A Study of the Bhagavadgita :15.1. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Thursday, September 22, 2022. 06:00. 
Chapter 15: Krishna and Arjuna Together is Victory-1.

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Earlier we deliberated on what the Gita has to say in the Eighteenth Chapter about the nature of action or work. We dilated upon yajna, dana and tapas as obligatory duties on the part of everyone, the meaning of which we tried to understand.

The Gita has been insisting on a combination of knowledge and action. It started by saying Yoga should be rooted in Sankhya, with Yoga being the expertness in the performance of action, and Sankhya being the knowledge on which this action has to be rooted. This has been the viewpoint of the Gita throughout. Work, of course, is obligatory on your part, but not just any kind of work. It is work based on a correct understanding of your position in this universe, which is called Sankhya. Thus, knowledge is as important as the impulsion or obligation to work. Neither can you work in a haphazard manner, nor can you be free from it. Knowledge-based action is the message of the Gita.

But what is knowledge? Again here in the Eighteenth Chapter, a distinction is made among three kinds of knowledge – the worst kind of knowledge, the medium type of knowledge and the highest kind of knowledge. The worst knowledge is the idea of any person in regard to a particular object in the world, to which one clings as if it is the be-all and end-all of all things. If any particular thing is the object of attraction wholly and entirely, then one concentrates the entire universe of values on that object, which happens many a time when people are infatuated over something. It is that infatuated, erroneous knowledge in regard to any object, by which you wrongly think that it is all-in-all for you. The mother says, "Oh my dear child, you are heaven for me!" If a couple has had no children for years and years and then a child is born, that child is heaven, God Almighty Himself. They go on hugging it and kissing it, and thinking that there is nothing else in the world except this little baby that has come. There is nothing else in the world. That is the highest treasure. That is called infatuation – wrongly thinking that one particular thing is everything – and if that is lost, you begin to feel that everything is lost. The whole world becomes meaningless, and you would like not to exist anymore.

This is attachment, an emotionally charged notion, and is not knowledge at all. This is the worst kind of understanding that you can have, where you cling to one thing. It may be to money, to property, to some person, or it may be to some position that you are apparently occupying in human society. Any attachment where one particular situation, event or thing is considered as everything is the worst, lowest kind of understanding. This is the fool's point of view – the ignorant, uneducated, uncultured person's point of view.

Higher than that is world-understanding, where you do not cling only to one particular thing, and begin to appreciate the value of other things also. Everything in the world is interconnected like threads in a fabric, into which everyone and everything is woven. No thread in the cloth is less important or more important than other threads. This is the scientific point of view, where the scientist does not cling to any particular thing. All things are equally good for him because of the interrelation of things in the cosmos. The causation and the production of effect in the world is a process that is interconnected so that in this world, according to the scientific point of view, nothing individually, particularly, can be considered as a cause of anything. Because of the interrelation of things, anything can be regarded as a cause and also as an effect. There is a cosmic give-and-take policy, as it were, among things in the world. One influences the other, and therefore nothing can be regarded as a cause or an effect. While a cause has an influence upon a particular effect, that effect may be a cause of some other effect, so that everything is a cause in some way and also an effect in another way.

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To be continued ...

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