Commentary on the Srimad Bhagavad Gita- Discourse 5.2. - Swami Krishnananda

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Monday, September 07, 2020. 0847.AM.
Discourse 5: The Second Chapter Concludes – The Establishment of the Soul in Universality -2.
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1.
The sense organs have only one work, which is to take us out of ourselves and place us somewhere where we are not. That is to say, we are compelled by the sense organs to be continuously conscious of something which is not ourselves; and the more we are conscious of an object, the less we are conscious of ourselves. There is a loss of Self. This is called atma-hana in the Isavasya Upanishad. Asurya nama te loka andhena tamasa v?ta?, ta?s te pretyabhigacchanti ye ke catmahano jana? (Isa 3). The killers of the Self, as the Isavasya Upanishad puts it, are those people who ignore the very existence of the Self by not being conscious of its existence, and of the role it plays in their life and in the direction of their actions. They depend entirely on the impulses of the eyes and the ears, and the sentiments or the feelings engendered by the power of the sense organs.

2.
Here is the foundation, or the anatomy, of what we call action—individually, as well as cosmically. As I mentioned, there is a cosmic action taking place like the engine of a vehicle which does not know in which direction it is going. Prakriti is not concerned with the direction that we take in our action. It propels us to act, and we may go this way or that way. The direction that we take depends upon our intelligence—buddhi sarathi. In the Kathopanishad, our intelligence is called sarathi. Like Sri Krishna acting as the charioteer for Arjuna who was in the chariot, the buddhi, or the intelligence in us, acts as the charioteer in this chariot of the body, of which the rider is the jiva. This is the image that we have in the Kathopanishad.

To be continued ..

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