Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity :31.3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday, January 13, 2023. 07:00.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Chapter 31: The Message of the Sixth Chapter-3.

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The great student Arjuna is perturbed. This is a grand description indeed of the magnificent possibilities of human nature, spiritual meditation rising up into an experience of cosmic identity for which arduous effort is called for by way of sense-control and restraint of the mental operations. The mind is hard to control. We cannot tie the violent and tempestuous wind and put it inside our bag, and similar is the mind in its rapacious behaviour – so cyclonic, uncontrollable and tempestuous. How would one control the mind?

Arjuna addresses Bhagavan Sri Krishna, “Do you not believe, O great Master, that a person who honestly endeavours to betake himself to this great yoga of meditation but fails in achieving his goal will be broken to pieces like rent clouds? He will lose both the here and the hereafter. Because of the fact of the austerity of his life, he has lost the pleasures of this earth, and because of the impossibility of reaching this height of spiritual blessedness, he has lost the other world. Would not be the state of affairs most pitiable, losing both this world and the other world? This world has gone because of the austere life; the other world has gone because it is not coming. What is your opinion? Is it not a tragedy that one may have to face if it does not become possible for a person to achieve the goal of life, this end as it is described as the finale of meditation in one's own present life? If one dies, what happens? In this attempt at the practice of meditation, even if it is honestly conducted, sincerely carried on, if the goal is not achieved in this very life and death overtakes that person, what would be the fate of that person?”

“There is no cause for anxiety,” is the reply of the great Master of yoga. 

Na hi kalyāṇakṛt kaścid (BG 6.40): 

“Whoever is engaged in doing good will not reap sorrow.” It is true that this yoga is hard to attain because the mind is fickle in its nature, and ordinarily this is not a feasible way of living. This is a hard life, a difficult life, not meant for the commonality of mankind. A speciality of blessedness, as it were, is necessary; a grace may be required in order to equip oneself with the strength to face this difficult disciplinary system of yoga meditation. Nevertheless, even a little that is done in this direction should be considered as a credit, and it shall not be a loss. By continuous practice, by abhyasa, one gains momentum in this practice, and death is not the end of life, as birth is not the beginning of life. Life is an interconnected association of life with life. There is no such thing as individual life in this world. Hence, it is puerile to imagine that someone is born individuallly somewhere unconnected with other things in the world and helplessly dies in a corner unwept, unhonoured and unsung. This is not going to be. There is a careful documentation of every event that is taking place anywhere in the cosmos. Everything is recorded everywhere in all its minutiae, and no event, call it birth or call it death, can go unnoticed by this cosmic record keeper. There is a note made of everything that is done, everything that is taking place, and every thought and feeling and action shall be noticed. They shall be carefully noted because we do not live in an isolated cosmos.

We are living in a universe which is not a chaos where anything is anywhere and anything can happen in any manner whatsoever. Such a thing is not the rule of life. There is a precision maintained in the operation of things, and every event, whatever be its nature, is causally related to the other conditioning factors which are internally related to the event that took place, and so the coming of a person as an individual at the time of birth or the going of a person at the time of death is not actually a person coming and a person going. It is one condition getting reshuffled into another condition. It is a particular arrangement of associations getting rearranged into a new pattern of arrangement in the structure of the universe, making out thereby that a new type of relationship is established between this centre which acted like the coming in the form of a birth, or the going in the form of a death. Thus, the coming and going, the birth and the death of people in the eye of cosmic regulations is not actually the coming and going of individualities. There are no persons for the universe. Things and persons, individuals, are a chimera for this large organisation which we call the universal organisation. Hence, all effort which is in the nature of an event that takes place somewhere produces an impact upon the whole atmosphere of which it is a content and a unit, and every event may be said to be a universal event in this manner. If a sparrow falls, the stars may know it. Hence, unnoticed no man is born, and unsung nobody dies.

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To be continued

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