The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 17.2 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, January 01,2022. 9:00. PM.

The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 17-2.

(The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita )

Chapter 17: The Meaning and Purpose of Sacrifice : - 2.

(Spoken on Bhagavadgita Jayanti).

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This question is an answer to itself. A person who walks in broad daylight does not require to be told what is in front of him. A beam of light has been thrown on our path by an analysis of this kind, and there is no need to be told who does the action. The very idea of action requires to be transmuted. We cannot use such words as activity, work, and the like, in regard to this peculiar operation that is taking place, which is not anybody's, and yet everybody's.

Now, it was told that action binds, but there are specific actions which do not bind. Actions which are of the nature of yajna, sacrifice or consecration, are liberating. Every other action is binding. In this world all action binds, other than that action which is of the nature of a sacrifice. This was discussed in detail earlier in one of our sessions. This is to be remembered once again. Every action is binding other than that which is performed in the spirit of a sacrifice, and we went into the details of the meaning of what sacrifice means. If you can remember it, well and good. If you have not remembered it, what I am saying now will have no meaning. These are hard things to remember. They are like the ocean and a sweep of every blessed thing. Unless you are contemplative and practical in your daily life, whatever has been told here will be like water poured on a hard rock. This is a continuation of what I said earlier, so it is necessary for you to remember what sacrifice means.

We are now moving in the very direction of the same subject, with a new orientation given to it. Action which is of the nature of consecration and sacrifice does not bind, and to some extent we have understood what sacrifice is, what consecration is. Now it is clinched by a few verses. He who is free from every kind of attachment: and one who is thus free from involvement of every kind: muktasya; he whose mind is rooted in this awareness of this vast operation of interconnected action, which is what we mean by ‘the mind getting established in knowledge': . 

It is not knowledge in the sense of book learning; it is an enlightenment or an insight into the very nature of things, a seeing into the very bowels of nature and understanding one's vital relationship with the structure of every blessed thing. That insight is jnana. He whose mind is established in that kind of insight of knowledge automatically does action as a sacrifice. 

His action becomes karma. Then what happens to the action of that person? It melts as waters of a river become one with the ocean: samagra? pravil?yate. It appears as if you go as a salt doll into a vast sea to measure its depths and lose yourself there, becoming one with the salty ocean.

In a similar manner, we enter into the spirit of the activity of the whole universe and we no more do, and we cannot say who does. Here, doing and being become one. Action and existence are identical at a particular level of experience. Our existence, our being, our living is different from what we do. We can exist without doing in a physical sense, in a social sense, sometimes in a psychological sense. Our existence does not seem to be the same as our activity. Even without activity, I can exist in some way, but in this sense we cannot separate existence and action in that condition of interconnectedness of all operations. That is the case because the very existence of the so-called agent of action gets united with the operation.

To be continued ...

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