The Bhagavad gita's Message of Knowledge and Action -4. Swami Krishnananda
12/07/2019
(Spoken on Gita Jayanti in 1974)
4.
One of the difficulties in understanding the gospel of the Bhagavadgita or any such message is that we are expected to think here in an absolutely reoriented fashion. A new educational value is presented to us. One of the things, or perhaps the most important thing that the Bhagavadgita tells us is that we have to think in a new fashion altogether, and the greatest knowledge conceivable is perhaps the art of thinking correctly. Knowledge does not mean the study of Sankara or Ramanuja. Knowledge is the system of thinking correctly, and we are masters of not thinking correctly.
Why? Because we have been caught up in a muddle of circumstances whose values we cannot properly understand; and the relationship we bear with whom, we understand much less.
To come to the crux of the whole matter, we cannot easily understand our relationship with the world. This is our difficulty; and therefore, we cannot understand our relationship with other people in the world. Therefore, also, we cannot understand our relationship with God. Everything is a confusion, and this confusion is called samsara.
In Sanskrit we have a very beautiful word – samsara. “I am caught up in samsara” means, “I am caught up in a mess, a muddle, a mire, a confused state of affairs,” which is what Arjuna cries out at the very outset in the First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita. “I am confused. I cannot understand what is right, what is wrong, what is proper and improper. What am I to do now?”
There is only one question before us into which we can boil all other questions of life :
"the question of what we are supposed to do in this world after we are born. What am I to do, what are you to do, what is anyone to do?"
The Bhagavadgita is the answer. It is very difficult to give a complete conspectus of everything the Bhagavadgita says, but we can pinpoint the essential emphasis of the Bhagavadgita in this context, namely, our duty is to harmonise ourselves with the environment in which we are living.
Harmony is called yogam –
(Gita 2.48)
"yoga-sthah kuru karmani sangam tyaktva dhananjaya
siddhy-asiddhyoh samo bhutva samatvaṁ yoga uchyate" –
and the action that proceeds from our personality on the basis of this understanding is called karma yogam.
Explanation :
1. The equanimity that enables us to accept all circumstances with serenity is so praiseworthy that Shree Krishna calls it Yogam, or union with the Supreme. This equipoise comes from implementing the knowledge of the previous Slokam. When we understand that the effort is in our hands, not the results, we then concern ourselves only with doing our duty. The results are for the pleasure of God, and so we dedicate them to him. Now, if the results are not to our expectations, we calmly accept them as the will of God. In this way, we are able to accept fame and infamy, success and failure, pleasure and pain, as God’s will, and when we learn to embrace both equally, we develop the equanimity that Sri Krishna talks about.
2. The Slokam is a very practical solution to the vicissitudes of life. If we are sailing in the ocean in a boat, it is natural to expect the waves of the ocean to shake the boat. If we get disturbed each time a wave rocks the boat, our miseries would be endless. And if we do not expect the waves to arise, we would be expecting the ocean to become something other than its natural self. Waves are an inseparable phenomenon of the ocean. Similarly, as we wade through the ocean of life, it throws up all kinds of waves that are beyond our control. If we keep struggling to eliminate negative situations, we will be unable to avoid unhappiness. But if we can learn to accept everything that comes our way, without sacrificing our best efforts, we will have surrendered to the will of God, and that will be true Karma Yogam
To be continued ..
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