The war of the ancient Sanskrit text the Mahabharata is a war between two factions of one family – thus brothers will kill brothers, cousins will slaughter cousins, friends will slay friends and teachers, etc. With both armies massed on either side of a great battlefield, Arjuna, the greatest living warrior and archer, freezes, freaks!
The sight of all his relatives arrayed on the battlefield weakens Arjuna's resolve and he tells to his friend
His heart anguished, his eyes filling with tears, Arjuna lets go of his arrows & bow, and sits down in the pit of his chariot. He prefers to be killed, unarmed and defenseless, rather than to fight.
Thus the most perplexing question ever asked in written history is posed in this Sanskrit text, the Bhagavad Gita, providing the superb opportunity for Krishna’s even more baffling, enigmatic and mysterious answer, which has confounded the finest of minds for centuries. Sooner or later, every intelligent thinking person attempts to read the Bhagavad Gita,which is contained within the Mahabharata. From saint to sinner, scientist to priest, the Gita has traditionally been seen as a profound key to understanding the meaning of life. Or to put it in more current terms: What are the rules?
Krishna is an incarnation of the god Vishnu, who protects and sustains the universe. Krishna’s first response to Arjuna is to inquire why this mood come over him at such a bad time. Derisively Krishna urges Arjuna not to act like a eunuch.
Still parked in the middle of the battlefield between the two armies of thousands of warriors, the armies of all the great kings of that time, their chariots, horses, and elephants all poised to commence a World War, Arjuna stubbornly decries that he will not fight!
Krishna tells him that he is wasting his sorrow, but his question – why should he fight? – is nevertheless based in eternal wisdom. He tells Arjuna that all these men here arrayed on the battlefield have always existed and always will.
Krishna then proceeds to explain to Arjuna that: Action without attachment to their fruits, meaning their results, bears no consequences.
Why? The answer is that whatever ‘act’ you might imagine you are doing or have done is in fact not done by you at all. You are not the ‘doer’! Only the deluded imagine they are doing anything – rather it is the three Forces of Nature, the GUNAS that are acting.
These three forces of Nature (Prakriti) are called the GUNAS, which in Sanskrit means ‘cord’ – as in a rope, that which binds, or as a bowstring that creates tension to compress waveforms. The GUNAS are forces that serve to distinguish you as an individual piece of God and therefore purposively ‘limit’ you from the infinite and immutable immensity.
In the first Cycle of Time, a golden age, the GUNAS would have served us well as instruments of exploration in time and space. But as the cycles move further into density and the solidification of the world, the GUNAS become – at least to my mind – more like goons! The Hindi word for thug or the mafia guy, who beats up the suckers, is ‘goonda’ and I can’t help amusing myself by associating these two words.
Disconnected from our Source, as we are here in the Kali Yuga, the GUNAS have become those polarity limitations we all falsely identify as ‘who & what’ we are. Our GUNAS are those endlessly multiplying and repeating downward cycles of the same-old-same-old and by now, very boring experiences inevitably leading you to that infamous brick wall. There hopefully, you are at long last forced to think, to rethink, and confront the in-your-face factoid that you are in a heinous rut that is growing progressively more unpleasant.
Your pain is a warning, an alarm, and you must confront the delusion – for it is delusional to imagine that you, as the small identity ego-self, can affect anything! As long as you believe and ‘think’ that you are SEPARATE from the God-within, the SELF-ATMA, then you have no power to control the GUNAS – yours or anyone else’s! The GUNAS are on automatic.
However anyone's hologram may seem to temporarily resonate with yours, you cannot change anyone or give them ‘the ears to hear’, or affect their illusory hologram one iota – unless the God-within them, through grace, ordains it to be so.
Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that he may have become the greatest archer in the world, but he cannot make his enemy stand in one place to, as it were, await the arrow to hit him in the forehead!
If you or any of us could affect, God forbid, anyone or anything, without their conscious or unconscious consent, from the very limited state of the small ego-self - the entire universe would collapse under the monstrous imbalances we, in our state of ignorance and delusion, would generate.
Thus deluded and unaware, you remain utterly helpless as your GUNAS, which are forever and perpetually seeking their primordial balance, shift from one imbalance to another, seemingly digging themselves down into deeper and deeper confusion, anger and sorrow.
The SELF-ATMA within is beyond the GUNAS and as the creator of them, remains completely and totally unaffected by them. Nothing you have ever done or ever will do has ever diminished or affected the God-within you for a NY-minute! EVER!
The three GUNAS are:
SATTVA – illuminating, binds the souls by means of an attachment to joy and an attachment to knowledge.
RAJAS – are characterized by passion, arises from an attachment to craving and binds the soul by an attachment to action (activity, restlessness, enterprise and greed).
TAMAS – arises from ignorance and deludes the embodied souls and binds through absentmindedness, sloth, and sleep (obscurity, indolence, neglect and delusion arise when ‘tamas’ prevails). [My intuition tells me that ‘tamas’ is the waveform generated by the EMFs coming off our TVs, which reportedly place most in a depressed state within 15 minutes!]
For those of you who understand astrology, SATTVA is correlated to the mutable signs, RAJAS to the cardinal, and TAMAS to the fixed. The four elements of air (touch), fire (sight), water (taste), and earth (smell) play through the GUNAS in a multiplicity of variations. A fifth element, ETHER, pervades the other four, and corresponds to hearing and sound: thus the universe is emitted from sound as pulsating waveforms.
In this the Twilight of the Kali Yuga, as you may have noticed, the small identity ego-self, you falsely imagine you are, is not in control of these GUNAS - which are in fact generating your illusory hologram. Until you reconnect with the God-within you, the real SELF-ATMA, you will never control them or become, as they say, the master of yourself and create your own reality.
Krishna tells us that no matter what we think we are doing, we in fact DO NOTHING. Our perception of reality is only the five senses operating on their objects.
It is not a matter of a judgment call of right or wrong when it comes to being attached to the results or fruits of your actions. It is DELUSIONAL! It is delusional to believe that the small ego-self is the ‘doer’ and such a belief will draw your consciousness further down into density. The wise KNOW they do nothing! The only ‘Doer’ is the God-within, the SELF-ATMA.
From The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata
Translated by J.A.B. van Buitenen /University of Chicago Press, 1981
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