3.Duty: An Empirical Manifestation of True Being : 5

The Teachings of the Bhagavadgita :


Part -5.


Kama is a very wide word, with a meaning which is capable of covering every form of longing. When desire intensifies itself, we call it passion. In Sanskrit we have many words indicating the same meaning: raga, kama, etc. An intense longing for something, an intense craving to do something, a yearning to possess something in an overwhelmingly powerful manner, is a passion – a kama, a raga. Any obstacle in the direction of the fulfilment of this passion becomes the target of anger of that person. Krodha follows therefore, as a brother of kama – and when one is, the other one also is. These impulsions are the products or the results of a very active manifestation of rajoguna – rajas – that is present in human personality, and no one can subdue them, normally speaking. A higher meditative technique may have to be employed, and there is no other recipe for this illness of man. The meditational technique that is very, very precisely stated in only a few words towards the end of the third chapter is to be dilated upon further on when we go to the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters, indicating thereby the lower can be controlled only by resort to the higher. You cannot employ lower means to restrain these lower impulses. Only a greater force can control a lower force. The reason has to be trained, for a long time, in carrying on correct judgment of things, so that the emotions may not preponderate and take advantage of the position when the reason is out of guard sometimes. 


The Bhagavadgita will tell us in a half-sentence, as it were, towards the end of the third chapter, that the final panacea for this great illness of man is only refuge to the great Atman or the Self that transcends even the reason of man. This is like a theorem that is being stated, whose explanations have to be provided for a little later. Yet, man seems to be helpless. There is a subtle feeling in every one of us that in spite of this glorious teaching, we seem to be somehow helpless, in some mysterious manner, and we cannot entirely be confident that we can be successful in this great adventure of the putting into daily action of this philosophical principle.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued   ....