Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita-( ENDS) Part 2: Post-10: Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday 25,  September 2024, 06:40.
Article
Scriptures
Introduction to the Bhagavadgita: Part 2.
POST-10.
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on March 17th, 1974)

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The various stages of the Bhagavadgita gospel in its eighteen chapters are really the eighteen stages of the soul's contemplation on God. It is, therefore, a Brahma-vidya, and not merely a history in the ordinary sense of the term. It is the gospel of God to man. It was not one individual Krishna that spoke to another individual Arjuna. They were the occasions for the delivery of an eternal message for the world as a whole. The Absolute talks to the relative, God speaks to man, the Universal interprets the particular in a right manner, and it is this that the student of yoga also tries to perform in his daily meditations. The yoga meditation, the yoga practice, the technique of the inner life of man is portrayed in the chapters of the Bhagavadgita, which should actually be the pinpoint on which we have to concentrate when we, in ashrams especially, study the gospel.

The student of yoga is likely to make the mistake of imagining that he has already reached a higher stage, and he may ignore the demands of the lower stages. This is a very serious mistake, to be carefully avoided. It is not proper on the part of any student of yoga to imagine that he has reached a higher stage and therefore he can completely close his eyes to the laws operating in the lower fields of life. The Bhagavadgita tells us that there is no such thing as the higher and the lower in life. We have an integrated circumstance before us. We cannot say that the legs are below and the head is above, and therefore we can ignore the legs, though it is true that they are below in one sense. Our legs are supporting our whole body, though they are below.

There are people who think that the more apparently external aspects of spiritual practice, especially the ethical, the moral and the social, can be cut short and one can rise directly to a meditative pose. This is what the Bhagavadgita would stoutly refute, and by this refutation it brings home to our minds a new perspective of the meaning of yoga, gives us a new definition of yoga altogether different from what we must have heard in public and in the various textbooks. The yoga of the Bhagavadgita is a unique yoga by itself. We will not find it expounded in such a manner anywhere else. It will look after every need of ours, and for this purpose will not ignore any side of our nature. Sometimes, in modern times, people call this the yoga of synthesis or the synthesis of yoga – synthesis in the sense that it pays due attention to every existent fact, every operating force, and every type of relationship with which the human personality is connected with fact or reality. As psychologists and psychoanalysts tell us, tension is due to nonconformity with reality. When we cannot conform ourselves to fact or reality, we are in a state of tension, in a psychopathic condition, a state which is analysed psychoanalytically.

The reality which psychologists speak of, the fact with which they expect human nature to be in conformity, is first of all to be explained. What is meant by reality? What is meant by fact, with which we seem to be fighting, which we are opposing in our daily life, and which drives us back with its power? The Bhagavadgita is the philosophy of conformity to reality, and the non-conformity with it produced the doubt and difficulty with which the First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita commences.

End.

Next

The Importance of the Bhagavadgita - 1.Swami Krishnananda

Continued

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