Gita XV---Individual’s freedom of choice

Every act of self is a creative one, while all acts of the not self are truly passive. It is in our inner life that we confront primary reality, the deeps of being. The law of Karma holds in the realms of the not-self where heredity, biological and social holds, but in the subject is possibility of freedom, of triumph over the determinism of nature, over the compulsion of the world. Man, the subject, should gain mastery over man, the object. Object indicates determinism from without; subject means freedom, indeterminism. The ego in its self-confinement, in its automatism, psychical and social, is a distortion of the true subject. The law of karma can be overcome by the affirmation of the freedom of spirit. The Gita affirms that there is no radical dualism between the supernatural and the natural. Through struggle and suffering, man can pass from his freedom that abides in the steadfastly chosen good. Liberation is a return to inward being, to subjectivity; bondage is enslavement to the object world, to necessity, to dependence.

Neither nature nor society can invade our inner being without permission. Even God acts with a peculiar delicacy in regard to human beings. He woos out consent but never compels. Human individuals have distinctive beings of their development. The world is not fulfilling a prearranged plan in a mechanical way. We are asked to control our impulses, shake off our confusions and wanderings, rise above the current of nature and regulate our conduct by reference to buddhi or understanding, as otherwise, we will become the victims of ‘lust which the enemy of man on earth’. The Gita lays stress on the individual’s freedom of choice and the way he exercises it. Man’s struggles, his sense of frustration and self accusation are not to be dismissed as errors of the mortal mind or mere phases of a dialectic process. This would be to deny the moral urgency of life.

(to be contd.)