The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

by Swami Krishnananda

Chapter 15: Seeing the Eternity in the Temporal

Those who know the secret of the coming of God as the Incarnation are freed from the turmoil of birth and death. Janma karma ca me divyam evaṁ yo vetti tattvataḥ, tyaktvā dehaṁ punarjanma naiti mām eti sorjuna   (BG 4.9). Here is an interesting message in itself. Those who have an insight into this mystery of God coming to the world are freed from the bondage of life in this world. So, in a way, it would mean from this proclamation that there is a lot of connection between our bondage and our ignorance of the laws of God's working.

In a Sufi statement it is said that our bondage consists not in our consciousness of the world, but in our unconsciousness of God. It is not the world that binds us. That we are perceiving the world outside as a kind of object of the senses may be consider as our bondage. But it is said that this is not the bondage. We are not troubled by our merely being aware that there is a world, but we are troubled by not being aware that there is something else also in the world. This is another aspect of the matter. That there is a world is all right; let it be there, but is there also something else?

We seem to have a perceptional capacity which can receive only certain fragments of reality, and the whole of the truth cannot be received by our sense organs. Our eyes see the world, but they do not see everything that is in the world. The world is only one abstracted fragment, as it were, of a total phenomenon which is the creation of God. This world is the creation of God, or at least it is a part of the large creation of God. But this creation, which is God's, has in it many things over and above what our senses can grasp. We do not see the entire operation clearly either with our senses or with our mind. That a partial vision alone is allowed us through our cognitive and perceptive capacities is our sorrow. Our sorrow is not that we either see things or do not see things. The problem is that we see a little of what is there, not the whole of what is there. And also, the little that we seem to be seeing is not a vital part of what is really there. It is a dissected part, as it were, so that it has lost its organic relationship with the all that is there. When we see a severed limb of a human being, we are not actually seeing a part of the human being, though to the senses which touch and see, it may look like a limb of the human being. We know very well that what we call the human being is not merely a structure of various physiological limbs. Some legs, hands, lungs, heart and brain put together do not make a man because even in a corpse these limbs are present, yet we do not say that any man is there. The man has gone.

The world that we see is something like a corpse of reality. The vital principle in it is not recognised by us, just as our eyes cannot see the man, but we can see only the body of the man. The human being is different from the physical features, but we can see only the physical features even of a human being who is alive. We infer that the person is alive by certain processes of argument, but our perceptions cannot confirm the living character of a human being. What the senses see is only a physical structure, but not the man that is more than, over and above, the physical structure. The world, therefore, as it is presented to the senses, does not reveal the whole of reality to us.

God as present in this creation is something like man being present in the body. What do we mean by a man being in the human body? Everyone knows what it means. I am a human being, I am a man, but I cannot say I am just this body because the physical occurrences to the limbs of the body may not be equivalent to any occurrence to the man as such. The human personality is different from the infrastructure of bones and flesh. Hence, as Bhagavan Sri Krishna says in this little verse: “You cannot know Me merely by looking at My body, but one who really knows Me has an insight into Me. My coming into this world, My operations in this creation, are invisible to the apparatus of human perception which is capable of contacting only the outer form and name, the space-time complex, the externality of creation, not the vitality in it.” There is life present in all creation. This is the same as saying that God's intelligence operates in every bit of even what we call the material or physical. That is one feature of this little message given in this verse.

We cannot understand this world merely by looking at it with our eyes, in the same way as I cannot understand you by seeing you with my eyes, because understanding the person is different from merely seeing the person with the eyes. But we do not do anything else but merely see the world, and pass judgment on it. Our opinions in regard to anything in this world are based on the reactions produced upon our sense organs by the physical structure of bodies, but the inner content of these bodies is inaccessible to the sense organs. That is so because of the fact that the inner essence of a thing is not in space and not in time.

The substantiality, the basic quintessence of any object, is transcendentally present, but not empirically visible. The world is said to be real empirically, but ideal transcendentally. Inasmuch as the ideality of the world is transcendental, it does not become an object of empirical perception. There is a double character in the world, namely, transcendental ideality of essence and empirical reality of form, as is the case with our own selves. There is a visible, tangible, physical form, but that is not the person. What we call the human person is not the tangible, physical form. So we may say the world is not what we see with our eyes, and therefore we cannot understand the world in the manner we see it. Thus, we get bound by our inadequate cognisance of the values of the world, by our erroneous perception of things, and not by the existence of the world as such.

In the Vedanta philosophy, we are instructed that the world is created by God, and anything that God creates cannot cause sorrow to any person. It is unthinkable that God can manufacture grief for created beings. This world of God's action is called Ishvara-shrishti in Sanskrit philosophical terminology. Ishvara-shrishti means God's creation. This creation of God is not the cause of the sorrow of man. The mountains and the trees and the rivers and the sun and the moon and the stars are not our sorrows. Our difficulty arises from the manner of the reaction that is produced between our perception and the reaction produced in respect of this perception from the objects outside.

Our evaluation of things is our conditioning in life. We have a peculiar notion about this world, and we can act in respect of the objects of the world only in the light of the opinion that we form about them. Our relationship in respect of the objects of the world and our opinion, our understanding of the world, are something like the obverse and the reverse of the same coin. We put on an attitude in respect of the world outside which is determined by our understanding of the world, conditioned by our opinions about things; but who tells us that our opinions are correct opinions? Who tells us that we have properly understood the world? Then how could we actually read meaning into the objects of the world in the light of merely our fragmentary sensory perceptions and mental cognitions?

This kind of individual reaction in respect of truly existent objects is called jiva-shrishti, the manufacture of the individual. We have a world of our own which may be considered as the psychological world. The pure physical world is regarded as the creation of God, but we are not experiencing the pure physical world of God. We are receiving impressions of the presence of this pure physical world of God as cast in the mould of our sense organs and mind, so we have a representation of the world, not a presentation of it. This is to land ourselves practically in the great controversy of presentationism and representationism in philosophical controversies. Do we see the world, or do we see only a representation of the world as determined by cognitive faculties? We need not enter into this controversy. However, it appears that there is some truth in the judgment that much is contributed by our mind and sense organs to the manner of our receiving the nature of the world outside. Philosophers both in the West and the East have come to some sort of a unanimous conclusion that we do not see the world as it is in itself. Though there must be a physical world outside in order that it may look like an external something and it may become a content of our consciousness of perception, yet we too contribute something because the whole world has to be thrust into the mould of our perceptive capacities. In that sense, we do not see the world as it is but as it is presented to us through our cognitive faculties. Thus it is that our experience of the world is personal to some extent, and not purely objective. We do not understand the world. We try to understand it as we would like to understand it from the point of view of the structural pattern of our own psychophysical individuality.

So the manner of God operating in the world cannot become a content of the human mind because God is transcendental operation, non-spatial and non-temporal action. God's activities are not a succession of performances. It is not something being done now and something else being done afterwards: I do something today, and another thing tomorrow. There is no today and no tomorrow for God; therefore, there is no succession or one thing coming after another. It is instantaneous operation that is called God's action because God is another name for eternity, and not a time process. Hence, God's operation in the world is eternity operating in time, man as something different from his body operating in this body. I am a whole in myself in spite of the discreteness of the limbs of my body. The many organisms that come together to form my physiological structure do not prevent me from feeling that I am one whole. What makes me feel that I am one whole is to be known by each one for himself or herself. The world is not made up of diverse particulars, in the same way as a human being – yourself, myself – are not discrete, isolated parts, but one single total.

Hence, God acts in this world as a total, as an instantaneous eternity stamping its force on apparent diversities of forms and names. He who knows this secret will not be born again. But we cannot know this secret, inasmuch as temporal sense organs cannot recognise non-temporal operations in the world. The timeless secret that is also there in the midst of time processes cannot be visualised by the sense organs and the mind, which can work only in time and space. We human beings are in time and space. Thus, we are conditioned by the necessity to see things piecemeal, bit by bit, part by part. Not only that, we are compelled to cognise everything as a physical object. But are you a physical object, yourself seated here? You will not say that you are a physical object. You are a living being. If you are a living being, why should anything else be a physical object? To my senses, to my tangibility and visibility, you are a physical object, but you will say, “I am not a physical object. I am a living being.” In a similar manner is the mistake we commit in the evaluation of things in the world. There is a living meaning in all things. Everything has an intelligent eye; every atom is a seeing ray of the consciousness that is transcendentally ideal.

There is a wealth of meaning, therefore, in this little misunderstood or bypassed sentence of the Bhagavadgita. Janma karma ca me divyam evaṁ yo vetti tattvataḥ, tyaktvā dehaṁ punarjanma naiti mām eti sorjuna: “After having cast off this mortal coil, he who has an insight into this mystery of My operation in this world as a perennial coming will not be reborn.” Why should the eternity be reborn? It is the temporal that gets reborn, and to have an insight into the eternity of operation in the temporal processes of the world, we should also have an element of eternity within us. We have to be spiritual. Only the spiritual eye can gain insight into the spiritual operations in this world. But our eyes are physical, and our mind is conditioned by physical action of the senses. Space and time, and even cause and relation, are physical operations as we understand them, and any understanding we have in terms of space, time and causation will also be physical. Therefore, we are barred entry into the spiritual secret of the cosmos. The perpetual dance of God's powers is so crucial in every one of our lives.