The Only Reality In Life Is Impermanence

2.14 O son of Kunti, contact with sense objects causes heat and cold, pleasure and pain, and these have a beginning and an end.

O Bharata, these are not permanent; endure them bravely.

2.15 O chief among men, these surely do not afflict the man who is centered,

Pleasure and pain are the same to him and he is ready for enlightenment.

Part 3: Bhagavad Gita, Commentary by THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM - Chapter 2 - You are God_English_part_3.md

2.16 The nonexistent has no being; that which exists never ceases to exist;

This truth about both is perceived by those who know the Truth.

2.17 Know It to be indestructible, by which all this body is pervaded.

Nothing can destroy It, the Imperishable.

2.18 These bodies of the material energy are perishable.

The Energy itself is eternal, incomprehensible and indestructible.

Therefore, fight, O Bharata.

Krishna says here that the sensory experiences are all temporary. Feelings of hot and cold, sweet and sour, wet and dry, experiences of pain and pleasure, as well as other experiences of like and dislike are all temporary. These experiences do not affect the centered person who is qualified to be enlightened.

Buddha refers to sensory experiences as anichha or impermanent and unreal. That they are impermanent is easy to understand. These experiences last only as long as the sensory stimuli are in place. Moreover, they are relative. What may be considered hot by one person may not be perceived as hot by another. Certainly, the conclusions that heat is pleasurable or cold is pleasurable are both specific to individuals and circumstances. These are related to time, space and individuals.

There are many sadhus - ascetics, who stay in the higher reaches of the Himalayan mountains with very little clothing, in what everyone would consider bitter cold. There are those who carry out the parikrama, circumambulation, of Mount Kailash and Lake Mansarovar with meager clothing and footwear. Studies have been conducted on Tibetan Lamas in their high altitude snowcovered monasteries that show how the Lamas can bear extreme cold without any discomfort. Renowned scientists from reputed institutions such as the Harvard Medical School have conducted such studies.

When nature is accepted totally, heat, cold, rain, dryness and all these changes do not affect the mindbody system. If we walk around without footwear, the earth that we walk upon becomes our friend. As long as we wear footwear with the intention of protecting ourselves from nature, we are treating nature as an outsider, as an enemy. We can therefore never be comfortable with nature because of this attitude.

One who is firmly grounded in himself is grounded in nature. To such a person, changes in nature's parameters such as heat and cold, rain and shine, make no difference. They do not give him either pleasure or pain. Such a person treats them naturally, equally, with no difference.

Krishna says that such a person is qualified and ready for enlightenment. Such persons have brought their senses under control, and as a result have their mind too under control.

What Krishna says here, and what was understood by the wise sages of the East for thousands of years, is only now being grasped by scientists and researchers.

The mind-body system that we are born with is transient, in the sense that it is perishable and ceases to exist at death. No human being, or for that matter, any living being on this planet Earth is exempt from this rule. Everything in material form ceases to exist in that form at some point in time, and in that sense, does not have permanence or a basis in Truth.

It is now accepted by medical science that the mindbody dies many deaths before its final exit. Cells within our body die in thousands everyday and get reborn. Over a period of a few years, every single cell in the mindbody system is replaced and renewed. What you were two or three years ago is not what you are today. What you are today is not what you will be in two or three years from now. Every single cell in your mind-body system, and therefore, every single bone, muscle, tissue, artery, vein, limb and body part are new, completely different from what they were two or three years ago.

The mind-body continually ceases to exist and gets recreated. It is not permanent. It is transient.

Separate from the mind body system is our spirit that lives on eternally. The spirit remains the same throughout our life with no change, despite all the changes to the mind body system. It continues to be, to exist, even after our death. The spirit does not die with the body. It lives on. It is permanent and true.

When one understands this difference between what is eternal - nithya, and what is transient - mithya, one becomes a seer and knower of Truth.

Nithya and mithya do not translate into real and unreal. In the same way maya is not unreal. Maya and mithya are real and perceived by our senses but they are not true, they are not lasting. They are not sat - truth, they are asat - untruth. They are factually real but truthfully unreal. That which is true will always be true, it cannot cease to exist. Truth here refers to the state of permanence, of being eternal.

I say a living Master is not present as you feel, and a dead Master is not absent as you think. The presence of a dead Master, an enlightened dead Master, is permanent and always real. A living Master's form is not His presence. He is present in His absence as well.

Our perceptions through our senses may be real but not necessarily true. What is an observed fact is not necessarily true. A dream is very real when it happens. You may get angry, frightened, excited, lustful and all of these when you dream. Your body responds to these emotions that you feel in a dream and your senses react to what you observe in the dream. Yet the moment you start witnessing the dream, you awaken. You cannot dream when you become aware. The dream is not true, though it seemed real.

The same happens when you are awake and daydreaming, which is most of the time. You are awake but you fantasize. The fantasies are real when you undergo the experience; they exist in your mind and even your senses but they are not true. They are not permanent and you cannot do anything tangible with them.

Even when you think you are fully awake, what you perceive through your senses may not be what you interpret them to mean. Your mind always filters its own lens of the ego. You judge whatever you perceive through your conditioned memories. In almost all cases, your judgment has already been made. All that you do is selectively put together pieces of what you perceive, to support your judgment.

That is the reason why the great Masters have always urged their disciples to wake up. Jagrat is the word used to awaken them. This is not the call to wake up from sleep but the call to wake up into awareness! It is the call to emerge from the non-existent reality of facts and observation into the truly existent Truth of self-experience.

Most of the time we exist in our past or future. We are constantly caught in the experiences of the past, reliving them under the excuse of learning from them, but in actuality, we are caught in guilt, regret or pleasure from remembering the past experiences and memories with no ability whatsoever to do anything about them. They are the ghosts hovering in our lives. The past is history. It is gone. The moving finger has written and moved on. There is no way that it will erase even a single thing that has been written. Our intelligence, creativity and bliss can be accessed only in this present moment, not in reviewing the past.

Our other mistake is to speculate about the future. The future is just as unreal as the past. If anything, it is more unreal, as it has not even happened. Yet, we build castles, we plan, we dream, and we fantasize about the future without the capacity to execute any of it. We are not even confident of taking our next breath that is not under our control. How can we control events of the future when we cannot control our breath?

The futility of our constant movement between past to future and back again is the greatest wonder of it all. It is merely the stuff of our thoughts and our belief that it is real. And it is the source of all of our suffering!

The only truth, the only true reality, is the truth of this very moment. As long as we focus on this present moment, we are truly aware and centered. The present moment never ceases to exist. In fact, that is all that does exist. The present moment alone is sat, truth, everything else is asat, untruth.

One who realizes this and acts accordingly, says Krishna, is enlightened.

We are all made of body, mind and spirit. The body is tangible; we can feel its boundaries. When a part of the body is sick, we can feel the discomfort. As long as we feel the body working smoothly, the parts of our body, we say we are in good health.

Our mind is subtle. We do not feel the mind in the same way as we feel the body. We do not feel its boundaries. Yet, we feel the effects of the mind: thoughts, desires, emotions etc. Modern scientific studies have shown that what we term as mind is spread all over the body. Mind and its intelligence are inbuilt into our cellular structure.

Recent studies have shown that it is our belief systems, which in turn arise from our experiences that define the development of our mind, and in turn influence the cellular structure. Earlier it was believed that genetic modifications to the cellular structures influenced the way we behaved. Now it is proven that it is our behavior that leads to our beliefs and thereafter determines our genetics.

Even subtler is the spirit. In fact, many people question this entity called spirit. What is it, they ask? What is this thing called spirit or soul? We cannot see it and we cannot touch it. Becoming aware of this subtle spirit or soul is just what Self-realization is all about.

In these verses, Krishna says first that the spirit pervades the body. His definition of body is the mindbody system. Secondly, He states that the body and mind are destroyed at death. Thirdly, He declares that the spirit does not die at death. Fourthly, He explains that the spirit is beyond our mental comprehension.

When death happens, body functions stop. Senses that are a function of the mind stop working. The brain which processes thoughts stops working. The entire mind-body system is then left by itself and it degenerates. This part is clear to all of us who have seen death.

What is unclear or unknown to us is that there is something within us that does not perish at death. Krishna clarifies here that this is the Self, the Ātman, the energy that never dies.

Upanishads talk about this spirit as dwelling deep in our hearts and being of such minute proportions that it is smaller than a fraction of a fraction of one's hair!

What is death? Is it the spirit leaving the body that causes death or is it that death forces the spirit into leaving the body? This argument becomes irrelevant once one understands that the body and the mind-body systems are perishable, that it has a definite shelf life. It comes with an expiry date, whatever that date may be. However, beyond this expiry date, there is something that lives on and that is the spirit.

This spirit is energy; it is the energy of life. As I explained before, after death this energy moves from within the body that it occupied temporarily to the energy that is outside the body, the universal energy that surrounds the body.

Krishna urges Arjuna to fight, with the full understanding that what he thinks of as real is unreal, that what he thinks of as permanent is impermanent, and what he thinks he is about to destroy can, in truth, never be destroyed.

Arjuna is overcome with remorse, guilt, pity and insecurity at the very thought of killing his kinsmen. He believes that he is committing a mortal sin by killing them, since he thinks it will be the end of them. Krishna tells him to open his eyes. He tells Arjuna that what he is about to do will only destroy that which is going to perish anyway. Even if he wanted to, Arjuna cannot destroy the imperishable spirit that lives on.

Arjuna's concern about the death of his kinsmen and elders arises out of his insecurity about his own death. He does not realize his true imperishable nature and therefore he is afraid of dying. By extension, he is afraid of others' deaths as well, especially at his own hands. Krishna tells him that there is no such thing as death. He tells him that death is unreal.

All our lives we see people around us dying. We all know that there is no one who is immortal. We all know that death is the only certainty in this otherwise uncertain world. Everyone, whether a beggar or a prince, must die.

When we wake up from a dream, we don't mourn our dream lives, as real as they felt at the time. Do we? No. In the same way, when we awaken into the highest state of consciousness, we have the same experience that this 'real' life was only a dream. There is nothing to mourn or fret over. The lineage of all enlightened Masters the world over has again and again supported Krishna's declarations with their own direct experience. The body is just the shell that houses your spirit. Even when the body perishes, you do not. It is impossible because you are eternal. You are bliss.

Krishna is stating this reality, straight out. He says firmly that there is no such thing as death. He says what dies or seems to perish is unreal; it had no permanent existence any way.

What does have existence, what is truly real, exists now, has always existed and will exist forever!