Here, Theophile the Elder calls on us to understand the symbolism of the Bhagavad Gita and to relate it to our own difficulties. The dialogue between Arjuna and Lord Krishna is a sacred and symbolical teaching that will shed some light onto our current life.
This epic unrolls the whole Yoga Way whose essential keys Theophile the Elder proposes to give us.
Arjuna’s doubts and his relationship with Lord Krishna.
The Bhagavad Gita is a wonderful spiritual piece, consisting of a dialogue between Lord Krishna and his disciple and friend Arjuna, one of the five Pandavas.
Krishna takes Arjuna to the battlefield to let him see and appreciate the strength of the Kauravas’ army the Pandavas’ army will have to face. The fight is about to start and Arjuna, as a true prince and warrior as well as the best archer, one who will always hit his target right at the core, wants to give up such a fight that opposes him to members of his own family and to the very teachers who have guided him all along his life. He thinks his position is unacceptable and, though he is known for being fearless, he’d rather be killed than fight his relatives for a mere question of power conquest. Suddenly, that quarrel seems to be totally absurd and unfair. He wants to renounce it, but that does not include his friend and Master, Krishna, whom he has entrusted with his own life and guidance.
Krishna reminds Arjuna of his duty as a prince and a warrior. Dharma must be restored on the earth. The Kurukshetra battle must be fought, as it is the only means to see fairness prevail again. The Lord had called for negotiations between the cousins, indeed, but Duryodhana, at the head of the Kauravas, was uncompromising. He would not give a sheer pinhead to his Pandava cousins. He envies what they are and anger and hatred haunt him. He has lost all sense of dharma, so that his attitude could only lead to the conflict the epic tale of the Mahabharata relates.
The battle is worth being considered as an inner battle.
War is the only means, because the Kauravas, the Pandavas’ one hundred cousins, dominate over the whole territory – a symbol for our inner territory – and they won’t give it up. Should they win the battle, any sort of spiritual life will be excluded. So, there is no choice for Arjuna. He must fight. The lord puts him in a position where he will be able to observe his inner weaknesses, face them and raise his spirit up to a higher level of his being. His feelings, his emotions made him lose all sense of discrimination (viveka). He is attached to his tendencies, represented here by his cousins and their father, the blind king who has abandoned the management of his kingdom to the harmful ambitions of his sons. Later on, we shall evoke what each character stands for within Arjuna’s personality.
The Lord asks him to face his inner enemies, his family, and to fight them. Hence he must give up all his tendencies and desires and restore the Divine within him. His attachments are blurring his reason and they lead him to argue: how could I fight those who are so close to me, my cousins, my uncle, my masters, and the very emperor who reigns over the entire land? But the Divine, not the blind emperor and his henchmen, is supposed to guide him. So Arjuna elaborates on his apparently sensible claims: how could we fight our own family and kill in order to reign?
All that may seem vain and unfair; yet the fight, here, concerns him and only him. He was born a prince and a warrior in order to fight his egotistic tendencies and restore within him whatever was right. If he does not do it, the whole territory is at risk, which is unacceptable. Arjuna will have to fight, but the Lord in him won’t force him, because love can never constrain. The Lord puts Arjuna in such a position to make him realize what he really is and to awaken his consciousness, then his super-consciousness, so that the Divine may regain His place by right, at the core of his life; otherwise, disorder and unfairness will go on reigning over him. The Lord gradually puts his disciple in touch with Truth. He helps him open his eyes and, through teaching and transmitting, he gives him the means to advance spiritually and to amend and adjust his character.
So, the Lord will transmit to him the required knowledge and its related practices, so that he may let his soul be completely free. He will expose the raja-yoga and the three chapters it includes: karma-yoga, jnana-yoga and the bahkti- yoga that binds them both, as it is underlying and omnipresent in all the Lord’s teachings. It seems that nothing can be really done within us if there is no love and no devotion.
In a very subtle way, the Lord will teach his disciple how to act correctly. He will gradually reinstall in him a sense of discrimination. He removes all the illusory veils, one after the other, so that the light of Truth may illuminate his mind again. The Lord does not impose anything on him. He makes his disciple face reality, face his own self, and he helps him take his own responsibilities and decisions in order to change and evolve towards being what he has to be.
As will everyone else, Arjuna resists facing his fate, facing his soul and facing himself. He’d rather renounce any inner combat. The Lord calls him a coward if he is to shun a fight that would free all the territories within him. Does he want to deny his soul a glorious destiny? He is a prince of blood, born to rule over his self, and not to let a bandit rule over him and lead him to ruin.
Isn’t that how we feel when trying to correct some deep and active tendencies within us? It often seems to be insurmountable. The result is unconvincing and superficial, and it doses not last long. Those inner tendencies are powerful and even regarded as being inherited. We count ourselves as victims, since there is nothing we can do about what comes from our parents, from our ancestors or just from our “society”.
The Lord takes us back to ourself. Did not our soul choose our family, our environment, the proper times and circumstances for a new birth and lifetime? The lord gently reminds us of it. He is there to help us, to guide us, just as he does with Arjuna.
Arjuna is no ordinary human being. His masters have taught and trained him throughout his life. He is back from a thirteen-year exile, from a retreat into the woods. He has stepped aside while going on working upon himself. It was a lifelong training, for him and for his four brothers, who had all decided to surrender to Lord Krishna, the guide who will lead them but not fight. Arjuna has only got the Lord’s presence to guide him, whatever happens. He has entrusted Him with guiding his life – a life that the chariot and its five horses represent – in order to face the biggest army in the world, an army that is apparently invincible.
Let us have a short break and look at the symbolic signification of Arjuna’s chariot:
- The five horses stand for our five senses (indriyas)
- The reins stand for the mind (manas)
- The charioteer stands for intelligence (buddhi)
- The passenger stands for the soul (atman)
- The chariot stands for the body.
The Lord drives the chariot and will lead it wherever He wants. Arjuna is not a mere practitioner. He is a disciple, which means that he has been initiated by his Master and friend (according to Sufism, one’s Master is one’s and only friend). Being a disciple means that we have surrendered, that we have totally and definitely abandoned our self to our Master, not out of laziness but out of love, and with a total trust and faith in our Master. His disciple condition already shows that Arjuna has been highly trained and prepared, but also that his Master has accepted him as such. This will not automatically come, as some people believe. They think they are doing their spiritual guide a favour, whereas it is the guide who, actually, is doing them a favour by accepting them. You will marry only your beloved, and not all the ones who ask for it. Such a union is rare and precious. That is the reason why the Lord is totally at the controls with his disciple. Arjuna acted out of love, a love that is being reciprocated. There is no intention to dominate here: the Lord only wants to gently guide his disciple. Yet, the combat is Arjuna’s and he is the one who will fight. Faced with his own tendencies, he will have to conquer them, in one way or another. The Lord will provide the required weapons, the tools and knowledge he needs for it.
All that is not a mere theory, since the Lord has put Arjuna in a position to be able to fight. Arjuna has entrusted Him with his entire person and abilities: now, he is no more than an ordinary passenger in his vehicle, totally surrendered in body and soul to the Lord.
Here is a simple reminder of what we are made of, in terms of yogic anatomy:
- A physical body: it is prana-powered, prana being the energy that comes and give power to each one of the elements that make us what we are (on the physical, emotional and mental plans).
- A mental and emotional structure, which constitutes our subtle or astral body.
- The body of the soul, the envelope preserving the soul within our person, where it is both protected and isolated.
The simple fact that Arjuna was accepted as a disciple shows that he was ready for a final battle, the battle that will lead to the release of his soul. He has had preceptors and masters in archery, and they taught him how to control his bodies. He has spent his whole life training and mastering his vehicles. Actually, he has prepared them for the event. That training period corresponds to the way Ashtanga Yoga and its eight steps proposes for mastering the lower bodies:
- Yama and nivama, for how to behave in one’s life;
- Asana, pranayama and pratyahara, for how to have one’s senses turn towards one’s inner self and move from macrocosm to microcosm;
- Dharana (concentration), for how to focus on gross objects, then on more and more subtle ones, until achieving a better focusing of the mind;
- Dhyana (meditation), for how to continuously think the Lord is within the Self and reach samadhi, the state of super-consciousness, which is a meditative complete absorption connecting us directly to the soul or the Lord who is within us.
This is where the story of the Gita begins.
This is where the Lord accepts and takes the lead of all Arjuna’s vehicles. But let us not deceive ourselves; the training took many years and a great number of lifetimes. At the end of that battle with his self, Arjuna’s power will be consecrated. He will be granted liberation through his realization of the Lord (the Self or God). The outcome of the battle will make him similar to the Lord with whom he has become united within himself. From being a prince he has now become a Lord, but the battle was no easy matter. He first tried to shun having to combat, bringing forth some most plausible, sincere and logical arguments, but the Lord showed him what the situation was really like. There was no escaping it. But there again, Arjuna had to come to his own decision. That’s his life and the way it has to evolve. In times of doubt and hesitation, he was lucky enough as he had let his friend and Lord guide and teach him, and finally reveal to him the soul in him and the Truth it bore.
Here again, the lesson is worth it. At the end of the eighteen chapters, everything will have been said and been put in place for Arjuna. But he will have to fight his own fight, because God will never intervene directly in it. He leaves to each one of us the task of achieving the fulfillment of his or her destiny and of deciding what to choose. He respects the freewill we have all been given. He is in no hurry, for He is both in time and out of time. He knows that, sooner or later, we will come back to Him, out of love, out of intelligence, but never under duress.
Now, you may say, why such a horrible war and the dreaded slaughter it will entail? The battle shows that we have not been able to follow the Lord’s advice and let Him guide us. All our thoughts and deeds have led to such a fight, which is the fruit of a great number of lifetimes we have spent either training or going astray. This battle is the final one, but it is fought under the aegis of the Lord. Lord Krishna himself said that all the parties in the epic would be liberated during the battle, because they were all in His presence. This inner total war is actually a blessing. It concludes an entire evolution cycle. Arjuna may be regarded as being subjected to the situation, but only his ego (ahamkara) is actually suffering. He has successfully learnt how to master all the aspects in his life, in spite of the weaknesses still dwelling within him and of the mistakes he can still make. But there is no more ego in him. He has been pushed to his limits and there is nothing he can do but surrender to the Lord if he wants to go through and pass an apparently insurmountable test. The enemy looks much more powerful and far better armed than him. The Lord’s very first lesson is given him via karma-yoga: “The secret of Karma is to perform actions without any fruitive desires, because the result belongs to the Lord.”
So, Arjuna must just do whatever he has to do without worrying about anything else.
We have seen that, finally, he is the one who created the battle, but the moment for it was chosen by the Lord, God’s avatar, who triggered it thanks to his Divine Presence on the Earth, on our inner earth. The moment is His, the decision is ours, but let us not forget that Arjuna is a disciple and that he has completely surrendered to the Lord. Therefore, he did not initiate what has been triggered, a total war and the way it was overcome, two facts that belong to the Lord. He still has to fight, which means to go through what the Lord has wanted for him, for him to be liberated. We can imagine that the massive scale of the battle is impressive. He fears he’ll never manage it. All by himself, he certainly could not, but with the Lord, we know that he is bound to win. Nevertheless, we ask ourselves how we are going to get out of it, hurt or dead? Nobody knows, but we shall be liberated, for sure: the Lord has promised we should be.
Theophile the Elder
An excerpt from Theophile’s journal
Comments on the Bhagavad Gita