The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

The First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

by Swami Krishnananda

Chapter 25: The Lower Self and the Higher Self

The Bhagavadgita is like a mantra, and the tradition is that when we chant a mantra we must think of the author of the mantra. It is a respect that we give to the author, and he is called the rishi. Here the rishi is Bhagavan Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa. We have to mentally offer our obeisance to this great Master who has been the medium to communicate this eternal wisdom to everyone. It goes without saying that our heart and soul, our whole body, goes in obeisance to the great divine Incarnation, Bhagavan Sri Krishna, whom we must remember in our minds, must keep planted in our souls in humble submission before we to speak anything on this great, grand, magnificent legacy bequeathed to us. Every time we must offer our prayers to these great divine forces. That is our respect to them, which is required of us.

yadā hi nendriyārtheṣu na karmasv anuṣajjate,
sarvasaṃkalpasaṃnyāsī yogārūḍhas tadocyate. (BG 6.4)
uddhared ātmanātmānaṃ nātmānam avasādayet,
atmaiva hy ātmano bandhur ātmaiva ripur ātmanaḥ. (BG 6.5)
bandhur ātmātmanas tasya yenātmaivātmanā jitaḥ,
anātmanas tu śatrutve vartetātmaiva śatruvat. (BG 6.6)

Here we have a bit of deep philosophical truth presented in a few words. Yoga is the art of Self-recovery. It is the Self gradually becoming aware of its Self. It is self-control, and also Self-recognition. It is Self-recognition in the sense of Self-realisation. All yoga is the systematised process of the self realising its Self. The whole world is the play of the Self. Philosophers have been intrigued in understanding how the whole world can be a play of the Self. There is nothing but the Self everywhere. But how many selves are there? Many selves? Two or three selves? Two selves? One self? These are difficult things to understand. Varieties of points of vision have furnished different kinds of answers to these questions.

It appeared to some thinkers that the world is filled with little selves. The Sankhya in the East thought like that. Philosophers in the West, such as the German philosopher Leibniz, felt that there are spiritual monads filling all space. Leibniz held that the whole world is nothing but a conglomeration of spiritual monads. Materialistic physicists say that everything is atoms, which are unconscious, essentially. But here is one who says, “Yes, the whole world is filled with atoms and is made up of atoms only, but they are spiritual atoms. They are self-aware. They are conscious.” And questions arose whether there are windows in these little selves so that they can see each other, or whether are they windowless, blocked and locked within themselves. This question was not actually expected. Nobody thought that such questions would be raised. The Sankhya was not wanting that such questions be raised, and nobody raised such questions until many, many years later. The windowless monads may not actually satisfy rational questions. The isolation which is non-communicative and totally self-sufficient, filling all space, looks like a new type of materialism rather than spiritualism, though the word 'spirit' is associated with the word 'monad', which is nothing but 'atom'. The Sankhya held that many selves are there, but it did not expect to confront this question of the relation of one self with the other. The purusha is the Self of the Sankhya, as we have the monad of the German philosopher.

There are others who feel that there are many selves, no doubt. The Vaishnava theologians such as Ramanuja, Madhva, Nimbarka, Vallava and Chaitanya all have an inclination to accept the multitudinousness of the Self, but with shades of difference in their opinions. Some feel that each self is different from the other, as we are all different from each other. One person does not seem to have any connection with another person. You can go that way, and another goes this way, without even knowing that the other exists. Do the selves exist in this manner as totally unconcerned individuals? Are they individuals? The Sankhya does not want to think that they are individuals in the sense of little bodies. The Sankhya feels that each purusha, which is comparable to the Self we are speaking of, is infinite. How could there be any commerce between one infinite and another infinite? Such questions are not raised, and they are not answered.

There are totally different selves, says Madhva and his coterie. Each one represents an independent, isolated spiritual unit, a jivatman. A jivatman is bound by maya, ignorance, some sort of confusion, and the great purpose of spiritual living is to cast off this veil of ignorance and live in the kingdom of God. Even in Christian theological parlance it is difficult to understand the position of the liberated spirit in the kingdom of God. The question is not very much mooted in the Bible, nor in rationalistic interpretations of the nature of the salvation of the soul according to Christian dogma. However, there is also parallel thinking in India which says that it is possible for liberated souls to live in the kingdom of God.

In the traditions of theology in India there is the position that in salvation, in moksha, there are categories. One can be free with different types of freedom. It may not be a uniformity. We are free to move anywhere as we like in the kingdom of heaven, in the kingdom of God. This is called salokya, living in the universe of God. God rules that kingdom. Therefore, there is some literal significance even in our calling that realm as a kingdom of God, a kingdom ruled by God, as this earth is ruled by an emperor. And we are totally free; nobody will restrain us. The concept of Brahmaloka in Indian theological parlance is also something like that where the Creator is the supreme deciding principle, and each individual is so transparently free that the extreme freedom that they enjoy goes to such a point of logical perfection that each one is mirrored in the other. In Brahmaloka, each individual, if we would like to call them individuals, is reflected in every other individual, and everyone is everywhere.

Plotinus, the great mystic of Alexandria, has this doctrine of it being possible for the soul to be everywhere and yet be independent in some way, like mirrors reflected one in the other, placed one in front of the other, and so on. Such illustrations are provided. God can be near us. We need not necessarily be wandering in the kingdom of God freely as an enjoyer of salokya. We can also have some samipya. We can be near God, in the same cabinet of God, as it were, or in His own palace or in his own Vaikuntha, in his own Kailasha, in his own Manideepa – whatever our concept of the great Master, the Divine Being, is. We can daily have darshan of God, not merely be moving in the kingdom. That is samipya. That is one kind of salvation because there is no bondage. We are near God. But greater freedom is sarupya, to be like God Himself, as if we are dressed like God, we have all the forms of God, and we look like God. It is said that in Vaikuntha Jaya, Vijaya, Pashudan, all look like Mahavishnu with shankha, chakra, gada, padma in their hands. We cannot know who is Vishnu and who is a Pashudan. But another concept of salvation is that non-separability from God's existence. It is savidya mukti.

Theologians view interesting illustrations of the possibility of salvation in this manner. If sesame seeds and rice grains are mixed together, there is a mix-up, a communion of sesame seeds with rice grains. One quintal of rice grains and one quintal of sesame seeds mixed up and shaken seem to have communion, one with the other. They become one, and we cannot separate one from the other. This sort of moksha is sometimes countenanced by thinkers such as the followers of the Madhva school. But yet we are independent. A grain of rice is not the same as a sesame seed. They can never become one or unite.

Or there can be a closer communion such as milk and water, which is not as markedly different as sesame and rice. We cannot distinguish one from the other, yet milk can never become water. They are two different things. Under given conditions the water can be separated from milk. So even in an apparent communion, there is a distinction. But if water is mixed with water, or milk with milk, that is real communion.

What is the position of the Self when it is bound, when it is on the path to freedom, and when it is liberated? One status of the soul is in bondage, another status is when it is striving to get liberated, and a third status is when it is totally free. The Bhagavadgita does not enter into these scholastic disquotations or metaphysical arguments on the nature of Self. The Bhagavadgita is a practical instruction. It is a teaching on the way of actual living in this world. But it is not unconscious of these difficulties that may arise in the notion of the Self. The Bhagavadgita is conscious of the possibility of these divergent notions that can associate themselves in respect of the nature of Truth, Reality. And it appears to me, at least, that the Bhagavadgita has, notwithstanding its awareness of these possible differences, succeeded in bringing a rapprochement of all these thoughts, and all these things that have been told seem to have a little grain of truth in them, though they do not tell the entire truth.

It is true that there is some point in opinions held in this manner. They are not entirely out of point. They are not one-hundred-percent falsehood. But they are truths of a particular category. The Bhagavadgita accepts that there are categories of fact, and when we come to the issue now in this verse in the Sixth Chapter of the Bhagavadgita, we are to consider the status of the Self.

The Self is called the Atman. The Atman, which is the Self, is the friend of the self. The self has to be raised by the Self. The self has to be expanded by the Self. The self has to be improved by the Self. The self has to obey the Self. And the self should not be deprecated; it should not be cast into any mood of despondency. The Self is the friend of the self; the Self is also the enemy of the self. It appears in this little verse that all the philosophies are pressed into a concentrated focus. We can take any idea of the Self as we would like because some notion of the Self is at the back of these statements, namely, that the self has to be raised by the Self, that it should not be trampled down, that it is its own friend, and that it is also its own enemy. It is the friend when it is conquered. It is the enemy when it is opposed.

How is it possible to oppose the Self? How is it possible to be a friend of the Self? Where comes the question of raising the self by the Self, and what is actually the meaning of deprecating, trodding down, disregarding or resenting the self? These questions cannot be answered if we have one stereotype notion of the Self. That is why I feel that the Bhagavadgita has here in its mind all the types of notion of the Self. All are valid because each person, each one of us, is one kind of self. None of us is identical in the concept of Self, or even in the living of it in practical life.

It is generally believed that a self is that which is identical with itself. Philosophically speaking, metaphysically conceived, a self is a non-alienable indivisibility. It is impossible to alienate it into something else. The thing that cannot become another is the self. I am what I am, and I cannot be you. A is A; A cannot be B. That law of self-identity is the law of the Self. That which knows but cannot be known is the Self. That which sees and hears but cannot be seen or heard is the Self. That which is responsible for every kind of experience but cannot itself be experienced is the Self. It is the subject which can never become the object, which means to say, it cannot be encountered in any manner. This is to have a philosophical, up-to-date notion of what we may call a metaphysical Self.

But the Bhagavadgita is a practical guideline for our day-to-day life. The Bhagavadgita is not teaching an academic, armchair philosophy. It is not a professor speaking in a university. It is a friend speaking to a friend, a parent speaking to a child, a physician speaking to a patient. Therefore, there is immense practicality down to the core of it in the instructions we have in the Bhagavadgita, though it does not mean that the teacher of the Bhagavadgita is not metaphysically awakened. Life is nothing but practice. Life is nothing but living. It has no meaning if it is not living. You have to live it and be it, and it cannot be explained in more explicit terms. That which you are is your life, and therefore, that is the most important thing for you. The way in which I am conceiving myself to be, the way in which I live, and the way in which I act and behave and conduct myself, the way in which I think and feel, this is my life. What is the use of telling you anything unconnected with this greatest of realities? The greatest reality is yourself, and anything unconnected with you has no reality for you.

So what are your feelings in regard to the self? A layman's self, a poor man's self, a rich man's self, an involved man's self, a detached man's self, a man's self and a woman's self, this self and that self, an individual self and group self, a social self and a political self, a family self, a world self – you can have concepts of these selves also, with certain definitions attached to them, and so it is possible to have many selves. That there are many selves may be taken as an accepted fact under strict supervision of precision of thinking.

Though the Bhagavadgita has no quarrel with the notion of a multiplicity of selves, it does not wholly agree with any of the schools of thought which hold such extreme ideas of the self. The notion of the self has to be flexible. It is malleable, it is ductile, or whatever we may call it. It can be moulded into any shape, and because it can be moulded into any shape, it can have many shapes. Now, that which can be moulded into many shapes may look like many things, and yet it need not be many things. We can cast a substance into many shapes by melting it into a crucible, and yet the substance has not become other than what it is. Molten lead is lead, whatever be the shape it takes. We can make an idol of it. It can be square, it can be oblong, it can be round, it can be any blessed thing. These are the forms of the substance which is cast into these shapes because of the mould through which it is interpreted, conceived and understood. So in a way there are many gods, many things. Are there not many things in this world? Yes, certainly. There are many things, countless things, but really they are not many things. They are many faces of a single substance.

Thus, manifold is the self, and one's self may look different from another's self. But what is the kind of self that the Bhagavadgita is thinking when it speaks in this manner that we have to raise the self? The self has to be lifted by the Self. Now, while we are engaged in understanding the meaning of this very, very important verse, the crux of the whole matter, we have to carefully carry with us a caution that together with the provision of there being a multiplicity of selves under different conditions, the Bhagavadgita is maintaining throughout, from the beginning to the end, the supremacy of the ultimate Self. Because there is one absolute Self in the end, therefore, there is one Self even in the beginning, and even in the middle, in adi and madhya and anta, which is the beginning as well as the end. That conviction is carried relentlessly throughout the teaching, right from the very outset. Mattaḥ parataraṃ nānyat kiṃcid asti (BG 7.7): Nothing superior to Me, nothing outside Me, nothing higher than Me can ever be. This great 'I am what I am' is asserted there. But together with it there is this intriguing passage which says that the self can be the friend of the Self or it can be the enemy of the Self, and how it can be the friend and how it can be the enemy also is explained very precisely: The conquered self is the friend, and the opposed self is the enemy.

Now, in what way can we oppose it and convert it into our enemy? In what way can we befriend it so that it supports us? It is difficult to logically explain all these things; analogically we may be able to understand something. There is a higher dimension of everything which includes all the lower dimensions. A dimension is something which is to be understood by us. We can take, for the purpose of a homely illustration, the dimension of management. There is a higher type of management and a lower category of management. There can be many little managements within a large circle of a single management. Many villages are sometimes headed by a chieftain. It is a kingdom by itself. A village is a kingdom by itself, headed by one single person we call the headman, the pradhan, and so on. This little village is a self-identical completeness by itself; it is an integration. It is one single concept of management, and yet this little self, this little management is subsumed entirely by a larger circle of administration which we call a tehsil or a taluk or a district. Now, that district also is a self by itself. It is a single administration headed by one principle of administration called a District Collector, or in the case of a tehsil, it is a tehsildar, and so on.

Here we should not bring personality into the picture. Unfortunately, we cannot think except in terms of persons. When we speak of management, we are not thinking of persons. The village is not a person; it is a system of organisation. A group of people does not make a village. When we speak of a village here from the point of view of management, we think of the unity of concept. So a management is an indivisibility conceptually introduced for the sake of secure existence. It has nothing to do with persons. This person may be there or that person may be there; that is immaterial. Thus, the district is not the District Collector. We should not make the mistake of identifying one with the other, though the principle called the collector is permeating the whole district. The collector is not a man. It is a principle permeating the entire area called the district, a force that makes itself felt – an energy itself, we may say. So a self is that which permeates everything. It is not sitting in one place. Even our own little self, this so-called self, is not in one place, in one part of the body. It is the total. The whole thing visible here is the self. It pervades. Nowhere is the self an individual. It is a pervasion, it is a control, it is a supervision, it is a management, it is an integrality, it is a concept, it is a consciousness, it is a principle; it is not a person, it is not a thing.

In this analogy that I am mentioning before you, there is a higher dimension of management which includes the lower without violating the existence of the lower. The district management is not in any way opposed to the village management, yet it is so much inclusive as to find within itself everything that is in the village. The higher is not a negation of the lower, but it is inclusive of the lower, so when we think of the district it is not necessary to think independently of the little villages.

Do we not feel that our bodies are made up of little cells, organically composed? Each little cell of our body is a self by itself. These days medical men say that we have got intriguing things called DNA and RNA and so on, hard things to comprehend, which suggest the existence of certain independent influences in each cell of the body. One doctor in Bombay told me, “Swamiji, these days medical science has done so much that we can know the past, present and future of a person by diving into a single cell of that person's body.” The whole life is reflected in that little cell. It is one mirror of the whole. The little cell of the body is a microcosm; the whole body is a macrocosm. As we say, the pindanda is the whole brahmanda in one sense; the whole cosmos is reflected in each individual. In one cell we find the whole man. Likewise, there is a larger dimension of control, supervision and administration which is the self.

We have to learn the art of thinking impersonally. We should not be always bogged down by this dogma of thinking in terms of persons – the prime minister is a person, the president is a person, the collector is a person, the minister is a person. We are habituated to think in this manner. None of these are persons. If we are true democratic thinkers or persons really having a love for the nation, we should not think of persons. There is no person anywhere in the country. They are forces operating; they are influences exerted for a non-individual motivation, which is national welfare. The illustration is that there are higher dimensions which include lower dimensions. There can be many selves. Each administration can be considered as one indivisibility. It is indivisible because it is self-contained, and it is indivisible because it is not one person sitting somewhere. It is a pervasive, integrated power.

There are higher selves. These are called generalities, or samyanas. Acharya Sankara makes reference to these in his commentary on the Brahma Sutras. There are samyanas and samyanas, generalities and generalities. He mentions this thing I mentioned to you just now. The village administration is a generality, the district administration is a generality, the provincial administration is a generality. By generality, he means an inclusiveness and compactness and totality. And the whole nation is one single person. Do we not say the whole world is one person? It is believed that in religious circles like the one propounded by Acharya Ramanuja, etc., the whole universe is the body of Narayana. There is only one person in the whole universe, and the whole nation is one person, not a multitude of many people. So when we carry the notion of singleness, unitary existence and indivisibility, we carry with us the notion of the self. Thus, we will be able to appreciate that the world contains only selves, and not persons and things. The self is not a thing and not a person. It is an indivisible consciousness. The village administration is a consciousness of indivisibility, and so on, in all the dimensions, until the world self or the universal Self is reached. So there are many selves.

Yet, we have to be conscious in admitting the possibility of many selves. It does not really mean that there are many selves, while it appears there are many selves for certain practical purposes of management. Yoga is the art of administering oneself. We have villages, we have provinces, we have countries, and we have international organisations inside our body. Every blessed thing politically conceived can be one way of thinking in our management of ourselves. As we manage a whole nation, we have to manage ourselves. Finally, we may have to conceive the whole universe as one single nation, one family, of which we may be the chief. And when we conceive ourselves as the chief of the administration of the whole creation, we should forget that we are persons.

Here, incidentally, we answer the question whether God is a person or an nonperson. Is the administrator of a country a person or a nonperson? When we say, “I want to see the head of the government” it looks as if we are going to see a person, somebody sitting on the chair. In that sense we may say, “Yes, the administration is a person; God is a person.” But the administrator is not a person from another angle of vision, into which I tried to throw a little insight. So we are seeing the whole nation reflected in that so-called person sitting on the chair. We have not seen the person. It is a concentrated, pinpointed presentation of the principle of the total administration of the whole country apparently sitting on the chair. So it is a person and a nonperson. God is a person, and yet is not a person. So the self can be conceived in an individual manner or it can be conceived in a non-individual, supremely universalised, general sense.

Now, in all the senses we have to encounter the notion of the self in order to understand how we can be a friend of the self, and how we can be an enemy of the self. The tehsildar can oppose the collector. Then what happens? Or he can be friendly with the collector. Here is a self becoming an enemy of the self, and if he is friendly, he is friendly with the self. The tehsildar friendly with the collector is the self friendly with the self, the self's friendship to the self. But if he opposes the administration of the district, he is in direct enmity, at loggerheads with the higher dimension. Sorrow descends upon the lower self when it opposes the higher self, and security is always automatically bestowed when the lower self is in communion with the law of the higher self. We shall have no problems if the little self is united with the higher self. Everywhere there is a problem, and nothing but problems can be there everywhere if the lower self is in opposition to the higher self. This is obedience to law, or opposition to law in another way.

Thus, we have a deep religious, philosophical and spiritual practical message concentratedly pressed into this little verse, into whose meaning we have to enter in order that we may be successful participants in the yoga discipline, which is the subject of this chapter.