Nothing goes waste -2 : Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha

04/10/2018

Play Of Opposites :-

We normally work according to two forces — preference and prejudice, attraction and repulsion; love and hate, acceptance and rejection — and these are called dwandwas or play of opposites. The world is a collection of opposites; this includes physical things and mental ideas and concepts, intellectual assessments, man and woman, day and night, sin and virtue, today and tomorrow — all these are dwandwas.

Krishna says the entire world being dwandwa-ridden, one should avoid the path of dwandwa and follow nirdwandwa, or transcend both good and bad, virtue and vice. According to the Bhagavad Gita (2:56), a man who is able to lead his intelligence on the lines of nirdwandwata, and transcend duality, will find virtue to be redundant and vices to be irrelevant. He will be able to neutralise, harmonise and oppose the effects of all karma. He will do so just as we learn swimming. You can learn to swim in deep waters only.

The drowning power of water is not removed, but by holding your head above and flapping your hands and feet, you remain afloat — neutralising and harmonising the so-called drowning power of water. This is how you can flow through the dwandwa-ridden world. There is no annihilation of opposites, only a transcending of opposites; one should not be affected by them; we should remain afloat.

There is great misunderstanding about what the Gita says on the results of karma. In the objective world, an action and its result are inseparable, just like a girl who becomes pregnant is bound to deliver a child after the completion of a healthy pregnancy. The foetus that is fully grown in the womb will want to come out, and the womb too will want to eject it; both will happen simultaneously.

However, the Gita does not dwell on the objective sense of any action. It is concerned with the subjective result which is thus explained: all the actions you perform can have either of the three results — one that is desired, the undesirable or a mix of both. All these refer to the subjective mind and are meant to be avoided.

When you do something well, it produces desired results and there is nothing exceptional about it. No result is actually adverse either.

To be continued ..