The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad gita-21-9.

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11/04/2018

21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 9.

The crux of spiritual knowledge and tapas or sadhana is reached when we come to our own selves from the outward panorama of things. Everything looks successful and grand and practicable when the dealings are only with external objects, with the vast cosmos. We may handle the whole world with great success and victory, but when it comes to a question of handling our own selves, we are an utter failure, because the most difficult thing is one’s own self and not the world outside, though it appears many a time that the world is a terrible thing before us. But we are the terrible things, and not the world.

Hence this great terror is our own ego which has to be offered on the altar of sharanagati. “Come to Me alone and I will free you from all sins,” is the last message of the Bhagavadgita. It is wonderful indeed that all our sins will be pardoned and will be extinguished as if they had never been there. How could that which was there not be there now? It is impossible to imagine. It was already mentioned in some other place in the Gita itself, “That which is, cannot not be.” So if there is sin, it cannot not be; no one can destroy it. But here is the message that it can be extinguished in one moment, as if it was not there, because it was not a substance existing—it was not a reality. Error, evil, and ugliness are not substances.


They are misplacements of values. Just as darkness cannot be called a substance, evil is not a substance by itself—it is an error of commission. Hence, when the erroneous affirmation of the individual ego is consumed in the fire of the recognition of the existence of the Universal, it is something like waking up from the dream consciousness into the brilliance of daylight. All the sins committed in dream are destroyed by the very act of our waking. We need not have to perform special tapas when we are awake for the errors that we committed in dream. The very fact that we have woken up into a higher degree or level of consciousness is enough penance or expiation for the blunders of the dream world. Likewise, the very fact that we have woken up into the consciousness of God’s All-Being is enough expiation for all the errors and mistakes that one might have committed in the dream of world consciousness.

In this great art of the yoga of the Bhagavadgita, the individual has always to walk hand in hand with God’s grace. God is our friend, and no one else can be our friend. The particular has to go with the Universal. We have to go with God. Arjuna is with Krishna. This is what the last verse of the Gita says, when it propounds that, “Victory is certain, prosperity will prevail, and everything shall be well, where Arjuna and Krishna are seated in one chariot and move forward in the battlefield of life.” Where man walks with God, all will be well. That means to say, everything that is individual becomes divine when the touch of the Universal galvanises it and transforms it into the precious gold of utter Reality, and lifts it from the mire of the reflected unreality of particularity. Hence it is our duty—the whole of the Bhagavadgita is a gospel of duty—it is our duty to see that everything that we think, speak and act, our entire outlook, is rooted finally in the existence of God-Being.

THE END
Swami Krishnananda

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