Verses 1.25–1.30🔗

Kṛṣṇa parked the chariot between the two armies and said to Arjuna, ‘Here are the people you wished to see.’ Arjuna wanted to see those who were about to fight him and die, and Kṛṣṇa, with no mercy at all, showed him that these were Arjuna’s near and dear ones. Kṛṣṇa Himself was related to Arjuna. Kuntī, Arjuna’s mother, also known as Prithā, was Kṛṣṇa’s aunt, sister of Kṛṣṇa’s father Vāsudeva; so He addresses Arjuna here as Pārtha, the son of Prithā, emphasizing their relationship. Kṛṣṇa is also referred to in Gītā as Pārthasārathi, the charioteer of Pārtha, Arjuna. Arjuna’s Dilemma Assembled in front of Arjuna were compatriots of his father Pāṇḍu, grandfathers and great grandfathers such as Bhīṣma, his own teachers such as Droṇa and Kṛpa, uncles such as Śakuni, brothers and cousins as all the Kaurava princes were, friends and well wishers.

At one time or another, each of them had been an object of affection and respect to Arjuna. Now, they were part of this enemy army. The expression of Arjuna’s dilemma starts here. The theme of Gītā is the story of Arjuna’s dilemma, his incompletion and its completion by Kṛṣṇa. As a warrior, as a kṣatriya, Arjuna was used to killing in battle. He was no stranger to death and violence. As long as those who faced him were his enemies Arjuna had no difficulty in carrying out the execution. However, those in front of him now were his svajanam—his relatives, people who actually were like his father, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, sons and grandsons, tied to him with bonds of blood.

Many others were his friends with whom he had previously enjoyed bonds of loyalty. Arjuna’s dilemma was not one of nonviolence, ahiṁsā. As a kṣatriya, this word had no place in his dictionary. His dilemma was one of violence, violence born out of his ego, his identity. He could kill people he did not identify with, but he could not bear to kill those whom he could relate with himself in one way or another. The bonds of family were far stronger than Arjuna had imagined. These bonds were rooted in his ego, and to cut these bonds was to destroy himself. This was Arjuna’s dilemma. What follows now is a bunch of fantasies, inauthenticies that Arjuna’s mind weaves in an attempt to justify his dilemma.

It is what the human mind conjures up time and again as its projection of the unconscious root thought patterns, trying to justify as authentic action. Sañjaya says that Arjuna was overwhelmed with pity. Some translate this as compassion. Compassion, true compassion, which is the hallmark of an Enlightened Being, is non-discriminatory; it does not differentiate. Please listen. When responsibility expresses through your heart, it is compassion. To the truly compassionate person, the whole world, of both living and nonliving beings, is an extension of his own self. Anything that hurts any object around such a person would hurt him, and he too would feel the pain. However, Arjuna’s emotion was discriminatory, inauthentic.

He felt pity only because they were his kinsmen, only because he identified with them, not because of his authenticity and responsibility to enrich them, not because he felt that all of them were his own extensions, and so by not fighting them he would in turn not fight himself. This was not compassion born out of ahiṁsā, nonviolence, but pity bornoutofhiṁsā,violence.Arjuna’semotionsarosefromhisrootpattern, his ego.True compassion arises from a state of integrity and authenticity, the absence of ego where one’s inner and outer identities are aligned, and one expresses peak of one’s positivity and possibility. It arises from a state of responsibility, out of no-mind and no-thought, where the feelings of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ have disappeared and one realizes that one is the Source of everything and so one is responsible for everything.

True compassion is a state of completion and bliss, one of true surrender to the Universe. Our Four Great Inner Powers Please understand, the four spiritual principles of integrity, authenticity, responsibility and enriching are the four Vedas, caturveda to experience surrender to the Cosmos and to have the power to simply manifest the reality of your choice! Listen! Whether you know it or not, whether you believe it not, you have four giant powers sitting inside you. Though you use these powers everyday in your life, you don’t use them consciously, with a clear intention. Please understand, all these powers are great energies, just like electricity or wind power. If you handle them properly, they can shower you with everything you want.

But if you don’t handle them properly, they will continue to impact your life in negative ways. These powers are related to the four major dimensions of your life— your words, your thinking, your emotions, and your living. When you awaken your peak possibility in each of these dimensions, it becomes a great power and support in your life. Each of the four powers is guided by a spiritual principle known as tattva. The tattva is the key to unlock the corresponding power in you. First spiritual principle is Integrity. When you practice integrity, the power of words or vāk śakti will be available to you. Second tattva is Authenticity.

When you practice authenticity, the power of thinking or mano śakti will be open to you. Third tattva is Responsibility. The power of feeling or prema śakti will be possible when you practice responsibility. And the fourth tattva is Enriching. You will have access to the power of living or ātma śakti the moment you decide to enrich others. The foundation for these tattvas is pūṛṇatva—completion of all the patterns we carry. When we live these spiritual principles and express these four great powers, the individual self merges with the universal Self, and true compassion happens out of the space of completion with the Cosmic Consciousness; from the experience that one is part of that Brahman.

Listen. Arjuna’s pity arose out of fear of losing his identity, his fear of expansion, his root pattern or ego. Arjuna was mortally afraid. He claimed that his throat was parched, his hair was standing on edge and his divine bow was slipping from his sweaty hands. If one did not know Arjuna better, one would have considered him a coward. Arjuna was no coward. He had no fear for his own physical safety. He was not concerned that he might be injured or that he might die. As a warrior of warriors, these feelings were beneath him. But, Arjuna was afraid of breaking social and ethical laws. His values and beliefs, his bio-memories, his root thought patterns, told him that what he was doing was wrong and unacceptable.

So powerful was this feeling that he was reeling, quivering, dazed and unable to think or function. Can something like this really happen? Can a hero lose his composure and exhibit the physical symptoms of a frightened coward? A true hero to whom death is play, who is trained from childhood by the greatest of Masters not only in the control of his body, his sleep, but of his mind as well? Arjuna’s situation shows how the mind can play games with the best of us, how the root patterns can take over the mind in so powerful a manner as to make us powerless, without our awareness. Arjuna was frightened that he would be held responsible for the death of his kinsmen, people who were father, grandfather and other such important figures to him.

He was afraid that even if others did not blame him, he would suffer the guilt and regret for his actions for the rest of his life. So great was this fear root pattern of potential guilt, that it drove Arjuna into behaving inauthentically like a coward. All he could foresee was disaster and evil all around him. At another, far deeper level, Arjuna was terrified of his own destruction. The moment one starts identifying with svajanam, kinsmen, family, friends and relatives, it is a material identification, born out of possession arising from one’s ego, the feeling of ‘I’ and ‘mine.’ Possession is born of attachment, and leads to attachment as well.

There can be no feeling of possessing something unless one is attached to it. People speak of attachment, liking and love. All these are valid only as long as a sense of possession exists. The moment the object of love turns around and displays independence and unwillingness to be possessed, the liking and the love disappears. Possession arises out of our survival need, from ourmūlādhāra cakra, an energy center located at the base of the spine. It is a primal feeling that yokes us to mother Earth. Out of the need for possession, feelings of lust, greed and anger arise. Often what one cannot possess, one wants to destroy. ‘What I cannot have, let no one have,’ we often feel, out of our incompletion.

Possession leads to violence. It is also the deep-rooted desire for possessions, the feeling of ‘mine,’ that gives rise to your identity ‘I.’ The need to possess does not stem from your identity. It is the other way around. ‘Mine’ leads to ‘I,’ not ‘I’ to ‘mine.’ This is why you cannot eliminate your identity till you renounce your attachment to all your desires and possessions. You need to get rid of the ‘mine’ first. Only then the ‘I’ disappears. Understand, incompletions will make you feel the whole world should be yours. Incompletions will continue to make you feel you can own, possess the whole world. Incompletions continuously make you exploit others.

Arjuna is in this mood and frame of mind. It strikes him at the moment of waging war, that what he is about to destroy are his own possessions, his own identity. If he were to destroy them he will be destroying a part of his own self, his own mind-body system. It is true that when someone dear to us dies, a part of our mind-body system dies with them. Arjuna knew that the destruction of so many of his near and dear ones, his kinsmen, would take a massive toll on him, akin to committing suicide. Arjuna’s dilemma was an existential one. What is the point of eliminating others, if it results in one’s own elimination?

It is a dilemma born out of partial understanding, an incomplete cognition, a peek into the truth of collective consciousness. If Arjuna were to be as unaware as Duryodhana, this doubt would have never entered his mind. Were he enlightened as Kṛṣṇa was, the answer would have been obvious. Arjuna was in between, hence his dilemma. Why should I destroy myself? What for? These are the questions that naturally follow this line of reasoning. Arjuna was far wiser than many modern philosophers in posing this as a doubt, without venturing into any answers himself. Many philosophers have concluded that there is no meaning to life when they encountered similar doubts.

They would not even want to enter their doubt, their dilemma. They would not want to take any logical arguments arising in them to the logical conclusion. Since they did not have the integrity of Arjuna to face the conflicting thoughts arising in them, or the guidance of Kṛṣṇa to take them to their logical conclusion, they provided their own answers created out of non-integrated reasoning lacking any experiential backing. Here, Arjuna is undergoing a process of transformation; he is going to rewrite his future! He started off in this war with the basic assumptions of the kṣatriya codes of conduct, on which his outer image, ahaṁkāra was formed. When challenged, a kṣatriya must fight; that is his code of honor.

Arjuna had no self-doubt in doing this as he was brought up in this belief system, this default societal pattern. However, the problem was that Arjuna was a thinking man. Unlike Duryodhana, or his own brother Bhīma, he was not a thoughtless man. This ability to think, to be aware, to be integrated was what had got him into trouble now. When he brought deep integrity into his thinking, doubts assailed him. ‘Am I really doing the right thing? Am I not destroying myself and all that I stand for when I wage this war against my own people?’ He finally landed up in utter confusion. Listen. Utter confusion, dilemma is the first thing any person has to face in his life for Enlightenment.

If we have not yet faced the dilemma, the possibility for transformation has not yet opened. When we are in dilemma, be very clear, the seeking has started in us. Arjuna has become a seeker of Truth. He was no longer satisfied with what he had imbibed all these years—śāstras, stotras and sūtras. He wished to go beyond. He questioned them, as he had doubts. He was in a dilemma. Arjuna-viśāda-yogaḥ is the name given to this first chapter of Gītā. Viśāda can mean many things in Saṃskṛit—grief, sorrow, despondency, despair, depression, powerlessness, dilemma and such. Here what we see is the dilemma that Arjuna was in, not knowing whether what he had been taught all his life, and what he had believed to be true, was really true after all.

Understand, sometimes people ask me, ‘Swamiji, after becoming your disciple, I see a lot of struggle inside my mind.’ I tell them, ‘I am doing it! I will not let you rest till you become completely authentic. Even one point inauthenticity cannot be tolerated. Understand, you have to do the job when you are in the body. You have to achieve It. Whether you feel the urgency or not, if you feel the urge, it is urgent for me. Whether you getting enlightened is urgent for you or not, you getting enlightened is urgent for me.’ When you look into my eyes, why are you afraid? Because I expose your mamakāra, your whole inner image to you.

I will expose your inauthenticity to you. I will expose your actual inner image, that which is hidden from you. Arjuna’s actual inner image, his whole mamakāra that was hidden from him, his root pattern of attachment, his deep fear of expansion, and his inauthenticities are now being exposed by Kṛṣṇa. The transformation that Kṛṣṇa leads him to over the eighteen chapters is the revelation of truth to Arjuna, and to all humanity. Kṛṣṇa is referred to by many names thus far. The word ‘Kṛṣṇa’ itself refers to His dark blue color, the color of the sky, and as infinite as the sky. It also means Sat-Cit-Ānanda—Truth-Consciousness-Bliss, and ‘who graces liberation to those who surrender to Him.’

He is called Keṣava as He destroyed the demon Keṣin. Keṣava also refers to His beautiful hair. The embodiment in Him of the trimūrti, holy trinity of Hindu tradition (the Saṃskṛit words K referring to Brahma, A to Viṣṇu, Īśā to Śiva) is another meaning of this name. Govinda is a combination of ‘go’ referring to all living beings and ‘vinda’ which means knower, Kṛṣṇa being the ultimate knower of the mind, body and being of all living creatures.