The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita : Ch-6. Part-7.

 6: Universal Action-7


Moksha-paryanah—here is another glorious message for us. You have to be yearning for liberation. Your aspiration for moksha is the masterstroke. It is the forte before you in yoga which dissolves the senses, the mind and the intellect at one stroke. As mist dissolves before the sun, the senses, the mind and the intellect dissolve, as it were, in a flow of moksha-consciousness. In this state your soul is surging forth into infinity. Your heart is yearning to attain union with the Absolute, like the calf running to the mother cow that it had lost, like a river rushing towards the ocean, not resting quiet until it reaches the ocean.


As you gasp for breath when you are being drowned in water, so is the soul to surge forth to that great destination called moksha, or liberation of the spirit, in the absolute Brahman. This longing is the panacea for all ills of human life. This desire for moksha is the destruction of all desires. It is the self-consummation of oneself, and the consuming of oneself in the fire of longing for that state where all longing ceases. To desire the atman is to end all desires. It burns up every longing which is extraneous. Vigateccha-bhaya-krodho yah sada mukta eva sah: Such a person is automatically freed from likes and dislikes. There is no need of any comment on this subject; it follows spontaneously. Such a person is already liberated even while alive in this world. These two verses are so grand and magnificent before us, occurring towards the end of the fifth chapter of the Gita, introducing us into the larger exposition of the sixth chapter where dhyana yoga or meditation is described.


What is meditation? It is the centring of oneself in one’s Self, the transferring of the object into the Self and the Self into the object, so that the two become one. Sometimes this state is called samadhi. A proper balancing of the subject and the object is samadhi; a complete equilibrium is samadhi. This is attained through meditation, dhyana. For this purpose you have to understand what is the object of dhyana—what meditation is.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ...