The Teachings of the Bhagavadgita : 6.5 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday,  07 Jun, 2023. 07:30.

Chapter 6: Self-Restraint and the Nature of the Self-5.

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The gaunatman, therefore, is the secondary self – a self which is imagined, foisted upon that which can never become the self. The object can never become the subject, and our object of love or affection cannot become us. It cannot satisfy us, it is not us, we have no connection with it – yet we seem to be concerned only with that. This is the wisdom to which we are initiated by the social atmosphere in which we are born, and the education that we receive in this world. This is a travesty indeed, in which we find ourselves.

You know very well why there should be withdrawal of consciousness from such contacts in the process of self-control, in the execution of the art of yoga. There is also the other false self, called the mithya-atman, which is the psychophysical individuality – this so-called 'I', this physical 'I', this body 'I', this psychic 'I', this sensory 'I', etc. "I am coming, I am seated here, I shall go there, I shall do this, I am hungry, I am thirsty, I am happy, I am unhappy." When you make statements of this kind you are referring to a false self in which you are involved. This false self is called the mithya-atman, consisting of the five sheaths to which we have already made reference – the koshas, so-called. They are the physical, vital, mental, intellectual, and the causal – annamaya, pranamaya, manomaya, vijnanamaya, anandamayakoshas, which are accretions grown over the central consciousness which is the true Atman, the mukhya-atman, the primary self. These accretions are not vitally connected with the self – as much unconnected as clouds are in relation to the space in which they exist. You know how thick clouds can hang over our heads and appear to contaminate space and cloud even the sun itself. But the clouds do not cover the sun, and they do not contaminate space, though it appears that they do this. 

Like thick layers of clouds, this mithya-atman consisuddhared atmanatmanam natmanam avasadayetts of unfulfilled longings. 

They include what you call the subconscious layer, unconscious layer, etc. They are the psychic personality of ours – the emotional, the vital, the volitional, etc., and even the physical bodily self. Other than this gaunatman, or the secondary self, the object of our love and hatred, other than this false self, the five koshas, there is a true subjectivity in us, in the direction of which we move gradually along the lines of the cosmological scheme laid before us by the Samkhya, which the Vedanta also accepts in many of its features.

(Gita 6.5). 

"uddhared atmanatmanam natmanam avasadayet

atmaiva hyatmano bandhur atmaiva ripur atmanah."

uddhared atmanatmanam natmanam  :

"The self has to be raised by the Self," says the Bhagavadgita: 

bandhur atmaiva ripur atmanam :

 "The Self is the friend of the self": 

Your own Self is your friend, and your Self has to guide your self. You may become your friend, and you may also become your enemy, under certain given conditions. 

Atmaiva hyatmano bandhur atmaiva ripur atmanah : 

"You have no friends outside you, you have no enemies outside you – you are your friend, you are your enemy." 

When you see friends outside and enemies outside, again you are committing this mistake of identifying yourself with the gaunatman. The secondary self takes possession of the true Self, as it were, with such a power and intensity of grasp that we seem to be seeing ourselves in our so-called externalised forms of friends and enemies, while really we have gone against the larger dimension of our own higher Self when we confront enemies in this world, and we are in harmony with the dimension of our own higher Self when we see friends around us. Thus, the objects of the world do not concern us, unless our self is connected with them in some way or the other, positively in love, or negatively in hatred.

Thus, we are living in a world of 'Self', and not in a world of objects. The so-called objects are not our concern. They become our concern, they become even the objects of our awareness of their being there on account of the consciousness moving towards them and enveloping them, entering them, possessing them, and getting identified with them in some manner, which is the epistemological process in the perception of an object. We cannot even know that the world exists unless we move outwardly in space and time in the direction of another location where we place ourselves, for the time being, either in love or hatred, so that even there we are coming in contact with our own selves – only in a larger manner. Thus, idaṁ sarvam, yad ayam ātmā (Brihad.U. 2.4.6): All this universe is Self laid out before the experiencing consciousness, with which the self is identified, and vice versa. The whole universe is Self and the objects, so-called, are misconceived locations and spatially-concealed positions of this universally pervasive Self, which is the Atman. This is a philosophical background of the necessity for the practise of self-control and meditation. When you understand this background you will also know automatically the techniques that you have to adopt in the control of the senses, in the practise of self-restraint, in meditation on Reality, which will be the subject of the sixth chapter.

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Next

Chapter 7: Meditation – A Discipline of Self-Integration

To be contnued

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