Bhagavadgeeta : ( 26/11/2012. )

8. In Harmony with the Whole Universe  : Part-19. But this religious, spiritual or mystical requirement on our part will take us beyond religion itself. As long as we are dogmatic in our adherence to a fanatical theological doctrine of this ‘ism’ or that ‘ism’, as long as we fight over languages and kin, and stick to our prejudices of nationalities and various cultures, to that extent we are far from God. The Bhagavadgita, in a super-national gospel, gives us this great caution, asking us to transmute ourselves into super-national individuals not belonging to any nation. In our spirit we are super and exist above these limiting shackles of wealth and power, of distinctions of umpteen types and, in a sentence, we may say that the Bhagavadgita’s gospel is a gospel of the universalisation of the individual. Towards this great goal the Teacher takes us in the further chapters. Chapter-8. ENDS Swami Krishnananda Next : Chapter-9: The Unity of the Lover and the ...

8. In Harmony with the Whole Universe  : Part-18. There are many students who think that the- " sixty-sixth slokam of the eighteenth chapter" is the sum and substance of Gita— "Sarva-dharman parityajya mam ekam saranam vraja, aham tvm sarva-papebhyo moksayisymi ma sucah." Well, this is the sixty-sixth slokam of the eighteenth chapter, and it has been told only towards the conclusion of the entire teaching which has passed through various stages. We too have to pass through the emotional turmoil through which Arjuna passed in the first chapter, and we will also find ourselves in the same condition of utter misery and helplessness in which he found himself emotionally. We will have to find ourselves in this condition, if we have not already done so. The spiritual seeker has to face a fire in which he has to be burnt and burnt. The demands that God makes upon us are hard indeed, harder and more inconceivable then the demands of a hard-boil...

8. In Harmony with the Whole Universe  : Part-17. All things are existent in some form or the other, ultimately, in their archetypal Creator, in God the Almighty. This is the way in which we are introduced to teachings of the next six chapters of Bhagavadgita, from the seventh to the twelfth, for the purpose of giving us a complete knowledge of the cosmology of creation with the intention of introducing us into the Being of God Himself. The terrible encounter had to be faced even by a great man like Buddha. “You have chosen this path in error; you are wrong. Your sadhana, the meditation that you are attempting, are false attempts,” Mara says to Buddha.  Christ’s temptations that are spoken of in the New Testament are the mystical stages through which everyone has to pass. Everyone is a Buddha and everyone is a Christ, one day or the other—if not today, tomorrow. Everybody has to pass through the same series of stages, and all have to undergo the same...

8. In Harmony with the Whole Universe  : Part-16. These difficulties that we made reference to, which we have to face in the study of these divine and sublime subjects, are because of the persistence of certain weaknesses in our individualities. The weaknesses are nothing but the affirmations of our own selves. There is an inveterate impulse in every one of us to assert ourselves, and the biblical story of the fall of Satan, Lucifer, is a commonly accepted doctrine of the original fall of man. That is the original fall, and the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree is the assertion of individuality by a sudden awareness of good and bad, good and evil. We are told that Adam and Eve had no idea of good and evil—they did not even know that they were naked. This idea itself was not there; there was no consciousness of it, because they were communed to the whole creation. The eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree is the desire to grab objects of sense for the sa...

8. In Harmony with the Whole Universe  : Part-15. So, when this selectiveness in perception is overcome by the intuitive character of comprehension which is the vision of God, it is not a sensory perception. God does not see the world with eyes as we see, but He has an intuitive, instantaneous, transcendental comprehension, at one grasp, at the totality of creation. And here, the distinctions that appear to our minds do not exist at all—they get transmuted into a single wholeness of indivisibility. When the great Creator is said to be inclusive of all things in the world, of every character, desirable or undesirable, necessary or unnecessary, pleasant or otherwise, we cannot understand. We cannot think as God thinks, because we have no intuitive comprehension of things. We have only sensory organs. We see, hear, taste, smell, and touch—but God is not like that. His existence is His Self; His perception is inseparable from His Being. His existence is Hi...

8. In Harmony with the Whole Universe  : Part-14. They are arranged in such a pattern in the cosmic set-up that there seems to be the sattvica, rajasa and tamasa, as they appear before our eyes. This is another great revelation here. Before the eyes of God the world stands transfigured, and it does not stand as it stands before us. Before God, the world does not exist as an object to be confronted every day, as it does with people. We have to confront the world; we have to face it; we have to attack it. Sometimes we are subjugated by it, and those are our sorrows, because our minds accept certain characteristics of the world according to the capacities of comprehension with which the mind is endowed, and what it cannot accept is rejected by the mind, just as a certain spectrum of colour in the leaves of a tree absorb a particular ray of the sun, and appear to us as green color. The green colour of the leaf, for instance, is the effect of an abstraction. A...

8. In Harmony with the Whole Universe  : Part-13. These answers, given by the Teacher, raise further questions of the relationship between the thread and the beads and so on, because the thread is not the beads, and the beads are not the thread. Again a doubt will come that God is not the world, and the world is not God. So we are not going into these details now in this chapter—it will be taken up further on. For the time being we are told to satisfy our initial curiosity that God is present in all things, and we need not be under the impression that He is far away, unreachable as a so-called transcendent. Yet, when God is taken as a Creator and as a thread passing through all the beads of things in the universe, the subtle misgivings of the transcendence of God persists, inadvertently, willy-nilly. However, keeping this question aside for the time being to be answered later on, we are told that everything in this world, whatever be the variety that we see, is co...