Bhagavagd Gita - Session 6- Track 603

An aspect of His nature is that it is entirely silent: the Supreme Lord even while acting, He is capable of a poise, which is completely silent. This is the difficulty of Karmayoga. To be like the Divine is that even while you do works, you become completely silent. Whenever there is a silence, what will happen is that whatever work you do, it will enter into silence and silence dissolves all works: there is no activity there, and yet it is from that silence that all activity proceeds. Such, is the special nature of the Supreme Divine. Therefore, Sri Krishna’s whole Karmayoga is: how to become like that so that even while doing actions, you do not get bound?

There is one important statement which we must immediately make: when it is said that the Supreme Lord is the doer of everything, which is the third statement, which I made: very often people therefore, make a confusion and they begin to apply it immediately and say that, “Whatever I do is done by the Lord. Since the Supreme Lord is the doer of action, I am doing His action; therefore, this is Supreme Lord doing this action”. This kind of confusion arises in the mind of many people who read the Bhagavad Gita. In fact, there are some people who are very egoistic and they want to be as big as God, and when they read this, “That all work is ultimately done by the Lord”, then they apply their work to the Lord and say “What I am doing is Lord’s wish; if I am whishing something, if I want to do something, I am not wishing egoistically, it is God who is doing it, I am only the instrument of that Lord.” It is in this way that a great illusion is created by these people, over themselves and over others.

We have to be very careful about this statement, let us analyse it. When it is said that Lord is the doer of all things, this statement is true in the ultimate sense, at the highest, all works proceed from God. But Lord Himself has produced a kind of a covering upon His own action: it is as if a kind of veil has been cast over His own action. Therefore, all the rays of light, which are coming from the Divine, are arrested by that veil, and only a scattered reflection of this light comes out of this veil. Where we are standing, where we are acting, is an action of the Lord proceeding from above, but coming through a veil, and therefore, what is coming, what is happening in our case is only a kind of a scattered rain of God’s light, God’s work.

There is therefore a difference between God’s action above the veil, and God’s action below the veil. Until you cross this veil, you should not claim that all you are doing is God’s work. You can say that all that is coming is God’s work, but through the veil and therefore distorted, therefore what I am thinking, what I am willing is God’s will, but distorted by this veil. And if I really want to claim that what I am doing is God’s doing, you must be sure that first the veil is removed, then you can rightly say that it is God’s own action.

In fact Karmayoga consists of this breaking, rending the veil. We shall go into the detail of this, but I just wanted to warn at this stage because very often, the moment this third statement is made, at least egoistic people immediately begin to claim what they are planning, what they are willing, what they are doing is not what they are doing, but God is doing. It is a kind of an illusion created upon their own illusion because they want to justify all that they are doing.