Bg 5.22
ye hi saṁsparśa-jā bhogā duḥkha-yonaya eva te
ādy-antavantaḥ kaunteya na teṣu ramate budhaḥ
Bg 5.23
śaknotīhaiva yaḥ soḍhuṁ prāk śarīra-vimokṣaṇāt
kāma-krodhodbhavaṁ vegaṁ sa yuktaḥ sa sukhī naraḥ
Bg 5.24
yo ’ntaḥ-sukho ’ntar-ārāmas tathāntar-jyotir eva yaḥ
sa yogī brahma-nirvāṇaṁ brahma-bhūto ’dhigacchati
Bg 5.25
labhante brahma-nirvāṇam ṛṣayaḥ kṣīṇa-kalmaṣāḥ
chinna-dvaidhā yatātmānaḥ sarva-bhūta-hite ratāḥ
Bg 5.26
kāma-krodha-vimuktānāṁ yatīnāṁ yata-cetasām
abhito brahma-nirvāṇaṁ vartate viditātmanām
Translation
22. The enjoyments that are born of contacts are only generators of pain, for they have a beginning and an end. O son of Kunti, the wise do not rejoice in them.
23. He who is able, while still here (in this world) to withstand, before the liberation from the body (death) , the impulse born out of desire and anger, he is a YOGIN , he is a happy man.
24. He who is happy within, who rejoices within, who is illuminated within, that YOGI attains Absolute Freedom or MOKSHA, himself becomin g BRAHMAN.
25. Those RISHIS obtain Absolute Freedom or MOKSHA --- whose sins have been destroyed, whose dualities are torn asunder, who are self-controlled and intent on the welfare of all beings.
26. Absolute Freedom (or BRAHMIC Bliss) exists on all sides for those self-controlled ascetics, who are free from desire and anger, who have controlled their thoughts and who have realised the Self.
Commentary
We, as seekers, try to detach ourselves from the external contacts in order to enjoy the Infinite Bliss which is the nature of the Self. Even an average intelligent man, if he cares to investigate his own experiences with the outer world, will discover, all by himself, that joy-hunting among the finite objects is no profitable preoccupation. The law of diminishing utility works in all our experiences and the very thing that gave a certain unit of joy in the beginning, itself soon becomes a stinking putrefying pit of sorrow. The experiences with the first laddu and the twenty-fifth laddu when you are not hungry, are a practical demonstration of this fundamental truth, that sensuous joys are doomed to pain from the very beginning.
A sense-object can only be as beautiful and joyous as a leprous whore, painted, powdered and dressed up to smile at strangers in the dark alleys of a dilapidated commercial town. Lord Krishna beautifully brings out this idea, when he points out to Arjuna, how sense-objects and their joys, being finite in nature, do not enchant a wise man.
Man, if he is wise, is satisfied only with the Infinite. Finite things can only torture us with hopes of getting a more satisfactory joy, and whip us along the path of sensuousness making us pant in sheer exhaustion, hunting for a complete satisfaction --- from ditch to ditch, from gutter to gutter. The chaster, the fuller, the Diviner joy, is gained only when we come to experience the Self as explained in the previous stanza.
AND THERE IS ALSO A WICKED THING, AN ENEMY ON THE PATH OF BLISS, A MOST DIFFICULT THING TO DEAL WITH, THE SOURCE OF ALL EVIL, VERY DIFFICULT TO WARD OFF. MIGHTY EFFORTS SHOULD BE MADE, SAYS THE LORD, TO REPEL THIS ENEMY:
Krishna himself feels that his over-enthusiastic description of the Perfect-man and his mental life may give to any reader a despairing sense of impossibility or futility. No one living the present life of agitations, can ever dare to hope that such a perfect happiness is ever possible for a mortal living upon this ever-spinning globe. If a philosophy is only an idealism which has no contact with the practical world, that philosophy is merely Utopian poetry fit for entertaining a pleasant idea, but never capable of making man a nobler being.
In order to remove that misunderstanding, Krishna, in this stanza, gives the assurance that man is capable of living that perfect joy in this VERY WORLD, if only he makes the necessary adjustments in himself.
My great-grandfather was a great violinist. His violin was preserved and worshipped in my house till now. I too have gained now a preliminary nodding acquaintance with music. Suddenly an idea struck me: "Why not take my great-grandfather's instrument and play upon it and thus become overnight a great musician?" If I play directly upon that ancient and faithful instrument, I will be forced to break it into pieces, for, that violin, in that condition, cannot give me perfect music. It needs general cleaning and dusting; perhaps, re-stringing and a lot of tuning up. When these adjustments are made, then only can it faithfully give out all the notes, implicitly obeying the strokes of my bow and the ticklings of my finger. In the same fashion, today, our mind and intellect, the instruments of singing the song of Perfection, neglected from beginningless time, need a lot of re-adjustments before they can gurgle out their contents of laughter and joy.
The technique of re-adjusting the inner-instruments is beautifully summarised here by Lord Krishna. The very brevity and simplicity of this verse are the obstacles to our understanding its full import. The advice has a deceptive look of simplicity. "WITHSTAND THE IMPULSE OF DESIRE AND ANGER," then he is a Yogi, even while here, before his death, the happy man. To a modern student of Freud and others, soaked with the ideas of behaviourism and such other modern superficialities of psychology, this may look rather an unscientific expression of a crude enthusiast. But when we analyse and try to grapple with its full import and implication, we shall see that it contains volumes of suggestions.
"Desire" is the avalanche of thoughts sweeping down from the pinnacles of our intellect, along the valleys of our heart, towards an object-of-desire in the outer world. When this avalanche of thought is barricaded on its sweep by a substantial obstacle ere it reaches it destination, the blast with which it shatters itself on that obstacle is called "anger." It is these two types of thoughts that generally agitate our bosom. The greater the desire with which we ponder over an object, the greater shall be the anger against any obstacle that comes between us and our object-of-desire.
To one who has won over joy and grief, and who has gained a certain amount of detachment from external objects, desire for obtaining the pleasant or the unpleasant is no emotion at all. Where there is no desire, hatred is an unknown alien factor there. He who has gained over these two impulses, powerful and almost irresistible as they are, is he who can afford to live in this world of multiplicity and imperfections as an independent solitary man of true and steady happiness.
Thus Krishna assures Arjuna --- and through Arjuna all others like us who will read and try to understand this immortal scripture --- that man can live perfectly happily even while in this form, among these very objects, in this very world, during this very life, if only he, in his spiritual evolution, learns to renounce his impulses of desire and hatred.
WHAT SORT OF A MAN RESTING IN BRAHMAN, ATTAINS BRAHMAN?... THE LORD SAYS:
From the above three stanzas it becomes clear that, according to Krishna, none of the usual fields of joy and happiness are visited by the man of perfection. Neither the warmth of flesh, nor the thrills of emotions and the ecstasies of thinking are available for him. Renouncing them all and conquering both love and hatred, the Yogi, in sheer transcendence, attains a realm of bliss, and Krishna declares that such a man alone can be said to be really happy.
It becomes very difficult to believe that a man in that condition would feel any happiness at all. All instruments of happiness have been rejected by him. There is no more any field for him to gain joy or satisfaction. Renouncing all food one cannot have any joy of eating.
Again, it is against the very logic and rhythm of life to say that man will be satisfied by a mere emptiness, a dark cave of total negation. Every living creature roams about in all its available fields of activity seeking to gain and achieve a greater fulfilment of joy. Even the state of "complete absence of pain" --- though it is a platform of relief --- is not the summit where an individual will feel contented and fully satisfied.
Under the above circumstances, it will be mere exaggeration to believe Krishna's assertion in the previous three stanzas. To avoid such a serious misunderstanding among the students, the Lord is here trying to find out for us the positive glow of assured Divinity when the ego rediscovers itself to be the Self as it renounces all its delusory preoccupations with the false and the fleeting. The substantial and definite experience of solid bliss enjoyed and lived by the Self, in the Self, as the Self, is indicated here in this stanza.
The seeker, in his detachment, not only withdraws himself from the world-of-objects outside, but also discovers in himself an ampler sense of bliss and security. This inward joy is not a rare flickering flash, but a constantly experienced factor. Such a well-developed seeker striving constantly on the path comes to discover a field of fruitful 'entertainment' and engaging 'recreation' in the brilliant light of joyous satisfaction within himself.
To him his entire within is flooded with the Light of Pure Consciousness. His heart is thereafter alit with the Glow Divine.
Such an individual --- who has withdrawn himself completely within, where he has learnt to enter at will and court and live in It --- is the one who has come to KNOW Brahman. In his realization of the Infinite he has come to experience the
Bliss of Brahman, the smokeless shrine of Truth.
MOREOVER:
When a man of meditation, striving diligently, with his senses well under his control, comes to wash off all his sinful mental impressions (which had been creating in him the veiling of the Self behind an unending array of doubts regarding the Reality), he gains the joy of the Self. When his ignorance, which is nothing other than agitations of the mind (Vikshepa) and the consequent veiling of the Truth (Avarana), has been removed, Knowledge of his Real Nature dawns in his bosom and he re-discovers himself as the Self!
Having thus re-discovered the Self, having thus gained the goal of all evolution, what would be the duties of such an individual in this existence, till finally, with a cheerful farewell, he drops his mortal coil down, to merge himself with what he knows to be his own Self? The general impression is that he will move about in the world like a mad, walking, stone-statue --- that eats at least once a day, a threat to society, a moving bundle of contagion and a screaming pillar of despondency and despair. Such a living death is not the goal indicated by the Vedas nor did the Hindu Rishis ever try to carve out of a man, a walking corpse!
Self-realisation is not a melancholy parade, crawling to a pre-destined tomb, but it is a joyous ride to the Palace of Truth, from which man has wandered away in his own ignorance and confusion. A true prophet is one who lives, consumed in an ever-reviving fire of love. He ceaselessly strives to bring out the Self from the non-Self that is veiling It, in all other forms around and about him. This is indicated by the term "engaged in the good of all-beings."
This lokaseva becomes his recreation, his self-appointed engagement. His body, mind and intellect are offered as oblations into the sacred fires of activity and while remaining at rest within himself, the Saint lives on, in an unbroken Consciousness of the Divine, the Eternal.
MOREOVER:
By the work of serving mankind --- the duties of reinstating Godly life in the bosom of the Satanic Age, the love in the heart that tries to redeem the prostitute or to cure the leper, the joyful enthusiasm to light and guide where darkness and blindness revel --- the Master is not bartering away his chances to live as a God of gods even in this world, here and now. Just as a doctor working among the unhealthy and the suffering is not himself contaminated by the diseases or the sorrows, so too a master-mind working amongst the wretched and the lustful, the passionate and the sensuous, the false and the low, is not in any sense of the term touched, even by a passing breeze, of the stink around him.
How this immunity is maintained and preserved by a man of equipoise even amongst the temptations of the vicious atmosphere is indicated here in this stanza. When a sincere seeker has, through his own intelligent self-effort and divine self-application, redeemed himself from the secret charms of the ever murmuring hosts of sense-appetites in himself --- when he has conquered the instincts of lust and anger in him --- when he has thus completely mastered all threats arising from within him and those that come to him from without, such a sincere pursuer of the Life Divine, when he has known the Self, gains the Bliss of Perfection "BOTH HERE AND HEREAFTER."
Sources: vedabase.com; The Holy Geeta
ye hi saṁsparśa-jā bhogā duḥkha-yonaya eva te
ādy-antavantaḥ kaunteya na teṣu ramate budhaḥ
Bg 5.23
śaknotīhaiva yaḥ soḍhuṁ prāk śarīra-vimokṣaṇāt
kāma-krodhodbhavaṁ vegaṁ sa yuktaḥ sa sukhī naraḥ
Bg 5.24
yo ’ntaḥ-sukho ’ntar-ārāmas tathāntar-jyotir eva yaḥ
sa yogī brahma-nirvāṇaṁ brahma-bhūto ’dhigacchati
Bg 5.25
labhante brahma-nirvāṇam ṛṣayaḥ kṣīṇa-kalmaṣāḥ
chinna-dvaidhā yatātmānaḥ sarva-bhūta-hite ratāḥ
Bg 5.26
kāma-krodha-vimuktānāṁ yatīnāṁ yata-cetasām
abhito brahma-nirvāṇaṁ vartate viditātmanām
Translation
22. The enjoyments that are born of contacts are only generators of pain, for they have a beginning and an end. O son of Kunti, the wise do not rejoice in them.
23. He who is able, while still here (in this world) to withstand, before the liberation from the body (death) , the impulse born out of desire and anger, he is a YOGIN , he is a happy man.
24. He who is happy within, who rejoices within, who is illuminated within, that YOGI attains Absolute Freedom or MOKSHA, himself becomin g BRAHMAN.
25. Those RISHIS obtain Absolute Freedom or MOKSHA --- whose sins have been destroyed, whose dualities are torn asunder, who are self-controlled and intent on the welfare of all beings.
26. Absolute Freedom (or BRAHMIC Bliss) exists on all sides for those self-controlled ascetics, who are free from desire and anger, who have controlled their thoughts and who have realised the Self.
Commentary
We, as seekers, try to detach ourselves from the external contacts in order to enjoy the Infinite Bliss which is the nature of the Self. Even an average intelligent man, if he cares to investigate his own experiences with the outer world, will discover, all by himself, that joy-hunting among the finite objects is no profitable preoccupation. The law of diminishing utility works in all our experiences and the very thing that gave a certain unit of joy in the beginning, itself soon becomes a stinking putrefying pit of sorrow. The experiences with the first laddu and the twenty-fifth laddu when you are not hungry, are a practical demonstration of this fundamental truth, that sensuous joys are doomed to pain from the very beginning.
A sense-object can only be as beautiful and joyous as a leprous whore, painted, powdered and dressed up to smile at strangers in the dark alleys of a dilapidated commercial town. Lord Krishna beautifully brings out this idea, when he points out to Arjuna, how sense-objects and their joys, being finite in nature, do not enchant a wise man.
Man, if he is wise, is satisfied only with the Infinite. Finite things can only torture us with hopes of getting a more satisfactory joy, and whip us along the path of sensuousness making us pant in sheer exhaustion, hunting for a complete satisfaction --- from ditch to ditch, from gutter to gutter. The chaster, the fuller, the Diviner joy, is gained only when we come to experience the Self as explained in the previous stanza.
AND THERE IS ALSO A WICKED THING, AN ENEMY ON THE PATH OF BLISS, A MOST DIFFICULT THING TO DEAL WITH, THE SOURCE OF ALL EVIL, VERY DIFFICULT TO WARD OFF. MIGHTY EFFORTS SHOULD BE MADE, SAYS THE LORD, TO REPEL THIS ENEMY:
Krishna himself feels that his over-enthusiastic description of the Perfect-man and his mental life may give to any reader a despairing sense of impossibility or futility. No one living the present life of agitations, can ever dare to hope that such a perfect happiness is ever possible for a mortal living upon this ever-spinning globe. If a philosophy is only an idealism which has no contact with the practical world, that philosophy is merely Utopian poetry fit for entertaining a pleasant idea, but never capable of making man a nobler being.
In order to remove that misunderstanding, Krishna, in this stanza, gives the assurance that man is capable of living that perfect joy in this VERY WORLD, if only he makes the necessary adjustments in himself.
My great-grandfather was a great violinist. His violin was preserved and worshipped in my house till now. I too have gained now a preliminary nodding acquaintance with music. Suddenly an idea struck me: "Why not take my great-grandfather's instrument and play upon it and thus become overnight a great musician?" If I play directly upon that ancient and faithful instrument, I will be forced to break it into pieces, for, that violin, in that condition, cannot give me perfect music. It needs general cleaning and dusting; perhaps, re-stringing and a lot of tuning up. When these adjustments are made, then only can it faithfully give out all the notes, implicitly obeying the strokes of my bow and the ticklings of my finger. In the same fashion, today, our mind and intellect, the instruments of singing the song of Perfection, neglected from beginningless time, need a lot of re-adjustments before they can gurgle out their contents of laughter and joy.
The technique of re-adjusting the inner-instruments is beautifully summarised here by Lord Krishna. The very brevity and simplicity of this verse are the obstacles to our understanding its full import. The advice has a deceptive look of simplicity. "WITHSTAND THE IMPULSE OF DESIRE AND ANGER," then he is a Yogi, even while here, before his death, the happy man. To a modern student of Freud and others, soaked with the ideas of behaviourism and such other modern superficialities of psychology, this may look rather an unscientific expression of a crude enthusiast. But when we analyse and try to grapple with its full import and implication, we shall see that it contains volumes of suggestions.
"Desire" is the avalanche of thoughts sweeping down from the pinnacles of our intellect, along the valleys of our heart, towards an object-of-desire in the outer world. When this avalanche of thought is barricaded on its sweep by a substantial obstacle ere it reaches it destination, the blast with which it shatters itself on that obstacle is called "anger." It is these two types of thoughts that generally agitate our bosom. The greater the desire with which we ponder over an object, the greater shall be the anger against any obstacle that comes between us and our object-of-desire.
To one who has won over joy and grief, and who has gained a certain amount of detachment from external objects, desire for obtaining the pleasant or the unpleasant is no emotion at all. Where there is no desire, hatred is an unknown alien factor there. He who has gained over these two impulses, powerful and almost irresistible as they are, is he who can afford to live in this world of multiplicity and imperfections as an independent solitary man of true and steady happiness.
Thus Krishna assures Arjuna --- and through Arjuna all others like us who will read and try to understand this immortal scripture --- that man can live perfectly happily even while in this form, among these very objects, in this very world, during this very life, if only he, in his spiritual evolution, learns to renounce his impulses of desire and hatred.
WHAT SORT OF A MAN RESTING IN BRAHMAN, ATTAINS BRAHMAN?... THE LORD SAYS:
From the above three stanzas it becomes clear that, according to Krishna, none of the usual fields of joy and happiness are visited by the man of perfection. Neither the warmth of flesh, nor the thrills of emotions and the ecstasies of thinking are available for him. Renouncing them all and conquering both love and hatred, the Yogi, in sheer transcendence, attains a realm of bliss, and Krishna declares that such a man alone can be said to be really happy.
It becomes very difficult to believe that a man in that condition would feel any happiness at all. All instruments of happiness have been rejected by him. There is no more any field for him to gain joy or satisfaction. Renouncing all food one cannot have any joy of eating.
Again, it is against the very logic and rhythm of life to say that man will be satisfied by a mere emptiness, a dark cave of total negation. Every living creature roams about in all its available fields of activity seeking to gain and achieve a greater fulfilment of joy. Even the state of "complete absence of pain" --- though it is a platform of relief --- is not the summit where an individual will feel contented and fully satisfied.
Under the above circumstances, it will be mere exaggeration to believe Krishna's assertion in the previous three stanzas. To avoid such a serious misunderstanding among the students, the Lord is here trying to find out for us the positive glow of assured Divinity when the ego rediscovers itself to be the Self as it renounces all its delusory preoccupations with the false and the fleeting. The substantial and definite experience of solid bliss enjoyed and lived by the Self, in the Self, as the Self, is indicated here in this stanza.
The seeker, in his detachment, not only withdraws himself from the world-of-objects outside, but also discovers in himself an ampler sense of bliss and security. This inward joy is not a rare flickering flash, but a constantly experienced factor. Such a well-developed seeker striving constantly on the path comes to discover a field of fruitful 'entertainment' and engaging 'recreation' in the brilliant light of joyous satisfaction within himself.
To him his entire within is flooded with the Light of Pure Consciousness. His heart is thereafter alit with the Glow Divine.
Such an individual --- who has withdrawn himself completely within, where he has learnt to enter at will and court and live in It --- is the one who has come to KNOW Brahman. In his realization of the Infinite he has come to experience the
Bliss of Brahman, the smokeless shrine of Truth.
MOREOVER:
When a man of meditation, striving diligently, with his senses well under his control, comes to wash off all his sinful mental impressions (which had been creating in him the veiling of the Self behind an unending array of doubts regarding the Reality), he gains the joy of the Self. When his ignorance, which is nothing other than agitations of the mind (Vikshepa) and the consequent veiling of the Truth (Avarana), has been removed, Knowledge of his Real Nature dawns in his bosom and he re-discovers himself as the Self!
Having thus re-discovered the Self, having thus gained the goal of all evolution, what would be the duties of such an individual in this existence, till finally, with a cheerful farewell, he drops his mortal coil down, to merge himself with what he knows to be his own Self? The general impression is that he will move about in the world like a mad, walking, stone-statue --- that eats at least once a day, a threat to society, a moving bundle of contagion and a screaming pillar of despondency and despair. Such a living death is not the goal indicated by the Vedas nor did the Hindu Rishis ever try to carve out of a man, a walking corpse!
Self-realisation is not a melancholy parade, crawling to a pre-destined tomb, but it is a joyous ride to the Palace of Truth, from which man has wandered away in his own ignorance and confusion. A true prophet is one who lives, consumed in an ever-reviving fire of love. He ceaselessly strives to bring out the Self from the non-Self that is veiling It, in all other forms around and about him. This is indicated by the term "engaged in the good of all-beings."
This lokaseva becomes his recreation, his self-appointed engagement. His body, mind and intellect are offered as oblations into the sacred fires of activity and while remaining at rest within himself, the Saint lives on, in an unbroken Consciousness of the Divine, the Eternal.
MOREOVER:
By the work of serving mankind --- the duties of reinstating Godly life in the bosom of the Satanic Age, the love in the heart that tries to redeem the prostitute or to cure the leper, the joyful enthusiasm to light and guide where darkness and blindness revel --- the Master is not bartering away his chances to live as a God of gods even in this world, here and now. Just as a doctor working among the unhealthy and the suffering is not himself contaminated by the diseases or the sorrows, so too a master-mind working amongst the wretched and the lustful, the passionate and the sensuous, the false and the low, is not in any sense of the term touched, even by a passing breeze, of the stink around him.
How this immunity is maintained and preserved by a man of equipoise even amongst the temptations of the vicious atmosphere is indicated here in this stanza. When a sincere seeker has, through his own intelligent self-effort and divine self-application, redeemed himself from the secret charms of the ever murmuring hosts of sense-appetites in himself --- when he has conquered the instincts of lust and anger in him --- when he has thus completely mastered all threats arising from within him and those that come to him from without, such a sincere pursuer of the Life Divine, when he has known the Self, gains the Bliss of Perfection "BOTH HERE AND HEREAFTER."
Sources: vedabase.com; The Holy Geeta
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