The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 8.4 Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, December 15, 2020. 07:28. AM.

Chapter 8: The Yoga of Action-4.

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 We cannot see God with our eyes because of the fact that God is Absolute-Consciousness and ‘our’ consciousness is thrown out of ourselves with the force of desire which rushes with a tremendous velocity towards the object of desire. Desire is our bondage; action is not the bondage. Any desireful action is binding; desireless action is free. To be desireless, again, is not an easy thing, because even as every finite entity is inseparably involved in some kind of activity, it is also involved in some sort of desire. The desire of the finite is engendered by the incapacity of the finite to rest in finitude.

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We ask for freedom from finitude; that is our desire, and we have no other desire. Even when we ask for small things—it may be a cup of tea—what we are asking for is not that little drink but a freedom from the agony of finitude, the sorrow in which we are sunk by the limitations of our personality. That we cannot tolerate. We want to overcome the limitation by some means. So we run to shops, go on trekking, climb mountains, go to the circus and the cinema, and we do all sorts of things not for their own sake—to think so is a mistake in our minds—but for the sake of achieving an illusory freedom from finitude. It is illusory because we are here following a wrong course of action, and even this illusion of the little transcendence of finitude gives us a titillation of satisfaction. That is why we are running after the things of the world. We are fools of the first water. And so we are after the things of the world, and we obey the orders of the senses.

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But we cannot be conscious of what we are really intending at the base, at the root of our personality. We are not asking for the objects of the world. That is not our intention; that is not our desire. Our desire is infinitude, nothing short of that, but the senses cannot allow us to think in this manner. They are dupers of a very strong type, dacoits who pull us in erroneous directions. And the consciousness is caught up in this vehement activity of the dacoity of the senses; and that is the source of bondage, not action.

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To be continued...

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