Hope, Knowledge And Karma – In Gita Verse 9.13 O son of Pṛthā, those who are not deluded, the great souls, are under the protection of the divine nature. They are fully engaged in devotional service because they know Me as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, original and inexhaustible.
Krishna is talking regarding our three nature where we are lost – Hope, Knowledge and Karma. Person who not only understood but also out of realisation dropped or rightly said transcended all these three are great souls.
We have our own experience that all the hopes are nothing but a mirage. Why?
Because all hopes are false. To hope is to be in the false. So it is not a question of creating false hopes: whatsoever you can hope will be false. Hope comes out of your falsity of being. If you are real there is no need for any hope. Then you never think about the future, about what is going to happen. You are so real, so authentic that the future disappears.
When you are unreal then the future becomes very significant, then you live in the future. Then your reality is not here and now, your reality is somewhere in dreams, and you make those dreams look real because through those dreams you gain your reality. As you are, you are unreal. That’s why so much hoping goes on. All hopes are false – you are real, and Krishna’s whole effort is how to throw you to yourself.
The ego is all false hopes combined together. Ego is not a reality, it is the collectivity of all your dreams, of all that is unreal, of all that is false. The ego cannot exist in the present. Look at this phenomenon. The ego always exists either in the past or in the future, never here and now – never, never. That is impossible. Whenever you think of the past, the ego comes, the I comes. Whenever you think of the future, then I come. But when you are here, not thinking of the past and future, where is your I? Sitting under a tree, not thinking of the past and future, just being there, where are you? Where is the I? You cannot feel it. It is not there. The ego has never existed in the present. Past is no more, the future is yet to be. Both are not. Past has disappeared, the future has not yet appeared. Both are not. Only the present is and in the present nothing like the ego is ever found.
So when Krishna says drop the ego, what does he mean? He is not giving you a new hope, he is taking all your hopes away. And that is the difficulty – because you live through hope, so you feel that if all hopes are taken away you will be dead. Then the question will arise: Why live? For what? Why move from one moment to another? For what? The goal has disappeared with the disappearance of hope. So why go on and on if there is nowhere to reach? You cannot live without hope. That’s why it is so difficult to drop the ego. Hope has become synonymous with life.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 3.40, blog I wrote – knowledge only gives you a feeling of understanding without giving you real understanding. Also how we have lost; in a knowledge. Now understand the difference between Knowledge and Wisdom.
Knowledge satisfies the ego; wisdom destroys the ego completely; hence people seek knowledge. It is very rare to find a seeker who is not interested in knowledge but is interested in, committed to, wisdom. Knowledge means theories about truth; wisdom means truth itself. Knowledge means secondhand; wisdom means firsthand.
Knowledge means belief: others say and you believe. And all beliefs are false! No belief is ever true. Even if you believe in the word of a buddha, the moment you believe it is turned into a lie.
Truth cannot be believed; either you know or you don’t know. If you know, there is no question of belief; if you don’t know, there is again no question of belief. If you know, you know; if you don’t know, you don’t know. Belief is a projection of the tricky mind – it gives you the feeling of knowing, without knowing.
Now the third we are lost in Karma. What is the law of karma?
It is not in fact a law, because there is nobody behind it as a lawgiver. On the contrary, it is intrinsic to existence itself. It is the very nature of life: whatsoever you sow, you reap. But it is complex, it is not so simple, it is not so obvious.
The law of karma is not some philosophy, some abstraction. It is simply a theory which explains something true inside your being. The net result: either we respect ourselves, or we despise and feel contemptible, worthless and unlovable.
Every moment, you are creating yourself; either a grace will arise in your being or a disgrace: this is the law of karma. Nobody can avoid it. Nobody should try to cheat on karma, because that is not possible. Watch… and once you understand it things start changing. Once you know the inevitability of it you will be a totally different person.
Krishna is saying from all our three natures we need to transcend. It is given to us as crude form unless we purify all this then we can engage in devotional service. If you look around you will find in the universe everything is given to us in the crude form. Whether it is Oil, Gold, Diamond, Oxygen – which has got on the air only 16%, we know that we need to purify all this for our utility purpose. Same with Hope, Knowledge and Karma, unless we transcend all then only we can engage in devotional service.
Tags: Hope Knowledge And Karma
