Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity :30.4. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, December 28, 2022. 07:30.

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

Chapter 30: Communion with Eternity-4.

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The mind, in this state of stability on the Atman, does not find itself placed in any particular locality. The Atman is not a locality. It is not something. Nor should it be imagined that the returning of the mind to the Atman is a kind of subsidence of our thoughts in a particular luminous spot in our body. The Atman is not inside the body, it is inside all things. The returning of the mind to the Atman, or the Self, is the returning of all objectivity into universality, externality into the supreme transcendence. It is not something moving to something else. It is not like a drop which is the mind going to another flame that is the Atman. Neither is the mind a drop, nor the Atman a flame of light. The mind is a force of objectification, a projection of consciousness outwardly in space; therefore, in a way, the mind can be said to be as vast as space itself. It is conditioned by space and time, so our longings are as vast as space, and shall continue for as long a time as time itself continues. This entire objectivation has to return to its originality. It is not one man's mind – your mind, my mind. It is the force of external projection of consciousness subsiding into the original which is the Atman, meaning thereby the soul and the Self of all things, which is not present in one or two things only, but in all things.

The inner status, the substantiality and the root of Being, the Self-sense of everything, is called the Atman. Inasmuch as this Self-sense is universally, ubiquitously present in all – the Atman is not in me or you or some people, it is that inviolable selfhood present in everything, every person, and also in every kind of relation between persons and things – to such an inconceivable universality the whole force of objectification returns. This is why such dramatic phrases are used here in these verses of the Gita, because language is impotent here. What happens in this spiritual communion cannot be expressed in the words available to us. It is the whole cosmos merging in Godhead, the entire creation entering into the Creator. This is what happens in yoga samadhi. It is not a little act that you perform in the corner somewhere inside your room. It is not my meditation; it is not your meditation. In the beginning it looks as if a person is seated for meditation, but as the progress continues, you become wider and wider in your comprehension. It begins with a person, as it were. I or you begin to sit in the posture mentioned, with this discipline described; yes, it is so, of course, but this is only the initial picture of meditation.

As we advance further and further, the little individuals – you or me – begin to get expanded in their comprehensiveness; large does the self become. The higher self occupies the position of the lower self. Remember the words ‘higher self' and ‘lower self' used in the earlier verses here. When the higher self is the experience of the lower self, the lower vanishes into the higher, and in the next higher stage of meditation the little individual, which is you or me, gets liquefied, as it were, into the larger self. The larger self again rises into the still larger one, the little general becomes the larger general, the little universal enters into the wider universal. These are the stages of samadhi and samapatti described in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, to which he gives his own terms: vitarka, vichara, ananda, asmita samadhis, and so on. All these words make no sense to us. We do not know what they actually mean. We have to stretch our imagination with great effort to understand some iota of the significance of these statements.

In the beginning it may look like some individual is meditating. The individuality merges into the selfhood of the person, which is nothing but the total wholeness of the consciousness of the individual. Here, when we speak of a person meditating, we should not think of the physical body merely. It is the self that tries to unite itself with the Self. And the Self is not a physical location, it is a permeating consciousness.

In the beginning it is a sort of localised selfhood, as it were, but this location of the self becomes expanded in dimension when it unites itself with the larger selfhood in meditation. As I mentioned, it goes on like this, higher and higher, until all-self becomes all-Self. Every self is everywhere. This is only to speak in a figurative, metaphorical way. There is no ‘every self' there. All rivers become the ocean, and there are no rivers in the ocean. There is the ocean; there ends the matter.

Having reached this state, one attains the goal of life, a goal which is everywhere, not only in the future. The ideas of location of personality and the futurity of experience vanish here because the location of personality is a spatial dogma, and the futurity of the possible experience of Godhead is a temporal dogma, and these two dogmas vanish. Neither are we spatially located as a little self, nor is the experience to be in the future, sometime in coming periods of the temporal process. These obsessions caused by the intervention of spatial location and temporal process vanish in toto. Eternity inundates us, and we are bathed, as it were, in the sea of bliss. So goes these verses of the Bhagavadgita.

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To be continued

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