The Central Intention of the Bhagavadgita - 3. Swami Krishnananda.

 

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Thursday 23, April 2026, 06:30.
Article
Scriptures
The Central Intention of the Bhagavadgita: 3.
Swami Krishnananda.
(Spoken on November 26, 1972)

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The good of spiritual life is not opposed to anything else as the bad, but we have an emotional attitude towards things, as Arjuna had in the beginning. Spiritual aspiration, or love of God, is not an emotion of the heart because emotions are always like waves, dashing on one shore and then dashing on the other shore. From this side we call it love, from the other side we call it hatred, but it is the same wave that dashes us either way, to either side.

When we take to seclusion and monastic life or ashram life, these emotional distinctions—or erroneous notions, we should say—which made us draw a line between God-love and world-love pursue us, and we make this distinction even in monasteries, even before a Master or a Guru, and in our private religious lives. Our emotions do not cease. We have worries, anxieties and daily annoyances even in monasteries, which we tried to avoid in home life. It was not our house that we wanted to avoid, but the annoyances of life, and they do not leave us even if we go to sequestered places.

Our father and mother are not simply personalities. They are certain emotional centres. When we think that the relationships of father and mother, husband and wife are obstacles to God-realisation, what we actually intend is not that some personalities are against us but that some emotions are against us. Father is a kind of emotion. Wife is a kind of emotion. Likewise, family relation is a kind of emotion. It is not a person, so we do not leave or abandon a person when we leave a father and mother. It is an emotion or a kind of attachment, a feeling, an urge that we want to give up, but we mistake the one for the other. When we think we have left a person, we think the emotion also has been left, but that has not been done. We have left a person, but the father and mother have not been left because they are not persons. They are emotional centres connected to our own hearts. Husband and wife are not human beings; they are emotional centres of attachment.

Therefore, when we go to monasteries, to ashrams, we are no better if we have not understood the psychology of vairagya. Vairagya is not abandonment of a thing or a person, but the abandonment of that factor which makes it necessary for us to give up certain centres of like and dislike. Inasmuch as all youngsters, seekers of yoga and novitiates, are not accustomed to this psychological thinking in their personal life, they get caught up in another net altogether wherever they are, whether they are in a temple in Badrinath or in the markets of Madras or Bombay. It makes no difference because our bondages are carried with us wherever we go.

The Arjuna in every one of us begins to work when we enter the battlefield of life, which is the practice of yoga. The battle of life is the practice of yoga, and this Mahabharata battle of the Bhagavadgita is the yoga of the Cosmic that is described before us in its vast reaches. The first step and the initial move in the practice of yoga is the resolution, the decision made by Arjuna, the mind of the seeker, as the representative of all seekers. Confidence and decision gave way to emotion and sentiment. “This is no good for me. I am not for this. I made a mistake. I am very sorry.” This is what Arjuna said: “I made a mistake, Bhagavan. It is not possible for me. Excuse me. I lower my weapons.” This is what the seeker also will say, and has said many times: “It is no good. I am very sorry indeed. What a mistake I have committed! I have become a Christian priest. I have left that, and this I am not getting. So where am I standing now?”

Kārpaṇyadoṣopahatasvabhāvaḥ pṛcchāmi tvāṃ dharmasammūḍhacetāḥ (B.G. 2.7). Now the disciple speaks: “Master, I am confounded. I don't know what to do. That has gone, this is not coming, and I am grieved to the core of my heart. Wretched is my fate.” This is the central point of the First Chapter of the Bhagavadgita, which opens up the gateway of the Second Chapter where the Guru begins to speak: “What is this? What has happened to you? You were so powerful and confident and decisive, and now you are speaking like this? Instead of Bhishma, Drona, Duryodhana being seen as grandfather, Guru and brother, can you not see them as warriors girting up their loins to fight against you in battle?” The same thing looks different after some time. In the Panchadasi it is said that a woman is standing somewhere. Her child thinks, “It is my mother”; her husband thinks, “It is my wife”; her father thinks, “It is my daughter”; but a tiger thinks, “It is my food.” The same thing looks different depending on the angle of vision of the onlooker. Arjuna saw Bhishma on the battlefield as a generalissimo, an old grandfather who tended him when he was a small child. What is the attitude that he should have towards him? It depends upon the context of the situation.

Now we are in the context of yoga, and not in the context of family, so in the context of yoga, how are we to look upon the world—as our dear friend or as a foe? Yoga is not our friend, and it is not our foe. It is something else altogether, as a woman is neither a mother nor a daughter nor a food. She has got an independent status of her own. We give her names and have a different attitude towards her from our point of view, but what is she by herself? That is the independent status of the person. Likewise, the world has an independent status of its own, different from what we would like it to appear before our mind. First it appeared as an enemy, now it looks like a friend, but unfortunately, it is neither an enemy nor a friend. It is an independent something on which we have foisted certain characters and values from the standpoint of our understanding and emotion.

Bhagavan Sri Krishna opens up the subject of real yoga when he tells Arjuna, “All this confusion in your mind is due to your wrong attitude towards the world. Don't think they are warriors. Don't think they are friends or enemies. They are something with whom you have to deal in a very scientific manner.” There is a difference between a sense object and a scientific object. A sense object stimulates the senses in a particular manner and gives back to us only the reactions of our senses, nothing more. But a scientific object is an independent unit by itself, having a character of its own quite different from the reactions which the senses have in respect of that object.

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