 Bhagavad Gita Commentary–Thirty-three–by Swami Nirmalananda Giri
 The Eternal Being
Having been told that Krishna had taught Yoga to the most ancient of human beings, Arjuna asks: “Vivaswat was born long before you. How am I to believe that you were the first to teach this yoga?” Krishna replies most directly and simply: “You and I, Arjuna, have lived many lives. I remember them all: you do not remember.” Buddha taught that remembrance of all our past lives occurs at the time of enlightenment. However, some believe that recall of all previous lives can occur even before that. Whichever it might be, the idea is that every moment of our previous lives remain embedded in our subtle bodies and can influence and even determine our present lives.
Yet, we are something more than a story–we are being itself, waves of the ocean of Infinite Being. Krishna, as the “mouth” of that Being, begins telling Arjuna of what he really is, and the truth of his relation to the world:
“I am the birthless, the deathless, Lord of all that breathes. I seem to be born: it is only seeming, only my Maya. I am still master Of my Prakriti, the power that makes me. When goodness grows weak, when evil increases, I make myself a body. In every age I come back to deliver the holy, to destroy the sin of the sinner, to establish righteousness. He who knows the nature of my task and my holy birth is not reborn when he leaves this body: he comes to me. Flying from fear, from lust and anger, he hides in me his refuge, his safety: burnt clean in the blaze of my being, in me many find home.” Transcendent being
I am the birthless, the deathless. Being completely outside of time, space, and all relativity, God (Brahman) is beyond birth and death, and any change whatsoever. The rest of us come and go, come and go, but Brahman abides forever; there is no coming or going for Him. Never must we consider God as being conditioned in any way by Relativity. This is not easy for us in the West who have lived from birth in an assumption that God perpetually reacts to us–that it is we who determine the state of God far more than He determines our state–and that we can control God’s “moods.” We have thought that our words, thoughts, and deeds will determine God’s relation to us and how He thinks of us and cares or does not care about us. This is a tremendous error. However choppy the waves may be, the ocean remains stable and constant. It is the same with our tiny, tempestuous minds and lives in contrast to the utter Changelessness of God.
Lord of all that breathes. Yet, He has the most intimate connection/relation with us as our Lord (Ishwara), our inmost Self (Antaratman) and Ruler (Antaryamin). How can this seeming contradiction be? The illusive power known as Maya. Therefore Krishna continues:
Only seeming
“I seem to be born: it is only seeming, only my Maya. I am still master of my Prakriti, the power that makes me.”
God is “born” in His creation, yet He is not born at all. Rather, through His power of Maya, He “dreams” creation and shows those dreams to us, enabling us to enter into His dream and dream along with him the dreams that will culminate in our awakening into His own Consciousness and Being, nevermore to forget ourselves in a dream body in a dream world. We, too, are ever unborn, though dreaming innumerable births and deaths. Why? Because each life we dream is an exercise in consciousness, a means of developing (evolving) our scope of consciousness and understanding (jnana). We suffer because the dreams get out of our control, but once we master our dreaming all confusion, doubt, weakness, and ignorance will cease and we will be “born again” into perfect spiritual awareness, into the ultimate liberation for which we were destined before we first entered into relative existence–or appeared to enter, for it was all a series of educational dream-movies in the cosmic school of God Consciousness. Why and wherefore
Puzzling over the purpose of life is a challenge and a torment to every thinking human being. So Krishna encapsulates its purpose in the next two verses: “When goodness grows weak, when evil increases, I make myself a body. In every age I come back to deliver the holy, to destroy the sin of the sinner, to establish righteousness.”
From age to age we see the advent of Divine Consciousness in the world. Sometimes this takes place in the form of spiritual revelation to purified individuals who can perceive the divine revelation and convey it to others. But sometimes beings of such high consciousness and power come among us that they seem to be manifestations of God Himself. Whether these Great Ones are direct manifestations of God in mayic human form, or are perfect, liberated beings who have long ago transcended the human condition and evolved upward unto total unity/identity with God, really has no relevance to us. What matters is the light they shed into our darkness and their teachings which, backed by Infinite Will, are truly “spirit and life.” Our obligation is not to define these holy messengers, but to scrupulously follow their teachings. For “whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” For they lead unerringly to the kingdom of Infinite Life.
We, too, come back in each life to purify and evolve ourselves, to reveal that which is holy and innate in us, and to dispel the sin and ignorance into which we have strayed, finally establishing our consciousness in the Consciousness with which it has ever been one. Here, too, it is a sleeping and a forgetting until we awaken, remember, and say with the Psalmist: “When I awake, I am still with thee.” The dream of separation and limitation is over forever. The purpose of life is Liberation. Self-knowing
“He who knows the nature of my task and my holy birth is not reborn when he leaves this body: he comes to me. Flying from fear, from lust and anger, he hides in me his refuge, his safety: burnt clean in the blaze of my being, in me many find home.”
Knowing that the advent of Divine Light in the world has our enlightenment as its sole purpose, if we live accordingly we shall transcend the need for birth in any relative world and live in God fully. Rising above all passions rooted in the ego–and above the ego itself–we stand forth in the purity of being that is God.
Read the Bhagavad Gita online: The English text of the Gita posted on this Web Site is arranged according to the meter of the original Sanskrit text so it can be sung–as it is done every morning in our ashram and in most of the ashrams of India.
1) Bhagavad Gita 4:4 [Go back]
2) Bhagavad Gita 4:5 [Go back]
3) See Questions 304 to 308 in The Spirits’ Book by Allan Kardec. This book is a most valuable source of information. [Go back]
4) Bhagavad Gita 4:6-10 [Go back]
5) Bhagavad Gita 4:7, 8 [Go back]
6) “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” (John 6:63) [Go back]
7) “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 7:21 ). “Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46). [Go back]
8) Matthew 5:19 [Go back]
9) Psalms 139:18 [Go back]
10) Bhagavad Gita 4:9, 10 [Go back]
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