The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 11.4. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Sunday, May 23, 2021. 7:14.PM.
Chapter-11. Participating with the Intention of the Universe -4.
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)
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Hell and heaven are nothing but these three gunas. 

What a difference between hell and heaven! 

Unthinkably different are the conditions prevailing in heaven and hell, but there is nothing substantially different in the formation of these arrangements or atmospheres or environments we call hell and heaven. The particular type of pressure exerted by the gunas in a type of intensity will give us the idea of a particular world, as I mentioned. We call it a physical world, an astral world or celestial world, a nether region, an inferno, and so on. So there is no inferno, paradiso, purgatorio – nothing of the kind. There is no earth, there is no heaven, there is no sky. These are all forms taken by different pressurised expressions of the three gunas: 

sattva rajas, tamas. The whole world is this much – including me, including you, including inanimate objects, animate objects, and every blessed thing. 

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"na tad asti prithivyam va divi deveshu va punah

sattvam prakriti-jair muktam yad ebhih syat tribhir gunaih." BG-18-40.

 (BG 18.40): In all the earth and all the heaven, there is nothing visible, nothing tangible, nothing intelligible which is not a formation of these three gunas.

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So where do you stand as an individual? 

You do not exist as an individual. You are a concentrated point of these three forces arranged in a particular form. They can rearrange themselves at any time, and you are no more there. Immediately there is a distribution of the constituents. We can have another building with the same bricks, only rearranging them in a different pattern. It may look like a temple, it may look like a church, it may look like a mosque, or it may look like a dome. It may look like anything. We may call the structure by different names because of the shape taken by the very same bricks. The same bricks look like different structures, and we give them different names. 

Here is a temple and here is a shop, and many things are told about buildings because of the form taken by the same building material. So there are three building materials in this cosmos – sattva, rajas, tamas. Finally, we will be told there are not even three. When we go to the later chapters, the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters, we will find even the three foldness of this force is not an ultimate fact. There is something very unique and surprising that is revealed later on. Thus, inasmuch as we are not independent, inasmuch as we are constituted of powers that are also the basic building bricks of everyone else also, there is an interconnection of us with everybody else.

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Now, the universe is a ubiquitous, all-pervading maintenance of balance. Even our existence is a kind of balance. If the balance is upset, we will not be here even for three minutes. Even the building is a balance of the building material. If the balance is not there, there will be no structure. It will not stand. The stability of the thing is the balance of its inner constituents, and therefore our so-called stability and perpetuation of our individuality, the imagination that we are existing as so-called Mr., Mrs., and so on, is an illusion because its existence, even for a moment, is due to the balance maintained by these inner forces. 

But why do they maintain this balance? 

This so-called maintenance of balance is also dependent on various other aspects of the very same three forces distributed elsewhere in the cosmos. If the leg is to stand erect, all the muscles of the body also should cooperate. It is not enough if only the knee bends or straightens itself. Medical men tell us that four hundred and fifty muscles are activated immediately merely by the act of standing. We do not know that four hundred and fifty muscles are working merely when we are standing. Likewise, the whole cosmos is active merely by a particular event that takes place.

To be continued ...

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