Equanimity of Mind🔗

12.17 He who does not rejoice or hate or grieve or desire, renounces both good and evil and who is full of devotion, he is dear to Me.

Krishna now goes into another level of controlling the mind. He now refers to one who does not love or hate. He is not talking about not loving anyone. When we love the way we do, with conditionality and expectations, it works well as long as these expectations from and about others are fulfilled. When something does not work the way we wish it to, the love disappears like a dewdrop in the sun. In its place, hate appears.

Hatred and love are opposite sides of the same coin as long as love is conditional. Love can flip into hatred in a moment, the moment we feel that our expectations are threatened. In love of this type, there is external rejoicing, sharing of joy and happiness and public expression of happiness as long as the emotion remains.

Often, love or what we believe is love is related to time and space. So long as the distance is large and the time of contact is minimal we see a few defects in those we profess to love. We aren't together long enough to put expectations on them. However, once we get closer and spend more time, we see the real picture. No wonder they say familiarity breeds contempt. It can also convert love into hatred. To transcend love and hatred which are two different expressions of the same perceived reality, we need to drop expectations. We need to develop a sense of non-attachment. We need to be unconditional in our love.

We all go through several stages of relationships in our lifetime. As children, we are totally dependent upon parents. Our parents influence us and our love for our parents is conditional. We love them only because there is no option. To survive, a child must depend upon its parents. An infant's natural behavior is self-centered and whatever natural emotion it has for its parents and guardians is geared to its own survival. It is one of absolute dependence.

As we grow into adolescence, we open up to the world and question many things we took for granted as an infant or a child; therefore, teenagers rebel. Adolescents throw away the dependence that they had for parents and elders. They wish to be independent. They break rules.

In adulthood, we learn that to survive and coexist, we need to follow societal rules and regulations. We develop skills to get along with others. We learn to work and relate with others. Otherwise, we may become misfits in society. The single most important lesson that people learn in adulthood is that it is important to relate with people meaningfully.

As we grow and mature, and the spirit and its development become important, we seek guidance. We look for a Master. With the Master, the relationship is the reverse of what we started with as a child. We are once again concerned about survival, but it is the survival of the spirit and not the mind or body. To help in this survival of the spirit, the relationship that we need with the Master is one of absolute dependence once again, but with a difference. For the relationship to work, it now needs to be totally unconditional and based upon deep trust.

The only relationship that will work with the Master is total and unconditional love. It is absolute surrender. Surrender transcends love and hate. When one is in a mood of total surrender to the Master or the Divine, both being one and the same, the concept of good and evil, sin and merit disappear.

In a spiritual sense, there is nothing that is a sin. No one is sitting up there with a notebook and pencil and deciding whether we should go to hell or heaven by measuring our sins. There is no hell or heaven. Hell and heaven are not geographical. They are psychological, within our mind and attitude. We commit sins because we are already in our own hell. We do well to others when we are in our space of heaven or bliss.

Religions try and control us through concepts of sin, original sin, hell and heaven. Please understand that there is no such thing as sin, or hell and heaven. Those who term you sinners are sinners themselves. That's why they call you sinners because they wish to control you. All religions try to control through fear and greed, through the carrot and stick. Otherwise religions cannot hold us, cannot survive as business entities, which is what they are.

Krishna breaks the mold. He tells us, 'Go beyond good and evil.' He says that because there is no such thing as good and evil. It is all in our mind. When we understand this Truth we are in His realm. That's His promise.

Q Dear Master, during the great war of Mahabharata everyone was following unlawful methods. Why?

At the beginning of the Mahabharata war everybody followed dharma - righteousness. But after a while you start seeing adharma, non-righteous behavior, such as killing at night. All five sons of the Pandavas were killed when they were sleeping. Arjuna attacked Karna when he was unarmed. Abhimanyu was killed by a group of warriors. He was alone without a weapon, without a

chariot. His own relatives killed him in the presence of his grandfather and he was hardly eighteen years old then.

The question you are asking is right. What happened exactly is that when the war started, it was for dharma. Slowly, the Kauravas went one step further, so the Pandavas also took one step beyond dharma. The Kauravas broke more dharmic rules in retaliation. So the Pandavas kept pace with the Kauravas.

By the tenth day, all rules were broken and it turned into a brutal war. After the tenth day it could no longer be called Dharma kshetra, place of dharma. It was called dharma kshetra as long as Bhishma was the commander. It seems as if the moment Bhishma moved away from the battlefield, from that day onward, it could not be called dharma kshetra. It was just a brutal field, not a battlefield.

The Mahabharata war was a representation of life as it was lived in that age. Vyasa, its author, has not tried to apply makeup. People ask whether the Mahabharata war happened at all. Let me tell you this: if the Mahabharata was a story and not history, Vyasa should receive multiple Pulitzer prizes for his highly creative work! The Mahabharata is the longest literary work in the whole world. It is larger than the Greek epics. Vyasa had no computer, no tape recorder with speech to text capabilities. He dictated and Lord Ganesha wrote it down!

The Mahabharata has at least 10,000 stories woven into it. All of these are seamlessly woven into the main text even though each is an independent event. Just imagine the effort required to create hundreds of thousands of characters and maintain the integrity of these characters throughout the epic without the help of editors. Do you think anyone could do it today?

Because it is impossible to create such a work of fiction, one needs to accept this as a compilation of true incidents that reflect the lifestyle in what is referred to as Treta Yuga – third quarter of Time - in our scriptures. This is how people behaved then and how people behave now.

This Is Whom I Love

12.18,19 One who treats friends and enemies the same, who faces in the same manner honor and dishonor, heat

and cold, happiness and sorrow, fame and infamy, one who is always free from attachment, always silent and satisfied with anything, without a fixed home, who is fixed in mind and who is devoted to Me, such a person is very dear to Me.

12.20 Those who truly follow this imperishable path of righteousness with great faith, making Me the supreme goal, are very dear to Me.