The Moksha Gita : Swami Sivananda // Commentary : Chapter 6.2. - Swami Krishnananda

Swami Sivananda

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Saturday, March 25, 2023. 09:30.

The Moksha Gita : Swami Sivananda

Chapter 6: The Nature of the Mind - 2.

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4. "Just as a silk-worm is caught in its own cocoon, so also man is caught in this vast net of Samsara by his own Sankalpas and Vasanas."

The conception that the prison of life of the individual is self-built is brought out by the example of the self-imprisoning of the silkworm with its cocoon which it itself winds around its body. Further escape from the jail becomes difficult.

The Jiva winds round itself the cocoon of love for separation from the Eternal Truth through the positive act of being untrue to itself. It is a self-deception, a self-blasphemy, a self-slaughter that is done by allowing oneself to fall into lower Yonis or degraded conditions of existence. It is real suicide, because it is killing the consciousness of the true Self. Negation of Truth is the faithfulness towards something other than Truth, and that something is obviously untruth. He who catches the unreal by discarding the Real is involved in the horrifying wheel of Samsara and once the Jiva is caught within the clutches of this turning wheel there is no easy hope of its near freedom.

The net of Samsara is knit together with the strings of Sankalpas. He cannot become a Yogi who has not renounced Sankalpas or the act of imagining. Sankalpa is a creative determination to carry out a certain effect in the realm of relative life by relating the self to objective selves which are taken for granted to be independent and real by themselves. This creative affirmation deposits the psychic objective tendencies in the core of the being of the Jiva and these tendencies assert themselves whenever they find suitable conditions for that purpose. The moral sense of the intellect suppresses the lower appetites and the base cravings during the waking experience but the moment this ethical sense is overshadowed by the Tamas that manifests itself in the dreaming and the deep sleep states, the physical propensities which mar the consciousness of the Self express themselves and demand wish-fulfilment. At this time, the discriminative faculty is held in check and the dance of the senses to the tune of the Vasanas becomes the main feature of the Jiva's life. The material greed ejects its venom of earthly passion for the possession of and the rejoicing with spatial objects. This is how the Vasanas manage to maintain individuality and activity, and make the Jiva suffer the illness of life as a localised body. It is not merely the suppression but the complete frying of the Sankalpa-bhavana that can liberate the Jiva from the thraldom of the earth.

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To be continued

Swami Krishnananda

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