Study of the Bhagavadgita : Chapter-3 : Post- 1. - Swami Krishnananda.
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Tuesday, October 27, 2020. 12:12. PM.
Chapter 3: The Transmigration of the Soul - 1.
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As I mentioned, the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavadgita constitute, in a way, stages of the development of the spirit of man from levels of greater involvement through higher and higher levels of lesser involvement. The worst of involvements is the picture of the war, the scene of the battlefield that is presented in the First Chapter, the Mahabharata context. Nothing can be worse in this world than hatred, and war is the pinnacle of this attitude. You dislike a thing a hundred percent, and more than a hundred percent; then war takes place.
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The dislike is the counterpart of what you call ‘like’ for certain things. It is not possible to have only one side of a coin, as you know. Every coin has two sides. Your dislike does not mean that you dislike everything. There is a like which is counter-correlated to that which you do not like. The reason for the development of this dual policy of the psyche, like and dislike, is the structure of the mind itself. Who created this peculiar structure of the mind that it should think only in a parochial manner, and not in a holistic way? It is not easy to understand merely by application of psychological logic, because logic of the mind, whatever be its precision, is again involved in this dual policy of the dichotomy between the subject and the object, as they are called philosophically.
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What does logic do, generally? It assumes a difference between the subject and the predicate. “Rishikesh is a holy place.” Gramatically, this sentence has a noun as the subjective side and a predicate as the objective side. The word ‘is’, which is called a copula in a grammatical sense, joins the subjective side and the predicate, or the objective side, and then the sentence appears to be a complete picture. It tells you what Rishikesh is: it is a holy place. Okay. But for the purpose of understanding the meaning of this sentence, you have to dovetail these two aspects of the sentence, the subject and the predicate, which is achieved by the action of the verb, the link between the two parts of the sentence; so without a verb, there cannot be a sentence.
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Why should there be a necessity to separate two parts and then bring them together into a whole? A thing that is separated is always separated. It cannot be joined together like pieces of broken glass. There is an artificial attempt made by human logic to bring about a reconciliation of the subjective side and the objective side.
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I mentioned to you earlier that the world, including all created beings and humanity, stands before us as a large object, and the perceivers, any one of us, stand in the position of a subject. Our perception of anything in this world is an attempt to bring about a cessation of this so-called clash between the subjective and the objective sides. The world does not find it easy to reconcile itself with our views, whims and fancies. We have seen that the world does not always go with us easily, nor do we find it so easy to harmonise ourselves entirely with the ways of the world. We have our own ways, and the world seems to have its own ways, so there is a dual face that is at the back of this very picture of a harmonised perception of the world. Our knowledge of the world, our knowledge of anything that is external or objective, is this finally futile attempt in bringing about a real harmony between ourselves and the world outside. Two things cannot be harmonised, because they are two things. When we have already assumed that there are two things, bringing them together into a state of absolute harmony or unity is not going to be a successful endeavour.
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