Lesson 4: Unitive Reasoning – Samkhya Yoga Chapter II: verses 1-16

 Lesson 4: Unitive Reasoning – Samkhya Yoga

Chapter II: verses 1-16

The Bhagavad Gita and its predecessors have been fostering

evolution in humans for several thousand years. It’s a most gradual

unfoldment, and we find ourselves in yet another period of

regression. Krishna urges us stand up for the positive steps toward

a peaceful, nurturing civilization that permit us to practice our

potential. Peeking ahead, my epilogue to chapter II, posted on the

website, expresses this nicely. It was meant to introduce a book on

the next chapters, which never came about. Here’s my favorite bit,

in the spirit of evolution. Krishna is speaking to Arjuna:

“Part of you, what I call the divine part, is desperate to express

some of the more complex abilities you possess, and if you

don’t bring them out they make you frustrated and depressed.

You really are a miraculously complicated creation of mine,

don’t you know? I always intended humans to do more than

scrabble for food or run swords through each other.

“What I want to teach you is how to access your full inner

being, because your real duty is to develop your unique talents,

to become what you truly are capable of as an independent

entity, instead of always conforming to a template laid down by

someone else. Your best features have been driven so far

underground you don’t even remember them yourself.

Reclaiming them is the real spiritual quest, and it’s the essence

of what I’ll be helping you to discover.”

Brad

I regret to tell you that I cannot do the Gita classes this year

too. I have been told I will be let go from my job soon and I am

spending most of my time with the baby and to prepare for

interviews. I hope I can land a job soon in these uncertain times,

especially as an immigrant here in the USA. Hope I can come back

again next year in better spirits. I hope Krishna gives me the

strength.

Scott:  Thanks for writing, Brad. Yes, you must put all your energy

into stabilizing your life, and caring for your dear daughter. I’m

sorry, but these are very troubled times. Stay safe, and very good

luck to you!

Bindu

I apologise for my delayed response to last week’s class. I had

taken a short break in Morocco as a temporary retreat from the

constant demands of both home and work. Like Arjuna, I often

find myself striving for perfection in my professional and personal

responsibilities. Yet when the weight of obligation becomes

overwhelming, I sometimes experience the desire to withdraw.

These brief periods of rest are not escapes from duty, but necessary

pauses that restore my capacity to engage fully with life.

Although I carried my laptop with me to continue my studies, I did

not engage with the coursework as I should have. I therefore wish

to reflect here on how my experience in Morocco became an

unexpected encounter with the Absolute and a practical lesson in

the unitive reasoning described in Chapter II of the Bhagavad Gita.

While in Agadir, my husband and I joined a guided tour to

Paradise Valley. The walk was described as a simple thirty-minute

trek requiring only basic footwear. However, upon arrival, the path

revealed itself to be a narrow mountain trail with steep cliffs,

slippery rocks, and no safety barriers. The environment was far

more demanding and dangerous than anticipated. At that moment,

I experienced intense fear and a deep sense of responsibility for

having placed my husband in such a situation.

Turning back was no longer possible. The group had moved ahead,

and the return route was equally treacherous. As someone who has

a fear of heights, I found myself overwhelmed. In response, I

began chanting “Om Namah Shivaya” with every step and asked

my husband to repeat the mantra silently. I walked not for my own

courage, but for his safety. I prayed not for my protection, but for

his.

On the return journey, the guide offered me a walking stick. I gave

it to my husband instead, believing his safety was more important

than my own, as I had been the one who led him into this situation.

When the trek finally ended, I stood still for a moment —

breathing, trembling, and grateful. I thanked God for guiding me

through the path. I am usually someone who freezes in moments of

fear, who retreats when confronted with danger. But on that day, I

walked.

That experience became my guru.

It taught me that before seeking beauty, we must seek awareness.

Before inviting others into our journey, we must understand the

path we are choosing. The unknown often carries hidden dangers,

and only presence of mind allows us to navigate them safely.

Experience, more than instruction, becomes the greatest teacher.

Parents guide us. Teachers instruct us. But experience transforms

us. In this sense, experience itself becomes a manifestation of the

Absolute.

Just as Arjuna stood on the battlefield wanting to withdraw from

his duty, life presents us with moments in which we are compelled

to face reality rather than flee from it. The Absolute does not

remove the battlefield; instead, it grants us the strength to stand

within it.

Each soul is tested differently. The presence of the Absolute

appears in many forms — sometimes as a guide, sometimes as a

stranger, and sometimes as an inner force that steadies us.

According to our karma, protection arrives when it is required.

I later received the following poem from a childhood friend. The

three of us were inseparable from primary school until Year 10,

when life took us on different paths. Living in London, I often felt

caught between two worlds — carrying both longing and

belonging within me. When I read the poem, it resonated deeply

with my own journey of identity, displacement, and reconciliation.

WHERE DAISIES MEET RED OXIDE

I dream of two cottages—

one English,

and one Indian.

An English one, because

I love the laces and frills,

the creepers and the daisies,

the quiet fireplace and patterned wall tiles,

the blue-and-white ceramics

and the tempting teapots

that whisper of slow afternoons.

An Indian one, because

I love the earthen pots

and the burnished brass vessels,

the red oxide floors and wooden windows,

the veranda that waits for conversations,

the open courtyard that holds the sky,

the Warli and the Madhubani,

the Mandala and the mirror art

catching light, memory and breath.

Can I have both

in one cottage?

A place

where the coloniser and the colonised

do not erase each other,

but exchange stories,

unlearn authority,

and quietly

defuse their identities.

I wrote to my friend Sahita in response:

“Carrying roots and wings is not easy. For a long time they pull in

opposite directions. Confusion is natural. Pain is natural. Longing

is natural. But healing comes when you stop choosing between

them and simply be where you are. It is about me — whether

Shaheen knows it or not. Thank you, da. A beautiful, deep-rooted

poem.”

Through reflection, I recognise that much of my learning has come

through struggle, failure, and painful transitions. My movement

from one cultural world to another felt like being placed on a

battlefield without preparation — required to fight in order to

survive, adapt, and grow. Yet it was yoga, in the sense Krishna

teaches, that enabled me to continue: disciplined action, grounded

awareness, and steady reason.

Yoga, in Chapter II, is not physical posture but the integration of

clarity, duty, and detachment. It is reason in action. It is learning to

face life as a unified whole rather than as fragmented opposites.

Through the walk in Paradise Valley, I experienced this directly.

The path did not change. The danger did not disappear. The fear

remained. What changed was my inner orientation. I stopped

resisting the moment and began to walk with awareness,

responsibility, and surrender.

Krishna teaches that suffering arises not from circumstances

themselves, but from attachment to how we believe life should

unfold. When I released expectation, I discovered an inner

steadiness that carried me forward. Whether described as God, the

Absolute, or inner strength, the experience revealed that I was not

alone.

Like Arjuna, I stood between two armies: one representing fear

and withdrawal, the other representing duty and responsibility. I

was not heroic; I was simply human. Yet I chose to walk.

The chapter teaches that the wise remain steady amid pleasure and

pain, gain and loss, heat and cold. I now understand this not as

emotional detachment, but as inner balance — a calm intelligence

that allows one to act without being ruled by fear.

That walk taught me that courage is not the absence of fear, but the

willingness to act in spite of it.

Thus, like Arjuna, I place myself at the feet of experience as my

guru. I do not claim wisdom; I claim learning. The battlefield of

life does not disappear, but my relationship to it continues to

evolve.

The Absolute does not remove the cliffs.

It teaches me how to walk upon them.

Love Bindu

Scott: Bindu, I think I warned the class (maybe I forgot) that

Krishna is a Trickster, and the more dedicated a person is to the

Gita and yoga philosophy, the more likely they are to be toyed

with. He only cares as much as the seeker. If someone doesn’t

care, he doesn’t, also. This is very early to see trickery come into

play. And, you made it! A frightening experience helps us break

through layers of conditioning, but we don’t normally invite it

ourselves. We imagine we do, but we don’t. It’s a trick we play on

ourselves sometimes, pretending. A Krishna trick is a blessing in

disguise. I see you have understood that quite well.

I too am afraid of heights. In order to become a firefighter, I

had to practice exposing myself to scary places, took up rock

climbing, and all through my career I had to battle with

acrophobia, but I managed. In emergencies, you do what you have

to do. Since my retirement, I’m slipping out of practice, but I still

consider it a success. And, I’m careful not to get up on the roof

very often. 

Shaheen’s poem touches on the dialectics that are the very

structure of yoga. Your response to her is in the same vein. Thank

you for sharing.

Vivek

Exercise 1

Call to mind an important teacher in your life, how you related to

them and what lasting changes they brought about in your mental

orientation. If you didn’t fully appreciate them at the time, how

might you treat them differently today?

Early in my career I worked with a boss who approached difficult

situations by asking, “what principles apply here”. This was a new

perspective for me. I had not explicitly asked that question earlier

and thought it offered a very useful way of looking at things to

figure out what to do

It was only over the years that I grew to appreciate the full power

of this approach as it grew roots and developed further:

 It creates a principled, even a moral basis to act, not just an expedient one

 It provides a basis for consistency in approaching similar decisions

 It helps explain the rationale to others. This is vital to lead others and

teams

 Over time it led me to think about a coherent framework and principles

beyond work situations, for life at large

 In turn that led me to pragmatic philosophies like Stoicism

Applying this approach is not simple. Difficult situations are

difficult because they have contending principles. Learning how to

weigh conflicting perspectives takes nuance, clarity and

pragmatism, not just one principle you can apply as a simple rule.

The effort is well worth it though. Over time you have calm and

conviction in situations, as well as a repeatable and consistent basis

to act

Exercise 2

Verses 11-16 present Krishna’s first teaching unit, beginning his

attempt to stabilize Arjuna’s mental state. In many ways he makes

shocking assertions with respect to our ordinary way of thinking.

Follow up any that bother you and try to discover why

Krishna makes several statements that we may have heard before,

even often. But they have not gone deep in us and are not how we

think and act every day

V11: The wise do not grieve for the dead or the living

We grieve for the dead. We grieve for the living...for our own

difficulties and of those we are attached to

V12: There was never a time when you and I did not exist or will

not exist

We think life is finite, limited in time. We live, we age and will die

V16: The unreal never exists, the real never ceases to exist

This is a truly mind-bending verse and the basis for the prior verses

Krishna is saying the reality we experience...multiplicity,

limitation and change...is not real, or at least not fundamental.

There is a fundamental reality. It is unchanging and eternal. It

includes all there is. It is one and limitless. That reality is us

This is totally at odds with the way we think and act. We believe

we are one small individual contending with a vast universe

outside us. That everything we experience is real. So, we identify

completely with the individual us, and experience the highs and

lows of the world with intensity and passion, with fear, with the

joy and grief that accompany every change

If we truly internalized this verse, we would treat all we experience

with dispassion, even as a play of the world to enjoy. What a truly

transformed state that would be

How do we begin that journey?

The Gita wants us to consider that all our experiences are transient,

hardly fundamental and lasting truths. As Krishna says in V14,

“sense experiences like heat and cold come and go, bear them with

titiksha”. Everything we experience changes and is insubstantial,

not fundamental, not real

Second, it points out that in every experience, what keeps changing

is the object of experience...the thing, place, person, circumstance.

What is invariant is the subject. That invariant subject is not the

individual body and mind we identify with...but the consciousness

behind them

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to begin to

dissociate with the world, body and mind, and begin to associate

with the consciousness. All else will follow

Scott: I like that you don’t just address the exercises, Vivek, but go

beyond them to show how they impact your awareness and acuity.

As in long-term benefits. This will be a welcome bonus for our

classmates.

Your second exercise is quite amusing, as well as trenchant.

In Vedanta, what lasts is real and what doesn’t is unreal. Curiously,

our in-person class tonight is on verse 53 of Narayana Guru’s

Atmopadesa Satakam, also addressing this topic of maya. Do you

know That Alone, Guru Nitya Chaitanya Yati’s masterwork, on

Atmo? Here he’s speaking about the belief that we must erase

maya to discover reality, which is both true and false:

Is it right to say this is only an illusion and there is no substance to

it? No, you cannot say that. This is what you are living, and if you

are living it, it has substance. It affects you. You cannot just

dismiss it from your mind as being of no consequence. You must

go back to the source. It is not far. It is right inside you, right

where your consciousness originates. Looking inside yourself you

can see that from out of unconsciousness, like little bubbles of

consciousness, awareness is coming to the surface. This awareness

is the illumination of a name, a form, a meaning. It brings

associated memories of the past, the present and even the future.

New dreams come, expectations come. You make designs in your

mind to act. Soon you find you are in the thick of action. There is

compulsion about it: you cannot put it off. You act.

If you watch all this, it’s like a fountain gushing up from a

great depth with tremendous force. You cannot plug it or stop it.

It’s a continuous flow. Narayana Guru says, “Know this to be a

sakti, a force.” When did it start? No one knows. Even before you

were born, someone else was undergoing the same kind of thing.

You yourself have come from that person or those people. Before

you were born, what is now in you was lying in someone else as a

seed. The desire of your father and your mother to come together

caused your appearance. The intertwining actions of millennia are

behind you. The history of ideas is within you. It’s a continuous

flow of great force, of which you are now a passing effect. This is

what the Guru calls adi bijam, the first seed of all this causation, of

this great energy.

So what should you do to get rid of this kind of intellect, this

kind of mind, that brings you to this terrible situation of duality? In

the previous verses we were told that everything finally resolves in

the still voice of aum. At the tail end of aum there comes a silence.

A...u...m.... It ends in silence. In that silence is everything and yet

nothing. Nothing is there because there are no names, no forms, no

meanings, no situations, no events, no pluralities. Yet that which

started out as ‘a’ and progressed through ‘u’ and ‘m’ culminated in

it. Thus, everything is there….

So how can you say it is all maya? You cannot just brush it

aside like that. At the transactional level it is a reality.

Gopica

In Grade 10, my tuition teacher in mathematics profoundly shaped

my competitive spirit and ethical perspective, though I couldn't

fully appreciate it then.

Looking back, I recognize a recurring pattern of confrontation with

teachers and mentors across various life stages; yet each instance

ultimately transformed into a profound blessing.

As i was reading the commentaries and the verses, felt emotional.

Tears rolled down. Those lasted for a while and question of how

do i stay connected permanently to my native intelligence comes

in. I was Awestruck with the metaphor of Bhisma and Drona. At

times I get confused when people question me was it not my duty

to follow it up closely being in certain role and they experience

more of detachment from my responsibility, mostly i am

confronted with my parenting style by my mother. Always a drama

triangle gets created whenever my daughter comes home and mom

is there with me. This time, I could see a clear invitation but I

responded with a smile. 

Reflecting after reading the verses I had been a person yielding to

life so far with not much of planning. I had always felt life had

been associating me with the people who contributed to my

transformation. Though there had been disappointments in

believing and investing time and effort. Those had been valuable

lessons to understand and move on. Felt naive about the sore spots.

It is helping me to connect with my discomforts and my rare

triggers.

Nataraja Guru's analogy on existence and non-existence is an eye

opener. Krishna's teaching to his disciple on how to make his own

decisions felt aligned with today's effective counsellor's role.

Lesson3 had brought me awareness to see the harmony in the

opposing elements. To decipher the gap rather taking sides in my

approach. To feel blessed with the existence gives me more

meaning and contributes to my acceptance. Felt, it had taken these

many years for me to become aware of the " Immortality is a state

of mind, not a bodily condition". Thank you! Scott for your

lessons.

Eagerly looking forward for transcendental liberation.

Scott: Serious confrontation with teachers followed by profound

appreciation is perfect preparation for a student of life, Gopica.

Arjuna’s trust of his teacher comes about slowly, as he asks well-

thought-out questions and sincerely ponders the answers. Krishna

doesn’t ask him to buy into any teaching until it makes sense to

him.

It takes 11 chapters for Arjuna to transform from thinking

Krishna is merely his chariot driver to realizing he is the

incarnation of Everything.

I don’t recall any previous student mentioning the

interpretation of Bhishma and Drona in verse 4—thank you,

Gopica. And now, Bailey also.

Responding with a smile is an excellent strategy for a “drama

triangle.” Nice.

Or course we’re all naïve until we’re not, so it’s not a fault,

unless we cling to our outmoded concepts. I think your idea that all

the people surrounding us are participants in our evolution is a

valuable one, helping us stay open and engaged in our

transformations. They truly are part of our consciousness. I’m glad

this class resonates with your understanding—it’s going to be fun,

and liberating.

Tears are an indication that the wisdom is hitting home, and

are welcome here. 

Saila

I am very sorry for the delay in sending my response, it is not that I

overlooked it, but I was struggling to get past the first hurdle -- 

Page 9, true surrender to move from the tendency to avoid, hide

from others the parts that are sore. Too much sensitivity is as bad

as too little. There is a paradox  where guarding oneself makes it

impossible to act impeccably. I became aware that there is a

tendency in me to hide the pain and to be aware that only the full

flood of absolutist wisdom can wash away the stains of the past

cloaked in shame, and at the same time only the proper attunement 

with the present can bring wisdom, so its a paradox. 

Just sometimes I can quieten the inner voice to listen and those

moments have shown me the power of listening.  When I read that

if one has desire then one has not quietened the mind, and that I

should be desireless, without baggage before going to the Guru. I

pondered on this extensively and felt hesitant to move on with the

studies until I have shed the baggage. I read almost all the chapter

but wondered whether it is right to run through this at such speed. I

felt I wanted to ponder and reset the knowing before moving

forward. 

Just an enquiry whether we can go through this work at a slower

pace, so that I can really extract and drink the juice from these

verses fully.

Scott: The paradox you describe, Saila, is important and will be

resolved with the yoga Krishna will soon be teaching. Shame is a

prime inhibitor of most people, and having no shame is an

ugly—and treacherous—state of mind. There’s a lot of room in

between those poles. Finding the happy medium, or median, is an

excellent starting place.

Listening is a powerful and underutilized potential of human

beings, and Arjuna’s careful and considerate listening to Krishna is

an implied teaching of the Gita. Jesus said it out loud, repeating the

Old Testament line: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Good

listening leads to incisive hearing.

Saila, you read four lessons worth of commentary, and then

beg that we go slower. I like your eagerness, but we are going

slower already. Hold your horses! Two years is about right for an

introduction to this magnificent philosophy. I have been intimate

with the Gita since 1970—over 55 years, and it’s still opening

doors for me. And yes, I’ve been eager all along.

It’s a fine idea, if you have the time, to read a whole chapter,

but then circle back to the first lesson on it. Keep in mind you are

assimilating more than you realize, and a second, third or fourth

reading will bring out what your mind has already picked up and is

busy processing while you aren’t looking. So, be confident. Great

vistas are opening up, and you have a front row seat.

Bailey

     Scott’s point that Arjuna’s throwing down of his bow at the end

of Chapter I deserves our respect as a refusal based on honest

principle rather than as a gesture of incoherent emotion strikes me

as a good one, and seems to speak to my own sense of dilemma,

both when in the aftermath of the Kent State shooting and the

Cambodia invasion I burned my draft card, and today when I

wonder what I can and should do as Donald Trump uses the

powers of the American presidency to advance his own wealth and

power and make the world safer for the despoilers of our

planet.  Back then I applied for status as a conscientious objector,

and my luck was that my draft board forgot about me (why? no

doubt I’ll never know) until I turned 26 and it no longer

mattered.  Today I can give money and write letters, and have done

so (should I be doing more?), and remain loyal to the Lady Clio

while pursuing, as best I can, the path of wisdom recommended to

me by Nataraja Guru.  In company with others, such as students of

the Gita.

     Arjuna’s dilemma, Scott also points out, is grounded in his

distress at fighting not only his kinfolk (in the larger scheme of

things all human beings, from some viewpoints all sentient

beings), but specifically his own teachers Bhisma and

Drona.  Bhisma is presented as the top commander of the Kuru

army (Bk I, v 10-11), representing, Scott says, the  “highest

achievement of the old order, the religious meritocracy featuring

celibacy and purity”.  The top master of disinterested technology,

would it be fair to say?   Drona seems to be an even more

significant figure as top strategist of the Kuru “old order”, the

King’s close advisor, the smartest one “who has cast his lot with

the oppressors” (commentary v. 7).  Superior military power is not

by itself “sufficient” to crush all opposition and establish long-term

domination (call it winning the horizontal power game) – or else

the British would have defeated the American Patriots in 1777-78

(see Ken Burns excellent series on the American Revolution) or

the Germans would have founded a durable “New Order” in

Europe in 1940.   Winning the “hearts and minds” matters even

more, as American decision-makers failed to truly understand in

Vietnam.  For the Nazis and the Japanese militarists of the 1940s

too the hearts and minds of “lesser breeds” were beneath contempt

(their bodies could be used and discarded); the teaching of History

here seems to me that, however vital the primary role of American

military and economic resources, the ultimate defeat of those Axis

“bad guys” also had a lot to do with  the fierce defense of dearly-

held values (withstanding the bombing of Britain, the Resistance in

France and elsewhere in Europe, insurgencies in China, the

Philippines and elsewhere in Asia – I am tempted to add the loyal

service of the Army of India despite certain attempts use the war to

undermine the Raj).  Today Trump, like Putin, like Netanyahu, is

playing the military card for all it’s worth  -- is that going to

reinforce or undercut his hold on the electorate which handed him

the levers of power in 2024?  Arjuna, where are you most needed

today?

       The Gita’s Arjuna very properly –as Scott emphasizes—turns

to Krishna, whose slight smile (v. 10) signals readiness to accept

the “mutual adoption” of Guru and disciple.  The teaching begins

with Samkaya, that is the traditional philosophy which takes

Reason as its point of departure.  Arjuna’s despair, his “I will not

fight” of verse 9 is called  by Krishna “unreasonable” in verse 11,

and he proceeds through verse 16 to explain why.  My

understanding of these verses is much enhanced, this time around,

by a book I am currently reading together with my wife

Christine: La Traversée vers l’Autre Rive  (Crossing to the Other

Bank).  Christine’s guru Arnaud Desjardins epitomizes the

teachings of his guru (the Bengali Vedantin Swami Prajanapad,

who died in 1974) for a group of spiritual seekers in Mexico

(2007).  After each of Arnaud’s presentations, questions are

invited, and answered either by him or his wife Veronique, who is

ow recognized as a qualified teacher herself.  This provides an

interesting and useful balance.  The seekers who pose the questions

may not be despairing warriors, but all resemble Arjuna in that

they are struggling with hard issues – a woman whose adult

daughter recently killed herself, another whose daughter was a

victim of incest –how can she pardon the perpetrator as her

Catholic teaching seems to command, a man subject to fits of rage

at injustices he sees going on... Arnaud’s and Veronique’s

responses, like Krishna’s, stress the origin of one’s sense of

suffering in an emotional identification with unreality.  Surrender

to emotion is, Arnaud stresses, the fundamental error.  In his

comments on verse 11 Scott compares Krishna’s teaching on the

unreasonable nature of Arjuna’s emotion-driven decision to lay

down his bow to the philosophy of the ancient Stoics. Of the

principal philosophic schools they were the one which

emphasized  neutrality.  Instead of seeing suffering from a neutral

standpoint, as the inevitable outcome of a very great complexity of

causes Arjuna identifies himself as the guilty doer of bad deeds,

were he to kill his kinsmen and mentors.  NO! says Krishna,

shockingly: “What is unreal cannot have being, and non-being

cannot be real.”  Driven by emotion, Arnaud would say, you take

your mental projection of Bhisma and Drona for the real thing.  Let

us admit that Arjuna’s emotion is generous, noble, deriving from

the best of intentions rather than rooted in fear, greed, desire for

glory, revengeful, even – it is STILL GROUNDED IN EMOTION,

THUS IN ILLUSION, IN MISIDENTICATION OF NON-SELF

WITH SELF.  Thus Reason, properly understood, explained by the

Guru Krishna, is the start of the path away from illusion.

     Yes, but isn’t that the Kuru army blasting its conches, beating

its drums, about to come charging the Pandavas with its

weapons?  Isn’t Donald Trump doing much harm, building his

power to do even more harm, in these United States and the wider

world?  That is not, surely, only my illusion.  If  only you could

grasp the whole picture, Arnaud and Veronique, might tell me, you

would understand why the reality of this moment cannot be

otherwise than it is IN THIS MOMENT.  You can still act; indeed

your dharma obliges you to act.  Perhaps.  The first commandment

for you, though, is ONLY UNDERSTAND.  Long ago, in Ooty, I

heard Nataraja Guru pronounce those words.  May I persevere in

heeding them.

Scott: I’m happy to see you capitalize History, Bailey, as it surely

has deity status. Your observations of the parallelism of current

events with the Gita makes fantastic reading.

Since Starlink collects the votes out of sight and out of mind,

voting is more obsolete than ever, but the hearts and minds still

matter. Unfortunately, their manipulation can be done collectively

with the internet, so it’s more crucial than ever to adhere to truth in

a hurricane of lies. I use the word crucial intentionally, on your

behalf.

We may need Krishna, more than Arjuna. In last week’s in-

person class, we got into the world-trashing of the Trump-Putin

alliance, and your comments reminded me of this part of the Class

Notes:

Deb cited Timothy Snyder saying in a tyranny, like we are in

now, no individual can solve the whole problem. So, you find

your area where you can do what you love and are good at it,

and you do that, as your contribution to the fight against

oppression. You don’t throw up your hands and say, I can’t do

anything. You activate your area of expertise.

Pravin, after listening to some of our frustrations, realized

why there are so many demons in all the myths. And they have

to be killed by a divine power. It’s a typical framing of many

myths. You have a demon who gets powerful, and it’s beyond

control, and it starts to destroy the world, and then the divine

has to incarnate. That’s even mentioned in the Gita.

It’s not just ignorance alone, there’s more of a

compulsiveness that blinds even the wisest people to become

unconscious and sleepy. There’s a story about Vishnu, the God

of Gods, and he’s actually sleeping. He’s been in a deep sleep,

so the demons come out and attack the world. It’s a fascinating

story where Maya is causing the sleep.

There are so many, many ways for the divine to destroy the

different demons!

Pravin has observed that every time there’s something wrong

in the world, if you wait a while some correction will happen.

And then, some even bigger things go wrong, and some other

correction happens, and it goes on. His takeaway is that there’s

some sort of limitation to the wrong, and we can’t see it

because we are limited beings.

As to reason, I just added this bit for the whole class in for the

lesson 6 responses:

Guru Nitya makes this point about unitive reasoning, in That

Alone:

What is the faculty with which you contemplate, or, as the

phenomenologists say, reflect? By the way, I agree with this

term because you are most often thinking with your known

tools of reasoning. You have to first suspend the mechanism of

reasoning with ordinary logic. Then you allow the given—what

is not conscious in deep sleep as well as what is conscious in

the wakeful—both to prevail and be juxtaposed. You are

therefore reflecting rather than manipulating.

The problem is one of getting over relativity. From the most

unknown to the most known, there are shades of ignorance or

shades of knowledge. Relative to something else you know this

well or less well. To give this up and adopt an absolutist

attitude is our main challenge.

I still maintain that feelings and emotions are complex

communications from our own “unknown territory,” and meant to

be heeded. Since they can run away with our good sense, we need

to contemplate them in a neutral manner. Arjuna’s next exhortation

to fight is against excessive, negative emotions. Nataraja Guru

assures us we aren’t meant to battle all, only the negative ones.

From chapter III:

37) Krishna said:

Such is desire, such is anger, born out of the modality called

rajas, all-devouring, all-vitiating; know this to be the enemy here.

40) This is said to be lodged in the senses, mind and reason. By

means of these, this (desire) bewilders the embodied one by veiling

his wisdom.

43) Thus knowing That to be beyond reason, stabilizing the self

by the Self, kill that enemy in the form of desire, so difficult to

overcome.

Remember, Samkhya is going to be upgraded to Yoga at the midway point of chapter II.