The Spiritual Import of the Mahabharata and the Bhagavadgita- 3.6 -Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, January 10,, 2021. 02 : 35. PM.
Chapter-3. The World is the Face of God - 6.

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The gods are watching us. They are seeing us even now. They are not non-existent myths, as people may imagine. They are as real as hard brick before us, and the Yoga Vasishtha tells us in a beautiful verse that when a person becomes completely surrendered to the law of the world—he is egoless, in other words—it becomes the duty of the rulers of the cosmos to take care and protect this individual. As the divinities take care of all the quarters of the cosmos, so the seeker is protected by all the angels in the heavens—gods in swarga, divinities all over, to whom we have paid scant respect earlier due to the affirmation of our ego. God Himself descends in a magnificent form, and to recollect what we have studied earlier in the Udyogaparva of the Mahabharata, divine forces get gathered for the help of the Pandavas.

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Yet everything has not been done, and everything has not been said. There is much more to be done, much more to be said. We know very well that the great glory in which the Pandavas found themselves in the midst of powers like Sri Krishna in the Udyogaparva was not the end of all things. There was suffering yet to come because, again to recall to memory the samadhis of Patanjali—savitarka, nirvitarka, savichar, nirvichar—they are not enough. There is great struggling on the path; every moment there is an encounter. At every moment, at every step, there is a power that is facing us as an opposite, as an object. The object opposes the subject at every level, and objects change their colours every moment, at every stage, like a chameleon. If today people are the objects, tomorrow the five elements are the objects, and they stand before us. What will we do to them? It is in the savitarka process of Patanjali that we encounter the five elements. The people have already gone; we do not have any more trouble with people afterwards. The dealings with people are over in the earlier stages of yama, niyama, etc. We have no fears from human beings or any other living beings; we have fear only from the five elements, and we do not imagine that they can give any trouble to us. Really speaking, they are the masters. The five elements are the rulers, and we can do nothing to them. We cannot please them easily, because to comply with the law of physical nature is hard enough.

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So it is naturally a surprise to the unsuspecting seeker to be faced with such realities, and to be terrorised once again in the same manner as before by forces unseen and unexpected. When we face in battle any power, it pushes forth all its energies to the maximum extent. Our energies come to the forefront only when we are opposed; otherwise no one can know what one’s strength is. When everything is failing and our last resort is to save ourselves, then we unleash all our strength. So it is that the Pandavas had to face a set of forces which encountered them with all their might and main. At that time there is a peculiar sorrow of the soul, which catches it by the neck, as it were, and the soul retaliates. “Not this, and it is not for me,” says the soul.

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To be continued ....

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