The Tree of Life: 1.3- Swami Krishnananda.

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Monday 07, Sep 2026, 17:00.
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Bhagavadgita & Hinduism
The Tree of Life: 1.3- 
1.The Twofold Character of Cosmic Life-3.
Swami Krishnananda

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The gunas of prakriti are the forces which make us a stranger to our own life and aberrant in our own personality, and make us lose our own self. The powers that make us lose our own self and search for that which is not our self are the gunas of prakriti. Just as the sap of the tree moves outwardly in the direction of the ramification of branches, the sap of life moves outwardly in the direction of the ramification of experiences. Therefore, we seek infinitude of experiences. Variety is the spice of life. We are bored of monotony. We know very well we can sit for hours and hours in a movie theatre watching a variety of sound and colour, passing the whole night without a wink of sleep. But if we sit for japa, for instance, chanting one name throughout the night, we will droop down into sleep in half an hour. The mind does not like monotony. It likes variety, but why?

The mind likes variety because it is a slave of this impulse of self-expression into the variety of experience. We are not masters; we are utter slaves of something which is handling us as puppets. This power is everywhere in the world; it is not only in the body of a particular individual. That is why it is called cosmic prakriti. The gunas of prakriti are cosmic powers which compel every individual, right from the lowest electron to the highest orbs of the solar system. All these are dancing like puppets, marionettes, by the strings that are operated upon by these powers of nature called sattva, rajas and tamas, which are the constituents of prakriti.

Visualising this horror of life due to which we seem to have no voice in anything whatsoever in this world, thinkers such as Schopenhauer in the West pictured a dark form before us, and said life is nothing but hell: If you want to see hell, be born into this world. This is the utter despair that sometimes made these thinkers write poems such as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam which says everything is wind passing; everything is despair, sorrow, straw, sapless and essenceless; now it is, now it is not; there is nothing worthwhile in life.

But the picture of life is not complete merely by seeing the seamy side of things. The problem lies here. The difficulty in understanding life arises merely because of the comprehensiveness of the pattern of life. If it is just one thing before us, we can look at it; but it is so many things, and it is difficult for us to comprehend. Life is not only one side of the picture. It is tremendous sorrow, no doubt, from the aspect of emphasis that we lay on one side of experience; but if it had been only that, we would not be living here even for three days. Utter sorrow will not permit a person to live in this world even for a few minutes. He will immediately have a heart attack and collapse. But one lives in spite of darkness everywhere and sufferings galore because there is a positivity ruling over the sorrows of life.

This twofold character of cosmic life is presented in these verses of the Bhagavadgita. The first part tells us the problematic structure of the tree of life, and the second part tells us how we can free ourselves from the clutches of this cosmic urge for self-expression and entanglement in objects of sense.

The powers of prakriti are nothing but the powers of the whole of nature. We cannot know what nature is, what prakriti is, because we are a part of it. It is not outside us. This is another difficulty before us. A thing that is outside us can be seen and examined through a microscope or a powerful instrument in a laboratory, but how can we examine that in which we ourselves are involved? A study of nature automatically becomes a study of man. To know things is to know oneself.

This uncomfortable truth automatically follows from the fact of the involvement of human nature in cosmic nature. The world is not outside us, nor is it inside us because as a limb of the body hangs inseparably in its relation to the organism of the body, we hang inseparably in relation to nature as a whole. To understand anything will appear to be like understanding everything, just as to know the structural pattern of one cell in the body would be to know the whole body because of the interrelatedness of the various parts of the whole which it is. This tree of life which has its roots above and branches below is the evolutionary process of the cosmos. The whole of cosmology is here in two or three verses. The creative will of God is the sap of the tree of life, and if we can compare the will of the Supreme Being to the impulse for self-expression in the seed of a tree, we may naturally conclude that the whole of life is nothing but a tree with all its ramifications.

We are told by the Upanishads and scriptures of this character that the One willed to be many; the seed intended to become the tree. This intention of the seed to become the tree is the desire of life. What we call desire is nothing but the urge of the seed to become the tree. Why does the seed wish to become the tree? Why should it not exist as a seed alone? What is wrong with being merely a seed? And what does the seed gain by becoming a tree? The whole of the Bhagavadgita is an answer to this question.

Why should we not keep quiet as a seed? Why do we want to become a tree? Why do we peep into nature through the skies and look at the sun for light and air? Why does the tree desire this? Why should we come out of our rooms or peep outside the window to see who and what are there? Why should we want to know? How can we explain this curiosity in our lives? Why is it that we feel like fish out of water within our rooms, and want to go out to other places? Why is it that we are so restless?

Well, the seed is restless. It has to become the tree. We cannot curb its force. Our movements from place to place are nothing but our seed of the mind moving as the branches of the tree of our own experiences. Nobody can rest quiet: na hi kaścit kṣaṇam api jātu tiṣṭhaty akarmakṛt (B.G. 3.5). We will go crazy if we are locked up in one room, just as the seed will struggle to burst forth in some way or the other when circumstances for it become favourable.

Unless we are able to know what this mysterious urge is which keeps us always on tenterhooks and never gives us anything, we will not be able to live happily in this world. We may go to any doctor, any Guru, but we will be the same person. Nobody is going to help us unless the light comes from within us, because our conviction is our guide. Our faith, our stability and logical conclusiveness of approach in life are the satisfaction. Gurus and physicians may show us the way, but they cannot walk for us. We have to walk.

The sorrows of life are the outcome of our subjectness to this urge of life to ramify itself into branches of experience and keep us unhappy nevertheless. If we are to seek for a concrete example of an experience between the devil and the deep sea, here it is before us. To live in this world in this condition is to be exactly between the devil and the deep sea. We cannot keep quiet. We are forced to run out of ourselves in search of various things. That is the deep sea on one side. But after searching for all the things in life, we are still in sorrow. That is the devil on the other side. Not to be seeking for things is sorrow, and not to find anything after the search is another sorrow, so always there is sorrow. Oh, what is this? We do not know whether to exist or not to exist. To be or not to be, is the great question. We cannot live, we cannot die, because to live is great sorrow, and to die is worse than that. We do not know which to choose between these two.

The Bhagavadgita gives the answer. We may have been studying, reading chapters of the Gita, but it is difficult for many people to find time to go into the nature of the answer the Bhagavadgita gives to the various queries that arise from our minds. Otherwise, we would be reading the Bhagavadgita like reading the British Pharmacopoeia from the first page to the last page. It may describe all the drugs that are available anywhere in the world—their composition, their character, and so on—but nothing happens. So would be the study of a scripture, whatever be the scripture, if the import of it is not absorbed into our experience.

Our spiritual sadhana is not a mere activity such as running a shop. It is not a business. People go to ashrams and do something, then go back home and do another thing, so it ends in various kinds of doings, but the inner pith of their personality is untouched. They go as they came, which is very unfortunate.

To regard spiritual sadhana as a mere outer activity, without any relation to the inner consciousness of our being, would be to treat typhoid fever by putting on a beautiful shirt. The typhoid fever will not go, even if the shirt is beautiful. Similarly, all sadhana which is purely of an extraneous nature will look beautiful on the outside but inwardly leave us in the same place.

So let sadhana be a turning of the tables round within the structure of our own mind, a vital transvaluation of values, a change in the very outlook of our life. The whole secret is in our hands. The magic is in our own internal approach. While the Guru, or whatever he is, is an instrument in the same way as the working of an extraneous medicine in our personality, the vitality in us has to cooperate. A corpse will not react to any medicine that is thrust into it. The vital force in the body of a person is the main factor which contributes to the cure of illness. If the vital force is absent, medicines cannot work. The medicines are the Gurus, but we have to cooperate. If we are non-receptive and stubborn in our outlook of life, if we stick to our own guns whatever happens anywhere, then there is no movement of the boat of life. We will be rowing the boat of life endlessly throughout the night of ignorance while the boat is tied to a peg, as an old story goes. The boat is tied, anchored. Due to the liquor of life that we have drunk abundantly, making us giddy and oblivious of all things, we have forgotten to lift the anchor. We try to row the boat of life towards God, but the boat has not moved one inch because the anchor has not been lifted. The anchor is the stubborn identification of our ego to this body. The body is the ego—that we think we are this person, and that only the sensations of this individuality are worthwhile in life.

Therefore, a complete rapprochement of the whole outlook of our life has to be effected which, in a few words, the Bhagavadgita tells us in the Fifteenth Chapter.

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Next: Discourse 2: The Search For Wholeness
Continued.

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