*Science of the Soul and Existential Crises. The Personal Level* 13 After identifying ourselves as pure souls, what we are supposed to do is like the spiritual house cleansing; driving away negative energies which are incompatible or unconducive to our evolution, and firmly, constantly developing the conducive ones. It is the extent and gravity of the required self-regulation which makes Arjuna also wonder if one lifetime is enough to reach that state of steadfast, unattached performer self-actualization. He asks Krishna what if the body dies without the fruits of our past actions being exhausted. Does a soul have to start all over again when it takes up a new body? Krishna gives some basic premises regarding this: no one can escape action. Whichever be the dominant tendency, action done with attachment to its fruit adds to karma. Righteous action like devotion, sacrifice and gifts, performed attachedly, with a firm mind does yield fruit according to the intent. Righteous action, performed unattached with a firm mind does not yield fruit. The balance of the previously accumulated fruits gets carried over in the next state of manifestation, i. e. life. The next embodiment of the soul is according to the dominant tendency of the action-fruits it carries with itself. Tendencies are flexible and their aggregate can be reconfigured too. In times like today’s, when we witness the majority of us being *rajas *and *tamas *oriented, going about life multitasking to be the fittest survivors, the prime purpose of life, spiritual health has been reduced to be a recreational activity in requirement of an appointment based session to attend to. Despite all the boasts of achievements and marks of greatness, we hanker for something to make it a full circle. But fulfilment evades because we miss the most crucial venture to invest and exhaust our resources and energies in. This, at last, compels some to take recourse in spirituality. In fact, the need for a self-initiated purgatory process for spiritual healing is witnessed at present than any other time in human history. Had it not been so, a variety of self-proclaimed saints and gurus, scripturally qualified or not, would not have generated hysterical mass following. Nevertheless, the verisimilitudes of multiple paths and meaning derived from *Bhagavad Gita *revolve around only one phenomena; the theorem of the liberation of soul, its realisation of the Absolute and harmony within and without. Once a seeker stars off with the true knowledge of the inherent duality of his own personality and the concurrent dual reality of the Supreme, unmanifested cosmic being, permeating through all the organic or inorganic entities, governing the manifested nature through its three stages of cyclical progression; beginning, middle, and end. As it is, we all dream about ultimate satisfaction in our lives and Krishna provides us the formula.
13 We are constantly concerned about the future now and hereafter and he shows us the way. But it is all conditional: we have to know the nature of that satisfaction and have to act for it. This masterpiece of mysticism, Krishna's *Bhagavad Gita *shows that the sanctity of the soul has to be preserved, and residing in the body it is not capable of doing it alone, so it develops the penchant for complete surrender to the Supreme God, the highest universal authority, the source of all and everything. When one says blood is thicker than water, one states the natural order of priority for a person in terms of bonding with and obligations towards the people related to us, and our blood relations, especially the core family becomes primary. On a higher spiritual plane, the essential lineage is traced to the Absolute Divine, God. Everything else, the transient material nature in the form of the basic eight elements in their numerous forms as bodies and its subtle qualities in their various combinations, becomes secondary. We just have to. wake up. to the reality of our soul, and train it to retain its essential purity. The qualities of the pure embodied souls, the passionate souls and the dark souls, as listed in *Bhagavad Gita*, serve as yardsticks to measure our own qualities by and to identify our personality type. While attributing all pure virtues and qualities to the persons of divine properties. 14 Krishna, the supreme visionary warns Arjuna against the demoniacal men (*Asura*) who are dominated by the dark tendencies of lust, wrath and greed which he calls. destructive of the self. and. triple gates of hell. (16.3, 21). At the personal level,* Bhagavad Gita *works as an eternal practical wisdom guide. It presents a prototypical process assuring in a well physiological, mental, emotional and spiritual integrity and harmonized energies. There is no fixed threshold as to where and when to do it, except for how to facilitate the self to reclaim itself and start internalising the comprehensive worldview of *Bhagavad Gita *effectively. It is in fact a school in itself which teaches humanity the science of soul in its entirety. And even if written in a spiritual manner, the delineation of the reality of our soul, mired in illusion and mind, a force to reckon with when complacent to senses, is logical. Conceptually, the mind is analogous to the biological phenomenon called the neuron, the basic nerve cell to process and transmit information between the central nervous system; the brain and spinal cord. The role of mind in keeping the soul from redemption by signalling it the wrong way, can be explained by drawing a parallel between the two. In *Bhagavad Gita*’s concept of the reality of an individual’s soul within and integral to the sphere of the cosmic reality, Mind functions in a human constitution like a neuron, the semi-permeable cell membrane as reason/intellect, ions as natural quality ( *guna*) based desires, central nervous system as soul and the stimulus as multiple desires. Like a cell membrane, the intellect can also block some of the negative desires from the mind but not all. Mind when not activated by desires, has the resting potential. However, due to the constant force of desire-based actions, the mind undergoes a change in terms of the shift in the proportional ratio of the qualities similar to depolarisation. And when the ratio of the desires inside the mind reduces in proportion to the other differently combined desires outside it, the mind cannot withhold their entry and reaches the threshold potential. And then, it fires an action potential to the soul which is based on the dominant quality of the powerful desires. Eventually, the ignorant soul obeys and incurs the consequential bondage. 15 Krishna as a perfect teacher, yogi and all-time guide, hands out the worksheets for the personality development and capacity building programs, to fulfill the requirement of freedom from the bondages. The exercise that we, the embodied ones, need to take up is to replace the stimulus of *rajas *and *tamas *laced desires with *sattva-based* ones. Then the mind will itself be pure and inform the soul accordingly. Krishna necessitated. purity of food, sacrifice, austerity, and almsgiving. 17.7). Purity of austerity has further been divided into three categories: body, speech, and mind. If earned and sustained firmly, according to this masterpiece of mysticism, *Bhagavad Gita*, this dynamic wisdom and its practice, coupled with a thorough devotion to the God or whatever terminology we use to assign to the unseen but eternal ruler and regulator of the cosmos, are the. spiritual safety valves. in a spiritually suffocating world. Fulfilling the spiritual quest of being permanently, comfortably established in the self has the potential to make us experience ourselves as an integrated whole and streamline our lives around the principle of unity in diversity at every level of this vast spectrum of creation. 16 In this regard, even if Krishna is regarded without any divinity attached to him, he works wonders psychologically. His lessons make us crisis resilient: Gita. supports the role of duty and participation. Joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. In fact, it works on many levels of human experiences. It convinces us, like it did Arjuna, to set new paradigms in our life in terms of our identity, our duties, our goal and our relationship with the Supreme Divine. It makes us flexible to accept change as crucial to subsistence and evolution. It makes us accommodate death as one of the natural stages of the body's life cycle on earth. It makes us compatible with our surroundings at both micro and macro level. Fulfilling the spiritual quest of being permanently, comfortably established in the self has the potential to make us experience ourselves as an integrated whole and streamline our lives around the principle of unity in diversity at every level of this vast spectrum of creation. KR IRS 18223 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZoojv9gtno8H0fivWU7GT3e7m5h-JKqRWC3Cvc%2BAjjgSFQ%40mail.gmail.com.
