The Three Types of Discipline of the Bhagavadgita - 3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday 24, Apr 2024 07:10.
Article
Scriptures
The Three Types of Discipline of the Bhagavadgita - 3.
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on September 18th, 1974.) 

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Let each one close one's eyes for a few minutes and probe into one's own conscience. Am I in harmony with myself so far as my thought, speech and action are concerned? Do I not speak something which I do not really mean in my mind? Is my action not in harmony with my deepest demands of conscience? When there is a diversity of movement among the three functions – thought, speech and action – there is a split personality created within ourselves. We are not a complete whole. We develop psychopathic conditions. When the discrepancy among thought, speech and action is not very serious, it does not disturb us very much. But when it becomes a habit or second nature, it may go deep into our personality and this split may become the essential nature of our own selves, so that we are not wholes but parts sundered from one another, and that is a psychological malady.

So, the first six chapters of the Bhagavadgita give a beautiful art of combining these faculties into not merely a complex of different parts as we do in the assembling of the parts of a machine, for example, but into a beautiful organic blend as an artist does when he paints a beautiful picture. In the picture which an artist paints, there is an organic completeness of the various types of ink that he uses so that you do not see the difference of the inks on the canvas or the background of the picture, but you see only the living force that is emanating from that picture that is painted on the canvas. When you enjoy a beautiful painting, you are not enjoying the ink or the beautiful pattern of the arrangement of the ink, but a new character that is projected out of this pattern of the arrangement of ink. That is a new type of art altogether, different from the mechanical assembly of parts of the machine as in a motorcar, etc.

Therefore, we are not supposed to bring about the assemblage of mechanical parts in the discipline of our personality, because that would be an artificial life. We are supposed to conduct ourselves in such a way that our life is an art, a beauty, an attraction, so that our face beams with a joy that draws people towards us as if we are a magnet. Beauty is a source of attraction, and we become a source of beauty on account of the discipline spiritually conducted according to this novel doctrine of the Bhagavadgita.

Now, this is not sufficient, and the next six chapters describe something much more. Whatever be the discipline that you have in your own self – you are a well-integrated, psychologically balanced personality – very good, but what is your relationship with the world outside? India is very big, and it is not exhausted merely by your personality, and it is not the whole world. The world is much bigger than even our country, and it has a connection with the whole international system. Inasmuch as you are an organic part of this country as a citizen, well, you would seem to have a connection with other parts of the world also. And this world, which is this Earth, has a connection with the solar system. Physicists and astronomers know what vital connection this Earth has with the Sun and the entire solar system and the Milky Way, and so on. Astronomers tell us that the whole physical universe is an organic completeness, as our own personality also is.

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Continued

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