Swami Gober's Bhagavad Gita Commentary: Introductory Essay - 28

Time, the Destroyer of Worlds

I am the mighty world-destroying Time, now engaged in destroying the worlds. Even without thee, none of the warriors arrayed in the hostile armies shall live.

Bhagavad Gita, chap 11, ver 32

Let’s see. As per the latest evidence we have, time started 13.7 billion years ago with an event called Big Bang. Even if the concept of a single point of origin for all space and time were to turn out to be wrong, the basic theme of modern cosmology would still remain: the grand evolution of the universe across vast time scales. Time has been creating worlds since the past several billion years and it would continue to do so for several more to come. The cosmos has been continuously evolving in complexity, unfolding beauty, harmony and order. Time is the magnificent creator of worlds, not the mighty destroyer of the worlds! Yes, time would go into destruction mode, but that's over a hundred billion years from now, when entropy shall take over the universe. But it seems like Krishna wouldn’t have it that way! The Lord of the Universe seems to be too eager to destroy, destroy, destroy!

And what a blubbering prophecy from someone who claims to be Time himself, and in the same line! This is amazingly ridiculous! ‘None of the warriors arrayed in the hostile armies shall live,’ proclaims Krishna. However, not one, not two, but three warriors of the enemy side survive the holocaust of the Mahabharata war. Ashwatthama, Kripacharya, and Kritavarma. These are no minor, negligible characters either, the former two being among Arjuna’s prime targets. Ashwatthama was capable of singlehandedly destroying the whole world, if it came to that, for he possessed such super weapons. In fact, after the war is officially over, there is an episode where Krishna himself urges both Arjuna and Ashwatthama to retract the celestial missiles they hurled against each other in uncontrollable fury, reminding them of the huge collateral damage that would take place. But here in this verse Krishna asserts none of the warriors gathered on the enemy front would survive the war! This has got to be the only prediction in the history of prophecy which, though made in retrospect long after the event, got it all wrong! The Bhagavad Gita was written several centuries after the Mahabharata rose into popularity; instead of raving crazy like this, couldn’t the author of the Gita have had a little respect for the writing profession and checked up on basic facts? I think no amount of simple-minded dumbness could have been capable of achieving such a feat as getting a simple post-event prophecy so screwed up! This is nothing but sheer delusive mania. It is lunacy for the sake of lunacy, out of pure contempt and malevolence for basic human intelligence.

Lord Krishna is not only supremely delusional, he is frightfully evil. He gives away his intentions himself in this verse and the two verses following it.

Therefore, stand up and obtain fame. Conquer the enemies and enjoy the unrivalled kingdom. Verily, they have already been slain by Me; be thou a mere instrument, O Arjuna!

Drona, Bhishma, Jayadratha, Karna and all the other courageous warriors—these have already been slain by Me; do thou kill; be not distressed with fear; fight and thou shalt conquer thy enemies in battle.

Chap 11, ver 33, 34

Everyone is going to be destroyed except the five Pandava warriors, and these five are his stooges anyway! And the incentives he offers to Arjuna to merrily participate in the all-out destruction rampage are so pathetic: fame, and enjoyment of kingdom! And this same world-teacher has been exhorting in all the preceding chapters that a wise man should not care for enjoyments of this world, should have no desires, no lust, even heat and cold should have no effect on him, he should merely do his duty and die! But now, enjoy the kingdom of abundance, and fame, oh wow! Bhagavad Gita is so full of this type of trashy tripe, it is appalling, grievously appalling! Krishna first dishes out all that wise-sounding stoic philosophy, indifference to everything, equanimity in all circumstances, living only to practice virtue, and finally here it all comes down to fame and enjoyment, eh!! That too with everyone all around dead! What a purely psychopathic fantasy!

“Be thou a mere instrument,” says Krishna. Instrument to what? Of course, to the destruction of the world! Krishna, however, did not want to just destroy the world in any old manner. His fantasy could have been to stand aside and behold it all, to take delight in it, overseeing it like an overlord and rave delusionally while the destruction is being carried out by his.. er.. ‘instruments’! This is a form of mental illness, rare but extremely serious and highly dangerous. Krishna could have made such a good James Bond villain really! He is the megalomaniac self-proclaimed super being of the universe, who simply wants to destroy everyone with any iota of power or skill in the world, save his subordinates and servants and devotees, so that he could shine resplendent as the sole all-powerful living entity in the world! Even if that world was mostly a cemetery. And of course, he could then indulge in his raas-leela or orgy sport with his 16,000 damsels amidst all that glorious graveyard desolation!

Sri Krishna had it all planned up, the war was about to commence, but at the last moment, like a poor pitiful fellow jolted out of a long hypnotic stupor, perhaps induced by Krishna himself, Arjuna surveys the battlefield and realizes the entire pointlessness of this war. He himself says, just as a victim or subject of some hypnotic experiment would upon waking: where am I, what the hell is happening, it is so unbelievable we have brought the situation to this! A true moment of clarity seems to have dawned on Arjuna. But Krishna is there right next to him to take care of it! In fact Krishna must have positioned himself as the charioteer of Arjuna precisely in order to avert such a disaster. Krishna at first just touches upon Vedanta and appeals to the self-image of Arjuna. 'The Atman never dies. Nobody ever kills nor is ever killed. Besides, O mighty warrior, you are the brave one, what will people think if you run away now. You are born a Kshatriya, you should never hesitate when it comes to killing people. You are the exterminator, O Parantapa, O scorcher of foes,’ and so on. But Arjuna is really not convinced with both the arguments. At this point, Krishna really gets desperate, this Arjuna could undo all of his nefarious scheme! Darn all those bugles and conches and a dozen other blowing instruments that went off all at once at the commencement of the war, breaking Arjuna’s thick soul slumber!

Krishna, in all his devious divine innocence, had led everyone up to this war, both by commission and omission, action and inaction, inaction in action, action in inaction. After the war, Gandhari, the mother of the Kauravas, rightly realizes this and damns Krishna and his entire race of people to total destruction, which eventually comes true. This lady Gandhari, owing to decades of blindfolding herself, has earned so much merit, it seems, that cashing on that good karma she could muster enough power to destroy the whole world if she wanted. Krishna tries very much not to let her wrath fall on the Pandavas, in the aftermath of the war, and succeeds in it. And he could have stopped the curse he himself attracted from her from taking effect if only he wanted. But it appears like by this time, Krishna simply got addicted to killing and destruction! So even the prospect of his own people and race being utterly wiped out must have seemed too exciting to him! He only appears too glad to receive the curse from Gandhari, and he does it in casual nonchalance as is his characteristic style! Some of the people standing by his side though are aghast, but Krishna explains to them, the Yadava race is incapable of being destroyed by anyone, so it has to self-destruct which is where Gandhari’s curse comes in handy! Now the question is, what is the need of wantonly destroying a race of his people, his own people, in the first place?

All this, though, would unfold much later. Right now Krishna is in a greater crisis, facing the prospect of non-destruction! His whole ambition seems to be thwarted by Arjuna’s unexpected reaction. He has to somehow manage Arjuna. He hits upon an interesting strategy. To begin with, Arjuna is a nitwit and a highly gullible person, notwithstanding his legendary prowess as a warrior. Naturally, Arjuna’s deep desire would be to show to the world that he too is a knowledgeable and intelligent guy, not just good at flinging arrows. Krishna exploits this weakness, he just all at once and without any warning pours down upon Arjuna all kinds of little bits of knowledge he (Krishna) has gathered about various schools of Indian philosophy, Yoga, Vedanta, Sankhya, Mimansa, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, mishes mashes everything up, all sorts of things, utterly irrelevant to the situation at hand, simply to get Arjuna overwhelmed. Now Arjuna is diverted from his own deep mental quandary of a while ago, he is not understanding one thing of what Krishna is saying, and why he is saying, but if he confessed as much he may appear like a nitwit, therefore he keeps popping in one or two questions here and there, just to appear like he is following at least something of what Krishna is saying (a neat strategy which I myself used to practice sometimes in my college).

Krishna's tactic is simply to overawe Arjuna into submission, not to make him understand anything (as if Krishna himself understood anything of what he was saying)! Krishna has only to give to Arjuna the impression of being someone who knows all the sublime things in the world. But going further than that, he actually succeeds in creating the image of being the Supreme God himself -- from the fourth chapter on when Arjuna slips into a more vulnerable state of mind. Krishna uses all kinds of terms, duty, renunciation, action, fire, knowledge, yagna, Brahman, Manu, equanimity, dog, pundit, whatever, it is just a veritable bedlam. As expected, Arjuna is utterly perplexed, not only at the quantity of information pouring forth at him and its totally unexpected onslaught, but the very metaphysical nature of it, a side of things to which he has not been previously exposed. All of what Krishna says seems only to be targeted at creating confusion and more confusion in the already confused mind of Arjuna, and nothing more.

Arjuna has no guts to tell it on the face to Krishna, “O Lord, you are driving me nuts with all these irrelevant philosophical palaverings, we can discuss all this philosophy later on at leisure if you will, can we just stick to the situation for now?” Still, he keeps protesting sometimes “I am confused, O Krishna, I am not really getting what you are saying, you are saying this, and you are saying that, I can't make much out of it. Please enlighten me.” This is exactly what Krishna intended, of course. He promptly leads Arjuna into more and more confusion, until Arjuna breaks down mentally, he stops all protesting, he totally agrees now “O Krishna, you are the Supreme Brahman, the God of gods, the one, infinite, eternal reality of the universe, I see all this so clearly. All my doubts are cleared, my perplexity washed away!” Ah finally! In fact, Arjuna has such a powerful mental breakdown that he starts experiencing profound hallucinations, of innumerable mouths, innumerable legs, innumerable stomachs, dancing all around, without a beginning, a middle and an end! And Krishna gently leads Arjuna's hallucinations to serve his own ends.

The rest of the Bhagvad Gita, after chapter 11 from which the above verses are quoted, is obviously an interpolation, dealing with totally inane topics like different kinds of foods, demonic nature and divine nature, and all kinds of more nonsense, except for one out-of-place highly meaningful chapter, dealing with the concepts of kshetra and kshetragna one ('field' and 'field-knower'). Anyway, the war takes place and the rest is history or myth, according to one's belief. Everyone dies, the Pandavas rule for a little time and they die too, and Krishna’s race is wiped out as predicted, and the Mahabharata ends.

People come, people go, they create a lot of fuss in between. And horrendous wars of course have been happening all through human history. The Mahabharata war may have been particularly devastating and tragic, particularly senseless and pointless, but then there was not much worth preserving in the society of that time either. So we can perhaps see this war as an opportunity for a new beginning. In fact, I regard the Second World War itself, however much suffering it caused, to be a great impetus to progress and civilization. This greatest war of all time was of course totally caused by just one man, Adolf Hitler. So in a way, though it may seem very awkward to put it so, I love Hitler for what he has done! A riddle worth pondering: So why not Krishna? Krishna was much better than Hitler, he was not even working to promote any selfish motives, sticking true to his teachings — how rare is that! He was causing destruction for the sake of destruction alone, not seeking any fruits thereof! Going by traditional accounts, that was the mission of his life, the purpose to fulfill which he was born. He was sent on earth to bring a whole age called Dwapara Yuga to a great climactic end, so that a new age could begin, the Kali Yuga. Whether he was acting out his own psychopathic fantasies, or whether he was the agent of some higher forces, he ushered in the age of modernity. Though it was only at a great cost, perhaps it was worth it all. Hinduism has this tremendous insight into the nature of things, and realizes that destruction is as important as creation, that they are complementary and form a cycle. Viewed in this light, Krishna’s sins may be condoned, and in fact I may have even begun to love this guy, if not for the simple fact that through the Bhagavad Gita the impact of his actions spread far beyond his own age. That he was responsible in causing so much destruction which brought an entire age to its end could be acceptable, but the real issue here is that he did not allow creativity to happen in the age that followed it.

It would seem as if Krishna didn't simply desire to end the then existing world but all future civilization too, to the extent possible. All the teachings of Gita appear to be working towards this end. Any civilization is built on work, lots of work. Work needs motivation, as a body needs food and rocket needs fuel! And the central teaching of Gita is “You have only right to work, but not to the fruits thereof.” This is what you tell to a slave, a bonded labor, right? Yours is only to work and not to desire for the outcome of it. A slave works mechanically, like a karma yogin, simply because he has no other option, and this is the only way of life he can lead. Civilization means mastery, but Krishna seems very much like wanting to inculcate a slave mentality in us, a whole nation of people. Civilization is based on work, and passion for work, but who would ever be interested to work like a slave? Gita intends to take away all initiative, all incentive, all motivation, all dignity of work. It actually replaces the concept of action and work, karma, with that of duty, dharma. You work because you are required to work, for the sake of righteousness! In one stroke, man loses freedom, life loses meaning!

Further, ego is the basis of all creativity, innovation, achievement, as the author Ayn Rand goes on pounding again and again. But Sri Krishna desperately seeks to undermine the ego. He keeps harping, “you are merely an instrument, a nimitta-maatra.” You have no free will even. All civilization is built on intelligence. But simply to accept the totally confused mess of Gita to be a holy book, leave alone the holiest of all scriptures, demands a radical degradation of intelligence. The whole mental capacity of this nation (India) had gone down the drain simply in the futile effort to make sense of Gita's muddle.

It was and is almost mandatory for any spiritual personage that appears on the scene to comment on Gita. In the past few decades, the trend particularly caught up. Osho himself gave Hindi discourses on Gita amounting to eight thick volumes. I have seen at least thirty swamijis and lady swamijis doing Gita Gyan Yagna, that is, commenting on Gita, in my own city in all these years. Some famous swamijis seem to be doing only this thing, going from town to town in India, in between flying to Chicago and California, and doing Gyan Yagna continuously, year in year out. These people are simplifying the Gita to the mass, but see, perhaps relativity can be simplified, quantum mechanics can be simplified, but how can you simplify something like the Bhagavad Gita which has no meaning to start with? But the swamis deftly follow Krishna's original strategy, confuse the people, confuse the people, until out of sheer desperation, they are forced to give up their intellects and are driven into an illusion of understanding.

India only inherited heap loads of junk from the age of the Mahabharata and the times that preceded it, in the form of its religion and culture. Nothing valuable came from so much of India’s unknown history, except for one thing, its mystical philosophy of Vedanta. This much was enough, though, to take the new age to such heights of civilization as could have never been imagined before. Powered by Vedanta, our own world could have touched the dimension of infinity. But the Bhagavad Gita crudely subverted and sabotaged the Vedantic outlook to life. This is the greatest damage Krishna did. He could have become Time and destroyed the worlds as much as he liked, to his heart’s content, but he had no right to destroy a beautiful world-view that brings out the infinite divinity and eternal splendor inside man.