What has been said in the previous stanza may be true for those rare few who have realised the Truth and are revelling in God-consciousness. But the strange life-of-detachment by which we can renounce completely the sense of agency, is not available for all of us. We are but aspirants and seekers of this Perfection. The way in which we can train ourselves to renounce the sense of agency will be the problem of all true students of the Geeta who want to LIVE the Geeta rather than talk about its ideas. In this stanza we have a prescription by which every one of us can come to live the life of intelligent detachment in life.
RESIGNING TO BRAHMAN — Total detachment is impossible for the human mind and that is exactly what spiritual seekers often fail to understand. As long as there is a mind it has to attach itself to something. Therefore, detachment from the false can be successful only when we attach ourselves to the Real. This psychological fact is scientifically enunciated in this stanza, wherein Lord Krishna advises the seeker to surrender all his attachments to Brahman and continue striving on. To remember constantly an ideal, is to become more and more attuned to the perfections of the ideal. In order that we may surrender all our sense of agency in our actions to Brahman, we have to remember this concept of Truth as often as we now remember our limited ego. When the frequency of our thoughts upon the Lord becomes as high as the frequency with which we now remember the ego-idea, we shall come to realise the Brahman-ideal as intimately as we now know our own ego.
In short, to-day we are “EGO-REALISED SOULS”; the Geeta’s call to man is to become “SOUL-REALISED EGOS.”
Once our Real Nature is realised, the actions of the body, mind and intellect can no more leave any impression upon the Self. Merits and demerits belong to the ego and never to the Atman. The imperfections of my reflections in a mirror cannot be my imperfections, but can only be because of the distortions in the reflecting surface. The reflection may look shortened or lengthened according to the type of the mirror into which I am looking. Similarly, the ego comes to suffer the perfect and the imperfect reactions of its own actions.
Having thus realised the Self, to remain in the matter-envelopments and their world of objects, is to remain ever perfectly detached “as the lotus leaf in the water.” Though the lotus leaf exists ONLY in water, draws its nourishment from the very water and dies away in the same water, yet, during its life as a leaf, it does not allow itself to be moistened by water. Similarly, a saint in the world, as a matter-entity, draws the nourishment for his individual existence from the world of objects but ever remains perfectly detached from his own merits and demerits, from his own concepts of beauty and ugliness, from his own likes and dislikes in the outside world.
Of the two methods by which ordinary Karma can be transformed into Karma-Yoga, we have here the technique of renouncing one’s sense of agency in one’s actions exhaustively described. This is no strange theory; nor is it a unique doctrine. At every moment, all around the world, we see this enacted in a thousand ways. A doctor’s attachment to his wife makes him incapacitated to perform an operation on her, although the same doctor, on the same day, may perform the same operation upon another patient, towards whom he has no self-deluding attachment.
If man were to act as a representative of the Infinite and the Eternal, he would discover in himself mightier possibilities and greater effectiveness, which are all wasted and squandered to-day by his mis-conception of the finite-ego as himself.
BECAUSE OF THIS:
