Nectar Droplets From Lord Krishna

[SS91]

The Philosophy
of
the Bhagavad Gita

By
Sri Swami Krishnananda

Ø   The Gita is a message of eternity, and it has a timeless significance for every one of us. The vicissitudes of life have no impact upon this message, because it arises from a source that transcends the transitions of life. It is a message which embodies the knowledge of what is ultimately real.

Ø   The relativity of things in the world is a pointer to the possibility of the existence of something which is not relative. The idea of relativity cannot arise unless there is something which makes us feel that things are relative.

Ø   The union of the individual with the Absolute is the final consummation of this story that is the Gita. It is a story of the movement of all creation to the Creator, the Father of all beings that are here as these widespread phenomena.

Ø   The deeper you go within yourself, the deeper is the meaning you will discover in the Gita. If your outer personality reads the Gita, you will see only the outer feature of its message. We have a piety inside our room, and a different religion altogether when we walk on the road or purchase a packet of biscuits in the shop, or travelling in the bus or train. If our confrontation with life in these various aspects in which we are unwittingly and necessarily involved can be charged with the spirit of religion, we can be said to be truly religious, and God will help us everywhere.

Ø   We are not just citizens of New York, Delhi or even this Earth. We have a passport with us for entering into the various planes of existence.

Ø   We have an obligation transcending the limits and the boundaries of the nation and the society in which we are born.

Ø   Law protects. It does not always punish. It protects when we abide by it, and it punishes when we disregard and disobey it. Our sufferings in life are therefore to be attributed to a disobedience of the law that operates in this world.

Ø   You will gradually realise that the practice of Yoga resolves itself into a simple system of the overcoming and the balancing of forces for the purpose of resolving all conflicts.

Ø   We are at every moment of time centrifugal and also centripetal; that is, we have an externalising impulse towards activity, social relationship and contacts of various kinds, and at the same time we have a powerful impulse to maintain our integrality and status.

Ø   While we are, in a sense, in a non-spatial and non-temporal indivisibility which is the status we maintain, we are also in a world of space and time.

Ø   We are not always happy. Happiness is the outcome of the preponderance of Sattva-guna, the balancing part within us, and to the extent we are balanced inwardly and outwardly, to that extent we are also happy, delighted and joyous.

Ø   We are not always in a position to see the wholeness that is behind the pictures in the form of the drama of creation.

Ø   There is a law that integrates the apparently conflicting powers in the same way as there is a law inside us which integrates the cells of our physical body into a wholeness of personality. There is an integration of the psychic structure as well as the physical body. This is the Dharma, the law that organises things.

Ø   The whole teaching of the Gita is centered on balance, equanimity, a putting in order of everything that is not in order. All the laws of various types signify one thing, namely, the necessity to maintain harmony, and it has to be maintained everywhere, in every walk of life, and in any given moment of time.

Ø   We are not in a state of Yoga. We only perceive things as they happen outwardly in the world of space and time. We are sense-ridden, entangled completely in the perceptions of the senses.

Ø   Our reason is not strong, our understanding is feeble, but the senses are vigorous and impetuous.

Ø   If we do not know how the law of the universe operates in relation to ourselves and other things, if we are ignorant of the law of our own country, how can we abide by the law? We are ignorant of the law and likely to blunder. The punishment for our transgression comes upon us as grief, sorrow, unhappiness, and insecurity--a feeling that something is wrong.

Ø   Our activities need not bring us happiness. We stoop down to the state of utter hopelessness and wretchedness, because we have not found time to walk with the light of reason and the justice of the universe. We cannot see this law with our eyes, just as we cannot see, for instance, a government.

Ø   The higher law is an impersonal operation, and therefore it is not an object of the senses.

Ø   The context in which Arjuna, the hero of this epic, the symbol of humanity in general, finds himself is the total human situation. It is your situation, my situation and everybody’s.

Ø   A judgement in the form of a logical conclusion that we draw in connection with our understanding in relation to humanity around us becomes the propelling force for our conduct and behaviour in relation to people. Our attitude towards people is the result of our understanding of people.

Ø   A like implies a dislike, and a dislike implies a like—they are not actually two different activities of the mind. It is one outlook, one attitude which shows features of a double attitude.

Ø   It is the stupid man, not the wise one, who sees occasions for joy in this world, or sees occasions for grief in the world. The world is not intended to bring you joy, nor is its intention to bring you sorrow.

Ø   In the duty that you are called upon to perform, there is on such thing as a superior or inferior duty. Everything has its role to play.

Ø   We cannot have an absolute love for anything or an absolute dislike for anything. What we loved one day may not be the thing that we love today, and in the same way we dislike some things which we may later crave.

Ø   The things from which we withdraw ourselves in a spirit of renunciation may demand recognition some time later when the circumstances are suitable for their expression.

Ø   The reluctance of Arjuna to take up arms is the reluctance of the spiritual seeker to grapple with reality in its essentiality.

Ø   A love for bodily existence, an affirmation of the ego and conformity to social relationships connected with the body and the ego, sum up our satisfactions in a nutshell.

Ø   We are so much accustomed to this strenuous life of adjustment with the outside atmosphere that we have mistaken this effort itself for a kind of joy and satisfaction. The condition of perpetual disease is mistaken for a normal state of health.

Ø   As the Buddha said in his wondrous message, everything is transitory, everything is momentary, and everything is like a link connecting itself with another link.

Ø   We love God for a purpose, which is connected with this world, and social values, psychic and bodily values become the conditioning factors of even the idea of God-realization. We seem to love God for the sake of people, for the sake of the world of Nature, for the sake of our egoistic satisfactions.

Ø   We justify our own way of thinking in the name of philosophy and we try to bring God Himself down to this world of our personal egoistic relationships and compel Him to answer to our needs that are psychological, empirical and relational.

Ø   Religion does not become religion and the spiritual does not become spirituality unless our outlook in respect of the whole of life gets tuned up to the demands of the nature of God and the internal relationship that subsists among God, world and soul.

Ø   There should be a harmony between our way of thinking today and the essential nature of the internal relationship of God, world and soul, as it is essentially.

Ø   The universal has to be implanted in the particular. God has to descend into the heart of man.

Ø   It is necessary to make a thoroughgoing search of our own psychic nature and the world of desires, which has various layers of manifestation. Only the uppermost one is actually visible and intelligible to us, and that only in some partial manner.

Ø   In the earlier stages of our aspirations we do not fully realise the problems that are deeply hidden and invisible in the outer layers of outer personality.

Ø   There are fears of various types which keep us secretly unhappy, and many of the attempts of life in the conscious level are attempts to brush aside these fears.

Ø   We occupy ourselves so busily with works of various types as a kind of outlet or counteracting power against these fears, usually known in the language of psychology as “defence mechanisms.”

Ø   An emotional stirring up of oneself into the enthusiasm of love of God, due to the study of scriptures or mystical texts, or listening to the sermon of a master, cannot be regarded as a reliable support for all time to come. There must be a conviction which must go deep into the heart.

Ø   The anxiety of a spiritual seeker is due to doubts concerning the correctness of the approach which he has launched. There are also doubts as regard the duties one owes to the world and to human society. Finally, there are doubts concerning what will happen to oneself should this realisation actually take place.

Ø   When your search is sincere, even if you have not understood things entirely, you will be taken care of by the powers of the world, and a Guru or a teacher will be there in front of you.

Ø   When something really exists, it cannot be called a phenomenon or a passing phase. A real thing cannot pass away, and that which passes away cannot be called the real. Thus, that which is, that which is real, cannot be regarded as destructible.

Ø   The process of death is one of transition and is not a destruction of anything.

Ø   The process of growth in a person is imperceptible; we never recognize that we are changing. This is because there is something in us which does not change.

Ø   The finite struggles to align itself with the Infinite, to which it really belongs, and this struggle of the finite to move towards the Infinite is the whole story of evolution.

Ø   We are not punished by death—we are only educated by it.

Ø   An apparently little event is a cosmic event; it may be a very insignificant, meaningless something, like a sneeze for instance. But it is not so meaningless as it appears on the surface. The whole universe is awake at the birth of every event. That is why we are told that there is no such thing as a secret in this world.

Ø   “I have no duty.” This would be a fallacious argument, because here we are trying to inject a metaphysical level into a social atmosphere, which should not be done as long as one is obviously aware of the fact that the social atmosphere is a reality.

Ø   Anything that you recognise as a reality cannot be ignored when any argument is put forth. We cannot expect facilities from society and then feel that we have no obligations in return.

Ø   There is a universe which is not exhausted by human society yet, this world of nature and its rivers, mountains and the solar system is not unimportant. You are expected to cooperate and collaborate with the world of Nature in as efficient a manner as you perform the duty in respect to yourself and human society.

Ø   There is a necessity to work for the production of material and economic values for the sake of the consumption thereof, by which human beings sustain themselves materially and physically.

Ø   You have to bear with fortitude the results that follow from your placement in an atmosphere of physical Nature.

Ø   You owe a duty to the various sides of human life—to human beings, to your ancestors, to the gods in heaven, to the sages of wisdom, and even to the beasts and animals. You have duties, not rights, in this world.

Ø   Rights will automatically follow without your asking for them. When you perform your duties, you need not demand your rights--they come spontaneously.

Ø   There is sacredness and sanctity present everywhere, and reverence for life is the insignia of true culture.

Ø   At a particular stage in our spiritual pursuits, we find ourselves in a dark night of the soul, as the mystics call this condition. This plight does not befall us in the earlier stages of spiritual life, when everything seems bright as daylight. But when we go halfway, we see darkness ahead of us.

Ø   The dejection, or the mood of melancholy in which the representative man, Arjuna, found himself, has been described as a spiritual condition. That is why even the so-called dejection is regarded as a part of Yoga.

Ø   The fact that the essence of everything is immortal, there is no need of entertaining the fear of such a thing as death.

Ø   What is inevitable has to be accepted, and to weep over the inevitable is absolutely without any significance, and is to no advantage whatsoever.

Ø   There is a duty of everyone in respect of the atmosphere in which one is placed. This is called the Dharma of the individual in respect of society.

Ø   Wisdom consists in understanding the process of connecting one’s activity with the whole to which it belongs. Any kind of selfishness or emphasis of one’s own particularity or finitude in the process of engaging oneself in an action would not be a Yoga, but a passage to one’s bondage.

Ø   Yoga is not merely action in the commonsense meaning of the term, but action proceeding from the being of a person, and the action becoming more and more comprehensive and complete as the dimension of the being expands itself gradually in the process of practice of Yoga.

Ø   We have only a duty, and we have no right to expect any fruit out of the performance of duty.

Ø   The fruit or the consequence of an action is decided by factors beyond the comprehension of the human individual, and therefore to expect a particular fruit would be the height of ignorance.

Ø   We are not supposed to pass judgements on action because success and failure are not to be regarded as the criterion of the correctness of an action, because they are valuations from our standpoint and not necessarily from the total standpoint of the purpose of the universe.

Ø   Pleasure and pain should not be the judging factors in the performance of an action.

Ø   Yoga is impersonality of approach and not merely the isolated hermit life of some individual.

Ø   The Gita regards life itself as Yoga. The way in which we have to live in this world is Yoga.
Ø   In the advance of consciousness through the process of its evolution we will find that there is an ascending degree of the concept of unselfishness.

Ø   Action and being commingle at a particular stage, so that existence itself becomes action.

Ø   All shall be for the best for that person who has ceased to be a person any more. That person has become an “imperson” and therefore everything is welcome, everything would be all right.

Ø   Action does not necessarily mean merely the movement of the physical limbs. It is a vibration that we set up in ourselves and in our atmosphere by the process in which the constituents of our individuality conduct themselves.

Ø   Every finite entity is active on account of the very finitude of itself. Action is the necessary consequence of the finitude of entities. The finite struggles to overcome its limitations, because the essential nature of the finite is not finitude.

Ø   Because of the movement of the senses externally towards the objects located in space and time, we are unable to be conscious of the presence of the spiritual element as a transcendent reality that is between us and the end of our actions.

Ø   Desire is our bondage—action is not the bondage. Any desire-filled action is binding; desire-less action is free.

Ø   When we ask for a cup of tea, what we are asking for is not that little drink but a freedom from the agony of finitude, the sorrow in which we are sunk by the limitations of our personality.

Ø   We want to overcome the limitation of the personality by some means, so we run to stores, go walking, go to the cinema and so on. That is a mistake in our minds, but it is done for the sake of achieving an illusory freedom from finitude.

Ø   The true God is inside us. Our own higher level wants us to rise up, to wake up and enter into it.

Ø   The senses within are the products of the three Gunas—Sattva, Rajas and Tamas—and these three Gunas try to commingle with the very same Gunas present as objects outside.

Ø   The whole universe is working without any sense of individuality within itself. It is doubtful if the universe is aware that we exist at all as isolated pieces.


to be contd.....

[SS91]

Ø   A spiritual seeker conceived in the light of the Gita is a spark from the divine conflagration of God-being, seeking union with its universal Selfhood or absolute comprehensiveness. Our conduct has to be in consonance with this great purpose.

Ø   I do not exist for myself, and you do not exist for yourself. Nothing exists for itself. Everything exists for everything else.

Ø   Your friends and foes are the inward conditioning of your own psychic fluctuations—they are not outside you.

Ø   The so-called individual efforts are part and parcel of the effort of the cosmos towards the realisation of its great purpose. However, the intensity of the ego-sense is the obstacle. Desire, anger, greed, etc. are various modus operandi of the ego of the individual.

Ø   Our search for God has to be a function of our soul within, rather than an activity of the intellect or the empirical understanding.

Ø   What we are required to do is only to accept the Presence, ask for God, seek Him from the recesses of our being, and we shall find Him.

Ø   Our action, our conduct, our movement and our behaviour in the particular atmosphere in which we are placed have to be in harmony with that atmosphere.

Ø   When we do not any more regard ourselves as helpless victims at the hands of isolated-ness in space and time, we then become a universal being participating in the purpose of the Cosmos. Then it is that we receive the Grace of God, for God is non-spatial and non-temporal.

Ø   The Incarnations, such as Krishna, Buddha or Christ, have various degrees of intensity in their workings and are in that particular shape or form which would be required under the circumstances. Hence it is that we see diversity among the messages of the Incarnations accepted by the various religions around the world. They are not diversified really. They appear to be so on account of the diversity of the needs of the circumstances which necessitated their descent.

Ø   Whenever the mind fixes its attention on something other than itself, which is supposed to be wider in its comprehension than the contemplating mind or the self, that process is to be regarded as a sacrifice.

Ø   Sacrifice is any act by which the propulsion of the mind and the senses outwardly is checked for the purpose of the utilisation of the whole of one’s consciousness for contemplation on a being which includes one’s own self.

Ø   The tendency to isolate oneself from everything outside is the opposite of Yoga, yet renunciation of any kind is impossible without Yoga. Renunciation does not mean physical disassociation with objects, but a withdrawal of the consciousness of the externality of things.

Ø   Yoga is not the repression of sense-activity but the freeing of sense-activity from involvement in desires which usually propel the activity.

Ø   We have to be convinced at the bottom of our being that the objects are not placed externally in space and time. If they are not external to us, the whole thing drops at one stroke. This is true renunciation.

Ø   When you sit for meditation, there should be no preconceived background of obligations of any kind. It would be advisable for every person who is doing the practice of meditation to see that immediate obligations are fulfilled before sitting for meditation.

Ø   We are agitated personalities on account on the lack of harmony among the senses, the mind and the intellect.

Ø   We have to be one hundred percent convinced that Moksha is the goal of life, the liberation of the spirit is the aim of all our activities, all our studies, all our engagements, anything that we do, in any manner.

Ø   Everything has to be done with great caution, leisure, and composure inwardly, and we will not be losers if we take time in this, because it is wiser to take time to understand each step, than to rush up and lose everything that was gained.

Ø   Love is only the recognition of the presence of the self in that which we love; if the self is not there, love is unthinkable. All love is self-love in various connotations of the meaning of self.

Ø   The Infinite is summoning the Infinite in every act of desire, in every process of sense-perception and what we ask for even in the least of our actions and desires is the universal Self, and nothing short of it.

Ø   “The Self is the friend of the self, and is the enemy also,” which means to say that the higher Self is the friend and the benefactor of ourselves, to the extent we are in tune with its purposes and laws. To the extent we are dissonant in respect of its laws, we are failures in life.

Ø   Yoga is a spontaneity of the movement of the lower self to the higher Self.

Ø   It is not the time spent in meditation, but the need for it that is important. If the mind does not feel the need for meditation, a mere prescription of place and time will not be of much benefit.

Ø   The mind is a trickster. It always deceives us form moment to moment because it does not have a continuity of moods.

Ø   Yoga as harmony has to be applied in its relevance at every level of life, even in our kitchen and bathroom, our social relationships and our personal vocations.

Ø   The great Masters of Yoga are most normal persons. They are not queer individuals looking like otherworldly ascetics. Normalcy of behaviour is a spontaneous consequence that follows from an understanding of the wholeness of life, which is basically Yoga.

Ø   The mind is absolutely steady, when it is in the presence of that which it likes immensely, hence the importance of the choosing of the ideal of meditation.

Ø   The all-pervading nature of God excludes nothing form its purview and inclusiveness, and that which we regard as the best thing in our life may be regarded as our object of meditation. Anything can be a suitable object.

Ø   The purpose of meditation is to break through the fort of the mind which as guarded itself very securely in the prison-house of this body.

Ø   Each disciple is unique in himself, and the Guru has to pay attention to the particular condition of the mind of the disciple.

Ø   The Gita tells us that we shall feel such a joy in deep meditation, such a satisfaction, such a delight when the mind is wholly absorbed in this manner, that even the worst sorrow of our life will not be able to shake our minds.

Ø   You must be very sincere and honest in your efforts in the direction of Yoga, and it shall take care of you. It cannot desert you.

Ø   When you practice meditation, you are clearing the debris of your personality. It is as if you are sweeping your room which has not been dusted for years.

Ø   Even the entertainment of the notion of the Absolute is a grand achievement. A whole-souled aspiration for God even in its initial stage is superior to all verbal knowledge, intellectual acumen, or scriptural learning.

Ø   The Cosmic Reality beyond the elements can only be an object of direct realisation and experience, and it can never become a spatio-temporal object.

Ø   The movement of the soul towards God is not a covering of distance as on a road, it is rather an ascent from the lower degrees of concept and being to the higher ones.

Ø   The greatest devotee of God is he who asks for nothing from God; not even knowledge, not even enlightenment, not even freedom from suffering. The highest devotion asks for God alone, and not anything through God or from God.

Ø   If we forget the presence of the mighty Absolute even for a moment, action becomes our action, and it rebounds upon us, and we shall be responsible for its consequences. We are, therefore, to perpetually maintain the consciousness of our inseparability from the Supreme Creator.

Ø   Even when we perform a charitable deed, it should not be done as if it is a prerogative of our effort. Our good deeds are not supposed to be “our” deeds, they do not belong to “us,” for no action can belong to us, really.

Ø   We cannot imagine what is timeless, and God is for us a “here” and a “now.”

Ø   Those who are capable of tuning their minds in an undivided manner to the All-inclusive Almighty Being—they lack nothing.

Ø   In mighty incarnations, sages, saints, and in the various natural phenomena, anything that stuns us or strikes us with wonder—such a thing is a ray of God’s manifestation.

Ø   You and I and everything imaginable put together do not make God, because these visibles are all shadows and unrealities in the end, and a multitude of unrealities does not go to constitute one reality.

Ø   Arjuna’s vision of God in the Gita is a timeless grasp of the eternity of Being, where everything is a here-and-now and not afterwards or somewhere else.

Ø   How do we get a vision of God? A whole-souled surrender of the self is the way. Unless the self melts away into the All-Self, this vision is not going to materialise itself.

Ø   In our spiritual practices, do we long to maintain our individualities? If this is true, the vision of God is far off.

Ø   A whole-souled absorption of all thought in God, to the exclusion of any other idea, is the highest spiritual practice.

Ø   If continuous contemplation of God is found to be impracticable, try your best to sit for meditation every day in a tenacious effort to fix the attention of the mind on God—notwithstanding that an entire absorption is not possible.

Ø   Love Him wholeheartedly from the bottom of your heart. Let your daily routine be infused with divine devotion. Work as an instrument in the hands of God and never forget for a moment the presence of this Supreme Parent.

Ø   Surrender the fruits of your action to God, and engage yourself in action in this world, perform your duties, go on with your vocation in the spirit of true Karma-Yoga. Be an ideal person. Hate not, love not.

Ø   We should live in such a way that neither should we shrink away from anything, nor should others shrink away from us.

Ø   Every character, conduct, behaviour, action and outlook that is going to tend towards the acceptance of God’s ultimate supremacy, perfection and absoluteness is to be considered as knowledge, and everything else is ignorance.

Ø   The universe is ultimately not made up of substances, but desires.

Ø   When knowledge dawns, there is a spontaneous dropping out of all relationship. The highest form of detachment is not sundering oneself from anything existent, but the raising of oneself to a consciousness of the pervasive character of the Reality that exists equally in the subject and object.

Ø   All learning is only an acquaintance that we try to develop with the forms outside. The things as they are in themselves, are outside our comprehension, and therefore our “knowledge” is a shell rather than a fact.

Ø   The sensory and rational powers urge themselves outwardly towards the objects of perception and indulgence, but the universal power of Self-integration drives the soul towards the Absolute.

Ø   It is necessary to have the blessings of the Guru.

Ø   The more we move away from the centre, the more are we heading towards what we call hell.

Ø   This little self of ours is like an ass carrying a treasure on its back, not knowing its worth!

Ø   The food that we eat, the way in which we speak, the kind of relationship that we maintain with others, the religious practices in which we engage ourselves, are all rooted in and defined by the belief or faith that we have as a philosophy of our lives.

Ø   We perform charity not because we are rich and others are poor. Rather, the others are equally important and they have as much right to exist as we ourselves have.

Ø   The recognition of a common principle in the midst of the varieties of sense perception is the supreme form of knowledge. Though many things are seen by the senses, the internal faculty of wisdom would tell us that there is, behind these varieties, a uniform principle of reality.

Ø   We should be able to connect every little thing in the world with that ultimate purpose of the liberation of the soul.

Ø   Our duty therefore is to surrender our individuality to that All-Being, we call the Almighty. Our blessedness lies here.

Ø   Man and God have to work together. This is the principle behind Arjuna and Krishna sitting in one chariot and driving forward into the field of battle.

Ø   In every bit of the relative or the particular, the universal is immanent, and the recognition of this universality in every particularity is the wisdom of life.