The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity -1.1.2 : Swami Krishnananda

06/03/2019
Chapter 1: 1.2
1.Introduction -2.

In a similar manner, there is one law which decides the way in which subsidiary laws should be framed. Even our eating habits and our modes of behaviour, conduct and relations are conditioned by it. It is not that we can live as we like. We have a freedom, and every citizen in a country has a freedom. We are all free people. Everyone is free. We do not look like criminals or shackled persons. Everyone is aware of some sort of freedom. We can do certain things according to our wish and according to our freedom. But this free will of ours, this freedom that is sanctioned, is conditioned by certain norms of behaviour which we cannot violate. So even freedom can be limited by certain sanctions. In a sense, we may say there is limited freedom.

But we need not be very much concerned over this limitation that is set over our freedom because it is necessary that individual freedom should be so limited in the interest of a larger welfare, because if this limitation is not to be imposed on the sanctioned freedom of the individual, there would be a tendency to assume an infinitude of that freedom. Infinites cannot be two; there is one infinite. If we assume an infinitude of our freedom, another person cannot exist, because our freedom will swallow everybody else.

This erroneous tendency is sometimes visible in morbid thinkers like tyrants, dictators and despots who assume a kind of infinitude of freedom, by which behaviour they are erroneously united in that everyone else is subsumed under them as their satellites, as it were, and one man can do anything to anybody else. This is a kind of Caesarean despotism, as they call it, which is freedom going amok. No individual can be free in that sense, because infinitude of freedom sanctioned to a particular individual may defy such a necessity felt by other individuals. Then existence would be nothing but chaos.

To be continued ..