TAMAS IS BORN OF ‘IGNORANCE’ — Under the influence of Tamas man’s intellectual capacity to discriminate between the right and wrong gets veiled and he starts acting as if under some hallucination or stupefaction. Lord Krishna says that Tamas, in the human personality, binds it to its lower nature by providing it with endless misconceptions and miscomprehensions of the true divine purpose of life, which, naturally, forces one in that condition to live in indolence, heedless of the higher purposes. One thereafter lives ever asleep to the nobler and the diviner aspirations of life. There is no consistency of purpose, brilliance of thought, tenderness of emotion, or nobility of action in an individual who comes under the contamination of the Tamoguna-influences.

So far, the Lord has been systematically mentioning the symptoms which are observed in our mental life when these gunas pollute our inner tranquillity. These three gunas not only bring about different amounts of divine brilliance in a given individual but also limit the Eternal Self, in all Its perfection, to feel and act as THOUGH It is limited and conditioned by the matter-envelopments.

AGAIN, THE ACTIONS OF THE ‘GUNAS’ IN OUR INNER WORLD ARE BRIEFLY INDICATED:

Viddhi, know; tamas, the third qualitty; mahanam, which deludes, which is a cause of indiscrimination; sarva-dehinam, of all embodied beings; to be ajnanajam, born of ignorance. O scion of the Bharata dynasty, tat, that tamas; nibadhnati, binds; pramada-alasya-nidrabhih, through inadvertence, laziness and sleep. The activities of the qualities are again being briefly stated: