Gita 03.10 – Don’t let familiarity take the mystery out of nature

Thank you Bhagavad Gita 3.10 Sahayagyaha Praja Srishtva Hooravarcha Prajapati Anena Prasavishyadvam Eshavostvayishta Kamadhuk Sahayagyaha with sacrifice Praja Srishtva the Praja was created Hooravarcha Prajapati Hooravarcha it was said Prajapati Prajapati can be referred with Brahma to Vishnu we will discuss that Anena Prasavishyadvam with this Prasavishyadvam prosper Eshavostvayishta Kamadhuk let this be your Kamadhuk your desire fulfilling cow so from this verse onwards Krishna is talking about the principle of sacrifice and its historical origin at the start of creation so it is co-existent with creation so what exactly is Krishna saying over here that Sahayagyaha Yajna was created along with Srishtva Sahayagyaha Praja Srishtva Praja that which is born in vernacular often Praja is used to refer to the citizens the population that is true but etymologically it refers to those who are born so Sahayagyaha Praja Srishtva so when all living beings were created at that time Yajna was created with them this is an interesting concept one of the many problems with reductionistic or atheistic ideas of the origins of life and origins of everything especially is that there are so many life forms and they often require different kinds of nourishments so the life forms are present and their nourishments are also present now the reductionist attitude would be that only those life forms developed and survived for which there are proper food there that is true but that doesn't still explain how that food came about and how those life forms came about and even if we were able to reconstruct explanation like that still a more fundamental question would remain that actually there is a fine tuned mechanism in this universe by which the necessities of all living beings are provided for so who is the provider and what is the mechanism by which these things are provided for Krishna is here talking about that mechanism and he is saying that actually everything is ultimately provided for by his arrangement now let this be your desire fulfilling cow now how exactly can yajna be a desire fulfilling cow what does it mean actually to understand that part let's look at the principle again of what it means to say that there is a desire fulfilling cow it simply means that actually there is no now the idea of kaam dhok that there is first of all let's look at what that term means in general and then specific in this context the cow is considered a very sacred animal in vedic culture and among the many reasons most important is that the cow is very dear to Krishna Krishna is a person and as a person he has his likes and dislikes he has his preferences so one of his preferences is a cow because Krishna loves cows those who love Krishna also love cows so naturally vedic culture also is centered around it gives a due place to the cow first the cow provides milk just as our mother provides us milk and we are nourished by cow's milk similarly how a mother nourishes and in that sense also the cow is special now going further there are some very potent cows which are not available now which are kaam dhok so these are rare cows which can be obtained with by those who can perform great tapasyas and those who can appease the gods and then these are kaam dhok whatever is required that can come from that cow so for example Vasishtha Rishi in the Ramayana had that kind of cow and that's why Vishwamitra when he was a king earlier Kaushika at that time when he saw that this sage has something which I don't have and this sage is able to I have brought my full army here and this sage is so easily feeding the full army something which would have been very difficult for me also to do so he felt so impressed by it that he desired to have that for himself and how could he get it so he tried to order and take it because he saw that the cow could produce anything and everything all varieties of food not just milk and he tried to grab the cow and Vasishtha being a sage did not raise force to stop it and that cow became distressed and said why are you letting me go have I displeased you anyway? he said no no you have served me very well but I cannot raise weapons against a king I am a Brahmana you just order me to stop him and I will do the stopping I am waiting for your orders he said ok protect yourself and immediately from the cow's body great soldiers appeared formidable warriors with arms and armors and then they crushed Vasishtha's forces and then those forces were routed and had to flee so Kaamadhoog a cow is something which can produce everything especially when that cow is special in terms of being a Kaamadhoog now today's logical skeptical mind may consider such a cow to be just a product of mythological imagination but the point is that we don't even know exactly how things are produced in nature we try to replicate it but still there is a mystical element to it which is not entirely removable Einstein said there are two ways of looking at the world one is to see a thing as a miracle and the other is to see everything as a miracle so it is a miraculous thing that just the mud on the ground can be converted into mangoes and the grass on the ground can be converted into milk so the inconceivable ability of God when God empowers certain beings for certain particular functions those beings do those functions and still the fact that they are able to do those functions are itself amazing if we think of it with a open mind and don't let the familiarity take the mystery out of it just because something happens regularly doesn't make it less mysterious less astonishing just because there are so many mango trees which produce mangoes it's ordinary in the sense that it occurs regularly but still it's extraordinary in the sense of the magical transformation that is happening the same God who has made that sort of things happen through certain systems can supersede those systems or can put multiple systems into one mechanism so an ordinary cow can eat grass and produce milk but an extraordinary cow a cow like a Kamdhuk with mystical powers can by the arrangement of God have multiple mechanisms integrated and that way can produce multiple things so rather than seeing these things as impossible from mechanical point of view we look at them as possible from the point of view of the person who has made all these mechanisms and that way we can avoid it doesn't have to be actually something which we have to be too skeptical about now Yajna is similarly a Kamdhuk because Yajna is to be done for the purpose and the pleasure of Lord Vishnu so when we do Yajna that is a means by which we please Lord Vishnu and he is the fulfiller of all desires so when we please him through the performance of Yajna then that is a mechanism which is being created for human beings to activate the higher powers of the higher beings ultimately the highest being Lord Vishnu or Krishna and by that arrange to fulfill their desires so therefore the key thing here to recognize is that we are actually working for we have to do our work but we do our work in the spirit of sacrifice and we do sacrifice separately and this is a whole subtle mechanism that is being created by which we can actually learn to acquire the higher truths we can learn to acquire not just the higher truths get faith in the higher truth of the subtler mechanisms in the cosmos but also gain access to our necessities through the mechanism of Yajna so by when we perform a Yajna for a particular Devata or when we perform a Yajna for a particular particular purpose then that Devata and that purpose are fulfilled by the higher arrangements of the universe how we can understand those higher arrangements in our contemporary terms we will discuss in our next.