“My Will Is Paralyzed”

This is what Arjuna says near the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita when he realizes that the choices before him are equally untenable; better, he says, to be killed “unarmed and unresisting” than to walk the path that lies before him. But, as the title reminds us, this is not Arjuna’s song to sing: Bhagavad Gita translates as the Song of the Lord, the Lord in question being Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu. This is Krishna’s song, where he explains the inner workings of the world and the beings within it to his friend, Arjuna, who becomes his disciple in the course of the text.

But we don’t know that in the beginning. After a brief setup of scene, we are with Arjuna the warrior standing on the battlefield and surveying the enemy he is to fight that day. Only the enemy doesn’t look very enemy-ish. Across the open field are cousins, uncles, teachers – some of the people Arjuna loves most in the world. Up to this point anger at the injustice that led to this fight has fueled his usual strength and vigor, but seeing all these beloved faces arrayed against him breaks much more than just his resolve.

-->“O Krishna, I see my own relations here anxious to fight, and my limbs grow weak; my mouth is dry, my body shakes and my hair is standing on end.”

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Arjuna thinks he is about to enter a fight for his life, and he is; what he doesn’t realize is that this fight will take place within his own heart and mind, and only secondarily on physical ground. The true fight, the more dangerous one, is with a terrifying and soul-destroying despair.
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“I have no desire for victory or for a kingdom or pleasures. Of what use is a kingdom or pleasures or even life, if those for whose sake we desire these things…are engaging in this battle? Even if they were to kill me, I would not want to kill them”…And casting away his bow and his arrows, he sat down in his chariot in the middle of the battlefield.

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He sees those beloved faces and realizes that winning is just as futile as losing. It isn’t whether he will win or lose, it isn’t even how he plays the game: what Arjuna is up against is why he would want to live at all if this is the game that has to be played.

Maybe some of you reading this recognize yourself in Arjuna and his grinding despair. You too have thrown your weapons to the ground, refusing to enter the fray because winning seems as painful and pointless as losing. This is what the depths of depression look like; it is the contours of acute grief, and the darkest of dark nights of the soul. Why win through to the other side when all you see there is a life devoid of meaning, a life you wish you weren’t forced to live anyway? Why not just sit down in your chariot and refuse to fight?

For those of us who know this inner torment, this solitary despair, Arjuna is our Everyman, our anti-hero, falling down just at the moment of battle. But the anti-hero turns into a hero; Arjuna the Everyman of despair becomes Arjuna the Everyman of determination, of joy, because blue-skinned Krishna, the Lord of this Song, shows him that there is an error in his – in our – thinking. We may be right about the futility of certain facile ways of life and thought that we have chosen or fallen into that have gotten us into this morass of despair, but we are wrong about what life ultimately is, about what we ultimately are, and Krishna is here to explain it all for us. 

More on this next time. 

Quotations from The Bhagavad Gita, trans Eknath Easwaran

Image found at http://memoirsofarovingmind.blogspot.com/2011/08/despair.html