Study of the Bhagavadgita : Chapter-1 : Post- 7. Swami Krishnananda

Friday, June 12, 2020.

Chapter-1. Introduction to the Bhagavadgita-7.

You may ask, “Is the world so unkind to us? Is God so merciless?” It is nothing of the kind. These ethical and social rules do not obtain in a world which is wider than human society and family relation. ‘Mercy’, ‘goodness’, ‘kindness’, ‘affection’ are words which are meaningful to us human beings; but the cosmos God has created is not made up of human beings. God has not created human beings, actually. He has created forces, energies. As modern science will tell you, quanta of powers by a process of permutation and combination become larger by logical embodiments and may look like organisms, plants, animals, and human beings; but really, in God’s eye, or to the eye of the world itself, there may not be plants, animals and human beings. There are only cosmic forces operating.

Any kind of attachment or aversion, any emotion which is sunk in love and hatred, is not the way in which the world is working or, perhaps, God Himself is working. God does not love you or hate you. Nādatte kasyacit pāpaṁ na caiva sukṛtaṁ vibhuḥ (5.15): The Lord wants not your good deeds, nor does He care for your bad deeds. The actions that you perform are the dispensers of your own justice. The universe is more an embodied law than a field of force that looks like human beings.

Perhaps many of you are scientists, or at least acquainted with the science of Newton, and so on. The classical science of Newton says that many things are in this world of space and time as things can be in a basket or glass balls can be in a soda bottle. In that way, the world of matter seems to be inside space and time. This is the classical picture that Newton and Laplace presented before us, making out thereby that there is no organic relationship between space and time and the world of matter, much less the relation between ourselves and space and time. That would keep us away from the structure of the cosmos, vitally speaking. If Newton’s statement was entirely true, space and time would not be vitally connected with us. We would be like apples in a basket. A basket knows not that there are apples, and the apple does not know that it is inside a basket, though it is inside. Such is the case that is made out by classical science, classical mathematics. Two and two make four. They cannot make anything less or anything more.

But modern findings, as you are all perhaps aware, have shown a vital relationship between even space and time and your own selves, so that you are sitting in this hall at your desk, not unconnected with the walls around you, not unconnected with the sun that is shining in the sky, not unconnected even with the distant stars or what you may call the white hole or the black hole. With that you are connected even just now. Though modern science is not regarded as a spiritual science, it tells you, very strangely, that every cell in your brain is connected to every atom of the cosmos. Every person is a cosmic individual, you may say. Certainly you are made in the image of God; and as God is a cosmic entity, anything that is made in the image of that cosmic substance should also have a cosmic significance. So you are not Mr. so-and-so, a little boy born of somebody who is your father. This is not the way in which the Bhagavadgita asks you to understand yourself, your relations, your friends, your society.

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To be continued ..