When we rightly diagnose Arjuna’s dejection, it is not very difficult for us to realise that, though its immediate cause is the challenge of the war, his condition of mental torture is only a symptom of a deeper disease. Just as a true doctor will try to eradicate a disease, not by curing the symptoms but by removing the CAUSE of the disease, so too here, Lord Krishna is trying to remove the very source of Arjuna’s delusion.
The ego rises when the PURE SELF is not recognised; this deep-seated ignorance in man not only veils his Divine Nature from himself, but also projects on the REALITY a positive misconception. The ‘ego-centric-idea,’ that he is conditioned by his own body, mind and intellect, is the true seed of Arjuna’s delusory attachments with his own relations and the consequent deep compassion that has risen in his bosom to make him so impotent and helpless. Grief and dejection are the price that delusion demands from its victim. To rediscover ourselves to be really something higher than our own ego, is to end all the sorrows that have come to us, through our false identifications.
Thus, the ETERNAL SPIRIT in man, asserting its false relationships with his body, comes to feel bound by a thousand relationships with the world of things and beings. The same PERFECT-PRINCIPLE-IN-LIFE, playing on the field of the mind, comes to experience the imperfections of the emotional world as its own. Again, the DIVINE-SPARK-OF-LIFE, assuming, as it often does, a false identity with the intellect, comes to sob and suffer for its hopes and desires, its ambitions and ideologies, which are the characteristic pre-occupastions of the intellect.
The SELF, thus getting reflected in the intellect, the body, and the senses, is the ego, which is the victim of the world of objects, feelings and ideas. To this ego, belong all the sad destinies of life as well as its fleeting thrills of acquisition and possession. The ego in Arjuna suffered neurosis, goaded by its own delusions and the consequent misapprehensions. Krishna, in his INFINITE WISDOM, knew that MIS-APPREHENSION OF REALITY can take place only because of a pitiable NON-APPREHENSION OF REALITY. Therefore, in order to cure the very source of Arjuna’s delusion, Krishna is here teaching him the cream of knowledge, as declared in the immortal books of the Hindus, the Upanishads.
A re-education of the mind through metaphysical and psychic methods is the last word in psycho-therapy, which the East gave to the world, many thousand years ago. Krishna starts his entire Geeta lesson with this attempt at the re-education of Arjuna.
True to that traditional cultural concept of education, here, the Great Master, Krishna, starts his instructions to Arjuna with a direct discourse upon the ETERNAL REALITY.
The inner equipments of both Bhishma and Drona allowed through them a glorious expression of the LIFE PRINCIPLE or the Soul in them, and these great men were incomparable due to this Divine shine that beamed out through them. In this clashing of weapons, to consider that the cultural soul of Bhishma will be wounded, or that the life of Drona, the master-archer and military genius, will be ended, is a delusory concept of an uninitiated intellect. By this statement Krishna has indicated to Arjuna a greater Self than the ego in every embodiment.
At every level of our personality, we view Life and come to our own conclusions about things. Thus, we have a PHYSICAL ESTIMATE of the world from the body level, quite distinct from the EMOTIONAL PICTURE of life from the mental level, and also an INTELLECTUAL CONCEPT of life from the level of the intellect.
Physically, what I see as a woman, is mentally my mother and intellectually, the same sacred feminine form is a bundle of cells, each having in its protoplasmic content, a nucleus that presides over all its functions. The imperfections that I see in a physical object will fail to give me misery, if I successfully gild it with my emotional appreciation. Similarly, an object which is physically abhorrent and mentally shameful will still fail to provide me with any sorrow, if I can appreciate it from my intellectual level.
So, that which gives me despondency and dejection at the physical, mental and intellectual levels can yield a thrilling inspiration if I re-view it from the spiritual level. Krishna is advising Arjuna to renounce his physical, emotional and intellectual estimates of his teacher and his grandsire, and those of the whole battle-field problem, and to re-evaluate the situation through his spiritual understanding.
This great and transcendental Truth has been so suddenly expounded here that it has, on Arjuna, the stunning effect of a sudden unexpected blast. We shall, later on, understand how this subtle, psycho-physical shock-therapy did immeasurable good to the hysterical condition of Arjuna.
“WHY DO THEY DESERVE NO GRIEF? BECAUSE THEY ARE ETERNAL. HOW?” THE LORD SAYS:
