Tag: study bhagavad gita

The title is shocking, isn’t it?

An important world religion declares, ‘The wages of sin is death.’ Yet death does not end the story. Judgement follows, and then an eternal existence in heaven or hell.

So the threat reaches beyond your earthly life. Death does not release you from an authority that claims the right to punish you.

The punishment is described in horrifying detail: a lake of burning sulphur, fire, agony. Elsewhere, skin is burnt away and replaced with fresh skin so that it can be burnt again. The skin is restored so that the suffering can continue.

‘God kills’ is a shocking title, but an eternity of deliberately sustained agony should disturb us far more.

Before I accept any of this, though, one question has to come first: who exactly is this ‘you’?

Is it your body, your mind, your personality, your memories, your name? Or a separate, invisible ‘soul’ supposedly lodged somewhere inside you? What dies, what survives, and what experiences the punishment? If the body has perished, whose skin is being burnt? If another body is supplied, what makes its occupant the same person?

The torment is described in vivid detail. But who is being tormented?

On the understanding I will set out here, the answer is no one.

Vedanta puts that identity at the centre of the enquiry, and what it points to overturns the premise that someone survives death to be punished. You were never born and you will never die. Your body was born, it changes, and it will die. But is that changing body the whole of what you are? You have watched your thoughts change, your preferences change, your understanding change, even the story you tell about yourself change. What do you mean by the ‘I’ to which you attribute all these changes?

The Atman is not a collection of separate entities distributed among individual bodies. ‘My soul’, ‘your soul’, ‘his soul’: we carry the language of possession into the very enquiry that calls our separateness into question. The one all-pervading whole is known as Atman, Param Brahma or Krishna. The whole is present in each cell. Bodies arise within the whole, last for a while and disappear. Their appearance does not create the whole, and their disappearance does not destroy it.

The ego identifies with a particular body, a name, a history and a position in the world, and builds its claims around that identification: this is me, this is mine, this must continue. Now project that same separate ‘me’ into eternity, carrying its account of rewards and punishments, forever anxious about what will happen to it. The enquiry into what that ‘me’ actually is has not even begun.

This brings us to Krishna’s birth, and to what ‘unborn’ actually means. Krishna says in Shloka 2:12 of the Srimad Bhagavad Gita: “There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings. We will also never cease to exist.” Krishna personifies the whole. On what day could the whole have begun? Where could it have appeared, when nothing existed outside it and nothing preceded it? The human form in the story has a birth. What Krishna personifies has none. Yet we celebrate his birthday year after year and overlook the understanding he represents. The Srimad Bhagavad Gita directs our attention to the unborn and imperishable, which weapons cannot cut and fire cannot burn.

Now return to the threats of death and burning. How do you kill what was never born and does not die? How do you burn what fire cannot touch? You cannot settle these questions by moving casually between body, mind, ego and an undefined ‘soul’, calling each of them ‘you’ whenever it suits the argument. First establish what you are talking about.

If you don’t know what you mean by ‘you’, you simply don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’re just wasting your time talking mumbo jumbo.

In the non-dual Vedanta I teach, there is no separate divine ruler who needs your praise, takes offence at your absence from a temple and prepares an everlasting torture chamber. There is ignorance of our own nature, identification with the changing body and mind, and the attachment, fear and suffering that grow around them. Understanding addresses that ignorance.

This matters for how we live now. Think of being desperately attached to an outcome. You must succeed, someone must approve of you, a relationship must continue, a plan must work, circumstances must change exactly as you demand. Soon the mere possibility of disappointment feels like a threat to your entire existence. You rehearse disasters, argue with people who are not in the room and suffer tomorrow’s imagined humiliation today. Then, with your attention consumed by fear, you try to decide what to do. How clearly can you see?

Non-attachment loosens that grip. You can say, ‘All right, what I fear may happen. Let me look at it.’ What would it actually mean? What could you do? Which options have you overlooked because you were so busy demanding a different outcome? Your ability to act intelligently begins to return. The problem may still be difficult and may still demand effort, but now you can give it your full attention. Acceptance makes room for a considered response.

Much of the heaven and hell we experience takes shape in our own minds, in anticipation, resentment, craving, comparison, wounded pride and the insistence that life must conform to our expectations. We carry that torment through the day and then search the sky for its author.

The same failure to enquire shows in the outward performance of religion. Stories are repeated, and the performance carries on. What have we understood? The Puranas and Itihasas are full of metaphor, and metaphor demands thought. If we take every image literally and stop enquiring, we keep the performance and lose the understanding it was meant to prompt.

In my reading, Hanuman represents the mind and its extraordinary potential when properly directed. What have we learnt about the mind by building an enormous statue in a foreign land? Worship that disturbs residential neighbourhoods and pollutes rivers, our own and pristine ones in Western countries alike, shows little understanding of the all-pervading whole. We take the imagery literally, overlook what it symbolises and turn it into noisy public spectacle in other people’s neighbourhoods, places so quiet that one can hear a pin drop. The people whose peace we disturb belong to that whole, and so does the water. Our conduct reveals what our ceremonies have actually taught us.

Great truths were given to us as metaphors. Many have taken them literally and built cults and senseless traditions out of them, carried those to foreign lands, and made a mockery of our people, our nation and, through our failure to understand it, the supreme philosophy of non-dual Vedanta.

And among those so eager to defend the Srimad Bhagavad Gita, how many have read it from beginning to end? People invoke its authority, repeat familiar phrases and swear upon it, while reading the text itself stays a task for some indefinitely postponed future. All I ask, to begin with, is that you read it once.

I understand one obstacle. In certain editions a few lines are surrounded by pages of commentary, and before the reader has met the complete argument, the first reading already feels like a monumental undertaking. So begin with a clear translation or interpretation and meet the whole text. Return to the difficult passages afterwards, turn to commentary when you are ready, and read it again as your understanding grows. That is the purpose of my work on The Ever-Relevant Gita and Bhagavad Gita in Clear English. I want that first reading to be within reach.

I must have read the Srimad Bhagavad Gita over a thousand times, yet reading it again can still prompt fresh thoughts, ideas and more clarity. A situation in my life brings a question into focus, and words I have read countless times suddenly carry a meaning I had missed. That takes attention and participation. Repeating ‘I am the Atman’ without examining what you mean achieves very little. Announcing ‘I was never born’ without understanding it achieves no more. Any sentence can turn into an empty slogan. The enquiry asks more of you.

So here is my invitation. Read the Srimad Bhagavad Gita once, completely, then examine the ‘I’ you have been referring to. When you say ‘my body’, what do you mean by ‘my’? When you say ‘my mind’, what distinction are you making? When you say ‘I am afraid of dying’, what exactly are you afraid of losing? Give these questions the attention you have given to predictions of your punishment, and examine the identity on which someone else’s account of your eternal fate depends before you accept it.

The opening threat was death, and then came suffering without end. Both were addressed to ‘you’. But who is this ‘you’?

Most believers have never asked. Not knowing what they mean by ‘I’, they split reality into ‘me’ and ‘God’, then tremble before the other half of a division they made themselves. They bring offerings, fast, chant and parade through the streets, all to bribe an unknown judge into sparing them. That judge threatens to kill them, and they worship him for it.

‘God kills’ is true only in the mind of someone who has cut themselves off from the whole. A frightened ego invents an executioner and spends a lifetime begging him for mercy. You are the whole. Your awareness is limitless. It can never become an object of your perception, because anything you perceive has a form, and anything with a form has a beginning and an end. The same goes for anything you think of: it is an object too, never the subject. So what you are has no form, no beginning and no end. No one is coming to burn you, and there is no one to be burnt. There is only the whole, and you have been too busy grovelling to notice that you are it.

The greatest Vedantic advice is not to believe someone or something, nor to fear a being who threatens to kill and punish you forever, but to enquire until you realise what you mean by ‘I’.