Articles for Saadhana

Harih Om Tat Sat. Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru. Jai Guru.

I don’t know, if I close my eyes and talk, will you be able to understand? I will try. I may open my eyes.

Bhagavad Gita started from a very simple human level and human base. Arjuna came to the battlefield, wanted to examine the army. Krishna took him. He stopped the chariot in front of Bheeshma and Drona. Arjuna looked at them and also the kith and kin. Suddenly he was overpowered by a huge stroke of sympathy and he went on speaking many things and finally said, “I will not fight’. This is a very simple human development in the day-to-day life of everybody.

Krishna started treating the grief. But Arjuna had said “yat-śreyaḥ syāt-niścitam brūhi tan-me (Bhagavad Gita 2.7”. “My grief is to be set right. I am not able to think about what is proper and improper.”

So there was a mental crisis and an intellectual crisis. In addition to that he says, “You must also tell me what is śreyas”. Śreyas literally means jñāna and moksha. So these were the three requirements of Arjuna. And Krishna was trying to meet all the three. He first of all made Arjuna introspect over the grief. And the main prop that he gave was that everyone is in reality unborn and undying. We are ever-present. There is no time when anybody had become absent. From absence, presence cannot be and presence will not become absence also. So the only answer is that if we are present now, we are present every time, earlier as well as latter. So, that problem was set right.

Then He also said that during the course of the life our senses interact with the objects and produce sukha and duhkha in the mind level. They cannot be avoided; they need not be worked for also. Because they are inevitable, be at home with them. So the problem of life also is resolved, death also is resolved, grief also is resolved. The rest of the instruction is an elaboration of the subject of spiritual wisdom.

The spiritual wisdom has to look at creation and also take you to the source and terminus of it. What is the source of creation? In the creation, what are we finding? We are finding mobile and immobile entities. We are finding gross and subtle entities. We have the smallest, the atom or the molecule or quark or something and the mightiest like sea, mountain, sky etc. So if you analyze it, you will find though it is pervaded by space, the most subtle and formless, all the things within space are form-full. So an explanation linking up the form-full and the formless is necessary. This is where Krishna turns from the non-dual singular presence of the soul to the distinct and manifest creation of the world.

You think of yourself. You are a child of your parents. Parents are the children of their parents. They were born from their parents. Suppose you go back, back, back, back, back, you will reach the first set of parents. You tell me now from here, when I use the phrase ‘the first set of parents’, before them there was no parent at all (This is where you must come along with me). You know, the first parents, if you again ask from whose parents they were born, they will not become the first. So it is called infinite regress in logic. There is no end to that question.

So we have to understand the first parents, wherefrom they have come. They have not come from parents. So at one point, I cannot say even ‘time’, at one point, everything became indistinct at the time of dissolution. Now the indistinctness alone is. From there, things have to become distinct. When they become distinct, there is a twofold division. What is that? Mobile and immobile. There are things which are mere matter and energy. There are things which are animated and are alive. This division cannot be precluded. So that the indistinct presence before creation suddenly splits itself into gross matter and energy. And when they split into matter and energy, in the matter itself many many divisions come.

At that point Krishna says that, “I am the president and I activate my prakṛti. And the prakṛti gives rise to mobile and immobile creation”. As long as you are in the world and you are surrounded by visible presences, you cannot forget the fact of personal presences, mammals and things like that. The moment you concede that mammals are there, there must be one source from which all these mammals were born. That one source is considered to be a big egg and that egg itself was as a result of an impregnation. Who impregnated whom? The impersonal absolute impregnated something different from it. So the primordial indistinct presence somehow split itself into two. And after becoming the two, one impregnated the other. From that impregnation, the whole world was born and in the world you find immobile and mobile creations. When it comes to that, you have to think of a personal source for it. That personal source becomes the so-called God for worship.

So Krishna goes on explaining from the seventh chapter how He becomes the solitary presence to begin with. Then he starts activating himself and then the world of visibility or visible creation started. Now this concept has to be introduced. As long as there are personal presences, personal entities in the world divided into so many categories, all of them must have been born from the same source. So, that is what we call the so-called God. So the reason why Krishna takes it up is, we are surrounded by a world. In the world, there are so many creations and all of them put together constitute the world. So there are good, there are bad, there are beautiful, there are ugly things. You will find it is a full collection of a number of opposites. When you think of the world like this, what can be done? It is not easy to forget this. So the whole thing has to be explained.

Ultimately the explanations are not satisfactory. When we are hearing that little girls are raped by elderly people, the question is it’s a very very wrong and cruel practice. But how this cruelty is imbued into the cruel people? You will be surprised if you have not heard. Duryodhana was the first person to ascend to heavens. Before Yudhishthira went, Duryodhana was present there. And what was he? An embodiment of cruelty! In spite of his stark cruelty he attained heaven. What does it mean? I think you have to think about it.

All the cruel people and gentle people have come from a source, the same source. Another point that you have to understand is because the world is full of contradictions, nobody is satisfied with the world and we cannot think of a cruel God also. So we reach a crisis, a conflict, a confrontation. This confrontation will come to an end only when the whole creation which is experienced in your mind subsides there, just like you go to sleep.

How do you go to sleep? You are doing worship and you are very joyous. After some time, maybe after a day or two, you become so tired that the flower falls from your fist and you dip into sleep. Where was that ecstatic worship and where was this seemingly nothing and nowhere sleep? So from the good and the best you slip into sleep. And think of a cruel, dishonest man. He is doing all kinds of atrocities. After some time, he gets tired and he also goes to sleep. What is the difference between the two? It wipes off the most innocent worship effect; it equally wipes off the cruelest effect. Now the source of both or terminus of both is sleep. Don’t you think that this is the truth about the world also?

You wake up from sleep. So sleep is the source of wakefulness. You slip into sleep from wakefulness. So the terminus of wakefulness is also sleep. In the same manner, the source of everything good and bad is that indistinct. The terminus of these two is also indistinct. If that be so, if everything has come from nothing and everything is nowhere, then what is the value of the good and value of the bad, effect of good and effect of bad? Both are equally multiplied by zero to be zero. This is the Truth. This Truth Sri Krishna explains from the seventh chapter onwards in various ways. In the viśwarūpa also he is confirming it. “I have already destroyed these people who are standing before you; you only become a cause for it.” Then he shows the viśwarūpa saying that “The war is already enacted; you only become an instrument for it.”

Then from the thirteenth chapter onwards, he again goes back to explaining things in a very scientific and systematic manner bearing upon the mind and the intelligence. So the reason why Krishna shifts from whatever he has said in the sixth chapter when he goes to the seventh chapter is, we are in the world and we are surrounded by forms or entities. This being so, an answer has to be found out for our enquiries and the concept of a personal presence and an impersonal absolute, both are equally necessary and they are hand in gloves with each other.

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.