The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : 16.2.

-



Chapter 16: The Essence of Creation is God's Glory .2.

We commenced with the grossest concept, namely, human society, to recapitulate the entire ground that we have traversed throughout the period of our study. When we think of life, we always think of human society, as frogs think only of frogs, as the old adage goes. To think of the cosmos of the five elements is a larger concept, and it requires a greater stretch of imagination than is available to the common man.

For him life is only human beings, or perhaps only a family—that is all the life that he can conceive of. When a person refers to life, he refers to his family, and nothing else can be comprehended within the idea of life. Life is miserable; when speak like this, we mean our family is miserable. Or if we are more sophisticated intelligentsia, we mean humanity is miserable—mankind is in a tragic situation. This is all the view of creation we have with our present stage of understanding.

Further on in the Gita, we were taken to the more psychological implications, which require a more impersonal outlook than the merely family outlook or even the so-called humanitarian outlook. The psychological outlook is superior to the merely human outlook, and from the second chapter onwards we were concerned with the individual propelling constituents that make up what we call the grosser forms of human society. Human beings are psychic entities. They are minds, essentially, and not bodies.

They are not fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, as they appear to be, but they are eddies in a psychic ocean. So the springs of action in human society are in the minds of people, and not outwardly in the political governments or in the communities through which people pass and in which they appear to live. Our ideas have to be gradually rarified as we move on further through the ethereal teachings in the chapters of the Bhagavadgita.

Swami Krishnananda
 To be continued  ....



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : Ch-5. Part-5.( Last Part)

-
Image
5: God is Our Eternal Friend-5. ( Last Part ) We are filled with doubts in our minds—we can prepare a dictionary of all our doubts—they are endless. Everywhere we have a suspicious attitude about the world, about things, about people, about ourselves, about the past, about the present, and about the future. These doubts cannot be dispelled until knowledge arises, and we know what knowledge means, an insight into which we have been given in the second chapter of the Gita. Knowledge is the knowledge of God ultimately, and as a result, knowledge of the nature of the world in its reality, as mentioned in the third chapter. This is true knowledge, and when we are awakened to this real knowledge, all doubts get dispelled. Then what happens? Atmavantam—we become truly possessed of the Self that we really are. We are people who have lost ourselves and are in pursuit of things outside. Yes, this is what has happened; we have grasped the world and lost our own selves, and we are
Read more

The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad gita : Ch-10. Part-3.

-
Image
Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-3. We are told in the Puranas that Narayana or Vishnu takes incarnations for the preservation of creation. Vishnu is regarded as yajna itself. It is the highest sacrifice—God sacrificing himself every moment of time for the sustenance of His creation. As adhiyajna He is the administrative power and the methodology of the working of the cosmos. All activity is comprehended under this yajna of the cosmos. Therefore God is present in all activity when it is considered as a passage to God, when it is regarded as a manifestation of God as rays emanating from the sun. Those wise souls who envisage God as adhibhuta, adhidaiva and adhiyajna, which means to say, who encounter God as a comprehensive Absolute and not merely existing only here or there, such devotees are true knowers. They can entertain or maintain this consciousness even at the time of passing from this world—they are not deprived of th
Read more

The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : Ch-9. Part-8.

-
Image
9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-8. The distressed souls seeking God are of one type. One who is baked in the fire of samsaram,who is tortured in this hell of earth, suffering through various sorrows, seeks riddance from the grief of the world by resort to God under the impression that God is like a parent—a father or a mother or a supreme saviour. The intention behind this devotion is redress—freedom from sorrow, the inability to bear suffering. This is the reason here behind the devotion to God. Whether this could be an adequate reason, anyone can contemplate independently for oneself. Can we love God merely because He is the only source of redemption from our sorrows? Do we want freedom from sorrow, or do we want God? That is a different question that will come up later on. Swami Krishnananda To be continued  ....
Read more