Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 23-5. Swami Krishnananda.
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Friday, August 05, 2022. 06:15.
Chapter 23: Introduction to the Sixth Chapter - 5.
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Now you have become a purified person after having passed through this stage of spiritual education. You are not a crude, slavish, helpless and frightened soldier in a vast field where nobody knows one's fate. You are not merely that person. You have now been placed on a high pedestal of participation, rather than subjection. It is not merely participation, but something more than that, as if you are on the lap of the Almighty Himself. Such a status has been bequeathed to you. Here you are in a highly concentrated state of Self pervading the whole personality. Now the Self seems to be sleeping in most people, in many of us. It is not pervading the whole of our being. Our senses overwhelm us; our instincts also demand their food and their daily meal. Our emotions, our vague volitions and our physical cravings, weaknesses galore, do not permit the pervasion of our soul through every cell of our personality. We are bodies, we are pranas, we are sense organs, we are whatnot. The soul is there as a light, as a lamp, as a life-giving root within us, no doubt, but it has not taken complete possession of us yet. We are too much of a body, too much of a physicality, too much of an external relation, and very little of the Self.
The Bhagavadgita, in the Sixth Chapter, makes us a concentrated self, ready to face God the Almighty face to face in a direct encounter. This body cannot face the Almighty. Who can stand before Him? With this little bone and flesh we cannot stand there. We have to become spirit before we try to stand before the Supreme Spirit. Only spirit can stand before Spirit. A fire that is like a conflagration is the Almighty's radiance, and brittle matter cannot stand before it. We have to be prepared for entry into the kingdom of the Almighty. This preparation reaches its culmination in the exercise that is provided to us in the Sixth Chapter, which is meditation.
Meditation is the art of rousing the soul into conscious action, not subliminal action, not potential action, not as a possibility but in actuality. In our case, the soul is a possibility. It is there. It can rise into action sometimes. The whole of the soul very rarely operates in us. We have no occasion for such an experience. Even our reason does not function entirely many a time. Sometimes the senses work partially, sometimes the emotions work, sometimes the intellect works, sometimes we are half sleepy, as it were, and the soul has no occasion to speak. The demand of life has not been so exigent as to rouse the whole soul into action. Very rarely does it happen. Sometimes it happens, but not always.
But it has to come to the level of conscious action. Unconsciously it should not be at the back of these psychic operations. There should not be a cloud of the psyche over the sun of the Self. There should be only bright sun in clear sky, and not a little struggling sunlight through the darkness of heavy clouds.
The meditation that will be described in the Sixth Chapter is the yoga of concentration of the whole self of a person, wherein we are aligned in every layer of our being – physical, astral and causal, outward and inward. The extrovert and the introvert blend together into a single focus of attention. Meditation is a little difficult matter. It is not thinking something outside. When you think something, it need not necessarily mean that you are meditating. That is a kind of meditation like a crane meditating on a fish. Baka dhyana they call it. Cranes generally stand on the edge or a precipice of a tank, concentrating on a frog coming to the surface or a fish slowly and lazily coming up, to pounce on it and eat it. This is called baka dhyana, the crane's meditation. It is a meditation on one's prey. It is a meditation of the burglar, of the thief, of the dacoit, of anyone who is entirely engrossed in what is totally outside. This is also a concentration, no doubt, but this is not self-integration; this is self-alienation.
We mostly live a life of self-alienation in our daily life. We are mostly other than ourselves, other than what we are, a fact which each one knows to the extent it is manifest in each one. Our sorrows are in the percentage of our self-alienation, and our joys are in the percentage of our self-integration. The more we are not, the greater is our grief. The more we are what we are, the greater is our joy. It is necessary for us to be what we are. This is meditation.
Now, what do we do in meditation? The Sixth Chapter will have something to tell us. To renounce all things and to be a holy man in a monastery, living as a recluse, as a monk or a nun, that is the step that one takes when one thinks of religious meditations. “I take to sannyasa, I become a holy man, a saint, a renunciate, a hermit. I live in a chapel or a temple. I do nothing. I shall have contact with nothing. I shall meditate.” Here the Bhagavadgita has some word to say. Are these the appurtenances of meditation?
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