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
37 comments
Read more

Everything is Politics

Politics begins to contaminate everything like an epidemic when ideology dies. Death of ideology is the most glaring fault line on the rock of present Indian democracy. Before the present regime took charge of the country, political parties were driven by certain underlying ideologies though corruption was on the rise from Indira Gandhi’s time onwards. Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology was rooted in nonviolence. Nothing could shake the Mahatma’s faith in that ideal. Nehru was a staunch secularist who longed to make India a nation of rational people who will reap the abundant benefits proffered by science and technology. Even the violent left parties had the ideal of socialism to guide them. The most heartless political theory of globalisation was driven by the ideology of wealth-creation for all. When there is no ideology whatever, politics of the foulest kind begins to corrode the very soul of the nation. And that is precisely what is happening to present India. Everything is politics
14 comments
Read more

Mango Trees and Cats

Appu and Dessie, two of our cats, love to sleep under the two mango trees in front of our house these days. During the daytime, that is, when the temperature threatens to brush 40 degrees Celsius. The shade beneath the mango trees remains a cool 28 degrees or so. Mango trees have this tremendous cooling effect. When I constructed the house, the area in front had no touch of greenery as you can see in the pic below.  Now the same area, which was totally arid then, looks like what's below:  Appu and Dessie find their bower in that coolness.  I wanted to have a lot of colours around my house. I tried growing all sorts of flower plants and failed rather miserably. The climate changes are beyond the plants’ tolerance levels. Moreover, all sorts of insects and pests come from nowhere and damage the plants. Crotons survive and even thrive. I haven’t given up hope with the others yet. There are a few adeniums, rhoeos, ixoras, zinnias and so on growing in the pots. They are trying their
7 comments
Read more

Brownie and I - a love affair

The last snap I took of Brownie That Brownie went away without giving me a hint is what makes her absence so painful. It’s nearly a month and I know now for certain that she won’t return. Worse, I know that she didn’t want to leave me. She couldn’t have. Brownie is the only creature who could make me do what she wanted. She had the liberty to walk into my bedroom at any time of the night and wake me up for a bite of her favourite food. She would sit below the bed and meow. If I didn’t get up and follow her, she would climb on the bed and meow to my face. She knew I would get up and follow her to the cupboard where bags of cat food were stored.  My Mistress in my study Brownie was not my only cat; there were three others. But none of the other three ever made the kind of demands that Brownie made. If any of them came to eat the food I served Brownie at odd hours of the night, Brownie would flatly refuse to eat with them in spite of the fact that it was she who had brought me out of
4 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
13 comments
Read more