The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita - 4.5. : Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday, January 30  2023. 08:00.

Chapter 4: The Struggle for the Infinite - 5.

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Now, we are ready for that, really. Suddenly we say, “We renounce father and mother, renounce every connection with the world. We shall have nothing to do with people. We seek God.” We move from one place to another place in this very world, and satisfy ourselves that the renunciation is complete. The great renunciation which the Bhagavadgita speaks of is not this much merely. It is not just a coming away from California to the Himalayas. It is a different thing altogether, which would not be easy for all people to understand; and if it had been so easy we would not be bungling in our spiritual life in the way we do every day. Arjuna could not grasp it, and how can we grasp it? We stumble into the same rut of thinking in spite of all our arguments and abilities and our efforts to get at the significance of true spiritual life.

We cannot properly appreciate the connection that exists between God and the world, between God and ourselves and between one person and another person. And the whole of metaphysical philosophy is supposed to deal with these supreme principles—God, world and soul—an understanding of whose internal relationship is supposed to be philosophy proper, or ontology, as they call it these days. But these principles elude our grasp because even in our endeavour to grasp the internal relationship among these ultimate principles we commit a basic mistake, an error which worms itself into the very situation of understanding. We remain as justifiable ego-centres, we remain ‘ourselves', we remain just what we are today. Even a whit of difference does not take place in us, though we are trying to lift ourselves into that status where we can comprehend the cosmic principles that we are discussing in this philosophy. We remain the same Mr. and Mrs., the same boy or girl, the same businessmen, industrialists, thinking of God, world and soul. So our philosophy becomes a jungle of words, a forest of incoherent ideas, tiring and not satisfying, and we get fed up with all philosophy— because we have not been discussing philosophy really, we were justifying our own way or thinking in the name of philosophy and trying to bring down God Himself to this world of our personal egoistic relationships and compelling Him to answer to our needs that are psychological, empirical, relational, whatever they be.

We are these Arjunas, and we cannot face this problem of the spirit finally. If we are cast into the fire ordeal of the requirements of true spiritual living, we would be utter failures and we would feel that none of us is fit for that life. We are just go-lucky people with an inward complacence that we are leading a religious life. But religion does not become religion and the spiritual does not become spirituality unless our outlook in respect of the whole of life gets tuned up to the demands of the nature of God and the internal relationship that subsists among God, world and soul. There should be a harmony between our way of thinking today and the essential nature of the internal relationship of God, world and soul, as it is essentially. Though it may not be an utter harmony that we achieve, there should be at least a tendency of our way of thinking towards that requirement of ultimate harmony. Even the first step taken in this direction is a step in the right direction, and is an admirable achievement indeed.

The universal has to be implanted in the particular. God has to descend into the heart of man. At least as a little iota of reality, a spark of that Fire should be present in us. Then we can be said to be set on the spiritual path. What we call the spiritual way of living is the way of God, the way of the Absolute, the way of the Tao, as they call it. Though we might have not achieved it, contacted it or understood it fully, we should be sure of moving in that direction, rightly. Even if we move only one inch in the direction of Badrinath, it is an achievement in that pilgrimage. But if we move in the direction of Delhi, it cannot be called a movement in the direction of the shrine.

Though it may not be easy to comprehend all the requirements of spiritual life, there should at least be a satisfaction in us that we are after the Goal. It is, therefore, necessary to make a thoroughgoing search of our own psychic nature, the world of desires which has various layers of manifestation, only the uppermost one being visible and intelligible to us in some partial manner. The lower layers are not known to us. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have tried their best to understand the deeper levels of the human psyche. These are the worlds of desires. The predominant desire working in the conscious level may make it appear that the underground world does not exist at all, but it does exist and will thrust forth its tentacles one day, and decide everything.

This is one of the reasons, evidently, why psychoanalysts like Freud thought that the religions of the world are an illusion. If religion is only a complacent attitude manifest by the underground world of desires in its outer form of social piety and external adjustments of values, religion would remain an illusion, no doubt. But if religion means an entry of even the least percentage of the universal into this particular existence of ours as individuals, that would be true religion, and it has no connection with the world of desires or the psyche.

So, there is a popular religion of the masses, the so-called pious that live in the light of human relationships, and there is the true religion of God, which is the subject of the Bhagavadgita. This is the reason which will explain why I said at the beginning that the message of the Gita is not meant for the ordinary man. It requires a great alertness of our personality, the total being, to grasp its message because the message is supposed to have been delivered by the Cosmic Form which included within itself everything existent everywhere, at any time, and we have to tune ourselves to that situation if we are to absorb its implications and its proper significance.

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Next
Chapter 5: The Mortal and the Immortal
To be continued

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