The Gita's Four Basic Conflicts of Life - Swami Krishnananda.
===============================================================================================Wednesday 21, January 2026, 07:25.
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Scriptures
The Gita's Four Basic Conflicts of Life:
Swami Krishnananda.
Spoken to a French-speaking group on December 28th, 1972)
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The Bhagavadgita cannot be easily understood. We can understand the Vedas and the Upanishads properly, but not the Bhagavadgita. Even the Upanishads, the fundamental scriptures of India, have a single meaning on the surface so that there is no difficulty in understanding them. But the Bhagavadgita is highly symbolic and esoteric, and the surface meaning is not its real meaning. No other scripture in India has had so many commentaries. While the Upanishads speak of God or the Absolute directly, the Bhagavadgita tries to touch various stages of the evolution of man, and that is the difficulty in understanding it.
The Bhagavadgita is, in one sense, the most important scripture because it touches all sides of life from the lowest to the highest. It touches the inner as well as the outer. It touches the social, the individual and the spiritual aspects at one and the same time. It is the only scripture which can satisfy every doubt in the world. In that sense, the Bhagavadgita is not a Hindu scripture but a world scripture. It does not speak of Hinduism, but of yoga proper, and yoga is not a religion but a science of life. Though the Gita is written in Sanskrit and, therefore, it may be called an Indian scripture, it is really a universal scripture. The purpose of the gospel of the Bhagavadgita is to bring about a reconciliation between the visible and the invisible, man and God. Life is a conflict, and the purpose of the Gita is to solve this conflict. There are eighteen chapters of the Bhagavadgita, and each chapter is a resolution of a different type of conflict.
The original conflict is between the individual and the Absolute. Lower than that is the conflict between the individual and the world of nature. Then comes conflict within one's own self. Then, as a result of all these, there is social conflict, but we are busy solving social conflicts without knowing their causes. Social service and social work, which are regarded as solutions to the problems of life, are really not solutions at all. However much we may materially and socially strive to make ourselves happy, we cannot be happy. People will not love each other ultimately on account of an invisible inner conflict.
By social work and social service, we are trying to bring about an outer appearance of mutual love among people, but this cannot last long. Social love and affection cannot last long because inwardly people do not love one another. Because of the absence of inner love, the outer love breaks at different times. Even best friends can separate one from the other on account of the absence of an inner bond between them. Unless there is an inner affection, the attempt at outward coordination and solidarity is futile. But mankind does not know this secret; therefore, we are suffering even to this day. All our knowledge has not helped us in understanding this secret. As long as there is personal, individual conflict within one's own self, social solidarity is impossible because society is nothing but a group of individuals. How can there be social peace when individual peace is absent? When the unit of the individual comprising the society is unhappy, how can the total be happy? This is the defect of the philosophy of socialism as well as communism. They will not succeed in the end because they have not gone into the root of the matter. Thus, we come to the conclusion that social welfare is possible only when there is individual welfare, and individual welfare is not possible as long as inner conflicts are not solved.
The inner conflicts are caused by a non-coordination of the inner layers of personality. We have various layers of inner personality, such as the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious levels of the mind. Though we may be happy consciously, subconsciously we may not be, so a study of our personality does not mean merely a study of our conscious mind. Western psychology has limited itself only to the conscious level and, therefore, it has not solved problems of life. Human personality is deeper than the conscious level. Modern psychoanalysis has understood this doctrine and secret to some extent. Not only can we not understand another person, we cannot understand our own self unless all layers are known at the same time.
Why is there a conflict between the subconscious and the conscious? The answer to this question can be known only when we know what the subconscious is. The subconscious, truly speaking, is a layer of impressions of previous experiences piled up one over the other for years and years together. These impressions which are piled up in the subconscious are consequences of external perception of objects through the senses. Therefore, the subconscious mind, of which the conscious mind is only a part, is made up of impressions of sensory perceptions, and so we may say our personality is made up of impressions of sensory perceptions. We have to think very cautiously and carefully when we analyse our personality in this manner. Thus we have come to know that our personality is the outcome of sensory perceptions.
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Continues
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