The Bhagavadgita's Message of Knowledge and Action: 1. Swami Krishnananda

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Sunday 15, September 2024, 06:50.
Article
Scriptures
The Bhagavadgita's Message of Knowledge and Action: 1. 
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on Gita Jayanti in 1974)

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In the history of the culture of the world, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita may be regarded as the central spiritual message to mankind. These two gospels of the spiritual ideal offset each other, as it were; they give us the art of life in consonance with the eternal on the one hand, and in consonance with the temporal on the other. The problem of the human being is principally one of reconciliation between the eternal and the temporal or, to put it in modern terms, bringing about a harmony between the religious ideal and the secular call of duty. This has been an age-old problem, a question that has never been adequately answered. And the Upanishads, while holding aloft the banner of the magnificence of life eternal, seem to absorb into their bosom all the values that may be regarded as secular and temporal – so that we are faced with a lion's den, as it were. The values that we regard as dear and near in this world of visible perception all seem to be transmuted into the heart of that Reality which is the central theme of the Upanishads. But man is man, whatever may be his ideal.

Now, while idealism is good and it has to always be there before us, it is essential that the ideal never remains as a future. One of the errors that we may commit in any type of endeavour or effort in day-to-day life is to place an ideal in the future so that the present stares at us and demands recognition in spite of the fact that the ideal is there before us transcending the values of all that is immediately real to our senses, our body, and our social life.

We have to reiterate here that our mistake lies in regarding an ideal as a future. “Then what about the present?” is the question. If an ideal is ahead of us in the far-off future, what has happened to us at the present moment? The conflict that apparently seems to be there between the ideal and the real is born of a miscalculation of religious values, a misinterpretation of the spiritual sense in life, and a thoroughgoing lack of understanding in respect of that which can be regarded as the organic structure of the values of life.

We as human beings are born with a prejudice. The prejudice seems to have entered into our very blood and vitals, the prejudice which insists that the present and the future are divided by a large and vast gulf which cannot easily be bridged, and this gulf that yawns before us between the future and the present is also the gulf that is between the world here and God above.

As I mentioned, in one sense the Upanishads may be regarded as a complete gospel, but the temporal values which necessitate a particular type of action or activity on the part of man seem to assume a new orientation altogether in the light of the Upanishads, and we are faced with a similar predicament as a child would be faced when confronted with a genius of mathematics, physics or philosophy. We cannot say that the child's values are ignored by the genius, but the child cannot understand the genius, notwithstanding the fact that all the values of childhood are comprehended in the values of a genius. Likewise, the values held as ultimately real by the Upanishads seem to go over our heads and speak a language which we cannot understand. We want to be told in our own language, in the tongue that we speak, and with a sympathy that is consonant with that which we regard as valuable and dear to our heart.

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Continued

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