Woh Kisna hai !!!

Krishna Govinda....!!!

Krishna is the sole great man in our whole history who reached the absolute height and depth of religion, and yet he is not at all serious and sad, not in tears. 

By and large, the chief characteristic of a religious person has been that he is somber, serious and sad-looking - like one vanquished in the battle of life, like a renegade from life. In the long line of such sages it is Krishna alone who comes dancing, singing and laughing. :) :)

Every religion, up to now, has divided life into two parts, and while they accept one part they deny the other, Krishna alone accepts the whole of life. Acceptance of life in its totality has attained full fruition in Krishna. That is why India held him to be a perfect incarnation of God, while all other incarnations were assessed as imperfect and incomplete. Even Rama is described as an incomplete incarnation of God. But Krishna is the whole of God.

He accepts life in all its facets, in all its climates and colors. He alone does not choose he accepts life unconditionally. He does not shun love; being a man he does not run away from women. As one who has known and experienced God, he alone does not turn his face from war. He is full of love and compassion, and yet he has the courage to accept and fight a war. His heart is utterly non violent, yet he plunges into the fire and fury of violence when it becomes unavoidable. He accepts the nectar, and yet he is not afraid of poison.

Krishna tells Arjuna, "So long as you believe you can kill someone, you are not a man with a soul, you are not a religious man. So long as you think that one dies, you don't know that which is within us, that which has never died and will never die. If you think you can kill someone you are under a great illusion, you are betraying your ignorance. The concept of killing and dying is materialistic; only a materialist can believe so. There is no dying, no death for one who really knows." 


So Krishna exhorts Arjuna over and over again in the GEETA, "This is all play-acting; killing or dying is only a drama."

In this context it is necessary to understand why we call the life of Rama a characterization, a story, a biography, and not a play, a leela. It is because Rama is very serious. But we describe the life of Krishna as his leela, his play-acting, because Krishna is not serious at all. Rama is bounded, he is limited. He is bound, limited by his ideals and principles. Scriptures call him the greatest idealist: he is circumscribed by the rules of conduct and character. He will never step out of his limits; he will sacrifice everything for his principles, for his character.

Krishna's life, on the other hand, accepts no limitations. It is not bound by any rules of conduct, it is unlimited and vast. Krishna is free, limitlessly free. There is no ground he cannot tread; no point where his steps can fear and falter, no limits he cannot transcend. And this freedom, this vastness of Krishna, stems from his experience of self-knowledge. It is the ultimate fruit of his enlightenment.

Krishna does not take life as work, as duty; he takes it as a celebration, a festivity. Life is really a great feast, a blissful festivity. It is not homework, not a task that has to be performed willy nilly.

It is not that someone will cease to work if he takes life as a celebration. He will certainly work, but his work will be a part of the festivity, it will have the flavor of celebration. Then work will happen in the company of singing and dancing. It is true there will not be too much work, it will be less in quantity, but in quality it will be superb. Quantitatively the work will be less, but qualitatively it is going to be immeasurable.

Krishna takes life as festivity, as a play, fun. It is how flowers, birds and stars take life. Except man, the whole world takes life as play, fun. Ask a flower why it blooms. For what? It blooms without a purpose. A star moves across the sky without a purpose. And purposelessly the wind blows, and keeps blowing. Except man, everything under the sun is a play, a carnival. Only man works and toils and sheds copious tears. Except man, the whole cosmos is celebrating. Every moment of it is celebration.

Krishna uses three words: akarma, karma and vikarma, meaning inaction, action and non-action. What is action? According to Krishna, mere doing is not action. If it is true - if any kind of doing is action, then one could never enter into inaction. Then the inaction of Krishna's definition will be impossible. For Krishna, action is that which you do as a doer, as an ego. 

Really action for Krishna is an egocentric act, an act in which the doer is always present. A doing with a doer, in which one thinks himself as a doer, is action. As long as I remain a doer, whatever I do is action. Even renunciation becomes an action if a doer is present in the act.

Inaction is just the opposite kind of action; it is action without a doer. Inaction does not mean absence of action, but it certainly means absence of the doer. An egoless action is inaction. If I do a thing without the egoistic sense that I am the doer, that I am the center of this action, it is inaction.

Inaction is not laziness as is generally understood; it is very much action, but without a doer at its center. This thing has to be clearly understood. If the center, the ego, the I, the doer, ceases and only action remains, it is inaction. With the cessation of the doer every action becomes inaction.

Action without a doer is inaction. It is action through inaction.

Krishna's every action is egoless, and therefore it is inaction. Even when he is doing something, he is really in inaction.Between action and inaction there is akarma or non-action, which means a special kind of action.

Inaction is egoless action; action is egoist action and non-action is a special kind of action. This thing which is midway between action and inaction, which Krishna calls non-action, needs to be understood rightly.

What does Krishna mean by non-action? Where there is neither a doer nor a doing, yet things happen, there is non-action. For example, we breathe, which we are not required to do by our own effort. There is neither a doer nor a doing so far as acts like breathing are concerned. Similarly the blood circulates through the body, the food is digested, and the heart beats. How can you categorize such acts? They come in the category of non-action, which means action happening without a doer and without a sense of volitional doing. As far as God's action is concerned there is neither a doer nor any doing of the kind we know. There things just happen; it is just happening.

Krishna declares himself to be the best among all things - of all the seasons he is the spring, of all the cows he is the kamdhenu, of all the elephants he is the eirawat. And secondly - and this is more significant - he finds his peers even among the lowliest of creatures like cows and horses.

Both things should be taken together. While he declares himself to be the best among different classes of creatures, he does not distinguish between one class and another. Even when he claims to be the eirawat among elephants, he remains nonetheless an elephant. Even when he claims to be the best among the cows he remains a cow. Similarly he is quite at home among snakes and reptiles. 

He does not exclude the meanest categories as you think. He chooses to be the best even among the meanest creatures of this universe. And there is a reason. But why does he declare him self to be the best and the greatest among us all? On the surface it seems to us to be an egoistic declaration, because we are so much involved with our egos that everything we see appears egoistic. 

But if we go deep into it we will know what a great message is enshrined in Krishna's declaration. When he says that he is the eirawat among the elephants, he means to say every elephant is destined to be an eirawat, and if one fails to be eirawat he fails to actualize his best and highest potential. Similarly every season has the potential to grow into a spring, and if one fails to attain to the highest in its nature, it fails its nature. And if a cow fails to be the kamdhenu, it means she has gone astray from her nature. 


A non-attached mind, according to Krishna, is one who accepts everything unconditionally. The interesting thing is that if you accept something totally it does not leave a mark, a scar on your mind; your mind remains unscathed and undisturbed. But when you cling strongly to a thing it leaves a mark on your mind. And when you are strongly averse to something you detest and deny it, then also it leaves a mark on your mind.

But when you neither cling to a thing nor run away from it, when you become receptive to everything - good or bad, beautiful or ugly, pleasant or painful - when you become like a mirror reflecting everything that comes before it, then your mind remains unscathed and unmarked. And such a mind is a non-attached mind; it is established in non-attachment.

Whoever says he has encountered Krishna in his physical form is a victim of mental projection; he is projecting his own mental images on the vast screen of universal consciousness and viewing the objective reality. It is like a movie projector projects fast moving pictures on all empty screen; there is really nothing on the screen except shadows. Such visions are not a spiritual experience, they are wholly psychic.

Krishna's meaning is very different. He says a sthitaprajna remains unperturbed in pleasure and pain - he does not say he is insensitive to them. He means to say that a wise man goes beyond happiness and sorrow, he transcends them - not by killing his sensitivity but by attaining to a higher state of consciousness, to superconsciousness. 

An unconscious person, one under the influence of drugs, is insensitive to pain and pleasure but he cannot be said to have transcended them. He has rather fallen below the normal state of consciousness. In that way every dead person is insensitive.

Transcendence is entirely different.

In all these declarations, Krishna says only one thing: that he is the culmination, the perfection of nature in everything. Whoever and whatever attains to the sublime reflects godliness. This is the central message of this declaration.

Krishna-consciousness is attained only when the mind ceases to be; it is a state of no-mind.

KRISHNA ;)