Bhagavadgeeta : ( 26/11/2012. )

5: God is Our Eternal Friend-3. So there is a great solace for all of us in the midst of the turmoil of life, in the sorrows of our days and the grief through which we are passing every moment of time. Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata, abhyutthanam adharmasya tadatmanam srjmyaham. Paritranaya sadhunam vinasaya ca duskrtam, dharma-samsthapanarthaya sambhavami yuge yuge is an eternal gospel. This one gospel is enough to keep us rejoicing day and night, completely forgetful of all the apparent sorrows of life. If anything is alive, it is God. Everything is dead without Him. This life force takes effective measures at the proper moment, whenever there is a conflict of forces. This conflict of power is the yuga. It has various connotations and denotations. Any kind of friction is a yuga, and one power colliding with another power is a yugasandhi. It may be of the yugas known as krita, dvapara, treta and kali, the well known classifications of time measurement, or it may...

5: God is Our Eternal Friend-2 This was the great answer which the Bhagavadgita poses before us, who walk like peacocks with the pride of knowledge, and tells us where we actually stand. Yes, this is a great revelation indeed—that the world is involved in our perceptions and vice versa, and therefore no valuation can be acceptable in the end if it is purely individualistic, notional and limited to a single observer of things. Here we have the central philosophy of the third chapter of the Bhagavadgita. I mention these few words only a kind of recapitulation of what we observed in the last chapter. All this is beautiful, yes, but who is to tell the senses that this is the state of affairs? Who is to give instruction to the mind that its perceptions and cognitions are erroneous? The teacher is absent, because the so-called teacher is the individual himself, and he is himself involved in the mistake that is committed in perception. The perceiver is involved in the percept...

5: God is Our Eternal Friend : 1. In our rapid study of the Bhagavadgita, we could observe that there is an inherent defect in the understanding ingrained in human nature by the reply that Bhagavan Sri Krishna gave, as a retort, to the problems raised by Arjuna. This defect, this shortcoming, was also pointed out in the third chapter. The human way of thinking is not necessarily the right way of thinking, though it is accepted as the norm of thinking in the world of human beings. But, unfortunately, the world does not consist only of human beings—a point which man cannot accept due to the egoism of his nature. The ego is self-assertive and proclaims its superiority over the perceptional capacities of others. Do we not always measure everything else with the yardstick of our own way of perceiving and knowing? Everything should be in accordance with our way of thinking—only then do we regard it as right. And, yes, it is true that Arjuna employed this yardstick. He was a huma...

4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 7. ( Last Part ) There is a remedy, because the locations of these desires are the senses, the mind and the intellect. These are the harbingers of desire and anger. Therefore it is necessary to restrain the senses, the mind and the intellect. Desire is nothing but an urge of the individual to move towards objects. It is like the impulse of the river to move towards something outside, say the ocean which is its object. The individual, in its finitude of consciousness, in its agony of being conditioned to the body, cries to come out of itself; and in its attempt to come out of itself and unite itself with others, hugs objects of sense and runs to them. This urge or impulse of the individual to run to outside objects for the purpose of assimilating them into himself—that is called desire—and these desires are channelised through the sense objects and propelled by the mind, sanctioned by the intellect. So these three are the arch devils, we may s...

4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 6. This is a very difficult thing. Anybody would say it is an impossibility, because our desires are so strong. We have impulses in us which tie us down to the body and to the society in which we are living. We have hunger and thirst and the urge to sleep; we are fatigued, we have anger, we have passions, we have jealousies, and we have every blessed thing. These impulses within us, which are inseparable from the nature of our mind itself, prevent us, or certainly hinder us, from contemplating any such possibility along the lines indicated here. No mind can think in this manner because of the desires that are inside us—intense desire, which also, when it is frustrated, becomes intense anger. Desire and anger—these will not allow us to contemplate in this manner. Either we have desire or we have anger; one of the two is always there. We cannot be free from both. But they are one and the same thing appearing in two ways—anger and desire are n...

.4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 5. There is a transcendental type of activity which the human mind in its present state cannot understand, and that is the significance behind the great gospel of the karma yoga of the Gita. Karma yoga can be said to be a transcendental action. It is not my action or your action; it is not activity in a commercial sense. It is an activity which is commensurate with the law of the cosmos. It is, again, an activity which is based on samkhyabuddhi—we have not to forget this point. The enlightenment of the samkhya, to which we made reference earlier, is the basis of this action called ‘yoga’ in the Bhagavadgita. The karma yoga of the Gita is therefore divine action, in one sense. It is not human action, because the human sense of values gets overcome, transcended in the visualisation of the involvement of the seer in the seen universe. Every thought becomes a kind of universal interpretation of things, and every action becomes a universal action. ...

4.The Cosmic Manifestation : 4. And in the tamasic aspect they become this body. So what is there, in this personality, which is not in the outer world? Whatever the world is made of outwardly is also the substance of this individuality. The gunas, which are the substances of prakriti, are present in the individual experiencer and also in the objects of perception. So the Bhagavadgita says: guna gunesu vartanta—the gunas operate upon the gunas. The eyes see, the ears hear, the tongue tastes, the skin touches, and the nose smells. How it is possible for these senses to function in this manner? The possibility is on account of the fact of the collaboration that already exists basically between the senses and the objects outside, on account of the fact that both are evolutes of the same tanmatras—shabda, sparsha, rupa, rasa and ghanda. So, the judgment of Arjuna in respect to the world outside, which he declares in the first chapter of the Gita, needs an emendation. What ...