A Study of the Bhagavadgita :12.7- Swami Krishnananda.
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Friday, July 15, 2022. 19:00.
Chapter 12: Communing with the Absolute through the Cosmic Tree -7.
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Jyotiṣām api taj jyotis (Gita 13.17):
It is the light behind all lights. It was mentioned in the context of the Visvarupa Darshana: thousands of suns cannot shine before it. All the brightest lights that you can think of are like shadows cast by that light. Yasya chaya amritam yasya mrityuh, says the Rig Veda: Even immortality and death are shadows cast by the Absolute. God is not to be considered even as immortal because the word 'immortal' is coined from the word 'mortal', so it is not a positive description of God. If mortality is not there, there will be no concept of immortality. Death and deathlessness are both shadows. Being unable to express the nature of God positively, the great poets go to such ecstasies of literary beauty, they say even immortality is not a proper description of God. Both death and deathlessness, here and hereafter, earth and heaven, are reflections of the Almighty's archetypal existence.
This is the grand presentation of the structure of the Supreme Absolute in the verses of the Thirteenth Chapter. Some of these beautiful verses in the same chapter also go into the details of how we can meditate by satsanga with saints and sages, by study of scriptures, by chanting of the Divine Name, by japa sadhana, and such things. A few sidelights on the Sankhya doctrine also are shown in the Thirteenth Chapter.
The Thirteenth Chapter is philosophical.
Many devotees and interpreters of the Gita think that philosophical description is to be found in the Thirteenth Chapter, the means of devotion to God are to be found in the Eleventh Chapter, the means of meditation are to be found in the Sixth Chapter, and the art of work or performance of duty is to be seen in the Third Chapter. So if you cannot study the whole of the Gita from One to Eighteen, read the Third for gaining knowledge as to how you have to perform your duty, read the Sixth for knowing how to meditate, read the Eleventh to know how you have to love God as an Almighty Person, and read the Thirteenth to know the intricacies of the philosophical aspects of the Bhagavadgita.
The chapters of the Gita that follow from the Fourteenth onwards give us some additional insight into the themes touched upon in some of the earlier chapters, especially the Second and the Third.
There are the gunas of Prakriti.
You know what are these gunas – sattva, rajas and tamas. These gunas of Prakriti were considered as the substance of Prakriti, the very thing out of which Prakriti is made. Now, when we think of substance or thing, we are likely to imagine some solid thing in front of us. The gunas of Prakriti, or Prakriti itself, are not substances in the sense of tangible things. They are forces, not solid objects. These gunas are actually energy contents. It is something like electric energy. You cannot call it an object. It can solidify itself into some objectified form under given conditions, but by itself it is a force, an energy, a motion. The gunas of Prakriti – sattva, rajas and tamas – are actually motion, energy continuum, forces operating not in the world but constituting the world itself. The gunas of Prakriti do not act as something outside the world; they are the very stuff of the world. Today we are told that electric energy is the sum and substance of all things. Even space and time can be bundled up into a continuum of space-time complex. Ultimately the world is made up of not substances or things, but energies, forces which devolve on themselves.
These gunas are described in the Fourteenth Chapter, suggesting thereby that they constitute the be-all and end-all of everything.
To remove the idea of tangibility and solidity, substantiality, etc., an additional chapter is devoted, which is the Fourteenth, where we come to know that the entire world which looks so hard, so solid and charged with gravitations of every kind is, after all, not so constituted. Appearances are deceptive. Things are not what they seem. The world is not solid. We feel the solidity of a table or a chair when we touch it with our fingers; but we are told today it is due to the electrical impulses created between the molecules constituting our fingers and the molecular content of the object called the table or chair. There is a repulsive activity taking place, a colliding of atomic principles, the molecular forces that form the object into a shape of wood or steel or any object on the one hand, and on the other hand they operate through the sensations of our fingers, etc. Actually, what we touch is not an object, and that which touches cannot be regarded as a finger; it is a sensation. If the sensation is not from the finger, the touch will not be there. If we cannot have the sensation of seeing or touching or hearing or smelling or tasting, there will be no world before us.
Therefore, the world is sensory, sensational, which means to say, it is non-solid. It is liquid, as it were, a non-substance, and it fades into airy nothing.
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