The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 16.1- Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday, November 30, 2021. 6:00. PM.

The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita 

Chapter-16. Understanding the Essence of the Mind - 1.

(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti).

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The incarnation of God in the form of the perennial Incarnation gave rise to the consideration of the nature of action as such, what exactly action is. It appears that the matter is clear to our minds. Everyone knows what action is. It is someone doing something. But what does this mean? Who is that someone, and what is the thing that someone is doing? It is found that the question is not so easy to answer.

The web of relations, which the world is, seems to be so intricately wound that any particular instant or point in that vast arrangement cannot be regarded as entirely responsible for any occurrence. The world is not a location somewhere, unconnected with things. Classical physics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concluded that space is like a container in which all matter is contained. By three-dimensional mathematics, the law of gravitation was found to be explicable as the plane geometry of Euclid or the ordinary arithmetic of the businessman. It was believed that matter has no connection with space, that matter is contained in space. Do we not sometimes believe in our own childlike understanding that a soul is residing in our bodies as a man is living in a house? But can we really accept that the soul is inside the body as a resident is inside the house? That does not seem to be the case. Likewise, it does not appear that the truth of the matter is that substances are contained in space.

It has taken a long time for us to gain a better insight of the circumstances of the world. We found that the substance called matter, including human bodies and organisms, is not inside space; it is coextensive with space, which implied that it is co-eternal with time. This was a startling discovery, as it were, because it is not possible to think anything which is coextensive with space and, in a similar manner, undifferentiated from the time process. We are not accustomed to think in this manner. We are not sticking to space, or hanging in time. We always believe that we are in space and in time, but there is no ‘in'. That word has to be dropped. I gave the illustration of the soul being considered as inside. “God is within me.” “The Atman is inside me.” “The soul is inside me.” These are the ways we speak, as if things are very clear to us, but the soul is not inside in such an easy manner. It is inside in a different way altogether. That also is the difference that obtains in the relation of matter to space and time.

The action of a human being is, therefore, to be analysed in the circumstance of the relation of the human being to the environment of the performance. We are used to think that the environment is not in any way related to us. It is a totally different structure into which we have entered, in which we are placed, and our movements and what we call our actions have no connection with the environment outside. “What I do is my business. It has no connection with anybody else. What has space to do with that? What has time to do with that?” This is the prosaic thought of a crude, untutored, self-centred mind which has not got that apparatus of understanding by which it can discover the endless chain of connection between itself and the world of God, creation as a whole. The human individual, or anything for the matter of that, is not to be regarded as a totally isolated, self-centred substance.

To be continued ....

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