The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita : 13- 3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday,  September 18 2021. 2:00. PM.
Chapter -13. Cosmology and Eschatology- 3.
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Our own self is the adhyatma, the deepest self in us, which, again, is inseparable, ultimately, from the Godhead. It is the essential essence of which everyone is constituted—you, and I, and everybody, and everything. As every little ripple or wave in the ocean is nothing but the vast ocean, the secret hidden at the recess of every individual occasion is the adhyatma, the Atman, the Self in us, which is incapable of further reduction, beyond which one cannot go, and beneath which there is nothing. The deepest and bottommost being of our personality is what is called the Atman; and even as the essence of the wave is the ocean, so is the essence of our own personality the Absolute.

Another mysterious term used here in this connection is karma, a word with which everyone is familiar and which is very much identified with action or the result of action. But here, in this chapter of the Bhagavadgita, it is used in a special sense. The force which causes the emanation of beings is the karma spoken of here, the power which ejects all particulars, every evolute arising from the Central Cause. And all the little karmas that we perform here, your action and my action and anybody’s work, is a reverberation, a sympathetic motivation, a continuation, a reflection or a refraction of this Cosmic Impulse for the great universal purpose. Here is a secret which carries within its bosom an importance of its own. All action is, in the end, a universal action, and it is not ‘your’ action or ‘my’ action. There is, ultimately, no such thing as your activity or my activity. Every rumbling or little noise made by every wave in the ocean is a work of the bowels of the ocean itself. So does the Supreme Will operate through every bit of our actions, and even the winking of our eyes. The little breath that we breathe is nothing but the Cosmic Breath pulsating through our individuality; our intelligence is a faint reflection of the Cosmic Intelligence; our very existence is a part of the Universal Existence.

The Bhagavadgita is driving us into this great gospel of Karma Yoga, a principle which we cannot easily understand unless we know what karma is, and why should it become Yoga, how it can be a divine aspiration. We are all afraid of karma, we are frightened by the very word, because karma binds, and we do not want it, and we want to get rid of it altogether. It is the speciality of the teaching of the Gita that it frees us from this fear of the incubus of karma and tells us that karma cannot bind us, and will not bind, if we know what karma is. The metaphysical significance of karma here inculcated in the Gita is that it is the Will of God operating; it is the creative power of the Absolute that is the visarga, the ejection, the emanation or the proceeding of all things from the Cause of all causes. The answers to the questions raised by Arjuna, stirred by the earlier statement in the Seventh Chapter, are given in these few words at the commencement of the Eighth Chapter.

Now, with this philosophical or cosmical background of our understanding of the entire scheme of creation, we can have some idea as to what will happen to us after our death here. And one of the questions put by Arjuna is: What is the way in which a person has to conduct himself at the time of his departure from this world, for the sake of contacting God? The major part of the Eighth Chapter is taken up with this discussion of the fate of the soul after death. But all this exposition is implicit in this very precise enunciation of the cosmological basis of the whole of the pattern of creation, which involves the pattern of our mutual relationships among ourselves as well as the relation between ourselves and the world of Nature outside.

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To be continued ....

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