Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 28-4. Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday, November 18, 2022. 08:00.

Chapter 28: Sitting for Meditation-4.

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Tatraikāgraṃ manaḥ kṛtvā: 

Thus collecting all thought, the entire psychic organ, mustering the whole force of it in a given direction. Which is the given direction? This is a question of initiation. There is a process called initiation in religious spiritual circles. A master has to instruct, guide, illumine the student in the art of concentration in meditation, in yoga. It is done by various means: by recitation of mantras, by study of scriptural passages, chanting them repeatedly, or by certain other exercises which are prescribed during initiation. Otherwise, by a reading of a commentary or a mere translation of these words much meaning may not come out to an uninitiated student.

Yatacittendriyakriyaḥ upaviśyāsane yuñjyād: 

Seated in this posture, as mentioned, bringing into a single communion the mind, the sense organs and all the individual operations, may one be prepared for this art of self-purification. Ātmaviśuddhi is the purification of self. What is the impurity in us? What is the dirt that we have got so that we require to be purified? The dirt is the accretion that has grown on our own consciousness, the dirt of longing for externals: kama, krodha, lobha, moha, mada, matsarya, and so on. Any kind of impulsion of consciousness towards whatever is outside is the dirt of consciousness. The consciousness is purchasing trouble by imagining that it wants something from outside it. By karma, upasana and dhyana, as the tradition goes – by unselfish performance of duty, by meditation religiously and by philosophical analysis – one has to purify oneself.

The shedding of the lower for the sake of the higher is a way of purification. Because you have a higher, you need not long for the lower. Therefore, the discipline in the direction of the higher principle in life involves a shedding of the calls of the lower instinctive resistance, which is the dirt in the context of the higher self. The higher self is a purified self; the lower is impure. The lower is impure in many senses. Firstly, the higher includes the lower, and to cling to the lower in spite of the fact that the higher includes all things would be to cling to an extraneous something which need not be there as our concern.

Secondly, the mistake in our thinking is that there can be something of the lower self as a total alien to a higher self. Our longings, our desires, and our cravings of any kind imply that we believe in the utter wholesale extreme reality of that particular thing which is lying there outside, as it were, as another self which the longing self requires. The lower self is not outside the higher self. So even in our longing for things as a sort of outside being, we commit the double mistake of firstly imagining that it is outside the higher, forgetting that it is subsumed by the higher. And also, the other mistake is thinking that it has a reality of its own. That which is already subsumed in some other principal cannot have an independent reality of its own. That which it implies has to be taken as included. It should not be considered separately. The larger finite includes the smaller finite, and the larger finite, from the point of view of the lower finite, is an infinite. It is an infinite because it is wider than the little finite. That which breaks the boundaries of a little given form of finitude is the tentative infinitude immediately superior to the given finitude. So there are levels of infinitude as there are levels of the self, as we have mentioned.

Hence, the purification of the self – ātmaviśuddhi referred to here – is the gradual withdrawing of consciousness from desires for lower forms of self, the object as self or the body as self, or any kind of temporal object as a desired something. Wherever there is a desire, there is also an implied hatred. There cannot be love without hatred. It is implied that to love one thing is to not love another thing. Not to love another thing because of the love for one thing is to have a subtle hatred for that thing which is not loved, and that it is an object of rapacious hatred will be known when that which is not loved interferes in any manner with the operations of the love for the given object. There can be subtle hatred or active hatred. Anyway, love and hatred are one and the same mental operation. They are not two distinct things. One cannot be there without the other. Now, this has to be properly understood psychologically and in a cultured philosophical mood with deep spiritual aspiration.

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To be continued

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