World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 73

practiced in the midst of life through loss of attachment to the fruit of one's action and the sense of the doer. This is the message of karma yoga in the Gita and the Isha Upanishad paves the ground for this teaching through its concise pregnant injunction. Sri Ramakrishna reduced the teaching of the Gita to the sense emerging from its repetition. The term "Gita" repeated strikes the ear as "tagi," a sound-form close enough to tyagi to mean this kind of inner renunciation. In the Isha, the same inner renunciation in action is enjoined as the condition for true enjoyment, but here the way to this renunciation is not primarily the way of works but the way of knowledge - the inner renunciation arises from the sustained contemplation of the idea that all is the habitation of the lord, whatever is individual universe of movement in the universal movement. The contemplation of this divine inhabitation within us and within all things, in their (static) being and in their (dynamic) becoming helps to dissolve personal desire and with it, the sense of doership and self-importance. This becomes the basis for the pure enjoyment of purusha, ishwara, the lord within us enjoying the works of prakriti or nature in and around us.
VII
The second half of the second line, once again in a seemingly disconnected fashion, now lays further emphasis on the renunciation of desire by drawing attention to its nature and connecting this with the first line, our central contemplation. In its simple statement, it is an injunction against greed : "Lust not after any man's possession." This seems to be in the nature of a moral commandment, a teaching for social ethics, which deviates significantly from the darshanic and yogic character of the first line and the first half of the second line respectively. But this "do not covet" seen more deeply in the light of what precedes it, yields for us a journey, a subtilisation from the moral to the yogic, a yoga of the loss of desire. In this sentence we are given an insight into human desire. In the practice of reduction of one's desiring, comes a profounder remembrance of our central contemplation: "All this is for the habitation by the Lord." No "possession" belongs to anyone but the Lord. In identity with the Lord - all is ours. Outside that identity - nothing is ours, we have no right to anything. What precedes this line rings immediately in our mind: "By that renounced thou shouldst enjoy." The state of desiring is absent from the lord, who is self-fulfilled and to whom all is his self-formulation, for his inhabitation. Thus to have desire is to be separate from the lord, a condition to be renounced.
In this fragmentation of Being in which we find ourselves, where consciousness arises as if by accident from the appearance of Inconscience, the Spirit, Lord, Isha, has plunged or involved himself, and awakens only gradually through the play of soul and nature. The secret of the divine will is at first hidden in an appearance of Inconscience, as in the electron. Uncon
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