Bhagavadgeeta : ( 26/11/2012. )

5: God is Our Eternal Friend-3. So there is a great solace for all of us in the midst of the turmoil of life, in the sorrows of our days and the grief through which we are passing every moment of time. Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata, abhyutthanam adharmasya tadatmanam srjmyaham. Paritranaya sadhunam vinasaya ca duskrtam, dharma-samsthapanarthaya sambhavami yuge yuge is an eternal gospel. This one gospel is enough to keep us rejoicing day and night, completely forgetful of all the apparent sorrows of life. If anything is alive, it is God. Everything is dead without Him. This life force takes effective measures at the proper moment, whenever there is a conflict of forces. This conflict of power is the yuga. It has various connotations and denotations. Any kind of friction is a yuga, and one power colliding with another power is a yugasandhi. It may be of the yugas known as krita, dvapara, treta and kali, the well known classifications of time measurement, or it may...

5: God is Our Eternal Friend-2 This was the great answer which the Bhagavadgita poses before us, who walk like peacocks with the pride of knowledge, and tells us where we actually stand. Yes, this is a great revelation indeed—that the world is involved in our perceptions and vice versa, and therefore no valuation can be acceptable in the end if it is purely individualistic, notional and limited to a single observer of things. Here we have the central philosophy of the third chapter of the Bhagavadgita. I mention these few words only a kind of recapitulation of what we observed in the last chapter. All this is beautiful, yes, but who is to tell the senses that this is the state of affairs? Who is to give instruction to the mind that its perceptions and cognitions are erroneous? The teacher is absent, because the so-called teacher is the individual himself, and he is himself involved in the mistake that is committed in perception. The perceiver is involved in the percept...

5: God is Our Eternal Friend : 1. In our rapid study of the Bhagavadgita, we could observe that there is an inherent defect in the understanding ingrained in human nature by the reply that Bhagavan Sri Krishna gave, as a retort, to the problems raised by Arjuna. This defect, this shortcoming, was also pointed out in the third chapter. The human way of thinking is not necessarily the right way of thinking, though it is accepted as the norm of thinking in the world of human beings. But, unfortunately, the world does not consist only of human beings—a point which man cannot accept due to the egoism of his nature. The ego is self-assertive and proclaims its superiority over the perceptional capacities of others. Do we not always measure everything else with the yardstick of our own way of perceiving and knowing? Everything should be in accordance with our way of thinking—only then do we regard it as right. And, yes, it is true that Arjuna employed this yardstick. He was a huma...

4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 7. ( Last Part ) There is a remedy, because the locations of these desires are the senses, the mind and the intellect. These are the harbingers of desire and anger. Therefore it is necessary to restrain the senses, the mind and the intellect. Desire is nothing but an urge of the individual to move towards objects. It is like the impulse of the river to move towards something outside, say the ocean which is its object. The individual, in its finitude of consciousness, in its agony of being conditioned to the body, cries to come out of itself; and in its attempt to come out of itself and unite itself with others, hugs objects of sense and runs to them. This urge or impulse of the individual to run to outside objects for the purpose of assimilating them into himself—that is called desire—and these desires are channelised through the sense objects and propelled by the mind, sanctioned by the intellect. So these three are the arch devils, we may s...

4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 6. This is a very difficult thing. Anybody would say it is an impossibility, because our desires are so strong. We have impulses in us which tie us down to the body and to the society in which we are living. We have hunger and thirst and the urge to sleep; we are fatigued, we have anger, we have passions, we have jealousies, and we have every blessed thing. These impulses within us, which are inseparable from the nature of our mind itself, prevent us, or certainly hinder us, from contemplating any such possibility along the lines indicated here. No mind can think in this manner because of the desires that are inside us—intense desire, which also, when it is frustrated, becomes intense anger. Desire and anger—these will not allow us to contemplate in this manner. Either we have desire or we have anger; one of the two is always there. We cannot be free from both. But they are one and the same thing appearing in two ways—anger and desire are n...

.4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 5. There is a transcendental type of activity which the human mind in its present state cannot understand, and that is the significance behind the great gospel of the karma yoga of the Gita. Karma yoga can be said to be a transcendental action. It is not my action or your action; it is not activity in a commercial sense. It is an activity which is commensurate with the law of the cosmos. It is, again, an activity which is based on samkhyabuddhi—we have not to forget this point. The enlightenment of the samkhya, to which we made reference earlier, is the basis of this action called ‘yoga’ in the Bhagavadgita. The karma yoga of the Gita is therefore divine action, in one sense. It is not human action, because the human sense of values gets overcome, transcended in the visualisation of the involvement of the seer in the seen universe. Every thought becomes a kind of universal interpretation of things, and every action becomes a universal action. ...

4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 4. And in the tamasic aspect they become this body. So what is there, in this personality, which is not in the outer world? Whatever the world is made of outwardly is also the substance of this individuality. The gunas, which are the substances of prakriti, are present in the individual experiencer and also in the objects of perception. So the Bhagavadgita says: guna gunesu vartanta—the gunas operate upon the gunas. The eyes see, the ears hear, the tongue tastes, the skin touches, and the nose smells. How it is possible for these senses to function in this manner? The possibility is on account of the fact of the collaboration that already exists basically between the senses and the objects outside, on account of the fact that both are evolutes of the same tanmatras—shabda, sparsha, rupa, rasa and ghanda. So, the judgment of Arjuna in respect to the world outside, which he declares in the first chapter of the Gita, needs an emendation. What ...

4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 3. It is said that, to speak in the language of the Samkhya, the sattva of prakriti enables the reflection of purusha, or the universal consciousness, through itself. When this universal consciousness of the purusha reflects itself through the cosmic sattva of prakriti, it becomes what the Samkhya calls mahat—mahatattva. It is the cosmic intellect. We may compare it with the hiranyagarbha of the Vedanta; we may compare it to Brahma, the Creator, in the language of the Puranas. This cosmic intellect or mahatattva concretises itself further into a cosmic individuality, and that is called ahamkara. It is not the ahamkara that I have or you have. It is a cosmic principle of self-consciousness. It is not the individual self-sense that we are speaking of here. It is an unintelligible cosmic situation where the cosmic intelligence is said to become self-aware—’I am’ or ‘I am that I am’—’aham asmi’. This is the cosmic ahamkara, comparable with the virat ...

4: The Cosmic Manifestation : 2. Likewise, all that is going to be the universe to come is present in a potential form in the samyavastha, or the equilibrated condition of the cosmos—prakriti- mulaprakriti in its primordial state. Sattva, rajas and tamas in this cosmical sense are different from the ethical qualities to which we attribute these characteristics. We say a person is sattvic or rajasic or tamasic, by which we mean a person is manifesting goodness or distraction or inertia. But in this cosmic sense, sattva, rajas, and tamas are far beyond the human concept. They are not ethical principles. There is no morality in prakriti—it is an impersonal power and it becomes a characteristic of judgment only when it is individualised subsequently. No question of judgment is possible in a cosmic set-up. It is difficult to explain what sattva, rajas and tamas could be in a cosmic state. We can only say they are something like the powers or forces which physics envisage in the m...

4: The Cosmic Manifestation : 1. The turmoil in the mind of Arjuna, described in the first chapter of the Bhagavadgita, is attributed by Bhagavan Sri Krishna to an absence of correct understanding. Every sorrow which sinks the heart is regarded, in the light of higher thinking, as a consequence of inadequate knowledge. Man is not born to suffer; it is joy that is his birthright. It is hammered into our minds again and again that our essential nature is not grief, and therefore to manifest grief cannot be the manifestation of our essential nature. Sorrow is not our birthright; it does not belong to our true substance. What we are really made of is not capable of being affected by sorrow of any kind. There is a deep quintessence in the heart of every person which defies contamination by sorrow of every type. Hence, the great point made out by Bhagavan Sri Krishna is that the sorrow of Arjuna is unbecoming of the knowledge that would be expected of a person of his kind. What i...

3: The World is the Face of God : 7.( Last Part ) These questions are the sum and substance of the first chapter of the Bhagavadgita. Doubts and doubts and doubts—at least three different doubts are mentioned. The retort of Sri Krishna to it, in the second chapter, is that we have no correct understanding of the matter. We have no samkhya buddhi. Samkhya buddhi is correct understanding; that Arjuna lacked. These are the words that Sri Krishna utters: “All this logic, ethics and morals that you spoke of in favour of the world and against the justice of the war—all this that you have said is an outcome of a lack of understanding. You have not understood what Truth is. There is a necessity for clarity of the power of reasoning before you begin to reason. A muddled reason cannot bring correct results. Therefore samkhya, understanding, is the first thing that you have to strive for, and not merely employ this ruptured weapon of unintelligent reason to justify ...

3: The World is the Face of God : 6. So it is naturally a surprise to the unsuspecting seeker to be faced with such realities, and to be terrorised once again in the same manner as before by forces unseen and unexpected. When we face in battle any power, it pushes forth all its energies to the maximum extent. Our energies come to the forefront only when we are opposed; otherwise no one can know what one’s strength is. When everything is failing and our last resort is to save ourselves, then we unleash all our strength. So it is that the Pandavas had to face a set of forces which encountered them with all their might and mane. At that time there is a peculiar sorrow of the soul, which catches it by the neck, as it were, and the soul retaliates. “Not this, and it is not for me,” says the soul. Here we find Arjuna at the very beginning of the Bhagavadgita. All the supports and all the weapons that we have in our hands do not seem to be sufficient to meet the powers that are ...

3: The World is the Face of God :5. So we pass our life in Aranykapurva for years in search of light; but the honesty, the sincerity, the asking is paid its due. Though God enforces discipline upon the individual, He does not forget to reward him for having passed through the difficulties. Reward comes. Devas—Indra, Varuna, Rudra and others—take pity on the Pandavas, and unasked help comes. Rudra gives pashupata, Indra gives his vajra, Varuna gave pasha, and Agni his agneya,and what not. The powers of the Pandavas get enhanced by the help they receive from the gods. The gods are watching us. They are seeing us even now. They are not non-existent myths, as people may imagine. They are as real as hard brick before us, and the Yoga Vasishtha tells us in a beautiful verse that when a person becomes completely surrendered to the law of the world—he is egoless, in other words—it becomes the duty of the rulers of the cosmos to take care and protect this individual. As the...

3: The World is the Face of God : 4. So, there is some mystery in this world. We can call God only as a mystery, and nothing else; and we are involved in this world of appearances. We are a part of this world; therefore it is not given to us to completely reject the law of the world. A complete carelessness towards the rules that are prevailing in the cosmos would be to the doom of the individual, and that foolhardy aspiration for God would be paid back in its own coin as sorrow. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa used to say that the devotee of God is not a foolish man; he is a devotee, but he is not foolish—he is wise. What is wisdom? Wisdom is nothing but an understanding of the nature of life. To understand what life is would be wisdom, and to mistake life for what it is not would be unwisdom. Religions often have made the mistake of a transcendent ascent of the religious spirit, overcoming the laws of the world, facing God in the high heavens and preaching a renunciation o...