The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 5.7 Swami Krishnananda

Wednesday, June 10, 2020.

Chapter 5: The Mortal and the Immortal-7.

1.

The phenomenon of death is visible before our eyes because of a mixing up of standpoints. This mixing up is called adhyasa in philosophic language, a superimposition of one thing on another thing. We read one meaning in another and that meaning in this, and so on. That which exists is not that which dies. And that which does not exist is not that which dies. 

Therefore, one cannot say what dies. The process of death is one of transition, and is not a ‘destruction’ of anything. A change of condition is what we call death, which is a change that is required by the law of the evolution of the universe.

2.. 

In fact, we die every moment. Every cell of our body changes constantly, and it is opined by biologists that after every seven years we become entirely changed personalities, physically. All the cells of the body renew themselves in such a manner that we are new beings after many years. Not merely that, every day there is transformation as we grow. 

We have grown from babyhood to this adulthood of today. But we have never seen how we have grown. This process of growing was imperceptible. And, if growth is nothing but change, how is it that it could not be perceived? We never knew that we are becoming something else every moment. All change is perceptible, visible, recognisable. 

But in our own case of growth, for instance, we never knew, we never recognised, we never felt that we are changing; all this because there is something in us which does not change. That character of this mysterious entity in us which does not change is the real reason behind the fear of death and the love of life.

3.

Change is only a condition, and not a substance; it is not a thing. It is, therefore, not a reality. But it appears as if some tremendous event takes place at the time of death, for all our practical purposes. We are horrified at the very name of death. The horrific nature of death is due to the identification of characters belonging to two levels of our being, the spiritual or the metaphysical getting transferred to the temporal or the transitional, and vice versa. 

We see two things at the same time, imagining that it is one thing and that the experience is not constituted of two different things. There is a procession of events, a continuous change of process charged with a unitary invisibility of being which is our basic essentiality. We call it the Atman, the soul, the self, consciousness, etc. 

There is an indestructible element in us, and that has got mixed with the condition of change which infects everything that is finite. We are imbued with the world of finites, of the bodily individuality of ours, and even the psychic isolation of ours is a character of our finitude. The finite struggles to align itself with the Infinite, to which it really belongs, and this struggle of the finite to move towards the Infinite is the whole story of evolution.

To be continued ..