The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 12.3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday, July 9, 2021. 8:33. PM.
Chapter-12. Control of the Senses :3.
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)
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Our minds are not so made to comprehend what this could be. A child’s mind is indeed the mind of every one of us. Spiritually we are illiterate, though we may be very literate in a political, social or practical view of things. The understanding of spiritual circumstances, the appreciation of spiritual values, a gaining of insight into what spirituality means, is an education by itself. It is necessary to reorient our thoughts and entirely change the very framework of the operation of our understanding. We have to become different persons altogether, as it were. For some time it appears we have to cease to be what we are now in order to be what we ought to be in the light of Truth, and then we may be able to appreciate what it could be to be good and inward in one’s evaluation of values, while it is at the same time a collaboration with the truth of the whole universe. This is how sattva operates as the reflection of divinity in all things. It is, in a way, the mirror in which is reflected the total picture of the truth of the cosmos. The whole truth is not capable of being contacted by any means available to us, but it is reflected in some way, in some degree, in some measure, macrocosmically as well as microcosmically.

So this is a tendency present in everyone. Every one of us, every created being, has this basic tendency to motivate in the direction of the finality of things. At the very root of all roots, we may say, there is essentially goodness pervading in the cosmos. The quintessential basic fundamentality of things is goodness, not evil; therefore, it is impossible for anyone not to be good at least some time in the process of evolution. When it becomes possible under certain given circumstances to work in tune with this inwardness, out of which everything has come, we become good persons, saintly persons, sages, Godmen even.

But we have another tendency also. That other tendency is the outwardness characteristic of rajas. It is true that we are capable of being very good; why not? We have the capacity and the potentiality to be immensely, wonderfully good. But we have also the capacity to be wonderfully devilish. That is because we live in two worlds, as it were, at the same time. Again I will repeat the same words – the centrifugal world and the centripetal world are both our worlds. We are sometimes said to be in a world of empiricality. We say this is a phenomenal world. This is what philosophers many a time tell us. We say this is a relative world. Now, what do we mean by saying that this is a world of phenomena and relativity?

The meaning is twofold here again. There is nothing absolutely and permanently valid in this world. Everything seems to be justifiable under conditions only, and nothing can be justified unconditionally. There is nothing unrelated in this world. Everything is related to something else. There is a tentative permanence of everything. An absolute permanence of anything is not seen anywhere. Now, when we speak of things in this way, when we say things are relative, transient, impermanent, not long-lasting, we imply thereby that in our understanding of the relativity of things we have already made a reference to the nonrelative, without reference to which, even the relativity of things cannot be understood or noticed. Our observation of the relativity of things is possible only on the stand of a nonrelative reference. 

We have some connection with a non-phenomenal and non-relative reality. If that were not with us as a point of reference, a standard of reference, we would not have even known that things are passing. The phenomenology and the relativity of the world is recognisable with reference to something which is not phenomenal and not relative. So we are, in one sense, living in a relative world of space, time and causal relations, perishability, transiency and impermanency. This is very, very true. But we are also secretly, at the bottom of our being, rooted in something which is not transient, not relative, not phenomenal, not extrovert. So we live in two worlds: a world of invisible operations, and a world of visible activity.

To be continued ...

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