The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 4.1. : Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, January 18,  2023. 06:30.

Chapter 4: The Struggle for the Infinite - 1.

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Though the Bhagavadgita is regarded as a well-known textbook, it is really not intended for the ordinary man. Its teachings, its ethical principles, its ultimate aims, are all of such a nature that it is difficult to accommodate them into the normal thinking of the human being living in a world of desires, ambitions, prejudices and traditional routines of various types, all which are cut at the very root by the altogether different outlook of life which the Bhagavadgita presents. The more we begin to ponder over its message, the more would we find it difficult to make it a guideline for our day-to-day life, though its purpose is nothing but that.

The arguments of Arjuna in the First Chapter are our arguments. The logic of the human mind takes this body as a final reality and everything connected with it as equally real, and the reports of the senses as wholly valid. The senses, the understanding and the logical reason are the apparatus of our knowledge in this world. These are the things that we employ in the assessment of values, and though it appears that apart from the senses we have the understanding and the reasoning, truly the understanding and reason are the handmaids of the senses, which seem to confirm by their own logic what the senses gather as information through their perception, and they do not give us any new knowledge. Our understanding does not give us a knowledge superior in quality to what the senses provide us by sensations and perceptions. This is why it is said that we are in a phenomenal world and, unfortunately, even our reason, when it is not cautiously exercised with reference to the implications behind its functions, would suddenly join hands with this empirical understanding, and it will amount to an acquiescence in what the senses say. Such were the arguments of Arjuna, and these are the arguments we trot out when our sentiments and emotions are to be justified and are to be fulfilled by hook or crook.

Setting aside for the time being the epic context and the story of the Mahabharata, and taking into consideration the principal spiritual message hidden behind the teaching of the Gita, we observe that the reluctance of Arjuna to take up arms on grounds of his own is the reluctance of the spiritual seeker to grapple with reality in its essentiality. We want a God suited to our senses, sentiments, feelings, traditions and social prejudices. Our reality and goal of life is conditioned by these feelings, and we seem to be living for a purpose which is evaluated in the light of this understanding lit up by the senses. Each one of us has to be a judge for one's own self in these matters of profound significance. Our aspirations for spiritual ideals, or God-realisation, may not be so well-founded as they appear to be on the surface. The whole edifice of this so-called love of the spiritual ideal may crumble down when the acid test of the superior understanding and the reason is applied, and we would reveal ourselves as poor nothings who have founded our arguments of the spirit on the quicksand of personal desire and ambition.

A love for bodily existence and an affirmation of the ego, a conformity to social relationships connected with the body and the ego, sum up our satisfactions in a nutshell. We are mortals, living in a transitional world which pretends to satisfy our desires, but never does so. But this pretension is taken by us as a reality, and we ground ourselves in the justification of this pretentious promise of the sense-world, and somehow or the other persuade ourselves to be satisfied with whatever is in the world as presented to the senses and whatever the emotions regard as what is ultimately required. Though we are not always emotional and sentimental in an obvious form, we are that basically; and our very root as individuals is unjustifiable finally in the light of the larger setup of things  which demand an existence of their own, not in any way inferior to our own existence. We have a subtle and secret longing to be independent and satisfied even at the cost of everything in the world. Consciously this does not come to the surface of our mind, but basically human beings are selfish. Not merely in human beings, but perhaps in everything in the world, there is an urge to maintain oneself in a bodily complex, and the fear of death is the greatest of fears; the love of life is the greatest of loves. Between love of one's own life and fear of one's own death, the one implies the other, and each one confirms that we regard this body as our entire property, our belonging, nay, as we ourselves. The social relationships are practically physical relationships, accentuated by psychic contact and adjustable with the temporary features which the world of Nature manifests in the process of history. We, somehow, manage to live in this world by a peculiar kind of daily adjustment with the unintelligible processes through which the world passes. We adjust ourselves not merely with the world of Nature every day, but, with a tremendous difficulty and strain on the mind, have to adjust ourselves with people around us. And this strain is a great toil indeed. We are so much accustomed to this strenuous life of adjustment with the outside atmosphere that we have mistaken this effort itself for a kind of joy and satisfaction. The condition of perpetual disease is mistaken for a normal state of health.

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To be continued

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