The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita : 17.1. - Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, 27  Jan  2024 06:50. 

Chapter 17: The Play of the Cosmic Powers - 1.

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As the teachings of the Bhagavadgita proceed on, they begin to unravel different types of mysteries. We have studied the Third Chapter, where reference was made to the gunas of prakriti, and we were told that there are three properties—sattva, rajas and tamas. And we shall be told further that the universe can be boiled down to a still fewer number of powers or forces.

The dialectical processes of what we know as the thesis and the antithesis, the position and the opposition of a thing, are the only things we see anywhere. These two aspects of a single force appearing as conflicting parties are known as the 'Daiva' and the  'Asura' tendencies in the cosmos, one moving towards the Centre and the other urging externally towards the periphery of names and forms—the centripetal and the centrifugal powers.

There are two impulses within us: to go in, and to go out. We have a desire to enter into the centre of all things and grasp the best of things in the world, the essence of everything. That is why we have a curiosity to know all things, an unquenchable thirst and a longing for more and more, endlessly. Our love for knowledge is infinite; it never gets satiated. We wish to go deeper and deeper into the mystery of all things, and freedom is what we ask for, finally. We seek freedom, and nothing else. But we work for bondage vigorously, at the same time, because the other urge also is there working with equal power, in the other direction. We are like a person whose legs are pulled both ways. It is difficult to say which is more powerful, for we are caught between the devil and the deep sea. There is a perpetual battle going on, a war that is being waged everywhere between these two powers, the Daiva and the  Asura, the divine and the undivine, as they are usually known. The universal power of Self-integration driving the soul towards the Absolute, and the psychic, the intellectual, the rational and sensory powers urging themselves forward outwardly towards the objects of perception and indulgence—this is the Mahabharata, this is the Ramayana, this is the conflict, this is the friction, this is the skirmish, this is the little fight that we see in the shops and in the streets and in the houses and everywhere. These are the propellers of the wars and crusades of history, these the stupendous meanings behind evolution as a whole. The powers struggle one against the other, and the history of the cosmos is the witness to the success or failure of either of these forces.

The Sixteenth Chapter of the Bhagavadgita tells us that it is our duty to work in cooperation with the universal power of integration—the Daiva, and not the  Asura. The  Asura, or the devilish, the demonical power, is that which pulls us out of ourselves, drives us away from the Self, takes us away from our own Centre, makes the Self the non-self, and converts us into objects, while we are the Subject in ourselves. This is the dark power that works in a mysterious manner, moving earth and heaven, to transform everything into an object rather than the subject with a status of its own.

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To be continued

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