Bhagavadgeeta : ( 26/11/2012. )

Chapter 16: The Essence of Creation is God's Glory - 5. The visualisation has not yet taken place—even an inkling of it seems to be very far away. The mind is kept in tenterhooks; it appears to be catching it but the idea is receding further, as the horizon moves further away as we try to approach it by going in that direction. There appears to be a confidence in the soul of the seeking spirit that God is immanent and capable of approach. But this capability of approach to the Being of God still remains as the ability to catch the horizon—appearing to be there but yet not possible of real contact. There is a spiritual anguish that grows deeper and deeper as the seeker goes higher and higher, and the agony grows more and more incapable of tolerance. The spiritual suffering in a way can be said to be more agonising than the sufferings of the mortal body. The soul’s anguish is incapable of experience and explanation. Only one who has trodden the path can know what it is to...

Chapter 16: The Essence of Creation is God's Glory -4. The idea of God becomes more and move emphasised as the chapters move forward, while in the earlier chapters it was kept aside for later consideration. The higher concepts come later for contemplation—the lower and gross ones come before. When we reach the ninth chapter, we are brought almost to the point where we can breathe the breath of the presence of God in all creation. The winds of the ocean of Being begin to blow directly on our face, and we are stumbling almost unconsciously on that stupendous aegis of God’s Being. Swami Krishnananda  To be continued  ....

Chapter 16: The Essence of Creation is God's Glory -3. So to come to the point, when we reached the seventh chapter, we were taken to a larger concept of creation, above the level of human society and even the individual psyche, namely the cosmos of five elements—earth, water, fire, air and ether. Mostly, people cannot imagine these things. Who thinks of five elements every day? We think only of a little bread and jam, and a cup of tea and a little skirmish and a rubbing of shoulders that we have in our little day-to-day life. These are all the little bits of creation that we can have in our minds. But this wondrous expanse of cosmic elements, which stumps the imagination of even the astronomer and the physicist, is beyond the imagination of ordinary human beings. Such was the idea of creation given to us at the beginning of the seventh chapter, which implied that there is a Creator transcendent to the created universe, who is the regulator and the dispenser of just...

Chapter 16: The Essence of Creation is God's Glory .2. We commenced with the grossest concept, namely, human society, to recapitulate the entire ground that we have traversed throughout the period of our study. When we think of life, we always think of human society, as frogs think only of frogs, as the old adage goes. To think of the cosmos of the five elements is a larger concept, and it requires a greater stretch of imagination than is available to the common man. For him life is only human beings, or perhaps only a family—that is all the life that he can conceive of. When a person refers to life, he refers to his family, and nothing else can be comprehended within the idea of life. Life is miserable; when speak like this, we mean our family is miserable. Or if we are more sophisticated intelligentsia, we mean humanity is miserable—mankind is in a tragic situation. This is all the view of creation we have with our present stage of understanding. Further on in the Git...

Chapter 16: The Essence of Creation is God's Glory .1. The creation of the world was referred to in the seventh chapter of the Bhagavadgita, indicating that the whole process of evolution is motivated by the will of God. By creation we have generally an idea of substances, things or objects, persons, etc. Tangible things, visible objects and cognisable contents are usually considered by us as contents in creation. But creation is something vaster and more pervasive than can be comprehended by the tangibility of the sense organs. As the teachings of the Gita move forward through the ascending chapters, we are taken further on to the greater subtlety involved in the structure of creation to culminate in the most subtle of all concepts—the Being of God Himself. Swami Krishnananda  To be continued  ....

Chapter 15: The Rarest of Devotees-15.  That we cannot part with, even in the case of God. The ego is never prepared for this painful ordeal, but one realists that dying to the temporal existence is to live in the eternal Being. One knows for certain that sharanagati or self surrender, the offering of one’s self in jnana yagna or bhakti or devotion, is no doubt a total annihilation of the local individuality. It is the death of the ego and destruction of everything that we regard as worthwhile in this world. It is terrifying indeed even to imagine, but it is an awakening into the cosmic emperor-ship of the soul of man—the enthronement of oneself in the supreme infinitude of the Godhead. So the religion of the Bhagavadgita, which is concisely presented in the ninth chapter, is not a religion that we usually see practiced in this world, but a soul speaking to God, a rousing of the spirit within to the all-comprehensive reality that is present in all religious faiths, cult...

Chapter 15: The Rarest of Devotees-14. So there is a transfiguration of values when the soul rises to God-consciousness, and the mortal does not remain mortal anymore. The immortality that is attained is not a length and duration of individual persistence, but an expansion of the soul’s consciousness to the infinitude of God’s Being. We say sometimes that the river enters the ocean—well, the ocean has become conscious of itself, as it were. Such a magnitude of attainment is unthinkable. “Whoever wholeheartedly concentrates his entire being upon Me, such a person is redeemed by Me,” says the great Master. What we are expected to perform or do in our religion or spirituality is to put together of all the parts of our personality and offer it to God. This is called self-surrender—atma samarpana or saranagati. Instead of offering a banana or a coconut, one offers oneself to God, because that is the last thing that one would offer. We are prepared to part with what we have, but we ...