Verses 14.13–14.17🔗

We act like a wind-up toy when we are steeped in rajas, and like a battery-operated toy with a dead battery when we are in tamas. Kṛṣṇa uses powerful words to drive home how desperate that state is: ignorance, madness, illusion, inertia and darkness. aprakāśo ‘pravṛttiś ca pramādo moha eva ca I tamasy etāni jāyate vivṛddhe kuru-nandana II 14.13 It is surprising how quickly one can slip from rajas to tamas. To slip from restless activity into inactivity and inertia is simple. Activity without meaning, activity with tension and stress and activity totally focused on sensual satisfaction quickly leads to deep fatigue. The activity without any meaning that we find in tamas is not the same as activity without a purpose and goal that we experience in satva.

Please do not confuse the two. The Purpose Of Life I mentioned earlier that the real danger of rajas is that we are constantly focused on a goal and we forget to be in completion and enjoy the path as we pursue a meaningless purpose. Life has no purpose. It only has meaning. The meaning of life is to be in the space of completion; to be in restful awareness, to realize our inner Divinity. That is why I say that I am here not to prove my Divinity, but to prove your Divinity. To be divine and to realize that inner divinity is our true meaning in life. Anything less than that is meaningless.

Being aggressive, being restlessly active, or being constantly on the move does not help us understand or realize this meaning. We will be running after one thing or another. We are just plain greedy. If we are driven by mere possessive obsession, we are bound to become tired sooner or later. Aggression results in deep depression. This is what I call the ‘depression of success’. I see this often in countries like the USA. People struggle to increase their material wealth, disregarding everything else. People change cars every year, houses every third year and their spouses every fifth year! People run after material possessions and trophies without knowing the right context of ‘why they are doing, what they are doing’.

One day when they have acquired and reacquired so many things and still feel incomplete, unhappy, uneasy and listless, they wonder why they acquired the things that they struggled for. They go into deep depression, deep incompletion what we call tamas. The depression of success is difficult to address. To experience failure when we have always been successful and worked so hard is difficult to Guṇatraya Vibhāga Yogaḥ FindYour Root PatternAnd Complete 1055 accept. What results then is depression, tamas. Tamas is generally born out of the ignorance of our true Self. Sometimes tamas can arise out of an effort to move out of that ignorance. A highly rājasic person, one who has been aggressively pursuing material gains, when moving into a spiritual path can easily move into tamas for a while.

Listen. Life happens to you inside and outside, both. If you think it is only inside and not outside, you don’t know the outside. If you think it is only outside, you don’t know the inside. If life is not happening to you inside, it is depression; if life is not happening to you outside, it is inefficiency. If life is happening to you inside, it is responsibility; if life is happening to you outside, it is success. Tamas is darkness. It is negative. We can only remove darkness by bringing in light. In the same way, we dispel ignorance by bringing in awareness of the science of completion, pūrṇatva.

The Upaniṣad says— tamaso mā jyotiṛgamaya—meaning, let my darkness be removed by light. Let the light and wisdom of Kṛṣṇa, the Jagadguru, dispel your darkness and tamas. In these verses, Kṛṣṇa tells us where the person goes after death when steeped in these attributes of satva, rajas and tamas. A sātvic person becomes divine. A tāmasic person chooses a lower life. A rājasic person continues to suffer due to greed. In another verse in the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that a person is reborn based on the last thought before death. Here Kṛṣṇa explains how that last thought is not an accident. It is based on one’s guṇa, nature, his patterns.

The mental setup, the conditioning, the mūla vāsanā with which we led life and with which we leave our life as well. When we are reborn, our spirit finds another body to occupy. Be Reborn with Gods Please listen! Every birth is your declaration of completion. You decide, ‘Come on! I declare completion. I will now work from the space of completion.’ During the birth you declare completion and start the whole think anew; and if you fall from the space of completion, you bring some of those past incompletions back. That is what is prārabdha karma. Karma which you bring back from the past incompletions is prārabdha. Whatever bio-memory you brought with you when you assumed the body is prārabdha.

The muscle-memory you are accumulating is agāmya, and all collective bio-memories is sañcita. If you come to planet Earth only with bio-energy, without bio-memory, you are an Incarnation. In the Inner Awakening program, we study the root thought patterns in great detail. People sometimes ask me, ‘What do you give during Inner Awakening?’ I tell you, I give you your life. I give your ‘life’ to you in Inner Awakening! Only when you have found your root thought pattern and removed it and regained your consciousness, you will understand, ‘Oh, God! I have literally wasted my whole life!’ Understand, in the Inner Awakening program, I give you your life, because I help you find your root patterns and destroy it!

Many superficial and deep root thought patterns will be burnt out during the meditations that the participants go through in this program. Therefore, symbolically, I give them the option to take a new spiritual name at the end, signifying a rebirth. Kṛṣṇa says that a person living in satva goes to higher spaces, the abodes of the realized sages. He becomes divine, tadottama vidāṁ lokān amalān pratipadyate (14.14). When we are steeped in satva, we live in restful awareness, the space of enlightenment. We live in the present moment. We are no longer attached to the results of our action and we are no longer controlled by fear and greed root patterns.

We stop thinking about ourselves and we start living for others. When one is in tamas, in deep ignorance and darkness, one sinks lower in rebirth. Kṛṣṇa says such a person is reborn as an animal. The lowest energy center of a human being is the mūlādhāra cakra, the root center. Human beings are provided with intelligence to move upward in consciousness. We have the freedom to make mistakes and we do make mistakes. When Kṛṣṇa talks about being reborn in ignorance and as an- Guṇatraya Vibhāga Yogaḥ FindYour Root PatternAnd Complete 1057 imals, it is not to denigrate animals. He means, a human being who behaves instinctively, out of a blocked mūlādhāra cakra, and out of an animalistic nature, is ignorant of his potential as a human.

We are not human beings striving for a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings enjoying a human experience. That is the truth. We can be in this state only when we are in satva. When we are in tamas, we forget our spiritual nature. When we are in rajas, we have a vague idea; however, even that spiritual experience becomes an attachment, another pattern, goal and desire. We become attached to something that is beyond attachment. Kṛṣṇa says that we are reborn into this human form, back into this cycle of life and death, this cycle of saṁsāra, with all its suffering. It is our choice to be instinctive and unconscious, in deep tamas, like an animal, or to be logical and chasing objects out of rajas.

The third choice is to be beyond attachments, in a super conscious state of completion, in an intuitive state, in tune with our sublime satva nature. This choice determines our next birth. In fact, it determines whether we will even be born again. Kṛṣṇa, the Master psychologist is right on the mark: Purification and knowledge are from satva, distress and greed are from rajas, and foolishness, madness and illusion are from tamas! Your True Nature is PūrṆa Beyond TriguṆa Our center is our true nature. Our true nature is divine. We are one with the universal energy, God, Parāśakti or whatever we want to call it. We cannot describe it.

We can just experience it. We experience bliss when our focus is in that central core and not out at the edges of our personality. Throughout life we run away from that center, that core of bliss, that space of completion. Let me define Completion. Completion is removing the delusion of incompletion, which makes you cognize the other is separate from you; the delusive cognizance, the delusive cognition. Our senses lead us towards the periphery where incompletions are, where material objects are. Our inner core is empty: it is śūṇya. But it is also pūrṇa, complete by itself with nothing else needed to top off the bliss. However, the outer periphery of incompletions is forever changing.

Nothing is eternal about it. Even when objects are the same, our perceptions keep changing. This periphery is māyā, illusion, tamas, ignorance. Understand, incompletion has no existence. Incompletion is the delusive cognition that stands between you and the Whole. Complete with everything. Our rājasic nature, the restless activity that strives to introduce purpose into something that is essentially without purpose, keeps driving us away from the center of completion into this peripheral darkness of incompletions, tamas and māyā. Rajas always drives us into tamas. Aggression, passion, attachment and aversion eventually take us into delusion and ignorance. But from time to time we get that spark of intelligence that says— there is more meaning to life than fantasies.

We start searching. When we seek our true nature, we move towards our center, the core of bliss. Then something in the external space attracts us and we move out to the periphery. We keep moving in and out, from center to periphery, from periphery back to center. That is why I call human beings eccentric! They can neither be in the center nor in the periphery. They settle in between and keep oscillating. They are eccentric. They are neither in complete madness nor in completion with their divine consciousness. The movement towards our core, our true self, ātma is driven by satva. The movement outwards is driven by rajas.

When we are fully settled in the periphery, we are caught in tamas. We are no longer human. When we settle into the center which is the space of completion, we go beyond the three guṇas. We become the triguṇa rahita, the Divine one who is beyond the three attributes, who is pūrṇa—complete. Where Do We Go From Here