The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 4.2. : Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, January 21,  2023. 07:00.

Chapter 4: The Struggle for the Infinite - 2.

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Man is never said to be, but is always said to become. We do not remain in ourselves continuously even for a few minutes. As the Buddha said in his wondrous message, everything is transitory, everything is momentary, everything is like a link connecting itself with another link. There is a procession of events, and there is nothing existent. If we are part and parcel of this transitional universe, there can be nothing truly existent in us. This is perhaps the reason why the Buddhist philosophers denied that there is such a thing as the self, by which we have to understand the transitional self, the empirical self which we regard ourselves to be in our poor understanding of the nature of things. We regard ourselves as a psychophysical complex—the body and the mind combined in some manner. And this self certainly cannot be regarded as our real self because it moves with the laws of Nature, and, therefore, it has births and deaths. The process of evolution is a name that we give to the continuous series of births and deaths of all things. A succession of events is another name for the death of one event and the birth of another event, which indicates the finitude of every event and of every object.

Anything that is finite materially or conceptually urges itself forward to overcome its finitude by an entry into another finitude, under the impression that when the finitudes join together they make the Infinite. That is why we love objects with the notion that two objects coming together will abolish the finitude of objects. But that does not happen, because two finites do not make the Infinite. Even a million finites cannot make the Infinite, because the Infinite is a transcendent reality which cannot be described by characters that describe the finite, and it is not a quantity which can be measured by mathematical laws. But our senses work through the space-time mathematics. The argument of logic is mathematical ultimately.

While we are sunk in this mire of phenomenality and this abyss of muddled understanding, we try to entertain a spiritual aspiration, a desire to overcome the world, which is conditioned by the world. Our longing to overcome the finitude of the world, the finitude of life, is directed by the finitude of the world itself. We are moving in a vicious circle, a merry-go-round, coming to the same point again and again, never getting out of the ruts of things. Arjuna's arguments were arguments in a vicious circle. We love God for a purpose which is connected with this world. The desire to transcend the world of sorrow and to overcome the finitude of bodily existence is at the back of love for the Infinite. We appear to be longing for the Infinite for the sake of the justification of the finite, a confirmation of our longings which the senses regard as real. And social values, psychic and bodily values, become the conditioning factors of even the idea of God-realisation. We seem to be loving God for the sake of people, for the sake of the world of Nature, for the sake of our egoistic satisfactions. Arjuna, in a wondrous manner, desisted from the battle of life, which is nothing but a battle with the world of every kind of relationship, personal or otherwise.

Now, the most difficult thing to understand is the significance of ‘relation'. We are accustomed to this word many a time. “I am related to you, you are related to me, I am your brother, you are my brother.” This is a kind of relationship, indeed, but this is a way of talking and taking things for granted without knowing their true meaning. A relation is difficult to understand because it eludes its connection with the two terms which it relates. If I am related to you, it is difficult for me to explain the meaning of this relation. The relation that we speak of remains merely a word with a grammatical sense, but no philosophical justification. It does not mean that I am identical with you when I say that I am related to you. If A is related to B, even in a most intimate manner, it will not follow that A is identical with B, because the difference between A and B is to be confirmed if there is to be a relation between A and B. If A is not different from B, there cannot be relation, and the two will be one, and we would not be speaking of the two as if they are related. But if they are really different, there cannot, again, be relation. Whether with difference or without it, there cannot be relation. And so relation remains an enigma before us.

The whole world is a mystery because of this fundamental something that is conditioning our life. This is what great philosophers sometimes call maya. We glibly translate it as ‘unreality' or ‘illusion', while it is a mystery which cannot be understood, but which controls us to such an extent that we are helpless totally. So the arguments based on this kind of relationship will fail in the end. In the same way as there cannot be an ultimate justification for the principle of relationship between things, there cannot be a justification for the validity of any argument based on relationships. And all logic is nothing but a structure built on relationship between the subject and the predicate in an argument. The subject and the predicate cannot be connected, and if they are not connected there cannot be logic; if there is no logic there is no argument; if there is no argument there is no justification; if there is no justification there is nothing possible in this world. So the whole thing amounts to a chaos finally.

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To be continued

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