Essays on the Gita

The Gunas, Mind and Works 501ignorant instinct or the unenlightened impulsion of the physicalmind and the crude vital nature is the chief instrumental forceof the tamasic doer of action. The instrument of the liberatedman is a greater spiritual light and power, far higher than thehighest sattwic intelligence, and it works in him by an envelopingdescent from a supraphysical centre and uses as a clear channelof its force a purified and receptive mind, life and body.Tamasic action is that done with a confused, deluded andignorant mind, in mechanical obedience to the instincts, impulsionsand unseeing ideas, without regarding the strength orcapacity or the waste and loss of blind misapplied effort or theantecedent and consequence and right conditions of the impulse,effort or labour. Rajasic action is that which a man undertakesunder the dominion of desire, with his eyes fixed on the workand its hoped-for fruit and nothing else, or with an egoisticsense of his own personality in the action, and it is done withinordinate effort, with a passionate labour, with a great heavingand straining of the personal will to get at the object of its desire.Sattwic action is that which a man does calmly in the clear lightof reason and knowledge and with an impersonal sense of rightor duty or the demand of an ideal, as the thing that ought tobe done whatever may be the result to himself in this world oranother, a work performed without attachment, without likingor disliking for its spur or its drag, for the sole satisfaction ofhis reason and sense of right, of the lucid intelligence and theenlightened will and the pure disinterested mind and the highcontented spirit. At the line of culmination of sattwa it will betransformed and become a highest impersonal action dictated bythe spirit within us and no longer by the intelligence, an actionmoved by the highest law of the nature, free from the lower egoand its light or heavy baggage and from limitation even by bestopinion, noblest desire, purest personal will or loftiest mentalideal. There will be none of these impedimenta; in their placethere will stand a clear spiritual self-knowledge and illuminationand an imperative intimate sense of an infallible power that actsand of the work to be done for the world and for the world’sMaster.