The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 9.6. Swami Krishnananda.

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Friday, February 26, 2021. 01:22. PM.

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Chapter 9: The Classification of Society- 6.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)
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The duty you are expected to perform is whatever you are capable of contributing to the welfare of the whole. Here again, a little analogy of the human body will be good. You do not expect the leg to think as the brain thinks. You do not expect the head to walk. You do not expect the nose to see, or the ear to smell. It is expected of each organ to perform a particular function. Now, the difference in the performance of these functions does not imply any kind of ethical or moral superiority, or even a social difference. Which part of your body is inferior, and which part is superior? Even a little hair of mine is dear to me. How can I say it is not dear? Even a nail is me. It is not merely mine, it is me – so dear, so loving, so beautiful, so necessary, because it is myself.

We are now considering your performance in the context of your whole relation in the fabric of human society, and we will consider the larger society of the universe afterwards. For the time being, let us confine ourselves to human society only. In the beginning of the Second Chapter of the Gita, the emphasis is on the social side first. The other sides come later on, gradually, stage by stage, when we go deeper and deeper. So your position in society, as conditioned and dictated by the preponderance of the gunas, will decide what your contribution should be.

You may ask, “Why should I contribute anything? Why should I not be inactive? I will not do anything. It is better to keep quiet.” Now, this is not possible. 

Na hi kascit kshanam api jatu tishaty akarmakrt (BG 3.5): 

No one sits for a moment without doing something. It is not possible to be inactive, because you are per force goaded to act in a particular way by the very fact of your relation to this larger organisation called society. It is goaded to perform that function, merely because of the fact of its being a part of that mechanism. It is integrally related to it. When the train moves, every part of the train also moves. There is no need to tell each part to start moving. It goes because it is connected.

It is important to realise that we are basically connected to everything in the world. It is not visible to open eyes. The naked eye does not see this relation. From the physical, material, bodily point of view, it looks as if we are totally independent. This wrong point of view, which erroneously tells us that we are independently located in this body, is the cause of the egoism of human nature. The adumbration of pride and self-assertion in a person arises due to the wrong notion of there being no connection of oneself with anybody. 

Therefore, we do what we like. We forget that we have invisible relationships with everything, apart from the visible difference that seems to be there between one and the other. Socially, pure common sense tells us to what extent we are connected to others. But even common sense is only a superficial understanding. A scientific probe is necessary to know what deeper relationships are involved in our connection with things. 

We are connected to even the stars in the distant heavens. The naked eye cannot know this. Even the empirical understanding, the mind, cannot appreciate to what extent the sun determines us, the moon determines us. The stars condition even our brains, what to think of other things. Even the cells of the brain are conditioned by the operation of the stars in the sky. Who can accept this if we are to accept only what our senses tell us?

The great Lord does not go so deep in the beginning, but it becomes necessary to go deep later on when the patient is not listening. So in the beginning he suffices with, “Okay. As a social individual at least, you have to contribute your might.”

I shall revert for two or three minutes to the point of this classification of society which the ancient masters classified as Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Sudra. We have to be very careful in understanding what these terms mean. They mean the obligations of a person, and not the person himself or herself. We sometimes mistake the obligation for the person, and try to put the cart before the horse. 

There are people who say these distinctions do not exist and they should not exist. It is no use talking like that. They do exist, and they cannot but exist, just as you cannot deny the difference between the leg and the head. However much you may be humanitarian and equilibrated in your opinion, they do what their functions are because they are expected to do only that function. You have to be honest and generous enough to understand the spirit behind this instruction. It is not possible for all people to do all things. 

This kind of equality is unknown. You cannot eat grass and give your sweet porridge to the swine because the human being and the swine are the same in the eye of the Lord, and everything is equal. There is a final unity of all things. It is said in a passage of the Bhagavadgita that one should look equally upon a Brahmin, a dog, an elephant, an elephant driver, a dog eater, etc. You can understand the spirit in which this is said. It does not mean you should walk with four legs because you are like a cow. That is not the idea. You do not develop a trunk because you are like an elephant. This kind of literal interpretation is not to be permitted.

To be contnued ...

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