The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : Ch-5. Part-3.

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 be any other type of sandhi or transitional period.


It is in the period of transition, which works like anarchy, that we find ourselves at a loss; where our brains do not function, intellects are not adequate to the purpose, and we feel totally out of gear. Our efforts fail when we are in a period of transition, when we are neither here nor there. At that moment it is that the Universal power reveals itself as the avatara, the Incarnation. The divine hand is the mysterious aid that comes unasked. That is the peculiarity of God’s grace; we do not ask for it—it comes unasked. While people grudgingly give some charity when asked, God gives abundantly even when not asked, because He is omniscient. He knows the secret and the needs of the world and the necessity of the whole cosmos. There is a complete evolution of forces, as it were, throughout the universe, whenever there is any difficulty at any point in space or in time.


Every event is felt everywhere in the cosmos, just as a little prick on the sole of our foot is felt throughout our body, due to the connectedness of the system. This secret is to be known, and whoever knows this is not reborn into this world, we are assured. Janma karma ca me divyam evam yo vetti tattvatah, tyaktva deham punar janma naiti mam eti. We will not be reborn into this world of suffering, mrityu loka, having known this secret of the perpetual manifestation, incarnation of divinity in this world. Having known this, we become assured of a perpetual friend with us. We are not lost souls; we are not orphans, as many a time we feel in this world of wilderness. It may look that we have no succour in this world of various types of sorrow, but we have a friend who is always ready to help us in our needs.


He is a friend who will never forget us, though we forget Him. We perpetually ignore His existence, deny it in every act of our perception, assert ourselves arrogantly, negate His very existence and try to blot Him out of the picture. This is the gratitude we show to God for the blessings that He bestows upon us. What a state of affairs, what a pity. But God is immeasurably kind; even million of mothers will not equal one God. Such is the compassion that God has upon people. Our insults upon Him are not taken seriously, and our denial of Him is not punished. Always, like the tree that gives fruit even if it is struck with an axe, like nature as a whole which fills us with bounty in spite of our disregard for its laws, God helps us.


Swami Krishnananda


To be continued  ...