The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita- 3.2 -Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday, September 16, 2020. 7: 00.AM.

Chapter-3. The World is the Face of God - 2.

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1.

In the process of evolution there is a transfiguration of the structure of individuality. The individuality transforms itself in the process of evolution, and simultaneously with this transformation, the notions, the ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, pleasure and pain also change. What is pleasant today need not be pleasant even to me, myself tomorrow, on account of the change of my attitude to things due to a shift of emphasis in the process of evolution. This is commonplace and does not require much commentary. 

2.

Hence we should not be under the erroneous notion that a jubilant feeling within us is a sign of spiritual vision, since our jubilation is somehow or other connected with the nature of our own personality. The likes and dislikes of the mind of an individual are reactions set up by the structure of the mind of that individual. The structure of the mind is responsible for the particular type of satisfaction that it feels, and the particular type of dissatisfaction also, which follows automatically from this structure. 

3.

So what I like need not be your liking, it follows, because of the simple fact that minds are not made in the same manner. Hence, a particular sense of elation within oneself can be a great credit to the capacity to achieve in one’s own individual mind that which one seeks as something pleasant. But we are told again and again that the pleasant need not necessarily be the good, and the good need not necessarily be the pleasant, although the good can also be the pleasant. 

4.

Hence the mass of votes poured upon Yudhishthira in the form of the rajasuya sacrifice, culminating in his coronation through the rajasuya, struck at the same time a note of retrogression by ways and means which were unthinkable; and this elation, and the rising to the throne after the rajasuya, ended in the banishment of the very same empire and emperor to the grief-stricken life of the wilderness of the jungles in the Aranyapurva.

To be continued ...


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