The Nectar of Gita…for you, me and all! Essay 4: Is your ‘Vessel of Happiness’ always complete and full to the brim?

Om Namo Bhagavathe Vaasudevaayaa!

Essay 4:

Is your ‘Vessel of Happiness’ always complete and full to the brim?

If you were to put this question across to anyone in our day to day life – be it a man or a woman; teenager or a septuagenarian; a student or an employee; a street hawker or a businessman; a homemaker or a career-woman; a local politician or a national level leader; a street mechanic or an IT professional’; a school teacher or a university professor; what could be the most probable and general answer? An affirmative ‘NO’, I believe.

But if you were to rephrase the question and ask “Is complete and permanent happiness your ultimate goal in life?”. The answer I believe, would be an affirmative ‘YES’. Two things flow out of this - one is that all of us want complete happiness as our life’s goal and secondly, no one’s happiness is always full and complete. Let’s see how and why this happens.

A teenager wants more freedom and adventure; a septuagenarian wants health and longer but enjoyable life; a student wants either better scores or reduced burden of studies; an employee wants a further raise and rewards; a street hawker wants to set up as shop; a businessman would like to be an industrialist; a home-maker may want to become an earning member; a career-woman may want better work-life balance; a local politician aspires to become a state or a national leader; a national leader may want to continue in power always; a mechanic may wish to set up a workshop; an IT professional may wish to work with the best names in the world; a school teacher may dream to move onto a university; a professor may be dreaming for a Nobel nomination. Where is the end for such aspirations, dreams and pursuits?

The vessel of happiness is housed in your mind and your life long effort is to see that it is always full to the brim and overflowing. But does this happen? It brings us to the first question where the probable answer was a big NO. Is it then that our vessel of happiness is ever growing in size so that we are not able to fill it up or does it leak? Both look possible.

At work, you may have done something special and you become a ‘shining star’ for a month. You are heaped with laurels and rewards and you are thrilled and overjoyed and share this happiness with your near and dear. Suddenly you find your vessel of happiness overflowing. A few days pass. The excitement and euphoria die down and   a look at your vessel of happiness indicates that there is a gap. Your efforts begin again. There are so many facets to your life and your quotient of happiness or otherwise comes from all these various sources. So, there is always a pressure within you to plug the gap arising from various quarters, by trying to fetch and fill in happiness from various sources. This unending cycle goes on and on!

Where lies the problem? The vessel of happiness is within you but you are trying to fill it up from sources outside you. Happiness is a state of mind and unless you choose to be happy, you can never be happy. No amount of external stimuli can ensure your happiness in a sustained way. Whatever flashes of happiness occur, they are only transient and temporary. As the rewards generally fall short of expectations, the happiness is partial. So, the key lies in reigning in your expectations. While your actions should be sincere, your ability to get non-attached to the outcome, takes you closer to your happiness goal. There will be fewer disappointments, frustrations and the vessel of happiness tends to remain full.

Karma Yoga of Gita trains one in this area. It advocates continuous and dedicated practice of one’s enjoined actions without attachment to the outcome, leading to a state of equilibrium of mind. It trains one to be in a state of intellectual stability that helps one to view the positive or negative outcome of one’s actions with equanimity. Perpetual and complete happiness is then just a natural corollary!

The Nectar of Gita…for you, me and all! Essay 3: The 18 Pearled String for ‘End of Sorrow and Eternal Bliss’

Om Namo Bhagavathe Vaasudevaayaa!

Essay 3:

The 18 Pearled String for ‘End of Sorrow and Eternal Bliss’

Gita is a book of 18 chapters. Each chapter is a priceless pearl and 18 such pearls are beautifully put on a golden string that comes to the world as ‘Bhagavad Gita’. While each chapter gives the seeker its own wisdom, these 18 chapters can be classified into 3 major groups of 6 chapters each. This grouping is based on the nature of wisdom and the path to enlightenment it offers. The following are the major groups:

Karma Yoga - The Path of Spiritual Action

Bhakthi Yoga – The Path of undistracted Devotion

Gnana Yoga – The Path of Liberating Wisdom

Karma Yoga: It is in brief, the path of spiritual action which propounds that whichever field you are in, and whichever rightful action you do, whether at home, office or in society, all such actions should be done in right earnest, as if serving the cause of God with non-attachment to the outcome of such actions. It is dedication of all your actions to God without any expectation of their outcome-good or bad.

Bhakthi Yoga: Realisation of eternal bliss or Enlightenment needs undistracted devotion to Param Aatma. One can follow any path, but undistracted, unqualified devotion or Bhakthi is a necessary condition. Devotion leads to purity of soul which in turn leads to Enlightenment.

Gnana Yoga: Let us understand the concept by trying to answer a few questions.

q. Why does one suffer sorrow or pain?

-Because one has a sensory body.

q. Why does one get a sensory body?

-It comes because of one's karmic actions.

q. Why does one get entangled in karmic actions?

-Because of one's attachment to the outcome of such actions.

q. Why does one get attached?

-Because of ‘Avidya’ or ignorance

q. How does one get rid of ignorance?

-Through attaining ‘Vidya’ or the Knowledge of Liberation that leads to eternal bliss or Enlightenment.

As we go on, we will get to know more of these in detail. Now if we ask ourselves, what is the objective of reading and understanding Gita, especially when it was told to a warrior prince in the midst of a battle field, that too a few thousand years ago! What do we gain out of this? How relevant it is to this present Android and social media world?

Human sorrow and happiness have always been the same over the millennia, though the causes and the nature may have changed with the passage of time. The emotions broadly remained the same. For instance, while frequent wars between clans for the control of land and wealth could have been the cause of pain and sorrow; plenty of cows, cattle, timely rains and good crops offered a good reason for happiness. In the current times, corporate rivalries, stock losses, tough job and career scenario are a possible set of reasons for unhappiness. Similarly, speculative gains, promotions, professional advancements, personal celebrations could be the reasons for happiness. Thus, as we see, while the emotions remained the same, the causes or sources of sorrow and happiness differed.

In the Kurukshetra battlefield, when Arjuna had a predicament for his own perceived reasons, Krishna through Gita, taught him a body of wisdom that gave him a sense of discrimination, and an ability to see things objectively in the right perspective. The light of wisdom dawned on him, liberating him from the shackles of ignorance. Ignorance causes sorrow and enlightenment leads to eternal bliss. That is what Gita stands for! For a sincere seeker, it shows various paths of observance and action as mentioned above, that result in freedom from sorrow and lead one to the destination of eternal bliss-Enlightenment of Soul.

Arjuna was just a representative seeker and the message from Krishna was for the entire world for eternity. It is universal and is as relevant today as it was then for Arjuna.

The Nectar of Gita…for you, me and all! - Essay 2: Does Gita by any chance, espouse the cause of violence?

Om Namo Bhagavathe Vaasudevaayaa!

Essay 2:

Does Gita by any chance, espouse the cause of violence?

A straight and clear answer would be a big fat NO!  Often, we get to hear or encounter this kind of a question from people who have either not read, or partly or casually read, or improperly understood Gita. A serious and spiritually oriented reading of Gita, would not give rise to such doubts.

A casual story seeker may see that once Arjuna dropped bow and arrows and refused to fight, Krishna with his Gitopadesh, encouraged him to fight, vanquish and kill the entire opposition. Surely, it looks like espousing the cause of violence. Here what is one missing? Obviously, the context, the person who was in charge of the action, the essence and the actual message of Gita.

The context was the great battlefield. The person in charge of the action was Arjuna, the great warrior. In a battlefield the options are very limited; especially when one is fighting for one’s rights. Here, Arjuna representing the Pandavas, was fighting for the land and kingdom which was rightfully theirs but which was deviously taken away from them. The options before him were to fight to the finish, win or be vanquished. A true and righteous warrior would naturally fight for victory. Things would not turn out to be good for him, if he loses his self-worth and backtracks at the nick of the moment when battle bugles are blown.

Let us transpose this scenario to the current times. We have our soldiers guarding our frontiers from enemy invasions. They are always fit and battle ready to repel any incursions. Hypothetically in one such testing situation of the enemy violating our border, the general expectation would be a valiant fight by our soldiers in pushing back the enemy. But imagine if such soldiers were to suffer from diffidence and were in a mood to drop their weaponry, what would be the fall out? All will be lost for us. We therefore see our top leaders, Generals and prominent speakers visiting the battlefront and addressing them with motivational speeches. In one way, those speeches are nothing but Gitopadesh! Can we then charge such motivational speakers as espousing the cause of violence? No one with sane mind would say so. Right?

Now coming back to Kurukshetra, what Vasudeva Krishna did was to make Arjuna see things in the proper perspective. That helped Arjuna to come out of his quandary and made him discharge his duty of fighting the war. Vasudeva Krishna was only instrumental in making Arjuna, a Kshatriya and warrior prince, to realise his enjoined duty of fighting the enemy in a battle field.

The message of Gita was for people to do their enjoined duty or ‘swadharma’ dispassionately and with diligence, without worrying about the outcome. A soldier has to fight the enemy, a farmer has to till the land, a student has to study, a govt servant has to administer so on and so forth. This is in brief what Gita propounds. As Gita took birth in the battle field and the person concerned was Arjuna, the message for him was not to backtrack from his ‘swadharma’ which was fighting ‘Dharma Yuddha’ – righteous battle. Hence espousing the cause of violence was never the objective of Bhagavad Gita. It was just the response of a misconstrued understanding of Gita.

The Nectar of Gita…for you, me and all - Essays on the relevance of Gita to our daily life situations

Om Namo Bhagavthe Vasudevaayaa!

Essay 1

Many of us today are in the cusp of Arjuna’s Sorrow!

The other day when I opened the day’s newspaper, I read about the news of two college going, exam-writing young girls committing suicide together. The news saddened me to the core. Another news item reported that over 150 students committed suicide in the last one year. The possible reasons point to the mounting pressure of studies, the demands of competitive exams, familial and social pressures for top scores and admission to the choicest professional colleges. Unable to cope with the stress, unable to manage expectations, unable to comprehend the broader aspects and niceties of life, these young people snuffed their tender lives out without even having a taste of it.

We keep seeing farmers committing suicide unable to manage debt and the burden of the family; we hear about young and middle-aged professionals falling into deep depression unable to strike a balance between professional aspirations and the demands of personal life. These happenings are not few and far between but are happening with alarming frequency undermining the happiness index of the society. Why this desperation? Why is this fear of the unknown? Why is this meaningless worry about an imagined failure? You may ask many similar questions but the likely answer is that all these are in the cusp of ‘Arjuna’s Sorrow’!

Confused about what is Arjuna’s Sorrow? Let me take you on time machine thousands of years back to the epic battle field of Mahabharatha. There, 18 contingents of soldiers and warriors arrayed against one another in the battle field of Kurukshetra. The epic battle was being fought by the Kouravas on one side and the Pandavas on the other side. They were fighting for the control of the land of Bharath. From the Pandavas side, the vanguard attack was to be led by the great warrior prince Arjuna riding on divine chariot driven by none other than Vasudeva Krishna. As per the war tradition, the warrior or the General has the right to march between the two enemy lines and survey and assess the warriors, weapons and the strength and weaknesses of each side before launching the attack. So Arjuna requested Krishna to run the chariot between the assembled warriors to take stock of the situation and to strategize his attack strategy.

Krishna drove the chariot as requested and Arjuna had a good view of the battle-ready warriors of either side. Suddenly, a pall of gloom descended on him. A huge wave of depression enveloped him. A sense of dejection and deep sorrow shook his heart. He dropped his famed ‘Bow’ down and squatted on the chariot with head bent and a volley of questions besieged his mind. Why is this war? Why should I fight? For what should I fight? For whom should I fight? What would I gain out of this? Would that be a worth the fight?

Imagine a great warrior facing these debilitating questions in a battle field. The situation before him was – ‘do or die’, ‘kill or be killed’, ‘rule the land and wealth or lose everything’!

Do these questions ring a bell somewhere in our mind? Don’t you feel these are some of the questions most of us face in our daily work and family situations when faced with situations that compel us to take some decision? Don’t we find ourselves often caught in the vortex of Arjuna’s Sorrow? Yes, indeed and these questions certainly require convincing answers either from within or from outside failing which, we will be at our wits end not knowing what to do…or mostly doing something which is not in our best interests. Arjuna had the big fortune of having a guru, friend, guide and philosopher like Vasudeva Krishna, who by his wise counsel, guided him to choose the right path leading to positive action.

Don’t we now feel that we also need a wise consul, at times that challenge us in our personal or work situation? For thousands of years, for those who sought its help, Bhagavad Gita (the Voice of God) served like a guiding beacon in helping people resolve their situations with balance of mind.

Let’s see more of this in the next blog!

Om Namo Bhagavathe Vaasudevaayaa!