Gita 14.03 We determine our bodies and our bodies determine us

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
thank you this is Bhagavad Gita 14.3 and the first two verses talk about the glory of the transcendental knowledge that he is going to speak and he starts talking about the modes of material nature by talking briefly about the nature itself about material nature about how soul gets placed in material it’s one thing to be shackled another thing to be placed just like say somebody may be shackled in a jail and different people or say different patients in a mental asylum may have different kind of restraints on them some may have thin ropes but before we talk about that they may have before we talk about what kind of fetters different people have a question may come up how did they end up over there why are they in the asylum where they have to be fettered in different ways talking here about what it is because of which we are in this material world so mama yonir mahad brahma that mama yoni that he has actually impregnated material nature tasmin garbham dadham yam metaphor here of of procreation where a male impregnates a female womb with the seed from which life can come so like that here talks about mama yonir mahad brahma mama yonir that i have mahad brahma brahma here refers to the great thing the great being and in this context it doesn’t refer to spiritual reality brahman it actually refers to the material reality or rather the material nature the the reservoir for the souls as the recipient of the souls so mahad brahma refers to the great material great womb tasmin garbham dadham yam tasmin garbham so in that seed i put sambhava sarvabhutana to bhavati bharata sambhava sarvabhutana from there emerge all the beings sarvabhutana tato bhavati emerge bharata or descendant of bharata so bhavati bharata so basically krishna is talking here about the material nature and talking about how different living beings acquire different forms our current existence is bi-dimensional bi-dimensional we are spiritual beings but we are having material bodies encased in material bodies we are so we have a spiritual core and we have a material covering but then for functioning in this world we need the material covering and we function through this material covering primarily so in that sense the material covering is important this material covering which enables us to function to decide how we are going to act so birds will fly in the sky and aquatics will swim in water their particular functionality is determined by the kind of body they have the same soul in one life may be in a bird’s body may be in the next life in a aquatics body the soul when it is in that body functions accordingly and all these different bodies they are like coverings for the soul and they are what are given to the soul by material nature we will talk in the next verse which we will talk about how he is a seed giving father two main points in this verse are that he impregnates material nature like the great womb and there in material nature the various bodies various bodies emerge in this world so the soul gets entangled in different bodies depending on the kind of body that it has but how does it get a body it gets body by by its particular nature by its particular focus unless the body this soul has particular karma which is done in the past by which it is ordained to get a particular body Krishna here focuses on not so much on the past karma but he talks on the basic principle the principle is that the soul in material nature gets a body and we too while we are in material nature will get particular bodies so the way we function in this world is according to our bodies so we determine our body and then our body determines us that means we determine our body not necessarily by conscious choice this is the body that I want we determine our body by the kind of actions that we do the karma the kind of karma that we do in this body that determines the kind of body that we will get in our next life that’s our karma we determine our body in the sense that we are by our actions deciding the kind of body that we will get in our future life and once we get that body we determine our body and then our body determines us that means our body determines us that is the body determines where we will be, how we will go forward so if we get a bird’s body then we function in a particular way in an aquatic body we function in a particular way the soul’s whole self-conception is determined by the kind of body that it has a soul in a duck’s body will quack a soul in a sparrow’s body may chirp a soul in a lion’s body will roar now the body exerts a kind of spell on the soul by which the soul becomes bound by which the soul becomes controlled for the soul to behave in that way the soul cannot not behave in the way in which the body has ordained it to behave that essentially is the condition of material nature that essentially is the spell in which the soul gets enraptured the same soul which might be say running like a cheetah in one body may move like a snail in the next body because that’s the kind of body it has acquired so we may be attracted to a particular body and we may be repelled by a particular body in the sense that say we may find a cheetah’s march very attractive and a snail’s movement very laborious but in either case you have to understand that it is the soul who by choosing to act in a particular way unconsciously chose to have acquired a particular body