Bhagavadgeeta : ( 26/11/2012. )

11/04/2018 21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 9. The crux of spiritual knowledge and tapas or sadhana is reached when we come to our own selves from the outward panorama of things. Everything looks successful and grand and practicable when the dealings are only with external objects, with the vast cosmos. We may handle the whole world with great success and victory, but when it comes to a question of handling our own selves, we are an utter failure, because the most difficult thing is one’s own self and not the world outside, though it appears many a time that the world is a terrible thing before us. But we are the terrible things, and not the world. Hence this great terror is our own ego which has to be offered on the altar of sharanagati. “Come to Me alone and I will free you from all sins,” is the last message of the Bhagavadgita. It is wonderful indeed that all our sins will be pardoned and will be extinguished as if they had never been there. How could that ...

31/03/2018 21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 8. I cannot even be aware that you are sitting in front of me unless the Universal is operating between you and me. Neither can I speak to you, nor can I understand that you are in my presence, nor can you know that I am here. All knowledge is a manifestation of Universality. Every experience is Universal in its nature. There is nothing anywhere except the Universal ultimately; the particulars are not. One who knows this truth cannot appropriate agency to oneself. That action that is free from the agency or the commitment of personality in the performance of activity is sattvic. Anything else is rajasic or tamasic—motivated by egoism, personal esteem, and selfish desire, or performed with an intention of harming others in some way or the other, covertly or overtly. The eighteenth chapter is something like a catalogue or an index of several things that have been discussed in greater detail in the earlier chapters, t...

15/03/2018 21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 7. Actions which are motivated by personal agency are erroneous actions, and who can avoid this feeling of personal agency in action? Everyone knows and feels, “I do, and I have to do”, not knowing that many factors are contributory to the production of a result. As we have already noted, all that goes to constitute the personality of the individual, no doubt, is a group of factors contributory to the result of the action. But this is not all. The outward world also has a part to play in the production of the result. Every event is a collision of the subject and the object, and a spark splashes forth, as it were, in this impact which is the result often attributed to the subject and often attributed to the object. But neither is the truth, because the experience of a consequence is the interference of the third element, as was pointed out earlier, namely, one degree of the Universal operating in the midst of the pa...

06/03/2018 21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 5. Likewise is the classification of will, emotion, action, etc. which is elaborated in the eighteenth chapter. When we decide, we are exerting our volition—the will is operating. It is sattvic volition or will which is able to restrain the senses and stabilise the mind and the intellect in the direction of harmony with all things. Rajas is that which confuses one thing with another other and is unable to bring about this harmonising feature among the various types of experiences we have in the world. Tamas is that which adheres to a prejudiced affirmation of will. Feelings are the expressions of emotion. They are the premonitions of a desire for pleasure, satisfaction, or happiness. We require immediate happiness—comfort at once, and not tomorrow. This inclination or instinct of the mind by which one seeks immediate satisfaction and pleasure, whatever be the consequences following, is a misguided attitude, ...

26/02/2018 21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 5. 5.1 But the higher understanding knows that such a thing is impossible on the very face of it. We cannot love something to the exclusion of something else, because there is an inward relationship of things by a prehensive activity, so that when we touch something, we touch something else also, at the same time, without knowing what we are doing. Any kind of relationship with any particular object or situation at once implies a sort of interference with the positive or the negative prehensions of that particular object with other things in the world. Everything is somehow or other related to everything, whether mediately or immediately. Thus the genius of logical knowledge appreciates the presence of an interrelationship of all things. This is rajasic knowledge, where we maintain the diversity of objects as a reality in itself and yet accede or concede there being an inward collaborative activity going on along t...

15/02/2018 21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 4. Our understanding, our volition, our feelings and our actions are therefore sattvic, rajasic or tamasic. The gross understanding or the tamasic, objective-motivated understanding is that which clings to objects as realities in themselves and pours forth all one’s affection upon the objects, transferring oneself into them in some manner, so that there is a loss of personality in the love that one evinces in regard to the object of attachment. This is the lowest kind of understanding of the nature of reality. For the mother, the son is all reality—there no reality more than that. She will die for her son. People die for wealth, people die for name, fame, honour and many other things of that kind. These are examples of how the self within is transferred to outside factors and features that are visibly substantial, or merely psychological or conceivable, and become objects rather than subjects. When one, as a true ...

05/02/2018 21.The Lord Dwells in the Hearts of All Beings- 3. 3.1 These three principles are described in the fourteenth chapter in some detail, which again become the principal features guiding the themes described in the seventeenth chapter. Everything is sattvica, rajasica or tamasica. Whatever we think, whatever we speak, whatever we do, whatever we will—everything conceivable anywhere in any manner is one of these things—sattvica, or rajasica, or tamasica, or it is a mixture of one or two of these things in some proportion. Anyway, there cannot be anything independent of these. That means to say there cannot be anything, anywhere, which is neither subjective, nor objective, or a blend of both. 3.2 The more we are able to bring a harmony between the subjective element and the objective features in the gradually ascending series of the manifestations of this principle of universality known as adhidaiva, the more we are able to succeed along these lines, the more...