Verses 7.24–7.27🔗

Unintelligent men, who do not know my supreme, illimitable and immortal form, assume my illimitable form as manifested. Here is another important verse. When He says earlier—My devotees achieve Me, attain Me—naturally Arjuna would have had the doubt: are you one more devata (demigod)? So Kṛṣṇa gives the explanation: ‘Unintelligent men, who are not mature, think I am just this form. Only an intelligent man understands that I am immortal. Even when I assume this form, I am that same consciousness. I have not become an ordinary human being by assuming a human form.’ He declares His divinity openly. He declares, ‘I am the same even when I assume a human form.

Don’t think I am one more demigod.’ He says, ‘I am unborn, immortal, illimitable, even when I assume this form. Even when I assume this form, I am that same ultimate divine. I am not an ordinary man.’ This is an important statement. This statement is made to declare His enlightenment and to express clearly and explicitly, ‘I am enlightened. I am the embodiment of the ultimate consciousness.’ The problem is that the person who is receiving this is not mature enough to recognize it as such. People ask me again and again, ‘Why is Kṛṣṇa repeatedly declaring that He is enlightened?’ That’s a big problem. If you talk about something again and again, people tend to think that something is wrong with that.

There is a proverb in Tamil: If you wear a new ring, you always gesture with that hand because you continuously show it off. If you wear a new earring, what will you do? You shake your head to show it off! If you speak about something again and again, there’s something wrong with that thing. If you are clear about it, why should you speak about it again and again? This is how a spiritually immature person will misunderstand what is said. Arjuna is approaching Kṛṣṇa out of fear and greed. When the Gītā started, Arjuna approached Kṛṣṇa out of fear and depression, and also out of greed, with the ‘What is beneficial for me?’ attitude.

He asked Kṛṣṇa what would give maximum benefit, which is an expression of the attitude of greed. Next he experiences fear. He is afraid of what will happen in the war. Fear and greed—that is the way he approaches Kṛṣṇa. So initially even Arjuna sees Kṛṣṇa as a demigod. At the initial level, Arjuna’s approach is also as though it is towards a demigod. That is the reason why Kṛṣṇa now declares His glory, or His true form. He says, ‘All types of people come to Me. I fulfill them at different levels, to encourage their faith and to enrich them to grow. But only intelligent people understand, that even if I assume this body, I am the ultimate, Jñānavijñāna Yogaḥ Listen, Cognize And Radiate 557 I am enlightened.

Unintelligent people think by seeing my body, by seeing my form, that I am not the Divine. So please be very clear: I am THAT.’ He makes a clear statement again and again, so that Arjuna understands. We need to understand two important issues here. First, the formless energy of Kṛṣṇa defines His supremacy, His divinity, His Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Second, in whatever form the formless is expressed, it is divine. It is the awareness of that divinity in Him that makes Kṛṣṇa divine, the supreme Master. If that awareness happens in you, you will be in Kṛṣṇa consciousness, immersed in Him; and you will be divine too. The intelligence Kṛṣṇa talks about is the intelligent awareness of one’s own divinity, not merely that of Kṛṣṇa.

They are both one and the same. It is only when we are aware of our divinity that we appreciate the Divine. I say to my disciples, ‘Till you become enlightened, you will have no clear awareness of who I am. Till then you try to reach me only out of fear or greed, however slight it may be. It is only when you are enlightened and are in the same awareness as me, only when it is no longer necessary for you to fear me or desire through me, that you open up to me in sheer gratitude.’ That is the intelligence that Kṛṣṇa speaks about. When that intelligence exhibits itself, when that awareness surfaces, then and only then true recognition of the Divine happens.

That true recognition happens when you recognize the Divine within you. How To Recognize Divinity? Kṛṣṇa asks: How can you recognize divinity when you are covered in ignorance? How can you recognize Me when you are not aware? Out of the thousands who come to me, tens of thousands, the vast majority seeks favors of one kind or another. They come for the healing of the body and mind, or they come for repairing relationships, and for material benefits. Even those who do not look for material benefits may aspire to that intangible peace and bliss. It is the rare person who comes without asking anything. It is not even seeking a benefit, tangible or intangible, that leads such people.

It is an awareness of what they need to be and where they need to be. They are attracted like iron filings to a magnet. It is a call from their being which leads them to me. In Mahābhārat, the Pāṇḍava princes could recognize the reality of Kṛṣṇa. No one needed to coach them for it. On the other hand, their cousins the Kaurava for the most part denied Kṛṣṇa. They rejected and ridiculed Him. Duryodhana, who was offered the first choice by Kṛṣṇa to choose either Him unarmed or His Yadava army, chose the utilitarian army! That was all Duryodhana could see. That was his level of awareness, steeped as he was in ignorance.

Arjuna jumped at Kṛṣṇa’s offer. All Arjuna wanted was Kṛṣṇa, His presence, not His army, not His divine powers, nothing else. It is a choice that all of us need to make, whether we wish to be Duryodhana or Arjuna. It is not a difficult choice, as it will be determined by our being and our awareness. It will not be a choice at all. It will be a happening. ‘No one knows Me, māṁ tu veda na kaścana (7.26)’, says the Master. How true! ‘Don’t take me for granted,’ says Kṛṣṇa. ‘Do not put me in a frame for I shall not stay there,’ He says. Can you know Nature?

Can you predict Nature? Each time you think you can, Nature does things differently. Then you say Nature is cruel, and ask why Nature is so cruel. Nature is Nature, not cruel, not kind, it just is. So is Kṛṣṇa. His compassion is not pity as we imagine. The compassion of the Master is beyond our frames of time and space. So we cannot fathom what that means. When a tsunami kills a thousand people, we weep. When we pray and then win a lottery, we make a donation to the temple, since we are very pleased. Divine compassion is not related to these. It is the truth that is beyond time and space.

Those who stay around me have experienced that whatever I say is the truth and it happens. They don’t question me, not because they are afraid. What control can I have over them? They are free to leave any time they want. In fact, I tell them the only thing that causes me to pause is Jñānavijñāna Yogaḥ Listen, Cognize And Radiate 559 when a disciple leaves me, because then I have lost the chance to enrich him. They know the way enlightened beings flow. They recognize that and they simply follow. They know that when I tell them something, it is not just a fact but the truth: truth that is not constrained by time and space.

Over two years ago when I went to the Himalayas with a group of disciples to the cār-dhām pilgrimage centers, I had asked them to tell the local religious authorities that I am a Mahāmanḍaleśvar. This title is given to the leader of a very large Hindu religious organization. It is more than a title; it confers spiritual leadership, like being canonized as a saint leader. Without questioning, they announced that a Mahāmanḍaleśvar had arrived. They accepted the statement and gave the due respect when I visited the temples. Back in 2007, I was at the Ardh Kumbh Melā at Prayāg in Northern India, which normally happens every 4 years.

However this time the sacred river Gangā reversed Her direction, and this happens once in every 144 years. So it was more significant and 90 million people gathered for a dip in the holy river. I went with a large group of disciples. In every Kumbh Melā, the first right to dip on the day of the royal bath is given to the nāgā sādhus, who are a special sect of naked monks, and among them the Mahānirvanī Akhāḍa, the oldest apex body of Hinduism. During part of my wandering days before my self-realization, I had been with a group of these monks and they had accepted me as their own.

Now at the Kumbh Melā they conferred upon me the title of Mahāmanḍaleśvar of their akhāḍā (religious sect), just a few days prior to the day of the royal bath, and also gave the first right to enter the Gangā on that special day. Amongst the disciples was one who was present two years earlier during the Himalayan trip. He couldn’t believe how the words he had heard from me were manifesting themselves now! I explained to him, it had nothing to do with what I had said. It is just the way Existence wants things to happen. What is spoken through enlightened beings is what Existence directs, and there can never be a contradiction in that.

The Truth is unpredictable because it is not bound by time and space as we know it. Truth cannot be known unless we are in truth ourselves. We cannot know Kṛṣṇa unless we are in Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Kṛṣṇa consciousness is not just about going around chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa. Such chanting, unless done with awareness from the space of completion, is of no real consequence; True Kṛṣṇa consciousness needs no words. In fact, it has no words because the experience is beyond expression. One who experiences it does not express it. Fear and greed are what drive us, says Kṛṣṇa. That is our delusion that leads us away from Him.

Attachment and aversion, rāga and dveṣa, form the duality, the polarity of human life. Even at the fundamental cellular level, biologists have shown that this tendency is exhibited. If you place a single cell in a petridish and place a drop of nutrient, it is attracted to it and moves towards it. If you place a drop of toxin in the same dish, the cell moves away from it. If on either side, you place drops of nutrient and toxin, the cell remains immobile. At the cellular level, attraction aids in growth and aversion in survival. A cell can either grow or protect itself. At the multi-cellular level with higher intelligence, human beings act in the same way as the primary cell.

They get attached to what they think is good for them and flee from what they think is not good. Unfortunately, what works well at the cellular level does not work so well at the human level simply because humans have greater intelligence. Cells obey Nature and are directed by Nature to recognize instinctively what is good and what is bad. They also automatically accept the consequence. Jñānavijñāna Yogaḥ Listen, Cognize And Radiate 561 Humans are different. They bypass signals from their body, refuse to accept what Nature tries to tell them and indulge in or avoid activities or objects based on their logic. Logic overriding Nature always leads to suffering.

Shedding attachment and aversion is the first step to awareness. Attachment and aversion are born out of our past; based on experiences and memories that form the root thought patterns, what we call saṁskāra in Saṁskrit. Based on these saṁskāras, we try to define our future. The problem is that these saṁskāras operate at an unconscious level and drive us from unawareness to unawareness, from incompletion to incompletion. Therefore, we end up acting instinctively, but unlike our cellular brethren, without listening to Nature. Human beings are given intelligence so that they can rise above instinct and logic and operate out of intuition. This intuition is born from awareness. It comes through meditation.

With awareness, we understand that there is truly nothing that we can be attached to, since everything is impermanent. As I said earlier, every moment of our life is a psychodrama. The same is true of aversion. It arises from insecurity and fears. What is there to be afraid of in life? Every occasion that we are afraid, we actually die inside us. If we shed our fear of death, we lose all our fears. When we move into awareness, through meditation, we settle within the boundary of our body-mind and we enter the present moment. When we are in the present moment there is no duality of like and dislike, attachment and aversion. We respond to each event as it unfolds with clarity,withintuitiveintelligence,withcompletionandwearealwaysright. No Sin, No Virtue