In this concluding stanza the Lord’s advice is precise and it is given with a loving insistence. The stanza rings with a spirit of paternal urgency felt by the Lord towards the Pandava Prince. In the language of war, Krishna advises his warrior-friend on the battle-field, how best to live the life of dedication and perfection as advised by the Hindu Rishis from the quiet and peaceful Himalayan valleys. With the “SWORD-OF-KNOWLEDGE,” Arjuna is encouraged to cut off the bonds of ignorance and ‘CLEAVE ASUNDER THIS DOUBT-OF-THE-SELF LYING IN THE HEART.” The spiritual doubt is explained here as working from the heart. This may read rather strange to a modern man: doubt must come from the intellect; it cannot come from the heart.
It is the traditional belief in Vedanta that “the intellect is seated in the heart,” wherein the term HEART does not mean the fleshy pumping-instrument in the human bosom. The term HEART is used here not in its physiological meaning but in its literacy usage, where HEART means “the source of all love and sympathy — of all noble human emotions.” An intellect functioning from and through an atmosphere of sympathetic love, kindly charity and such other noble qualities alone can be considered in the science of philosophy as the human reason. Therefore, when the Upanishads talk of the doubts lying crystallised in the heart, the Rishis mean the intellectual perversions in some of the seekers that make them incompetent to feel and appreciate the Vision-of-the-Soul.
These doubts can be completely annihilated only when the individual gains an intimate, subjective experience of the Self in him. This can be achieved only by Yoga — NOT a strange mystical process, secretly advised to a few, by mysteriously rare groups of Gurus, to be practised in the unknown dark caves of the Himalayas, living altogether a frightful life of unnatural privations. In the Geeta, the word Yoga has been forever tamed and domesticated to be with all of us, serving us faithfully at all times in our life. By the term Yoga, in this last stanza, Krishna means the “twelve techniques” which he has explained as the subjective-Yajnas.
The chapter concludes with a spirited call to Arjuna: “ARISE, O BHARATA.” In the context of the Geeta, though the word may be rightly said to mean only a call to Arjuna, it is a call to every seeker — especially to this country as a whole — to get up and act well in the spirit of Yajna, and thereby to gain more and more inner purity, so that through true meditation everyone of us can come to experience and gain the Supreme Peace which is the final fulfilment of evolution.
