THE HOLY GITA
CHAPTER NUMBER 08
AKSHARA BRAHMA YOGA OR THE YOGA OF THE IMPERISHABLE BRAHMAN:
VERSE NUMBER 15
Text in Transliteration:
Maam upetya punarjanma duhkhaalayam asaasvatam
Naapnuvanti mahaatmaanah samsiddhim paramaam gataah
Text in English:
Having come to Me, the great souls are no more subject to rebirth, which is transitory and the abode of pain; for they have reached the highest perfection.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIDBHAVANANDA:
Man gets whatever he has made himself worthy of. The Lord gives Himself over to the devotees worthy of Him; and there is no gain greater than this. Having gained God, the devotee is in Eternal Beatitude. The wheel of birth and death does not touch him any more.
The difference between the wheel of birth and death and the Eternal Beatitude is explained in the next verse.
COMMENTARY BY SWAMI SIVANANDA:
Birth is the home of pain or seat of sorrow arising from the body. Study the Garbhopanishad. There the nature of pain, i.e., how the child is confined in the womb, and how it is pressed during its passage along the vaginal canal and the neck of the womb or uterus, is described. Further it is much affected by the Prasuti-Vayu(the vital air which is responsible for the delivery of the child).
Mahatmas (great souls) are free from Rajas and Tamas.
Having attained Me; This denotes Krama-Mukti or gradual liberation. The devotees who pass along the Devayana through the force of their Upasana, attain to Brahmaloka (the world of Brahma the Creator) or Satyloka (the world of truth, the highest of the seven worlds) and there enjoy all the divine wealth and glory of the Lord and then attain to Kaivalya Moksha (final liberation) through the knowledge of Brahman, along with Brahma during the cosmic dissolution.
Mahatmas or great souls who have attained Moksha do not come again to birth. Those who have not attained Me, take birth again in this world.
Comments by the blogger:
Before reaching the highest perfection, the souls have to be subject to rebirth, which is transitory and the abode of pain.
There could not be two opinions about this worldly life being an abode of pain. But there is goodness too. Therein the Lord’s trick lies. We, poor souls, for a tablespoon of worldly bliss go gladly through a cartload of pain and sorrow. Still, Lord’s maya or illusion is there which goads us toward greater highs of action and thereby further court even more pain.
Lord Buddha moved from yogic pillar to meditational post before attaining wisdom. And the wisdom consists of a simplest of sentences possible in the Spiritual lore: desire is the reason for all sorrows. It was not as though he had come up with a new brand of wisdom unknown till then to Hinduism. Lord Buddha came after the Vedopanishadic period. That is after the Vedantic period was over. So the dwandvas or the dualities like love and hate, sorrow and bliss, light and darkness and so on and so forth had already been found to be lying at the bottom of all human sorrow. But the specialty of Lord Buddha was he did not just say that the desire was the reason for all sorrow and pain but he realized it even like the Vedopanishadic Sages. One must realize the truth personally. All the scriptural knowledge and scholarship would not help even to gain a foothold that has been the prerogative of the Great Souls.
The Lord is very candid. He posits if we are ready for such highest perfection.
And reaching the highest position means ourselves being turned into a sanyasi or monk or yogi in the right sense of the word. The ochre-clad beggars we see every day of our lives are not persons of high renouncement. They are way below us. They have taken to an abject way to live a life of sloth. The question is if we are ready to give up all we have, including the spouse and children and all the wealth like that Jain couple? Are we ready?
No we are not ready; at least the majority of us including me are not ready.
What is the consequence? We have to bear a cart-load of pain for a spoonful of happiness. Even our happiness is tinged with sorrow. A child is born and the family is celebrating the occasion. But the pain the mother had gone through! And what about the child? It has to pass through the neck of the womb and the vaginal channel. And that gives it pain. And after being pushed through the channel, it comes into our atmospheric world. And the temperature is different and the feeling of protection and the dark comfort are gone. The child cries out in sheer bewilderment. And we rejoice at the action of the child’s cry. Because our rational mind instructs us that a child must cry out like anything when it comes into our world! The child that keeps mum after coming into our world is a dead or dying child. Or something is terribly the matter with the child’s mind or brain! So to make us cry and shed tears of joy, the new-born child has to cry hoarse! The very starting point of joy is tinged with heavy sorrow and pain for the child. What about the child born of the Caesarean Section? Here too the baby must cry like anything. And leaving the HEALTHY child which cries like that, the surgeon would be busy with the mother who would not know anything! The crying child would be left quite for some time to mend for itself. Because the more it cries the greater is the proof that everything is quite all right with the baby!
Everything the baby does is a joy for us and very painful for the baby. Take for example the daily bath the baby is given! But it has its compensation. The mother would dry the baby and smear it with baby powder and then suckle the baby! Even the baby would forget all the pain and discomfort it went through just a while back and fall into a deep slumber!
Marriage is called kalyaanam in Tamil. Kali stands for sorrow. Aanam stands for the commencement. So kalyaanam or marriage in Tamil means the beginning of all sorrow! Would you believe it?
Like this, every stage is filled with pain and sorrow. But you and I are ready. Because we have been habituated to look at life that way!
I think we should not be like the mentally deranged person on the street. He or she always has a big bundle which the person would not leave even if you give a thousand rupees. All sorts of refuse fit to be thrown into a fire to make this world free of the nauseating odour would be there. In course of time the size of the bundle would increase!
I think we should not be like that person and go on gathering refuse for our bundle. At some point in time we must stop freshly earning and should leave it to our children to become a money making machine while we live a life of austerity. If we can do that, we would have more and more time daily to devout to God. This is the modern kind of Vanaprastha. We can’t go into the woods. For we have grown in number and the woods are shrinking already. Cho Ramasamy (the late editor of an incomparable Tamil weekly, Tuglak) had said in an interview some twenty-five years before his death that he had stopped to live for making money. One should be able to draw the line somewhere at some point. We should try to gather our spouse into a bear hug and say that henceforth we would live for ourselves. And explain what that stands for. Swami Sidbhavananda has written that fulfilling ourselves is the highest praise we give to our Maker. We should cogitate on life and do this without finding fault with the present world and the youths. We should not become fed up with the way the youths live and the world is being run by our leaders. Without finding fault with anyone, we must give silently up worldly strivings in favour of the Lord and strive to spend more time in that way.
This is the least possible compensation we could make to the world which bore our youthful days of hilarity and unceasing action. Then the next birth would take care of itself!
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