The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 5.6. Swami Krishnananda

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Friday, July 24, 2020. 10:53.AM.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Chapter 5: The Udyoga Parva of the Mahabharata - 6

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The Bhagavadgita wants to be your good friend. The Bhagavadgita wants to be a good physician of your illness. The Bhagavadgita does not want to make money off of you as a patient by giving you one tablet for your headache and saying, “Quit, now you are okay.” It wants to diagnose your entire disease and say, “My dear friend, this is the difficulty.” A holistic interpretation of medicine is the proper way of treating an illness, as people say nowadays. It means that you have to consider the whole being of the person when you treat that person for any particular illness. It is not the leg or the nose or the head or the throat that is ill; you are ill. This is what expert medical men tell us.

The Bhagavadgita tells us, my dear friend, that the war is not taking place in the Kurukshetra field. It is not taking place, it never took place, and it is not going to take place in any country. It is not caused by this person or that person; it is not the fault of this community or that community. It is a complicated situation, into which you have to go deep to solve the problem, if your intention is really to solve it. If you want only to do a patchwork and imagine that you have solved the problem, well, do it. There will be a cessation of the battle; there will be peace, as it were, and after a few years it will burst forth into action once again because it was not a peace, it was a tentative, disgruntled truce. Actually, it was not peace at all.

So, the great solution coming from a great being, Sri Krishna, the mastermind who is at the back of the Bhagavadgita, tells us that even a little event in our daily life – it may be an event in the kitchen, not necessarily in a huge administrative complex – is an action that has to be understood in its proper setup, in its proper relationship to the whole environment. This you will not be able to appreciate properly because you are thinking you are inside the building and it is outside, and you are a private body, you have connection with only a few people, and all events are locally conditioned. These ideas of localisation, parochialism and pinpointed events to geographical conditions and national occasions are the effect of the finite mind thinking. The human problem is not a finite problem, it is an infinite problem. Infinite is man’s problem. It is not a national problem, it is not a political problem, it is not mine, it is not yours, and if you take these things in that light, you will never solve any problem. Therefore, a universally oriented understanding had to come into action to solve this great problem of human life. That is the task of the Bhagavadgita.

Chapter-5. Ends.

Next : Beauty and Duty in the Bhagavadgita

To be continued