The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 4.2. Swami Krishnananda

========================================================================

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10/03/2020.
Chapter 4: The Struggle for the Infinite - 2.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1.

A love for bodily existence and an affirmation of the ego, a conformity to social relationships connected with the body and the ego, sum up our satisfactions in a nutshell. We are mortals, living in a transitional world which pretends to satisfy our desires, but never does so. But this pretension is taken by us as a reality, and we ground ourselves in the justification of this pretentious promise of the sense-world, and somehow or the other persuade ourselves to be satisfied with whatever is in the world as presented to the senses and whatever the emotions regard as what is ultimately required. 

Though we are not always emotional and sentimental in an obvious form, we are that basically; and our very root as individuals is unjustifiable finally in the light of the larger setup of things  which demand an existence of their own, not in any way inferior to our own existence. We have a subtle and secret longing to be independent and satisfied even at the cost of everything in the world. Consciously this does not come to the surface of our mind, but basically human beings are selfish. 

Not merely in human beings, but perhaps in everything in the world, there is an urge to maintain oneself in a bodily complex, and the fear of death is the greatest of fears; the love of life is the greatest of loves. Between love of one’s own life and fear of one’s own death, the one implies the other, and each one confirms that we regard this body as our entire property, our belonging, nay, as we ourselves. 

The social relationships are practically physical relationships, accentuated by psychic contact and adjustable with the temporary features which the world of Nature manifests in the process of history. We, somehow, manage to live in this world by a peculiar kind of daily adjustment with the unintelligible processes through which the world passes. 

We adjust ourselves not merely with the world of Nature every day, but, with a tremendous difficulty and strain on the mind, have to adjust ourselves with people around us. And this strain is a great toil indeed. We are so much accustomed to this strenuous life of adjustment with the outside atmosphere that we have mistaken this effort itself for a kind of joy and satisfaction. The condition of perpetual disease is mistaken for a normal state of health.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2.

Man is never said to be, but is always said to become. We do not remain in ourselves continuously even for a few minutes. As the Buddha said in his wondrous message, everything is transitory, everything is momentary, everything is like a link connecting itself with another link. There is a procession of events, and there is nothing existent. 

If we are part and parcel of this transitional universe, there can be nothing truly existent in us. This is perhaps the reason why the Buddhist philosophers denied that there is such a thing as the self, by which we have to understand the transitional self, the empirical self which we regard ourselves to be in our poor understanding of the nature of things. 

We regard ourselves as a psychophysical complex—the body and the mind combined in some manner. And this self certainly cannot be regarded as our real self because it moves with the laws of Nature, and, therefore, it has births and deaths. 

The process of evolution is a name that we give to the continuous series of births and deaths of all things. A succession of events is another name for the death of one event and the birth of another event, which indicates the finitude of every event and of every object.

To be continued ...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

=======================================================================