The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity 3.4 - Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Friday 19, Apr 2024 06:10.
The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita: 
Chapter 3: The Aranya Parva of the Mahabharata -4.

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Then what happens? In spiritual life what is required is sincerity, honesty of purpose, and a genuineness of acquisition. They say there is nothing else required except that. Yet, even very sincere souls are sometimes put to a hard test. We cannot say that the Pandavas were not sincere. They were very sincere, good souls, but they had to undergo this difficulty. What a hardship!

In one place, Kunti prays to the Lord to express the troubles all her children had to pass through and the mysterious way in which God's help came to their succour. And in the end, old Bhishma regretfully states, “What a pity, my dear people! You are good souls, with great mastery in warfare, indomitable strength, great learning, and a person like Krishna as your friend. With all that, you had to suffer untold misery in life. Indeed, mysterious is fate. Providence is difficult to understand.” This is what Bhishma uttered in the end. With such security and facility, such hardship had to be faced and could not be avoided.

All of us, all spiritual seekers, are basically good persons. A sincerely aspiring spiritual seeker is a great asset to this Earth. They are what we call the salt of the earth. Such people are rare to find. A soul that seeks satisfaction in a super-mundane reality, and longs only for that as the only worthwhile thing, is a great manifestation of force, a divinity on Earth. And Yudhisthira stood for that ideal of super-mundane aspiration and righteousness, what we call the righteousness of the kingdom of God, but that righteousness also had to tread the path of thorns. Why should it be like that? Even today, people are not able to understand why such good souls should have been exiled into the forest. For what fault were they exiled?

We may say there was some indiscretion. There are occasions when we may be able to read some meaning of indiscretion on the part of even good ones, which leads to their difficulty and problems. We may accept this point of view also. Even an extremely good person is susceptible to erroneous action, due to what we may call an error of judgment at a particular moment. As we say, why did Yudhisthira have to play dice? He could have withheld himself from that, and so on. Likewise, spiritual seeking may also sometimes get involved in a slight error of judgment, and that error consists in an imbalance of attitude, some protest coming from an unattended part of our personality and society.

In the beginning, it is a protest from society. We will have so many difficulties when we try to free ourselves from the tangles of family attachment, social attachment, etc. Many people come to this ashram who are between two horns of a dilemma. They cannot stay here, they cannot stay there, and they want to stay here, they want to stay there. Such difficulties arise. There is a pull from here, and a pull from there also. And even when we seem to have settled this issue, we will find that we might not have judiciously done it. Sometimes we may vehemently settle an issue. That vehement settling is not a judicious settling. We may settle an issue by giving some pain to one party, which is also one kind of settling. But here, in dealing with our mind, we may not be wise in settling the issue of its demands by giving pain to it from some side, against its own will. Yoga, as is the case with any other enterprise in life, is a sort of educational career. We have to educate ourselves. Force of will is not to be applied except when it is applied as a sort of educational method. It should not be merely a vehemence of the ego or the force of the rod. Sometimes this difficulty is before us.

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Continued

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