Gita 18.22 – Rise from tunnel vision through funnel vision

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
thank you 18.22 in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna talks about knowledge in the mode of ignorance wherein we think of one thing to be everything essentially this is tunnel vision now there is tunnel vision and there is we could say funnel vision now when we are going through a tunnel at that time we can see only in one way actually even the tunnel itself is dark there might be some lighting put in over there but we can’t go we can’t go anywhere other than where the tunnel is going and we can’t see anywhere other than whatever has been the direction of the path or the light that is there in the tunnel whatever tunnel is going that is the only thing we can see and that is the only way we can go so tunnel vision of reality refers to a fragmented vision of reality wherein people are able to see things only from one perspective and not from any other perspectives those with tunnel vision of reality are always restricted to seeing things from one perspective and they often do not even know that other perspectives exist now tunnels are useful as long as we know that they are tunnels and that there is a world that exists outside the tunnels so if we think that the tunnel is the only reality then that becomes a problem the tunnel can be a passageway it can help us go from one side of a mountain to another side of a mountain but while we are in the tunnel if we think that this tunnel is all that exists then it becomes a problem knowledge in the mode of ignorance means that we think of one thing to be everything we start thinking that this particular vision of reality is the only vision of reality there are no perspectives one thing we are seeing we think that one thing to be everything there is no proper understanding of tattva over there actually understanding is neither so the tunnel vision of reality will keep us restricted in our understanding of things so for example there is a thing called Schumacher who writes in one of his books that when he was in USSR at that time a tourist guide was taking him around and he had a map with him and he just couldn’t make any sense of the map so he asked the tourist guide that he pointed out where is this church he said no we don’t show churches on our map that was an official policy of being anti-religion anti-god so they just denied the existence of churches in the landscape of Russia but that church is there the guide said no actually that was a church now that building is being used for some other purpose that was shown so when we have a particular ideology a particular bias a particular tilt then we select that which fits into the world view and then deselect everything else so to be able to select reality properly we need the practice of bhakti we need to recognize that we are at our core souls and that the soul has the capacity for spiritual vision science which is a prominent form of knowledge today is a powerful way of acquiring knowledge at the same time science offers in many ways a tunnel vision of reality a scientific world view leaves out that which is spiritual by plan, by fiat it leaves out that which is spiritual and thus we are left with that which is material so in a sense it gives us a tunnel vision of reality now we may say no but at our level of consciousness we can’t see the spiritual so then why bother about something which we can’t see actually speaking then why bother about gravity in gravity we can’t see we can see only its effects because most of scientific advancement happens when we move from visible phenomena to invisible principles and to the extent we make that journey successfully or effectively to the extent we move closer to Krishna to the extent we fail to make that journey to scientific understanding as long as we stay fixed with facts alone then we don’t necessarily see the patterns a theory is an explanation of facts it is an interpretive framework within which we place facts now moving on if we look at spiritual knowledge there is a process for gaining realization of spiritual reality and that we could say is like a funnel so now a funnel is what enables us to move from normally we think of a funnel as we pour water from the or pour water or oil or something from the top it has a broad opening and then at the bottom there is thin from which things are filtered out probably or we may use it for putting something into a narrow opening now we can conceive moving not up to down in a funnel but from down to up in a funnel that means that we have a material level of consciousness a constricted level of perception and as we move up from the material level of consciousness we start getting more and more of a expanded vision of reality as the funnel expands from the lower side to the higher side like that our vision expands from the lower side to the higher side the more we become purified the more we become spiritually oriented in our consciousness the more our intelligence and our consciousness become tuned to see realities that we were not able to see earlier sukhamarthintikam yathak buddhigrahayam atindriyam buddhigrahayam ultimate experience of happiness at the spiritual level comes atindriyam it is beyond the senses it is experience with buddhi buddhigrahayam atindriyam and then pashyam atmanidushyati one sees the spiritual vision and becomes satisfied delighted in that there is jnana chakshu which at an intellectual level the world view helps us to make sense of things and further there is pratyakshavagamam dharmyam there is direct experience there is both we can make intellectual sense over a period of time we start making experiential sense we all have our particular tunnel vision at this stage based on our culture our conditioning, our upbringings but from that tunnel vision we can funnel our consciousness upwards and in the process of bhakti yoga which raises our consciousness on the material level to the spiritual level that is what funnels our consciousness and through the funneling of our consciousness we will rise to a higher, sweeter deeper, broader vision of reality wherein we become free from whatever tunnel vision we might have had earlier thank you