The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 12.1. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Friday, June 25, 2021. 11:00.AM.
Chapter-12. Control of the Senses :1.
The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita
(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti)
Post-1.
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1.

A wonderful message the blessed Arjuna receives from Bhagavan Sri Krishna in a brief encounter, as it were, as a response to quandaries that beset the mind of Arjuna as we have them portrayed in the First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita. Arjuna listens to all this with rapt attention and then says, “It is enrapturing indeed to hear your cosmic message, but how is it that no one seems to be in a position to make it a part of one’s practical day-to-day existence? It is the same old humdrum life of toil, upset, suffering and anxiety, in spite of it being possible for any sensible person to understand and appreciate this wondrous message of cosmic solidarity that you have now bequeathed to me very briefly but touchingly.”

2.

Sri Krishna replied, “It is not that people are unable to understand things, but there is something in the human individual which is associated with this understanding. There is a great potentiality, capacity and goodness in every person, yet there is something which is terrific about the person.”

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3.

There are two forces, we will be told when we come to the further chapters of the Gita. Everyone is involved in the activity of these two forces. We were discussing about the operation of the three gunas: sattva, rajas, tamas. Everything and everyone everywhere is constituted of these three gunas, these three forces that appear as forms, substances, objects, persons and things. Everything is threefold. But there is also another way of explaining this situation. The manner in which these three forces arrange themselves into a particular pattern, either as a form or as an action, is also a twofold operation. A threefold basic substance of all nature, of prakriti, is an impulse in two ways – the inward impulse and the outward urge. These two ways will be more elaborately described in the Sixteenth Chapter.

We have these days, in our times of scientific advancement, discoveries of an operation of forces which we may call centripetal and centrifugal. There are two ways in which one can move. Either we go inside or we go outside. Now, in a manner which is intelligible, we may identify the inward tendency to a particular aspect of the working of sattva, and the outward impulse to the working of rajas. But the inward movement becomes a function of sattva only when we are able to understand the meaning of this inwardness. We have only a prosaic and man-on-the-street understanding of the meaning of inwardness. For example, we are inside this room and after some time, we will be outside this room. Whenever we speak of inside or outside we associate this insideness and outsideness with some enclosure, being inside an enclosure or outside an enclosure. 

There is a limitation, and one can be within the limitation or one can be outside the limitation. But sattva is not an inwardness of that type. It is a different thing altogether. When we are in a sattvic state, when the condition of equilibrium, transparency and rationality operates, we are in an inward mood of appreciation of values, which does not necessarily mean we become introverts in a psychoanalytic sense. We do not cast our eyes within our body and look into our own inwardness of physical personality. That would be to understand inwardness as we know inwardness to be something inside the four walls of a room. Even the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are not adequate to the purpose because sometimes they carry meanings which are not appropriate to their connotations.

To be continued ....

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