THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

VII. 7. The Three Purushas371the lower Purusha and the higher, Sri Krishna defines more minutelythe relations of God and the individual soul to Nature. “Prakritiis the basic source of cause, effect and agency; the Purusha, ofthe sense of enjoyment, of happiness and grief; for it is the soulin Nature (Purusha in Prakriti) that enjoys the threefold workingsof things caused by Nature (the play of conservation, creationand destruction; reception, reaction and resistance; illumination,misconception and obscuration; calm, work and inertia;all being different manifestations of three fundamental forces calledthe guÍas or essential properties of Prakriti), and it is the attachmentof the soul to the guÍas that is the cause of births inbodies, good and evil. The highest Purusha in this body is theone who watches, who sanctions, who enjoys, who upholds, whois the mighty Lord and the Supreme Soul.”The personality of the Supreme Soul is universal, not individual.Whatever is in all creatures, character, idea, imagination,experience, sensation, motion, is contained by Him as an objectof spiritual enjoyment without limiting or determining Him. Heis all things at once. Such universality is necessary to supportand supply individual existence, but it cannot be the determininglimit of individual existence. Something has to be reserved, somethingput forward, and this partial manifestation is the individual.“It is verily an eternal part of Me that in the world of individualexistence becomes the jÈva or individual.” The jÈva or individualis kØara Purusha, and between him and the Supremestands the akØara Purusha, the bird on the summit of the tree,joyous in his own bliss, undisturbed by the play of Nature, impartiallywatching it, receiving its image on his calm immovableexistence without being for a moment bound or affected, eternallyself-gathered, eternally free. This akØara Purusha is ourreal self, our divine unity with God, our inalienable freedomfrom that which is transient and changing. If it did not exist,there would be no escape from the bondage of life and death,joy and grief, sin and virtue; we should be prisoners in a cagewithout a door, beating our wings against the bars in vain foran exit; life and death, joy and grief, sin and virtue would beeternal, ineffugable realities, not temporary rules determining thegreat game of life, and we should be unwilling actors, not free