Verses 7.28–7.30🔗

Kṛṣṇa talks here about pāpa and puṇya, sinful and meritorious acts. The concept of sin and merit itself is a delusion, one of duality. At the level of Kṛṣṇa consciousness there is no pāpa or puṇya, no sin and no act of merit. All are the same. Your immediate question will be, ‘Can I do anything I want? Can I kill, maim, annihilate, and be a Hitler?’ When you reach Kṛṣṇa consciousness you will not be a Hitler. It is impossible. At the level where you are now, it is necessary to follow some regulations because you still operate in duality. You operate from attachment and aversion. You act out of fear and greed.

Unfortunately, instead of these statements being guidelines for self-awareness as they were intended to be, they have become tools in the Jñānavijñāna Yogaḥ Listen, Cognize And Radiate 563 hands of institutions, whether religious, political or societal, to control us. Thousands of years ago, great masters like Patañjali outlined prescriptions for Self-realization. In his Aṣtāṅga yoga, Patañjali established practices of yama and niyama. These are internal and external regulations for your guidance, not for others to manipulate you with. These are milestones to guide your way. Once you reach the destination, you don’t need the milestones; you don’t need any regulations. Every year, I take a group of disciples to the Himalayan mountains on a pilgrimage, and the first stop is Rishikesha, where the river Gangā is about to enter the plains.

Here I make them take the sannyās vows prescribed in yama. It is for their protection and guidance. It is not to instill notions of sin and virtue. Thesefivevowsaresatya,ahiṁsā,asteya,aparigṛhaandbrahmacarya. Satya is truth in thoughts, word and action; ahiṁsā is not harming anyone in thought, word and action; asteya is not coveting, not stealing what belongs to another; aparigṛha is living with minimal needs; brahmacarya is living without fantasies. They take these vows after a dip in the sacred river Ganga and participate in a vṛaja homa, a fire ritual of purification. For the next two weeks they wear the saffron cloth that I give them. These vows are for self-discipline and they lead one to awareness and completion.

No one needs to control us. Understand, as long as we need to look over our shoulder to see if someone is watching us, we are still living in hypocrisy. Kṛṣṇa addresses mortal beings here, in the form of Arjuna. So He talks about doing virtuous acts and avoiding sinful acts. What follows is more important. He says to go beyond duality, the duality of sin and virtue. This is only possible when we become aware. It is only when we become aware that we can reach Him. In the verses of the famous Bhaja Govindaṁ, Ādī Śankarācārya says hauntingly, punarapi jananaṁ punarapi maraṇaṁ ... Birth and death again and again; lying in a mother’s womb again and again.

This [ocean of] repeated birth and death is so difficult to cross. Please save me, O Murāre Kṛṣṇa!’ The greatest philosopher that Hinduism has known, prays to the greatest Master that the Universe has known, ‘Save me from this endless cycle of saṁsāra, the cycle of birth and death.’ To know that one needs to be saved from this cycle needs great wisdom. To seek the feet of the Master who can lead you to that liberation needs great wisdom and awareness. You can be born again and again and still think that you are being born for the first time, and that this is the only life that you have.

This knowledge requires no wisdom. With this knowledge, you focus on this life and want to extract the maximum juice out of it. You run after everything possible, as if there is no tomorrow. You live in a fantasy world. You enact a psychodrama. Please understand, this is not your only life. This body is not who you are. All this is temporary. What you chase is a dream. One day you will wake up and discover that this life is nothing but a dream. You are more than this body and mind; you are above this body-mind. What you are endures after death. When you understand this Cosmic Truth, you are liberated.

At some time, you do not wish to be part of this psychodrama anymore. You are bored. You ask, ‘What for?’ just as Śankara plaintively asks Kṛṣṇa, ‘Again and again, without end, I come and I go. Please save me from this useless journey; let me be with You.’ Buddha calls this cycle of birth and death a bondage. It is sorrow because it is not real. It is not the real you that dies and is reborn. The real you changes bodies as you change clothes. It Is Never Too Late To Reach Me Kṛṣṇa ends this chapter with the prescription for how to know and understand Him and reach Him.

Even at the time of death, He says, even if all your life you lived a dissolute life, if at the point of departure you realize your folly, the futility of the psychodrama that you have enacted, that is enough to redeem you. The mere recognition of that can save you. His compassion is unlimited. Jñānavijñāna Yogaḥ Listen, Cognize And Radiate 565 He promises: Knowing me at the time of death, even at the time of death, will lead you to Me. Please understand, this is not easy, not so easy as it seems. If you have been ruled by greed, greed for power, wealth, possessions and all such material objects throughout your life, nothing can change suddenly at the time of death.

You will be full of the same fantasies that you were obsessed with throughout your life. Your last thoughts will be on those very same things. We cannot change our nature at the last minute. If we want to die with the thought of the Divine uppermost in our mind, we must cultivate the habit of remembering Him now. We should start knowing and understanding Him today. Then and only then will we know and understand Him at the time of death. Some may ask, ‘What is the need to understand and know Kṛṣṇa, whether at the point of death or before? If I do the right things in the right manner, why should it make any difference whether or not I understand and know Kṛṣṇa?’

Please understand that Kṛṣṇa is not talking about the physical Kṛṣṇa, or even about the Cosmic Consciousness that He is. He speaks about our understanding, about knowing ourselves, who we are. The ultimate Master resides within us, not anywhere else. The external Master, be He Kṛṣṇa or Nithyānanda, is a guide to make us understand, know and accept the Master within us. Yes, it may be possible in rare cases for that wisdom to dawn on us at the point of death, but it is not common. Someone who constantly seeks that truth will continuously search for that Master within, and has a better chance of making that connection earlier rather than later in life.

Kṛṣṇa in His deep compassion says, ‘Even if that happens at the point of death, I shall redeem you.’ He does not want us to miss that chance, even if we have not thought about Him all our lives. He does not rule out the possibility, even if we have not been seeking all our lives. He wants us to discover the master within. Even if we do that at the point of our last breath, it is okay with Him. Many read Gītā and claim that they understand what Kṛṣṇa says. What they mean is that they understand that language into which the Gītā they are reading has been translated, that’s all.

How can we even intellectually understand that Kṛṣṇa is supreme? Forget the demigods, how can we even accept that He is greater than us? We are so full of our identity and root patterns, that even if a thousand Kṛṣṇas were to descend in front of us, we would ask them for their identification cards! We will recognize Kṛṣṇa only if He comes in front of us in the mold and image of Him that we have stored in our minds! Kṛṣṇa must come to us in our image of Him. Then we will accept Him as the Supreme and hang His picture on the wall. Everyday, Kṛṣṇa comes to us in many forms.

He comes to us in the form of every person we meet.Wedecidewhomwewillacceptandwhomwewillreject.Wecannot accept Kṛṣṇa in parts and reject Him in parts. Either we accept Him totally or reject Him. We have to surrender to Him. We have to surrender our identity, our root patterns to Him. We have to surrender to Him that foolish image that we have in our minds of Him. Meditation is a technique for surrendering one’s identity. Completion is the process of surrendering one’s root patterns. Throughout the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa suggests to Arjuna techniques, sūtras that leads to liberation. Combined with the cognition at the intellectual level, śāstra, with the higher devotional acceptance of His glories through verses, stotra, the Gītā leads you through the path of surrender into liberation.

Dropping one’s identity requires a deep cognition, acceptance, intranalization, and completion which brings the merger of the Self, World and God. Simply put, we accept our Divinity and become one with the Divine. We become complete, whole! This is what Enlightenment is about. At the Inner Awakening program, you are initiated into the science of completion with everything—with yourself, others and life and into Jñānavijñāna Yogaḥ Listen, Cognize And Radiate 567 the creation of the space to cause the reality for yourself and others. You are empowered with the four great powers of words, thinking, feeling and living to rewrite your future as you want. You can choose to be initiated into a meditation process that enriches you to reach your innermost core.

This meditation process, called the ānanda gandha meditation or ‘fragrance of bliss’ meditation, enriches you to constantly be in the space of completion and complete with any patterns as they surface. It anchors you to the present moment of completion where no root patterns or the branches of parasite patterns can form in you. In this state, you don’t create further karma (unfulfilled actions) and your mindset of unfulfilled desires is extinguished. You are liberated. You are in the space of perpetual completion! The simple truth is that the present moment of completion is Kṛṣṇa consciousness. When we reach this state of being in the present moment, we reach Him and we are complete.

So it is not the mere intellectual understanding of what we read in the verses, but the authentic listening, śravana, authentic intranalying, manana and powerfully living and radiating, nididhyāsana of what Kṛṣṇa speaks into our listening, that can complete us. So, let us pray to the Ultimate Kṛṣṇa to give us the intelligence and awareness to realize the truth about ourselves, to give us this experience of eternal bliss, Nityānanda May you reach Kṛṣṇa consciousness and realize eternal bliss, Nityānanda! Thus ends the seventh chapter named Jñānavijñāna Yogaḥ, ‘The Yoga Of Knowledge and Conscious Realization of Absolute’, of the Bhagavad Gītā Upaniṣad, Brahmavidyā Yogaśāstra, the scripture of yoga dealing with the science of the Absolute in the form of Śrī Kṛṣṇārjuna saṃvād, dialogue between Śrī Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna.

The Art Of Leaving Death is our ultimate fear. Anyone who claims not to be disturbed by the thought of death is only lying. The moment we understand death, our life becomes a celebration. Krsna reveals the secret of death, understanding which, we can live even our death. c h a p t e r Akṣarabrahma Yogaḥ ... In this chapter, Kṛṣṇa speaks about death. He gives us deep insight into how death can become liberation and celebration. Death is the end of life, as long as we don’t understand it! The moment we understand it, it becomes a liberation and celebration. Death Is A Celebration Death is not the end of life, as we think.

It is the climax of life. End is different from climax. The moment we think that death is the end, we wonder about it, trying to figure out what happens next. We create more trouble for ourselves. We worry about death the moment we think it is the end. Our lives become dull because of such worries. The shadow of death happens even when we live. A man who is unable to understand death is like the living dead. A person who understands death will live even his death. A person who does not understand death dies even when he is alive. A person who understands death lives even when he dies.

Death or life are not incidental, they depend on our intelligence. When we have clear intelligence, we live our death. When we don’t know, when we do not have the clarity about death, we die even when we live. The fear of death haunts everyone from birth. All religions sprang up from this one fear, this one question: Why do we die? What happens after we die? How can we escape death? Each religion answers this question in its own way. Most religions answer in such a way that they can control us through the fear of death and the greed of escaping death. They talk about sins and merits and threaten us with hell and entice us with the promise of heaven.

None of these really exists. There is no heaven or hell that any religion can The Art Of Leaving Akṣarabrahma Yogaḥ The Art Of Leaving 571 threaten or entice us with. These are not physical locations or even metaphysical locations; they are merely states of our mind. Death is not an end; it is a passage. It is a passage in a journey that continues. It is not a one-time event, as some religions seem to believe. We do not live and die once; we live again and again. As Kṛṣṇa says, the undying spirit casts off bodies as one casts off garments and puts on new ones. The spirit within is immortal.

The spirit within us is part of the Cosmic energy and lives on, whereas the bodies that it assumes perish. Enlightened Masters of the Vedic tradition experienced the state beyond life and death and have provided us with guidelines about how to achieve the same state. However, they expressed this to a select audience of disciples in a language coded for the understanding of those mature enough to work with that knowledge. Here Kṛṣṇa, the greatest of all enlightened Masters, out of His infinite compassion, provides this knowledge in a form that anyone can understand. All one requires to imbibe this knowledge, is an open mind and the willingness to work sincerely with integrity, authenticity and with dedication.

When we understand the art of living, the process of leaving becomes a celebration. When we understand that this life and the departure from this life is a single journey in a continuous cycle of birth and death, there is no urgency in living this life and there is no fear in leaving this life also. When we understand that what we do in this life and how we do it determines how we are reborn, we will have a far greater understanding of how to lead this life. Arjuna starts here with questions. Knowing Him At the Time Of Death