The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita ; 9.4 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday,  06  June,  2023. 07:00.

Chapter 9: The Divine Incarnation and God-oriented Activity - 4.

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Often we make a distinction between the two, and no one can help making this distinction. We can never believe, ordinarily, that knowing is the same as acting. And so, under a misapprehension that the two are different, we take to a way of knowledge, severing ourselves from action or activity altogether; or, otherwise, we go to the other extreme and plunge into activity without proper understanding, or knowledge. Action is to be the movement of knowledge itself. Again, to bring the old analogy, the waves have to be the ocean. The knowledge of the structure of things has to be not only the root, the base of our actions, but this knowledge itself has to become a movement in the form of action.

What we call activity is the movement of our being. It is not something outside us, as the rays of the Sun can be said to be the movement of the power and force of the Sun itself. Our efforts, our endeavours, our conduct and behaviour and action in this world are a spatiotemporal expression of our own being. When this spatiotemporality is cut off from the movement of our being, when we do not any more regard ourselves as helpless victims at the hands of this isolatedness in space and time, we, then, become a universal being participating in the purpose of the Cosmos. Then it is that we receive the Grace of God, for God is non-spatial and non-temporal. God's actions are not individualised movements towards some ulterior purpose.

Human beings as we are today in this condition, we will find it difficult to understand what all this means. Religion is not an easy affair, and Yoga is not meant for all, unless one is prepared wholly in one's being towards this completion of one's life's purpose. We are, therefore, required to prepare ourselves for this arduous task in the form of Yoga.

We are not to forget the messages of the earlier chapters when we go further. The chapters in the Bhagavadgita are not watertight compartments. There is an ascending series of thought, a vital connection between one chapter and another, and though it may often appear that the one repeats the idea of the other, the so-called repetition is only with a different purpose and with a special significance, and not a mere tautological mention of the same idea.

We have to recast our mind back to the very conditions of the First Chapter, as if we are preparing for an examination on a particular subject, wherein we go on muttering within our own minds the earlier stages of our studies when we go ahead through the further chapters of a textbook, so that we may not forget the earlier one in our absorption in the later thoughts therein. There is a continuity of thought and a wholeness of purpose motivating the entire message of the Gita throughout the eighteen chapters, even as there is a continuity and an organic wholeness in the various processes of our development from babyhood to adulthood and a maturity of feeling in our own physiological personality. We do not give up our baby body when we become adults. We have only grown into maturity in a larger wholeness and knowledge and power when we become adults and grown-up persons. So is the system followed in the methodology of the development of thought in the various chapters of the Gita.

Thus, the Fourth Chapter gives us two important aspects of the message of Yoga. Firstly, God's Hands move in this world as Incarnations which cannot be counted in number. It is not that there is only Incarnation historically. Every event in the world is a divine miracle beyond the understanding of the human individual, and this divine miracle is the working of the Incarnations.

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To be continued

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