The Three Types of Discipline of the Bhagavadgita 6. Swami Krishnananda

09/07/2019
(Spoken on September 18th, 1974.)
6.

Now, this is not sufficient, and the next six chapters describe something much more. Whatever be the discipline that you have in your own self – you are a well-integrated, psychologically balanced personality – very good, but what is your relationship with the world outside? India is very big, and it is not exhausted merely by your personality, and it is not the whole world. The world is much bigger than even our country, and it has a connection with the whole international system. Inasmuch as you are an organic part of this country as a citizen, well, you would seem to have a connection with other parts of the world also. And this world, which is this Earth, has a connection with the solar system. Physicists and astronomers know what vital connection this Earth has with the Sun and the entire solar system and the Milky Way, and so on. Astronomers tell us that the whole physical universe is an organic completeness, as our own personality also is.

The second six chapters of the Bhagavadgita describe how to take into consideration in real discipline of life the factors that are transcendent to your individual personality also. If you are a very well conducted, moral, intellectual, cultural person individually and yet know nothing about the outer world, you will be a failure in life. People will say that this man knows nothing of the world though he is a very good man in his own individual personality. As far as he is concerned, he is an ideal, golden man, but he has no idea about the world outside, and when he is in public, he is a failure.

The Bhagavadgita wants you to also be integrated in your relationship with the public, not merely in your relationship with the parts of your own personality. And what is this public? ‘Public’, according to the Bhagavadgita, does not mean merely the human beings outside. The world is larger than a set of human beings. Mankind is not merely the content of the world; there are many more things than mankind in this world. The forces that control the destiny of the world are not mankind’s forces. They are natural forces. Nature’s wrath is more fierce than man’s wrath, and nature’s bounty also is vaster than man’s bounty. And nature, according to the Bhagavadgita at least, is the whole physical universe, not merely these little mountains and rivers that we see in the geographical realm of our country or this Earth.

The Bhagavadgita goes into a vaster realm of a wider cosmos, I should say, of which you are a citizen because you are ruled by the government of the universe. Just as you have a constitution for your own country, there is a constitution for the entire universe, according to which every leaf moves, and every wisp of wind blows. Nothing can happen in this world unless it is ordained and permitted by the constitution of the setup of the whole cosmos, of which you are an integral part. You cannot isolate yourself from that.

So self-discipline, according to the Bhagavadgita, does not merely mean individual bodily, psychological, intellectual discipline, which of course is necessary.

It is also universal and cosmic discipline.

To be continued ...

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