A Study of the Bhagavadgita : 47 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday 28, Aug 2024, 06:40.
A Study of the Bhagavadgita:
Chapter 8: The Stages of Yoga-5.
Swami Krishnananda
Post-47.

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What you have to offer to the Supreme Absolute is Atman, and not anything material. Atman is offered to the Paramatman. The jiva consciousness is dedicated to the Universal Consciousness. You are offered, nobody else. You offer yourself in the altar of the great yajna of Universal Consciousness – brahmarpanah. 

This is the greatest dedication that you can give to God. If God asks you, “What will you give me?” you cannot offer God some bananas or sweets because they are not your possessions. Only you are your possession. You have no right over anything in this world except your own self. Not even one needle can be your property, so the offering that you have to make to the Universal Being is only yourself. This is jnana yajna, the wisdom sacrifice, as it is so called. Into the flame of the wisdom of the all-pervading nature of God, you offer yourself in the consciousness of a practical annihilation of your individual existence.

When you offer something into the holy fire in a yajna or a sacrifice, you seem to be offering some substance – some material of ghee or rice, etc. But here in this wisdom sacrifice, what you offer is not some article from the world outside. It is a part of yourself. A little of yourself goes gradually with every little sense of belonging to the whole. 

This is brahma havir. Brahmagnau brahmana hutam: You offer yourself into the flame or the fire of God so that you get burnt into the ashes of a non-entity altogether.

Who is offering this? You are offering. Who are you? Now another difficulty is placed before you. The offering is not made by you; it is made by itself, to which you are making the offering. It is offering itself to itself. The war of the Mahabharata is waged by the Universal Virat. It is not engaged upon by Arjuna, Bhima, the Kauravas. 

“I have come to engage upon this great work.” 

Kalosmi lokaksayakrt pravrddha (Gita 11.32). 

The Viratsvarupa, the Cosmic Form, speaks in the Eleventh Chapter. The great war is the universal war. It is motivated by the Universal Being for its universal purpose, and the Universal is offering itself in the sacrifice of the yajna of the Mahabharata war. You cannot lift even a finger unless the central Universal Will operates, even as without the order issued by the total muscular setup of your personality, your fingers cannot lift, your eyelids cannot move; so is anything that you think or seem to be doing in this world. Even this so-called yajna that you are trying to perform is a motivation that comes from the Universal Being. The Universal offers itself to the Universal. God knows God. God contemplates God. 

God offers Himself to God: brahmana hutam.

Brahmaiva tena gantavyam: The aim, the purpose, the destination of this kind of cosmic sacrifice is the attainment of God only. 

God, through the performance which is also God, reaches God through the sacrifice, which is also a movement of God within Himself. This is the drama of God in this world which is Himself, where He is the director and the actor, the arena and the light, the audience and the performance. This is the cosmic drama that God seems to be playing for His own pleasure, and not for your pleasure, because you cannot have any pleasure unless this pleasure is there behind you, animating your existence.

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Continued

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