual force of aggregationand separation, attraction and repulsion, supporting the formativeforce of the fiery (radiant, gaseous and electric) and otherelemental movements, ranges pervadingly in the subtly massivestability of ether. This Akshara is the self higher than the buddhi— it exceeds even that highest subjective principle of Naturein our being, the liberating intelligence, through which manreturning beyond his restless mobile mental to his calm eternalspiritual self is at last free from the persistence of birth and thelong chain of action, of Karma. This self in its highest status,paraṁ dhāma, is an unmanifest beyond even the unmanifestprinciple of the original cosmic Prakriti, Avyakta, and, if thesoul turns to this Immutable, the hold of cosmos and Nature fallsaway from it and it passes beyond birth to an unchanging eternalexistence. These two then are the two spirits we see in the world;one emerges in front in its action, the other remains behind itsteadfast in that perpetual silence from which the action comesand in which all actions cease and disappear into timeless being,Nirvana. Dvāv imau puruṣau loke kṣaraś cākṣara eva ca.The difficulty which baffles our intelligence is that these twoseem to be irreconcilable opposites with no real nexus betweenthem or any transition from the one to the other except by anintolerant movement of separation. The Kshara acts, or at leastmotives action, separately in the Akshara; the Akshara standsapart, self-centred, separate in its inactivity from the Kshara. Atfirst sight it would almost seem better, more logical, more easy