The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita- 3-4. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Sunday 29, June 2025, 07:30.
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Shrimad Bhagavad Gita
The Philosophy of the Bhagavadgita- 3-4.  
Chapter 3: The Spirit of True Renunciation - 4.
Swami Krishnananda.

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The seeker on the spiritual path is described in the First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita, Arjuna being made the spokesman of this occasion. The field of battle is the field of life. The things that we want to do in this world are the confrontations before us, and our wisdom will be judged by the manner in which we deal with these situations. A situation means anything and everything with which we are connected, anything that we are supposed to do in the world. In this duty that we are called upon to perform, there is no such thing as a superior or inferior duty. There is no superior thing or inferior thing in this world, just as in a huge machine we cannot say that some part is superior, some part is inferior. Everything has its role to play. Any kind of comparison or contrast would be odious in such a setup which has no human significance but is cosmically oriented.

The spiritual seeker, the sadhaka, has a spiritually oriented enthusiasm in the beginning. Every one of us has a love for spiritual life. And the moment the idea of spiritual life arises in the mind, we find ourselves in an unspeakable situation of clinging to something and abandoning something else. This is the obvious feature in religion and in the popular spirituality of mankind which goes by the name of asceticism, renunciation, etc. The idea of spirituality is generally inseparable from the idea of renunciation, the giving up of something for the sake of clinging to something else which we imagine at that moment as our ideal. We bifurcate one thing from the other. But the Bhagavadgita is not a gospel of renunciation of this type. No doubt, it is fired up, right from the beginning to the end, with a surge of renunciation which will burn and burnish us into the gold of the ideal higher personality. If at all there is any scripture which emphasises wholeheartedly the spirit of renunciation, it is the Bhagavadgita. But if there is anything which tells us that spiritual life does not mean the cutting of oneself from what is real but constitutes a harmonisation of oneself with the atmosphere in which one lives, there cannot be a greater and more significant teaching than the Bhagavadgita in this respect.

While, when a particular mood preponderates in us, we may be stirred into an aspiration for God, as we conceive God, and feel or imagine that we are fed up with this world, it may subside because this is likely to be a tentative mood which is occasioned by a particular circumstance that may not continue for all times. And when the wheel moves, when the spokes find themselves in another position, our understanding, our feelings, or attitudes change simultaneously, and we see different things altogether before us. We do not like a thing always, nor dislike a thing at all times. As years pass, our ideas of things change, and what we loved one day may not be the thing that we love today. So is the case with the things that we disliked one day or disregarded at some moment of time.

These moods of ours are relative to the conditions through which our psyche passes in what we may call the process of evolution. They are relative and not absolute situations. We cannot have an absolute love for anything or an absolute dislike for anything. They are like the stages of the healing of a disease or a wound, the recovery of health by degrees, when we begin to feel different things on different days. This is what happened to the great Arjuna, and to every one of us it does happen, also. The sentiments in us are strong enough to counterblast our rationalities and our arguments, though they may be philosophical or supposedly spiritual. Whatever be the philosophical profundity of our arguments, we should not imagine that our sentiments and feelings are weaker. They take up the case and argue in a manner which is deserving of equal attention, as the argument of the opposite party. And the arguments of Arjuna in the First Chapter were the repudiation of all the feelings that he had entertained earlier, just the opposite of what he said a few days before.

Merely because of the nature of the confrontation before us, we may be repelled after a time even by the goal of spirituality, the very ideal which attracted us earlier, because our comprehension of the nature of this ideal was not comprehensive enough. One cannot keep up the sobriety of spirit throughout one's life, because of the power of rajas and tamas within, whose nature one does not properly understand. The things from which we withdraw ourselves in a spirit of renunciation may demand recognition some time later, at some moment, on some occasion when they find that the circumstances are suitable for their having a say, because, usually, the religious renunciation is a misguided attitude in most cases of even so-called genuine aspirations, all because we work upon the reports given to us by the sense organs; and to a large extent our idea of God, the idea of spirituality, the notion of renunciation, are all conditioned by what the senses tell us.

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