Bhagavagd Gita - Session 1 - Track 104

There is another view, which says that the whole world is a kind of a dream. In dream many things happen, may not happen, it has no significance. When you wake up, everything disappears. So, wake up, and you find nothing happens in the world. So, where is the question of war, fighting etc?…nothing! It is a nightmare at the most, or at the worst: the world is a nightmare in which you are troubled by so many things happening, and when you wake up you find that there is nothing! If such is the world, then there is no question of Divine Will in the world! According to that view: Divine has no will, it is pure existence or pure silence, and all this bubbling of the world is a kind of a dream which takes place and which can be removed, can be eliminated altogether.

In contrast to these two views, Sri Krishna declares that the Divine is not only the ‘creator’, not only the ‘preserver’, but He is also the ‘destroyer’. If He is Durga, He is also Kali. If He is Shiva, He is also Rudra and that nothing is ‘outside’ Him. Even if you call it a dream, even that dream happens in Him, because there is nothing else than Him. Even if it is a nightmare, the nightmare happens to Him, because there is nothing else than Himself. ‘The Reality is only one’, this is the starting point of the Bhagavad Gita: “the Reality is only one”.

Therefore, you cannot wish away the phenomenon of battle and war and massacre. Therefore the Divine can Will ‘fight’, because He ‘is’ the world, He is moving in the world, and He has a will in it. It has not happened simply because somehow it has happened. It is a plan of the action of the Divine, who is moving with the world, developing the world, and at different stages He has a different kind of will and manifestation of it: if He is your friend, He is also your enemy, because your enemy is non other than the Divine Himself, because there is only one Reality – The Supreme Divine. As a friend He protects you, as an enemy He strikes you, Himself! Such is the consequence of the idea that ‘Reality is one’.

If you say the Reality is not one, then of course different consequences can come about; but if Reality is one, then this is the necessary consequence of it that ‘all’ the forms of the Divine, ‘all’ the relations of the Divine are all ‘relations of the Divine Himself within Himself’. On ‘all sides’ the Divine stands; in ‘all things’ is the Divine that is the proposition of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘in all things is the Divine’.

If the Kurukshetra has come into existence, if the battle has come about, there must be some Divine Will. The discovery of the Divine Will is the fundamental task. The Divine manifests in such a way that He does not reveal to you His will very easily: this is the law of the development you might say. Why? There must be some reason we shall come to later on, but the fact is that this will is not so easily revealed. We do not know what is the Divine’s Will; and all our problems arise because we do not know the Divine’s Will. If you therefore discover the Divine’s Will and become instrument of it, then the problems are resolved. You might say therefore that Bhagavad Gita is not an allegory. If it is only an allegory, much of the significance of the Gita vanishes: it means that the Gita does not face a concrete real situation of life, and does not help you in answering the concrete situation of life. It only talks in a cloudy manner, like a poet who stands above in the ether, but does not come down on the brass tacks of the earth. Therefore, right from the beginning, there is a complete recognition in the very first word, dharmakṣetre kurukṣetre (I, 1): it says very clearly that all this, is happening in the Kurukshetra.