Commentary on the Srimad Bhagavad Gita- Discourse 4.3- Swami Krishnananda

Wednesday, June 24, 2020.8:41.AM.

Discourse 4: The Second Chapter Continues – How to Live in the World-3.

1.

Thus, Sri Krishna tells Arjuna, “Don’t be a coward, saying that one day you will die and afterwards everything will be annihilated, saying that you don’t know what will happen afterwards.” The fear of death implies the futurity of the soul. We say that we must do good actions, we must be righteous, we must live moral and ethical lives. These injunctions cannot have any meaning unless the soul is deathless, because at any moment one can pass away. If tomorrow is the end of this individuality, all good actions also go with it. Therefore, all the injunctions for being righteous and good and humane become futile but for the fact that there is a possibility of the continuity of life after the perishing of this body. That is, rebirth of the soul is implied in the very injunctions to be good in this world, to do some service, and to have a worthwhile existence in this world.

2.

The rebirth of the soul is also very interesting. The soul perpetually takes these successive forms in the period of time on account of it being necessary, in the process of evolution, to advance further and further in the experience of life. It is necessary for us to die in order that we may learn better lessons in a newer form of existence. Death is not the extinction of individuality. Death is only the shedding of a condition imposed upon consciousness for a given period of time, a condition which is not necessary eternally. 

3.

We shall advance further. Just as a student rises from one class to another class, transcending the lower for the sake of attaining the higher by shedding the conditions of the lower class and entering into the conditions of the higher class, in a similar manner, consciousness within the soul is now conditioned in the physical body and in this physical world for the purpose of fulfilling certain desires which it entertained in previous births. 

4.

When these conditions of desires are broken—that is to say, when they are fulfilled completely—the conditions necessary for the existence of this body in space and time are transcended automatically, and we enter into a new realm, a higher state of education, as it were, where a wider perception and a deeper insight of things is possible. This process of transmigration, metempsychosis, coming and going, will never cease as long as the soul does not learn the lesson that it is essentially eternal, and it becomes totally desireless.

5.

The body is perishable: antavanta ime dehā nityasyoktāḥ śarīriṇaḥ (2.18). The soul is, of course, eternal—but, nevertheless, this body is perishable. How interesting! Eternity is enshrined in perishable clay, which is this body—two contraries indeed. Prakriti and purusha are very intriguingly juxtaposed in this experience of body-consciousness. As I mentioned yesterday, the artificiality of the soul assuming this body and becoming the body is as artificial as the assuming of colour by pure crystal. We have become the body itself, and we think that we are only the body. As long as we are intensely body-conscious, the soul is only a theoretical construct. But this is not correct perception, in the same way as the redness that we see in a crystal is not correct perception.

To be continued ...

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