The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 15.2- Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, November 20, 2021. 9:00. AM.

The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity :15-2

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita 

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

(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti).

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God as present in this creation is something like man being present in the body. What do we mean by a man being in the human body? 

Everyone knows what it means. I am a human being, I am a man, but I cannot say I am just this body because the physical occurrences to the limbs of the body may not be equivalent to any occurrence to the man as such. The human personality is different from the infrastructure of bones and flesh. 

Hence, as Bhagavan Sri Krishna says in this little verse: “You cannot know Me merely by looking at My body, but one who really knows Me has an insight into Me. My coming into this world, My operations in this creation, are invisible to the apparatus of human perception which is capable of contacting only the outer form and name, the space-time complex, the externality of creation, not the vitality in it.” There is life present in all creation. This is the same as saying that God's intelligence operates in every bit of even what we call the material or physical. That is one feature of this little message given in this verse.

We cannot understand this world merely by looking at it with our eyes, in the same way as I cannot understand you by seeing you with my eyes, because understanding the person is different from merely seeing the person with the eyes. But we do not do anything else but merely see the world, and pass judgment on it. Our opinions in regard to anything in this world are based on the reactions produced upon our sense organs by the physical structure of bodies, but the inner content of these bodies is inaccessible to the sense organs. That is so because of the fact that the inner essence of a thing is not in space and not in time.

The substantiality, the basic quintessence of any object, is transcendentally present, but not empirically visible. The world is said to be real empirically, but ideal transcendentally. Inasmuch as the ideality of the world is transcendental, it does not become an object of empirical perception. There is a double character in the world, namely, transcendental ideality of essence and empirical reality of form, as is the case with our own selves. There is a visible, tangible, physical form, but that is not the person. What we call the human person is not the tangible, physical form. So we may say the world is not what we see with our eyes, and therefore we cannot understand the world in the manner we see it. Thus, we get bound by our inadequate cognisance of the values of the world, by our erroneous perception of things, and not by the existence of the world as such.

In the Vedanta philosophy, we are instructed that the world is created by God, and anything that God creates cannot cause sorrow to any person. It is unthinkable that God can manufacture grief for created beings. This world of God's action is called Ishvara-shrishti in Sanskrit philosophical terminology. Ishvara-shrishti means God's creation. This creation of God is not the cause of the sorrow of man. The mountains and the trees and the rivers and the sun and the moon and the stars are not our sorrows. Our difficulty arises from the manner of the reaction that is produced between our perception and the reaction produced in respect of this perception from the objects outside.

To be continued ...

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