Commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita: 3-1. Swami Krishnananda.
Chinmaya Mission:
A historic moment unfolded in Durban, South Africa, on Friday, 4th April 2025—the seventh day of Chaitra Navratri—as the Bhoomi Poojan ceremony took place at Chinmaya Annapoorna, marking the beginning of the Annapoorna Devi Temple’s construction.
Chinmaya Annapoorna is the sixth and newest manifestation of Pujya Gurudev’s vision in South Africa. It houses the ‘Nourish to Flourish’ initiative, which prepares and delivers thousands of nutritious meals daily to schools, orphanages, old age homes, and shelters in Durban.
Having surpassed 75,000 meals in just six months, Swami Abhedananda (In-charge, CM South Africa) announced the next step: to build a temple for Mother Annapoorna at this sacred site.
Devotees of all ages offered into the earth, while Swamiji led the rituals with detailed explanations, joined by priests, trustees, Brahmacharins, and committee members in placing sacred bricks and ploughing the ground.
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Monday 21, April 2025, 08:00.
Books
Srimad Bhagavad Gita
Commentary on the Bhagavadgita: 3-1.
Discourse 3:
The Second Chapter Begins: Sankhya Yoga, The Distinction between Purusha and Prakriti.
Swami Krishnananda
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We look at the world only with our eyes, and judge things according to the report that is provided through the medium of the senses. All the information that we get of the world through the sense organs is therefore galvanised, and in many ways distorted. It is assumed that a person, as an individual, has to do something with this world. The business of life is, practically, an attempt to handle this world in some way—to harness it, and utilise it for one's own purpose.
Here is the essential point. We have to use the world for our purposes. Through scientific advancement and technological discoveries and inventions, we seem to be trying to use the world more and more for our utility. It is an object; it is a thing; it is a tool which has to be used for an externalised purpose—not for the benefit of the world, but for the benefit of another, who calls himself the human individual. Do we not mostly judge things in this manner? Everything has to be cast into the mould of our sensory and physical needs. We make remarks about things: “It is like this and it is like that.” These remarks are judgments that we pass on the things in the world based on evidence provided by the sense organs, which are entirely unreliable on account of their impetuosity. Due to this, the thinking mind, or the consciousness that is aware, is pulled out of its own roots. The activity of the sense organs plucks us, as it were, from ourselves, and throws us into the winds of the outside world. We are distressed from morning to evening on account of a loss of self that we undergo, even when we do not actually know what is happening to us.
Every perception is a movement of the self towards an object. The consciousness has to charge the mind with an intelligence that peeps through the sense organs and locates objects, the world in front, in a particular juxtaposed manner. So our conclusion that we know something—we know the world or we know whatever it is—is triply conditioned: firstly, by it having to pass through the mentation, the psychic organ, the antahkarana; secondly, by the mind having to think only through the sense organs; and thirdly, by the sense organs having to visualise things as located in space and time. Thus, there is a threefold defect in human perception, which includes social relations and everything that we regard as ours or not ours. Due to this purely personal judgment born of human sentiment, Arjuna turned the tables around, and made an unexpected gesture of putting down his weapons. He said, “I shall not embark upon this otherwise well-praised adventure of a war with the Kurus.”
I hinted yesterday that the spiritual seeker mostly finds himself in this predicament when he cannot handle the world properly. In one condition of the mind, the world is an object of delight and enjoyment—as a property. In another condition of the mind, it looks like an obstacle from which the earlier we extricate ourselves, the better. We wish to free ourselves from all our entanglements in the world. But a third stage comes when the world reacts in an adverse manner upon the mind that has thought it to be a redundant tail, as it were, of its perception. Then it is that there is actually a humiliating coming down of the aspiring consciousness, and a last moment's feeling that perhaps everything is over and nothing is possible. It appears that even the great Buddha had this experience the day before his enlightenment. It was all dark. There was no light on the horizon. After years of austerity, he was crawling on all fours due to the weakness of the body. He thought the tapas was over and he had achieved nothing. There was a complete dejection of the spirit.
This predominantly spiritual despondency of a spiritual seeker is also called yoga. The First Chapter, which is nothing but a description of the weeping of Arjuna, is called Visada Yoga: the yoga of the dejection of the spirit. This dejection is not a morbid, melancholy mood of the spiritual seeker. It is a healthy realisation of the impossibility of an individual being to face this world of values alone, and the need felt for a higher assistance. It may be a Guru for one person; it may be God Himself for another. Therefore, in the utter helplessness of not being able to know what actually is to be done, Arjuna asked what was his duty par excellence. What was his duty in this world? This was the question of Arjuna, which he couched in various styles of expression according to the tradition of that time.
The answer of Sri Krishna is that all this is a kind of blabber which an ignorant mind resorts to for self-justification, under the impression that ignorance is bliss. “Neither do you know what you are, nor do you know what the world is. How do you make judgments of this kind, that you shall do or you shall not do? On what grounds do you make a statement that this has to be done and this should not be done? What is the rationale behind the ethics, morality, and the justification for any kind of action in this world? What is the ground on which you base your argument for embarking upon a particular project of this type or that type? Is it merely an impulse of the instinct, or the force of the sense organs, or the appetite of the biological organ? Or is it a well-reasoned-out structure that you philosophically constructed for the purpose of rising high into the sphere of a spiritual conclusion? Neither do you know yourself, nor do you know the world, Arjuna; yet, you speak as if you are a wise person: prajñāvādāṁś ca bhāṣase.”
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Continued
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