Swami Gober's Bhagavad Gita Commentary: Introductory Essay - 2

Situational Awareness

What, O Krishna, is the description of him who has steady wisdom (sthitaprajna) and is merged in the Superconscious State? How does one of steady wisdom speak? How does he sit? How does he walk?

Bhagavad Gita, chap 2, ver 54

Sthitiḥ Sanskrit stability, steadiness; 1- standing, remaining, abiding, residence; 2- stopping; 3- fixity, firmness, steady application of devotion; 4- a state, position, situation, condition; 5- natural state, habit; 6- permanence, continuance; 7- steadfastness in duty, decorum, moral rectitude, propriety; 8- maintenance of discipline

Prajñā Sanskrit; Pali, paññâ; "know, understand, discern"; Tibetan: shes rab; Chinese; bōrĕ/bānruò, is often translated as "wisdom," "cognitive acuity," or "know-how".

(Indopedia, the Indological Knowledge Base)

The ideal of wisdom man promulgated in the Bhagavad Gita is called 'sthitaprajna', the one who is totally still, steady and imperturbable in all circumstances. But since Krishna only enunciates this ideal in response to a specific query of Arjuna regarding the nature of such a man, we may assume that the notion of sthitaprajna must have been wafting in the spiritual air of the time. Krishna may have added some of his own nuances to the concept, but the idea itself must have been fairly prevalent. Krishna defines a sthitaprajna as one who has gone beyond desires, attachments, fear and anger, one who is established in his self nature. The word sthitaprajna translates to sthita = steady or stabilized and prajna = wisdom; steady wisdom, implying one whose wisdom is no more on shaky grounds. However, a sthitaprajna could be a true wise man or he could be simply some stoically stolid dodo incapable of any emotion. Really, Krishna doesn’t supply any criterion to differentiate the one who is simply suppressing all his desires and emotions and practicing a self-imposed paralysis, and the one who has in reality found the joy of his inner self and has therefore risen beyond the normal gamut of human reactions and feelings.

Whether genuine or fake, a sthitaprajna is a completely introverted person, shelled up in himself, like a tortoise withdrawn into its shell, as Krishna himself puts it. This is a famous but a rather uninspiring and unhappy simile from the Gita, and doesn’t sound too promising. The very first paragraph in a section titled “How Turtles and Tortoises Behave” at petplace.com says this:

An unhappy turtle is a lazy turtle. Like a reclusive child, an unhappy turtle will withdraw into its shell, physically and emotionally. He will remain quietly unobtrusive for minutes or even hours. When he does finally emerge, it is often only to try to escape. But if given ample space and naturalistic conditions, turtles and tortoises can be very active and entertaining and seem to feel quite at home.

For centuries, people have imagined a clinically catatonic person, unaware and unresponsive to the world outside, to be a sthitaprajna. But most interestingly the word sthitaprajna itself could have a meaning which is the polar opposite to this. The Sanskrit word ‘sthiti’ has many contiguous meanings, but the only one that has survived into Hindi and other Indian languages is ‘situation’. And ‘prajna’ could mean either wisdom or consciousness. So sthitaprajna can also translate to situational awareness. Instead of presenting the image of a tortoise that has retracted all its extremities into itself, it could present the image of a hare or other frisky creature that has extended its feelers, is alert, aware and conscious, extremely sensitive and responsive to its environment. I think a true spiritual person should fit snugly into both these metaphors, he should have the flexibility to both extrovert and introvert himself as and when needed. To only learn to withdraw into one’s self and nothing more could have dangerous consequences.

The Bhagavad Gita itself is known both for its steady wisdom — of which I am not really sure — and its situational awareness, of which I am totally certain! In the rest of this essay we would be discussing the Bhagavad Gita and its legendary situational awareness. Interestingly enough, ‘steady wisdom’ is something that one can find in so many other spiritual texts too, but the Bhagavad Gita has a USP, its so-considered situational awareness, and this is something that has contributed greatly to its uniqueness and popularity. What is this thing exactly? Sometime back I was talking to my mother, I asked her “You know that killing people, advocating ruthless war, slaughter, these are all evil things, so why do you think that Krishna is such a holy god, or is it simply because he daubs himself in blue all over?” She said quite dead-pan and without hesitation, “Krishna did what was right in the situation. It all depends on the situation, one has to act according to the situation.” That about sums up the basic logic of all the billions and billions of Bhagavad Gita fans down the centuries, for sanctioning and even worshipping violence. Look at that classic, hallowed poster of Bhagavad Gita, the iconic battlefield scene. The Gita is the longest sermon, which could easily find a place in the Guinness Book of Records, delivered right in the middle of one of the greatest battlefields in the history and lore of humanity! That too, not before the battle has commenced, but right after! This is some situational awareness!

Krishna, in the very name of ethics, wisdom, and spirituality goes on instigating Arjuna to carry out a totally pointless and totally devastating war. It is not just violence Krishna is advocating, but total mindlessness, because in the actual epic itself, at various times as well as in chapters preceding the climactic event, elders and all kinds of people around emphasize that war is to no one's advantage and everyone stands to lose in this all-out war should it take place. Even by Mahabharata standards, then, war and particularly this war is a futile and evil thing. So how come Krishna goes on prodding Arjuna to go on a rampage and kill everyone, that too with such gay abandon? It is so apparently a counter intuitive, counter logical, counter commonsensical thing to do, but the Gita pulls it off with aplomb, all in the name of steady wisdom and situational awareness!

There is an interesting allegorical explanation touting the situational awareness of the Bhagavad Gita, which says that the Kurukshetra war is simply a metaphor for general life situation. The notion that life is a chaotic jungle where only the fittest survive, that life is a constant kill-or-be-killed situation, fight, fight, fight, till death, would be a part of the most unspiritual worldview one can imagine! But unfortunately, the Bhagavad Gita enthusiasts cannot normally think with anything beyond a typical Bollywood movie logic. Even among these people, though, any simpleton with the least notion of ethics and common sense in him would know that violence is wrong; and while Buddha and Mahavira go to the other extreme making nonviolence the central precept of their religion, something to be practiced at all costs irrespective of the situation, as if by simply eschewing violence any idiot or weakling can become holy and enlightened, Krishna does the exact opposite. He says (liberally paraphrasing), ‘Arjuna, you just fight, this is closest to enlightenment you can hope to attain.’ Enlightenment means realizing one's self-nature (swadharma), and according to Sri Krishna, Arjuna's swadharma is continuously killing enemies, nothing more! Interestingly enough, Mahatma Gandhi, through whose sincere efforts the concept that life is a battlefield spread, made nonviolence the central precept of his philosophy and at the same time considered Sri Krishna his Guru, and Bhagavad Gita his mother! Such massive confusion goes around, it's so pathetic, and even more sadly people don't even as much as notice the circus. This is situational awareness.

And simply because no one can understand the rationale of Krishna's exhortations, down the ages people have been trying to comment and add their interpretation to it, and also simply because no one understands, they tend to think that it must be something divine, totally beyond the comprehension of ordinary intellect. Only liberated people of steadied wisdom are supposed to understand the sublimity of the Lord. Most people though cannot hope to reach that level of wisdom where the logic of Sri Krishna can be deciphered, and so a crude oversimplification has come about and prevailed just to palliate the curiosity of the masses. People want to know what was the overarching need for the war. The reason is readily supplied: the Pandavas are the good guys, and the Kauravas are the bad guys and these rotten bad asses have to be killed by the blessed good souls with the help of the divine Soul of the Universe. Common folks buy it lock, stock and barrel. So the war is perfectly warranted, and Krishna in his infinite wisdom urged Arjuna to do the right thing, to finish off the baddies. No issues.

Krishna is above the norms and morals of the ordinary society anyway, and we knew this since the days he was dallying with any woman he could spot around him. In himself, Krishna has both steady wisdom and situational awareness. Steady wisdom is mostly for the girls, reportedly he could go on for hours without climaxing, and situational awareness is for the men, he knew exactly when to climax and where to climax. The battlefield of Kurukshetra was it! And no Arjuna is going to spoil the fun.

The climactic event of the Mahabharata story is set on the plains of Kurukshetra, also called Dharmakshetra in the Gita, and this is the very first word of the scripture, 'Dharmakshetra' — meaning a holy place or a place where righteousness is practiced. Why holy? Because a righteous war is going to be fought on that vast plain, and we will now see how righteous it is indeed. What is it that these people are fighting for? It's kingdom, of course. Now, the very first thing that any person with the least common sense will notice in this story, and no genius, no luminary, down the ages, has noticed in the least, is the totally shocking manner in which people are treated as things and property throughout the epic. Kingdom is invariably regarded as someone's personal estate, private property. Nowhere do the interests of people come in, nor any meaningful reference is ever made about the inhabitants of the kingdom, they are all implicitly assumed to be mute tribute-paying chattel and nothing more. So this is our righteous story and its righteous war. And this is situational awareness. From the beginning to the end of the epic story, nowhere do we get any sense that this kingdom thing is constituted of real people living real lives in a society. Relentlessly and most brazenly, the only sense the epic conveys about the kingdom is that it is some kind of treasure house with different parties claiming the rightful ownership. Really, people are so totally nonexistent entities in the story that it didn't occur to the main author and various other additional authors of the Mahabharata that you could easily portray Duryodhana, the eldest of the Kauravas, as evil by simply making him act cruelly towards people. But the concept of people simply doesn't exist, so it never occurred to anyone.

Sometimes in these semi-mythological, semi-historical tales like Ramayana and Mahabharata, but very rarely, we come across vague phrases like ‘welfare of people’ and ‘protection of the masses’. And we get to hear this phrase that ‘all people lived happily in his reign.’ First of all, I can't imagine how anyone could be happy without cable television being around, and then no mention would be made as to what exactly Rama or Yudhishthira did to make all the people so happy. Were they conducting free distribution of any drugs or what? Buddha goes on lamenting that this world is so full of misery, he seems to have had no idea that if a righteous king was ruling the land, everyone would be happy and there would be no further need of Nirvana and such things! Everyone would be happy automatically and forever. This is the kind of sophisticated situational awareness people had!

India is the biggest democracy today and we are all very proud of it, but its epic stories and epic heroes not only do not have the least notion of democracy, they do not most bizarrely seem to have any notion that a society is made of people. The whole of Mahabharata takes place in divine isolation, as if the larger society doesn't simply exist. (Chandamama tales of kings and kingdoms though are all about democracy where the king always goes incognito surveying his kingdom, this is so obviously because these stories are written by contemporary authors.) Both in the Bhagavad Gita and the main epic, one keeps coming across the phrase ‘enjoying the kingdom’, as if that is the only thing a king has to do with a kingdom, enjoy it! Krishna goes on provoking the greed of Arjuna, ‘Fight, Arjuna, and then you can enjoy the kingdom nicely.’ Today if a chief minister were found to be 'enjoying' his state, he would be most probably put behind the bars for indulging in corruption. In those days though, it seemed to be the most righteous thing to do. A righteous king — meaning one who is performing all the prescribed rituals, looking after every need of a virtual army of Brahmana priests, just the way Yudhishthira did — has only to concern himself with enjoying his kingdom and all the people he is ruling would live happily ever after, immersed in divine contentment!

It is so brazen, kingdom was just a source of wealth and power, no further issue about it. And all these dumb masses who have been worshiping Krishna and Arjuna, Mahabharata and Gita down the ages, they didn’t have any inkling that these heroes of theirs and their stupid stories did absolutely nothing for them, the common people. Even so much as their presence was not acknowledged. But dumb masses are just what they are, in those days they used to go to watch street plays of Ramayana and Mahabharata endlessly, these days they watch superidiotic IPL cricket matches on TV endlessly! How can you expect them to think anything for themselves? Like mild and docile cows they go on feeding whatever grass and fodder is placed before them. And of course, Krishna is the supreme cowherd!

So there is this kingdom, but the whole and sole question about it is regarding its equitable inheritance. There are again absolutely no other issues! Krishna goes on talking about Atman, Brahman, eternity, infinity, but it doesn't occur to him or anyone else in this whole epic of righteousness that equitable inheritance of a kingdom is simply not a logically feasible concept. One king is there ruling one kingdom, he has four sons, he divides the kingdom between four sons, now four sons have four sons each (fortunately daughters are not an issue yet), so the kingdom gets divided into sixteen parts, these sixteen people have four sons each, now 64 parts; now in 10 generations, less than 200 years, the original kingdom would be divided into 10 to the power of something parts. Each king would be ruling two houses in a street probably. Now further he would have four sons, just extrapolate and it is not difficult to imagine a situation where each king would be ruling a brick in the wall. If it went a bit further, each king would be ruling a land the size of a pinhead. Duryodhana, the supposed baddie of the epic, in his wisdom foresees this eventuality and tells Pandavas that he wouldn't give them a pinhead size of land, and so the whole war starts. But see, if he were to give back the Pandavas their kingdom, these Pandavas being the icons of righteousness would go on dividing the kingdom equally and righteously generation after generation, and eventually every illustrious king in the Pandava lineage would end up ruling a pinhead of space. So better not give them a pinhead of space in the first place. You don't need any Malthus to tell you all this. This is the silliest of simple logic. But equitable inheritance is treated as sacrosanct principle in the Mahabharata, and the very basis of righteousness. And nobody down the ages, no gober swamijis pullulating devotional channels on the Indian television, no-one at all, questions this concept of right of inheritance.

Even a poor, illiterate yokel could have seen that Duryodhana is the good guy here, that Pandavas are the bad guys — if only this yokel had some commonsense! With Duryodhana, the kingdom – little though it is to begin with – would stay united and has high chances of being expanded; with Pandavas coming in, not only would it get divided into half, but one of the halves would most likely get divided into five more pieces, and within 5 years into 20 more! Duryodhana has the greed, the ambition, he would unite and expand, he is the right guy to rule the kingdom, the interests of the people would be promoted in his rule, with the Pandavas no one would stand to gain anything expect for hordes of overweight Brahmanas.

Granted that the Pandavas and the Kauravas are equal idiots (with the exception of Yudhishthira who is beyond any compare in matters of stupidity, he is simply supernatural), the right side throughout the story is the Kauravas, and the wrong side is the Pandavas. So this Krishna is siding the patently wrong side to begin with, the evil side, and then preaching steady wisdom and situational awareness. He is our divine God!

The Pandavas are so pathetic, in the last message of peace negotiation that Yudhishthira sends to Kauravas, this comes out particularly clearly. Yudhishthira says, ‘Without kingdom what are we supposed to do, are we supposed to go out in the streets and beg?’ It is a revealing sentence, it shows besides freely hogging on what people produce, the Pandavas do not even know a way of making a decent livelihood. Arjuna could always join a circus, of course, and tour from village to village displaying his archery skills, because that is the only thing he knows, and Yudhishthira could always be paraded as a buffoon, ‘Look this is the guy who sold off his kingdom, his brothers and wife in a dice game, was pardoned and given them all back, after which he went again to play the same dice game with the same person and again lost his kingdom.’ Twice over! And exhibiting Draupadi's magic endless saree could have fetched some extra audience and revenue as well, the Pandavas need not after all become so destitute without the kingdom.

These people have clearly and absolutely no concern with people or society, they just want power so that they can live in opulence. While that is the general tendency, the Pandavas are especially pathetic, because they are supposed to be meek saints and they don't have greed, for greed and desire for expansion is an evil thing. All they need is just some comfort and peace. Remember, Gandhi's stupid celebrated dictum ‘There is enough on the Earth for every one's need, but not for everyone's greed’? So Kauravas are the greed guys, and Pandavas are the need guys. If these latter become the kings though, there is no future for the kingdom, it would keep getting divided instead of keep expanding! Slight correction: the aforementioned greed/need Kaurava/Pandava equation is only true as far as the popular perception is concerned. In reality, the Pandavas are hideously greedy monsters as we would see in some subsequent essays, and that is the reason too why Yudhishthira is so incurably addicted to gambling, to make away with some free wealth — but they are only greedy for wealth, not for dominion since that would entail assuming even more responsibilities of ruling even larger sections of people.

Yudhishthira has a reputation for sinking to a new low every time, so as per his habit, in this same message of peace negotiation he actually asks Duryodhana just to give the Pandavas five villages, one for each. Even for such a shameless guy as Yudhishthira, this is a shameful thing to do! I just can't conceive how to partition a kingdom or a state into five villages and the rest! Monstrously absurd! It clearly shows, these people utterly don’t know anything about the mechanics of running a country or the administration, and are the least interested in such things, don't have so much as a notion of people and society. All they need is some sustainable wealth so that they could spend the rest of their lives without the need to work! Lazy turtles indeed! Still the Pandavas have some vestige of shame left not to ask for gold or anything directly, but they settle for villages. Even if each of the humble, righteous Pandavas gets a small province, they can live off it nicely, leeching on the peasants' produce for a whole life-time! This is their idea of righteousness!

Yudhishthira, the most virtuous of the virtuous, the wisest of the wise, has particularly mastered the art of being a sthitaprajna. On any given day, in any given situation, he could be filled with so much steady wisdom that he could comfortably withdraw into his shell, or into his room, or during a war, into his tent, and play the dice game for endless hours with or without a partner. Playing the dice game is Yudhishthira’s way to self-realization. And Krishna’s fabled, idolized and worshipped situational awareness consists in striving to reinstate this total moron as the king of his pathetic little kingdom. Krishna wants Arjuna to be eager and willing to kill every king of the land to achieve this objective because if there were many kings around, one or the other of them could invite Yudhishthira again to a gambling match, and Yudhishthira, by his own admission being totally unskilled at the dice game, would lose again and would go on losing until he has lost his entire kingdom and the same story would repeat. So better finish off any king around who could possibly invite Yudhishthira to a dice match. Such exemplary situational awareness as Krishna demonstrates is simply impossible to find in ordinary human beings. It requires that one has merged the mind into the superconscious state and is imbued with divine intelligence. In fact, only the God of the universe, in his omniscience, could muster so much situational awareness at a single time. That He sat, walked and spoke amidst us is the wonder of wonders.

The Bhagavad Gita is the supreme example, one cannot just think anything beyond that, of a lack of any kind of situational awareness! Forget the tortoise and hare, the Bhagavad Gita has as much steady wisdom and situational awareness as a blind elephant gone amuck in a crowded street! It is not just a question of this one book, countless people across a vast number of generations who have adored and admired this book seem to have no minimal general awareness, that is supposed to characterize human beings, leave alone anything deep. No one simply questions or thinks!