The Blessed Lord said,
The highest knowledge, best of all
The kinds of knowledge, I’ll proclaim again.
All sages, knowing it, have gone
From here to the highest perfection.
{1}
Come creation they do not take birth
And come the dissolution do not tremble,
Taking refuge in this knowledge,
Coming to identify with me.
{2}
My womb is great Brahman.
In this, I set the egg.
The genesis of all species, Bharata,
Engenders out of that.
{3}
As for the forms engendered
In all wombs, son of Kunti,
Brahman is their greater womb.
I am the father, generous with seed.
{4}
Purity, Power, and Darkness:
The gunas nature has engendered
Bind down in the body
Eternity’s embodiment.
{5}
Purity—spotless, shining,
Clear of sickness—binds it by
Attaching it to happiness,
Attaching it to knowledge.
{6}
Know that Power’s very self is
Passion born of thirst and clinging.
This can bind the embodied atman
By attaching it to action.
{7}
Know that Darkness, born of ignorance,
Deluding every body
Binds this with distraction,
Laziness, and sleep.
{8}
Purity latches on to happiness
As Power does to action, Arjuna.
Obscuring knowledge, Darkness
Latches on to distractions.
{9}
Purity comes up by overcoming
Power and Darkness; Power,
By overcoming Purity and Darkness; Darkness,
By overcoming Purity and Power.
{10}
When this body’s every gate
Lights up with knowledge,
You will know for sure that
Purity has burgeoned.
{11}
Greed, activity, starting
Projects, restlessness, desire:
Bull of the Bharatas, these spring up
When Power burgeons.
{12}
Dullness and inertia,
Distractibility, delusion:
These arise when Darkness
Burgeons, Arjuna.
{13}
When an embodied atman, grown great
In Purity, goes on to dissolution,
He sets foot on the stainless worlds
Of those who know the Highest.
{14}
When a Power-seeker goes to dissolution,
He is born with those attached to action.
Likewise, someone who dissolves in Darkness
Takes birth in deluded wombs.
{15}
They say that work well done
Will bear a Pure and spotless fruit.
Of Power, though, the fruit is pain.
Ignorance is the fruit of Darkness.
{16}
Purity gives birth to knowledge;
Power, to greed. Distractions,
Delusions, ignorance
Arise from Darkness.
{17}
Upward go the Pure. The Power-
Seekers, in the middle, stay there.
Stuck in the basest guna,
The Dark must go below.
{18}
When an observer sees
Nothing at work but gunas,
He knows what’s higher than the gunas,
And so he comes to be me.
{19}
Going beyond these three gunas
Born in the body, the one embodied—
Freed from birth and death, old age
And pain—can get to immortality.
{20}
Arjuna said,
Someone who’s gone beyond these
Three gunas, Lord—what marks him out?
What’s his behavior? And how does he
Go beyond these three gunas?
{21}
The Blessed Lord said,
Enlightenment, activity,
Delusion, Arjuna:
He does not scorn their presence.
He does not yearn for their absence.
{22}
Seated apart, as if indifferent,
Unmoved by gunas, thinking,
“These are just the gunas in a whirl,”
He doesn’t waver. He stands fast.
{23}
Pleasure and pain the same thing, self-reliant,
A clod, a rock, and gold the same, steadfast,
Equal toward likes and dislikes,
Equal toward blame or praise,
{24}
In honor or dishonor equal, equal
To the friendly faction or the hostile,
Renouncing all endeavors: He
Is said to go beyond the gunas.
{25}
Whoever in the unswerving yoga
Of devotion serves me,
Going beyond these gunas: He
Is fit to become Brahman.
{26}
I am the basis of Brahman,
Of immortality, of eternity,
Of the dharma’s perpetuation
And of the blissful singularity.
{27}
SESSION 15
The Highest Human Godhood
Krishna begins with the complex metaphor of an upside-down tree. By scaling that metaphorical tree—by getting to the root of existence—you get to a place from which there is no return to suffering and rebirth.
Krishna expands on the idea of how every life is an embodiment of something divine. It takes a striving yogi to perceive that.
To show how the divine is both without and within, Krishna locates himself in the earth, providing food, and in the stomach, digesting food. He is the “Highest Human Godhood” because he transcends the ephemeral and the permanent alike.
The Blessed Lord said,
Roots on high and boughs below,
The imperishable asvattha tree
Has hymns for leaves. They say
Whoever knows it knows the Vedas.
{1}
Below and above it spreads its boughs,
Nourished by gunas, sprouting what we sense.
Its roots stretch out below, entangling
Actions in the human world.
{2}
Here in the world, the form of it can’t be perceived,
Not its end, not its beginning, not its foundation.
Cutting, with detachment’s hard weapon,
This asvattha tree’s well-planted root,
{3}
You must pursue a path to the place
Where those who go do not return again.
I seek refuge in that primal spirit
Energy flowed out of long ago.
{4}
No pride and no delusion, guilty attachments conquered,
Forever in the metaself, desires turned away,
Freed from the opposites known as joy and sorrow,
They go, undelude
d, to that imperishable place.
{5}
The sun does not illumine,
Nor the rabbit moon, nor fire,
That highest home of mine
Where those who go do not return.
{6}
Just a fragment of me in the living
World becomes a life, eternal,
And draws the senses (six, including
Mind) that rest in nature.
{7}
When the Lord takes on a body
And also when he leaves it, these
Are what he takes along with him
As a wind does perfumes from their source.
{8}
Presiding over hearing, vision,
Touch and taste and smell
As well as mind,
This savors what it senses.
{9}
Whether he steps out of it, or stays in,
Or enjoys the body with the gunas,
Deluded people do not see him.
The eye of knowledge sees him.
{10}
Striving yogis see him
Stationed in the atman; thoughtless,
Unperfected atmans, even
When they strive to, do not see him.
{11}
The brilliance coming from the sun
That makes the whole world shine,
That brilliance in the moon
And fire: Know it to be mine.
{12}
Entering the ground, I support
Species with my vigor.
Becoming Soma, soul of flavor,
I flourish all my herbs.
{13}
Becoming metabolic fire,
I shelter in the breathing body,
Yoked to breathing in and breathing out,
And I digest four kinds of food.
{14}
I am seated in the hearts of everyone.
From me come memory, knowledge, and forgetting,
And I alone am what all the Vedas know.
Crafter of Vedanta, knower of the Vedas: me.
{15}
The perishable and imperishable
Are spirits twinned within the world.
The perishable one is in all creatures.
What stands upon the peak is called imperishable.
{16}
Still, the highest spirit is another,
Named the Highest Self,
Who enters and bears up the three worlds,
Their eternal Lord.
{17}
Going as I do beyond the perishable,
Higher even than the imperishable,
I am celebrated as the Highest Human Godhood
In the world and in the Vedas.
{18}
Someone who without delusion
Knows me as the Highest Human Godhood
Knows it all and worships me
With all his being, Arjuna.
{19}
And so I’ve spoken this most
Secret precept, sinless one.
Awakening to it will make you wise,
And what needs doing will be done.
{20}
SESSION 16
Tell the Divine from the Demonic Inheritance
Krishna details two kinds of human inheritance, the divine and the demonic. After assuring Arjuna that he has a divine inheritance, Krishna dwells at length on the demonic one. The punishment of such people after death takes the form of rebirth in a demonic womb, and so the cycle perpetuates itself.
Krishna exhorts Arjuna to renounce lust, rage, and greed, and to let the scripture guide him in the work he must do here, on earth.
The Blessed Lord said,
Fearlessness, purity of heart,
Staying yoked through knowledge,
Charity, self-control, and sacrifice,
Study, austerity, simplicity;
{1}
Ahimsa, truth, renunciation,
Kindness, creaturely compassion,
Serenity, and modesty;
No rage, no lust, no fickleness, no slander;
{2}
Brilliance, patience, courage, cleanliness,
No treachery and no vainglory:
These traits belong to someone, Bharata,
Born with a divine inheritance.
{3}
Fraudulence, arrogance, narcissism,
Anger, coarseness, ignorance
Belong to someone, Partha,
Born with a demonic inheritance.
{4}
Inheritance can free you, if divine,
But if demonic, it can bind you.
Don’t grieve: Your divinity’s inherent.
You were born a son of Pandu.
{5}
Two kinds of beings are created
In this world, demonic and divine.
Divine ones I’ve extensively explained—
On the demonic, Partha, hear me out.
{6}
Demonic people don’t know
What to do, what not to do,
Or purity, or proper conduct.
No finding any truth in them!
{7}
“No truth, no base,” they say, “no lord
Is in the world. It came to be,
But one thing doesn’t follow from another.
What else causes it but lust?”
{8}
Holding to this view,
Lost souls with small minds
Emerge as enemies, cruel
In action, to destroy the world.
{9}
Harboring a lust that’s hard to fill,
Showy and arrogant and drunk,
Deluded, grasping after false ideas,
They proceed with dirty purposes.
{10}
Obsessing over countless worries
They die with in the end,
Enjoying lust, their highest aim—
Concerning that, they’re all conviction—
{11}
Trapped and roped by a hundred hopes,
Devout in lust and rage,
Intending to enjoy their lusts, they strive
To stockpile wealth illegally.
{12}
“This is how much I profited today,
And this, the chariot I have in mind,
And this, and this as well, is mine,
And more wealth in the future!
{13}
I killed that enemy,
And I’ll kill others, too!
I am the Lord! I am the enjoyer!
I am perfect, strong, and happy!
{14}
How rich I am, how well-born!
Who else is like me?
I’ll sacrifice, I’ll donate, I’ll rejoice!”
So they say, by ignorance deluded.
{15}
With many fancies leading them astray,
In a net of delusion entangled,
Attached to lust’s enjoyment,
They fall into an unclean hell.
{16}
Self-absorbed and stubborn,
Full of wealth and pride and drunkenness,
Their sacrifice, though called a sacrifice,
Is mere hypocrisy without the rite rules.
{17}
They cling to egotism, force,
&nb
sp; Insolence, lust, and anger.
In every body, their own or someone else’s,
It’s me their envy hates.
{18}
These hateful sadists, mankind’s
Basest, I am always hurling
Into cycles of rebirth
In hexed demonic wombs.
{19}
Entering demonic wombs
Birth after birth, deluded people
Don’t attain me, son of Kunti.
From there they take the lowest path.
{20}
Through Lust and Rage and Greed,
This triple gate of Hell,
The atman perishes. That’s why
You should renounce this triad.
{21}
Arjuna, getting free of these
Three dark gates, a man
Has done the best thing for himself.
From there he takes the highest path.
{22}
Whoever throws out scripture’s rules
And turns where his desire makes him
Does not attain perfection,
Happiness, or the highest path.
{23}
So let the scripture be your standard
And settle what to do, what not to do.
Knowing what the rule of scripture says,
You should do your work—here.
{24}
SESSION 17
Tell Apart the Three Kinds of Faith
Arjuna asks whether someone who throws out strict scriptural rules is in a state of Purity, Power, or Darkness.
Krishna details how the three gunas influence the religious aspects of life. The three gunas structure Krishna’s classifications of faith, diet, sacrifices, austerities, and charity.
He finishes with a description of the mantra Aum Tat Sat.
Arjuna said,
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