Basic Question – In Gita Verse 5.7 One who works in devotion, who is a pure soul, and who controls his mind and senses is dear to everyone, and everyone is dear to him. Though always working, such a man is never entangled.
Krishna tells Arjuna the person who has surrendered himself to the whole, is spontaneous, compassionate. Everyone loves him and he loves everyone. Such a person never gets attached.
What does Krishna mean by – a pure soul, and who controls his mind and senses: He talks about non-attachment, which is our basic nature. We are born with it.
In the first place try to understand the meaning of the word anasakti or non-attachment. It is unfortunately one of the most misunderstood words. Non-attachment is generally taken to mean aversion, but it is not aversion. Aversion is a kind of attachment – the opposite of attachment.
Someone is attached to sex and someone else is attached to its opposite – brahmacharya or celibacy. Someone is attached to wealth; he is running after wealth, and someone else is attached to renunciation of wealth; he is running away from wealth. One person is obsessed with the idea of looking handsome; another person is obsessed with the idea of looking ugly. But those who are averse to sex, money or good looks appear to be non-attached because their attachments are negative.
Attachment has two faces, positive and negative. You can fancy a thing so much that you madly run after it, you cling to it – this is positive attachment. And you can be so much; repelled by a thing that you want to escape it, to run away from it; then it is a negative attachment. Negative attachment is as much attachment as positive attachment.
Non-attachment is altogether different; it is freedom from both the positive and the negative kinds of attachment. Non-attachment means one is neither attached to something nor averse to it. Non- attachment is transcendence of both attachment and aversion.
In the world of spiritualism there are many words like non-attachment, which have been badly distorted and misconstrued. Veetrag is one such word which means transcendence of attachment, but it has become synonymous with aversion. When someone goes beyond both attachment and aversion, he achieves the state of veetrag or transcendence. This word veetrag belongs to the tradition of Mahavira, while anasakti belongs to the tradition of Krishna, and they are synonymous.
But there is a difference in the approach of the two.
While Mahavira attains to the state of veetrag by renouncing both attachment and aversion, Krishna attains to the state of anasakti by accepting both positive and negative attachments. And these are the only possible ways. While their ends remain the same, their means are different. While Mahavira insists on renunciation of attachment, Krishna emphasizes its acceptance. So in a deeper sense veetrag is negative and anasakti is positive.
A non-attached mind, according to Krishna, is one who accepts everything unconditionally. The interesting thing is that if you accept something totally it does not leave a mark, a scar on your mind; your mind remains unscathed and undisturbed. But when you cling strongly to a thing it leaves a mark on your mind. And when you are strongly averse to something you detest and deny it, then also it leaves a mark on your mind.
But when you neither cling to a thing nor run away from it, when you become receptive to everything – good or bad, beautiful or ugly, pleasant or painful – when you become like a mirror reflecting everything that comes before it, then your mind remains unscathed and unmarked. And such a mind is a non-attached mind; it is established in non-attachment.
According to Krishna, non-attachment is embedded in the very nature of a human being, in his very being. Non-attachment is our basic nature, our original face. So the real question is how one deviates from his nature. We don’t have to practice non attachment, we don’t have to do something to come to it. We have only to know how we have gone astray from our nature. This is our basic question.
Tags: Basic Question
