Ladder Of Consciousness – In Gita Verse 4.31 O best of the Kuru dynasty, without sacrifice one can never live happily on this planet or in this life: what then of the next?
Krishna tells Arjuna unless you drop your focus from the fruits of the war you cannot be blissful, and if you cannot be blissful even if you will not fight the war, that act will be an act of sin.
Let’s understand Krishna’s this verse by – Three Steps to Heaven: Instinct, Intellect, and Intuition:
Intuition is the highest rung of the ladder, the ladder of consciousness. It can be divided into three divisions: the lowest and the first is instinct; the second, the middle one, is intellect; and the third, the highest one, is intuition.
The word “in” is used in all three. It is significant. It means these are qualities inborn. You cannot learn them, there is no way to grow them with any outside help.
Instinct is the world of the animals – everything is instinct. Even if sometimes you see indications of other things, it is your projection. For example, you can see love in animals – the mother looking after her kids very lovingly, caringly – and you can think that it is not just instinct, it is something higher, not just biological. But it is not higher, it is simply biological. The mother is doing it like a robot in the hands of nature. She is helpless – she has to do it. In many animals the father has no instinctive fatherliness; on the contrary, many will kill their own kids and eat them.
Instinct does not make you a man, it simply keeps you an animal, two-legged, but still you are an animal.
The second rung, intellect, gives you something which is higher than biology, chemistry, and animal nature. Intellect is also inborn, just as intuition is, just as instinct is. There is no way to increase your intelligence; all that can be done is to make your whole potential actual, which will look as if your intelligence has grown.
The reality is that the most intelligent person uses only fifteen percent of his potential; the normal, ordinary, common person uses only six to seven percent. Eighty-five percent of intelligence remains unused even in Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russell. That eighty-five percent can be made available and it will be a tremendous growth. You will think that certainly you have grown in intelligence, but you have simply recovered, reclaimed what was already yours.
We have found ways to teach intellect and to increase your power of memory. All the schools, colleges and universities – the whole system of education around the world is only doing one thing: sharpening your intellect. But there has arisen a problem which was not foreseen by the educationists: when your intelligence becomes a little powerful it starts interfering with your instinct. A competition, a struggle for power starts.
The intellect tries to dominate, and because it has logic on its side – reason, argument, a thousand and one proofs – it can manage, as far as your conscious mind is concerned, to convince you that the instinct is something evil. That’s why all the religions have been condemning instinct.
Intuition is like instinct because you cannot do anything about it.
It is part of your consciousness, just as instinct is part of your body. You cannot do anything about your instinct and you cannot do anything about your intuition. But just as you can allow your instincts to be fulfilled, you can allow and give total freedom to your intuition to be fulfilled. And you will be surprised at what kinds of powers you have been carrying within you.
Intuition can give you answers for ultimate questions – not verbally but existentially. You need not ask: “What is the truth?” Instinct won’t hear, it is deaf. Intellect will hear but it can only philosophize; it is blind, it can’t see. Intuition is a seer, it has eyes. It sees the truth – there is no question of thinking about it.
Instinct and intuition are both independent of you. Instinct is in the power of nature, of unconscious nature, and intuition is in the hands of the superconscious universe, the consciousness that surrounds the whole universe, the oceanic consciousness of which we are just small islands – or better, icebergs, because we can melt into it and become one with it.
In some ways intuition is exactly opposite to instinct.
Instinct always leads you to the other; its fulfillment is always dependent on something other than you.
Intuition leads you only to yourself.
Now for us it will be easy to understand this verse – when Krishna calls Arjuna O best of the Kuru dynasty, means Arjuna is person of intuition, because of his self-unconsciousness he thinks his instinct is his intuition, as right now he is result oriented and focus on others, Krishna immediately knew that right now Arjuna is acting from his instinct, so it will be from his animal nature. He reminds him of his Intuition, so that he can come out of all his philosophies. He can become intuitive instead of instinct. Both are independent of you – if you are self-unconscious then you will be instinct, other oriented, result oriented, and if you are self-conscious you will be intuitive, and leads you towards yourself – your subjectivity.
Tags: Ladder Of Consciousness
