Gita 02.01 The intensity of Arjuna’s emotion conveys the potency of Krishna’s solacing wisdom

Thank you the first verse the second chapter which is describing the in summary the increased condition to address which the Gita was spoken so so he was overwhelmed by Krupaya by great feeling of distress he was overwhelmed by that he was possessed by it and he was crying because of that his eyes were filled with tears so there is a difference between the experience of emotion and the expression of emotion and there is the internal experience of grief and the external experience expression of grief by crying or in any appropriate way there may or may not be one to one correlation between the two sometimes some people might express grief as a profession there are a class of people called Rudalis people who are criers so when when some big person would pass away at the funeral ceremony these people would come and cry so just as while they were alive people would sing their praises and people would be paid for singing the praises similarly people would be paid for crying now because these people are professional criers or grievers so they may have a lot of expression of emotion but there will be very little any experience of emotion because they may not even know the person for whom they are crying very well they just hired and paid for that this is an example of the expression of emotion without the experience of emotion going to the other extreme some people may be very stoic and they may be able to conceal their emotions nobody is actually unfeeling although different people based on their particular nature may have different levels of capacity to feel so some people may be so may have very little emotions but even their emotions but they don't express those emotions some people are said to wear their emotions on their sleeves that means anything that happens immediately they become emotional they start crying so now if we consider that perspective then it's understandable that actually we would not be able to focus that much on overcoming those people who find it very difficult to overcome their emotions other extreme are stoic or stolid people stoic people they will go through distress even adversity with heroic unemotionality for them the capacity to conceal their emotion or even to repress their emotion that is a mark of their heroism so conceal means the emotion is there and they don't feel it or repress means that they don't even acknowledge the emotion is there at all so we could we could have the emotion and not acknowledge it to others that would be concealed we could have the emotion and not want to acknowledge it to ourselves also that would be like repression so the other extreme could be that the person feels but doesn't express and a third category could be that person doesn't express and doesn't feel at all so say this could happen that person has no consciousness invested in that particular object say cricket match between India and Pakistan raises the emotional temperature to extraordinary highs in both Indians and Pakistanis to volatile stormy highs but among Indian Americans who don't even know much what cricket is then there is very little or if any emotion invested no matter whether a particular match is lost or won by a particular country so there is no emotion and there is no expression of emotion so if you look at these four categories the internal experience and the outer experience we could have no experience no expression we could have experience but no expression we could have expression but no experience and we could have both experience and expression now for a warrior like Arjuna who is in a battlefield trained to be a battle-hardened warrior intimidation is seen as a strategic strength and vulnerability is seen as a sign of weakness serious sometimes even fatal weakness so that means if someone shows themselves to be vulnerable they might get that emotional vulnerability could be exploited by the opponent so hit where it hurts that's a principle in say boxing in any sports where there are opponents who want to get the upper hand the opponent is punching the boxer and the opponent sees that oh this is where the boxer is weak and they will punch more and more over there similarly if we consider the reality that one of us is and he is under great emotional stress the emotion we experience internally is so great that it just cannot be concealed thus Arjuna is crying in the middle of the battlefield for everyone to see and grief suppose somebody were crying somebody goes to a child is crying very very loudly fervently feverishly and then if the mother goes and speaks some words to the child consoling and the child becomes silent relatives and observers think mother is very expert or if a person is in terrible grief and they go for some grief counseling and they go in in utter heartbreaking distress crying and they come out peaceful and composed you think oh this grief counselor is expert counselor similarly by considering how greatly Arjuna was affected by the emotion that he who was a warrior trained to conceal emotions that might be considered as weak was publicly exhibiting emotions of with his tears of fear and grief and lamentation with his tears so we can appreciate the empowering and solacing nature of the wisdom of the Gita that it relieved Arjuna of his monumental distress of his epic distress so the Mahabharata is epic and within that epic Arjuna experienced epic distress and Krishna helps him to become relieved of that epic distress Thank you.