Gita 01.29 Know which emotion is mental and which spiritual not just by content, but also by context and consequence

Bhagavad Gita 1.29 Here Krishna is Bhagavad Gita is going on and Arjuna is speaking Arjuna is expressing the profound distress of his heart and he states that that his whole body is trembling that is his hair is standing on end Gandiva is the Gandiva is slipping from his hands his whole skin is burning for us our body is a very vivid resident location for our consciousness that means we experience very strongly whatever happens in the body although we are souls who are essentially transcendental the soul's consciousness is located in the body and through the body it is rooted outwards so because of that when we any changes happen at the physical level we notice them now for example when the changes happen at the level of the mind we experience them but we may not notice them for example if we feel fearful if we are worried about something the emotion of worry will be there within us but we will not feel that emotion immediately because we are letting ourselves because we will simply get carried away by that emotion and there is experience of something and there is consciousness awareness of what we are experiencing we will be worried but we may not even realize that we are being worried obviously we will be in anxiety but we will be so caught in the horror movie that the mind is broadcasted that we will not even notice that it is casting a horror movie we may just go along with it if we don't want that to happen then we need to step back and observe what is happening and observation, self observation becomes much easier when some effect is seen at the physical level than simply observing the cause at the mental level if our hand starts trembling then we will notice it much more than if simply we are feeling fear at the level of our mind and Arjuna when he starts expressing what has gone wrong with him the result of that experience is that he cannot move forward anymore he cannot do anything constructively he is paralyzed normally the word paralysis is used in two senses one is to refer to the disease where we become paralyzed by inability to move certain bodily limbs or it can refer also to the situation where we get carried away by certain emotions those emotions control us so much that we cannot function properly that is paralysis can be mental or paralysis can be physical it is physically induced when the body literally cannot function it is mentally induced when emotion grips us so much that it cannot prevent us from functioning properly Arjuna is of course not entirely paralyzed because he is speaking and he is noticing what is happening to him but this is a precursor what is going to right now is a precursor what is going to happen to him that he will physically become reluctant and then stop fighting by putting aside his bow let's look more closely at the symptoms that he is mentioning my body is trembling that his skin is standing on it so the bow that he was holding is slipping from his hands my skin is burning so the point here is that everyone of us has to face difficult situations in life and beyond the physical level is the mental and the spiritual so our emotions may come from the level of the mind especially when they are surfacing at the level of the body in terms of the effects they may be coming from a mental level or from a spiritual level that means we may be experiencing ecstasy at the spiritual level and that may also cause horripilation these symptoms when somebody is ecstatic also their physical things change dramatically at the physical level in terms of awareness, in terms of agony in terms of whatever it is that they are experiencing so for each one of us we have to learn to distinguish between what is mental and what is spiritual and how do we go about distinguishing that for that we absolutely need to have some amount of philosophical education without proper philosophical awareness we will simply get carried away by the emotions that are surfacing in our mind we will not be able to act constructively we may mistake the mental to be the spiritual so Shri Prabhupada explains that these symptoms can come out of they can come out of fear in the case of Arjuna right now he is not really absorbed in Krishna so his emotions can't be said to be spiritual therefore it's a safe bet to say that they are coming from the physical mental platform from the mental platform so Krupaya Paraya Vishto it was mentioned right before Arjuna's speech Ashwagandha began speaking it is said that Arjuna was overwhelmed by compassion so to that fear, Arjuna's fear is not so much of losing his own life or as as the loss of life of his loved ones of the loss of the whole generation of people of multiple generations of people who are assembled on the war field that they will all die in one go and then a catastrophe will result by that not only will their death be a catastrophe but from their death will be the beginning of further catastrophes what all catastrophes Arjuna envisions that he will describe in due course but here Arjuna's intense emotions are described and we can discern a particular emotion by looking at the context and the consequence so to know what emotion is to know which emotion is material which is spiritual we need to look not only at the content because the content can be similar for emotions induced by loving ecstasy and by fearful agony so we have to look at not just the content but also the context it is clearly no no contact with Krishna in a devotional sense of devotional absorption over here and although Arjuna is speaking to Krishna he is not really in Krishna consciousness at this point he is in self consciousness or he is in context consciousness we could say thinking of what is happening on the battlefield and if you look at the consequence the consequence will be that he will put aside his bow he will actually give up his dharmic duty and giving up his dharmic duty means that what he is experiencing is taking him away from dharma and if the emotion is spiritual it will take us towards Krishna it will take us towards dharma since Arjuna is going in the opposite direction can safely infer that the emotion he is experiencing is not spiritual it is mundane it is emerging from the mind.