Chapter 2, Verse 4
Arjuna says,
"Bheeshma and Drona are noble and ancient,
Worthy of the deepest reverence.
How can I greet them
With arrows in battle?”
Sri Aurobindo:
"Arjuna is the man of action, the fighter and not the thinker. In the Gita he typifies the human soul brought face to face with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state. The crisis which he undergoes is an all-embracing inner bankruptcy which he expresses when he says that his whole conscious being, not his thoughts alone, but his heart and everything else, are utterly bewildered and can find nowhere the Dharma, nowhere any valid law of action. 'Give me,' Arjuna practically asks Krishna, 'that which I have lost, a true law, a clear rule of action, a path by which I can again confidently walk.' He does not ask for the secret of life, the meaning and purpose of it all, but for a Dharma. Yet it is precisely this secret for which he does not ask to which the Teacher intends to lead his student; for he will teach him to give up all rules except the one broad and vast Dharma [the divine law by which the Godward effort of humanity is kept from decisively regressing and instead is conclusively carried forward in spite of the natural order of action and reaction, the rhythm of advance and relapse by which nature proceeds] of living consciously in the divine and acting from that consciousness."
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3 comments:
I love Krishna.
Arjuna wonders: how can it be my duty to participate in this mass slaughter of my beloved teachers and relatives? Reasonable points of view can be argued for both sides. There is no absolute right or wrong answer once and for all time; situations change constantly and participants in difficult situations choose rightly sometimes not by “reasoning it out” but by getting in touch with that still, quiet place inside which intuitively encourages the optimum path in a given situation. For one person in a certain situation, the optimum path may point in one direction, whereas for another it may not. Rules are guidelines and only helpful up to a certain point.
"Jesus might be called a ‘free spirit.’ He cares not a jot for anything that is established: the word killeth, everything fixed killeth. Experience, ‘life’ as he alone knows it, is, according to him, opposed to every kind of word, formula, law and dogma. He speaks only of innermost things: ‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’ is his expression for the innermost thing. Everything else, the whole of language even, has only the value of a sign, of a simile for him. If I understand anything about this great symbolist, it is this that he regarded only inner facts as ‘truths' and that he understood the rest, everything temporal, material, and historical, only as opportunities for parables."
Friedrich Nietzsche
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