God Lives in Our Hearts
Inspired by the Epilogue in "The Betrayal of Krishna, Vicissitudes of a
Great Myth", by K.K. Nair/Krishna Chaitanya
Within our awareness as human beings, God can live only in our Hearts. When
our Hearts turn inhospitable, the God-within will die to us. Therefore and
as a result, we too will die.
Throughout time we possess the innate ability to Become, to grow to some
‘similitude’ to the One that dwells within All. Yet those who remain
unconscious and disconnected from the God-within "may continue to infest the
world and altogether ruin its character as sacred precincts." These
unconscious disconnected ones who are seemingly soulless go on “infesting
the world” and increasing their tyranny through war, propaganda, and
financial manipulation.
The above is my paraphrasing of K.K. Nair/Krishna Chaitanya, the Indian
polymath and genius, from the epilogue to his wonderful book ‘The Betrayal
of Krishna’ 1991, which I find to be even more veracious and relevant today
— as we watch the symptoms of dissolution spread their tentacles around the
globe.
In the Bhagavad Gita XVI.9, Krishna reveals that these men who have lost
their real Selves, meaning their union (yoga
means union) and connection to the God-within them, and who are of small
intelligence (an intelligence that is limited to five-sense perception and
thus merely quantitative), who with their cruel evil actions come forth as
enemies for the destruction of the world.
Krishna paints a clear picture of the character of the tyrants whose purpose
is world destruction. These cruel ones are attached to insatiable desires;
they are frauds, hypocrites, and arrogant, deluded by their troubling and
fatal pride. Because they have accepted ideas that are false
[asat]
and not in alignment with eternal Truth
[sat]
of those metaphysical principles that generate harmony in the universe, the
actions of tyrants proceed with unclean polluting purposes. [BhG.XVI.10]
These cruel soulless tyrants who have lost all connection with the
God-within them find no satisfactions in their ephemeral conquests. Peace is
beyond them. A pervasive constant restless state of fluctuating anxiety
stalks them and is ever present, destroying any chance of lasting joy.
BhG.XVI.11: Convinced beyond any doubt that the gratification of their
desires is the highest aim, their immeasurable anxieties, cares and worries
cling to them, and will end only in death.
“Strangled with hundreds of nooses of expectation"
I defer to J.A.B. van Buitenen’s superb translation of BhG.XVI.12:
“Strangled with hundreds of nooses of expectation giving into desire and
anger, they seek to accumulate wealth by wrongful means in order to indulge
their desire.”
Yet their end is ineluctable, inescapable as Krishna makes clear: Led astray
by their own imaginings, enveloped and covered in a net of delusion, the
entrapment of their own making, still clinging to the gratification of their
desires, they fall into unclean and impure states of consciousness. They
fall into a foul hell world,
[naraka],
a place of torment. [BhG.XVI.16]
This
naraka
‘place of torment’ is a state of consciousness, which indeed is shared by
both the living and the dead. It is not that our families and parents by
birth make us into miserable self-pitying failures or greedy uncaring
bloat-head tyrants. We cannot blame others. Rather it is that we are each of
us born into the circumstances that resonate perfectly with our own nature
(our gunas) based on the confluent accumulations of our actions in other
lifetimes.
BhG.XVI.19: These cruel and hating, the vile and worst of men, [by the force
of their own acts] are constantly hurled into the cycles, birth after birth,
into the wombs of a demonic nature. We reap what we sow. The tyrants who are
run by desire, anger and greed set the stage of their own making. The
God-given opportunity to change, learn and evolve is built into every ‘Fall’
from Grace. By observing our own lives and others, eventually we may
understand that whoever acts under the impulse of selfish desire does not
attain lasting happiness, true perfection, or the highest path
[param gatim].
The last line of Bhagavad Gita XVI.24 states very clearly this: You are able
and thus should act; you are even obliged to perform acts in this world. In
my words, the immutable imperishable One did not create this vast amazing
universe only for us to withdraw from it! We have come here to enjoy
Creation, the ‘play’ in the Divine Lila and ultimately through interacting
with this world, to Remember that we are portions of the One that created it
all and return to our eternal Source and Sustainer.
Shankara
In Chapter X of “The Betrayal of Krishna” entitled ‘Seizure by Schoolmen’,
K.K. Nair/Krishna Chaitanya proceeds to describe the subversive enduring
consequences created by the Indian philosopher and saint, Shankaracarya
(788-820) that have muddled and undermined India’s spiritual ideals to this
day. K.K. Nair accuses Shankara of becoming “bookish to the point of ceasing
to be human.” I find this insightful observation significant because in my
own search, the teachers I have come to most respect all say that the texts
inevitably become an obstacle. I can spend the rest of my life reading 100s
of sublime sacred Sanskrit texts, but if I cannot live what I have learned
and incorporate their Wisdom into my daily life — surely I will have failed.
K.K. Nair says that the sacred dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna was
designed by the enlightened poet Vyasa to have archetypal significance. The
Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue that has always taken place throughout time in
the inner depths of the hearts of men and women who are placed in critical
terrible circumstances, the crucible. This same dialogue “should take place
in the heart of everyone today, if history is not to close in the end of
mankind by starvation on a planet drained of its life support resources, or
by suffocation in a polluted ambience with earth, water and air turned toxic
or by a nuclear holocaust.”
K.K. Nair was keenly aware of what the future threatens. He had not buried
his head in the sands and withdrawn from the world, justified by any false
understanding of what is spiritual. “But for Shankara, the world is an
illusion, action is anathema…and man himself is a phantasm without any
authentic identity.” He calls Shankara a nihilist who has subverted the true
meaning of Vyasa’s Gita, which affirms that our liberation is to be achieved
by acts in this world. “Krishna’s teaching is that man can rightly decide on
what he should do only by knowing what he is, and also what the world is,
since he evolved from the world, lives and acts in the world…empirical
knowledge and intuitive wisdom should be integrated.” This sounds like good
common sense to me.
According to K.K. Nair, Shankara has reduced the self of man to an unreal
appearance of the Absolute. The English word ‘appearance’ is often used to
describe the relationship of the unmanifest One to the manifest. Certainly
the realms of five-sense perception are temporal and their temporality
allows us to describe them as ‘appearances’ in the sense that they are time
based and not eternal. However as every reader knows, the world perceived by
the five-senses is all too real to those of us who are stuck in it — and why
are we stuck in these webs of our own making? We like it! Why create the
universe in the first place if we are not here to enjoy our ‘play’? Even in
these perilous dark days of the Kali Yuga, very few choose suicide. We are
eternal beings, here enjoying the experience of limitation and
differentiated five-sense perception until we are ready to move on to
another universe.
Lokasamgraha
“Shankara dismisses the reality of life lived by all mankind, all of us.”
True spirituality is not escapism! Arjuna possessed no begging bowl; he was
not a parasite on society. The Bhagavad Gita does not instruct us to abandon
the world and our responsibility for its well-being. As K.K. Nair/Krishna
Chaitanya says, “The Vishvarupa [the Divine Form of Krishna] did not
liquidate the hordes of [the enemy] Duryodhana.” For that Arjuna must rise
up out of his confusion and armed with the Wisdom Knowledge of Truth,
embrace his destiny. Even our release from death and birth,
samsara,
is “something to be achieved here itself, within the rim of earth’s
horizons, within the orbit of existential history, not in some
transcendental void.”
K.K. Nair suggests that Shankara’s idea of Brahman [the One] “must be a very
impoverished existence of the solitary One with nothing to relate to or
commune with…” Haven’t you ever wondered what comes after the Void? Perhaps
this is the very reason that the One has manifested vast numbers of
universes that ‘float like bubbles in an ocean.’ We refer to the world as
‘Creation’ because everywhere we look we see the creative principles of
Maya-Shakti weaving her magnificence, both in beauty and horror. This is a
polarity universe. No one forced us to come here.
“Common sense should not be disparaged, for ultimately it may be the only
thing that can save us from the philosophers.” In K.K. Nair’s vast
knowledge, scholarship, and love of irony, he shares with us this quip from
Cicero: “…the wildest nonsense anyone can deliberately think of would have
been anticipated in earnest by some philosopher or other!” Well, Cicero
hadn’t seen the worst that was to come in the form of the Internet these
days, which is wall-to-wall plastered with the most amazing rubbish beyond
his wildest dreams. The suggestion has been made that much of this ocean of
‘disinformation’ in being intentionally generated by clever people who
obviously can find no better employment.
Do as you please!
Returning to the discussion of whether we are to participate in the
well-being of the world or withdraw from it — furthermore, K.K. Nair/Krishna
Chaitanya interprets the Bhagavad Gita to mean that “man is not meant to
renounce his volition and become a passive instrument.”
Krishna expressly asks Arjuna to
evaluate all he has been taught. BhG.XVIII.63: Reflect wholly on this
Wisdom-Knowledge that is more secret than all that is secret and having done
so — Do as you please! Arjuna must take an active part in his decisions and
“only accept them as his own, only if he found them acceptable. Desire and
revulsion also should not be surrendered in a mental or supramental state of
bemused apathy.”
I find this phrase a “bemused apathy” particularly accurate. Surely there is
a great deal of evidence of using the so-called spiritual life as an excuse
to escape our responsibilities. When men and women who possess
Wisdom-Knowledge and moral integrity lose courage and retreat from the
world, the world will sink into chaos and collapse. Hiding our heads in the
proverbial sand will achieve nothing.
K.K. Nair agrees with the scholar and freedom fighter B.G. Tilak
(1856-1920), who “consistently interpreted the Gita as a great text of
activism. He highlighted the Gita’s refutation of Mimamsa fundamentalism and
ritualism and the total withdrawal from action advocated by the doctrine of
sannyasa
[renunciation]. The way of illumination and the way of devotion should
ultimately merge into the way of action for the world’s welfare (lokasamgraha).”
We are this world. Why should we not take care of it?
“A compassionate identification”
If by our own efforts we are able to access and unite with the God that
dwells within the Heart of everyone, then we will be able to act in ways
that enhance the well-being of the world we have created, before we Forgot
our real Source. We will become whole, integrated into the Wisdom-Knowledge
of the primordial metaphysical principles that have always been the only
support of every manifest and ‘unmanifest’ (invisible to our current
five-sense apparatus) particle and form of any universe. “…skill will come;
what is primary as the Gita emphasized is a change of heart, a turning of
one’s entire being towards God, or which comes to the same kind of rebirth,
towards the world in compassionate identification.” For when we Love the
ubiquitous One — who and what will we hate?
The sheer cleverness of saying there is no path, no journey Home has some
truth no doubt, but I dare to say that there are very few who can manage an
entire day of total union with and immersion in the One — among the few I
would include the Kashmir Shaivite Swami Lakshmanjoo, this wonderful fellow
Sri Nasargadatta Maharaj, and the very readable Swami Muni Narayana Prasad
in Kerala. No doubt there are more. Cleverness is not sufficient to the task
of moving our consciousness from the webs of duality to total union.
Therefore for most of us, the journey ‘feels’ real enough and is indeed the
proverbial Razor’s Edge. We walk through non-existent Time, the Abyss on
both sides beckoning, pulling us into more subtle forms of delusion. The
closer we feel to Home, the more we require vigilance and discernment, an
adamantine Will. So we pray we may not to lose our Way.
Vyasa’s Gita urges us not to abandon the duty to which we are born. We are
all very different, many flavours and distinct unique talents. We do what we
can. All undertakings are temporal, enveloped in error and flawed. Thus we
practice to overcome unruly desire, conquer the parts of us vulnerable to
compulsion, and at all times hold our intellect in a state of enlightened
non-attachment to results. [BhG.XVIII.48]
The Bhagavad Gita is our trusted guide, an incomparable jewel and precious
touchstone, the boat that will carry us over the ocean of delusion. Our only
refuge is the Grace of the immutable imperishable God-within us that
pervades and permeates All. There we know — God is Love.
V. Susan Ferguson
"This whole universe has come into existence just to carry you to God
consciousness."
- Swami Lakshmanjoo, Kashmir Shaivite, The Shiva Sutras
Sources:
The Betrayal of Krishna, Vicissitudes of a Great Myth, by Krishna Chaitanya
(K.K. Nair); Clarion Books, Associated with Hind Pocket Books, Connaught
Place, New Delhi, 1991.
The Bhagavadgita in the Mahabharata
A Bilingual Edition
Translated & Edited by J.A.B. van Buitenen
The University of Chicago Press, 1981
The Bhagavad Gita
Translated by Winthrop Sargeant
State University of New York Press, 1994
...
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