Commentary on the Srimad Bhagavad Gita- Discourse 4.4- Swami Krishnananda

Sunday, July 05, 2020. 8:10.AM.

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

Sri Krishna’s argument goes on, from stage to stage. Firstly, the fear of death is to be ruled out because of the possibility of attaining immortality, and the whole process of evolution through birth and death being a journey to the finality which is the end of all transmigration. As the river will meet the ocean, the soul will reach the sea of all-pervasiveness. Not only that, the performance of duty, which is the main subject of the Bhagavadgita, involves the consideration of the manner in which a human individual lives in this world as a combination of spirit and matter, soul and body, consciousness and objectiveness.

There is a duty imposed upon every person on account of the very involvement of consciousness in space and time. We have to do our duty, our svadharma. 

Svadharma api cavekshya na vikampitum arhasi ( B.G- CH-2 SLO .31) : 

“Considering the essentiality of performing your duty, at least from this point of view, you should not shirk doing what you actually ought to do.” 

The duty as such is implied in our involvement in the atmosphere. The components of our psychophysical individuality actually belong to the world outside. The physical body is constituted of the five elements, the mind also is constituted of rarefied forms of tanmatras, and the sense organs are superintended by divinities like the sun, the moon, and others. In a way, we may say that we are living a borrowed existence. 

We have no independent existence in ourselves. The physical stuff belongs to the physical universe, the mental stuff belongs to the tanmatras, and the sense organs cannot even think and perceive without the operation of the superintending divinities which control the workings of the sense organs. Inasmuch as there is such an involvement of the person in the divinities that superintend over the sense organs, and we also are subject to the conditions of material existence, which are the five elements, we have a duty of maintaining a harmony with these elements.

Duty is nothing but the maintenance of harmony with the atmosphere. We should not be in a state of conflict with anybody. The atmosphere in which we are living may be a family atmosphere, a community atmosphere, a provincial atmosphere, a national atmosphere, an international atmosphere, or it may be the atmosphere of the whole of physical creation. Whatever it is, it is an atmosphere with which we have to be in a state of harmony—that is, neither our body, nor our mind, nor our conduct in life should be in a state of conflict with the demands of other such existences which also require a harmonious existence. 

##We should concede the same rights to other people as we concede to our own selves. The privileges and rights that we expect in this world are also the privileges and rights expected by other people.

To be continued .....

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