Lessons on the Upanishads:18 - Swami Krishnananda.

 

Swami Chinmayananda:

Arjuna is Me (individuality/ego) in the body. And who is the charioteer? Krishna, the intelligence, the pure intelligence and he has pulled the reins that there are the four horses. They can only jump about, but they cannot move an inch forward. With one han, Shri Krishna pulls it and thuds back and talks to the confused individuality in the world. Your intellect also through self-control, your higher intellect can guide you inside. Geeta is to be heard from within. Not outside. So, the horses are sense organs. The reins are the mind. Driver is intellect. The chariot is body, and you are the master. 

For example: I am living in a Himalayan peak, African jungle, and you are offering me birthday present, a car. What am I to do with the car? I will have to carry it in my head, to my ashram and there put it up on a pedestal. That is all that I can do because there are no roads. A vehicle can go only when there are roads on which the horses can trot, the wheels can move. And where are the roads? Vishayan, the sense objects. The sense objects are the road, the sense organs are the horses, the rein is the mind, the charioteer, the driver is the clean intellect, pure intellect - Krishna. And I, the individuality is in it.

#bhagvadgita #chariot #krishnarjunayudham #bhagwatgita #gitagyan 
[Bhagavad Gita, Shri Krishna, Sanatana Dharma, Hindu]

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Friday 28, November 2025, 19:00.
Books
Upanishads
Lessons on the Upanishads: 3.4.
Chapter 3: Preparation for Upanishadic Study -4.
Post-18.

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When you do a work, you must put a question to yourself: “What is the reason behind engaging in that work? Is it because there is some extraneous or ulterior motive behind that work? Or is it done for mere self-purification? You must distinguish between work done as a job and work done as a duty. A duty may not apparently bring you a material benefit at the very outset, but it will bring you an invisible benefit. That is why duty is adored so much everywhere and people say you must do your duty. If duty is not so very important, but a remunerative job is the only thing that is important, then insistence on duty would be out of point.

Everybody says duty must be done; but, what is duty? Work done as a duty alone can purify; no other work can purify the self. It is not any kind of labour that can be regarded as karma yoga. So, what is this duty that we are talking of which is going to chasten the personality of the individual, and purify it? Briefly it can be called unselfish action. It is a work that you do for the benefit that may accrue to a larger dimension of reality, and not merely to the localised entity called your own individual self.

When you serve people, you are to always bear in mind the reason why this service is done at all. Mostly, the reason is buried underneath. You have social reasons, political reasons, economic reasons and family considerations when you do any work in the form of service of people. But service which is spiritually oriented is not a social work or a political activity, nor is it connected even with family maintenance. It is actually a service done to your own self.

How is that so? You may put a question: In what way is the service of people, for instance, a service to you own self? Remember the few words that I spoke a little while ago, that one's essential being is also the essential being of everybody else. So the people that you see outside, even the world of space-time, is a wider dimension of the selfhood which is your own pure subjectivity. This is a subject that is a little difficult to understand, and is to be listened to with great caution and care. The service that you render to others—even to a dog, let alone human beings, even feeding manure to a tree for its sustenance or taking care of anything whatsoever —is not to be done with any kind of ulterior motive, much less even the consideration that it is something outside you.

Work becomes purely a spiritual form of worship only when the character of selfhood is introduced into the area of this performance of work and into the location of the direction towards which your work is motivated. You are serving your own self when you serve humanity. People sometimes glibly say, “Worship of man is worship of God.” It is just a manner of speaking, without understanding what they mean. How does man become God? You know very well that no man can be equal to God. So how do you say that service of man is equal to service of God?

Therefore, merely talking in a social sense does not bring much meaning. It has a significance that is deeper than the social cloak that it bears—namely, the essential being of each person is present in every other person also. So when you love your neighbor as yourself, you love that person not because that person is your neighbor in the sense of social nearness, but because there is a nearness which is spiritual. The person is near to you as a spiritual entity, as part of the same self that is you, rather than a nearness that is measurable by a distance of yards or kilometres.

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Continues

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