Bhagavagd Gita - Session 35- Track 3503
The greatest art of education and therefore of Sadhana is to find for each one the right movement of acceleration. How fast or how slow you should move, that is where the wisdom of the Yogi or the teacher lies: not to put to much pressure upon the child…read, read, read, all the time, and by reading a lot he will certainly get good marks, but then in many other respects he will remain behind for which you have to pay a price afterwards. So, you have to have a judicious understanding of the process of development of evolution, and constantly you should see one important element in it: ‘what is the aspiration?’, ‘what is the intensity of aspiration?’. That will give you the measure. If there is a right aspiration, then you can give a pressure, if there is not that aspiration then don’t put too much on it, wait. It is like a good cook: slow fire, big fire, you must know where to put at what time and so on. So, Yoga is basically ‘cooking’. It is a gradual process by which we can become heated: it is Tapas actually, all heating. So how to heat ourselves properly, in the right way that is the question.
Question: The divine life will be willed by the Divine?
Oh! Yes, Divine is omnipotent. He is not bound by His plans. Oh, yes certainly. That is the freedom of the Divine because He has no barriers at all: what is it that controls Him? His plan is the least that can control Him. It is His plan; He can change it, anytime. Certainly, in fact that is the real hope: all Yoga is the prayer to the Divine to change His plan, so that a new world can be created. His present plan is…He can go on like this for years, and years, and years: etat mangalam idam mangalam, “That is good, this is good”. But if you are unhappy with the present then pray, the plan will be changed.
Comment: ...aspiration is so strong and so burning, and sometimes I find that my progress is not keeping up with that aspiration.
Comment: People placed in identical circumstances react so differently?
In fact, the idea of ‘same circumstances’ is only a superficial idea: there are no two identical circumstances for everybody. Each one lives in his kṣetra, depends on kṣetrajña.
We now come to the 12th chapter. This is quite a short chapter…only 20 verses: it is elucidation of the last portion of the 11th chapter. It is a statement, a very short statement of one of the most important statements of the Gita, which prepares an exposition of the remaining 6 chapters, a short statement which prepares the ground for a long exposition of 6 chapters thereafter. If that last sentence is not given here in this chapter, then you might say that the Gita comes to a culmination at the end of the 12th chapter. But because of that last sentence, which is very important, it needs 6 more chapters for exposition.
So, in one sense this chapter is an elucidation of the previous chapter. You know, one of the things we have been doing constantly is to see the link in the Gita, constantly, right from the first chapter we have tried to see how the argument gradually develops on, and on, and on, to show the… (Even though it seems a very winding argument sometimes) we have to see the linkages and we have been doing this all the time. So, once again I begin with that statement of linking chapter n°11 with chapter n°12.
But before that also: ananya bhaktyā (VIII, 22). This is ananya bhakti: this is the linking point.
What is ananya bhakti? There are Bhaktis…Sri Krishna, by showing Himself in viśvarūpa darśana, which is the main substance of chapter n°11; He expounds the object of knowledge in its integrality. As we have been saying the entire Bhagavad Gita is a book of ‘integral knowledge’ and ‘integral Yoga’. The object of Yoga is the attainment of integral Divine. The process is also integral and the instruments also are integral. The Divine that has to be realised is not merely the Divine that is immutable and silent, akṣara, the Divine that is to be realised is also kṣara, is also mobile, is dynamic. It is also that transcends both mobility and immobility: He is Purushottama, the Lord who is at once quiet and dynamic; the Divine that unifies the whole universe. He is the one in many, many in one, one in all, all in one. The one who has sovereign will, which manifest itself at many levels and although when it manifests in different levels, it seems contradictory very often, it is still the one will that is manifesting in the world: that is the real meaning of the viśvarūpa darśana, it’s an integral vision of the integral divine. It is also a manifestation of the integral result of the integral Yoga.