Articles for Saadhana

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.

Bhagavad Gita is a complete handbook on our country, its culture, values, ideals, various standards, norms, disciplines, everything you will find incorporated in Bhagavad Gita. And the distinction about Bhagavad Gita is, this exposition was made in the battlefield of Kurukshetra before the war to enable and empower Arjuna to fight. That was a particular occasion. But if you treat it as a general presentation, it is to enable every living individual in this world to live his life meeting the challenges, persecutions, trials and tribulations, never getting retarded, going forward with sufficient enthusiasm and involvement, finding all the drive, all the energy, all the resolve from the mind and the intelligence. In other words, the external world however huge and imposing it may appear to be will not be able to get the better of us. Our mind and intelligence are far superior and soul is the most.

If you look into the whole of Bhagavad Gita, it is a personality-based gospel. In Bhagavad Gita, Krishna always emphasizes the mind should be your focus and intelligence is the tool which will be activated in order to help you to focus on the mind and redress its adversities and enrich it with the necessary insight, joy, commitment and what not! Sri Krishna certainly speaks about a kind of a regulation and control to be exercised on the senses by virtue of which the mind will become more orderly and refined. One will be able to sit in a place and exclusively employ the mind and intelligence in the way of meditation.

So this is a kind of a self-based pursuit where inner absorption becomes the goal as well as the practice. Obviously we will not be able to spend all the sixteen hours of the day excluding sleep in that kind of an absorption. Even ascetics living in the forest areas in a hermitage will not be able to do so. That means the absorptional hours will be very few, small in percentage and the interactional spell will be far more. Unless the absorptional sādhanā  is followed with an interactional pursuit also, there will not be any kind of a progress or fruition in spirituality.

So there are only two points in Bhagavad Gita. One is absorptional inner refinement and the like, another is interactional. In the interactional, Sri Krishna goes on saying in several places in many ways, everything in this whole creation is a display of the Supreme Reality. There is no difference between the Supreme Reality and what we see around. In other words, the gross is nothing but a display of the subtle. World in its visible form is itself a gross representation and display of God. Can you take it like this?

So here is a verse which he says:

The entire prakṛti consists of sattva, rajas and tamas. And these are interplaying as a result of which the whole creation, preservation etc. are going on. So sattva, rajas, tamas are the three gunas, constituents of prakṛti which bring about the entire world, preserve it and also dissolve it. All the individual bhāvās as well as the collective entity called the world, all of them are but an outcome of sattva, rajas and tamas. “So whatever sātvik, rājasic and tāmasic traits and expressions are there, understand all of them without exception are me.” In that case, what should you do?

Do not distinguish between a religious or a spiritual act and a non-religious and non-spiritual act. Everything is the same. Therefore, in interactional life have a wholesome, continuous attitude.

Yat-karoṣi yad-aśnāsi yad-juhoṣi dadāsi yat, whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer in the way of a sacrifice and whatever you give in the form of gift, offering or otherwise, yat-tapasyasi kaunteya, also whatever you do in the form of austerity or worship, all of them together alike, consider them to be an offering to the Lord. Stop your differentiation, consider even the tāmasic bhāvās around you are no other than a display of the Supreme Reality. Drop the differentiation and consider everything to be as an offer to the supreme. Don’t do anything specially in the form of worship or yāga or yajña. If you do, it is okay, don’t look for it. And everything that you do should be equally an offer to the Lord.

So it is development of this wholesome spiritual attitude and being governed by it throughout your wakeful hours. In the process, if you feel like sitting in meditation and getting absorbed, do that also. But the actual point is that every activity, big or small, internal or external, religious or non-religious, everything should become alike, Godly. Actually it is something very simple! But when I explain in this way, “Oh Swamiji, is it possible to consider everything I do as worship? Is not worship something distinct? What about my taking bath, answering the calls of nature?” The mind should think like that and the thought should be processed. Ultimately you will have to come to the resolution that it is so. Tat-kuruṣva mad-arpaṇam.

Yat-karoṣi yad-aśnāsi yaj-juhoṣi dadāsi yat |

Yat-tapasyasi kaunteya tat-kuruṣva mad-arpaṇam ||

I would like you to reflect upon this verse and see whether your mind accepts it. It has to. Where is the obstacle? Whatever obstacle is there, that is called impurity. That impurity should be removed. Then you will be able to say, “Even my own eating, drinking, sleeping, anything and everything that I do, becomes an equal offering to the Lord.”

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru. Jai Guru.