Skip to main content

Jnana in Gita

Knowledge, or wisdom rather, is a means of reaching the divine, according to the Gita. It is called Jnana Yoga. The previous two posts of this blog discussed Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga.

The wisdom that the Gita advocates is of the spiritual kind. It is essentially the realisation of the oneness of all reality and hence the divinity of all reality. You are divine. So is the guy next to you. So too are the flowers in your garden, the bees that come to the flowers, the water that sustains your plants, the insects, the stones... What greater religion can there be than the one which bathes you in an ocean of divinity, the same ocean in which all other creatures and everything else stand bathed?

Most humans don't reach such a stage of spirituality, however. We are driven by three gunas (attributes), Krishna tells Arjuna. These gunas control our actions.

Tamas or delusion is a predominant guna. It is a kind of delusion. It's a kind of darkness that veils the reality preventing you from seeing clearly. Your perception lacks logic and understanding. Laziness, fear, and such factors may play a certain role too in the production of that dark veil. A lot of common people live behind this veil of Tamas. They don't want to see any better too. They are happy to follow the herd, to swim with the current. Give them a slogan and they will shout it gladly for you as long as you can keep giving them some lollipops. They will rally around the leader without ever bothering to find out whether the leader is a pied piper. Give them lollipops and take their souls in return. The souls aren't worth much, and you know it. That doesn't matter, what will you do with souls? You need votes only.

Rajas is the second guna. Passion, that's what rajas is. The worldly successful people are all driven by rajas. Your pied piper and his corporate cronies are all driven by rajas which is characterised by ambition, greed, lust, arrogance, power, vanity, anger...

People driven by the guna of rajas may pretend to be spiritual and install the idol of their god in a palatial temple but their heart will continue to cling to the sceptre they have ensconced in their own palace. Such people don't hesitate even to kill fellow beings in the name of their god.

Passions don't carry you to god, however. Divinity is a different affair altogether.

Satva, the third guna, will take you to the divine milieu. Satva is harmony, balance. It is characterised by integrity. Satviks create harmony wherever they are, not division. The only real spirituality belongs to them. Jnana Yoga is their prerogative.

Jnana (gyan, as some dialects have it) or wisdom is the opening of an inner eye. You see a different reality once that eye opens. There is more light, a different kind of light. It's cool, that light is.

Let me end my personal reflections on the Gita with a quote from the divine song itself, 18.52-53, as translated and explained by Vishwanath Iyer.






Comments

  1. Liz A.March 1, 2024 at 2:38 AM

    It's like religion is philosophy in a way.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 1, 2024 at 7:08 AM

      Religion as philosophy would make a lot of sense to intelligent people.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...
11 comments
Read more

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...
14 comments
Read more

Independence from Dictators too

Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar asked the state to observe ‘Partition Horror Day’ on 14 Aug instead of celebrating the country’s Independence. His organisation, the RSS, as well as its ideological sibling the Hindu Mahasabha, had explicitly directed its members not to celebrate the Independence on 14-15 Aug 1947. From Bombay Chronicle, 9 Aug 1947 Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins gave us a graphic description of what the RSS did on 15 Aug 1947, in their classic book Freedom at Midnight . When the rest of India celebrated its new Independence, the RSS hoisted its own flag, “an orange triangle, emblazoned upon which was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.” About 500 RSS men stood saluting the swastika on 15 Aug 1947 in Poona. Lapierre and Collins describe the RSS as a “para-fascist movement” whose members “saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.” Rajendra Arlekar is an RSS man. He has been doing whate...
10 comments
Read more