Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 22-3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, July 02, 2022. 05:00

Chapter 22: The Integration of Sannyasa and Yoga - 3.

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Again the Kathopanishad has a similar passage making out the same meaning in another context. Yacched vāṅ manasī prājñas tad yacchej jñāna-ātmani jñānam ātmani mahati niyacchet, tad yacchec chāntav-ātmani (Katha 1.3.13). Yoga is summed up in this one verse of the Kathopanishad. The senses have to be rooted in the mind. Yacched vāṅ manasī prājñas: An intelligent person should stabilise all the actions and activities of the senses in the mind itself so that the mind acts, but not the senses. But how will the mind act? Will it think of some object outside? No. Tad yacchej jñāna-ātmani: That restrained mind, enhanced in its potency by the withdrawal of the sense organs, should be rooted in understanding. What is understanding? This has been explained in the earlier chapters of the Bhagavadgita. Sankhya is the right understanding. “Arjuna, you lack sankhya. Therefore, you cannot be in a state of yoga,” said Bhagavan Sri Krishna. So here buddhi should be understood as buddhi yoga, to which reference was made earlier in the chapters of the Gita. Thus, in right understanding this controlled mind is to be rooted: tad yacchej jñāna-ātmani.

Now the Bhagavadgita will go further on the subject of right understanding. During the study of the Third and Fourth Chapters, we found that this right understanding is connected with cosmic operations. Our existence is not an individual existence. We are not individual performers of action. Agency is not to be attributed to us. All action is performed by prakriti, the three gunas – sattva, rajas, tamas – which universally operate uniformly everywhere so that if this is a requisite of sankhya buddhi, right understanding, it takes us to a cosmical level. This is also the point made out in this verse of the Kathopanishad. Even if the mind is rooted in the intellect and right understanding, it is to be once again noted cautiously that it is simultaneously cosmically oriented: jñānam ātmani mahati niyacchet. Mahat tattva is cosmic intelligence, mahat brahma.

If the reason, the understanding, the mind, is not to contemplate an external something, what will it contemplate? What will the mind think then? What will the reason argue about or the understanding understand? The understanding will understand itself only. This understanding reverts to itself. As I mentioned, some people call this a transcendental category of apperception, which is nothing but consciousness turning back upon itself. This is the state of the universalisation of the content of the otherwise empirical understanding, which is usually turned in the direction of objects. Mahat tattva means ‘cosmic intelligence'. It is to be accepted that when it is made clear to us that our very existence is conditioned by the gunas of prakriti – sattva, rajas, tamas, which are universal – our understanding also has to be universally oriented. So what are we going to think? There is nothing for us to think except the wide range of the very substance of our makeup, physical as well as psychological, material as well as rational. The so-called outwardness has now become a widely spread-out expanse of an expression of the universal. So the mahat tattva is not somewhere far off from our brain or our understanding. It is the larger self of the little selfhood of our reason.

In the beginning of the Sixth Chapter, which we are going to study now, it will be told that the self is the friend of the Self. This is another way of saying that the little understanding of ours, which is the little self of ours, should be the friend of the larger self, which is the cosmical Self, mahat tattva.

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To be continued .....

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