A Study of the Bhagavadgita : 4-1: Swami Krishnananda.

Chinmaya Mission :

Arun Yogiraj, a distinguished sculptor, had the honor of crafting a 51-inch divine statue of Bhagavan Shri Ram in Ayodhya. 

As the grandson of Basavanna Shilpi, he continues his grandfather's legacy, who crafted Murtis for Chinmaya Mission during Pujya Swami Chinmayananda's era. 

Basavanna Shilpi's notable works, including Shri Ganesha, Shri Adi Shankaracharya, Dakshinamurti, and Nandi, adorn Sandeepany Sadhanalaya in Powai, Mumbai. 

Additionally, he sculpted the Deenabandhu Devasthanam Kaliya Mardana murti in Chinmaya Mission, Indira Nagar, Bengaluru, and the Ram Sita murti at Chinmaya Tapovan Ashram, Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh.

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Sunday, 28 Jan 2024 06:20.

Chapter - 4: The Total Picture of Creation-1.

Post-10.

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Bhagavan Sri Krishna held the opinion that Arjuna was lacking sankhya, which means proper understanding, and I endeavoured to tell you that sankhya is the knowledge of the placement of a person in this universe. Unless you know where you are placed in this universe, your location in this setup of things, you will not be able to do anything. Work, activity – doing anything whatsoever, and any motion for that purpose – is guided by the circumstances prevailing at that given moment of time. 'Circumstance' means the knowledge of the location of the person at a given moment of time.

Now, your location in this universe can be known only by a study of the whole process of creation. Doctrines of creation are adumbrated in schools of thought such as the Sankhya and the Vedanta. I mentioned to you previously in the context of the discussion of the nature of consciousness that the primary principle is the pure 'I-amness', Pure Consciousness adapting and adjusting itself to its own Self, as it were. The Sankhya calls this indivisible absolute consciousness Purusha. You may call it by any other name – God, if you like, the Supreme Absolute. It is absolute because it is not related to anything outside. It is a non-related, indivisible omnipresence, conscious of itself alone, and there is no consciousness of anything else. 'I am what I am' – aham asmi. This is the consciousness of the Supreme Purusha.

The process of creation is supposed to start with the emergence of the activity of Prakriti, which is the cosmic impulsion of this Universal Consciousness to delimit itself in a certain fashion for the projection of this cosmos. As I mentioned, this Prakriti, this cosmic impulsive objectivity, is made up of three forces called sattva, rajas and tamas – dynamis, stasis and equilibration. Prakriti, so-called, is compared to a rope with strands. You must have seen coir ropes or jute ropes, etc., with three entwined strands. The rope is not different from the strands. You cannot say the strands are the qualities or the properties of the rope. Many times people say sattva, rajas, tamas are the qualities of Prakriti. This is an understatement, really speaking, because these three properties constitute the very substance of Prakriti itself, just as the three strands of the rope are the rope itself. The threefold operation of sattva, rajas, tamas is itself Prakriti. Therefore, Prakriti may be said to be activity minus the consciousness of Universality, and Purusha is consciousness of Universality without activity.

Sankhya has a humorous analogy to describe how Purusha and Prakriti work together in collaboration because, as I mentioned, Purusha consciousness is universal awareness minus activity or motion, and Prakriti is only motion or activity minus consciousness. So how can these two, inactive consciousness and active unconsciousness, be clubbed together?

The analogy of the Sankhya philosophy describes two persons, one who is blind but can walk, and another who is lame but can see. These two people join together because they both want to move in the same direction.–But how is it possible? Without legs they cannot move, and without eyes they also cannot move. So the lame person sits on the shoulders of the blind person, and now there is a joint action of seeing and moving. The lame person who sits on the shoulders of the blind walking person can see, and directs him where to go, and so it is a very good understanding between them. This is how Sankhya gives you a humorous comparison of the manner in which perhaps Universal Consciousness, which is inactive, operates in conjunction with the activity of Prakriti, which is unconscious. When these two processes are blended together and Purusha and Prakriti jointly act, what happens first is that Prakriti, in its sattva aspect, reflects the Universal Consciousness within itself, as light can be reflected in a glass. The glass here, which is sattva, is not perfectly clean where the light passes unaffected and undisturbed, but there is a little disturbance and the consciousness, which is universal Purusha, gets delimited to some extent, though in a very insignificant manner.

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To be continued

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