A Study of the Bhagavadgita :11.8 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday, May 30, 2022. 20:45.

Chapter 11: Beholding God as He Beholds Himself-8.

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Arjuna poses a question at the beginning of the Eleventh Chapter. "Wondrous is this teaching, my Lord. You have made me immensely happy when you said mattaḥ parataraṁ nānyat kiṁcid asti (Gita 7.7): 'Nothing outside me can exist.' The absoluteness of God does not permit anything external to Him. Externality delimits God's existence, and He would become a finite person if there were external things. The superiority and absoluteness, the infinitude, the spacelessness and timelessness of God precludes any kind of outsideness in God's existence. This is what I have heard from you. Is it possible to have a vision of this Great Being? Am I blessed to behold this great Universal Reality with my eyes?" This is a queer question for a mortal to put before the Almighty Master.

And the kindhearted teacher says, "You can, but you cannot behold the Cosmic Reality with your two eyes which are meant only for sensory operations, and which always externalise objects and tell you that all things are outside. With these eyes, you cannot have the vision of the Almighty. This Infinite Being can be beheld only by a consciousness that is within. The eye of consciousness can behold it."

Divyaṁ dadāmi te cakṣuḥ (Gita 11.8). "A divine eye is bestowed upon you here, by My grace." The divine eye is not this kind of eye, but an eye of the soul itself. The soul alone can behold the Universal Soul. These sense organs – eye, ear, and so on – cannot. You cannot see God, touch Him, smell Him, or have any sense contact with Him because sensory operations are externalised actions in space and time. Spaceless and timeless existence cannot be contacted. It is not a contact at all. The soul is of the nature of the Absolute, made in the image of God, as they say, and can behold God. The soul alone can behold God, not any apparatus of this body.

So the Master says, "I shall bestow upon you a rare opportunity of having the power to visualise this Supreme inclusiveness, the interconnectedness of all things, where everything is everywhere. God is everywhere; everything is everywhere. All things of this world and the other world, of all the realms of creation – heaven and earth and hell, everything you can find – is interconnected in this cosmic timeless infusion of the reality of all existences." Suddenly there was a flash, the Gita says. What kind of flash was it? It was not the flash of light that you can see with your eyes. It was not the sunlight that you see. You cannot open your eyes and look at the Sun, but thousands of Suns arose simultaneously in the horizon, as it were. Imagine what that would be like. That kind of light flashed before Arjuna.

Divi sūryasahastrasya bhaved yugapad utthitā, yadi bhāḥ sadṛśī sā syād bhāsas tasya mahātmanaḥ (Gita 11.12). Na tatra sūryo bhāti (Katha 2.2.15), says the Upanishad. The Sun is like darkness, like a firefly, as it were. The light of the Sun is actually virtual darkness before that light. Na tatra sūryo bhāti: The moon and the stars and fire will not shine there.

Na candra-tārakam, nemā vidyuto bhānti, kuto'yam agniḥ: tam eva bhāntam anubhāti sarvaṁ tasya bhāsā sarvam idaṁ vibhāti (Katha 2.2.15). All the lights of this world are reflections, perhaps distorted reflections, of the Almighty Light. That light shone before Arjuna, whose soul was shaken up completely. The personality broke, as it were, and this shattering which Arjuna felt before this incomparable majesty of the Almighty made him sing prayers, which are incomparable in themselves.

When you are in the state of ecstasy, you do not know what you are speaking. When you are angry, you also do not know, and say anything that you like. But much more is the difficulty you feel in ecstasy. The mouth shuts and the tongue ceases to operate, and if you say anything, you do not know what you are saying, because your words at that time of divine ecstasy are of divine origin. The word that was God, as it were, manifested itself through the prayers, the hymns, the psalms of the great devotee whose soul opened itself completely before the Almighty Being, and long verses of an intricate nature of beauty and linguistic excellence form the major part of the Eleventh Chapter of the Gita.

To be continued ....

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