The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 3.2. : Swami Krishnananda.

 =========================================================================

=========================================================================

Monday, January 02,  2023. 07:00.

Chapter 3: The Spirit of True Renunciation - 2.

========================================================================

The Bhagavadgita is principally a spiritual message, spiritual in the true sense of the term. We have to clear our minds of the usual notions of spirituality and religion. When we take to such textbooks of Yoga as the Bhagavadgita, we have, first of all, to recondition our minds and make ourselves prepared for the reception of this impersonal teaching. We are personal, and the teaching is impersonal, manifest in various stages. Ultimately, it will become totally impersonal, into which the personalities vanish altogether, as if they had never been at any time. But we are hardboiled individuals, our personality is as realistic to us as flint, and so it would not be easy for us, who cling to the status of our individualities, to appreciate and to receive into our minds the great cosmic intention behind the teaching of the Bhagavadgita.

The teacher of the Gita knows this psychology very well. Perhaps he is one of the greatest psychologists we can ever imagine. And so he commences the teaching from the level of the ordinary human being. The feelings of man are to be taken into consideration when he is confronted or dealt with in any manner. And it is the feelings or the groups of the feelings of the individual that work themselves up into action. When we face the world or are busy with the performance of any duty in the world, our feelings guide us along a particular direction. When we are small boys, youngsters, jubilant with youthful enthusiasm, we entertain great hopes and imagine that we have great powers. We make a programme of our life. “Such is to be my achievement in life.” But this enthusiasm is beclouded with a lack of understanding of the nature of the atmosphere in which one lives, to which fact one is awakened gradually as one becomes more and more mature. The boyish enthusiasm subsides slowly, and the maturity of the grey hair begins to speak in a different language and tells us that the world is made of a different stuff altogether from what we imagined earlier when we were not sufficiently educated in the art of living.

Arjuna was such a person, and he stands as a symbol for any person, anywhere, at any time, a simple person embodying in his personality the forte and foible of anyone. The strength and the weakness of man can be seen in Arjuna. Every one of us, anywhere, has a strength but also a weakness. All these points have to be taken into consideration. We should not unnecessarily underline the weaknesses of ourselves, ignoring our strengths, nor should we go to the other extreme of imagining that we are all-in-all and that we are free from every defect.

We are in a world of conflicts and forces, rajas, which pulls us outward in the direction of space, time and objects through the avenues of the senses, and sattva, which keeps us intact, integrated in our own selves and in our own status. The stability of our personality is maintained by the sattva that is present in us, and the distractedness of our life is caused by rajas, which also preponderates simultaneously, in some measure. And a feeling of enough with work, the getting fed up with things, an exhaustion, a tiredness that we often feel in life is the result of tamas, the principle of inertia. All these are to be found in us at all times. We are sattvika, rajasika and tamasika, at every time. Only one of these properties comes to the surface at a time, putting down the other two, or at least one goes down sometimes, and we appear to be in a particular mood of the hour. 

The mood can change. Even our ideas can vary; our outlook can completely get transformed for reasons we cannot easily understand, due to the coming to the level of our consciousness of these properties, one or the other—  sattva, rajas or tamas. These properties, or qualities, which are psychological and individual, as well as physical and cosmical, work in various ways and constitute not only the body of the objects of sense, including our own bodies as subjects, but in a subtle form make up our psychological organ, so that, as the Gita itself says in one place, there is nothing anywhere which is not a compound or complex of these three gunas, i.e., sattva, rajas and tamas. Neither on earth nor in heaven can we find anything, anywhere, which is not the result of a permutation or combination of the three gunas. One may be an angel in heaven, or a mortal here in this world, but all these forms are constituted of the gunas.

To be continued

=========================================================================