The Lord advises his friend, Arjuna, to realise that he cannot fight his inborn tendencies of a warrior, and that he will perforce be propelled into fighting his foes, whether he likes it or not. Gurudev then gave a very befitting example of a monkey. He said, “No matter how hard you try to be a human being by wearing a suit and smoking a pipe. But the fact is that you can’t cease to be a monkey. You just can’t help that. You became a monkey as a result of your past karmas and desires. Since you are helpless in your behaviour, it is better to exhaust those Vasanas in the given field and then try the higher.”
We are obsessed with the idea of “I do” (ahamkar). So if you have a sense of doership and feel that “See, I did this, it would not have been possible without me” then you will get the result also. But if you have understood that you cannot be the doer, and that 200 lbs of flesh has no power of its own to move, then you surrender all actions to Him, then the doership becomes His. Explaining this he again gave an example: “The puppets before a curtain are working, talking, singing and fighting as though with life in them. Just go behind the curtain and see.” But so long as you don’t understand that, you will be bound helplessly by your nature. It is for you to understand that just as “puppets have no existence, no vitality, no emotion of their own; they are mere expressions of the will and the intention of the unseen hand behind them”, it is only then that your sense of doership can vanish, and “with that stinking bundle”, as he called the ego, vanish the results that would have accrued to you.
Let’s humbly surrender to that great power that vitalises all inert matter.
Prarthna Saran, President Chinmaya Mission Delhi.
