What Is Dharma Why Do We Need It And How Do We Choose It – Chaitanya Charan

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
How can we choose dharma over our own lower needs, lower consciousness over ourselves? So if we could maybe just dive straight in from there.
What is dharma to begin with? Why do we need it? Okay. So now the word dharma is famously multivalent. It has many different meanings.
So the commonly known meanings of dharma is religion. We have Hindu dharma, we have various Christian dharma. That is one way in which the word is used.
It is also one valid usage, but that is not the only usage. Another word of meaning of dharma is duty. That this is my dharma.
So parents take care of the children. When children grow up, they have the dharma to take care of their parents like that. That could be a dharma.
Dharma can be referred to duty. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Krishna asks, I want to know what is my dharma, I am bewildered. He’s basically asking, what is the right thing to do? So you could say dharma can also be translated as the right thing to do.
It could be. Now going deeper, we want to say dharma, if it comes from the root, dhri, dhri means to sustain. So dharma is the activity which sustains us.
The activity that enables us to be who we are. So in that sense, we don’t really choose dharma over ourselves. It is rather by choosing dharma, we become ourselves.
We become the fullest manifestation of who we are by dharma. So dharma is not a set of religious rituals and certainly not a set of don’t do this and don’t do that and don’t do this. So yes, there are some pleasures we do need to abstain from.
But then that is required for any activity in life. If there’s an athlete, the athletes, they have to have a strict regimen. They regulate their diet.
They do so much discipline so that they can be good athletes. So in any field to become something worthwhile, there are some things we abstain from. But what dharma is about is that, since I want to sacrifice, so I’ll just introduce one concept.
So as I said, the word dharma has many meanings. The Bhagavad Gita talks about three modes. There is sattva, rajas and tamas.
Goodness, passion and ignorance. So goodness can be associated with clarity and passion with energy and ignorance with apathy. So apathy, I don’t care about anything.
Energy and clarity, broadly speaking. So one way to understand these modes is that you can say some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen and some people wonder what happened.
Wonder what happened. So that’s goodness, passion and ignorance for you. So broadly we could say dharma in this context is what? That where sattva guides and regulates rajas and tamas.
Sattva regulates and guides rajas and tamas. So we have clarity and then we direct our energy. And apathy is not always a bad thing.
Because if we start getting affected by everything that happens around us, we’ll be overwhelmed. To some extent we have to turn off. We have to tune off.
For example, sleeping. If we kept being worried about all the things that could go wrong in our life, we’ll not be able to sleep. So even the tamoguna is not a bad thing.
If there were no tamoguna, we would not be able to sleep. To some extent when we go to sleep, we are apathetic about what is happening around us. And that is required.
But the key is what is dominating. Is it apathy that is dominating or defining a person? Is it simply energy or is it clarity? So dharma is that situation when energy and apathy are guided by clarity. Okay, this is what I’m going to focus on and this is what I’m not going to focus on.
So then what this means is dharma is those set of activities that help us, those set of activities that help clarity to become stronger. And then guide energy and apathy accordingly. So this is one more meaning of dharma.
Now you could go at a higher level. Dharma culminates in bhakti. So dharma at one level is being who we are.
But at our core we are also spiritual beings and we are part of the supreme spiritual being. So we could say the paradharma, the culmination, the summit of dharma, the Shrimad Bhagavatam says is bhakti. So it says dharma is a multilevel meaning.
And at an operational level, at the level we are discussing today is that, say if a person is attacked, a basic right of all living beings is to live, to survive. And to practice what they believe. So if that is not being allowed, that is also dharma being violated.
So in one sense, dharma is a very universal concept. It is not a sectarian concept at all. It talks about our essential nature and how we can live in harmony with that.