“You Were Never Born; You Will Never Die”

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So there is Arjuna, falling down on the field of battle, overcome with such weariness and despair from even the thought of the fight before him that he can’t imagine going on. Why live at all if this is the battle he must fight? He places himself at Krishna’s feet, literally and figuratively, looking for something to help him move from the place of complete and utter STUCK that he is in. And he gets it – boy, does he get it – but not at all in the way he is looking for.

Arjuna is waiting for a pep talk on why he should make a choice for one course of action or the other. Instead he gets the deep dive into metaphysics and the ultimate nature of reality.

“You speak sincerely, but your sorrow has no cause…One man believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain. You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed; you can never change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, you do not die when the body dies. Realizing that which is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging, how can you slay or cause another to slay?”

                                                      Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2

Bet Arjuna wasn’t expecting THAT as the answer.

Krishna does tell him to stand up and fight, to do his duty and stop being a sissy (okay, not in so many words, but close), but it’s all as a way of explaining to him that the whole world around him - and he himself within it - are not what he thinks, and his despair comes from all this wrongheaded thinking. What Arjuna does matters because it affects the people around him; but at a much deeper level, the only actions that can ever really matter are those that lead to an understanding of the Self, the truest part of every being, which is “everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundation of eternity.” If he can come to realize this, Krishna is telling him, all despair and doubt, all fear of any kind, will be but a whisper of wind passing by him because he will be living in full knowledge of the truth.

The Self is not the same thing as the Christian understanding of a soul. The Self is immortal, unchanging, tied to a body for a time but never contained within it. The Self is not where human and divine meet: it is where they recognize that they are one and the same. The divine is the Self writ large; the Self is a part of the divine essence attached to a personality, at least for a while. Atman, the Self, is one and the same thing as Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, the ground of all being, the essence which stands behind all deities and creations.

Do you feel this sense of profound connection to everything that is? Do the tiniest blade of grass and the largest galaxy in the universe and the face of every human you see all reveal the divine to you? If so, then the Bhagavad Gita, in all its sheer beauty, may be a scripture that calls to you.

The impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between these two have attained the end of all knowledge.

                                                      Chapter 2

Quotations from The Bhagavad Gita, trans Eknath Easwaran

Image found at http://heartofphilosophy.wordpress.com/events/past-events/edge-of-reason-ngv-2007/