Bhagavagd Gita - Session 36- Track 3611

What are the other ones? ‘sālokya’, when you begin to ‘stay’ in the Divine. To be one with the Divine is sāyujya, you become one, united, but ‘sālokya’ is to stay in Him: mayi nivaśas viśaṣisi, you will stay in Me. When you begin to ‘live’ in the Divine, act in the Divine, feel in the Divine, be His lover and beloved: that is the result of Bhaktiyoga.

Then there is sādharmya; you not only become one with the Divine, not you live in the Divine, but you act ‘in’ the Divine and act ‘with the power’ of the Divine, act with the nature of the Divine, act with Para Prakriti, (not in Apara Prakriti), madbhāvā: madbhāvā is My Para Prakriti, My direct becoming. It is only when you do Karmayoga that you get this benefit that you participate in His active nature.

But if you follow only Karmayoga and not others, you may get madbhāvā, but you don’t get the privilege of living in Him, that comes by Bhaktiyoga. You don’t get the privilege of becoming one with Him that comes only by Jnanayoga. But all the three together is by ‘ananya’ Bhakti, by supreme, un-comparable devotion, you get all the three: that is amṛtam dharma; madbhāvā, to be stationed in My bhāvā, in all its completeness, all the three liberations put together: that is madbhāvā. You begin to be united with the Supreme, begin to live in the Divine, you become like the Divine Himself; it’s also called sādṛśya-mukti: you become like the Divine. In all your activities your Apara Prakriti is lost; you begin to participate in the higher nature, ‘Para Prakriti’. It is the attainment of Para Prakriti that is the dharma amṛtam. It is when you not only know the Divine, not only when you love the Divine, not only you act in the Divine, or act according to the Divine, but you do all this simultaneously: when will, knowledge, action, all are united perfectly well, then manifest there the Para Prakriti.

Question: Is that the Supramental being?

That’s right. This Para Prakriti is ‘Supermind’. So, you enter into the Supermind, begin to become Supramental.

So, this is the condition which Sri Krishna says is the real condition of Jnana. Till that time, don’t say you have got ‘Jnana’. This is the real definition of perfect knowledge. It’s that perfect knowledge that makes you the Divine, completely acting like the Divine, acting with the nature of the Divine.

I think we will stop here today. We shall continue because now another subject starts with the 19th verse, so we shall take it up separately.

Question: How do you differentiate in the philosophical quest, the spiritual quest?

The spiritual quest is when you use psychological experience as your means. You want to attain to the supreme object of knowledge, not by intellectual methods. When you try to understand the Divine by intellect, it is ‘philosophical’. When you try to understand the Divine by the psychological expansion, by your explosion of your normal functioning of your mind, body, life, and with that explosion, you enter: that is spiritual quest.

Buddha for example did not start a philosophical enquiry when He left His home. He was already a learned man by that time, He was a great philosopher already, but when He saw those foresights, then an explosion took place, then He could not remain at home in the confines of ordinary life, not that He wanted to escape from action and responsibility, not at all, but the quest sized Him in the very psychological being of the totality of the being. And He wanted to find out was: what is the cause, (not philosophically), experientially, what is the cause of all the suffering and how that suffering can be remedied? It’s a spiritual quest.

Question: That would include the occult?

Occult quest also, yes, but more than occult also. When the object of spiritual quest and the object of philosophical quest is the same, namely, the supreme object of knowledge, but the methods are different. In philosophy, the method is intellectual doubt, intellectual groping, comparing one fact with the other, finding the connection between them, finding the causes of them, finding the ultimate ‘how’, ultimate ‘why’, grasping as much as possible by intellectual means, by deduction, by induction, by implication, by analogy, by all these methods put together is the philosophical quest.

But in a spiritual quest, you want to see the Divine face to face and nothing else satisfies you.

Question: Does it have a sequence?

It can be either.