Part 3: Bhagavad Gita, Commentary by THE SUPREME PONTIFF OF HINDUISM BHAGAWAN SRI NITHYANANDA PARAMASHIVAM - Chapter 1 - Shastras, stotras, sutras
without understanding they will never work. Most of the regulations laid down by many religions are beyond understanding. One religion will say you cannot eat pork. Another prohibits beef and yet another stipulates that everything can be and must be eaten. One religion will say that you can marry only once and must stay with that spouse for the duration of your life. Another will say you can leave one spouse and take another; some will say you can be married to four at a time.
Different religions say such confusing and contradictory things about what is right and wrong, and they have different gods and different versions of heaven and hell. It is as if each religion issues a different passport and visa when you die.
If one thinks about all this with awareness, the underlying reasons will become clear. The rights and wrongs that society and religions lay down have nothing to with the truth of existential reality. These regulations, which define our conduct, be they right or wrong, are in place for the sake of self-preservation. It is like saying, 'I agree not to kill you and in turn you agree not to kill me.' This gradually is extended across society. Such regulations are needed to provide safety to all those who live within that society.
What about those actions that extend beyond the individual? When one group attacks another group and kills its people, with or without provocation, how can you justify it? When you kill someone else in defense of your country you are called patriotic, and you are celebrated as a hero. But you are still a murderer! If the murder is carried out in the name of patriotism, does it become justifiable?
Throughout the history of mankind there have been hundreds, if not thousands of wars. In each war the victor was always considered to be in the right. All these wars were in defense of so-called noble principles. Whoever won had a nobler principle, that's all. If Hitler had won World War II, history would have been rewritten and he would have been a hero.
It is as the Tao says: there is no right or wrong, no good and bad, no light and darkness. Everything that is terribly wrong has something right in it for someone. Everything wonderfully right has something wrong in it for someone. Such is the truth of life.
What has been considered right at one point in time and space, is considered wrong at another point in time and space. What is considered absolutely incorrect at one time becomes universally acceptable in another era. At one time in Bharat, it was considered a duty and an honor for a woman to commit suicide by walking into the funeral pyre of her dead husband. If she did not voluntarily walk into the pyre, she was forcibly burnt. At one time, so-called witches were burnt at the stake and it was considered justifiable. Today these acts are considered barbaric aberrations.
Fundamental, existential truths cannot oscillate between right and wrong. They have to be one or the other at all times and in all space. Unfortunately, in the true existential sense, there is no such definition. It is simply because Existence does not operate that way. Existence is random, truly random. Randomness cannot be differentiated as right random and wrong random.
Human nature is such that whenever rules are made, the first impulse is to break the rule. This impulse is deeply rooted in us and is part of our desire to be free of all bondages. If you have a speed limit, and if you do not see a cop, you will speed. If you happen to get caught speeding and you are in a country where corruption is an acceptable practice, you may try to wriggle your way out through a bribe.
One can understand a child doing such a thing. A child is driven by curiosity and does things that may seem dangerous and incorrect to an adult. But why does a conditioned adult consistently break rules? First of all he does not believe that the rule applies to him. He is perfectly happy to have the rule applied to everyone except himself. Each man and woman would like to be free from rules that bind, but want them to be applied to others so that they can be free from interference.
In Bharat, when you travel in trains, and you buy the cheapest tickets, your seats will not be reserved. So you must fight to get a seat. People jump in through windows and push one another to get a seat. Then they try to prevent others from getting into that compartment! They will begrudge someone else having what they just struggled for.
Anything that you do out of a sense of duty to your conscience is always forced, because it is based only on what you have been taught as right or wrong, Because it is forced, you will always want to break away in some way or other from some of those rules. It is only when you consider something to be right or wrong based upon a deep internal awareness, that you do it with earnestness. You do it because something deep inside you tells you it is the right thing to do. Conscience is societal. Consciousness is natural.
As an adult, whatever you do must be done in awareness, not out of force.
Unfortunately, we always get caught in this game of choosing between right and wrong. We are conditioned from early childhood to play this game. Our emotional strings are controlled as if by a master puppeteer, through greed and fear. It could be your church telling you that if you covet your neighbor's wife you will go to hell. Or it could be your legal system that tells you if you do not pay taxes you will go to jail. Or it could be your adult child blackmailing you emotionally to continue financial support.
It also could be the attraction of becoming the President of your neighborhood Rotary Club, if you raise money for charity. Or the feeling of accomplishment that comes over you by jogging ten kilometers in the midday sun, because you have read it improves cardiovascular fitness.
In every action of ours, we are ruled either by fear or greed. Fear and greed are embedded deeply into our psyche through conditioned mindsets of good and bad. Be very clear, it is not your conscious mind directing you, not at all. It is your unconscious mind driving you through embedded memories, memories that you have limited access to.
If we act out of greed, we have temporary pleasure. Often even that pleasure is tinged with guilt. Even if you give to a beggar feeling charitable, you wonder at the back of your mind whether you are doing the right thing or possibly supporting one of their bad habits. Are you encouraging other able bodied people to beg? If the beggar is disabled, you remember stories about how children are maimed and used by beggar mafia in some countries. You can never win. For every well-intentioned action, your mind can bring up at least a few arguments against it.
If you do something out of fear, this bothers you even more. In addition to feeling guilty, you also feel you are a coward. In a big city like New York or Mumbai, you will see hundreds of people passing by a man or woman lying on the pavement. Or when some one is being mugged and crying for help, others refuse to get involved for fear of their safety. They will look away or close their windows. These people are afraid; they are afraid to get involved. They are afraid to help another human being in trouble. The same people will rush out to rescue a puppy. I am not against rescuing pups or kittens but why do you run away when another human seeks help?
Our concepts of right and wrong seem absolute to us, or at least absolute in relation to our conditioning. They are not. If you read the history of countries that were colonized, you will find that colonizers introduced many bad practices in the name of civilization.
Such incidents have happened for thousands of years. They are happening now as you read these words and they will happen again and again in the future. So, what can you do? People ask me, 'Are we to keep quiet and do nothing?'
No. First, drop your judgment about something or someone being right or wrong. You are no one to judge and in any case, your judgments are based purely upon your own social conditioning. God Almighty does not judge, contrary to what your religions may say. Drop your negativities first. Then you will realize that your impressions about other people's negativities will also drop. You will start seeing good in each person and in every situation.
Second, raise your awareness through meditation. Look inwards and connect with your consciousness. There is no other way for you to understand and accept the ways of nature. There is no absolute right or wrong in nature. Nature just flows. With meditation, you too learn to flow.
As you flow, you learn to act in awareness. You learn to extend a helping hand to a passerby even if it seems to involve personal danger. Actually, you will fall so much in tune with Existence that you won't even feel that there is danger that can threaten you. You will begin to experience that everything is happening only for the good.
One of my healers told me this incident recently.
As he was walking to a meeting he passed a man lying face down on the road. Normally he would have walked by, and he almost did. Then something strange happened. He thought of me and his legs couldn't move. They in fact moved backwards to the spot where the man lay. Despite the delay, he stayed till an ambulance came to pick up the man.
This is not about right and wrong. This is about awareness. This is not about what others would say or do. He said a few hundred people passed by looking and not doing anything. If so many people chose to do nothing, then some would consider the right action based on that alone, is it not? But for the person who stopped to help, the correct action was to be of service.
There are people who interpret their religious scriptures to mean that they can destroy those who do not believe in their God or their principles. How can you call these people or their religious leaders who encourage this attitude spiritual? There are millions, perhaps billions, who believe this implicitly and therefore act without awareness. How can spirituality be exclusive? It is never exclusive. It is inclusive, always inclusive. This divisiveness is what causes the collective unconsciousness to rise in our society.
Whenever something is collective, it will be from the unconscious. It can never be from awareness. To be in consciousness, you need to work individually. Conscience can be collective; Consciousness is the path of aloneness.
Do not worry about what others say about right and wrong, including me. That is my awareness, not yours. Go into your inner space and find out your own answers through a process of connecting with your awareness. Only then can you be free from your bondages of fear and greed, as well as guilt. Only then you will be liberated.
The War begins
1.13 Conches, bugles, trumpets, drums and horns all suddenly sounded,
Their combined sound renting the skies.
1.14 Seated on a magnificent chariot drawn by white horses,
Krishna and Arjuna sounded their divine conches.
1.15 Krishna blew on His conch, the Panchajanya;
Arjuna sounded the Devadatta; and Bhima, sounded his great conch called Paundra.
1.16,17,18 King Yudhishtra, the son of Kunti, blew his conch, the Anantavijaya, Nakula and Sahadeva blew the Sughosa and Manipuspaka.
That great archer the King of Kashi, the great fighter Sikhandi, Dhrishtadyumna,
Virata and the invincible Satyaki, Drupada, the sons of Draupadi, and the others,
Such as the mighty-armed son of Subhadra all sounded their conches.
Conches, called shank in Sanskrit, are the shells of mollusks that live in the sea. From time immemorial, Hindu scriptures have referred to the use of conches in ritualistic, devotional and celebratory occasions. In general, a conch was blown to signify obeisance to the divine or royalty, or in celebration of an auspicious and victorious occasion. Blowing on the conch signified joy.
It is said that the valampuri shank, the conch that describes a right hand spiral, has exceptional supernatural properties. The sound produced by blowing into a valampuri shank produces the sound of aum, the pranava mantra, which is the sound of creation. Experiments have shown that when the sound of aum is recorded digitally, the shape of the sound wave is a spiral similar to that of a valampuri shank!
Each of the great warriors in the Mahabharata war had his own personal conch, and each one's signature was the sound produced by his conch. Most of the great warriors also had their own flags that flew on their chariots and their weapons, especially their bows, had great spiritual significance. They were often bestowed upon the warrior status after long penance to the Divine. It is said that even if his flag were masked by dust and distance, Arjuna's presence in any part of the battlefield would be known by the sound of his conch and the twang of his bow!
When Bhishma blew on his conch in support of Duryodhana, the response was tumultuous on both sides. Every warrior on the battlefield took out his conch and blew his signature sound. Of all the sound that emanated at that moment, a few were heard above the rest. Krishna sounded his Panchajanya, the conch of Vishnu. The sound of Krishna's Panchajanya drowned out all other sounds on the battlefield. It was the announcement for all that the Divine was already present with the Pandava army.
Vyasa, through Sanjaya, says that Krishna sounded His divine conch. This is significant since Vyasa attributes divinity only to Krishna's conch, not to anyone else's. He refers to Krishna as Madhava, and later as Hrishikesa. Madhava signifies that Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu, who is the husband of Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth and Fortune and in this context, signifies that whoever Krishna sides with would be invincible. Krishna is then referred to as Hrishikesa, controller of the senses, the Super Conscious, who has created the maya, the illusion that is this Great War of Mahabharata.
Vyasa implies that all that happens is a creation of Krishna. For what purpose? He alone knows. The Divine truly has no purpose. The Divine IS, that's all.
Krishna was Arjuna's charioteer. The chariot was a blessing from Agni, the Fire God. This chariot was said to be capable of traversing all the three worlds. His bow gandiva was also a gift from Agni. Arjuna is referred to as Dhananjaya, winner of wealth, in reference to his ability to generate the wealth needed by his brother Yudhishtra.
Not to be outdone, Bhima blew on his conch Paundra, a fearsome sound that invoked dread amongst the Kaurava army. Here Bhima is called Vrikodara, one with the stomach of a wolf; Bhima was forever hungry and ate more than all his brothers combined, and yet had a lean and flat stomach of a wolf, and, like that predator, he was feared by his enemies for his strength and anger.
Bhima's sound was followed by that of the other three Pandava princes', Yudhishtra, Nakula and Sahadeva and then by the great warriors', Drupada, Virata, Satyaki, Sikandi, Dhrishtadyumna, Abhimanyu and others, all blowing on their conches in celebration of their impending victory.
Each of these warriors had a great history. Yudhishtra, the eldest of the Pandava princes was born to his mother Kunti through the grace of Yama, the God of Justice and Death, and was universally known as Dharmaraja, the King of Truth, as he was never known to tell a lie. Nakula and Sahadeva, were born to Madri, the second wife of Pandu, through the grace of the Ashwini Kumaras, celestial beings.
Drupada, the King of Panchala, was the father of Draupadi, wife of Pandavas and father of Dhrishtadyumna. Dhrishtadyumna was born to Drupada, when he prayed to Shiva to give him a son who would match Drona in valor and vanquish him in battle. Virata was the king in whose kingdom the five Pandava princes and Draupadi spent a year in hiding. His daughter married Abhimanyu, Arjuna's son by Subhadra, Krishna's sister.
Sikandi was born as Bhishma's nemesis, when Amba, a princess who Bhishma captured as a bride for his stepbrother Vichitravirya, immolated herself to be reborn to avenge her shame.
It is as if Sanjaya, the narrator of the incidents of war, repeatedly tries to impress upon the blind King Dhritharashtra the caliber of the Pandava warriors and their glorious antecedents, so that the shock of the impending disaster to the Kuru clan of Dhritharashtra would not be so unexpected. Sanjaya specifically refers to these warriors as 'aparajita', invincible, always victorious in whatever task they undertook, with the clear implication that they would be victorious in this war that they had embarked upon as well.
It is significant that Bhishma's conch, which was sounded by him as the Commander-in-Chief of the Kaurava army, to signify the beginning of the war, was responded to by Krishna, and not by Dhrishtadyumna, the Pandava Commander-in-Chief, or any of the other Pandava princes. Krishna's was a response, not a reaction to the challenge issued by Bhishma. It was an acceptance of the fact that whatever was thrown at the Pandava army was being accepted by Him, Divinity Incarnate.
Krishna, as the Super Conscious guide of the Pandava princes, absolves them of any guilt or wrong doing by taking upon Himself the responsibility for whatever is to happen. The rest of the Pandava army, including Arjuna, follows His lead in blowing their conches.