The Relevance of the Bhagavadgita to Humanity

An Exposition of the First Six Chapters of the Bhagavadgita

by Swami Krishnananda

Discourse 29: The Yoga of the Bhagavadgita

Praśāntātmā vigatabhīr brahmacārivrate sthitaḥ, manaḥ saṃyamya maccitto yukta āsīta matparaḥ (BG 6.14): One should devote oneself to yoga in a state of mind well subdued, not agitated by expectations of any kind, because all expectations which have an ulterior character smack of a desire and expectation for fruits to be yielded by our works. Fearless, therefore, should one be when one sits for meditation. There should be no fear either from any possible eventuality from outside, nor should there be any fear of doubt lurking in the mind as to the very utility of one's engagement.

Here is a subtle point which may come into our minds: What is the utility of my meditation? Even well-intentioned, good-natured, sincere students will have these difficulties. “What have I obtained after years of struggle on this path?” To ask a question like this is to again expect the fruit of action, which has been ruled out already. Karmaṇyevādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana (BG 2.47): You are here but to do, and not to question why. This is difficult because, very unfortunately, the expectation of a result from what we do, even religiously and spiritually, is part of our nature. This attitude of the mind to expect some result to follow from what we do is a part of the structure of the mind itself; therefore, to be told that we should not so expect would mean that we have to go against the very grain of our own internal makeup. We have to conquer our own self, as it were, in yoga. There is nobody else whom we have to conquer in this world. Yoga is self-conquering, self-mastery. This was the suggestion given to us in the earlier verse that the self should be subdued by the self.

Years of practise will show no indication of any event taking place. But nehābhikramanāśosti pratyavāyo na vidyate (BG 2.40): Not even the least good that we do in this world can go without being recognised. Even the least good, even a modicum of the proper thing done by us, will be properly recognised at the proper place, and at the proper time. That it will be manifestly recognised at the proper time only, and not just now when we demand it, is the unpleasant part of it, at least from our point of view. Today I sow the seed, and tomorrow I want to reap the harvest. This is our expectation. It is difficult to have a satisfaction that our duty has been done in the manner it is to be done, because the spiritual seeker's anxiety that twenty or thirty years of meditation have yielded no tangible results will certainly have an impact upon the ardour of the practice. This impact may be cooled down. All enthusiasm may receive a wet blanket because of a subtle suspicion that perhaps something has gone wrong in our practice. There will be an unintelligible agony felt inside caused by many factors such as the laws of all earthly amenities, to which condition one has betaken oneself in the hope that one will receive a rain of celestial nectar. That rain has not started, and many problems harass the student. These problems are listed in a sutra of Patanjali, and they are important matters needing attention. Physical illness sometimes tortures the student of yoga to such an extent that he feels that he would better leave the practice than fall ill. Sickness of the body, anxiety of the mind, and many other pressures coming from outside as well as from inside will unsettle the whole issue. This is not a situation in which only a few find themselves. The majority of seekers unwittingly land themselves in this difficulty. Later on a lethargic attitude supervenes, a sense of enough with everything that one has done. This sense of enough arises not because of a satisfaction of having achieved something but because of a dissatisfaction that nothing has been achieved.

Then doubts which are more subtle in their nature insinuate themselves into the mind. “Perhaps I am not for it. I am unnecessarily straining myself, losing the here and also losing the hereafter at the same time. I am not fit for the hereafter. Maybe I have to take several births.” This kind of sorrow will also be gnawing into the vitals. And the sorrow will have another adverse effect upon the whole practice, namely, remission of effort. The tenacity of purpose with which one took to the practice in the beginning will cool down and there will be a break in the middle. “After twenty years of tenacious continuation of the practice, I have got nothing, and if I stop doing it for one day, what do I actually lose?” Then the continuous sessions get discontinued and the chain breaks. Sometimes there are medical prescriptions given by physicians. These medicines have to be taken at particular intervals for several days, and the number of days and the intervals are all very important. If the intervals are not taken notice of, there will be a break in the chain of action of the medicines that are taken. “For three days I have taken it; on the fourth day, what does it matter?” This kind of idea should not come to the patient's mind.

Hence, the cumulative force which was generated by practice will get dampened by a remission of effort due to the despondency of spirit caused by helplessness, which again is brought about by the feeling that, after all, nothing is coming. “Why should I not go back to my old pleasures of life? After all, they are concrete, available, real things. What for is this pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp, the phantasmagoria of a God which may be there? Even if it is there, it is not for me.” And so this pramada, or heedlessness in practice, catches hold of the person.

Also, I mentioned a kind of lethargy, and not actually sticking to the principles of a methodical routine. The stability of the mind in yoga practice can be maintained only by a methodical routine. If there is no method, the structure may fall. There is a precise arrangement of the material of a building in order that the building may stand erect. If the arrangement is not precise, if it is imprecise, then it is possible that the building may fall. Hence, the strictness with which the practice commenced should be maintained; but it is really hard to maintain it because the senses, which have been controlled by the vigour of aspiration in the beginning, will now whisper from inside, “You are a fool. You have denied us our diet, thinking that a gorgeous meal will descend from the heavens. How foolish you have been! Thirty years have passed and you have got nothing. We are here to serve you. Even now it is never too late to mend. We have not left you, though you have deserted us. You are an ungrateful man, but we are still ready to serve you. We shall be with you. Give us what we want, and we shall give you what you need.” The senses speak like this even after forty years. And why not listen to this good advice of a real friend rather than hang on some imaginary friend who may be there or may not be there, who has actually given nothing even after years of austerity, starvation, sorrow and suffering?

And down the person goes to the level of matter and the conditions prescribed by the sense organs because pleasure is not only tantalising, it is very attractive. Who can resist the attraction? And what attraction can be there in the ideology that you have placed before yourself in yoga? You have ideally pictured before your mind a pleasure centre, which you call the goal of yoga, but there is a real, concrete, tangible, contactable pleasure centre whose realism is overwhelmingly more impressive than the doubtful impressiveness of the pleasure of an ideal that is only in the mind of the seeker. These are difficulties indeed, hard things.

Did not the Buddha feel this difficulty? “I am done for. A waste is this yoga. Unnecessarily I have given pain to this body by starvation.  I am crawling now. I have no energy even to stand on two legs. Today is my last day. So much credit for this yoga! Be gone! I am quitting today.” Such were the ideas of Buddha a day before his illumination, and a sea of temptations thronged around him. The senses become stronger and stronger as they are starved more and more. A starved snake is more venomous than a well-fed snake, and not only are they starved, they are angry. A starved person is susceptible to immediate irascibility. A hungry man is an angry man, it is said. So the senses are starved. You have not given them what they wanted, and so they are very wroth with you. They are waiting to rush upon you in ambush. This happened to a great man like Buddha; beauties, grandeurs, pictures of magnificence unthought of and unseen in this world were there before him. “Why not come with us? Enough of this hard austerity melting the flesh and breaking the bones.” Fears of other types also came upon him. Threats of death and destruction were also dealt at him. Every saint and sage has passed through this stage.

Why do these difficulties come before us when we are honestly longing for something holy, something divine, godly? Why should we deserve this kind of punishment, and why should we be meted this dish of pain and poisonous sorrow while our intention is tolerably honest and sincere? The reason is scientific. It is a thing that has to take place because it is a preparatory starvation for introducing health into the system.

The sorrows are nothing but the inward feelings of an empirically bound mind that its friendships are being snapped. All its belongings are taken away. The world is a large belonging of this individual person, and all association, all contact, is a desirable source of pleasure. They are being severed. It is as if your limbs are being amputated. A psychological amputation is going to take place. All the antennae of the connection with the psyche are cut off by means of this dissociation of interest in things, and so while in the beginning it was an emotional upsurge of an ideal satisfaction that is yet to take place, it is basically an inward suggestiveness towards secret suffering. “Though I may be blessed with divine vision and universal consciousness, I have lost something which is already there.” It is hard to be free from this notion that along with a possibility of divine enrichment in the future there is, simultaneously, an immediate loss. That you are going to have a large salary in the future may not sufficiently compensate your sorrow that you have lost your purse today. “After all, I have lost my purse, though I may get a larger salary tomorrow. No loss is tolerable. So let God Himself come and stand before me; that is fine, but have I not lost the world? That is also there as a point to consider.” The mind will be thinking over this matter. “After all, I have lost the world.”

It is not possible to adjust the mind to the expected idealisation that the whole of reality can be found in the object of meditation. The whole of it is not there. It is some grand, great thing, no doubt, a very large thing, a beneficial thing and a desirable thing, but the loss is also real. These are the ways in which the senses speak. And then the pramada, or the heedlessness of remission of effort, creeps in.

Then there are other tricks of the psyche which tell us that we have attained to a satisfactory stage of spiritual enlightenment. “I have visions. I have seen colours and heard sounds which come from the denizens of the higher heavens.” These visions are not considered to be illusions. They are regarded as satisfactions, so that the effort may be stopped somehow. The mind will not be able to concentrate on that point anymore. It will flit here and there and move about. In the earlier stages, due to the pressure of the effort exerted upon it, which acted like the whip that goads the horse to pull a vehicle, it did concentrate. But how long will it move like this with the power of a whip? Then the mind gets exhausted. It falls down, and the concentration ceases. However much you may try to fix your mind, it will not be possible.

Therefore, here is a benign word of blessing. Vigatabhi: Have no fears of this kind. Let all these fears be shut out because there is a time and also a manner of the coming of the divine grace. It comes at the proper time, and it comes in a proper manner. We have to expect it in the manner it will come, and also at the time it can come, and not at any time that we may call it. Submissively we have to expect it, no matter the length of time it may take to visit us.

Brahmacārivrate sthitaḥ, manaḥ saṃyamya. The senses are turbulent, and the needs of the human personality are galore. Countless are our needs. The physical body needs food. Every sense organ requires a food. The ego also requires a food, and our emotions require a food. Our logical understanding, reason or intellect also asks for its own food. Now, this is the manner in which they are sustained by their own requisite diets, and brahmacharya is the way of the universal existence. Brahma is completion, it is the plenum, it is the total, it is self-sufficiency, self-completeness, and to move as a whole is to be in a state of brahmacharya. For our practical purposes, Brahma may be considered as that which is integrated. To live an integrated life is to be a brahmacharin, and to dissipate one's energies in any channel of sensory activity would be the opposite of it. Enough has already been said in the earlier chapters of the Gita of what it means to be a whole person. We need not comment on it once again, as it would be an unnecessary repetition. It is necessary for us to maintain ourselves as wholes, and not fractions. We are not subordinates of any circumstance in this world. We are not slaves of any condition. We want nothing. We do not want anything because we have everything in us. We have everything in us because we are wholes. We have to bring into our minds what was told us in the Third and Fourth Chapters of the Bhagavadgita that is it possible for us to satisfy ourselves that we are a sort of completeness of selfhood.

God should be our ideal, finally. Yukta āsīta matparaḥ: devoted to Me only as the Supreme Almighty. Here in this devoted and dedicated betaking of oneself to the supreme Godhead, one has to maintain a certain attitude. Where is this Godhead? The God that you are seeking for communion in yoga – where is this God seated? In every experience through which you pass there is an element of God because anything that you are forced to regard as real in some sense partakes of the reality which is ultimate. The ultimately real is present in some measure in the relatively real, because even to enjoy a relative reality there must be at least a little of the ultimate in it. Hence, our problems must be real in order that they may harass us. Unreal problems cannot give us trouble. So even a problem has a reality, and nothing can be real unless there is a jot, at least, in it of that which is absolutely real. Even that which is passingly real, transitorily real and relatively real – real as a phantasm even – must have some shadow of the ultimate Reality. To the extent anything is impossibly real, even if it be a little insignificant so-called 'something' of the world, insofar as it enjoys a reality of its own, it attracts our attention and it calls for our obedience to the law that operates in its circles. Hence, the Bhagavadgita will tell us that we should be moderate in our attitudes, and not go to extremes in a supremely idealistic sense minus all realism in it. The ideal of spiritual realisation is not bereft of the real element in it. The ideal is also real. Generally we make a distinction between the ideal and the real, but such a distinction is uncalled for. The ideal has no meaning unless it has a reality. An unreal ideal is not going to bring us anything.

Hence, in a proportionate measure it is necessary for us to recognise elements of reality even in the lesser circles of environment in which we are unavoidably placed, as it were, and which we are helplessly forced to consider as real. When a cold wind blows, it is real. When a hot air blows, it is real. When hunger pinches from inside, it is real. When there is illness, it is real, and when there is agitation of the mind, it is real. They are not unreal events taking place.

Now, to compare them with an absolute Reality and hold that they are not real would not be a wise attitude towards them because in our ascent to the Absolute, or the supreme Reality, comparisons are not allowed. We cannot compare one thing with another thing. Each has to be taken from its own point of view and from the status which it occupies. Everyone is important in this world. There is no unimportant person, and everything has a value. Totally valueless things do not exist. The very fact that they exist should be enough proof that they have some value, and therefore it is up to us to give them sufficient regard to the extent of the value that we evince in them. There is no beggar bereft of all value. Nothing in the world is a beggar of that type; hence, in all the levels of ascent in yoga, in all degrees of rise from selfhood to selfhood, we have to pay tax at every toll, and these tolls are nothing but the gates of the different levels of reality.

What are the levels of reality? They are as many as we encounter. Therefore, any kind of excessive attachment to an unrealistic ideal should not be the motivation in yoga. There is some element of reality in the world to the extent that the consciousness permits such reality, and an austerity which does not want to take notice of the existent reality in the relative values of life will have to pay the penalty of that ignorance of the law of the lower level. So the yoga of the Bhagavadgita is a balance of attitude outwardly as well as inwardly, horizontally as well as vertically.

Nātyaśnatas tu yogosti na caikāntam anaśnataḥ, na cātisvapnaśīlasya jāgrato naiva cārjuna; yuktāhāravihārasya yuktaceṣṭasya karmasu, yuktasvapnāvabodhasya yogo bhavati duḥkhahā (BG 6.16-17): The yogin, the student of yoga, is not a peculiar person. The yogi is a normal person. The yogi looks like any other person. The yogi does not have two horns and four eyes. He looks like anybody else. There is no necessity to put on faces or to be queer in one's behaviour. Normalcy, freedom of expression and utter relief of every tension is the characteristic of a yoga student. The difference between a yoga student and an ordinary person is freedom from attachments and emotional involvements of every kind.

Yoga permits us to work, as is the case with work in a factory or on the roadside. Outwardly, all work will look like a uniform behaviour of people, but yoga is not an outward behaviour; it is an inward attitude. It is a detached consciousness that speaks the nature of yoga. The outward relationship is the form of one's empirical existence in this world, but the inward meaning in it is to be seen in the attitude of consciousness. There is an element of universality present in the work that a yogi does, and that is the unselfishness about it. The dispassionate performance of work, which is the special feature of any performance of a yogin, is due to an element of universality present there which distinguishes it from all other works involved in personal attachments, involved in the desire for fruits of what one does, binding action. Na karma lipyate nare (Isa 2) says the Isavasya Upanishad: Action does not bind.

Hence, we are told repeatedly in the Bhagavadgita that the yogin is not necessarily an inactive person: na niragnir na cākriyaḥ (BG 6.1). Nor is it action of an involved nature. It is not inaction because inaction would also be a personalised attitude, and a yogin has overcome the limitations of personality in some degree. It is not action; it is not inaction. It is a different attitude altogether, difficult to describe. Aniṣṭam iṣṭaṃ miśraṃ ca trividhaṃ karmaṇaḥ phalam, bhavaty atyāgināṃ pretya na tu saṃnyāsināṃ kvacit (BG 18.12): For the sannyasin, for the renunciate, for the yogin, action is neither good nor bad. It is also not a mixture of two things. The action of a yogin cannot be called good action, nor can it be called bad action, nor can it be called a combined product of something good and something bad. In the case of ordinary persons the actions may be good or bad or mixed, but in the case of the renunciate any kind of evaluation in this manner is unwarranted because the yogin's actions are natural actions. 'Natural' means 'spontaneous', spontaneous in the sense of communion with the facts of nature; therefore, these actions are nobody's actions, or rather, they are everybody's actions. The yogin's action is the action of the whole world or, in a sense, it is no action at all. Such is the inscrutable nature of the behaviour of the yogin.

All extremes are avoided. “I want these things,” the yogin will not say. “I do not want these things,” the yogin also will not say because he has established a harmony of attitude inwardly in consciousness in relation to events and things in the world. Complete abstemious attitude of an over-pressurised ascetic is not the yoga of the Bhagavadgita. Yoga is not starvation. The yoga of the Bhagavadgita does not tell us to starve ourselves emotionally, intellectually, or even physically and materially. The yoga does not want that we should kill ourselves. It also does not tell us that we should pamper ourselves, that we should indulge our ego and the sense organs.

The yoga of the Bhagavadgita is the yoga of healthy living. You know what healthy living is. Normalcy of intake and normalcy of avoidance, both these are normal behaviours. In order to live a healthy life we have to avoid certain things and we have to take certain things. Now, this intake of certain things for the purpose of the maintenance of health is not to be considered as attachment because it is partaken of as a necessity in the maintenance of the balance of the person, the health of the body. Even eating is not to be a pleasure; it is a medicine. Food has to be taken as a medicine for this illness of hunger. We do not take medicine because there is pleasure in taking it. It is a necessity. The diet of the senses and the food of the body are necessities to the extent they are unavoidable for existence, but they should not become luxuries and excitements of senses and the physical appetites.

Hence, there is this norm of a golden mean prescribed in our diet, in our food, in our intake; in our daily behaviour, in our work, in our occupation, in our character, in our conduct, in our sleep, in our wakefulness we should be normal. We should not be excessive either way. This shows the wisdom of the yoga of the Bhagavadgita that we should maintain samatva, which is yoga, a balanced outlook at every stage in yoga, even in the least and the most initial steps, because this balance called for implies our due regard for all things that are real, relatively at least, in the atmosphere outside. We do not disregard the world in our love for yoga, nor do we pamper, praise, eulogise, or get attached to the objects of sense. In all the levels of approach we maintain a wise, judicious attitude. Therefore, we are ever in a state of perfect equilibrium of conduct in attitude with all things at every level, whatever those things be. Hence, we are friends of all people: sarva-bhūta-hite ratāḥ (BG 5.25): The yogin is a well-meaning friend and benefactor of all. You have the goodness by which you show due regard even to the least of values in this world. The yogin respects everything. He does not disregard anything. Therefore, he is a benefactor, a lover, a friend, a philosopher and a guide of all. Such is the yoga of the Bhagavadgita, a wholesome outlook to the whole of life in all its manifestations.