Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity : 29-2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2022. 07:00.

Chapter 29: The Yoga of the Bhagavadgita -2.

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And down the person goes to the level of matter and the conditions prescribed by the sense organs because pleasure is not only tantalising, it is very attractive. Who can resist the attraction? And what attraction can be there in the ideology that you have placed before yourself in yoga? You have ideally pictured before your mind a pleasure centre, which you call the goal of yoga, but there is a real, concrete, tangible, contactable pleasure centre whose realism is overwhelmingly more impressive than the doubtful impressiveness of the pleasure of an ideal that is only in the mind of the seeker. These are difficulties indeed, hard things.

Did not the Buddha feel this difficulty? “I am done for. A waste is this yoga. Unnecessarily I have given pain to this body by starvation.  I am crawling now. I have no energy even to stand on two legs. Today is my last day. So much credit for this yoga! Be gone! I am quitting today.” Such were the ideas of Buddha a day before his illumination, and a sea of temptations thronged around him. The senses become stronger and stronger as they are starved more and more. A starved snake is more venomous than a well-fed snake, and not only are they starved, they are angry. A starved person is susceptible to immediate irascibility. A hungry man is an angry man, it is said. So the senses are starved. You have not given them what they wanted, and so they are very wroth with you. They are waiting to rush upon you in ambush. This happened to a great man like Buddha; beauties, grandeurs, pictures of magnificence unthought of and unseen in this world were there before him. “Why not come with us? Enough of this hard austerity melting the flesh and breaking the bones.” Fears of other types also came upon him. Threats of death and destruction were also dealt at him. Every saint and sage has passed through this stage.

Why do these difficulties come before us when we are honestly longing for something holy, something divine, godly? Why should we deserve this kind of punishment, and why should we be meted this dish of pain and poisonous sorrow while our intention is tolerably honest and sincere? The reason is scientific. It is a thing that has to take place because it is a preparatory starvation for introducing health into the system.

The sorrows are nothing but the inward feelings of an empirically bound mind that its friendships are being snapped. All its belongings are taken away. The world is a large belonging of this individual person, and all association, all contact, is a desirable source of pleasure. They are being severed. It is as if your limbs are being amputated. A psychological amputation is going to take place. All the antennae of the connection with the psyche are cut off by means of this dissociation of interest in things, and so while in the beginning it was an emotional upsurge of an ideal satisfaction that is yet to take place, it is basically an inward suggestiveness towards secret suffering. “Though I may be blessed with divine vision and universal consciousness, I have lost something which is already there.” It is hard to be free from this notion that along with a possibility of divine enrichment in the future there is, simultaneously, an immediate loss. That you are going to have a large salary in the future may not sufficiently compensate your sorrow that you have lost your purse today. “After all, I have lost my purse, though I may get a larger salary tomorrow. No loss is tolerable. So let God Himself come and stand before me; that is fine, but have I not lost the world? That is also there as a point to consider.” The mind will be thinking over this matter. “After all, I have lost the world.”

It is not possible to adjust the mind to the expected idealisation that the whole of reality can be found in the object of meditation. The whole of it is not there. It is some grand, great thing, no doubt, a very large thing, a beneficial thing and a desirable thing, but the loss is also real. These are the ways in which the senses speak. And then the pramada, or the heedlessness of remission of effort, creeps in.

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To be continued

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