The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity 6-2 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday 21, Jul. 2024, 06:40.
The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity-6.2
Chapter 6: Beauty and Duty in the Bhagavadgita-2.
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita: 
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)

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The context of the Bhagavadgita, the occasion for whose delivery we are bringing to our memories today, was certainly a historical occasion. But that historical occasion could not manage itself. People require a ruler, as they are unable to rule themselves independently; and to discover, to find, and to install an administrator or a ruler of people is to endeavour to fix the location of a significance in their own lives. Everyone knows there must be some significance in the lives of everybody, but we wish to see the significance operating actively in our lives. It is otherwise difficult to understand how we require a ruler at all. It is nothing but the requirement of a principle of operation, understanding and action. We are not expecting a person before us. A ruler is not a person. We are also persons; in what way are we less? That is not actually what we want when we appoint a king, a monarch or a chief administrative power. We do not require a person; we require a location of intelligent interpretation of the values of life, an impartial observance and observation of the needs of the whole populace, which is a crude manifestation before us of the need we feel in our lives for something which is other than our own selves, something other than pure nature, pure earth, pure mountains and trees. Every moment of time, every day of our lives, we require, we feel a need, a necessity, to transcend, to exceed ourselves, and to allow the operation of an understanding which is not necessarily our individual understanding as it acts in a discreet manner in each one of us.

Everyone has an understanding. There is no one bereft of it totally. If that were the case, where comes the need for a regulation, a system, an operation? Why should we require any kind of rule, constitution and system when everyone has an understanding, everyone knows what is proper, and no one is the less for it? The need is something beyond ordinary human requirement. It is a human requiring a super-human operation. A regulation of any kind, whatever it be, in any measure, in any percentage, is a super-human invading and occupying, controlling the human and the particular.

The Mahabharata was a big medley of the coming together of individuals, many people joining together and deciding things for themselves – a mob, a crowd gathered together in a field of action, operation, the meaning of which to some extent was clear to each one, but its basic principle was not clear. Some sort of an understanding of every performance in our life we do have, but occasionally we find that this understanding is inadequate. There are knotty, difficult situations in our lives when our usual understanding seems to be inadequate. We have our daily routine which we conduct fairly well with our understanding, and we do not feel that we are inadequate in the understanding of our daily performances, but there are certain occasions when we find that our understanding is not adequate to the purpose. Then it is that we run hither and thither for help from a superior understanding. This superior understanding is not to be confused with any person, though, unfortunately for us human beings, the manifestation even of this superior understanding happens to be through a person only. Sometimes it happens to be in a group of people.

I had occasion sometime to mention that the beauty of a painting is not in the ink and the canvas, though the painting contains nothing but the ink and the canvas. You would be wondering, “What is beauty if not the presentation of the pattern of the ink on the canvas?” It is not possible for anyone to clearly say what beauty is. It is a super-personal manifestation in the context of the personality of the ink and the canvas. That is why it is so attractive that we go on gazing at it and are drowned in its perception. Beauty is inexplicable. That is why it is so attractive. We go on gazing at it and are drowned in its perception. It is not capable of understanding through mathematical equations. Mathematically it is very easy to understand what a painting is – so much of ink and so much square feet of canvas; so much area it occupies geometrically, and so it is easy, mathematically very simple to understand. But beauty is not mathematics, and duty is also not mathematics.

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Continued

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