A Study of the Bhagavadgita : 36 - Swami Krishnananda.

=================================================================================

Tuesday 18, June 2024 06:55.
Chapter 7: The Entry of the Absolute into the Relative -6.
Post-36.

=================================================================================

Arjuna says, “I understand what you say.” Insatiable is this fire of longing for objects of sense. It will consume you. The more you pamper it, the more it asks. Fire cannot be satisfied by any amount of fuel. It asks for more and more fuel so that it may enlarge itself and burn everything. Desire wants to consume you completely so that you may not be here at all. And if your desire is obstructed by an event, you are angry. You want to destroy that cause which is apparently obstructing the fulfilment of your desire. So anger is only another form of longing. It is the longing to perpetuate your longing which, obstructed, manifests itself as the obverse of what you call a desire, and you call it anger. Actually, this one impulse that is rising in you on one side looks like longing, desire, passion, lust; on the other side it looks like irascibility and anger.

Arjuna knows what this means. “Now, what is the use of hearing all these things? How am I to overcome this wondrous malady, kama and krodha, if they are predominantly present in individuals as rajasic properties working havoc in everyone? How would we live this cosmic life which you have so gloriously described?”

The method of meditation is very briefly discussed towards the end of the Third Chapter in two verses, but it is the essence of the whole matter: it is possible to overcome longing, desire for objects of sense, only by intense meditation through a gradational process. This is also described in detail in the Sixth Chapter. 

Indriyani parany ahur indriyebhyah param manah, manasas tu para buddhir yo buddheh paratas tu sah (Gita 3.42). 

evam buddheh param buddhva samstabhyatmanam atmana, jahi satrum mahabaho kamarupam durasadam (Gita 3.43). 

This is a brief statement of a longer, more detailed enunciation of the very same thing in the Katha Upanishad. Indriyas, sense organs, are very powerful. Impetuous are the sense organs. Like a wild tornado, they will dash the ship of your life.

But the mind is superior to the sense organs. The mind has the capacity to know that the indriyas, or the senses, are impetuous in their nature. This is the superiority of the mind. The senses do not know that they are impetuous. They are just impetuous. They are wild movement. This wild movement of the senses is identical with the senses themselves. They cannot know that they are wild. If you are angry, you do not know that you are angry. Anger consumes you to such an extent that an angry person does not know that he is angry. If you know that you are angry, it will not be real anger. So the mind has the capacity to subdue the impetuosity of the senses by a little bit of deliberation. The mind knows that the senses have to be restrained, but the mind cannot easily take a decision. The mind has an indeterminate perceptional capacity of knowing the difficulty produced by the sense organs, but the decision has to be taken: this must be done. The senses have to be subdued.

*****

Continued

======================================================================================