III: 28

Chapter 3, Verse 28

"But those who know the relation
Between the properties of nature (Gunas) and actions
Realize how these properties
Work upon other properties.
Those who understand these workings
Do not get attached."

Mahatma Gandhi:

"As digestion and similar processes [like shaping our bones, growing our hair, and coloring our eyes] go on automatically and we claim no agency for them, we being conscious of the processes only when disease or injury intervenes, in a similar manner all our activities should be like leaves in the wind, without arrogating to ourselves the agency thereof. For example, charitable people do not even know that they are doing charitable acts. It is their nature to do them. They cannot help it. This kind of detachment can only come from tireless endeavor and God's grace."

[The prescription is for "tireless endeavor," all the while understanding that this movement is only Gunas (the triple-strand of nature's stuff) acting on Gunas and the real "we" are not the agents of our actions. It sure sounds paradoxical all right, but every paradox is only an expression of our dualistic thinking which dissolves in the integrated tapestry of intuitive awareness. People who are seemingly "poles apart" are in reality "connected at the hip."]

Sri Aurobindo:

"Ordinary people are bewildered by the ego-sense owing to their ignorant self-identification with the work and the becoming, while failing to understand that the becoming is a power proceeding from the soul. They think that it is they and others who are doing everything, failing to realize tht nature is doing everything and that they are misrepresenting her works to themselves, because of ignorance and attachment. Enslaved by the Gunas, they are, by turns, hampered by the dull complacency of Tamas, blown by the strong winds of Rajas, and limited by the partial light of Sattva, not distinguishing themselves from their minds which are continually modified by the fluctuations of the Gunas. The consequence is that they are slaves to attraction and aversion and the other pairs of opposites. It is the ego-self, bewildered by ignorance, which attributes these things to itself, because it assumes the responsibility of the doer, obscuring its true status as an instrument of the higher power, which is all that it really is."