Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 4. Swami Krishnananda

 

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Saturday 03, May 2025, 11:00.

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Scriptures

Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 4. 

Sami Krishnananda

(Spoken on February 24th, 1973)

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Thus, these few verses of the Bhagavadgita give us a conspectus of human life in its aspect of spiritual evolution. In the Fifteenth Chapter again we have various statements of the Gita bearing upon the same subject, if we read it with concentration of mind, taking us from the kshara to the akshara and to the purushottama. This again is a theme on the very same truth. There is a kshara and an akshara; there is a perishable and an imperishable. Beyond the perishable and the imperishable is the supreme principle. This also is a description of the very same process of evolution in another way. Pure materialism is limitation of consciousness to the perishable alone, the kshara. This is what we call crass materialism. We believe only in the objects of sense. Even consciousness does not exist for the materialist, nor does mind. There is only matter, and everything else that we call the mind, and so on, is only an offshoot, an exudation, of material objects and forces. This would be attachment to what the Bhagavadgita calls kshara, perishability.

How can matter be reality? The material processes are subject to change, which itself is proof enough of their instability and consequent unreality. But simultaneously with this existence of this changeful kshara, or prakriti, as it is sometimes called, there is the akshara, the perceiver, the cognising consciousness behind this kshara. It is akshara or, as we may put it, the object world and the subject consciousness. The object world is kshara; the subject consciousness is akshara. Consciousness is indestructible. The perishable body enshrines within itself an imperishable life. It cannot be destroyed with the destruction of the bodily forces. The kshara which is the body, the kshara which is the world, has immanent within it an akshara which is consciousness. The object and the subject are mutually related in this way, but neither of these can be called the ultimate truth because, as the Bhagavadgita has already pointed out, where one is related to another, it is only a rajasic type of knowledge. This is the sort of knowledge that the Sankhya philosophy advocates occasionally, where the purusha is related to prakriti, and vice versa.

But any kind of contact is the womb of pain. All contacts are sources of unhappiness, even the contact of purusha with prakriti, because Truth is not a contact, it is not a relationship, it is not a mutual connection of things because mutual connection, cooperation and relation imply a basic fundamentality. The Purushottama reigns supreme above the kshara and akshara.

The Supreme Being sits at the Virat – Purushottama, Ishvara. “Transcending the perishable universe and the imperishable perceiver, I reign supreme as the Absolute wherein the two are blended together into a union, a singleness of existence.” Many other verses from the Gita can be quoted to this purpose.

What we have to bear in mind in this context, therefore, is that our life is incomplete and human life is a preparation a for higher achievement. All morality is the determination of the lower by the higher purpose. The good is that which is determined by the higher. Where the lower is determined by another lower, there cannot be a correct judgment. There must be a standard of reference which is higher than that which is to be judged. This is the law of righteousness. The wider and the deeper, the higher, the more comprehensive both in quantity and quality is to be the judge and the standard of reference in the evaluation of things in the world. Only then can we know what is good, what is right, what is justice and what is lawful.

Unless we rouse within ourselves this higher consciousness superior to the human understanding, we will not be able to judge what is right. We are apparently satisfied with our present laws because of the restriction of our consciousness to the present laws. When our understanding is merged in the circumstances in which we are steeped, we cannot know where we actually stand. That is the animal's satisfaction. The animal's mind is merged in the law of the animal. It cannot have an understanding of what is above it. The animal does not know apparently that there is a higher consciousness called the human consciousness, and therefore, it is satisfied. A wolf is satisfied with being a wolf, a pig is satisfied with pighood, and so on. They cannot imagine there can be a higher form of life. And if man also is to be only in that condition of fully laying faith in his own lot, not knowing that there is a higher form of existence, how could he be regarded as higher than the animal?

But we say that man is superior to the animals. In what sense is he superior? The only distinguishing character of the human being, the differentia in the life that is human, is that man can know what is good and what is righteous, whereas animals cannot know. We eat like animals, sleep like animals, and be afraid like animals; we have all these lower characteristics of animals, but there is one thing in us which is not in animals. We know what is good and what is right, which animals cannot know because they are not endowed with that gift.

How is it that we know that something is good and righteous? Because we are capable of having an envisagement of an existence slightly higher than our present lot. This is, therefore, in one sense, a linkage between the divine and the animal. While the divine transcends this complexity of doubt in the mind between divinity and animality, and while the animal is completely engrossed in the bodily consciousness, the human consciousness is midway between the divine and the animal so that we have animal instincts on one side and divine aspiration on the other side. While we are subject to the weaknesses of flesh and the ravages of the body like the animals, we are at the same time restless with our present lot and we seek a higher state of existence. Thus, we are lower than the celestial and the divine, and yet higher than the animal.

This analysis should open our eyes to the fact that it would be folly on the part of any person to be satisfied merely with human perception, though it be a scientific perception, because as in the verse of the Bhagavadgita which I quoted, to mistake the particular for the entire, the individual for the whole, is gross knowledge, the lowest knowledge, and the cause of our pain. Bereavement, suffering, sorrow of every kind is the outcome of this sort of belief, which engenders this attachment in the form of mineness: “This is my brother; he should be happy. Pray for his health and long life. If another's brother may die, I am not worried.” This is the lowest kind of knowledge. Why should someone else's brother die, and our brother live? We pray for our children, our relations, for the prosperity of what belongs to us. This is tamasic knowledge. Where we pray for all, that is rajasic knowledge, but that is not enough. Higher than that, there is something which is the recognition of the Selfhood of things, atmatva. This is the final gospel of the Bhagavadgita, towards which we have to strive, which is the practice of sadhana.

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Continued

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