A Study of the Bhagavadgita :13.3. - Swami Krishnananda.
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Tuesday, August 02, 2022. 20:50.
Chapter 13: The Positivity and the Negativity of Experience - 3.
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Purushottama is supreme. adhidaiva is the linking consciousness which is the transcendent essence between every degree of subject-object relation.
There are different degrees of this relation in the cosmic evolutionary process, and the relater – namely, the subjective side – and the objective side stand totally cut off in the lowest level of experience, especially in the physical world where you and I do not seem to have any connection whatsoever. The object outside – the thing that you have, anything in this world – does not seem to have any vital, organic relation to you. That is the lowest level to which consciousness has descended by its utter segregation from the objective world. But as experience rises in its dimension through meditational techniques, the adhidaiva, which is invisible, becomes more and more perceptible, tangible and experienceable, so that the rise from the lower levels to the higher will also be a diminution of the distance that appears to be there between the subject and the object, so that in the highest state the adhidaiva engulfs both the subjective side and the objective side and there is no one perceiving anything.
Yad vai tan na paśyati, paśyan vai tan na paśyati (Brihad. 4.3.23):
Seeing, you do not see; knowing, you do not know; being, you do not have any consciousness of being in that state where the seer merges into the object on account of the absorption of both the sides into the adhidaiva, the Universal Consciousness. This is something that is to be considered as the import of this marvellous verse – a hard nut to crack for many of the commentators on the Gita.
Dvāv imau puruṣau loke kṣaraś cākṣara eva ca, kṣaraḥ sarvāṇi bhūtāni kūṭasthokṣara ucyate;
uttamaḥ puruṣas tv anyaḥ paramātmety udāhṛtaḥ, yo lokatrayam āviśya bibharty avyaya īśvaraḥ.
These two slokas are something like mantras that are repeated by every seeker. Thus, the concluding slokamof the Fifteenth Chapter says whoever knows this secret is free forever.
These three gunas pursue us wherever we go, perhaps till the end of the Eighteenth Chapter.
This subject started from the Thirteenth Chapter, where mention was made of Prakriti and its three gunas, Purusha, and Yoga.
In the Fourteenth Chapter we were told that the three gunas of Prakriti are responsible for every kind of experience. There are three things, we are told – sattva, rajas and tamas – and the import of their action has been in a more cosmological fashion described in the Fifteenth Chapter.
It is in the Sixteenth that we land on a revelation which seems to present before us the truth that there are no three things, as we have been told up to this time. There seems to be only two things: the positive and the negative forces. This is the subject of the Sixteenth Chapter: the positivity and the negativity of experience. Daiva asura sampat is the terminology used here. The divine and the undivine qualities act and react upon each other throughout creation, right from the highest to the lowest level. The three gunas manipulate themselves and operate in such a way that they seem to be capable of acting as only two forces in the universe.
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To be continued .....
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