Half Knowledge is More Dangerous than Ignorance🔗

To protect the good and to destroy the evil, and to establish righteousness

I shall incarnate again and again.

Krishna always fulfills his promises. It is only you who needs a little openness to experience Him, that is all. Never think that He is not here.

A group of devotees was telling Ramakrishna that if they had been there during the period of Chaitanya, then they would have received his Divine love. Ramakrishna replied that there were some fools who were sitting before Chaitanya and said that they missed Krishna! These were the same people who were now before Ramakrishna saying that they had missed Chaitanya! These were the people who would tell Ramana Maharishi that they had missed Ramakrishna, and today, one of these people would be sitting here to say that they missed Krishna!

Understand that all you need is a little openness and sensitivity. If you can, you may listen to Krishna's flute here and now! If you miss it, you are missing it but Krishna comes down again and again to fulfill His promise. With a little more openness and sensitivity, you can experience Him wherever you are.

Krishna's Gita had very little to do with Pandava and Kaurava princes. The Parabrahman delivered it to every ordinary being, so that this individual mortal can realize that he too is an inherent part of the Parabrahman.

Krishna has done His job by giving you the Gita. His purpose is to help the entire world over time and space. It is for you to sit up and listen.

Do not sit here and complain or wonder what there is for you in the Gita. Open your mind and receive. You will be helped. That is the promise of the Master.

Q: How can Krishna who is Vedas Himself denigrate the Vedas saying that they are useless?

The differentiation that Krishna makes here is between acquired knowledge and experiential knowledge. He refers to Vedas and Sankhya as acquired knowledge, at least in so far as Arjuna and the rest of humanity are concerned.

As I mentioned before, no experience remains an experiential truth once it is expressed. Acquired knowledge can never be your truth. It is some one else's truth, not yours.

In Mahabharata there is this description of how Duryodhana borrowed the invincible armor of his teacher Drona.

Jayadratha killed Abhimanyu, Arjuna's son. Arjuna swore to kill Jayadratha before the next sunset. Arjuna was wreaking havoc in his fury and Duryodhana wailed in frustration to Drona, the Commander. Since Drona was protecting Jayadratha he lent his invincible magical armor to Duryodhana and told him to stop Arjuna's onslaught.

When Arjuna rained arrows from his mighty gandiva at Duryodhana they seemed to have no effect at all. Arjuna understood what had happened. He cut loose Duryodhana's chariot from the horses, got Duryodhana down on foot upon the ground and disarmed him. He then pierced parts of his body not covered by the armor till Duryodhana fled from the battlefield.

Like the uselessness of borrowed armor, borrowed knowledge is useless; in fact it can be more dangerous. It can boost one's ego to a point of self-destruction.

That is what happens to many philosophers and preachers. With a superficial knowledge that they have acquired by reading the scriptures, they believe that they have the same powers as the Masters who experienced and expressed those scriptures. They consider themselves as experts in Sankhya, Vedanta, Mimamsa and so on, and argue endlessly with no idea of what they are saying.

For someone who understands the oneness of divinity, there is no difference between what Sankara says and what Ramanuja says. There is no difference ultimately. It is only the approach that is different.

In a book store there was a display of the commentaries of Sankara and Ramanuja on Gita. A learned scholar puffed up with his own importance went to the bookseller and demanded, 'Do you know the difference between the commentary by Sankara and the one by Ramanuja? I see that you have them both here.'

'Oh, just forty rupees Sir,' said the bookseller. Just one dollar, that is all.

That is all the difference! No need to be puffed up in knowledge as if one knows the difference. You may say Sankara is steeped in gnana, knowledge, and Ramanuja is steeped in bhakti, devotion. No work of Ramanuja or anyone else can match the devotion of Sankara in his description of Devi in Soundaryalahiri. Ramanuja's commentaries are no less compared to those of Sankara. An enlightened Master's experience is always total. There is no separation as bhakti, gnana or dhyana, devotion, knowledge or meditation paths of excellence. They all lead to the same point.

Krishna tells Arjuna here to go beyond the three attributes explained in the Vedas. Once expressed, even the scriptures are governed by the attributes; they are in satva or goodness. Krishna urges Arjuna to transcend them and also transcend like and dislike, raga and dvesha, in order to reach the state of equanimity of a sage. In that state, He says it is as if the knowledge gained from the Vedas is as irrelevant as water to a person sitting in a river.

Krishna is not degrading knowledge; He is not insulting the scripture. He is telling Arjuna to go beyond acquired knowledge represented by the Vedas and Sankhya into the experiential knowledge of Yoga. Here the Yoga that Krishna is talking about is not the noun form of union, but the process of uniting.

Yoga is often referred to as union. As long as you call it this, you are only talking about the acquired knowledge of this great science and art. It becomes 'uniting' when you practice it, when you experience the process of uniting. This is what Krishna is referring to.

When a water drop in the ocean unites with the ocean, it is undifferentiated. It has no attributes any more. It has merged with the source from where it came. As long as it feels separate and retains its individuality, however much it may know about where it came from, it will remain separate. It has to drop its identity. This dropping of identity can never be intellectual; it can never be based on knowledge. It must be experiential; it must arise from the being.

Q: Krishna mentions Sankhya as the knowledge that has been taught to Arjuna. He says He wants to take Arjuna through Yoga. What is the difference?

Arjuna had earlier quoted extensively from the scriptures in the first chapter of Gita, Arjuna Vishada, Arjuna's dilemma. He said that if he killed his leaders, the Kuru race would be destroyed. The destruction of the lineage will bring in social evils. Social evils would then break up families and women will go astray. This will lead to degeneration of morals. Moral degeneration will lead to neglect of rituals to ancestors. Finally there will be destruction. This was the sum and substance of Arjuna’s understanding of what would happen if he continued to battle his foes.

Arjuna quoted the scriptures with his understanding of what he had been taught and understood. Krishna refers to all this as Sankhya. Sankhya here not only means the Sankhya philosophy developed by Sage Kapila, but encompasses all scriptural knowledge as well. As I said earlier Krishna does not pulll down this knowledge, but implicitly warns that knowledge without experience is dangerous. So, He says he will take Arjuna from knowledge into experience, from Sankhya into Yoga.

Scriptures of all evolved cultures have arisen out of the experienced wisdom of enlightened beings. They get diluted and distorted as others without the same experience, start expounding on that experience. Most others understand these scriptures at only the physical or gross level of knowledge as it is understood literally. There are many other layers of understanding.

For instance, in this verse about Sankhya alone, one can get into endless arguments about the different interpretations of the Vedas such as Sankhya and others without coming into any practical conclusion. Such argument is the territory of philosophers. What Krishna tries to do is to take us beyond these arguments.