Gita Study Group 2.28.11

Wednesday, March 23, 2011, written by ryan

In this week’s Bhagavad Gita study group we discussed chapter 7, titled The Yoga of Knowledge and Experience.  As we did for chapter 6, we discussed a selection of slokas in chapter 7 including 1-2, 3, 7, 8-9, 14, 16-17, 27-30.  The chapter opens with Lord Krishna introducing the concepts of knowledge and experience as they will be discussed in the chapter:

1-2. Devote your whole mind to me and practice yoga.  Take me as your only refuge.  I will tell you how, by doing this, you can know me in your total reality, without any shadow of doubt.  I will give you all this knowledge and direct spiritual experience.  When a person has that, nothing else in the world remains to be known.

Swami Tyagananda points out that there is a distinction here between knowledge and experience.  Through the study of the Gita, we gain intellectual knowledge.  But the real change in our lives comes from spiritual experience, when we truly live according to the teachings of the Gita.  And, as quoted above, Krishna says, “when a person has that, nothing else in the world remains to be known.”  Any other kind of knowledge (e.g. all of the knowledge we have gained in our courses at Harvard) is necessarily incomplete.

It seems obvious that, if you believe there is truth in the Gita, you would see the value in attaining that which leaves nothing else in the world to be known.  But some may still ask, “why do we need knowledge of the ultimate reality when I am living perfectly fine without it?”  And we see that most people go through their lives without seeking or even wanting knowledge of the ultimate reality.  Knowing this, we may ask, “If I can live a perfectly fine life without learning this knowledge, why should I go through the trouble?”  What this knowledge of the ultimate reality will do is that it will remove the sense of unfulfillment in our hearts.  If we are honest with ourselves and look closely at the lives of the people that surround us and that have come before us, it is clear that both joy and suffering are inherent aspects of life.  Although most people would acknowledge this, it is those who are dissatisfied with this constant up and down who say, “no, there is something wrong here, I do not simply want to accept this life and hope for the best, I want to see if something can be done about it.”  It is those who have this hunger who will seek knowledge of the ultimate reality.  Whether this inner hunger or even the initial stages of a reflective and questioning life come about depends largely on how much we look at life and reflect upon it.

Swami makes a very important observation: most people are so engrossed in their immediate obligations and planning for the future and worrying about the past that rarely, if at all, do people step back and ask, “What is this life?  What does it all mean?”  This issue is not only relevant in a spiritual context, but in the secular context as well.  A recent book by Yale Law Professor Tony Kronman also points out the decreasing engagement with these important questions.  Thus, many busily travel through their lives, at one point busily studying for and stressing about midterms, and then moving on to think about graduate school and jobs, then getting married and having children, then becoming a grandparent, then getting old, and only then, perhaps, will a person look back and think, “What was the meaning of it all?”  In sloka 7 of chapter 7, Krishna says:

7. Who cares to seek for that perfect freedom?  One person, perhaps, in many thousands.  Then tell me how many of those who seek freedom shall know the total truth of my being?  Perhaps one only.

Thus, there is no guarantee of freedom for those who seek it, but by seeking, one gives herself the opportunity to make spiritual progress which is carried into the next life.

We also read slokas 16-17 which classify the four kinds of people who turn to religion:

16-17. Among those who are purified by the good deeds, there are four kinds of people who worship me: the relief seeker, the knowledge seeker, the material seeker, and the spiritual seeker.  The spiritual seeker is the highest of these.  He is continually united with me.  He devotes himself to me always, and to no other.  For I am very dear to him, and he is dear to me.

The relief seeker is the person who turns to God when there are difficulties and challenges and hopes that God’s help will remove these difficulties.  The knowledge seeker is the person who has questions about life and/or the universe and turns to religion for an answer to these questions.  The material seeker would like to have things that he is unable to obtain, so he may turn to God to ask for these things.  The spiritual seeker is the one who has seen the underlying, unfulfilling nature of the universe and, as discussed above, are searching for a way out of this state of unfulfillment.  People in this fourth category are really seeking the Spirit.  Swami points out that each of these four types of people are disappointed with something.  The first three are disappointed about something in life, while the last is disappointed with life itself.  For the first three types of people, God is a means to an end, for the spiritual seeker, he is the end in itself.

These are just a few of the ideas that we discussed during the Gita study group.  If you would like to listen to a recording of the study group, mp3 files will be available on dropbox.

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Karma: What It Is, What It Is Not. Summary and thoughts on Swami Tyagananda’s Lecture 2.27.11

Friday, March 4, 2011, written by ryan

Swami Tyagananda’s lecture at the Vedanta Center in Boston this Sunday focused on the theory of Karma.  The idea of karma has become a part of popular Western culture and, as part of popular culture, has been misinterpreted and distorted by many.  Thus, it is important, especially among those of us living in the Western world to revisit (or to learn for the first time) the true idea of karma.

Swami Tyagananda outlined four main ideas about the theory of karma which explain what it is and what it is not: 1) karma is based on the law of cause and effect; 2) karma determines only our experience and not our actions; 3) karma is always individual and never collective; 4) karma is empowering, we should not think that we are the victims of karma.

Karma is based on the law of cause and effect.  We experience cause and effect throughout our daily lives; however, there are times when our experiences are difficult to connect to a specific cause.  These are the times when we may ask, “Why?”  The theory of karma says that all of our actions—in this life or in previous lives—will be met with experiences of happiness or sorrow (sukha or dukkha).  In this way, the theory of karma offers a way of understanding the experiences in our lives that otherwise may seem random or unjust.

Karma determines only our experience and not our actions.  What we do in this life is not the result of actions in a previous life.  Therefore, karma cannot be blamed for our bad actions.  Our actions in this life, however, may be affected but not determined by our past lives through samskara.  Samskara are mental impressions that give us tendencies toward certain actions.  The workings of samskara can be seen through an example that Swami Tyagananda offers.  When someone tastes chocolate ice cream for the first time, they may enjoy it and have it again and again and develop deeper and deeper mental impressions about chocolate ice cream.  Now, with these mental impressions, that person may have a strong desire to eat chocolate ice cream, however, he still has the choice of whether or not to eat the ice cream.  In this way, samskara may influence the way we act, but they do not dictate what action we ultimately choose.

Karma is always individual and never collective.  There are times when people talk about the collective karma of a group or a country.  This is especially prevalent when there are natural disasters or wars.  This idea of collective karma is simply not a part of the theory of karma.  When thousands of people are victims of a natural disaster, the theory of karma says that each of those people’s individual karma dictated that they have that experience.  It just so happened that they experienced it at the same time and in the same place.  In the same way, there are people in different places that experience happiness and sorrow at the same time or people that enjoy experiences of happiness and sorrow in the same place but at different times.  Thus, in terms of the theory of karma, we should not interpret a collective experience of happiness or sorrow as an indication that those people have a collective karma.

Karma is empowering, we should not think that we are the victims of karma.  This point is connected with the second point made above.  Karma should not be confused with fate or destiny.  Karma does not dictate our actions.  The theory of karma says that we are responsible for our actions and ultimately for our experiences.  Thus, instead of being the victims of a capricious world, karma is a theory that says that we are in control of our future experiences.  With these ideas in mind, we should cast off our childish habit of blaming the outside world for our bad experiences and feel empowered to determine our future experiences through our current actions.  Furthermore, as karma helps us understand the suffering in our lives, it will also help us to cope with this suffering.  While suffering is inevitable, misery is optional.  This means that our experiences of joy and sorrow will come, but we need not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by these experiences.  Chapter 2, Sloka 38 (among other slokas) of the Gita speaks to this idea:

Make grief and happiness, loss and gain, victory and defeat equal to thy soul and then turn to battle; so thou shalt not incur sin.

After explaining these four ideas, Swami Tyagananda emphasized that karma is simply a way of thinking about the world.  It is one possible explanation of why we see such variation in the world, why some people are born into abject poverty and some are born into fortunes.  I, myself, have difficulty thinking about how to reconcile the idea of karma with an idea of God’s role in the affairs of the world.  If the theory of karma holds, is God subject to our actions?  Although Swami could not give a definitive answer to this question, one of his comments did help ease the feeling that an answer to this question is unavoidably necessary.  He said that karma is a way of thinking about the world, it is a concept.  Concepts only exist in the mind.  The mind itself is in the world.  If you believe that God is ultimately the only reality and that our experience of the world (including the mind) only exists in Maya, then the reconciliation of these ideas—in a way our finite minds can understand—seems less important.

In fact, the theory of karma includes the idea that it does not have to go on forever.  Although karma cannot be separated from its effects, we can separate the self from karma and its effects.  The idea that we have agency and are the doers of actions (karta) and also experience the pleasure or pain that result from this action (bhokta) connect us with work and its results.  When a person can detach himself from the sense of doership and experiencership, he can free himself from karma.  We all experience this state of detachment in our sleep.  Vedanta says that you can cultivate this state of mind even when awake.

This last idea appears in Chapter 4, Slokas 20-23 (as well as in other places) of the Gita:

20. Having abandoned all attachment to the fruits of his works, ever satisfied without any kind of dependence, he does nothing though (through his nature) he engages in action.

21. He has no personal hopes, does not seize on things as his personal possessions; his heart and self are under perfect control; performing action by the body alone, he does not commit sin.

22. He who is satisfied with whatever gain comes to him, who has passed beyond the dualities, is jealous of none, is equal in failure and success, he is not bound even when he acts.

23. When a man liberated, free from attachment, with his mind, heart and spirit firmly founded in self-knowledge, does works as sacrifice, all his work is dissolved.

Note: The translations of the Gita come from Sri Aurobindo’s Bhagavad Gita and its Message

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Gita Study Group 2.21.11

Saturday, February 26, 2011, written by ryan

In this week’s Bhagavad Gita study group with Swami Tyagananda, we discussed chapter 6 of the Gita, titled The Yoga of Meditation.  This semester we will be using the Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood translation of the Gita.  Swami told us that this translation is not as literal as the one that we used last semester, but he feels that the style makes it more conducive to understanding the text.

Our discussion touched on slokas 1, 3, 5, 10, 13-17, and 32 of the sixth chapter.  The first sloka begins, “He who does the task / Dictated by duty, / Caring for nothing / For fruit of the action, / He is a yogi, / A true sannyasin.”  These lines evoke the idea of detachment which, as Swami Tyagananda reminded us, does not mean a neglect of work, but, as the lines state, a detachment from the results of work.  Swami Tyagananda emphasized that the ideal of detachment does not mean that we should never be attached to anything.   For example, when working, we should be attached to the task at hand in the sense that the task has our full concentration, but when we have finished the task we should be able to detach our mind from that task and move on to the next.  Thus, we should strive to have control over our mind in both attachment and detachment.  This same idea reappears in slokas 10, 13-15 which describe a yogi’s meditation: “…He must exercise control over his mind and body.  He must free himself from the hopes and possessions of this world.  He should meditate on the Atman unceasingly.”

The fifth sloka of chapter 6 reads:

What is man’s will

And how shall he use it?

Let him put forth its power

To uncover the Atman

Not hide the Atman:

Man’s will is the only

Friend of the Atman:

His will is also

The Atman’s enemy.

Swami Tyagananda explained the apparent contradiction in this sloka by diagram.  He showed us that the state of the spiritual seeker could be represented by the relationships between the mind and body with each other and with the rest of the world and the divine spirit.  All of these relationships are fraught with tensions which keep us away from our ultimate goal of realizing the Self.  The will is our enemy (and Atman’s enemy) in the sense that it creates and perpetuates these tensions.  For example, it may be the will of the body that urges us to overeat, but this may be in tension with our mind’s desire to eat moderately.  In the same way that it may reinforce tensions, the will is also a source of strength which can help us to resolve our tensions and, in that way, the will is our friend.  It is only after we have resolved our tensions with the world around us and the tensions between our mind and body that we can more clearly see the divine spirit and make progress in that direction.  Thus, it is valuable to be reflective and to try to identify the various tensions in our lives so that we may have a chance to utilize our will as a friend to resolve these tensions.

During the discussion, we also discussed other ideas regarding meditation, love, and monastic life.  I encourage anyone else who attended this week’s reading group to add any thoughts they may have and to correct any points where I have misinterpreted Swami Tyagananda or the text of the Gita.

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