Verses 2.14–2.18🔗

Therefore, fight, O Bhārata. Kṛṣṇa says here that the sensory experiences, mātrā-sparśhaḥ are all temporary. Feelings of hot and cold, śītoṣṇa, sweet and sour, wet and dry, experiences of pain and pleasure, sukha-duḥkha, as well as other experiences of like and dislike are all temporary, anityāḥ. These experiences do not affect the centered person who is qualified to be enlightened, so amṛtatvāya kalpate. These sensory experiences are anitya or impermanent and unreal. Moreover, they are relative. What may be considered hot by one person may not be perceived as hot by another. There are many sādhus or ascetics, who stay in the higher reaches of the Himalayan mountains with least clothing; in temperatures everyone would consider bitter cold.

There are those who carry out the parikramā, circumambulation, of Mount Kailaśa and Lake Mansarovar. Studies conducted on Tibetan Lamas in their high altitude snow-covered monasteries showhow the Lamas can bear extreme cold without any discomfort. Renowned scientists from reputed institutions such as the Harvard Medical School have conducted such studies. When Nature is accepted totally, heat, cold, rain, dryness and all these changes do not affect the body-mind system If we walk around without footwear, the earth that we walk upon becomes our friend. As long as we wear footwear to protect ourselves from Nature, we are treating Nature as an outsider, as an enemy. One who is firmly grounded in himself is grounded in Nature.

Kṛṣṇa says that such a person is qualified and ready for enlightenment. Such persons have brought their senses under control, and as a result have their mind too under control. What Kṛṣṇa says here, and what has been experienced by the wise sages of the East for thousands of years, is only now being grasped by scientists and researchers. It is now accepted by medical science that the body-mind dies many deaths before its final exit. Cells within our body die in thousands every day and get reborn. Over a period of a few years, every single cell in the body-mind system is replaced and renewed. What you were two or three years ago is not what you are today.

Every single cell in your body-mind system, and therefore, every single bone, muscle, tissue, artery, vein, limb and body part is new, completely different from what it was two or three years ago. The body-mind continually ceases to exist and gets recreated. It is not permanent. Separate from the body-mind system is our spirit that lives on eternally. The spirit remains the same throughout our life with no change, despite all the changes in the body-mind system. It continues to be, to exist, even after our death. The spirit does not die with the body. It lives on. It is permanent and true. When one understands this difference between what is eternal, nitya, and what is ephemeral, anitya, one becomes a seer and knower of Truth.

Make Your Perception Pure and Patternless Nitya and anithya do not translate into real and unreal. In the same way māyā , loosely translated as illusion, is not unreal. Māyā and anitya are real and perceived by our senses but they refer to things that are not true, that are not lasting. They are factually real but truthfully unreal! That which is true will always be true; it cannot cease to exist. Truth here refers to the state of permanence, of being eternal. I say a living master is not present as you feel, and a dead master is not absent as you think. The presence of a dead master, an enlightened dead master, is permanent and always real.

A living Master’s form is not His only presence. He is present in His absence as well. Our perceptions through our senses may be real but not necessarily true. A dream is very real when it happens. You may get angry, frightened, excited, lustful, and such when you dream. Your body responds to these emotions and your senses react to what you observe in the dream. Yet the moment you start witnessing the dream, you awaken. You cannot dream when you become aware. The dream is not true, though it seemed real. The same happens when you are awake and daydreaming, which is most of the time! You are awake but you fantasize.

Even when you think you are fully awake, what you perceive through your senses may not be what you interpret it to mean. Your mind always filters through its own lens of the root pattern or ego. You judge whatever you perceive through your conditioned memories and then selectively put together pieces of what you perceive, to support your judgment. Please listen! A blind man was sitting in front of a huge fire with a burning stick in his hand. Somebody came and asked him, ‘What is this? Such a huge fire! Don’t you see? What are you going to do about it?’ The blind man said, ‘Yes, yes! That is why I took this burning stick and put it on my eyes.

Now I am not seeing the fire!’ Can that be the solution? You may laugh now, but all your solutions are usually of this type. And you even accept as your master, the fool who tells ‘Take the stick and put it on your eyes!’ Will not seeing the fire, solve the problem? Burning your eyes is not going to give you liberation from the scenes you are seeing. Look in! Shrinking from life is nothing but putting the burning stick in your eyes! Just because your eyes are burnt, it does not mean that the fire will not impact you or the world will not impact you. Perception of fire is still burning from inside you, as per your experience.

The innermost perception has to change. You need to realize that it is not the outside scene, but the innermost perception you carry for the outside scene, which is impacting you and giving you the experience of your reality. I tell you, if there is fire burning and you sit at a distance and just go on gazing at the fire, you will feel the heat in your body! If you just turn your eyes away while maintaining the same distance—you will not see the burning and no more experience the burning in your body! How? The seeing has reduced the distance between you and the fire! That is perception and reality!

This is what Śrī Kṛṣṇa means when He says, ‘O son of Kuntī, contact with sense objects causes heat and cold, pleasure and pain, and these have a beginning and an end.’ Understand, a pattern is any action that is unfulfilled as per your fantasy, either because of an outside hindrance or an inside hindrance, and is in incompletion! Please listen! Now, I am defining perception. The way your patterns react and respond to the facts is perception. Perception is nothing but processed facts. There are three levels of perception: • No pattern, no perception—that is the worst. • Pattern with perception—that is okay. • Perception but with no pattern—that is the best.

I am giving you the essence of philosophy, which is a combination of your patterns and facts. If only facts are playing a hundred percent role, you don’t have any pattern. These are the non-responders who are soaked in dullness. They neither have patterns nor have consciousness. The vast eleven lakh (one hundred and ten million) army of Kauravas signifies this dull unconscious space of ‘no pattern, no perception.’ They lived in stupid materialism with their life philosophy as stupid atheism. That is why Duryodhana is never attacked by any pattern or dilemma that overpowers Arjuna. Then, there are responders who have ‘patterns with perceptions.’ The moment Arjuna sees the vast Kaurava army, his whole body and being shivers with the fear pattern.

His patterns do not let him see the army as army and just fight as per his natural perception of himself as a warrior. No! He sees relatives, friends and teachers and wants to escape the war; he wants to shrink from life! Ultimately, we have the Lord of all perceptions, the one with complete consciousness, Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa Himself! His very existence is the pure space of perception. He is the destroyer of all patterns, who enriches Arjuna in destroying and completing with the army of root patterns by transforming Arjuna’s own perception! Sāṅkhya, Best Enriching Philosophy of Completion Please listen! The best enriching philosophy on the planet Earth is Kapila’s Sāṅkhya!

Do you know why? Because He has no patterns. Kapila is established in completion—the space of pure perception! No patterns are involved in the processing of information through the senses. The fire is seen as the fire. Not even an iota of the idea of heat or cold is superimposed on it! Superimposing any idea on life takes away the joy of life. The great news for human beings is that māyā (illusion) can be transformed. Perception can be transformed. You can become enlightened! O humanity! I am here to give you the great news! Perception can reach completion! When you bring completion into the perception, a moment of perception can literally bring enlightenment!

Let me give you an example. Recently I visited the cremation grounds in Vārāṇasi with a group of disciples. When we were watching the dead bodies burning in front of us for some hours, some people were just sleeping, some were affected and were feeling nauseated, and some were not at all affected by the same scene of the body burning part by part in front of oureyes.Whatisthedifference?Itisjusttheprocessingofinformationwith patterns. The possibility of perception! That is the reason why the great Masters have always urged their disciples to wake up. Jāgṛat is the word used to awaken them. This is not the call to wake up from sleep but the call to wake up into completion!

It is the call to emerge from the non-existent reality of processed facts or patterns into the truly existent Truth of self-experience. Most of the time we exist in our past or future. We are constantly caught in the experiences of the past, under the excuse of learning from them. But in actuality, we are caught in guilt, regret or pleasure from remembering the past memories. The future is just as unreal as the past. Yet, we build castles, we plan, we dream, and we fantasize about the future without the capacity to execute any of it. We are not even sure we will take our next breath. How can we control events of the future when we cannot control our next breath?

The futility of our constant movement between past and future and back again is the greatest wonder of all. Now, I am giving you the best possibility of perception. Listen! Bring integrity in your thinking. Your eyes, your senses will not forget the reality even at that moment, and will not cognize heat or cold, pain or pleasure. Many times, due to lack of integrity our mind and body cognize their own facts, their own concepts. The only truth, the only true reality, is the truth of this very moment. As long as we are in this present moment, we have a pure perception without any patterns, only then we are truly complete and integrated.

The present moment never ceases to exist. In fact, that is all that does exist. The present moment alone is sat, truth, everything else is asat, untruth. One who realizes this truth and acts out of completion, says Kṛṣṇa, is enlightened. We are all made of body, mind and spirit. The body is tangible; we can feel its boundaries. When a part of the body is sick, we can feel the discomfort. As long as we feel the body working smoothly, we say we are in good health. Our mind is subtle. We do not feel the mind in the same way as we feel the body. We do not feel its boundaries.

Yet, we feel the effects of the mind: thoughts, desires, emotions etc. Modern scientific studies have shown that what we term as mind is spread all over the body. Mind and its intelligence are inbuilt into our cellular structure. Recent studies have shown that it is our root thought patterns not genetics, which in turn arise from our earliest experiences of powerlessness, which define the birth and developmentofourmind,andinturninfluencethecellularstructure.Earlier it was believed that genetic modifications to the cellular structure influenced the way we cognized. The process where we perceive or receive information through five senses, internalize it with our root thought patterns, and respond based on our patterns is Cognition. Now it is proven that it is our root thought pattern that leads to our cognition and thereafter determines our genetics.

Even subtler is the spirit. In fact, many people question this entity called spirit. What it is, they ask. What is this thing called spirit or soul? We cannot see it and we cannot touch it. Becoming aware of this subtle spirit or soul is just what Selfrealization is all about. In these verses, Kṛṣṇa says first that the spirit pervades the body— avināśi tu tad viddhi yena sarvam idaṁ tatam. His definition of body is the body-mind system. Secondly, He states that the body and mind are destroyed at death—antavanta ime dehā nityasyoktāḥ śārīriṇaḥ. Thirdly, He declares that the spirit does not die at death—vināśam avyayasyāsya na kascit kartum arhati.

Fourthly, He explains that the spirit is beyond our mental comprehension—anāśino ‘prameyasya. When death happens, bodily functions stop and the senses, which are a function of the mind, stop working. The entire body-mind system is then left by itself and it degenerates. This part is clear to all of us who have seen death. What is unclear or unknown to us is that there is something within us that does not perish at death. Kṛṣṇa clarifies here that this is the Self, Ātman, the energy that never dies. What is death? Is it the spirit leaving the body that causes death, or is it that death forces the spirit into leaving the body?

The body-mind system is perishable, that it has a definite shelf life and comes with an expiry date. However, beyond this expiry date, there is something that lives on and that is the spirit. This spirit is energy; it is the energy of life. Kṛṣṇa urges Arjuna to fight saying, ‘Therefore, fight, O Bhārata, tāsmad yudhyasva bharāta’, with the full understanding that what he thinks of as real is unreal, that what he thinks of as permanent, Nitya is impermanent, Anitya and what he thinks he is about to destroy can, in truth, never be destroyed. Kṛṣṇa tells him to open his eyes and see with pure pattern less perception; that what he is about to do will only destroy that which is going to perish anyway.

Even if he wants to, Arjuna cannot destroy the imperishable, avināśi spirit that lives on. Arjuna’s concern about the death of his kinsmen and elders arises out of his root pattern of fear and insecurity about his own death. He does not realize his true imperishable nature and therefore he is afraid of dying. By extension of this fear, he is afraid of others’ deaths as well, especially at his own hands. Kṛṣṇa tells him that there is no such thing as death and that death is unreal, anāśinaḥ. All our lives we see people around us dying. Death is the only certainty in this otherwise uncertain world. Everyone, whether a beggar or a prince, must die.

When we wake up from a dream, we don’t mourn our dream lives, as real as they felt at the time. Do we? No. In the same way, when we awaken into the highest state of consciousness, we have the same experience that this ‘real’ life was only a dream. There is nothing to mourn or fret over. The lineage of all enlightened masters has again and again supported Kṛṣṇa’s declarations with their own direct experience. The body is just the shell that houses your spirit. Even when the body perishes, you do not. It is impossible because you are eternal, Nitya; you are bliss, Ānanda. Kṛṣṇa is firmly stating this reality that there is no such thing as death, nābhāvo vidyate sataḥ.

He says what dies or seems to perish is unreal, nāsato vidyate bhāvo; it had no permanent existence anyway. What does have existence, what is truly real, exists now, has always existed and will exist forever! Look in! When you drill with integrity and authenticity, normal perception itself is nothing but perception of God! Because any perception will directly lead you to the space of the root of all actions, including perception! You will see that the ultimate perception, what Kṛṣṇa declares as your true nature of eternal existence and indestructible energy becomes your reality! Sāṅkhya is reality. What exists as reality is perceived by you without the interference, perversions created by your powerless patterns. Sāṅkhya is the philosophy of reality—ultimate existentialism. Completion will lead you to experience that Sāṅkhya, the reality, existential reality—Tattva Satya, Satya Tattva! You Are Immortal