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Pardon me for the interregnum in which I had vanished from these pages. Hereafter you would get to be reading regularly. And that’s a promise!
THE HOLY GITA
CHAPTER THREE
KARMA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF ACTION OR THE METHOD OF WORK
VERSE NUMBER 34
Text in Transliteration
Indriyasye ‘ndriyasyaa ‘rthe raagadveshau vyavasthitau
Tayor na vasam aagacchet tau hy asya paripanthinau
Text in English
Attachment and aversion of the senses for their respective objects are natural; let none come under their domination; they are verily his enemies.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIDBHAVANANDA
Life in the body and in the senses is not an end in itself; it is only a passing phase. Senses have been serviceable for the evolution of the subhuman into the human. Now the goal for the human is to evolve into the divine. Senses are stumbling-blocks to it. They are therefore labeled the enemies of a spiritual aspirant. They require to be transcended. It is from attachments and aversion that they get their power to function. When these dualities are done away with, the senses cease to be enemies. Likes and dislikes are created by the egoistic attitude. When this hurtful attitude is changed into the helpful devotional attitude, likes and dislikes melt away; the senses in their turn get tamed down.
The function of the scriptures is to exhort man to change his attitude from the base to the noble. When the life for the individual is converted into the life for the Lord, the senses cease to be enemies.
SRI RAMAKRISHNA AS QUOTED BY SWAMI SIDBHAVANANDA
When can desire and hatred, the enemies of man be destroyed? These propensities of the mind prove themselves enemies when directed to worldly affairs. They become allies when directed Godward. Desires for worldly things must be converted into the desire for God. Let man be annoyed with God and agency with Him for not revealing Himself. Desire and anger cannot be totally destroyed, but they can be transmuted; then they become harmless.
SWAMI SIVANANDA
Each sense has got an attraction for a pleasant object and aversion for a disagreeable object. If one can control these two currents, viz., attachment and aversion, he will not come under the sway of these two currents. Here lies the scope for personal exertion or Purushartha. Nature which contains the sum total of one’s Samskaras or the latent self-productive impressions of the past actions of merit and demerit draws a man to the course through the two currents, attachement and avertion. If one can control these two currents, if he can rise above the sway of love and hate through discrimination and Vichara or right enquiry, he can conquer Nature and attain immortality and eternal bliss. He will no longer be subject to his own nature now. One should always exert to free himself from attachment and aversion to the objects of the senses.
The blogger's opinion;
While studying Gita one should have a deep faith in the rightness of the Lord’s words and our limitations to understand Him fully. Since the Lord is teaching not for the caviling and doubting Thomases but for persons and humble but daring students like a faithful Arjuna, He is not afraid of saying things like, “for they (the five senses) are his veritable enemies.”
Is it a sin if I love my daughter and hate the brat who plunged some sharp instrument into the innards of Nirbaya on her last bus ride? Isn’t it natural for me to hate the rapists of Nirbhaya? But yet the Lord says attachment and aversion are my two enemies! On a bird’s view of things said by the Lord, it would appear as hypocrisy. This is exactly why we need able commentators like Swami Chidbhavananda and Swami Sivananda. The former speaks about the serviceability of the senses in the day to day course of the life of Man. The later speaks about subjugating the senses so their services may be directed to the Lord.
And both mean one and the same thing!
We cannot subjugate senses while still immersed in the crass worldly life. For example, every man can form desire a beautiful wench but can anyone be commanded to make love to an ugly leper with wound all over her body which emanates a smell typical in her case! Leave that, can even a good and perfect man be forced to ministrate to a leper?
But a Mother Theresa could do it with ecstatic love and affection! How? In what way she was different from others? The answer is not far to seek. While ministering to the lepers and the depraved was her act born of love for Her God, we cannot escape from subjectivising the whole thing.
But don’t we have a right to lead a good life? Is it a sin to eat beef while there are thirty crore poor people in India who just don’t know wherefrom their next meal would come from? Certainly no. We have a right to maintain our body and keep it fit for our vocation. But should we make pigs of ourselves in the midst of such a wholesale impoverishment predominantly fostered and maintained by the ruling family which ruled this accursed country after independence for so very long a time?
Jesus Christ says there shall be a moderation in everything.
The senses have a tendency to invade into our humane nature and turn us into a selfish prisoners of theirs. That is why we should exhibit moderation in everything. Moderation in the ultimate act of love-making is to live with one’s own spouse till the last breath!
Too much attachment to our senses make a pig of ourselves, while moderation converts us into living saints!
Why should I turn into a saint and not content with going through life as ordinary average man and woman feeding our senses?
Our senses are at once our own friends and arch enemies; in so far as they can take us toward a beast or God.
This is where God, our maker, scores easy-effortlessly over even as great creative writers like Shakespeare! For God gives his characters in His effort to write the millennial story of humanities time and time again much freedom and an essential personal choice, much different from ordinary creative writers among human beings! He endows us with five senses and sends us to the earthly plane. The baby’s attachment to mother’s breasts and the divine nectar of breast-milk is only the beginning! In live, in every course of life and in every way of doing things, He gives us much choice so personal that we can become saints or downright sinners! The creator doesn’t seem much to care about his creations and the way they act in this world!
But God cares for each of his created beings and non- beings.
This world is a Kurukchethra, a battlefield and a daily and day-today personal war has to be waged by God’s individual characters, beings and non-beings. This is the reason why there is much wrong in this world. The world is not a perfect place of Eden. Both the saints and sinners occupy this world. This world shall never be a well-oriented and ideal one! The word is incomplete. The daring Master is continuously writing the story of evolution. While the evolution on the physical plane is over, it is still continuing in the spiritual field. In God’s world, both the saints and sinners have equal opportunities to do as they wish and equal right to occupy and evolve.
But one thing is sure, the theory of evolution is not complete and Darwin's theory is much faulted one. God is the ultimate creator among the creative artists and his creation is teeming with anachronistic characters numberlessly, so to speak!
The world was never conceptualized as a completed picture though it was drawn by the Master Craftsman.
This is why there are so many dichotomies.
This incomplete world harks back to the battle field at Kurukchetra; for, it was occupied by both saint, sinners and ordinary men working out their karma in between the two levels!
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