Vanity thought #948. Abandon the variety

The concluding Bhagavad Gītā verse, sarva-dharmān parityajya, starts with “Abandon all varieties of religion and just surrender unto Me.” In the context of previous chapters Śrila Prabhupāda explains that by varieties of religion Kṛṣṇa means all the things He’s covered before, the list is long but certainly incomplete: “..knowledge of the Supreme Brahman, knowledge of the Supersoul, knowledge of the different types of orders and statuses of social life, knowledge of the renounced order of life, knowledge of nonattachment, sense and mind control, meditation, etc.” (BG 18.66). I would like to talk about this “variety” a bit more.

Playing with semantics here – translation says “all varieties” so it’s possible to find “a variety” that is not on Prabhupāda’s list and add it here. I want to go a bit further and talk about “the variety”, as in “that whole thing that appears as variety”. I can’t claim that this is what Kṛṣṇa meant in this verse but this proposition is based on other verses from the scriptures, one of them being spoken by Kṛṣṇa Himself, so it’s a legitimate extension of sarva-dharmān parityajya verse and does not contradict it in any way.

Kṛṣṇa was speaking to Arjuna to encourage Him to take a specific course of action in specific circumstances. If we had a different set of circumstances then the message would have been modified. One might object that Bhagavad Gītā was spoken for the benefit of the whole humanity and so its proclamations are universal but to that I’d reply that it relates to the whole humanity because we all get into the same kind of difficulty as Arjuna all the time, our circumstances might look different but they really aren’t, it’s just old wine in a new bottle. All our problems have been had before by millions and millions of people and this particular one, “what course of action to take”, is practically the same dilemma day after day, week after week, month after month and so on. “Forget all other obligations, surrender and follow me”, Kṛṣṇa said, it works for all of us all the time and is very useful for everyday choices.

It doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t look at a bigger picture here and see this verse in perspective.

Bigger picture is that variety does not exist.

Variety is an illusion, a puff of magician’s smoke, a trick that puts us under spell. It’s not there. There’s no variety. That’s why I’m saying abandon *the* variety – when we see things differentiated from each other we are in māyā.

Look at this verse, spoken by Mārkaṇḍeya Ṛṣi (SB 12.9.6):

O lotus-eyed Lord, O crest jewel of renowned personalities, although I am satisfied simply by seeing You, I do wish to see Your illusory potency, by whose influence the entire world, together with its ruling demigods, considers reality to be materially variegated.

This is probably the best verse in support of this view of “variety” but look at the one where Kṛṣṇa Himself speaks of the same illusion (SB 11.10.32):

As long as the living entity thinks that the modes of material nature have separate existences, he will be obliged to take birth in many different forms and will experience varieties of material existence. Therefore, the living entity remains completely dependent on fruitive activities under the modes of nature.

Here’s Śukadeva Gosvāmī’s take on this (SB 12.4.25):

The three states of intelligence are called waking consciousness, sleep and deep sleep. But, my dear King, the variegated experiences created for the pure living entity by these different states are nothing more than illusion.

Here’s what Pṛthu Mahārajā said, too (SB 4.22.29):

Only because of different causes does a person see a difference between himself and others, just as one sees the reflection of a body appearing differently manifested on water, on oil or in a mirror.

“Because of different causes” here refers to the previous verse: “When the soul exists for sense gratification, he creates different desires, and for that reason he becomes subjected to designations.”

It would appear that it’s us, the conditioned living entities, who are the cause of the illusion of variety, it’s created for our own bewilderment because we like it that way. This is not a complete picture, though, because while we might want to see magician’s trick it’s the magician himself who does it, and among many verses describing how exactly Kṛṣṇa pulls it off I’ll cite this one, spoken by the Serpent Kāliya (SB 10.16.57):

O supreme creator, it is You who generate this universe, composed of the variegated arrangement of the material modes, and in the process You manifest various kinds of personalities and species, varieties of sensory and physical strength, and varieties of mothers and fathers with variegated mentalities and forms.

So, there’s no variety of existence, there’s just us and Lord’s illusory potency. Everything we see in this world as variegated reality actually isn’t. What we see is only one energy, we don’t see multitude of spirit souls covered by it nor do we see the Lord directing it, and that’s why Mārkandeya Ṛṣi asked Their Lords Nara-Nārāyana to show how this illusion works.

The implications of this are very far reaching. That woman in your house that is called “wife” does not exist, these little people called “children” do not exist. There’s no keyboard to lay my fingers on and the clear distinction between your eyes and the monitor is not there.

When you see two women in fits of jealousy trying to outdo each other – there aren’t two women there, it’s only ONE energy that appears variegated, in this case split into two. When two men propose two different ways to achieve some goal, there arenn’t two men and there aren’t two ways, it’s just ONE energy that appears to act in different ways.

When you see a mosquito landing on your hand in a clear act of aggression – there’s no mosquito and there’s no hand, they appear as separate objects only due to the illusion.

There’s only ONE energy and ONE force acting in complete agreement with itself. When we see two competing ideas – there aren’t any, it’s just illusory manifestation of reality within the same force.

Why is it so? For one thing, because everything here is connected through cause and effect and nothing exists independently. We can always draw a quick connection between two however far out ideas, a common point they originally diverged from. With seven billion people on the planet we are only six degrees of separation between each and every one of us. Don’t quote me on that, it’s probably just an average – I know someone who knows someone who, after six steps like this, knows everyone else on the planet. I don’t know if seeing someone on TV counts – like you see Chinese Premier and it counts as your gateway to the entire China.

This interconnectedness of everything we see in this world is another way to seeing everything as one and we can observe it with our own eyes and analyze with our own intelligence. If things are really connected and effects do not exists without causes, and causes do not exist without effects – than it’s really just one big thing engaging with itself. This is the thing that I called “the variety”.

Originally the entire material energy, mahat-tattva, is unvariegated but then, due to Lord’s intervention, things start to get moving, yet the energy is still one and the Lord is still one, and we are still there. Among these three – the Lord, us, and mahat-tattva, the first two are eternal and unchanging and it’s only mahat-tattva that undergoes transformations and becomes “the variety”.

It is probably impossible for us to see the world this way on our own but by Kṛṣṇa’s grace we WILL eventually see phantasmagoria of material manifestations as one big trick, not as actual variety of phenomena. Sooner or later this time should come and I see nothing wrong with trying to understand this now and certainly there’s nothing wrong with trying to behave according to this truth.

That’s where lies the connection with sarva-dharmān-parityjya verse – we should behave as if nothing in this world is of any importance but Kṛṣṇa’s orders. Kṛṣṇa says abandon all varieties of religion but we know that dharma means so much more, there’s no adequate English word to fully convey all its meanings. In that particular context Śrila Prabhupāda translated it as religion and we would assume he’s talking about Christianity and Islam but he isn’t, look at the list at the top of this post again – it’s not about what we know by “religion” at all.

We can take dharma to mean any kind of innate nature of anything, and I’ve heard it explained this way from authoritative sources. We think we should act like men, citizens, fathers, employees, human beings, gentlemen, alpha males, beta males, that we should be sensitive yet strong, caring yet unflinching in our decisions – so many things are expected from us at any given moment, and probably even more from women, but all these are external dharmas related to external designations.

Kṛṣṇa told Arjuna not to act on such considerations and abandon them altogether. He said Arjuna should not see himself as junior to all the great personalities on the other side of Kurukṣetra, that he should not see himself as eternally obliged to them in any way. He should not see himself as a part of the family and, specifically, as a potential destroyer of his family and family values in general.

So, all these various duties that Arjuna assumed as his own need to be abandoned. Where did they come from? From “the variety”, of course. Look at Mahārāja Pṛthu’s verse above – all these designations are illusory like our reflections on different surfaces. They only look different but their source is one and the same – us and our stupid material desires.

Look at Kṛṣṇa’s verse above – as long as we see this one grand illusion as full of variety with different roles for different manifestations we will be forced to take birth here again and again.

This has to stop.

Also because this is becoming my longest post ever.