Essays on the Gita

566 <strong>Essays</strong> on the Gitasatisfactions and self-realisation. The mind of man is not only avital and physical, but an intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, psychic,emotional and dynamic intelligence, and in the sphere of eachof its tendencies its highest and strongest nature is to straintowards some absolute of them which the frame of life will notallow it to capture wholly and embody and make here entirelyreal. The mental absolute of our aspiration remains as a partlygrasped shining or fiery ideal which the mind can make inwardlyvery present to itself, inwardly imperative on its effort, and caneven effectuate partly, but not compel all the facts of life into itsimage. There is thus an absolute, a high imperative of intellectualtruth and reason sought for by our intellectual being; there isan absolute, an imperative of right and conduct aimed at by theethical conscience; there is an absolute, an imperative of love,sympathy, compassion, oneness yearned after by our emotionaland psychic nature; there is an absolute, an imperative of delightand beauty quivered to by the aesthetic soul; there is anabsolute, an imperative of inner self-mastery and control of lifelaboured after by the dynamic will; all these are there togetherand impinge upon the absolute, the imperative of possession andpleasure and safe embodied existence insisted on by the vital andphysical mind. And the human intelligence, since it is not able torealise entirely any of these things, much less all of them together,erects in each sphere many standards and dharmas, standards oftruth and reason, of right and conduct, of delight and beauty, oflove, sympathy and oneness, of self-mastery and control, of selfpreservationand possession and vital efficiency and pleasure,and tries to impose them on life. The absolute shining idealsstand far above and beyond our capacity and rare individualsapproximate to them as best they can: the mass follow or professto follow some less magnificent norm, some established possibleand relative standard. Human life as a whole undergoes theattraction and yet rejects the ideal. Life resists in the strengthof some obscure infinite of its own and wears down or breaksdown any established mental and moral order. And this must beeither because the two are quite different and disparate thoughmeeting and interacting principles or because mind has not the