The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 15.1- Swami Krishnananda.

 =======================================================================

========================================================================

Sunday, November 14, 2021. 7:00. AM.

The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity :

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita -15.1

Chapter -15. Seeing the Eternity in the Temporal-1

(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti).

========================================================================

Those who know the secret of the coming of God as the Incarnation are freed from the turmoil of birth and death. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(BG Ch-4.Slo-9).

"janma karma cha me divyam evam yo vetti tattvatah

tyaktva deham punar janma naiti mam eti so ’rjuna."  

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Translation :

janma—birth; 

karma—activities; 

cha—and; 

me—of mine; 

divyam—divine; 

evam—thus; 

yaḥ—who; 

vetti—know; 

tattvataḥ—in truth; 

tyaktvā—having abandoned; 

deham—the body; 

punaḥ—again; 

janma—birth; 

na—never; 

eti—takes; 

mām—to me; 

eti—comes; 

saḥ—he; 

arjuna—Arjuna

---------------------------------------------------------------

Slokam explained in one line :

"Those who understand the divine nature of my birth and activities, O Arjun, upon leaving the body, do not have to take birth again, but come to my eternal abode."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Commentary :

Understand this verse in the light of the previous one. Our mind gets cleansed by engaging it in devotional remembrance of God. This devotion can either be toward the formless aspect of God or toward his personal form. Devotion toward the formless is intangible and nebulous to most people. They find nothing to focus upon or feel connected with during such devotional meditation. Devotion to the personal form of God is tangible and simple. Such devotion requires divine sentiments toward the personality of God. For people to engage in devotion to Shree Krishna, they must develop divine feelings toward his names, form, virtues, pastimes, abode, and associates. For example, people purify their minds by worshipping stone deities because they harbor the divine sentiments that God resides in these deities. It is these sentiments that purify the devotee’s mind. 

The progenitor Manu says : na kāṣhṭhe vidyate devo na śhilāyāṁ na mṛitsu cha

bhāve hi vidyate devastasmātbhāvaṁ samācharet [v8]

“God resides neither in wood nor in stone, but in a devotional heart. Hence, worship the deity with loving sentiments.”

Similarly, if we wish to engage in devotion toward Lord Krishna, we must learn to harbor divine sentiments toward his leelas. Those commentators who give a figurative interpretation to the Mahabharat and the Bhagavad Gita, do grave injustice by destroying the basis of people’s faith in devotion toward Shree Krishna. In this verse, Shree Krishna has emphasized the need for divine sentiments toward his pastimes, for enhancing our devotion.

To develop such divine feelings, we must understand the difference between God’s actions and ours. We materially bound souls have not yet attained divine bliss, and hence the longing of our soul is not yet satiated. Thus, our actions are motivated by self-interest and the desire for personal fulfillment. However, God’s actions have no personal motive because he is perfectly satiated by the infinite bliss of his own personality. He does not need to achieve further personal bliss by performing actions. Therefore, whatever he does is for the welfare of the materially conditioned souls. Such divine actions that God performs are termed as “leelas” while the actions we perform are called “work.”

Similarly, God’s birth is also divine, and unlike ours, it does not take place from a mother’s womb. The all-Blissful God has no requirement to hang upside down in a mother’s womb. The Bhāgavatam states:

tam adbhutaṁ bālakam ambujekṣhaṇaṁ

chatur-bhujaṁ śhaṅkha gadādyudāyudham (10.3.9) [v9]

“When Shree Krishna manifested upon birth before Vasudev and Devaki, he was in his four-armed Vishnu form.” This full-sized form could definitely not have resided in Devaki’s womb. However, to create in her the feeling that he was there, by his Yogmaya power, he simply kept expanding Devaki’s womb. Finally, he manifested from the outside, revealing that he had never been inside her:

āvirāsīd yathā prāchyāṁ diśhīndur iva puṣhkalaḥ (Bhāgavatam 10.3.8) [v10]

“As the moon manifests in its full glory in the night sky, similarly the Supreme Lord Shree Krishna manifested before Devaki and Vasudev.” This is the divine nature of God’s birth. If we can develop faith in the divinity of his pastimes and birth, then we will be able to easily engage in devotion to his personal form, and attain the supreme destination.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is an interesting message in itself. Those who have an insight into this mystery of God coming to the world are freed from the bondage of life in this world. So, in a way, it would mean from this proclamation that there is a lot of connection between our bondage and our ignorance of the laws of God's working.

In a Sufi statement it is said that our bondage consists not in our consciousness of the world, but in our unconsciousness of God. It is not the world that binds us. That we are perceiving the world outside as a kind of object of the senses may be consider as our bondage. But it is said that this is not the bondage. We are not troubled by our merely being aware that there is a world, but we are troubled by not being aware that there is something else also in the world. This is another aspect of the matter. That there is a world is all right; let it be there, but is there also something else?

We seem to have a perceptional capacity which can receive only certain fragments of reality, and the whole of the truth cannot be received by our sense organs. Our eyes see the world, but they do not see everything that is in the world. The world is only one abstracted fragment, as it were, of a total phenomenon which is the creation of God. This world is the creation of God, or at least it is a part of the large creation of God. But this creation, which is God's, has in it many things over and above what our senses can grasp. We do not see the entire operation clearly either with our senses or with our mind. That a partial vision alone is allowed us through our cognitive and perceptive capacities is our sorrow. 

Our sorrow is not that we either see things or do not see things. The problem is that we see a little of what is there, not the whole of what is there. And also, the little that we seem to be seeing is not a vital part of what is really there. It is a dissected part, as it were, so that it has lost its organic relationship with the all that is there. When we see a severed limb of a human being, we are not actually seeing a part of the human being, though to the senses which touch and see, it may look like a limb of the human being. We know very well that what we call the human being is not merely a structure of various physiological limbs. Some legs, hands, lungs, heart and brain put together do not make a man because even in a corpse these limbs are present, yet we do not say that any man is there. The man has gone.

The world that we see is something like a corpse of reality. The vital principle in it is not recognised by us, just as our eyes cannot see the man, but we can see only the body of the man. The human being is different from the physical features, but we can see only the physical features even of a human being who is alive. We infer that the person is alive by certain processes of argument, but our perceptions cannot confirm the living character of a human being. What the senses see is only a physical structure, but not the man that is more than, over and above, the physical structure. The world, therefore, as it is presented to the senses, does not reveal the whole of reality to us.

To be continued....

=======================================================================