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Atma Vidya Group
Hello, wellcome to AtmaVidyaTV
Bhagavad Gita: The ego and the Self
Today we will start with our reflections about
the various Scriptures of humanity
To start, I selected here the Bhagavad Gita
Great Scripture of India,
part of the epic Mahabharata
in which it exposes the dialogue of Krishna -
representing the divine verb -
and Arjuna, representing the human kind.
Also, to illustrate,
I put here a Krishna's canvas that a painted,
to decorate the scenary and
inspire our reflection.
I will open here ... Chapter VI, verses 5 and 6.
Krishna says: 5. Each one must rise spiritually by
the power that gives you the Divine Spirit, and not up abash.
The Self, that is, the Spirit of man,
is the lover of man and his best friend,
but to the ignorant may appear to be their enemy because it tends to destroy
their sense of separate personality.
6. The Self is the friend of him who
dominates his personal “I”, bottom, but if the soul has not yet
reached the Knowledge - that here is written with capital K -,
may seem to you that the Self is your biggest enemy,
because he wants to free the soul from ignorance and illusions
and the mistakes that are enjoyable to you.
Here, according to a more modern language,
Krishna is providing insights about the ego-Self axis.
The personality that we are (seemingly) at this time
and the Nature that we are in Reality.
See how our life goes nowadays.
It is not surprising people are getting sick more and more.
We believe that we are the body, the mind, personality- the defects, desires,
fears and anxieties of this personality.
And we base our lives exclusively on it.
But see, neither the body nor the mind nor our personality are stable in itself.
That is: My thought today is one, tomorrow will be another,
tomorrow my body will not be the same body of today and
my personality also changes every day.
So, these three things that we believe we are,
and which we are attached, don't even have consistency in their own nature.
And we live our entire lives to "pamper" those things
which in essence are not even anything definite for us - are always changing.
So we're always chasing things, seeking pleasures that will vanish
- they have no real consistency -
and we can't really see what we are,
because we're stuck on the transitory, the ephemeral.
Thus, we live distracted, instead of wanting to live truly happy,
because we seek happiness in daily distraction, only in pleasures that end quickly.
We are "distracted", but note,
when are not external factors to distract us,
that's inevitable the encounter with ourselves, with our consciousness.
Oh!, and maybe that's why,
for we do not give value to this inner consciousness, this Real "I" -
- and Krishna also says that to the ignorant seems to be his worst enemy because it tends
to override the feeling of separate personality, the ego -,
then, because we don't know about this Real "I" we live walking, falling, stumbling,
without knowing about what we already are.
Many people believe that for us to reach something high in our lives
we have to pursue a particular goal, a path, we have to achieve...
No, we already are.
The great problem is that we are unconscious about who we are.
We live tied to sense objects and the ephemerality of the transitory.
When we discover that Self (Real "I") who we really are,
then the life becomes full.
We are very tied to our mind. But the mind ("mente" in portuguese),
as one of my teachers said, she lies ("mente" in portuguese),
so it has this name.
The mind defends the ego, but we have to go beyond the mind,
because we are more than it.
We have to go to the field of consciousness.
Consciousness pure, unblemished, equanimous that we really are.
The mind is to the ego, while consciousness is for the Self -
the being that we already are, but we ignore.
Stay in Peace!