Verses 1.23–1.24🔗

Arjuna starts out on a challenging note. He says he would like to see all those who had assembled to fight him, in support of the evil minded Duryodhana. Accordingly, Kṛṣṇa drew up the chariot between the two armies so that Arjuna could have a good look at all those who had gathered. Arjuna is being called Guḍakeśa in this verse—Guḍakeśana Bhārata, the one who has transcended sleep or the need to sleep. Sleep, here, also refers to the unconscious mind, the incomplete inner space. Please listen. Sleep is nothing but the rest we need to give to our tired inner chatter. Sleep is related to the incompletions of the mind.

All our incompletions, that drive our actions, reside in our unconscious space as root thought patterns. Only thing we need to go beyond sleep is a complete inner space. Integrity brings deep sleep to us, makes us conquer tiredness and ultimately conquer sleep. Arjuna’s Integrity, the power of words Let me define Integrity, the first spiritual principle. Integrity is the key which unlocks the power of words, or vākśakti. Integrity is you fulfilling the word or thought you give to yourself and to others, and experiencing a state of completion, pūrṇatva with Intelligence Questions yourself and with life. Integrity has two dimensions—honoring the words you give to yourself and honoring the words you give to others.

Integrity means not just fulfilling, buthonoringthewordyougivetoyouandothersasyourverylife,isIntegrity. Listen. Honoring the word you give to you—that is the key point. Who is the first person to hear the words you utter? YOU! When you honor the words you give to yourself, your confidence in yourself grows and your self-doubt melts away. YOU become powerful! When you honor the words you give to others, others’ confidence in you grows. Your relationship with that person becomes powerful! The words you utter are YOU! You become the words you speak to yourself and others. If you go on saying, ‘I am sick, I am sick’, you simply will become sick. In the same way, if you constantly tell yourself, ‘I am healthy’,yourenergywillwakeup.Youwillbeveryhealthy!Cosmicenergy awakens in your system and makes your declarations a reality.

It is important to choose the right words, because you can create your reality with the power of your words! A small story about the power of words, vāk śakti. Once, a small town was visited by a saint. As the saint passed by a small hut, a woman came to him and begged him to pray for her dying child. Since the saint was new to the town, a crowd gathered around him, curious to see if he could do anything. The woman brought the sick child out to him and he said a prayer over her. Do you really think your prayer will help the child, when even medicine has failed?

After all, they are just some words!’, yelled a man from the crowd. The saint turned and started shouting at the man, ‘You idiot, you don’t know what I am doing! Just shut up!’ The man was furious! His face grew red and hot. ‘How dare you insult me,!’ he shouted at the saint. The saint smiled at him calmly and said, ‘If one word has the power to make you so angry, may not another word have the power to heal this child?’ That is the power of words! Listen: every thought we complete is the word we give to us. We have to honor it. The first step of integrity is completing all the negative words we created within us about us and life, and completing all of them.

With integrity, our inner chatter disappears, it never becomes tired. By bringing integrity to his thinking and words, Arjuna had conquered his tiredness, his boredom, his powerlessness and conflicts. When we have integrity and authenticity, when we give our life to fulfill our words, Cosmos intervenes to fulfill our words and makes them into reality. Arjuna is being referred to here as one who has conquered sleep, as a result of tirelessly doing pūrṇatva, completion with all the negative words he carried. Because of Arjuna’s integrity, the power of words or vākśakti became available to him. To fulfill the words of Arjuna, Śrī Kṛṣṇa, the Cosmos Himself becomes his charioteer, leading him to his total surrender to Divine.

Kṛṣṇa has been called Hṛṣīkeśa, one who controls the senses from His powerful space of completion. A person who does not have even one moment of powerlessness or incompletion in his life is an Enlightened Being. A person who never had any patterns, any incompletions in his life, right from his birth, is an Incarnation. Physically, mentally, and spiritually, Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the space of eternal completion. His senses are complete as He knows what He experienced through them is not the source of happiness. The relationship between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna is the highest form of interaction between the Divine and the human. You see, for one who is caught in the sleep of unconscious patterns, this world of illusion, māyā, appears utterly real.

But the enlightened Master has awakened to the level of pure consciousness and knows that this world is just another type of dream. When the disciple is able to completely trust the Master’s senses that this world is illusion, and not his own senses that give the incomplete pseudo-idea that this world is real and is the source of his happiness, then the surrender is total. When approaching the Divine or one’s Master, the ultimate step is one of complete surrender. Stages of Surrender This surrender happens in three stages. At the first level it is an intellectual surrender, the intellectual acceptance of what the Master represents and what he means to you.

A true seeker reaches this stage when he encounters the real Master, Sadguru destined for him. The seeker sees in the Master, qualities he has been searching for. His questions start dying down and answers come even before questions happen. Intellectual surrender to the Master replaces inadequate questions with adequate doubts. Doubts are not violent like questions as they do not arise from the root patterns or ego. They arise from a genuine, authentic need to know, to create adequate, complete cognition. Despite his high level of surrender, one does see Arjuna initially in this state of questioning, perhaps as a lesson to us. At the next level, one reaches the state of emotional surrender.

From śāstras one moves to stotras, from the head to the heart. It is like coming home when the heart surrenders. One feels a deep connection with the Guru and constantly remembers Him. It is impossible to forget Him. His memory brings tears to one’s eyes, tears of gratitude that are impossible to hide. ŚrīRāmakṛṣṇasayssobeautifully,‘Whenthinkingofthe Divine or your Guru, Master, if you have tears streaming down your cheeks, be very sure that this is your last birth.’ Emotional surrender leads one close to liberation. At the final level, is surrender of the senses. One truly realizes Hṛṣīkeśa, Master of senses, and gives up one’s distorted, incomplete sense of reality and embraces the Truth of the absolute reality of Advaita, non-duality that the Master and every Incarnation have expressed.

Ultimately, we must move beyond both doubt and faith to completion that creates a deep trust in the Master, recognizing that everything the Master expresses is for our liberation. As Arjuna progresses through the Gītā, layers of his incompletions peel off, and he travels into deeper stages of surrender. Arjuna calls Duryodhana evil minded. This was to paint a contrast of his own state of mind to that of Duryodhana and rest of Kauravas. When one’s mind is filled with patterns of greed, lust, envy and fear, there is a single-minded focus on the potential material benefits. Duryodhana was like an animal, operating out of instinct from his low-level consciousness.

Unlike Arjuna, he was not an intelligent man and did not suffer from doubts and guilt. Animals suffer no guilt. They do not consider hunting their prey as something that needs discussion. So it is with Duryodhana. He needs power and his objectives were to do away with the Pāṇḍava princes and usurp the entire kingdom, that’s all. When a human behaves the way Duryodhana does, he is in an unconscious space, blindly driven by self-denial patterns. Please understand, when we are driven by root patterns, we don’t even know what we do, why we do—why we are making money, why we have married, why we are living. Nothing! The Kaurava warriors blindly driven by Duryodhana, did not know—why they are fighting, why they want power and exactly what is going to happen?

With such an unconscious, incomplete space, Duryodhana and his allies did not suffer from any doubts. When our root patterns are driving our life, we may believe that we are winning, but we will never be driven to victory. If your enemy is driving you, will he be driving you towards victory? Mired totally in self-denial patterns, these Kaurava warriors followed Duryodhana blindly, unaware that the person they followed was blind himself. Arjuna, on the other hand, is in turmoil. He is driven by Hṛṣīkeśa, the Master of senses, who can control and complete any root pattern. Arjuna’s charioteer is Kṛṣṇa Himself, whose very life is a living science of completion.

As Kṛṣṇa brings the chariot to a stop between the two armies, in a metaphoric sense, He brings Arjuna’s inner space to a steady state to drive him to completion. With Duryodhana’s self-denial root pattern of saying ‘no’ to life, cloning itself into the manifold Kaurava army of conflicting patterns, even if Duryodhana won any war out of that pattern, he would never achieve satisfaction or completion. Because the reason he is fighting for power is to feel secure from his fear. He will feel secured only when he breaks that pattern, not by winning the war! It is the wrong strategy, for the wrong reason! Arjuna, unlike Duryodhana, has become aware of his root patterns, he is exposed to his inauthenticies, and is working to free himselffromtheirbondage.However,heisnotinthezoneoflightyet.The conflict between Arjuna and Duryodhana is the conflict that all humans face within themselves—a conflict between their possibility and patterns, their deep unconscious desires, the incompletions driven by their root patterns, and the possibility of completion, consciousness.

Completion is consciousness! Which part wins depends on one’s ability to complete and surrender to the superconscious Divine or the Master, Śrī Kṛṣṇa. As long as one is in darkness, one does not miss light. But, Arjuna is in the state of a person who has had sight and has now lost it, who was in the light of completion, but fell into the darkness of incompletion. Yet, only in its own light, can a moon even see its dark patches. And so is Arjuna now seeing his incompletions face-to-face and is blessed to have the source of light, Jagadguru Kṛṣṇa to enlighten him. He is an intelligent man, but suddenly wondered whether what he was doing might be wrong and evil.

So he is disturbed. Duryodhana, on the other hand, has a mind that is always in darkness, He has never experienced true intelligence or completion. Therefore, words like ‘immoral’ or ‘non-integrity’ or ‘inauthenticity,’ ‘dharma’ or ‘adharma’ would make no sense to him.