The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita : 14.4 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, December 08, 2021. 5:00. PM.
The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita-14-4.
Chapter-14. The Glory and Majesty of the Almighty-4.

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We speak of God as Light, but we cannot imagine any light which is greater than the light of the Sun; for us that is the supreme light, and the inclusiveness which God is, the infinitude which is God's being, has also to be explained in a similar manner, by imagery and comparison. Imagine thousands of Suns rising and splashing forth simultaneously in the sky, dazzling the eyes of the beholders. No one has seen in one's life what it is to see thousands of Suns at one stroke. These, again, are words for us with no significance. We cannot even dream what it would be to see several thousands of Suns coming together and blazing in the eastern horizon. We can only console ourselves by thinking that we understand what it is. Even the great immortality that we are thinking of is a shadow, as it were, cast by the super-immortal being of God, says the Veda.

Not merely is God this supernal Light which blinds the eyes of the soul, but God is infinitude, again something which we cannot understand. What is infinitude? Every blessed thing is there transformed into its originality, not in its crude, distorted, reflected form, as we see it here today. The originals of things get revealed in the Supreme Being of God. These are the archetypes of all things. Philosophers tell us that we are all shadows here, moving in the world of phenomena. Every one of us has a reality beyond ourselves. Even our own realities are not here! We are above in a noumenal existence, while this phenomenal universe is a conglomeration of shadows and reflections of the true archetypes. God is not a totality of shadows, a bunch of finite particulars. God does not become complete by a bringing together of all the individuals conceivable in the world. You and I and everything imaginable put together do not make God, because these visibles are all shadows, unrealities in the end, and a multitude of unrealities do not go to constitute one reality.

We are far below the level of understanding what all this can be. Our minds are not made in such a way as to be able to grasp what these originals could be like. Our souls are our originals; the body and mind are reflections. But when we think of ourselves, we think only of bodies and minds; our real soul is beyond our comprehension. The soul that is in ourselves; the soul that we really are is the original in us, and that is the representation of God. God is present in us as the soul in us, and not merely as a particular expression of name and form in space and time. That is why when the great vision is described in the Gita, we are told that perfection was seen everywhere in that Glory. One does not see ugliness and suffering, which are consequences of the finite vision which wrests one particular from another, and does not read the meaning of anything with relevance to all other things. The vision of God is the vision that God Himself has in respect of the whole of creation. To see God is to see through the eyes of God. And that would be a veritable realisation of the Soul of the universe.

Here the perceptive faculties and the cognitive processes cease to function. It is not the intellect that understands or the feeling that feels God's presence, it is the bursting forth of the intuitional integrality, by which what is intended is a totality of grasp of the whole of the cosmos at one stroke and in simultaneity, and not as a succession of phenomena. We do not count one thing after another thing as we do here in this world when we try to see a series of objects. We cannot see with our eyes all things at once. Even when it appears that we are seeing many things at one time, we are really seeing one thing after another thing in a series, in a time process, as if they are extended in space. But, as we observed, God-vision is a timeless, spaceless experience. And, therefore, it is not a visualisation of many things one after another in a series, as in an arithmetical computation. It is a timeless grasp of the eternity of Being, where everything is a here and now, and not afterwards or somewhere else. Everything is just here, and everything is just now. Here is the abolition of space and a transcendence of time. Our spatial and temporal body-mind-complex vanishes, melts away into the supernal menstruum of the Absolute. Such was the vision which the great Lord condescended to bestow upon the seeking Arjuna.

To be continued ...

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