While Arjuna was promised such a glorious transcendental experience, too divine for him to believe, he felt a certain amount of lack of confidence in himself, which was, perhaps, reflected, on his face. He had a feeling that he was not fit for such a great inner experience. Such a feeling can come to anyone of us, because there is none among the intelligent who is not painfully conscious of his own shortcomings.
Vedanta is not a philosophy that heartlessly keeps the sinners out of its halls of wisdom. It does not believe that there is any lost soul who will ever wander among the heathens, and who can ONLY be redeemed IF he enters the portals of the Church of Vedanta!! Tolerant to a fault, Vedanta declares the Truth and nothing but the Truth. The All-pervading Divine manifests everywhere and therefore, there is no sinner who cannot, through his endeavour, come to claim his own heritage of Absolute Perfection. The Geeta is a scripture of life written for man, and its universality is unmistakably seen in the statement here. It assures man that “EVEN IF HE BE THE MOST SINFUL AMONG THE SINFUL,” he too can cross over his painful destinies of the present and reach the shores that lie beyond finitude and imperfections. Such a clear charter of man’s right to the Divine has never so far been written in any other existing scripture of the world!! To rediscover that, in reality, the ego is nothing other than the Self in us, and to live thereafter as the Self of all, is called true ‘Wisdom’ (Jnana). Having thus awakened to our Real Nature, the dreamy cravings of the flesh can no more enchant us away from our pristine glory and make us run down the channels of sensuousness, to wreck ourselves on the stony bed of sin and sorrow. This is indicated by a beautiful metaphor: “BY THE RAFT OF ‘KNOWLEDGE’ ALONE SHALL YOU GO ACROSS ALL SINS.”
IN WHAT MANNER DOES THIS WISDOM DESTROY SIN?… HERE IS AN EXAMPLE:
