A Study of the Bhagavadgita :13.5. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday, August 11, 2022. 06:15. 

Chapter 13: The Positivity and the Negativity of Experience - 5.

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It appears that the seed for this duality or conflict is sown at the time of the creative act itself, as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for instance, tells us in a very dramatic fashion. The One willed to be two; that is all. The moment this will has started operating and the One thinks it is two, or the two have actually become manifest, there arises a necessity to bring about a relation between these two. This is the conflict. The conflict of the world is nothing but the conflict of relation between things. The most difficult subject to study in philosophy is the subject of relation – how anything is related to another thing, how the subject is related to the predicate. The subject is related to the predicate; otherwise, there cannot be any kind of logical judgment. But it is also not related to the predicate, on account of which it is dichotomised, and it is necessary for logic to bring them together into an act of cognition, which is deduction.

Thus, at the very beginning when the Will seemed to have taken the shape of a dual consciousness – "May I become many" – the manifold revealed itself only after One had become two. We do not want to go into details of the manifold; two are quite enough for us to create trouble all over in the world. Even if there are only two people in the world, war will take place. It is not necessary for millions to exist in order that there be conflict. Conflict can be there even if there are only two because conflict is the irreconcilability between one thing and another thing, and that thing is precipitating itself into the medley of the manifold that we see in the cosmos. So these two forces seem to have been somehow or other operating right from the beginning of time. We do not know how they started.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad tells us there has been a gradual descent of this nature of conflict into grosser and grosser forms until we are here, quarrelling among ourselves in any way whatsoever. In the beginning it is a metaphysical distinction, and not actually a quarrel in the sense of brothers and sisters or soldiers fighting in a field. That has taken place only latterly. In the earlier stages it is a philosophical, conceptual distinction of the subject and the object. This has also been mentioned in the Upanishad. I am digressing a little from the Gita to the Upanishad to elucidate this point. In the earliest of stages, as the Upanishad will tell you, the dual consciousness of One having become two is again consolidated to the consciousness of "I am myself these both". The One convinces itself, after having manifested itself into the two: After all, where are these two? "I myself am A. I myself am B. I am A and B." A is not B, of course; they are two different things according to the law of contradiction, but you cannot know that A is not B unless there is something in you which is neither A nor B. So the consciousness asserted itself, "After all, I am A and B both because I am between A and B – the supreme adhidaiva prapancha."

There is a gradual descent from the divine origination of this metaphysical duality into the lesser forms of creation through the realms of being – the fourteen realms, as we are told in our Epics and Puranas – until we come to the lowest kingdom of this Earth where that consciousness of there being something between A and B is lost completely, and all we know is that everything is different from everything else. Kali Yuga has come, we say. Kali Yuga is the age of conflict; everything is different from everything else, and nobody likes anybody. Everyone is at loggerheads with everyone else in this Kali Yuga, in which we seem to be somehow sunk. As the scriptures say, some five-and-a-half thousand years or nearly six thousand years have passed in the Kali Yuga, which seems to span four lakhs and thirty-two thousand years. So further descent into conflict may be expected, but before that we will quit this world. We do not want to stay here until the last conflict takes place where each one will abolish the existence of everyone else. That is Kalki Avatara, the Transcendent Being coming in the form of an abolition of both things, subject and object: neither this nor that. God will say, "I don't want this creation at all. I made a mistake." We may perhaps draw this kind of humorous conclusion from the act of Kali which, in a wonderful way, and in a very unpalatable and destructive way, is described in the Epics and Puranas.

So here we have, in the Sixteenth Chapter, the definition of the twofold forces acting in different ways, centripetal and centrifugal, the daiva and the asura sampat. The asura sampat, which is the devilish form it takes when it becomes uncontrollable, is psychologically engendered by certain operations in us, to which a reference is being made towards the end of the chapter. 

Trividhaṁ narakasyedaṁ dvāraṁ nāśanam ātmanaḥ, kāmaḥ krodhas tathā lobhas tasmād etat trayaṁ tyajet (Gita 16.21): 

The road to hell is threefold. The undivine nature can take you to the lowest perdition; and its seed is sown in our own hearts. Life and death are both operating in our own selves in a mysterious way, right from the time of our birth from the womb of the mother.

To be continued ...

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