The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita : 16.4. - Swami Krishnananda.

Swami Chinmayananda:

May all of us rise above and beyond our limitations, remove the weeds within and await the harvest of light in our lives! Love, light and grace to everybody!

Happy Makar Sankranti to all

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Chinmaya International Foundation (CIF):

The auspicious Makara Sankranti day, during Uttarayana, marks the beginning of the harvest season. 

Signifying the end of the winter solstice and the beginning of longer, warmer days, this festival holds profound cultural and spiritual significance.

May this Makar Sankranti fill your life with the light of knowledge, the warmth of joy, and the spirit of togetherness. 

Wishing you and your loved ones a blessed and Happy Makar Sankranti! Shubh Uttarayana!

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Wednesday, 17  Jan  2024 07:30. 

Chapter 16: The Supreme Person-4.

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The great non-attachment which the Bhagavadgita speaks of is anasakti—not an ordinary austere attitude of the individual, but a flowering of wisdom in the form of the recognition of the omnipresence of the Supreme Creator, which is at once a deathblow dealt at all desires, whereby further effort in that direction is not called for, even as when we wake up from dream into a consciousness of the world outside us, our so-called anguishes and desires of the dream world vanish of their own accord without any need on our part to exert in the direction of removing them. We have not to struggle to get over the problems of our dream world when we wake up into the reality of this world because we have a higher knowledge when we have woken up from the dream. 

The very knowledge itself is the panacea for the evils of dream experience, and there is no need for any extraneous effort on our part to get over the difficulties of the dream world. The desires and aversions of dream melt away in the knowledge of waking, and so do the problems of life melt away in the presence of God; and what detachment can be greater than this experience? Here is an automatic rising of the soul to an awareness where desires have no significance whatsoever. The Bhagavadgita, when it speaks of the need to employ the axe of detachment for felling the tree of bondage, actually refers to the knowledge of God, attaining which, experiencing which, there is no return to mortal existence.

Supreme is that Abode where the sun shines not, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor anything that we call light here. The supernal divine effulgence overshadows the brightest of lights that we can think of in this world. Reaching it, we do not come back. We shall not have any more rebirth, or transmigratory life. We shall not reap the fruit of sorrow any more; we shall be pervasive realities. We shall be immortalised for ever and ever. We shall not return to this world. Once we have woken up from dream, we have not to return to the dream world for any purpose or engagement, and we do not have a desire to go back to the dream to finish some work or task which had been left unfulfilled there. 

All our pleasures, all our engagements, even our debts in the dream world are paid at once merely by the fact of waking, and we have not got to pay our creditor from whom we have borrowed in the dream world. The payment is the knowledge, and knowledge is the payment of all dues. So, too, the question of returning to the world does not arise, once we attain the Absolute. We have not got to come back to this world, even as a waking person has no need to go back to the dream world. Such is the glory and the magnificence and the majesty of the Almighty. This is the implication of the stimulating words that we read at the commencement of the Fifteenth Chapter.

The Supreme Godhead is Purushottama, in the language of the Bhagavadgita. The purusha is consciousness, the principle with which we are acquainted in terms of the Samkhya philosophy, the seeing and knowing subject that is apparently counterposed with prakriti, or the world of matter. There are two realities, or two principles, normally considered by us as existing by themselves: the purusha and the prakriti, the Knower and the Known, consciousness and matter, the observer and the whole universe outside, called respectively here as the akshara or the imperishable, and the kshara or the perishable. But, transcending both, and comprehending both, absorbing both in itself, is the  Purushottama, the Supreme  Purusha above the purushas or empirical consciousness that are visible here as the isolated individuals in the form of yourself, myself and everybody. 

All this universe is pervaded by the  Purushottama. There is, finally, only one  Purusha in the whole universe, whose heads are all the heads, whose eyes are all the eyes, and whose ears are all the ears. Everyone's head is his head, all thoughts are his thoughts, all deeds are his deeds. No one does anything other than he, and no one can think, or even exist, except this marvellous Being. “Whatever was, whatever is, and whatever shall be, whatever can be anywhere under any circumstance is the  Purusha alone,” is the ancient and eternal proclamation of the Seer of the Veda. Into it all other purushas melt as rivers join the ocean, and there is neither the individual nor the world of matter, neither the subject nor the object in that All-Being. There is the one indivisible, oceanic experience of all-comprehensive existence. One who knows this  Purushottama is liberated at once. And knowledge is the same as liberation.

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To be continued

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