Commentary on the Bhagavadgita : 19 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, February 06, 2022. 20:00

Discourse 42.

Chapter-15 Begins: The world as an Inverted Tree.

POST-19.

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We are now face to face with a very important section of the Bhagavadgita, known as the Purana Purushottama Yoga Chapter, the Fifteenth Chapter. It is considered very sacred, and people chant it every day before they take their lunch because it glorifies God. It describes what God is in respect of this world and individuals, how we are related to the world, and related to God, finally. This subject is briefly touched upon in a very short chapter of only twenty verses, but these twenty verses are very, very important.

This world, this creation is, to put it in modern language, something like the a force running away from its centre to its circumference, or periphery, and becoming less and less connected to the centre. It loses its soul, as it were, more and more as it runs away from the centre, until it reaches the very edge of the periphery and remains like a rock, without any sensation whatsoever. Inanimate life is the lowest category of existence that we can conceive. But as the movement is in the other direction, from the periphery to the centre, there is greater and greater consciousness of one’s Selfhood. As one realises one’s greater and greater nearness to the centre, there is also a larger comprehension of the dimension of one’s being.

This world is a topsy-turvy presentation, as it were, like an inverted tree. The manner in which souls descend from the highest region of Godhood is compared to an inverted tree; the sap of the inverted tree moves downward from its root through the trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, etc., and the lower the sap goes, the greater is the ramification of its movement. That is to say, this sap, the vitality of the tree, is highly concentrated in the root, slightly diffused in the trunk, diversified in the branches, and becomes more adulterated as it gets subdivided further into the minor branches, reaching the little tendrils and leaves, where only a modicum of the vital essence of the tree remains.

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NEXT- SBG : Ch - 15, Slo-1 : Ūrdhvamūlam adhaḥśākham aśvatthaṁ prāhur avyayam -

To be continued...

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