In these two aphoristic stanzas the Lord has hinted at the summary of the entire following chapter. This is the traditional style in Sanskrit text-books on Brahma-Vidya, wherein each section is closed, often indicating the following section.
The above verses give us a complete picture of the Man-of-perfection and his purposeful life at all levels of his existence. Students of Vedanta are ever anxious to live the Perfection. They are not dreamers, content with flirting with Utopian idealisms, but they are the most utilitarian, practical men of the world, who want to live a more purposeful, efficient and effective life in this world. Therefore, they are not enamoured of mere ideas, however noble they may be, unless those ideas can actually be lived in life.
How to achieve the perfect mental equipoise which has been indicated in the previous stanzas, should be the question that must agitate the minds of all true seekers. Here, as a summary, with lots of dots and dashes, Krishna is giving the scheme of practice, by which every diligent pursuer can gain a complete integration. These two stanzas become rough notes to be enlarged and exhausted with details and descriptions in the next chapter.
The external world-of-objects, it has already been said, cannot by itself bring any disturbance to any one of us. It is only when we are in contact with the world-of-objects that we suffer the agitations in life. So long as we are standing on the bank of a river or on the seashore, the waves in the water cannot buffet us. It is only when we are in contact with them that we will be tossed hither and thither. Forms, sounds, tastes, smells and touches constantly bring their objects to agitate the mind, but we shall get agitated by them only when we are identifying ourselves with our mental conditions. If we, therefore, shut out the external object — not by physical methods such as plugging the ears, but by a discreet intellectual detachment from our mental reactions to the external world-of-objects — we shall discover in ourselves, the necessary tranquillity to start meditation.
It is a great mistake that seekers often take the foregoing instruction too literally. They converge their eye-balls and gaze towards the space between the eye-brows for the purpose of meditation. This is an exaggeration, though it faithfully follows the instructions laid down here. It is to be understood, as Shankara says, “TO GAZE AS IT WERE” towards the point between the two eye-brows. It is psychologically very true that when we are looking “as it were towards the brow,” our gaze would be turned upward at about forty-five degrees to the vertical backbone. In that attitude of upward gaze, the human mind is held uplifted and it becomes the right vehicle for higher contemplation.
There is an intimate relationship between the rhythm of the flow of breath in us and our own mental thought-conditions. The more agitated the mind is, the more spasmodic and uncertain becomes the rhythm of our breathing. Therefore, the instructions here, which advise us to control our breath-flow to make it “EVEN WITHIN THE NOSTRILS” becomes a conducive physical practice for coaxing the mind to a relatively quieter existence.
These instructions are all mainly physical adjustments for creating a conducive mental atmosphere. In the following stanza, the necessary adjustments to control the mental and the intellectual sheaths are hinted at. The tireless seeker is asked to control his sense appetites, mental oscillations and intellectual storms by dedicating all his outer and inner activities to the one great eternal goal of reaching Perfection — realizing the Self. As far as the taming of the intellect is concerned, the advice given by Krishna is that the seeker should “RENOUNCE DESIRES, FEARS AND ANGER.”
In enumerating these three qualities, psychologically speaking, Krishna has expounded an exhaustive theory of self-development and inner growth. There is an intimate relationship between these three: desire, fear and anger. Desire, we had found earlier, is that pattern of thought in which the mind runs constantly towards a given object with an anxious expectation of procuring and possessing it. Where there is desire, there we come to experience fear. And it is very well known that when we desire a thing so much as to live ever in the fear of losing it, maddening anger can exhibit itself at any moment against any threat of an obstacle between ourselves and our object-of-desire. When these three emotions — desire, fear and anger — are controlled, we have controlled almost all the mad impulses of our intellect.
He who has thus freed himself from desire, fear and anger, who has controlled his senses, mind and intellect, in his all-consuming ambition for liberation, and who has quietened the flow of his breath, such an individual could remain in the contemplation of Truth, without contact with the external world, his eyes fixed steadily and held in an upward gaze. Krishna says: “such a man of meditation is verily free for ever.”
This assertion that such an individual “IS VERILY FREE FOR EVER” is an anticipatory truth and not an accomplished fact. In ordinary conversation, we use the phrase “baking of bread,” which, in its literal meaning is false, since bread need not be baked; we bake only dough. But in such usages, what we mean is that the goal is not too far away from the particular act we are doing. Even while boiling water, we say that we are making tea; the idea is that tea-making cannot be far away when the water has already been boiled. Similarly, here also, when we have made all the above-mentioned adjustments, at all levels of our existence, and when we sit in contemplation of the Self, we become released from all our misunderstandings and come to experience the freedom of Godhood… ere long (achirena).
WHAT HAS HE, WHOSE MIND IS THUS STEADILY BALANCED, TO KNOW AND MEDITATE UPON, IN THE DHYANA YOGA?
