Bg 2.59
viṣayā vinivartante nirāhārasya dehinaḥ
rasa-varjaṁ raso ’py asya paraṁ dṛṣṭvā nivartate
Bg 2.60
yatato hy api kaunteya puruṣasya vipaścitaḥ
indriyāṇi pramāthīni haranti prasabhaṁ manaḥ
Bg 2.61
tāni sarvāṇi saṁyamya yukta āsīta mat-paraḥ
vaśe hi yasyendriyāṇi tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā
Translation:
59. The objects of the senses turn away
from the abstinent man leaving the longing (behind); but his longing also
leaves him on seeing the Supreme.
60. The turbulent senses, O son of Kunti,
do violently carry away the mind of a wise-man, though he be striving (to
control them) .
61. Having restrained them all, he should
sit steadfast, intent on Me; his Wisdom is steady, whose senses are under
control.
All sense-objects ultimately reach those
who are courting them with burning desires. From one who is completely
abstinent, sense-objects must necessarily get repelled. But even though the
sense-objects may, temporarily, seem to turn away from him who is abstinent,
the deep taste for them, ingrained in his mind, is very difficult to erase
completely. Here Krishna, in his Supreme Wisdom, assures the seeker that these
mental impressions of sensuous lives, lived in the past by the ego, from the
beginning of creation to date, will all be totally erased, or at least made
ineffective --- as roasted seeds --- when the seeker transcends the ego and
comes to experience the Self.
This is not very difficult to understand,
since we know that the objects of sorrow and occasions of tragedy in one
plane-of-consciousness are not available in another.
In his discourse so far, the Lord has
emphasized that a perfect-Master is one who has complete control over his sense-appetites.
In India, a mere philosophical idea, in itself, is not considered anything more
than a poetic ideology, and it is not accepted as a spiritual thesis unless it
is followed by a complete technique by which the seeker can come to live it, in
his own subjective experience. True to this traditional Aryan faith, in the
Geeta too, the Lord indicates to Arjuna the practical method, by which he should
struggle hard, in order to reach the eminence of perfection in all men-of-steady-Wisdom.
The ignorance of the Spiritual Reality functions in any individual in three
distinct aspects: "Unactivity" (Sattwa) "Activity" (Rajas);
and "Inactivity" (Tamas). When the Sattwa aspect in us is molested by
the "veiling of the intellect" (Avarana) and the "lack of
tranquillity" of the mind (Vikshepa), then we come to the sorrows caused
by their endless roamings through the sense-organs. Unless these are
well-controlled, they will drag the mind to the field of the sense-objects, and
thus create a chaotic condition within, which is experienced as sorrow. That
this happens even to a highly evolved seeker is here accepted by the statement
of the Lord. With this assertion, he is warning the seeker in Arjuna, that he
should not on any score let his "objective-mind" take hold of, and
enslave his "subjective-intellect." This warning is quite appropriate
and timely in the scheme of thought in this chapter. Invariably, among those
who are practising religion, the common cause by which very many true
seekers fall away from the Path, is the same all over the world. After a few years
of practice, they, no doubt, come to live a certain inexplicable inward joy,
and over-confident, and often even vainful of their progress, they relax in
their Tapas. Once they come back to the field of the senses, "the turbulent
senses do violently snatch the mind away" from the poise of perfect meditation!
Since the sense-organs are thus the
saboteurs in the Kingdom of the Spirit that bring the disastrous downfall of
the Empire of the Soul, Arjuna is warned here that, as a seeker of
Self-perfection, he should constantly struggle to control his sense-organs and their
mad lustful wanderings in their respective fields. Modern psychology would certainly
look down with a squint-eye upon this Geeta theory, because, according to Freud
and others, sensuousness is instinctive in man, and to curb it would lead to an
unnatural suppression. According to the West, TO CONTROL is TO SUPPRESS, and no
science of mental life can accept that suppression is psychologically healthy.
But the Vedic theory is not pointing to any mental suppression at all. It is
only advising an inward blossoming, an inner growth and development, by which
one's earlier fields of enjoyments through the senses, drop out to make room
for the perception of a newer field of ampler joys and more satisfying Bliss.
This idea is very well brought out here,
when Lord Krishna, as though in the very same breath, repeats both the negative
and the positive aspects of the technique of Self-development. He advises not
only a withdrawal from the unhealthy gutters of sensuousness, but he also gives
the healthy method of doing so by explaining the positive technique of
Self-perfection. Through a constant attempt at focussing our attention "ON ME, THE
SUPREME," he advises the disciples to be steady. In this simple-looking
statement of half-a-verse, the Geeta explains the entire technique of
Self-development. Immoral impulses and unethical instincts, that bring a man
down to the level of a mere brute, are the result of endless lives spent among
sensuous objects, during the infinite number of different manifestations,
through which the embodied soul, the ego in each one of us, had previously
passed. It is humanly impossible for an individual to erase and transcend in
his life-time, the thick coating of mental impressions gathered along his
journey from life to life, from embodiment to embodiment.
Naturally, this is the despair of all the
promoters of ethics, the teachers of morality and the masters of spirituality. The
Rishis of old, in their lived experience, discovered for themselves a
technique, by which, all these mental tendencies could be eradicated. To expose
the mind to the quiet atmosphere of meditation upon the All-perfect Being, is
to heal its ulcers. By this process, one who has come to gain a complete
mastery over his sense-organs, is considered as one who is 'steadfast-in-Wisdom.'
The concealed suggestion in the stanza now becomes quite obvious; no one, who,
with excessive force controls his Indriyas, by sheer strength of will and sense
of abstinence, has any chance of flowering into a full-blown spiritual beauty.
He who has all his sense-organs, of their own accord, lying tamely surrendered at his
feet, who has come to re-discover the Infinite Perfection in himself, is called
a man-of-Perfection. Neither has he ruined his instruments-of-cognition, nor
has he closed down the arches-of-knowledge in him. A Perfect One is he whose sway
over the animal in him is so complete that the inner Satan has become, for the
Sage in him, a tame Caliban to run errands and serve faithfully.
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