A Study of the Bhagavadgita :69 - Swami Krishnananda.

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Tuesday 22, April 2025, 08:30.
Books
A Study of the Bhagavadgita:
Chapter 11: Beholding God as He Beholds Himself - 3.
Swami Krishnananda
Post-69.

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Divine thoughts, God-thoughts, should be at the back of your life even in ordinary routine activities. It is not that you have noble thoughts only in your puja room, in temples, and during satsangas, and at other times such as in the marketplace, you are foolish. You can die in a marketplace rather than in a temple or during satsanga. How is it that you go carefree, thinking everything is fine? You do your meditation during meditation time, but before the meditation time comes, you may not be in this world. So why entertain this foolhardy imagination that you shall meditate afterwards, in the evening when the sun sets? The sun may not set for you.

Therefore, great caution is to be exercised. Throughout your life you must maintain this consciousness of it being perhaps the last moment for you; and the last thought, as it is said, which will be your asset when you pass from this world, is the fructification of all the thoughts that you entertain throughout your life. The tree will decide the fruit; your life in this world will decide what kind of thought you entertain at the time of passing. It does not mean God-thought will come at the last moment while throughout life you have forgotten it. The last thought, so called, is the maturity of the essence culled, as it were, from all the thoughts, feelings and emotions that you entertained throughout your existence. The kind of life that you have lived in this world from birth until death will decide what kind of thought will come to you in the end, so be very cautious.

When one actually passes away, the soul departs. It catches hold of a thin, threadlike support of whatever it has done, whatever it has felt. Its knowledge, its imagination, its desire, its actions will decide the course or path that it will pursue. Towards the end of the Eighth Chapter, mention is made of two kinds of courses for the movement of the soul – the Northern Path and the Southern Path, as they are called. A very detailed explanation of it is found in the Upanishads. The Sun and the Moon decide many things about your own personal life. The solar influence, as the Upanishads and the Gita tell us, is greater during the northward movement of the Sun, during the waxing period of the Moon, and during the daytime rather than during the night; and whoever passes during this period will move through a subtle divine ray which is the path of the soul, and the Sun is where this soul will be received. You will be wondering, "How will I reach the Sun? It will burn me." It will not burn you because at that time you will have no physical body. The soul is in its astral form, and an astral being from the Sun comes to meet it and take it forward. Then you go to the Absolute. Otherwise, if your mind has been tarnished by lower desires and you are not fit to pass through the Sun to the Absolute, you will be reborn in this world itself, or something else will happen to you which is not liberation.

So the Eighth Chapter is quintessentially an answer which the Lord gives to the questions of Arjuna, which briefly I placed before you, that you can read in greater detail in commentaries of the Bhagavadgita. Highly elevated expressions of the religious consciousness are found in the Ninth Chapter. From the Seventh Chapter onwards, as I mentioned, the religious consciousness becomes more and more intensified until it reaches the pinnacle or the apotheosis in the Eleventh Chapter. In the earlier stages, say from the Seventh Chapter onwards until we come to the Ninth, God is always placed on a pedestal of superiority in the heavenly world, as it were. God is a transcendent being, and He seems to be very far from us. He is the creator of the cosmos; therefore, He is above creation, and above us also. So we can imagine the distance between ourselves and God: God is so far, He may take time to reach us. These ideas may also enter our minds because of the psychological distance created by us due to the conception of God being the creator of the cosmos and the cosmos being so vast.

Here in the Eighth Chapter, during the enunciation of the possibility of the soul attaining God after death, the point is that you will reach God only after death, and not when you are alive. This also keeps God at a distance, especially in your practical life. But it is in the Ninth Chapter that God comes down to your level. There is a diminution of the distance between God and man as the Gita proceeds higher and higher, from the Seventh Chapter onwards. God is a transcendent creative principle, the judge of the cosmos, very far from you; you cannot see Him. This idea may enter into you when you reach the Seventh Chapter, where it briefly touches upon the creative process. Even this idea of liberation being possible only after death, and that nothing is possible in this life, may enter into you when you reach the Eighth Chapter.

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Continued

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