The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 4.4. Swami Krishnananda

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28/03/2020.
Chapter 4: The Struggle for the Infinite - 4.

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1.

#The whole world is a mystery because of this fundamental something that is conditioning our life. 

*This is what great philosophers sometimes call maya. We glibly translate it as ‘unreality’ or ‘illusion’, while it is a mystery which cannot be understood, but which controls us to such an extent that we are helpless totally. 

##So the arguments based on this kind of relationship will fail in the end. In the same way as there cannot be an ultimate justification for the principle of relationship between things, there cannot be a justification for the validity of any argument based on relationships.

**And all logic is nothing but a structure built on relationship between the subject and the predicate in an argument. The subject and the predicate cannot be connected, and if they are not connected there cannot be logic; if there is no logic there is no argument; if there is no argument there is no justification; if there is no justification there is nothing possible in this world. 

###So the whole thing amounts to a chaos finally.

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2.

#But though we appear to be living in a terribly difficult atmosphere, impossible to understand, and more difficult to live in, there is something in us which compels us to get on in this world, notwithstanding the environment that is around us which threatens us every moment of time with consequences dire. 

##All this does not matter; we, somehow or the other, wish to live, even if it be in hell itself. We wish to live here. The desire to live in hell is to be explained. The explanation comes only from something mysterious within us which does not belong to this phenomenal world, and which we cannot understand with the phenomenal mind, understanding, or reason. 

###We are between the devil and deep sea, pulling us in different directions—something telling us something inside, and something describing another thing altogether in a different manner outside in the world of senses.

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3.

#The spiritual seeker girding up his loins for God-realisation, for leading a spiritual life, is faced with the complex of the world and the difficulties presented by the social relations. 

*What about my father? What about my mother? What about my sister? What about my relations? What about my disciple? What about my Guru? What about this and what about that? 

##Now, all these are nothing but items of relationship; and the Absolute is non-relational. It is not related to anything, and to aspire for the Absolute would be to aspire for a non-relational existence. But our existence in the relational world is so tight, and we are tethered to the peg of relativity with such strong ropes that we are likely to commit the error of interpreting our aspiration for the Absolute in terms of relations. 

###This is a danger even on the spiritual path. We may like to justify everything—even the aspiration for the Absolute, God-realisation, or moksha—relationally, all of which can be cast into the mould of sense-experience and egoistic pleasure.

To be continued ...

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