Bhagavagd Gita - Session 3- Track 306
If you light a flame and if there is air and wind, the lamp will constantly go on flickering; but if you remove all the air, and all the disturbing movement of wind, then the flame will automatically be steady, and the light will be perfect within limits but the light will be perfect, because of the steadiness of the flame.
This is the possibility with regard to the Buddhi. indriya(s): this is very difficult to make them steady; manas is also very difficult to make it steady; the one element in us which is easier to deal with, in making it steady, is buddhi. That is why you start with Buddhiyoga and by Buddhiyoga you make your intelligence absolutely steady. When the intelligence is steady, then there is luminosity, in that luminosity you will see everything as it is.
This ‘seeing-as-it-is’, is very important; normally we do not see things as they are. We see things as if we are spectacled: if we have blue spectacles right from our birth, attached to our eyes, we shall never know what is whiteness, what is redness; because blue eyes will be always there, and we will see everything blue. Normally you may say that every human being is born with some kind of spectacles already fixed. That is why it is necessary to take off those spectacles, and see things as they are. And the best way of doing it, it is: to make the intelligence absolutely stable. Let it not flicker, and when it does not flicker, there will be immediate discrimination; as soon as you see the light everything will be clear. What is stable and what is mutable immediately you will be able to make a distinction. Similarly, as soon as the intellect is stabilised, the first thing you will see is, that there is ‘mutability’, and there is ‘immutability’. This is the distinction that we will see when the intellect is completely steadied. It may take time, but if it is done, then this is the consequence you will get, you will realise the ‘immutability’. And, by realising the immutability, you will become free from mutability. Knowing the two conditions simultaneously, and knowing the distinction between the two, you will be able to withdraw from mutability and go to immutability. And that is the ‘Moksha’; the moment you can come out of mutability and enter into immutability, you are liberated from mutability, you are no more, unsteady. That is one way.
Sri Krishna says, “the same Buddhiyoga, you apply to action”, and this is such a method, that even while doing action, you will feel free. It is that Yoga, which Sri Krishna is expounding to us; while doing action, you still remain free from action. How to do that? First proposition He makes is, that ‘you realise that in the field of action, there are two parts: there is the ‘will’, and there is a seeking for the ‘fruit of will’”. Or you might say there are three things: there is a will; there is an action; and action, which is meant to bring about a certain result. In this process, as far as result is concerned, our tendency is not only to ‘produce’ a result, but our attitude is to ‘enjoy’ the result. In fact, we are doing action for an enjoyment of a result. There is a subtle distinction between ‘will’, ‘action’, ‘result’, and ‘desire to enjoy the result’. In this respect, Sri Krishna says, “first of all make a distinction between ‘action’ and the ‘result’ and see that on ‘result’, you have no right”. As far as your decision to act is concerned, it is done in your mind, so, let us say, you have a right to action; but once the action is thrown into the field, that over the result you have no right at all, it happens automatically, whatever happens you cannot determine afterwards. This is the first result of Buddhiyoga: you know the distinction between action, and result, and how result is beyond you.
Knowing this, you become free from the clutches from results of fruits of action. And then you arrive at a ‘samatvaṁ’; the arrival a of samatvaṁ itself can be called ‘Yoga’. Just as Yoga is a concentration, and which leads you to the ‘steadiness of the flame’, similarly samatvaṁ leads to the ‘steadiness of action’. Your activity, normally which is flickering all the time, now becomes steady. Your action becomes strong, powerful, because now there is no wavering in the action; we are not troubled by the clinging to the desires, and to the fruits of action: that action is Karmayoga, an action, which is ‘action’, not an unsteady action. And action, which is action: to arrive to a stage when you can really act, without unsteadiness; that is Karmayoga. This is the first definition of Karmayoga you get here.