The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 8.4. Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, April 18,  2023. 07:20.

Chapter 8: The Yoga of Action -4.

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Krishna enlightens the mind of Arjuna. “You are mistaken, my dear friend, in saying, ‘I shall not act.' What does poor action do to you? It cannot harm you. It is an impersonal requisition of the law of the cosmos, and in the obedience of yours in respect of it, you shall not be bound. Rather, you shall be liberated, because the activity of the cosmos is towards the liberation of the spirit.” It is not intended for binding you, for the whole of creation moves towards Self-realisation, finally. We may call it the realisation of the Absolute.

Towards that end the universe is evolving, and we are dragged on as when we are in a railway train which is moving. The whole cosmos is a vehicle rushing in a tremendous speed towards Universal Selfhood, the great Atman of the Cosmos, the God of Creation, the Absolute, Brahman. This being the case, it will be highly improper and unbecoming on the part of a person to think in terms of little finite desires, and to work for the fulfilment of those tinsels or petty ends, forgetting the great purpose behind even our little desires and actions. Hence, perform action with this consciousness of its being a sacrifice of your individuality, gradually, by degrees, towards the larger purpose of the consciousness of the Deity that it is transcending both you as an agent and the end as the limited object outside. This synthesis between the subject and the object is the Deity.

There are degrees of Deity. That is why it sometimes appears that we have many gods in religion. They are not many gods, for they are the many degrees of the same God in various levels of manifestation. The gods of religion are not really gods. They are various levels of the appearance of the One Supreme Godhead operating as a synthesising principle at different levels of synthesis between the subject and the object. When we practice Yoga, in the sense of the requirement of the Yoga of the Bhagavadgita, we are moving from a lower level of finitude to a higher level of it. The finitude gets diminished gradually as we ascend further on. But we cannot step over the present state of finitude and enter the higher dimension of it until we enter the Deity which is transcendent to our present state of finitude. That is the meaning of worship in the religions of the world. This is the adoration that we offer to God, and that is what we call the ‘Devata', or the ‘Deity', of worship. It is a higher consciousness of our own self.

It is our own higher self calling us, it is not some other god sitting in the heavens and beckoning us. There is no outside god. The true God is inside us. And our own higher level is wanting us to rise up, to wake up, and enter into it. If we are conscious of this higher principle present in us as a transcendent element containing within itself not only our present finitude but also the finitude of the objects we are wanting to acquire through our desires, we have overcome the limitations of the present opposition between the subject and the object. We have won a victory in the war of the Mahabharata. There are eighteen days of the war, says the Epic. May be there are eighteen stages of the ascent, and it is difficult to imagine what stages they are, how many steps we have to climb to win the last battle.

So, at every step we confront one deity on the way. At every step we are performing a sacrifice, or yajna in the form of the surrender of our present finitude. “Arjuna! My dear friend! O humanity! Children of God! This is the principle of correct action, or right action. Here is explained Karma Yoga in its essentiality: When you perform an action as a necessary condition of overcoming your present finitude in the interest of the realisation of a higher reality in the form of the Deity, the Deva, it shall bless you.”

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To be continued

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