The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity 3.1 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday 02, Apr 2024 07:30.

The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita: 

Chapter 3: The Aranya Parva of the Mahabharata -1.

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Great and interesting meanings have been read into the Mahabharata epic, and the more we go into its secrets and implications, the more may we be able to relate it to human life in general. Do we not hear it said again and again that the more we study the Bhagavadgita, the deeper is the meaning that one discovers in it? If that is the case with the Bhagavadgita, that is also the case with the Mahabharata because in a comparison, we may say, if the Bhagavadgita is the soul, the Mahabharata is the body. So the spirit of the Bhagavadgita is embodied in the epic of the Mahabharata. If the Bhagavadgita is a gospel for all life, the Mahabharata epic is a dramatic description of the performances of man as such.


In the early days of spiritual aspiration, it is natural for those days to appear very fine, like a beautiful rising sun. At dawn the sun is so cool that we never feel that it can get extremely hot. Pleasant is the contour of the golden orb that rises in the east. Its internal nature and capacity will be known in midsummer. Early days are happy days. Childhood days and student days are days of freedom, with a kind of satisfaction born of not knowing much of the meaning of life. If all knowing is a great joy, not knowing anything is also a kind of joy. They are two types of extremes. Little babies know nothing, and the spiritual seeking in the early days is like a sapling, a tender plant, and a tender plant is very beautiful to see. It is not manifesting in that budding age the ruggedness of the huge tree that it is going to become one day in the future. A little baby plant with tender leaves, how beautiful it is!


I was referring to the implications and suggestiveness of the first book of the Mahabharata, the Adi Parva, and the subsequent occurrences, the interesting transitional periods one passes through, and if we can study our own selves as spiritual seekers in the story of the Mahabharata, it will be easy for us to discover that spiritual life is not a smooth-sailing affair. It is not blindly walking on a beaten track, a cemented road. There are ups and downs, and zigzag movements. In the initial stage, there is a total oblivion of the difficulty on the path. Every one of us is in that condition, or has been in that condition.


“I shall search for God. There is nothing meaningful in life except the vision of God, communion with God, the realisation of God.” How beautiful is this aspiration! But whoever has passed some years in this world carrying this aspiration in one's mind will be able to recollect how unintelligent and unclear that enthusiastic feeling was. It was a wonderful feeling. Nothing could be more wonderful, more beautiful, more pious and praiseworthy, and yet it sowed the seeds of difficulty later. Irregularities of behaviour psychically began to manifest. We were not so very clear and positive later on. There were suspicions, doubts, and tendencies of problems, though they did not actually manifest. It is something like what we nowadays call a Cold War, not an actual conflict. It is a kind of uneasiness, and a not knowing what is the direction that is to be actually taken.


In our transitional period of aspiration, which originally was a single beaten track of movement towards only God in the early age, we think, “Neither I want this, nor that. It is only the Father in heaven that I am after. Spiritual salvation is the goal of my soul, and I have no other aspiration.” But with a little more growth into the final maturity of the adolescent and the earlier ages of being an adult in spiritual life, doubts arise in the mind. They are all accepted, logically feasible, valid doubts; and these doubts generally, most often, do not leave a person till the end of life.

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Continued


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