The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity 5-5 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday 04, Jul. 2024, 06:40.
The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita: 
Chapter 5: The Udyoga Parva of the Mahabharata-5.

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The conflict of the actual historical battle is, no doubt, a conflict, and it is also to be taken into consideration, but it is not outside the environment in which human beings are involved. We are not always judicious to appreciate that even a historical battle is not purely historical. It is not a political event as it appears on the surface. It is a deep secret of the human psyche affecting a larger atmosphere, the whole world, and it may even reach up to the skies. Even the stellar regions may be involved in exerting some influence in the action of a single man on Earth. It may be an emperor, a dictator, an administrator, a major general, a businessman – any person does something, and he or she is convinced that only that person is the motive and the impulsion behind the action. Sometimes a group of people believes that the group is the impulsion, and a nation believes that the nation is the source. They may not be wholly correct in this opinion because, on a very in-depth analysis, it is difficult to believe that events occur in one particular place. It is perhaps not entirely true that actions are local actions. It does not appear that any event is connected with that particular apparent locality only, as a boil on the foot does not appear to be an action of the foot only. There seems to be some trouble in many other places manifesting in a particular locality of the body. Every conflict is a kind of irreconcilable illness, a morbid condition; but where is its source?

Now, in the finding of an answer to this question as to where the source of this conflict is, we are likely to make a mistake in thinking that other people – so-and-so, this person or that country – is the enemy and they are the causes of the conflict.  We have such answers easily available. But man, being finite even in his understanding, seems to have finite answers to these questions.

The Bhagavadgita wants to be your good friend. The Bhagavadgita wants to be a good physician of your illness. The Bhagavadgita does not want to make money off of you as a patient by giving you one tablet for your headache and saying, “Quit, now you are okay.” It wants to diagnose your entire disease and say, “My dear friend, this is the difficulty.” A holistic interpretation of medicine is the proper way of treating an illness, as people say nowadays. It means that you have to consider the whole being of the person when you treat that person for any particular illness. It is not the leg or the nose or the head or the throat that is ill; you are ill. This is what expert medical men tell us.

The Bhagavadgita tells us, my dear friend, that the war is not taking place in the Kurukshetra field. It is not taking place, it never took place, and it is not going to take place in any country. It is not caused by this person or that person; it is not the fault of this community or that community. It is a complicated situation, into which you have to go deep to solve the problem, if your intention is really to solve it. If you want only to do a patchwork and imagine that you have solved the problem, well, do it. There will be a cessation of the battle; there will be peace, as it were, and after a few years it will burst forth into action once again because it was not a peace, it was a tentative, disgruntled truce. Actually, it was not peace at all.

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Continued

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