Gita 17.28 Having no faith in anything higher makes performance of religious activities unfruitful

Transcript

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Bhagavad Gita 17.28 Krishna concludes this chapter which talks about the three modes as pertains to how they apply to religious activities in order to answer Arjuna’s question about the status of religion status of those who do religious activities but which are not within the which are not directly according to Shastra. 17.1 and Arjuna is and Arjuna asks that those who have faith but not according to scripture does that fall in goodness, passion or ignorance? So Krishna has answered that by analysing āhāra, yajña, dāna and tapa in the three modes of material nature and then he has talked about the gradual spiritualization of consciousness that happens through the practice of the recitation of Om Tat Sat the Om Tat Sat which represents redirecting our thoughts towards transcendence. So then here he concludes So, he says if without faith you have done yajña, hutam refers to yajña, dattam refers to dāna and tapas refer to austerity if it is done without the and what is the result? kṛtam chayāt asaditya ucyate pārtha asaditya ucyate that is considered to be asad, false, temporary not giving any constructive results either in a future birth or in this birth Krishna has talked similarly earlier about the importance of faith when he said saṁśayātmā vināśyati nāyam lokosti na paro asukhaṁ saṁśayātmanah so there he has said ajnaśca aśraddhānaśca that those who are ignorant those who are who are lacking in faith and those who are filled with doubt nāyam lokosti na paro either in this life or in the next asukhaṁ saṁśayātmanah they will not be able to get happiness either in this life or the next essentially Krishna is alerting us the reality that our actions have consequences those consequences mean that unless we free ourselves from the negativity associated with our actions we will suffer and the negativity ultimately is not just about the specific action that we do but the specific faith conception that we have which underlies that action it’s interesting that Krishna there also faithless and doubtful he classifies them in two different ways ajnaśca aśraddhānaśca saṁśayātmanah so aśraddhānaśca is one who lacks faith and one who is filled with doubt saṁśayātmanah one who is doubtful so faithless refers to a person who just doesn’t connect with positive reality because of lack of knowledge doubtful refers to a person who connects with positive reality but then is half-hearted about the process and thus stays caught in illusion saṁśayātmanah naśyadī nāyaṁ loko sthinaḥ paro na sukhaṁ saṁśayātmanah similarly it comes over here aśraddhīty ucyate vārtha that it’s considered to be temporary not connected with eternal reality na cittat pretyo no iha that pretya refers to after we leave the body no iha nor in this life so Krishna says that ultimately lack of faith is a serious problem it’s interesting we may say that faith everybody has some kind of faith, isn’t it? without faith nobody will act that is true at the same time what is the conception of the faith with which we are acting that means what is it that we are particularly doing that either elevates or brings down our consciousness what is it that we are trying to do to push our consciousness up that is what we need to consider if you do not have any faith at all that means we are going through the externals without even trying to develop the internals so if one gives charity or does austerity or performs sacrifices but does not even make an attempt to take one’s consciousness upwards does not even believe that does not even have any operational faith that these activities help in raising one’s consciousness upwards then that person is in serious trouble and that person is not going to be elevated at all we often talk negatively about ritualistic activities even ritualistic activities are not the problem it is if at least if one has some deference to tradition or this is what we have done in the past and this is what we are meant to do now so let me do it so should this force alarm us if we are doing activities mechanistically religious activities certainly it should cause concern that we at least try to invest some consciousness in what we are doing and we try at least to start doing them with some knowledge and with some effort to try to become more spiritual and with that increase spirituality try to move towards Krishna try to move towards transcendental reality however we understand it to be and to the extent we invest our consciousness to that extent even that investment of consciousness itself is an act of faith so to say that somebody has no faith means this context refers to that somebody doesn’t have any conception of any higher reality any higher power anything higher apart from what one is experiencing at a sensory level even the demons who want to enjoy sensual pleasures understand that there are higher powers which govern the world and they need to appease those higher powers in order to gain worldly pleasures also so we need to gain some understanding like that in order to move forward in our life Thank you