The Three Types of Discipline of the Bhagavad-Gita: 3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Ik Onkar (Extended Version)  · A.R. Rahman, Harshdeep Kaur.

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Wednesday 05, November 2025, 20:15.
Article
Scriptures
The Three Types of Discipline of the Bhagavadgita: 3. 
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on September 18th, 1974)

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To give an instance of this predicament or possibility, there can be a war between the understanding and the feeling, and then you will be an unhappy person at home though you may be a dignified public person outside. Your social status and the rational capacities may make you, or at least appear to make you, a noble individual of an elevated status in the eye of the public. You may be a big person or a big gun, as they say, in the eyes of the world, but privately you may be a miserable person at home. This is a phenomenon which is not unknown to people. Most people are privately unhappy though publicly big, rich, well to do and powerful. There can be political power which one may wield, social status and public esteem; all can go simultaneously, hand-in-hand with internal agony and sorrow which one suffers privately in one's own abode. Why should this happen? It is because while your intellect, your reason, your public capacity works in a particular direction, your emotion works in a different direction altogether.

Love and hatred may be said to be emotional functions, though as an intelligent, cultured, educated person, you may be convinced that love and hatred are not worthwhile characters. You must be an impartial being. This is the philosophical conclusion which your reason may come to, but your emotion will have a grudge of its own against certain aspects of life and an affection for certain other aspects.

The Bhagavadgita wants you to bring all these faculties together. The understanding and the feeling are one, like husband and wife, if we can put it in that way. There is a clicking of two clocks together simultaneously, without any kind of discrepancy in the sounds that they make. They speak in the same voice. What you feel, that you understand, what you understand, that you feel. Or, to put it in another way, your thoughts, your speech and your actions are in harmony with one another. What you think, that you speak, and what you speak, that is the way you act. This is a very difficult thing to achieve. Personal or self-discipline may be summed up in the technique of bringing together into a beautiful blend the thoughts of the mind, the words that you speak, and the actions that you perform in society.

Let each one close one's eyes for a few minutes and probe into one's own conscience. Am I in harmony with myself so far as my thought, speech and action are concerned? Do I not speak something which I do not really mean in my mind? Is my action not in harmony with my deepest demands of conscience? When there is a diversity of movement among the three functions – thought, speech and action – there is a split personality created within ourselves. We are not a complete whole. We develop psychopathic conditions. When the discrepancy among thought, speech and action is not very serious, it does not disturb us very much. But when it becomes a habit or second nature, it may go deep into our personality and this split may become the essential nature of our own selves, so that we are not wholes but parts sundered from one another, and that is a psychological malady.

So the first six chapters of the Bhagavadgita give a beautiful art of combining these faculties into not merely a complex of different parts as we do in the assembling of the parts of a machine, for example, but into a beautiful organic blend as an artist does when he paints a beautiful picture. In the picture which an artist paints, there is an organic completeness of the various types of ink that he uses so that you do not see the difference of the inks on the canvas or the background of the picture, but you see only the living force that is emanating from that picture that is painted on the canvas. When you enjoy a beautiful painting, you are not enjoying the ink or the beautiful pattern of the arrangement of the ink, but a new character that is projected out of this pattern of the arrangement of ink. That is a new type of art altogether, different from the mechanical assembly of parts of the machine as in a motorcar, etc.

Therefore, we are not supposed to bring about the assemblage of mechanical parts in the discipline of our personality, because that would be an artificial life. We are supposed to conduct ourselves in such a way that our life is an art, a beauty, an attraction, so that our face beams with a joy that draws people towards us as if we are a magnet. Beauty is a source of attraction, and we become a source of beauty on account of the discipline spiritually conducted according to this novel doctrine of the Bhagavadgita.

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