Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity :31.2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday, January 09, 2023. 07:30.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Chapter 31: The Message of the Sixth Chapter-2.

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We, as human individuals, also have a true personality and a makeshift personality, a kind of personality of which we may be afraid. We may be frightened about our own selves. There are features in us which can cause fear to us. A person can be afraid of himself due to the fact there is a real person and also a false person, a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde. Both are present in one person, and these two personalities are the two voices speaking – often at the same time, and severally at other times – in the language of a unitary divine selfhood, and also in the distracting clamour of a desire-filled family of sense organs.

Hence, insecure is that person who sees a duality between the self and its atmosphere, which atmosphere may be the area occupied by the false selfhood of one's own self, the apparent individuality of one's self, which is also a false self, or the secondary self of the world of nature and human beings outside. So there is a dual aspect of this fear which can overtake a person under specific conditions. The world may frighten us, and we ourselves may be a fearsome element to our own selves. The dual aspect of operation even in a single individual is the cause behind psychopathological conditions and impulsions to commit such atrocious and desperate actions as suicide. It is as if the self wants to kill itself. Which self is killing itself? It is difficult in this muddled form of thinking to distinguish between the two mix-ups of aspects of one's own personality. There is an atrocious fear that is injected into the personality arising from a false vesture of an externality which is hanging on one's true nature as a coat, as it were, which sometimes appears as a beloved friend. Even a false friend may appear to be a nice friend, but is not a true friend.

So fears which arise due to this artificial association of the true self with the false vesture appearing as an individual, as this psychophysical personality, or as an association socially and physically existing outside in nature, vanish in a second when that which has caused this duality between the self and its environment vanishes and the self is seen in that which looks like an outward object. Then there is security, because security is a name we give to the protection we gain from our environment. We have a psychological environment in ourselves and a social environment outside. Both these have to be unified with our true self.

The art of meditation described in this chapter of the Bhagavadgita should pave the way to this realisation of the true self hiddenly masquerading as the other forms of experience. Our love for our own self as this person, and our love for objects of sense outside, are both certain temporal manifestations of the integrality that the real self vehemently wants to maintain. Even that which we cannot consider as really a part of our existence here, which is redundantly hanging outside in the world as unrelated to us, is also our concern because it is there. It is not merely the source of fear that is our concern. Our concern is also in respect of that which is the object of our consciousness. Anything that we are conscious of as existing there as a reality – not merely that which we love and hate, but even those things which are objects of our mere awareness of there being something outside as an object – they too are manifestations of the self.

So in the unification of all the ingredients of experience into the integrality of selfhood it is necessary to melt all forms of spatial and temporal intervention in our experience so that the experiencer feels its own presence in that which is experienced, and vice versa. This is the finale of yoga experience. There is not much use in going into details of the actual character of this experience, because one who has not tasted it directly will not be able to form a concept of it. Conceptualisation of a transcendent presence will not be able to present a true picture of what that experience could be. Because all conceptualisation is an abstraction of reality, the content thereof will always elude the grasp of this conceptualisation. Hence, suffice it to say that the four verses which almost conclude the essential message of the Sixth Chapter glorify the presence of the Divine in all things and the perennial support that anyone can expect from this permanent presence anywhere, and the fact that fearlessness rules the world. In this world where God is the ruler, fear cannot be. Such a yoga is this grand yoga of spiritual identity with the creative principle of the universe.

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To be continued

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