The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 6.1. Swami Krishnananda

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Thursday, August 06, 2020. 9:13.AM.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Chapter 6: Beauty and Duty in the Bhagavadgita

(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)

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It is believed that there was a super-mundane manifestation of power in a particular context of an ancient historical period which is said to defy any relevance to mere temporal events and any attempt to interpret all earthly history in terms of an unimaginably super-mundane system of the evaluation of values. It is as if there was a sudden change of the entire administrative system, and a new policy began to give significance to every project, every action and every event. History has to be read in the light of a super-history, a trend of thinking which is not unknown to some philosophers of history these days. There is a non-temporal motivation, evidently, in all temporal processes; otherwise, it would be difficult to explain how there can be any meaning in temporal existence.

It is not difficult to appreciate that the significance of temporality cannot itself be temporal. If some meaning is to be there behind events we call temporal existence, that meaning certainly should be something other than the temporal. This is common sense, and simple understanding. Our life cannot be explained merely by the processes of our life. Life as we live, as we understand, as is recorded in history, cannot be explained by these processes themselves. Our longings cannot be explained and accounted for by the longings themselves. Desire is not the explanation of a desire. The explanation is somewhere else, not in the upsurge of desire itself. The world cannot explain itself. The explanation of the world cannot be the world. There must be something other than the world to explain what the world is. This is to have a logical insight into the meanings behind life’s adventures, if meanings are there at all; but a meaning there seems to be. Meaningless life we do not seem to be living. But where is the meaning? To read meaning into something is to discover in it something other than itself. We are not just seeing an object to understand it. We bring into action a principle of operation which explains the meaning of the object.

Now, it appears that sometimes in the drama of the creation of God, in the cosmic history of events, there comes a time – we have to speak in guarded words here because we do not know how to express these events in their proper connotation – there seems to have arisen, and there seems to be arising occasionally, certain circumstances which require an interpretation; else, perhaps, the purpose of creation is not to be served. It is necessary to provide a system of understanding things while it occasionally becomes difficult to understand events in nature, processes in history, and conditions in life.

To be continued ....

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