14. Verse 4-10

vīta-rāga-bhaya-krodhā

man-mayā mām upāśritāḥ

bahavo jñāna-tapasā

pūtā mad-bhāvam āgatāḥ

 

“Being freed from attachment, fear and anger, being fully absorbed in Me and taking refuge in Me, many, many persons in the past became purified by knowledge of Me—and thus they all attained transcendental love for Me.”

This is a very wonderful verse that now addresses the highest goal. Prayojana  is called the highest goal of spiritual existence, the immersion in this state of transcendental love of God. The Sanskrit term mat–bhāvam—bhava means the state of ecstatic love. Mat means “me”—“for me”, and this is Lord Sri Krishna speaking. And He is addressing the things that are actual obstacles in our spiritual realization, and He categorizes them as attachment, fear, and anger. Of course, these are quite complicated things. There’s more to them than just what we might think of when we reference these things. And I’ve just made a few notes here that I might read from:

Because we identify as being our material bodies we are attached to all of the things and relationships that are connected with our bodies. I mean this is an extraordinary idea, when you think about it. If, as we’ve mentioned before, we look at the process of the transmigration of the soul, then we see that when one enters a—they take a new birth, a new body, that there are instantly all kinds of familial connections: to a mother, and a father, and perhaps siblings, and then those related to those bodies, grandparents, uncles, aunties, etc, and then as one grows and matures they enter into their own relationships, and perhaps have their own families. And one becomes utterly absorbed in these temporary relationships, seeing them as everything, as absolutely everything. And as a result of these attachments, one is on a constant roller coaster of emotions, sometimes happy, often sad, sometimes fearful, going through all of the trauma and drama associated with relationships, sometimes crying and pulling out our hair, and other times celebrating, and laughing, and embracing, or crying, happily, or in great sadness.

And then at the end of this roller coaster one suddenly experiences death. They leave that body, and instantly, at that moment, all those relationships that we were utterly absorbed in are perpetually terminated. All material relationships become terminated, with very rare exceptions. And then one again finds themself in another womb and are born to new parents, and take up a whole new cycle of relationships, and develop intense attachments, all based upon, and solely upon, these bodily connections, the relationship and connection of bodies.

So this attachment makes us fearful about losing everything and everyone that we are attached to, so fear arises out of this. And fear is founded upon, ultimately, fear of death. We desire to be eternal, to live happily ever after. We desire things to last and to be permanent. We become distressed when things come to an end, when they terminate. That is the very nature of the material condition. The reason that we experience this is because as eternal spiritual beings—I am an eternal being. I do not come to an end. And when I am confronted with that which is material and is by nature impermanent, that impermanence always causes me great distress and fearfulness, that things come to an end, including my own experience in this body, the life of this body.

So from all the different attachments, it really magnifies the experience of fear. And as we build these attachments, we endeavor to exploit them for our happiness, to be filled with pleasurable experience and pleasurable sensation, what we are referring to as happiness. But in that pursuit, if my desires are not fulfilled, or if the opportunities for material enjoyment are lost, then I manifest anger. And of course, we all know this problem with anger, that it steals one’s intelligence, and causes one to fall into a hellish condition, and it perpetuates material entanglement, samsara, the repeated cycle of birth and death.

Spiritual culture means actually finding a way out, how to get free from this attachment, fearfulness, and anger, and of course, the death and impermanence associated with the attachments that we have. And one must come to learn—actual spiritual culture, means to attain the perfection of life, which is the awakening of my eternal and deeply loving relationship with the Supreme Soul. Love for God is the actual highest attainment of human existence.

So, one of our spiritual masters, which I’ve mentioned before, param guru, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur, who appeared in the 1800s in India, through to the very early 1900s, he was an extraordinary personality. He worked as a magistrate. He was a high functioning official in the British Raj. For a time he was the assistant to the Governor, the British Governor of Orissa, the current state of Odisha, and it was based in Puri. He was a highly intelligent man, and people were simply awed by his spiritual intelligence. And he was a prolific writer, in Sanskrit not so much, a lot in Bengali, and in English.

He did a translation of the Bhagavad-gita in which he folded into his translation of each verse, he folded into, commentary into the verse, to expound on it and to make it extremely clear to the average person who would read it. And his translation of this verse, which contains, as I said, quite a bit of commentary, is something I would like to share with you, because he speaks to these points in a very poignant way. So he states:

“Foolish people are deluded by three propensities while considering the transcendental nature of My appearance, activities, and form. These propensities are material attachment, fear, and anger.”

So before going any further, beginning with, “Foolish people are deluded by the three propensities…” Somebody may take exception to that, and become a little bit miffed. “How can you describe me as being foolish?” And it’s quite simple: In terms of actual spiritual understanding, anybody that identifies the body as the self, that I am male, I am female, I am young, old, middle aged, I am thin, I am fat, I am of this nationality, anybody that’s identifying with those labels is characterized as being foolish, and also ignorant. Doesn’t matter if you’re a great scientist, or a president of a country, or a king, an extremely wealthy person, a common garbage collector, rubbish collector, whatever. It doesn’t matter what your station in life is, if you are embracing untruth as truth then you are considered actually to be foolish.

“Those whose intelligence is conditioned by matter exhibit great attachment for material objects, and so do not want to acknowledge that there is an existence of anything beyond matter. According to them, material nature is the supreme truth. And some of them ascertain dead matter as the eternal cause of the cosmic manifestation and the source of life.”

So just pausing for a moment. This is material reductionist thinking that—the idea that life has come from matter. And they have so many theories attempting to establish this, and people embrace it. And yet, within the scientific world there is no clear understanding or actual appreciation of what is consciousness, what exactly is it and how does it arise?

People want to say that—try to describe how a combination of atoms can begin to produce the, what they call “the building blocks of life,” yet in reality there is no working, or even tested, hypothesis for how material elements come together and suddenly produce consciousness or life. It is not even a possibility. This is born out of people’s unwillingness, their dogmatic unwillingness, to accept that there are fundamentally two forms of energy that we perceive in the world: matter, and that which we call life.

Life is a characteristic, a symptom, of the presence of this spiritual energy, that manifests consciousness. This spiritual energy, the soul, can impart consciousness, temporarily, to matter, like the body, but as soon as the living being leaves, the body no longer manifests consciousness, because that is not its actual nature.

“Some philosophers tend to accept that there is an eternal spiritual existence, but they take shelter of dry reasoning and arguments to understand it. In the course of their arguments, they carefully negate all material qualities and activities, considering them to be false, and try to imagine an impersonal Brahman that is formless. This is nothing but an indirect manifestation of My illusory energy.”

So this is, he is paraphrasing the words of Lord Krishna. Continuing:

“Such speculators cannot approach my eternal spiritual form. Indeed, when they consider My transcendental form, they assume that it is a product of matter. Therefore they abstain from meditating upon My transcendental form and My Deity incarnation. Due to fear that spiritual form is just like material form, they are denied the opportunity to understand My supreme transcendental nature and form. Some speculators, being unable to grasp anything transcendental, become angry and ascertain the truth to be some kind of void or impersonal existence. This is the reason for the popularity of Impersonal philosophies. Many people have achieved pure love for Me by giving up material attachment, fear and anger, and seeing Me everywhere, by taking shelter of Me in all respects, by following the previously explained path of knowledge, and by rejecting as insufficient the path of dry argument.”

So this incorporation of the explanation of things into the translation of this verse by Srila Bhaktivinoda, is extraordinarily wonderful, and filled with deep spiritual significance and meaning.

And what I would encourage you to do with this, and other verses that we are studying here, don’t think that you can just go through this once, and that you will have a profound spiritual understanding. There may be some rare individual where this occurs, but for most of us there is a need to revisit these things and engage. We must engage, hand in hand with the cultivation of transcendental knowledge, we must engage in a mood of humility and of servitude, to undertake a spiritual practice, sadhana, that will reward us with spiritual insight and understanding.

And the foundation for this practice is the practice of meditation upon spiritual sound, of transcendental sound, mantra. And so, when we engage in a spiritual practice that purifies and transforms us, it also rewards us with growing insight of realization, an actual spiritual awakening to these spiritual truths. And so, what happens is, as we grow spiritually, and we revisit what we have heard and read, we suddenly see it in an infinitely deeper way, and we have a deeper understanding and appreciation of the truth.

So, reading the verse that we were studying in this particular video:

“Being freed from attachment, fear and anger, being fully absorbed in Me and taking refuge in Me, many, many persons in the past became purified by knowledge of Me—and thus they all attained transcendental love for Me.”

So these words, I just bring your attention to mat-bhāvam, this “transcendental love for Me,” and āgatāḥ, this “attainment”.

So this is a topic that we will speak more about as we go forward in this study of these Bhagavad-gita Chalisa—these 40 essential verses of the Bhagavad-gita.

Thank you very much.