God, nature & us!

210. na ca māṃ tāni karmāṇi nibadhnanti dhanaṃjaya udāsīnavad āsīnam asaktaṃ teṣu karmasu 9.9 These works do not bind me, Dhanahjaya, Indifferently seated am I, detached from those works.

211. mayādhyakṣeṇa prakṛtiḥ sūyate sacarācaram hetunānena kaunteya jagad viparivartate 9.10
With me as overseer, prakriti emanates the mobile and the immobile. Because of this, Kaunteya, the universe is revolving.

A key idea in Hindu spiritual vision is that everything we do boomerangs back to us one way or another. This is the essence of the law of karma. Another way of saying this is that our actions bind us, as if by a rope. In other words we cannot do something and not be bound by I, causing the birth-death-rebirth cycle. Krishna says here that he himself is exempt from this action causality reaction principle, that his own actions have no binding effect on him.  This corresponds to the idea that whereas every event and thing in the universe has a cause, the Divine itself does not. God is the causeless effect, is self-existent (svayam-bhú). Likewise, whereas ever action has a reaction on mortal actors, this is not the case with God. The idea is  very interesting and meaningful. If we do acts of caring and kindness we will be thanked for it. If we commit acts of harm and cruelty we will be punished for it. But these rules don’t apply to God, or at least not when (apparently) God creates havoc in the form of flood and famine, earthquakes and hurricanes. For the good that God does we thank Him and laud him. But for the bad that is inflicted on the innocent by the forces of Nature, we merely wonder, and sometimes complain or blame Him. But in either case God is not affected in any way by our prayers and praises,   anger or appeals. One may ask: “But why this privileged position?” The answer given is that this is because God does all this in an absolutely detached mode. In other words, consequences, whether good or bad, follow only when one does something with attachment, i.e. with personal and self-serving interest in fruits and rewards. God has no self-interest in Creation and its aftermath. This is an insightful reflection on the natural world:  Nature  is only one step below God. Ultimately, it is utterly indifferent to what it does. We may admire the beauty of the flower, we may be appreciative of the warmth and light from the sun, we may be thankful for salt and shower, and we may suffer from disease and draught, pain and penury. But Nature itself is quite indifferent to our plight or to that of the rodent that is swallowed by the snake. This then is the essence of what is said here. In the classical worldview, things in the world were put into two broad categories: those that move and those that are stationary. The mound and the mountain are (seem) stationary, while wind and water are constantly moving. In the biological world, plant and tree are immobile whereas birds and beasts are mobile. All this is part of Nature. All these emerge, says Krishna, under the direction of the Divine. In other words, the entire universe and all the things in it with their infinite range of qualities and propensities are there because of and under the sway of an almighty, omniscient divine principle


What do we learn from this perspective in the Gita? We learn  that there exists a far greater power and force ruling the cosmos. No matter what, all said and done, we are at its mercy all the time. By reminding us of this,  the Gita inspires us  to humility in the face of this overpowering principle that undergirds and oversees the entire world.

 We are reminded of C. S. Lewis’s line in The Four Lives: “Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?” But, as Joseph Heller reminded us,  it is important to guard against turning “impotence  into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.”

Then the Gita goes on to say that it is because of this that the universe is revolving: meaning, is being repeated again and again. This refers to the cyclic nature of the universe. In other words, all that is happening in the world, from the first tick of emergence to the last pralaya of dissolution of a yuga is because the Divine has so willed it. In this context it should be mentioned that modern cosmologists are by no means unanimous in the once-in-a-cosmic-time Big Bang theory.

The eminent physicist-cosmologist Roger Penrose wrote, for example wrote a few years ago “that the circular patterns seen in the WMAP mission data on the Cosmic Microwave Background suggest that space and time perhaps did not originate at the Big Bang but that our universe continually cycles through a series of “aeons,” and we have an eternal, cyclical cosmos….and that each “Big Bang” marked the start of a new aeon, and our universe is just one of many in a cyclical Universe, starting a new universe in place of the one before.”

If this is not the yuga-idea what is!

V. V. Raman April 17, 2013


Rajaram Bojji  FIE., FNAE. IRSE (Retd.)
http://rajarambojji.atrilab.com
+91 9885700007 India
+1 5713455048    USA