The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

by Swami Krishnananda

Chapter 18: Reconciling Knowledge and Action

It was mentioned that there are varieties of sacrifice, and the mode of this sacred performance has been pointed out to be as variegated as the possible approaches of man to reality. How many kinds of sacrifice are there? As many as there are ways of approach to the Supreme Being. How many kinds of yoga are there? 'The same' is the answer. How many types of meditation? As many as there are human beings. No two minds can think alike in every respect. Therefore, identical forms of reaction to reality are not contemplated. The generality of approach may be of a uniform nature as we are all human beings, but each one is different from the other in details of thought, opinion, aspiration and performance. So while the foundations of human approach to reality may be a common ground, the superstructure, the tapering and completing of the edifice vary according to the individual relationships to the otherwise-uniform reality.

Now, our relationship to reality is the crucial point here in our understanding of the manner of our reaction to it, which is called sacrifice. Our attitude to God is called sacrifice, to put it more plainly in religious language, and inasmuch as the face of God is shining through every form of creation, our attitude to anyone is a sacrifice. Thus, the whole life becomes divine, transformed in an instant. Life becomes a worship and a yoga. Life becomes a karma that is liberating, not binding, because of the fact that the liberating karma is the same as the person's attitude to reality.

There is no necessity to get involved in binding action because the face of God cannot bind anyone and there is nothing, not even an atom, which does not let through its apertures at least an eye of God. Nevertheless, our relationships are manifest in different degrees of expression, which we considered earlier on a different occasion. We have a social relation to God if we consider the variety of creation, including humanity, as a manifestation of God's performance. We have a material and a physical relationship, if we regard our own selves as bodies and the world as a constitution of matter. As physical embodiments, we react physically to the physical nature, but we are also psychic beings. We are minds, intellects, feelings, volitions which react to the inner psychological components and the living secrets hidden in nature. And finally, at the root of our being, we are the ray of the universal Spirit itself.

So when we speak of sacrifice as our reaction to reality, we naturally have to consider it from various levels of the expression of our personality, to which correspond the correlative of these degrees, namely, the levels of being in the external universe. The layers of our personality, individually speaking, correspond inch by inch to the cosmological levels outside in all creation. So it was said that there is material sacrifice, social sacrifice, sensory sacrifice, vital sacrifice, psychological sacrifice, intellectual sacrifice and spiritual sacrifice. Dravyayajñās tapoyajñā yogayajñās tathāpare, svādhyāyajñānayajñāś ca yatayaḥ saṁśitavratāḥ (BG 4.28). In one verse all types of possible sacrifice on the part of a human being in relation to reality have been delineated.

Yet, the more subtle is the sacrifice, the better it is in the production of permanent result, or effect. Śreyān dravyamayād yajñāj jñānayajñaḥ paraṁtapa, sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ pārtha jñāne parisamāpyate (BG 4.33): Knowledge is superior to material possession, a thing which we have yet to learn in our modern culture. We do not pay much respect to knowledge. There is respect only to material property, house, wife, land, husband, money, status and social position. All these are materially oriented values which have preponderated to such an extent that there is today a threat of matter engulfing spirit, externality swallowing the subject, the winds of undivine forces threatening the very existence of the little spiritual voice of man. Such a state of affairs the world today is appearing to land itself in, and this is not a happy state of affairs.

The world is not made up of material substance. We have discussed earlier in our previous session that the world is not made up of substances. Therefore, it is futile on the part of anyone to imagine that material relationship is the proper relationship. The world is constituted of subtle energy, subtle force – vibration, finally. We made reference to the properties of prakriti called sattva, rajas and tamas. We have to remember once again these properties are not conceivable, much less perceivable substances or things. They are subtler than even electric energy, which linguistically cannot be explained. It is a force that exerts some pressure, and therefore it cannot be located in a particular place. Electricity is not in one place because of the fact that it is not a substance, but a force. Physical substances can be located; energy cannot be located. It is coextensive with its environment. Today in modern physical science we have been told that the location of an atom or an electron can be determined not independent of the environment which it occupies, but in relation to the environment. The atmosphere of an electron is conditioning the very structure and the movement of the electron, so that we may say the electron is not an individual but a social unit in the sense that its environment conditions, determines and even decides its operation and existence.

But what is the environment of an electron? It is not one inch outside it, not one foot, one kilometre. The whole universe is the environment of even a single electron, which means to say, a little particle cannot be considered independent of the operation of the environment, which is as vast as space and as long as time itself. This is the way in which we have to understand energy. An electron is not a particle. It has not a little sand-like location. The language is such that it somehow compels us to wrongly think of the location of something which is not a particle. The word 'electron' is only a symbol for conceiving, inadequately, the pressure-point of a particular conceived location of universal energy. So, in this sense, the environment of a thing is as vast as the space-time complex itself.

Thus, we cannot consider the universe as material. Energy is the substance of the cosmos. Whatever subtle, adequate and careful word we use to describe the substance or the reality of the universe, we will fail in understanding it properly, because even when we think of energy or force we are likely to think that it is some permeating substance. It is not like air that is moving. Even air is a material substance. We cannot humanly conceive of what energy is. It is only a symbol that we use for something that the mind cannot even think.

However, the point that we are made to understand here is that the world is not made up of material substances, and also it is not made up of located objects here and there, spread out like items in a zoo or a museum. It is a difficult to understand position of every inch of movement conditioning every other spread-out form of that very same energy. The Bhagavadgita tells us that when we conceive of ourselves in our relation to reality in the degrees of expression of which it is capable, we have to understand that the nearer we go to it, the better it is for us. The nearness here consists in the proper and adequate conception of it, the inwardisation of it in the proper sense of the term, and the reaction in respect of it as would be befitting its true nature, not in terms of the appearance which it tries to put on in its phenomenal presentation through the web of space and time.

Thus, matter is not reality. Hence, material possessions are not a safe value in our life. Therefore, we are very, very foolish in imagining that materially possessed people are rich people really. They can be dispossessed more easily than those who are not so possessed. The rich man has a greater danger of falling into oblivion and sorrow than the person who is not so materially rich. Thus, sacrificial offerings may be of a material character such as charity of money or gifts of material value, which are good enough, but they are poor in comparison with subtler values, which are the real values.

Human life is not a material existence. Likewise, any existence is not finally material. We are not physical bodies. We may be physically well fed, but we may be deprived of every other value in life. We would find this life to be equal to death. Each one can think of this matter for one's own self. Let us imagine that we are physically well placed but mentally completely deranged, socially kicked out and put in a state of utter insecurity. We do not know where we stand, yet we are fed well, robust, and we have material wealth to burn. We will find that all this material wealth will not count if other values are taken away from us. Self-respect is also a value which cannot be seen. It is not a substance. People hang themselves for want of self-respect. They jump into wells; they kill themselves merely because they have lost recognition in society, which is a chimera, actually speaking, a word, an idea, a notion which cannot be seen with the eyes. The loss of an unseen so-called self-respect can kill a person, in spite of all the physical wealth and the mountain-like gold that one may have. Even in our day-to-day existence we see that material values do not count much, and our value is to the extent of the comprehension of reality with which we are endowed. Therefore, knowledge is superior to material values. Dravya yajna is good, but jnana yajna is greater – śreyān dravyamayād yajñāj jñānayajñaḥ.

Now, here again we have to properly understand what is meant by 'knowledge'. It is not a professor's learning that we are speaking of here. Just as values in life do not mean a material collocation of substances and relations with them, knowledge does not mean acquaintance with information of the structure of the outer world. Today, unfortunately, that is called education. We have only information of the existence of things, but not contact with things. We may know how many kilometres the sun is away from us, we may know its diameter, we may know its intensity of heat and the physical reaction it produces; nevertheless, we have no control over the sun. It is as it was. We may know the length and breadth of the cosmos, but it matters little for our daily life. And our learning today of a professorial and academic type is far away from the personal life of the person who seems to be acquainted with it or possessed of it.

The personal existence of the origin of knowledge, the learned man, is different from the knowledge. This is again a matter of personal investigation and self-analysis. The knowledge of the academic type, the bookworm type, the informative type, which is called the modern educational process, has no direct connection with the existence of the person. His existence is like anybody's. He is like a beggar as far as the person is concerned. He can be threatened by even a little mouse moving in his house. His knowledge is vast, but the knowledge has not become his being. Philosophy is supposed to be love of wisdom, but it is much more than that. It is possession of it.

The knowledge that we are contemplating has a connection with its content. Knowledge means 'knowledge of something'. It is an awareness of something, an acquaintance with something, a connection with something in our consciousness, but what sort of connection? That is the crux of the whole matter. Knowledge as we have it today in the form of learning is an external relationship of consciousness with its content. We have no possession of the content of knowledge. We are only theoretically acquainted with the structure of that object. Therefore, knowledge does not help us. We do not seem to be really happy with our knowledge.

We have been told that knowledge is power, knowledge is virtue and knowledge is happiness. Each learned person may close the eyes and brood over himself or herself: “I am a learned person. I am a person with knowledge.” Can you be sure that today's embodiment of knowledge is also an embodiment of power? You will find that power does not go with knowledge, it does not go with virtue, it does not go with happiness. The learned man today is not necessarily a happy man, not necessarily a powerful man, not necessarily a virtuous man. That means to say, the characteristics of knowledge are totally absent in present-day knowledge. Here we refer to another kind of knowledge which is identical with its content. It is possessed of its object.

Yoga is said to be the identity of knowledge with being, consciousness with its content, subject with object, man with God, and the percipient with that which is perceived. This knowledge which is vitally related to its content is also a master of that content. Knowledge becomes power because of the fact that its content is not dissociated from it, as is the case in ordinary learning. Hence, knowledge is superior to external performance and material relationship. Any kind of thing that we do with an instrument outside is inferior to that which we do merely with thought. Thought moves the whole world. Ideas are behind every performance. We are today not in a position to understand the secret of this great doctrine of ideas being superior to material possessions because our materially involved mental process has not extricated itself from the clutches of matter and the bodily weight so that it may appreciate the apriority of a subtle non-material power conditioning operations of even material bodies. Even a mountain, even a solar system can move by the internal force which is the conditioning factor behind it, and which is not at all material.

Therefore, the Lord says: Knowledge sacrifice is greater than material sacrifice, social sacrifice, or any other kind of sacrifice that requires externalised relation. The highest kind of sacrifice is universal relation. Hence, it is a force that can destroy the adverse results of actions which are otherwise binding. Sarvaṁ karmākhilaṁ pārtha jñāne parisamāpyate: All binding reactions cease to operate when knowledge arises, because action cannot produce reaction in a given condition. In other conditions, every action produces a reaction. What we call karma-phala, or the nemesis of action, is the reaction produced by action, and the reaction is nothing but the reverberation produced by the external atmosphere in respect of a content which is the subject thereof, which imagines that it is dissociated from its external environment. The conditioning factor in respect of an individual performer of action arises due to the imagined situation that this condition is outside. The world is external, and the percipient thereof is a content inside.

Then there is the nemesis of the action, but action will not produce any result and there will be no reaction to the action if you yourself are the action. The action is not something that proceeds from you as an external emanation or exudation. It is you yourself operating. Yesterday I mentioned that in our day-to-day actions, generally we do not operate. We are hard-boiled individuals maintaining our self-identity in the same manner that we were earlier, even during the performance of action. So we are not wholly unselfish in our performances. We maintain our individuality. But in unselfish actions, we lose our individuality. We become the action itself. How can a person become the action?

First of all, you must understand what a person is. If you think that you are the body, naturally you cannot become the action, you cannot melt the body in action. But you are not the body. This is what we are dinning into the ears of everyone. You are a status, a consciousness, an awareness, an idea, a concept. This must be accepted first. This we have already understood to some extent when we considered this issue a few minutes before. Therefore, your engagement in action does not mean the body getting engaged – yourself getting engaged. And what are you? Just consider what you are. You are an ideal, an idea, a sense of being, a consciousness, an attitude; you are something very ethereal, as it were. You do not seem to be a solid person, even to your own self. You are something different from your body and, as I mentioned just now, bodily relationship does not count much. The body is practically nothing in comparison with ideological issues which are the life and death of everybody.

So, brahmārpaṇaṁ brahma havir brahmāgnau brahmaṇā hutam (BG 4.24): When the person, which is the real person I am speaking about, becomes identical with the process – when the performer becomes the performance itself, when the performance does not become an exterior occurrence on the skin of the performer – then action being one with the performer, there is no question of its getting motivated in the direction of an exterior result, because the result also is a part of the person's relationship with reality. Therefore, action does not produce reaction, and it is not to be considered as an action at all. It is a kind of play: lokavattu līlākaivalyam (B.S. 2.1.33). It is a joy to act. It is a satisfaction to work, because you are moving within your own self. Work does not mean drudging. It is not a slavish mentality. You are not working for somebody's sake. This idea of 'somebody' is the great sorrow of man. There is no somebody here. You yourself are in your cosmical relationship, and again remember, not in a material sense but in a wider, deeper, profound, universal sense.

So you are in a friendly world, you have friends everywhere, and you see yourself everywhere. In this visualisation of the structure of the universe in its relation to you, you will see the God of your creation in the littlest of your actions. You will see yourself in the Almighty, and the Almighty in yourself, which is another way of saying you will see the universe reflected in you. The macrocosm is scintillating in every little microcosm, and vice versa, in the microcosm you will find the representation of the cosmos. Hence, every action becomes a yoga.

Yogasaṁnyastakarmāṇaṁ jñānasaṁchinnasaṁśayam, ātmavantaṁ na karmāṇi nibadhnanti dhanaṁjaya (BG 4.41): By renouncing all deleterious aspects usually connected with individual action, and rooting that purified action in knowledge, about which we made reference just now, and establishing the self in the Self, karma does not bind.

Action cannot bind, because action is not anybody's action. It is an interrelated cooperative society, as it were, which this universe is. In a large democratic setup, we may say, which this cosmos is, no one is the owner of any particular property. The whole universe is a self-contained system where each one participates in the performance of this great duty of the purposiveness of creation, and we need not have any property. It is not necessary to possess anything. The idea of possession is a disease of the human mind. No possession is necessary. Why do we want to possess? Why is there so much greed? And what can we possess? It is not possible to possess anything here because nothing is outside us, and we are also not anything that is outside something else. Inasmuch as externality in space and time is a mistaken perception of reality, the idea of possession also is mistaken. Hence, we get detached automatically from the sense of involvement in the so-called externality of objects. That is called yoga, the art of non-attachment.

Non-attachment, or detachment, does not mean abrogating physical relationship with the objects. It is not a social kind of tyaga. It is an inward acceptance of the non-relation of oneself with anything because of the absence of externality itself. That is called jnana. Therefore, jnana and yoga go together. After some time we will be told that sankhya and yoga are one and the same thing, not two different things. Knowledge and action are not two different things. Yoga and jnana are the same.

Therefore, with this idea, with this thought, with this acceptance and conviction of an inward detachment consequent of the natural realisation of there being no such thing as externality in creation, and again consequently establishing oneself in the Self of all things in the world, we begin to see ourselves in the whole universe and we begin to see the universe in ourselves. This is to see God in man, and man in God. With this astounding message, the Fourth Chapter concludes.

But as human beings, we will again go on putting questions and more questions. Knowledge and action are impossible to reconcile. We cannot be reconciled even with our own brother and our neighbour. There is always a suspicion and an irreconcilability of attitude even with a partner in business, what to talk of God who is the biggest partner in this business of relationship. We cannot get on with Him, and we cannot get on with anything. There is always difficulty. We cannot get on with anything for a long time in this world. That is our problem. How can knowledge, which is supposed to be an awareness of something, be capable of reconciliation with that which it knows?

The whole of philosophy, whether in the East or the West, has been a harangue on this great question of the relation of knowledge to content, thought to action or idea to reality, the relationship of subject and object. We have systems of philosophy – realism, idealism, materialism, subjectivism, objectivism, metaphysical idealism, representationism, presentationism, and what not. All these are attempts of the mind of man to probe into the mystery of the relation between the knower and the known, which also, incidentally, is the relation between knowledge and action, which again, incidentally, would mean the relation between ourselves and anything.

Our problem is the question of relation. In what way am I connected with you? Please tell me. You will not be able to give an answer. You cannot say that there is no relation, nor can you say what sort of relation it is. Do you possess me, or do I possess you? Are you outside me, or am I outside you? Is the world inside you, or is the world outside you? It does not appear to be inside, it does not appear to be outside, and any kind of conceivable relationship between one and another does not seem to satisfy the logical inquisitive attitude of man. This is so because of the fact that the question of relation arises on account of our thinking in terms of space and time.

I have mentioned to you something about the quandary of relation on an earlier occasion, which I shall repeat in a few words now for the purpose of your remembrance. It is impossible to solve the question of relation because a relation is that which connects the subject with the predicate in logical propositions, or any thing with any other thing. Now, the connection that we call the relation between A and B has to be different from both A and B. If the relation between A and B is identical with A, then there would be no relation between A and B. If that relation is identical with B, then also there will be no relation between A and B. This peculiar thing called relation cannot belong to A, and it cannot belong to B. Therefore, it must be some independent thing altogether, neither connected with A nor connected with B. If that is the case, it cannot connect A and B. Then how can we think of a relationship between A and B? What is my connection with you? Nobody knows, because we cannot understand what a relationship is. But why do such difficulties arise? These difficulties are imaginary, and they are conceived in our mind due to an involvement in an impossible position, namely, that there is such a thing called connection at all. It does not obtain.

The relationship of one thing with another thing is a question that arises on account of thinking in space and time. Now, space and time is the ultimate relationship of all things. But we forget that our thought itself is conditioned in space and time. There is no such thing as thinking space and thinking time. You cannot conceive space in your mind because to conceive space in your mind, you have to convert it into an object or a content of your thought. It cannot become a content or an object of your thought because thought operates only on the basis of there being such a thing called 'space'. The very thought operation is conditioned by space. Therefore, space cannot be thought by the mind, and space and time go together like brothers. Where the one is, the other also is.

Hence, the thing called relation cannot be imagined by the mind. It cannot be so because all relation is spatiotemporal, and to think of relation or to imagine, to attempt to understand what relation is between one and another, we are trying to understand what space and time are. That is not possible because even our thought is conditioned by space and time. The mind that tries to understand relation in terms of space and time is already conditioned by space and time. Therefore, no one can understand what relationship is. The world of relation seems to be an illusion. This is what some great philosophers concluded finally, and we have reverted to this theme sometime earlier: how the world is an inexplicable concatenation of causes and effects where each cause seems to be an effect and each effect seems to be a cause because of the organic structure of things.

Such is the great subject with which the Fourth Chapter ends, and which becomes the initiator of a question by Arjuna as to how we can reconcile knowledge with action. I gave a little answer how this can be reconciled. Whatever I spoke a few minutes ago is the answer to the question of how knowledge and action are reconcilable, and they are one and the same thing. This the Bhagavadgita will tell us in the coming chapter.