Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity :30.2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2022. 07:30.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Chapter 30: Communion with Eternity-2.

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We can extend this interesting analogy to conceive the extension of our visualising pictures on a screen in a cinema hall. Suppose, with a stretch of your imagination, you place yourself in the screen itself. Do not be one person in the audience outside the screen. Imagine you are also one of the pictures in the screen. Would you not be in a real world? Real world indeed! And all are shadows, nevertheless. The grandeur and the three-dimensional solidity of pictures, which are nothing but two-dimensional shadows, become more enlightening and educative if we ourselves become their friends. In case we ourselves are part of the dramatis personae appearing there as shadows dancing on the screen, that would be the world in which we are living.

There is not one substance in this world that can be called real, nothing that is original. The original is somewhere. All thoughts are reflections of original motivations in the higher realms. Every event is a shadow of volitions of the denizens of higher degrees of reality. It has been said that marriages take place in heaven first, and their reflections are seen later on. Wars take place in the heavens first. Perhaps diseases also originate internally in the system before they manifest themselves outside in the physical body. The fruit ripens from inside, and it takes time to appear ripened on the surface.

We have to exercise a special mental effort to appreciate this position in which everything in the world is only a shadow of originals, including the perceptive media, the perceiving individual like me and you, so that the whole world is a theatre of shadows, puppet movements whose strings are pulled by originals which are undetectable by the eyes of the shadows because the puppets cannot turn back and see the strings.

The mind is happy. We are all rejoicing in this world with all the wealth and the glamour of possession. Everyone seems to be very secure, but as secure as the idiotic shadow. It is difficult to understand the blunder that we have committed in coming to this earth. It is a headlong movement into samsara, with head down and legs up. The word ‘headlong' is mentioned in the Upanishad, to make matters very clear. It is sinking into the pit of suffering when we entered the womb of the mother, and when the Upanishad makes out that we have fallen headlong, as it were, into this sea of mortality, it also suggests, at the same time, that we are afflicted with hunger. Hunger and falling headlong go together.

Appetition is our nature. There is a craving from every cell of our body. Every part of what we are is hungry for things. And what are the things for which it is hungry? It is a grabbing attitude of the derelict mind, that which has lost sense completely. It is raving, as it were, in the agony of separation from the original from which it has fallen. The fall is beautifully described in Genesis, and it is also described, in a more dramatic fashion, in the Upanishads. Yet, we seem to be ruling in hell because we do not want to serve in heaven. We think that ruling in hell is better.

So the lords of the earth, the kings and emperors and potentates and the rich men of the world are these wondrous shadows, these reflections, lifeless automatons that seem to be full of life due to the energy that is borrowed from an original which is at the back but cannot be discovered due to the outward movement, like a projectile, of the actions of the mind. 

Parāñci khāni vyatṛṇat svayambhῡs tasmāt parāṅ paśyati nāntarātman (Katha 2.1.1). 

Before Plato told this analogy of the cave, the Kathopanishad had already envisioned it. Outwardly turned are the senses and the mind; shackled is the consciousness of the mortal. Therefore, there is a compulsion to see only the outside, and never can you have a moment's rest and the occasion to sink down into yourself and see what is at the back. We have no eyes at the back of our heads. We have only eyes at the front, which see only what is external. Therefore, the inward original, the archetype, is never seen. But in yoga there is an occasion of the coming back. The shadow enters the original. The reflection goes back to That from where the reflection arose. Then what happens? That is what is described here in these slokas.

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To be continued

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