Bhagavadgeeta : ( 26/11/2012. )

Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-7. There is an inherent essentiality, the basic minimum of our being, consciousness in its substance, and that is adhyatma. This svabhava is the determining factor of our character and conduct in life. Our behaviour outwardly is conditioned by what we are inwardly as manifest through the vesture of the various layers, the pancha-koshas, as they are called—the mind and body complex. Bhuta-bhavodbhava-karo visargah karma-samjnitah. This is a very difficult and hard saying. The meaning of karma is defined here, in this half-verse, which gives the definition of a peculiar type of karma—it is called bhuta-bhvodbhava-karo visargah. In the Bhagavad Gita, karma has a large dimension and a vast sweep. It is on account of this majestic conception of karma, that karma becomes almost the gospel of the Gita. People wonder many a time whether the Gita can be teaching only action. Yes, we may say it is so,...

Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-6. The internal self of man, the hidden soul of all things, is called adhyatma. The deepest essence of anything, for the matter of that, is prakritiatman or adhyatma; the essential nature of a thing is adhyatma. Our essential nature, our irreducible minimum characteristic of Being—that is adhyatma. It is the basic essence of all things, the Selfhood that is at the basis of even phenomena. The individual is not the body; it is not the mind. These cannot be called adhyatma, because they are not svabhava, our essential nature. Our basic characteristic is not exhausted in this bodily manifestation. What we think in our mind is not ourself, because our thoughts vary from day to day, from moment to moment. There is a non-varying, permanent feature in us—that which enables us to identify ourselves as a continuity of individuality. While thoughts change and ideas differ, we do not change. Right ...

Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-5. The answer is again a concise statement of cosmology, the whole structure of the universe in its relationship to God. We have been discussing it in some detail in connection with a few of the verses of the seventh chapter. The Supreme Being is the indestructible Absolute; It is the eternal. The language of the Bhagavadgita introduces these technical terms. The supreme Brahman or the Absolute is called the aksharam. It is the imperishable amidst all that is perishable, the eternal among the transient, the changeless among all things that change in this world and the perpetual witness of the varying phenomena of nature. It continuously maintains the awareness of creation, preservation and dissolution of the whole cosmos, and nothing else anywhere can be regarded as eternal or imperishable. Nowhere in this world do we see anything or come across anything that is imperishable. Whatever w...

Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-4. The comprehensive philosophy of the Gita is presented in a single verse here again, as in several other places. We should not be excessively religious, or excessively anything, because any kind of excess, even if it be devotion, so-called, entails a kind of dislike and hatred which unwittingly enters into the field of our consciousness. We are made in such a way that we cannot exist without hating something. We may be high class devotees of God, yogis par excellence, but the mind is made in such a way that it cannot escape this predicament of condemning something, deriding something, looking down upon something and contrasting something with another thing. This attitude is unfortunate and is not a positive component of true yoga. This is a message that is given in a seed form at the end of the seventh chapter, which recounts in passing the cosmology of the Bhagavadgita. This cosmology is deta...

Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-3. We are told in the Puranas that Narayana or Vishnu takes incarnations for the preservation of creation. Vishnu is regarded as yajna itself. It is the highest sacrifice—God sacrificing himself every moment of time for the sustenance of His creation. As adhiyajna He is the administrative power and the methodology of the working of the cosmos. All activity is comprehended under this yajna of the cosmos. Therefore God is present in all activity when it is considered as a passage to God, when it is regarded as a manifestation of God as rays emanating from the sun. Those wise souls who envisage God as adhibhuta, adhidaiva and adhiyajna, which means to say, who encounter God as a comprehensive Absolute and not merely existing only here or there, such devotees are true knowers. They can entertain or maintain this consciousness even at the time of passing from this world—they are not deprived of th...

Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-2. But this is an erroneous attitude, because it does not take God in His Truth. There is a conceptual transcendence attributed to God by the religious devotion. While the materialist denies God and affirms the world, religion affirms God but denies the world. Anyhow there is a kind of denial, which is not the gospel of Bhagavadgita. Any kind of extreme is cautiously avoided, because yoga is samatva, or balance of attitude. It is not a swinging of the balance on one side exclusively. So, towards this end, the last verse of the seventh chapter tells us—sadhibhutadhidaivam mam sadhiyajnam ca ye viduh, prayana-kale’pi ca mam te vidur yukta-cetasah. The Lord of the Gita speaks: “I have to be known as adhibhuta, adhidaiva and adhiyajna, and not merely any one of these to the exclusion of the others.” The whole universe is adhibhuta, and the directing principle hidden beneath all phenomena is adh...

Chapter 10: The Imperishable Among All that is Perishable : Part-1. The seventh chapter of the Bhagavadgita concludes with a message that leads on gradually to the commencement of the eighth chapter. This message is that in our devotion to God we have to so tune our consciousness that the various aspects in which God manifests Himself are taken into consideration at one stroke, and God is not conceived partially. Many of the religious attitudes of the devout take God as a transcendent, other-worldly Being, and religion has often been identified with a kind of neglect of the world and apathy towards human society. A religious attitude is made synonymous with an ascetic attitude of a denial of worldly values and all social significance, amounting to the conclusion, almost, that God is not in this world, and to attain God one must reject this world, reject any social concourse. This is the feature into which religions get driven, almost as a universal characteristi...

9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-20. This is the divine madness of the great mystics, the sages and saints who were God-intoxicated. We have words which demonstrate the incapacity to express the depth of this reality that we are trying to convey. Otherwise, why do we say “God-mad”, “God-intoxicated”, etc? These words ‘intoxication’, ‘madness’, etc., have extreme meanings, which alone seem to be able to convey this extreme experience that is going to take place. We will be surprised to read the expositions on the mystical revelations of saints and sages in mystical texts, in language which is not normal. All these superb poets, who established themselves in God-experience, tried to express their feelings and experiences in terms which is not the ordinary language of the world, and that is why when we read this poetry we feel shaken up—we are disturbed in a very profound manner. The greatest art is that which disturbs our feelings the moment we lo...

9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-19. It is the last fear that the ego of the individual has to shed. \If everything is going to be lost and you are not going to have even a farthing left in your life, you are going to be deprived of your kingdom, your profession, your land and house, your relations, everything—even the raiment you put on your body will be snatched away from you and the very ground that you are standing on is going to be cut from under your feet—you will be shocked indeed to hear all these things. But the shock that you get at the moment you feel that you yourself are going to be lost will be much greater than the other shocks. At the time of losing possessions—even the last thing that you can think of—the fear of losing oneself is the greatest of all fears, greater than the fear of losing all property and even status in life. So the last sorrow of the ego is this touch of God, and that is why the great mystics have said that n...

9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-18. So the seventh chapter of Gita tells us that jnana is the highest type of devotion. In the earlier stages of devotion, our hair may stand on end. There may be perspiration; there may be chocking of the throat; there may be trembling of the voice and a shutter of the whole system, a feeling of melting, as it were, into nothingness. A kind of swooning also takes place in ecstasy of devotion. These are the bhavas of bhakti. But the swooning is not a morbid psychological swooning of a patient who is bereft of consciousness—it is the shock that is injected into the soul by the presence of God. When God touches us, we may become unconscious, and this unconsciousness is not a disease, like an ordinary unconsciousness that comes to us when we fall from a tree, for instance, and get hit on the head. How is it possible that we can be in a swoon when God touches us? Yes, it is possible, on account of a particular ...

9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-17. We seek God for enlightenment, that is true, and devotion takes a new turn when the soul asks for God only. Not that it has obtained God, not that it has even comprehended the infinitude of God, but it has come to a definite conclusion that God is the goal of life. Even to come to this conclusion is a hard thing for normal people. The comprehension of the infinitude of God and the philosophical, mystical, spiritual meaning hidden behind the relationship between us and God—they are a different thing altogether. But even apart from these profundities, the deepest conviction that can charge our feelings is that we can accept nothing as our aim of life except God’s Being. If our deepest essence convinces itself that what we need is God’s Being and nothing else—not favours from people, not satisfaction from objects, not status in society, not a long life in space and time—but only That, and nothing but That, even...

9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-16. It can feel the atmosphere of the ocean which is there to swallow it. The rasa bhakti, the various experiences, is the impact of the Soul upon the various vestures of our personality, God touching us in different degrees of intensity. Devotion to God is the connection that we establish between ourselves and God, and this connection increases in its intensity and strength as the devotion goes on developing gradually by daily practice. In the beginning it may be true that we are expecting something from God. Yes, we cannot deny this fact. Who can say that we do not expect something from God—at least ‘peace of mind’, as we say. It is the least harmful of things that we are asking; even then it is something that we ask from God. Well, everyone asks for something from God, a redress from some kind of difficulty—psychological, intellectual, social, political, and what not. So, He is the resource-filled and ...

9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-15. The four stages mentioned here—arto jijnasur artharthi jnani—explain subtly the various stages of bhakti, gaunabhakti, vaidhibhakti, culminating in parabhakti. Ritualistic devotion is called vaidhibhakti. The well known devotions of the world, where devotees cry to God in prayers of various types, as inculcated in the various religions, is gaunabhakti; but parabhakti is the inability to exist without God. In the Bhakti Shastras, various rasas are mentioned—various tastes, as they are called. The subjects treated of in the Alankara Shastras are rhetoric. We pass through various stages of emotion in devotion to God, right from the social level, the physical level, the vital, the mental, the intellectual and the spiritual levels. We find that we are shaken up gradually as we proceed onwards, stage by stage, to the Being of God. It is as if the river is straining towards the ocean—it is sensing the very pres...

9: The Unity of the Lover and the Beloved : Part-14. But if the world has been created out of God Himself, then also a similar conclusion follows—we are not seeing the world in front of us, we are seeing only God. We may say that the world does not exist, or that only God exists; both mean the same thing. So to say that God created the world out of nothing, or to say that God created everything out of Himself are two ways of stating one reality, one fact, one conclusion that there cannot be anything external to God—vasudevah sarvam. This is the height of devotion, which the mind cannot ordinarily contain, because devotion here melts into experience. Where there is a lover and a beloved, there can be love, devotion, affection and longing. There can be yearning and an agony and anguish within because of the consciousness of having lost the beloved, being in a state of bereavement of the beloved, and longing for proximity to the beloved, the devotion getting...