Bhagavagd Gita - Session 33- Track 3312

Now, how to work it out? This working out is a very interesting process: to make somebody who is awake and to make him asleep is a very difficult task. As I said once: if you are really awake and you try to sleep with a state sense of awakening, you cannot sleep. Deliberately you cannot go to sleep. Something must happen, so Prakriti has to find another means: how to make this Purusha who is so much alive, so much awake, but he wanted to have this play of evolution which cannot be done without going to sleep, so Prakriti had to make a tremendous effort to make Purusha eat the fruit. This is called ‘the temptation’, that is to say… ‘temptation’…Why is it called temptation? It is called temptation because Purusha had to forget that He is Purusha, then only He can be tempted.

Now, for Purusha to forget that He is Purusha is one of the most difficult task, it can’t be done easily. So, first of all Prakriti weaves out a certain acuteness of division, then casts its net of division upon the consciousness of Purusha, then Purusha begins to see this net. While seeing this net, He is as it were deviated from His awaking consciousness. Now, an object has been produced, it gets engaged in this new object that has been produced by Prakriti…presented. Now, Purusha begins to look into it. As soon as he begins to look into it He is caught into the net, goes to sleep.

This is the whole story of bondage: we are all bound because we began to watch Prakriti. In the act of watching, we became engaged with it: this engagement is ‘bondage’. To get engaged, we, whole the time, want to see what is this net, and this net began to weave itself out, more and more spinning of it, and the whole world is nothing but a spinning process, and we are constantly engaged in watching, that ‘paradise’ is lost, is gone (only in consciousness, not lost really, it is only lost from our consciousness). We are now engaged in this net only, which is very small narrow thing. Now we have to work it out because only trough the process of evolution it can be done. This process of evolution is symbolised by the serpent.

Comment: It is difficult to dis-engage.

I read now.

This is the description of the…you can see how the Divine sees Napoleon as it were, because it is the description of Napoleon with the Divine vision: how the Vibhuti, seeing the Vibhuti, how the Divine sees in him the great force of evolution, sees the Divine in him, sees the Self which is equal in all, and sees how evolution is moved forward through this instrument called Napoleon.

“The name of Napoleon has been a battlefield for the pre-possessions of all sorts of critics, and according to their predilections, idiosyncrasies and political opinions, men have loved or hated, panegyrised or decried the Corsican. To blame Napoleon is like criticising Mont Blanc or throwing mud or Kunchenjunga. This phenomenon has to be understood and known, not blamed or praised. Admire we must, but as minds, not as moralists. It has not been sufficiently perceived by his panegyrists and critics that Bonaparte was not a man at all, he was a force. Only the nature of the force has to be considered. There are some men who are self-evidently superhuman, great spirits who are only using the human body. Europe calls them supermen, we call them vibhūtis. They are manifestations of Nature, of divine power presided over by a spirit commissioned for the purpose, and the spirit is an emanation from the Almighty, who accepts human strengths and weakness but is not bound by them. They are above morality and ordinarily without a conscience, acting according to their own nature. For they are not men developing upwards from the animal to the divine and struggling against their lower natures, but beings already fulfilled and satisfied with themselves. Even the holiest of them have a contempt for the ordinary law and custom and break them easily and without remorse, as Christ did on more than one occasion, drinking wine, breaking the Sabbath, consorting with publicans and harlots; as Buddha did when he abandoned his self-accepted duties as a husband, a citizen and a father; as Shankara did when he broke the holy law and trampled upon custom and ācāra to satisfy his dead mother. In our literature they are described as Gods or Siddhas or Titans or Giants. Valmiki depicts Ravana as a ten-headed giant, but it is easy to see that this was only the vision of him in the world of imaginations, the “astral plane”, and that in the terms of humanity he was a Vibhuti or superman and one of the same order of beings as Napoleon.

The Rakshasa is the supreme and thoroughgoing individualist, who believes life to be meant for his own untrammelled self-fulfilment and self-assertion. A necessary element in humanity, he is particularly useful in revolutions. As a pure type in man he is ordinarily a thing of the past; he comes now mixed with other elements. But Napoleon was a Rakshasa of the pure type, colossal in his force and attainment. He came into the world with a tremendous appetite for power and possession and, like Ravana, he tried to swallow the whole earth in order to glut his supernatural hunger. Whatever came in his way he took as his own, ideas, men, women, fame, honours, armies, kingdoms; and he was not scrupulous as to his right of possession. His nature was his right; its need his justification. The attitude may be expressed in some such words as these, “Others may not have the right to do these things, but I am Napoleon”.