Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 3. Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday 18, April 2026, 19:30.
Article
Scriptures 
Spiritual Evolution According to the Bhagavadgita: 3.
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on February 24th, 1973).
Post - 3.

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The Bhagavadgita, as I may have mentioned, is a fund of all varieties of wisdom. We will find science, evolution, biology, and physics in the Gita. Every blessed thing is in the Bhagavadgita, if only we have the eyes to see it through the lines of the Gita. And when we reach this sattvic type of knowledge wherein the basic reality is recognised as the source of the variety that we see through the senses and understand through the intellect, we reach the goal of our life. Yadā bhūtapṛthagbhāvam ekastham anupaśyati: When we recognise the rootedness of all variety in the One; tata eva ca vistāraṃ: as the basis for the proceeding of all the variety; brahma saṃpadyate tadā: that itself is the realisation of Brahman. This knowledge is identical with the realisation of God. God is knowledge. The Absolute is consciousness. The realisation is the same as this wisdom. Sat is chit is ananda, as we call it. This existence of the Absolute is the consciousness of the Absolute. Spirit supreme reigning beyond the limitations of sense and understanding is the goal of life, towards which we are moving.

We have grown slowly from the lower stages of life, from matter to the vegetable kingdom, from there to the animal, and now we have come to the human level. This is not the end of evolution, but we are likely to mistake this for the complete achievement of consciousness. We, in our scientific prejudice, are likely to imagine that human knowledge is the final knowledge and that it is complete by itself. This is, unfortunately, not the truth. If human existence were to be the final achievement possible, we would not have an urge to grow further, to achieve more things, to be happier.

Why are we so miserable in our human existence? Because human life is incomplete. Human life is not the goal of knowledge, and there are further stages of the evolution of the universe, of which the human level is only one link in the long chain of this process. What pushes us forward and urges us onwards is the existence of a higher principle beyond us. We become restless merely because of the fact that there is something higher above us. The very existence of something higher is enough to push us onwards.

The unconscious urge of the lower to realise the higher is evolution. When it is consciously manoeuvred, the process is called yoga. Unconscious movement towards the higher is evolution; conscious movement towards the higher is yoga. Yoga is nothing but conscious evolution wherein we do not contradict the evolutionary process but become aware of what is happening and are conscious of every bit of this process, and instead of blindly struggling against odds of which we have no understanding whatsoever, we consciously cooperate with this unavoidable process called evolution. That is yoga. So science and philosophy coalesce. Spirituality and scientific discovery are not opposed to each other, provided each one knows its own province of activity and understanding.

Thus, these few slogas 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. Dvāvimau puruṣau loke kṣaraś cākṣara eva ca, kṣaraḥ sarvāṇi bhūtāni kūṭastho'kṣara ucyate; uttamaḥ puruṣas tv anyaḥ paramātmety udāhṛtaḥ, yo lokatrayam āviśya bibharty avyaya īśvaraḥ (BG 15.16-17). 

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.

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