A Study of the Bhagavadgita :13.4. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, August 07, 2022. 05:30. 

Chapter 13: The Positivity and the Negativity of Experience - 4.

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Dvau bhūtasargau lokesmin daiva āsura eva ca (Gita 16.6): Creativity is of two kinds: divine and undivine. 

There can be a divine creativity and also an undivine creativity. You can manufacture demons or you can manufacture gods, if you so like. Both these are in your hands. But how is it that you are capable of manufacturing two contraries? These are explainable in terms of what you already know as the centripetal and centrifugal forces, as they are called. The forces that tend towards the centre of anything are called centripetal forces. From the periphery or the circumference they gravitate towards the centre, try to become one with the centre. This force that gravitates towards the centre of anything is known as the centripetal force. But there are other forces which ramify themselves in a distracted manner from the centre towards the circumference and become rampant everywhere. These are called centrifugal forces. So there are two operations taking place in this world – tending towards the centre and tending away from the centre. The daiva, or the divine, is that which tends towards the centre; the undivine is that which runs away from the centre.

Now, it is up to any one of us to know how we are feeling anything at all in this world. Are you centrifugal or centripetal in your experiences? If you are running after the world and feel very much wretched, miserable and inadequate in your own selves – you feel that you are poor nothings, that the world is everything, so you have to run after the gold and silver and the wealth of the world – if this is your attitude, the centrifugal force is violently working in you. But if you feel the world is not superior to you; that your being is far superior to the becoming of things; that you need not run to things in the world; that the world has to come to you on account of the centrality of the subjectivity in you – if you are a person satisfied in your own self and do not want things to come from outside to satisfy you, then the centripetal force is working in you. The divine daiva sampat is operating in each person when there is satisfaction in one's own self.

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Yadṛcchā-lābha-saṁtuṣṭo (Gita 4.22) : You never make complaints, and you never say you want something. 

You have a feeling, a conviction that things are perfectly all right in the world and there is nothing wrong anywhere. 

The only thing is you have to adjust yourself to the conditions prevailing in the whole creation because it is said in the Upanishad, yāthātathyato'rthān vyadadhāc chāśvatībhyas samābhyaḥ (Isa 8). The Isavasya mantra tells us that God, when He created the world, seems to have foreseen every necessary change or emendation in the constitution of the creation, and there is no need for the parliament of the cosmos to go on emending things every day or from moment to moment. Even the necessary changes that may be foreseen after centuries or ages in the future have already been preconceived and have been taken care of. That is to say, a spiritual seeker's duty seems to be finally an adaptation of oneself to the circumstances in the cosmos, and not trying to rectify the cosmos. There is no necessity to attempt that impossibility.

Therefore these two forces, the divine and the undivine, are operating both outwardly and inwardly, and the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are epic representations in a dramatic fashion of the war that seems to be taking place, the conflict that is always there between the daiva and the asura, the centripetal and the centrifugal, the divine and the undivine, the good and the bad, light and darkness. Dvau bhūtasargau lokesmin daiva āsura eva ca.

To be continued ...

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