The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 5.5. Swami Krishnananda

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Wednesday, July 01, 2020. 08:28.PM.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Chapter 5: The Udyoga Parva of the Mahabharata - 5

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1.

It is up to each person to appreciate why this situation arises, why mostly people are incapable of a balanced outlook in anything. There is always a spurt or a pressure of a particular aspect of our psychic personality. It is not that all the soldiers within are arrayed in a perfectly logical fashion to form a beautiful, artistic pattern. It is a hodgepodge of arrangement, a jumble, as it were, of our internal faculties, a chaos. It is not a good regiment that is within us. It is a crowd of clamorous powers, naughty children, an uncontrollable mob making a loud noise, as it were; we do not know who starts the noise, and what is actually the meaning of this noise. A loud noise from inside us says “Do this. I want this”, and then we feel that we have to do something in answer to this noise. If a large crowd shouts “We want this”, we do not know who is saying that. Everybody seems to be saying it, though someone may be shouting at the top of their voice. Our personality is mostly imbalanced. We are not psychically balanced. This is the reason why we have physical, social, and sometimes even psychological difficulties. We are restless. This is the conflict in which we find ourselves every day.

2.

The conflict of the actual historical battle is, no doubt, a conflict, and it is also to be taken into consideration, but it is not outside the environment in which human beings are involved. We are not always judicious to appreciate that even a historical battle is not purely historical. It is not a political event as it appears on the surface. It is a deep secret of the human psyche affecting a larger atmosphere, the whole world, and it may even reach up to the skies. Even the stellar regions may be involved in exerting some influence in the action of a single man on Earth. It may be an emperor, a dictator, an administrator, a major general, a businessman – any person does something, and he or she is convinced that only that person is the motive and the impulsion behind the action. Sometimes a group of people believes that the group is the impulsion, and a nation believes that the nation is the source. They may not be wholly correct in this opinion because, on a very in-depth analysis, it is difficult to believe that events occur in one particular place. It is perhaps not entirely true that actions are local actions. It does not appear that any event is connected with that particular apparent locality only, as a boil on the foot does not appear to be an action of the foot only. There seems to be some trouble in many other places manifesting in a particular locality of the body. Every conflict is a kind of irreconcilable illness, a morbid condition; but where is its source?

3.

Now, in the finding of an answer to this question as to where the source of this conflict is, we are likely to make a mistake in thinking that other people – so-and-so, this person or that country – is the enemy and they are the causes of the conflict.  We have such answers easily available. But man, being finite even in his understanding, seems to have finite answers to these questions.

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To be continued ...;

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