The Three Types of Discipline of the Bhagavadgita - 4. Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday 29, Apr 2024 06:50.
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Scriptures
The Three Types of Discipline of the Bhagavadgita - 4.
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on September 18th, 1974.) 

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The second six chapters of the Bhagavadgita tell you how to take into consideration in real discipline of life the factors that are transcendent to your individual personality also. If you are a very well conducted, moral, intellectual, cultural person individually and yet know nothing about the outer world, you will be a failure in life. People will say that this man knows nothing of the world though he is a very good man in his own individual personality. As far as he is concerned, he is an ideal, golden man, but he has no idea about the world outside, and when he is in public, he is a failure.

The Bhagavadgita wants you to also be integrated in your relationship with the public, not merely in your relationship with the parts of your own personality. And what is this public? 'Public', according to the Bhagavadgita, does not mean merely the human beings outside. The world is larger than a set of human beings. Mankind is not merely the content of the world; there are many more things than mankind in this world. The forces that control the destiny of the world are not mankind's forces. They are natural forces. Nature's wrath is more fierce than man's wrath, and nature's bounty also is vaster than man's bounty. And nature, according to the Bhagavadgita at least, is the whole physical universe, not merely these little mountains and rivers that we see in the geographical realm of our country or this Earth.

The Bhagavadgita takes us into a vaster realm of a wider cosmos, I should say, of which you are a citizen because you are ruled by the government of the universe. Just as you have a constitution for your own country, there is a constitution for the entire universe, according to which every leaf moves, and every wisp of wind blows. Nothing can happen in this world unless it is ordained and permitted by the constitution of the setup of the whole cosmos, of which you are an integral part. You cannot isolate yourself from that. So self-discipline, according to the Bhagavadgita, does not merely mean individual bodily, psychological, intellectual discipline, which of course is necessary. It is also universal and cosmic discipline.

But the Gita is still more. The third step is absolute discipline. This is the only way in which that third type of discipline can be defined. Absolute discipline is that type of unitedness and harmony that you establish in life whereby you are friendly not only with the outer universe but with the profundities of the inner structure of the universe. Just as your body is not your whole personality, the physical universe is not the whole creation. Just as you may mistake the physical body for a human being, you may mistake the visible, physical universe for the total reality. Even as there are many more interesting features within your physical personality, there are riches and vaster secrets internal to the visible physical universe which are not recognisable by human understanding, and not perceptible to human senses.

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Continued

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