Commentary on the Srimad Bhagavad Gita- Discourse 3.1. - Swami Krishnananda

03/04/2020.

Discourse 3: The Second Chapter Begins – Sanhkya Yogam -1.

1.

We look at the world only with our eyes, and judge things according to the report that is provided through the medium of the senses. All the information that we get of the world through the sense organs is therefore galvanised, and in many ways distorted. It is assumed that a person, as an individual, has to do something with this world. The business of life is, practically, an attempt to handle this world in some way—to harness it, and utilise it for one’s own purpose.

2.

#Here is the essential point. 

##We have to use the world for our purposes. Through scientific advancement and technological discoveries and inventions, we seem to be trying to use the world more and more for our utility. It is an object; it is a thing; it is a tool which has to be used for an externalised purpose—not for the benefit of the world, but for the benefit of another, who calls himself the human individual. 

#Do we not mostly judge things in this manner?

#Everything has to be cast into the mould of our sensory and physical needs. 

#We make remarks about things : “It is like this and it is like that.” 

### These remarks are judgments that we pass on the things in the world based on evidence provided by the sense organs, which are entirely unreliable on account of their impetuosity. Due to this, the thinking mind, or the consciousness that is aware, is pulled out of its own roots. The activity of the sense organs plucks us, as it were, from ourselves, and throws us into the winds of the outside world. We are distressed from morning to evening on account of a loss of self that we undergo, even when we do not actually know what is happening to us.

3.

#Every perception is a movement of the self towards an object. The consciousness has to charge the mind with an intelligence that peeps through the sense organs and locates objects, the world in front, in a particular juxtaposed manner.

##So our conclusion that we know something—we know the world or we know whatever it is—is triply conditioned: firstly, by it having to pass through the mentation, the psychic organ, the antahkarana; secondly, by the mind having to think only through the sense organs; and thirdly, by the sense organs having to visualise things as located in space and time. 

###Thus, there is a threefold defect in human perception, which includes social relations and everything that we regard as ours or not ours. Due to this purely personal judgment born of human sentiment, Arjuna turned the tables around, and made an unexpected gesture of putting down his weapons. He said, “I shall not embark upon this otherwise well-praised adventure of a war with the Kurus.”

To be continued ....