“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” – Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov
In the preceding parts of this segment on Hinduism exploring the Bhagavad Gita, we saw that ultimate reality is presented as (1) metaphysical principles of Brahman, atman, monism, the gunas, and freedom (moksha); and (2) theological tenets of a unitary supreme deity, infinite in all aspects, common to all religions, assuming incarnations when societies lapse into evil, and personally interested in humanity. Today we look closer at the human mind for its place in this crystallization.
We have already seen that the body and mind are maya or part of the illusion of true reality while the inner, primeval, non-egoic self – the atman – is genuinely real. The next step is to unravel the nature of human consciousness in order to locate the bridge to atman. The Gita fulfills the role of guidebook in this endeavor.
The battlefield of Kurukshetra should be interpreted as a metaphor for the war waged within all of us, a fight on many fronts: life itself, outer and inner conflicts, good and evil, the quest for self-mastery, and the spiritual struggle for one’s own soul.1 One cannot quit this battlefield; action is unavoidable, whereas inaction is failure of duty – that is, the duty to oneself to be fully human. To some extent that duty is clear: one must fight for good against evil.2 Krishna counsels Arjuna:
“Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate. For the warrior, nothing is higher than a war against evil. The warrior confronted with such a war should be pleased, Arjuna, for it comes as an open gate to heaven. But if you do not participate in this battle against evil, you will incur sin, violating your dharma and your honor.”3
But there is more; one must also heroically confront death in order to transcend the limits of worldly existence.4 In the end, good and evil actions and events are confined to the temporal outer world, itself a distortion of reality. Truth rests in the passionless passivity of the soul:5 the original, eternal self – atman- which is nothing less than goodness itself.
(continued next post)
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1Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy. HarperCollinsPublishers, 1990. ISBN 0-06-270051-0, page 10.
2 McGreal, Ian P. (editor) Great Thinkers of the Eastern World. HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, 1995. ISBN 0-06-270085-5, pages 179.
3Easwaran, Eknath (translator) The Bhagavad Gita. Nilgiri Press, California., 2007. ISBN 978-1-58638-019-9, page 92 (Bhagavad Gita 2: 31-33).
4Miller, Barbara Stoler (translator), The Bhagavad Gita, Quality Paperback Book Club, New York, 1998. Page 1.
5Beck, L. Adams, The Story of Oriental Philosophy. The New Home Library, New York, 1942. Page 113.
