Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 21-2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, May 18,  2022. 19:00

Chapter 21.The Two Ways of Yoga -2.

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The sense organs cannot know themselves. The eye cannot see itself, the ear cannot hear itself. The eye can see what is outside it. While the senses can know what is outside them, and the intellect also has this capacity to understand what is outside, it has also an additional prerogative of the ability to concentrate itself on itself. This feature it exercises by its great power of a new kind of judgment, which is the recognition of unity in things and not merely getting dispersed in the particulars of perceptions. 

If the intellect were just like the senses in its framework or makeup, it would not have been able to connect the various sense perceptions into a single ‘I'. I see, I hear; I am that which sees and hears and tastes and smells and touches. This ‘I' is to be identified with a transcendental element operating in the intellect, reflected through the intellect. In Indian philosophical parlance we call it chidabhasa, a reflection of the Atman, the Universal, reflected in this particular medium of the intellect, the reasoning capacity in man.

Now, in this Bhagavadgita verse the word tad buddhaya, rootedness of the intellect in That, suggests that our faculty of judgment through understanding or reason, which has this dual capacity of objective judgment and subjective self-recognition, should be further enhanced in its capacity of insight. 

Here is the beginning of yoga practice, actually. While it is necessary to synthesise diverse sense perceptions into a single operation of recognition through understanding, and incipiently this unifying capacity seems to be inherent in the intellect, yet in spite of our synthesising the particulars of sense perceptions, we do not seem to be so much engaged in that which causes this insight in the understanding as in the objective particulars of the world.

Our understanding is outwardly turned, mostly. It is potentially inwardly turned, but practically outwardly turned. Latently we have a universal element operating in us, but patently it is not operating. The patent observation is of an external something, based, of course, theoretically and latently in something which is not of this world. Philosophically we may accept that there is a transcendent element in us, taking philosophy as a theoretical concept, not as a practical experience. But practically this theoretical concept has not become a guideline to us.

The Bhagavadgita wants us to raise this potential in us to a practical operation in our day-to-day existence. This is yoga. The potential has to become the practical. This unifying capacity of the buddhi which is borrowed by it from something which is lying at its background should not simply lie at the back of it as a propelling medium. It should also become its daily contemplated object. The universal element, which is the reason behind the intellect's capacity to synthesise sense perception, should also become its own object of perception, so that we should visualise the universal in our understanding as clearly, distinctly and concretely as we are visualising the so-called objects of the world. 

Such people are rooted in God. They are those whose intellect is rooted in That. The word ‘That' implies the universal God-being in us. In That our whole soul has to be fixed. ‘Whole soul' means everything from top to bottom, from head to foot. Whatever we are and whatever we have, all this has to be mustered in into a single focus of attention on this, which alone gives value to our life, and without which we would be shreds of little bits of matter and isolated particulars. There would be no unifying sense in us. I would not even know that I am if this unifying factor were not to operate.

To be continued ....

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