The Breakdown🔗

1.47 Sañjaya said:

Arjuna was ready to give up. He was all set to run away from the battlefield and escape from the reality of his duty.

He had convinced himself through his own illusory arguments that what he had embarked upon was pure evil, nothing but evil, and therefore he wanted no part of it. He said, 'I am ready to lay down arms and be defenseless. Let Duryodhana and his men kill me.'

For a kṣatriya to say this means one of two things: His act is one of total surrender, or the helplessness of extreme confusion. A kṣatriya warrior, a supreme warrior such as Arjuna knows no fear. It is neither fear of death nor fear of injury that compels him to say what he did.

As I remarked earlier, Arjuna was not in a mode of total surrender, not yet. He was not in the mode of ahiṁsā, nonviolence. He was not in tune with the cosmic consciousness to say that 'Killing others is killing myself, as I feel they are one with me.' His arguments about killing his kinsmen being like killing himself were born out of his ego and not out of self-realization.

Arjuna's desperation, his feeling of helplessness arose from his dilemma, which was becoming more extreme by the minute. Arjuna was an intelligent man, a thoughtful man. He was a man accustomed to the light of clarity but who was now in darkness. He did not know where he was headed. He was torn between his duty as a kṣatriya prince, and the scriptural codes of morality.

Arjuna's distress was complete. He sat down, unable to bear the weight of his emotions. He put down his bow and arrows, which signified that he was out of the battle.

Arjuna's delusion was complete. He was as far away from reality as he could possibly get. The greatest of warriors of his time, the greatest of men, was in the depths of despair due to the inner turmoil that he was going through.

The inner conflict between his upbringing and value systems, his saṁskāras and what he was about to do by waging war against his kinsmen, had reduced him to a pitiable wreck, who had now abandoned his weapons and collapsed inside his chariot. Arjuna, at this point, was no example of a true kṣatriya.

Arjuna was now a true example of mankind. He was being human. He was torn between darkness and light. He was experiencing the deep conflict between the unconscious saṁskāras that were driving him and the reality of what he ought to do. The clarity that would come about with the help of the great master, would be his enlightenment.

The darkness that surrounded Arjuna at this stage was māyā, the illusion that prevents all human beings from perceiving the Truth of Reality that pervades all our experiences. Yā mā iti māyā, that which is not real but appears as absolute is māyā. Māyā is not unreal in the sense that it does not exist. Māyā truly exists as reality. It veils, it covers Reality, the ultimate Truth, the Truth of our inner awareness, the Truth of our inner divinity; and therefore it is unreal, an illusion.

Had Arjuna been Krishna, had Arjuna been enlightened, he would not have been tormented by the play of his māyā. Had Arjuna been a Duryodhana, or even a Bhima whose individual consciousness was not awakened, he would have accepted the māyā without question, and again not been tormented by it. But, Arjuna is intelligent. He is partially awakened, a seeker. He is in the presence of the greatest of all masters. He is struggling to rid himself of his māyā and seek clarity.

It is Arjuna's ego that created the māyā in him. His own identity and his own identification with who he was, along with his conviction that he should preserve his lineage - all these factors created the illusion in him that he was something other than who he was. These created the doubt in him that he should do something other than what he was there to do.

All of us come into this world with no identity. As we grow we collect labels describing ourselves - mother, father, brother, sister, relative, employer, employee, colleague, enemy and so on. We become so associated with the labels and their accessories that we forget who we really are. Our life is then about seeking fulfillment in the wrong places.

A small story:

A worried man went to see a psychiatrist. He was smoking a pipe and wearing strange beads. He had long hair and his trousers were torn in some places.

Seeing him, the psychiatrist said, 'You say you're not a hippie. Then why are your clothes and hair like this?'

The worried man replied, 'That's what I'm here to find out, doctor.'

This is how it is for most of us! Like the hippie who went to the doctor to know himself, we search for happiness in the external world because that is where we have been taught to look for fulfillment. We only know how to look outside. Unfortunately, we keep believing that our bliss is outside of ourselves rather than at the core of our being. We have not learned how to look within and experience it.

Happiness comes from within. Eternal happiness that constantly flows as bliss is always within. You cannot find it outside. You cannot reach it through material possessions, through relationships, through selfish philanthropy. It is a state of no-mind that you experience within yourself.

As very young children we were all in bliss. Have you ever seen an unhappy baby, except when it is physically disturbed by hunger, thirst or pain? A young child is forever in bliss, always curious, always seeking, always energetic. As we grow, as we learn from others, we are taught to shift our attention away from that bliss. We learn from elders, from teachers, from people around us who have been at it longer than us. In short, we learn how to stop feeling blissful.

Just as we learned how to stop feeling blissful, we can also learn how to 'un-stop' that stopping of bliss. We can relearn how to connect with our blissful nature again. We can learn to become aware of who we really are.

That is the process Arjuna was going through. He had lost his awareness of inner bliss because of his saṁskāras and was in the deep throes of despair. The process of relearning, the process of transformation at the hands of the master was about to begin. If we become aware of that process, if we follow that process carefully over the eighteen chapters that the master takes His disciple through, we too can become aware.

Shankara says beautifully:

If you imbibe even a little of Bhagavad Gita, if you drink even a drop of Ganga water, if you think even once about that great master Krishna, you will never have to face death.

Q: Swamiji, how does the tale of a war help us in day-to-day issues? There have been hundreds, if not thousands of wars in the history of mankind, and many have been well documented. These have not stopped other wars. They have not helped mankind learn. How does one expect Bhagavad Gita to transform peoples' attitudes?

Mahabharata is not merely the tale of a war. It is a tale of many lives, which get involved in a war. The war itself is incidental to the story of the Pandava and Kaurava princes. What led to the war, how it could have been avoided and most importantly, why it was not avoided are the experiences from this epic.

Contrary to most accounts of wars, written as historical documents, Bhagavad Gita is about how an expression of the Divine convinces its human aspect to go to war as a part of fulfilling its responsibilities.

Bhagavad Gita is not about war; it is about how one should act in awareness, whatever be the circumstances before us. We cannot always choose the events of our lives, but we can choose to live them with awareness and spiritual maturity.

The scriptural authority of Gita stems from the assurance of Krishna guaranteeing Arjuna that His words are the Truth. It is the Divine instructing the human. You may not know or even believe that someone like Krishna ever lived on this planet earth. But many great masters throughout the ages have meditated upon these truths expounded by Krishna and affirmed them with their own direct experiences. I affirm them with my own inner experiences of the cosmic truth. Every word of this scripture resounds with Truth.

The truth of Bhagavad Gita exists at many levels. What you read from a translation or even a commentary is still only superficial. It is at the physical level. There are many more energy levels at which the Bhagavad Gita needs to be understood. These can only be conveyed in the intimacy of the master-disciple relationship.

Any personal transformation is dependent upon two things. First, we must want to be transformed. No master, no book, nothing can be of help if we do not wish to transform ourselves. We must seek to be transformed. The universe is not bothered about whether we are transformed or not; it is up to us. Second, we must be in the present moment in order for that transformation, that alchemy to happen. You cannot live in the past or fantasize about the future and expect to be transformed.

That is why meditation is such a powerful tool of personal transformation. In fact it is the only real tool of personal transformation, in addition to the enlightened master. No one can meditate on our behalf; we need to do it for ourselves. With practice, meditation immediately brings us into the present moment. We can be transformed, liberated, enlightened.

Unlike addictions that lower our consciousness and require more and more for the same effect, meditation raises our consciousness and takes less and less to get the same and deeper benefits. With experience, we will find that we flow through our days in mindful awareness and bliss.

Bhagavad Gita is meditation. Each verse is a sūtra that we can meditate upon. These verses, these profound truths, will take us deeper into inner awareness in meditation. As we contemplate upon them, they can transform us as nothing else can. That is why Shankara says that even a little reading of the Bhagavad Gita will liberate us.

Metaphorically, this epic is the story of our own inner war. It is the fight between our positive and negative tendencies, our fear and greed. In many ways we are at war from the moment we are socialized and conditioned.

Unfortunately, we are constantly at odds with ourselves. We do not know how to accept and celebrate everything that happens in the inner world and the outer world. We have yet to learn that life is good and our nature is bliss. So we struggle to define and bring 'order' to everything in life with the hope that we can succeed in being happy or at least not unhappy. In doing this we only bring chaos and suffering to ourselves and others.

Mahabharata is the story of this inner war. That is why this great expression, Bhagavad Gita, touches and transforms us even today. It is Arjuna's story but it is our story as well!

Thus ends the first chapter of the dialogue between Sri Krishna and Arjuna, called Arjunaviṣāda Yogaḥ, in the Brahmavidya Yogashastra Bhagavad Gita Upaniṣad.