The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity 6-3 - Swami Krishnananda.

Swami Chinmayananda:

Devotees all over the world would vouch for the fact that every letter written to him would elicit a reply in a few days from wherever on the globe he happened to be at that point of time, in which even the address on the envelope often handwritten by him! He wrote over a hundred letters a day, over and above all the other aspects of his busy daily schedule. On one occasion, when his address book was misplaced by his secretary, he dictated two hundred and fifty addresses, including the PIN codes, from his photographic memory!

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Saturday 21, Jul. 2024, 06:10.
The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity-6.3
Chapter 6: Beauty and Duty in the Bhagavadgita-3.
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita: 
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti

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There are two great difficulties in life: the understanding of duty and beauty. Neither of these will be clear to our minds, though only these two things control our lives. There are only two things that pull us vehemently in their direction: beauty and duty. We cannot escape the call of duty, nor can we escape the call of beauty. Neither of these can be really understood, however much we may wrack our heads.

In the Bhagavadgita we have the presentation of a great beauty, and also the explanation of a great duty. Both these things are there. God is the centre of the supreme duty incumbent upon everyone in creation, and God is also the greatest beauty. The cosmic form, the Visvarupa Darshana, was the pinnacle of beauty, grandeur, and magnificence. It was also the explanation of duty. In that picturesque miracle which is feebly explained before us in the words of the poet, a staggering reality is envisioned. 'Staggering' is the only word I can use, because our heads will become giddy thinking that. We will become giddy if we begin to think what beauty is. We will also become giddy if we begin to know what duty is. These are the two things which will make our heads reel. A person who is absorbed in the true conception of duty ceases to be an ordinary human being, and one who knows what beauty is also is not an ordinary individual.

Poets and sages, therefore, are superhuman. They do not speak an ordinary human style, though it appears they employ the medium of human expression through a brush or through a pen. Whatever be the medium that they employ, it matters not; their intention is the same. So the human crowd of individual understanding that brought about that gathering of people in the battlefield of Kurukshetra found that it cannot explain itself. It appeared that everything is clear. In the earlier stages, everything seems to be fine. Yes, we understand, but when we are face to face with a dark screen or thick wall, we find we cannot penetrate through it.

So everything was clear to everybody; otherwise, why should they gather there in such a large crowd? But when the inward constituents of human nature were brought to the surface of direct action, they told each individual, “You are not intended to understand us.” A confused presentation of ideas is the picture of the First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita – an individual man speaking, and an individual speaking his ideas of some situation which is not necessarily human and individual.

A superhuman difficulty was there. The question was a simple one, namely, the question of the methodology of the battlefield. But that little question actually rose and blossomed forth into another question altogether: the question of mankind itself. One little man's problem dug out the problem of everybody. It was originally one person's problem, and it could have been answered then and there by somebody else, but the problem of that one person was so deep that when one had to go to the bowels of that little question of one man, the deepest roots of it, it was found that it touched the problem of everybody. As we go deep into the root of a single wave in the ocean, we seem to be touching the whole ocean. So one question, a little thing of a simple matter, actually brought into the field of action a terrible consequence of the need to solve the whole problem of creation itself.

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Continued

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