VII: 14

[Krishna Jaya]

Chapter 7, Verse 14

 

"How hard to break through

Is this, my Maya,

My mysterious cloud of appearance.

But those who take refuge within me

Shall pass beyond the world of shadows."

 

Father Bede Griffiths:

 

Maya is the power which both creates and 'measures' the world.  It is very often translated as illusion, but Maya is really Nature perceived as the manifestation of God.  If we see Nature alone and do not see God in it, then we are under an illusion.  Then Maya is deceiving us.  It depends upon our point of view.  When we see rightly that the world is a filter through which God is manifesting, then it becomes the means to know God.  This is the crux of it: either the world is a sign and a means to realize God, or it is a blanket which hides God.  Everything turns upon whether we make this world into an illusion or whether we make it into a sacrament, a sign of God.  Once we put our trust wholeheartedly in God, we go beyond Maya and are no longer deceived.

 

Aurobindo: [Re: "…those who take refuge within me…"]

 

Not wisdom and selfless action alone are demanded of the aspirant now, but Bhakti also, devotion to the Divine, love and adoration and the soul's longing.  This demand, not expressly made until now, was prepared when Krishna laid down, as the necessary element of his Yoga, the conversion of all action into worship, fixing as its culmination the giving up of all action into the Supreme Self whence originates all our will and power.  What was implicit is now made explicit, and we begin to see more fully Krishna's purpose.   The aim is not inaction and immergence in the eternal impersonal, but union with the Purushottam, the Supreme Self, as personified by Krishna.

 

By combining the tranquil impersonality of the Self with actions done as worship, by this double key we escape from the lower egoistic personality and grow into the purity of our true spiritual person.  Then we are no longer bound and ignorant in the lower mind, but become free Jivas in the supreme nature.  Then we no longer live in the knowledge of the one immutable Self and this multiple nature as two opposite entities, but rise rather to the very embrace of the Purushottam discovered simultaneously through both of these elements of our being.  All three are of Spirit, and the two which are apparent opposites [like the head and tail of the same coin] are only the complementary faces of the third which is the highest truth.

 

A friend:  Even though it is possible to grasp the Creation through the senses, it is impossible to understand it fully with our limited minds. Scientists try to elucidate the mysteries of Nature, the Lila of God that follows certain patterns from the microcosm to the macrocosm. In the middle, we the human beings, are part of Nature and loaded with our existential doubts.  Krishna and Jesus Christ came to dissolve these doubts, encouraging us to develop our full potential and teaching us the way.