The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 5.1. : Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday, February 02,  2023. 07:00.

Chapter 5: The Mortal and the Immortal-1.

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The First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita pinpoints the basic difficulties which a spiritual seeker may face in the long run, in spite of the preparations that he might have made with all his logical conclusions and sincerity of purpose. In the earlier stages of our aspirations we do not fully realise the problems that are hidden deep, invisibly, beneath the outer layers of our personality, not directly connected with our daily life. We have an unconscious personality apart from the conscious one limited to this bodily existence, and this unconscious level of ours is larger in its content than the little expression of it we visualise outside as the body and its social relations.

There are fears of various types which keep us secretly unhappy, and many of the activities of life in the conscious level are attempts to brush aside these fears; and then we imagine that they do not exist at all. We occupy ourselves so busily with works of various types as a kind of outlet or counteracting power against these fears, usually known in the language of psychology as defence mechanisms. We protect ourselves by certain psychic mechanisms which we have formed within ourselves as a kind of self-deception, we may say, finally. This is the attitude of the ostrich which is said to bury its head in the sand when it is threatened with any kind of fear outside. It hides its head in the sand so that it cannot see things outside, and when nothing is seen outside, it thinks that nothing exists outside. This is not merely the ostrich's way but, perhaps, the attitude of every human being when he is faced with insoluble difficulties.

The problems are mostly in the unconscious level; they are not always on the conscious surface. It may not appear to us that they exist at all. We are comfortably placed in a sensory world wherein the senses are fed to surfeit, and they keep us completely ignorant of the dangerous abyss through which we may have to pass in the future stages of our life. We are brainwashed by the impetuous activities of the senses to such an extent that we cannot be aware of what is ahead of us, what may happen tomorrow, because if we can be awakened to the fact of all things that are to be faced in the future, we may perish just now with a fear of it, and Nature does not want anybody to die like that, as it would defeat its purpose. Nature keeps everything as a secret and lets the cat out of the bag only when necessary.

Now, when the tremendous confrontation of the Mahabharata battle was there staring at the face of the otherwise heroic Arjuna, what was unconsciously present in the human being that he was came out and spoke in its own voice. Fears which were otherwise unknown and undreamt of manifested themselves as the only realities and gripped Arjuna with such power that his personality changed completely, and he was not the man that he was before. We can suddenly become different persons in a moment if serious conditions overtake us. Just a second is enough to transform one into a different personality altogether, and one can be a personality of any type, because we are everything inside us. Everything that is anywhere exists also within us, and anything can come out under a given condition. 

Great fears overpowered Arjuna's mind like serious diseases. Doubts of various kinds harass our minds when we begin to tread the path of the spirit because of a basic misconstruing of the very meaning of the path chosen, which mistake we commit due to a lack of proper training in the art of living the spiritual life. An emotional stirring up of oneself into the enthusiasm of love of God, due to the study of scriptures or mystical texts, or listening to the sermon of a master, cannot be regarded as a reliable support for all time to come. There must be a conviction which must go deep into the heart, and as long as the head and heart stand apart like the two poles of the earth, there is the likelihood of the psychic apparatus getting out of order and throwing us in different directions as scattered pieces of our personality, so that we may lose even the little that we had earlier. This is what they call the ‘fall' in the language of mysticism, religion and spirituality. This happens because we are not studying ourselves properly and we had a wrong notion of ourselves based upon what we know through sense perceptions, social relationships, and so on.

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To be continued

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