GUNAS BORN OF PRAKRITI — It is indeed difficult to find an adequate rendering for the word “guna” in English. The tradition of thought in the West has nothing equivalent to these terms, as the science of psychology in the West is even today passing through its very early childhood. The influences (gunas) under which the thoughts function in each bosom, will be considered by it only when analytical and experimental psychology has exhausted its observations and study.
The concept of Sattwa is rather that of perfect purity and luminosity, the opposite of “foul-darkness” called Tamas, and distinctly different from the “dusky-colour” of Rajas. We find in our literature that these gunas are associated with-light (Sattwa), red-colour (Rajas) and darkness (Tamas).
The term guna also means ‘rope,’ by which, the spiritual beauty of life in us is tied down to the inert and insentient Matter-vestures. In short, gunas are the three different influences under which every human mind has to play in such an endless variety at different moments of its changing environments.
These gunas are born of Matter. Produced by Nature, the “Field,” they generate a feeling of attachment, and successfully delude the indwelling Self and chain It AS IT WERE, to the cycle of birth-and-death, in a stream of constant change and pain. The gunas have no separate existence as attributes inherent in a substance. All that we can say is that they are as many different mental climates in which the minds behave so differently from each other, according to their given moods, governed by the predominating gunas at any particular moment of observation.
These gunas, like chords, AS IT WERE, bind the Spirit to Matter and create, in the Infinite Spirit, the painful sense of limitations and sorrows. The Infinite and All-pervading Spirit can never be contaminated by the dreamy projections of a delusory world-of-Matter. The ghost that emerges from a post cannot leave its marks on the post. Even after murdering a dozen people in my dream, my hands, that were dripping with blood, cannot, when I wake up, carry any blood stains. While dreaming, no doubt, the “dream world” of my own imaginations was real to the dreamer in me. But, on waking, the waker in me cannot have any marks left over on him from the dream. Similarly, the Eternal Life, functioning in Matter, gets, AS IT WERE, bound to the limitations and finitude of Matter, and this delusory experience is continued as long as the gunas bind It to and entangle It in Matter.
Now it becomes evident how a clear understanding of what constitutes the gunas and how they bind us to Matter will provide us surely with a charter of freedom, a scheme for getting ourselves freed from the tentacles of our own imaginations.
The embodied-self, though Indestructible and Infinite, in Its identifications and attachments with the body, feels the changes in the body as Its own changes. This delusion is maintained, in each one of us, by the play of the three gunas in us. In the following stanzas, we have a clear enumeration of the behaviour of the mind when it comes under the influence of each of these gunas separately.
OF THESE THREE GUNAS, “SATTWA” IS THUS DEFINED:
