Gita 03.27 – Mistaking initiation of action with its execution is illusion

Thank you prakrteh kriyamanani prakrteh kriyamanani by the action of material nature gunaih karmani sarveshah of the modes, karmani by the, all the works are performed ahankara mudhatma, the deluded soul kartaham itimanyate thinks himself to be the doer, so what exactly is being said in this verse is that the notion that we are the doers is an illusion which is created by ego, ahankara now interestingly in this section the whole point is to work with detachment and Krishna has talked about various reasons why Arjuna should work and the previous section was talking about how Arjuna has to set an example for others and he should not disturb others minds but engage them according to their nature, so then while that is going on suddenly why does Arjuna have to talk about Krishna have to talk about who is the doer, the flow may seem a little jerky over here in the Gita but that's because we just need to go that if we stay at the same surface level and understand the Gita the flow may seem illusive but if we go deeper the point that is being made is that one can work but one can do the work without getting entangled if one does not have the notion of doership and what creates the notion of doership is the idea of being a doer, the idea of thinking that I am that I am the doer or rather one can work without getting entangled and what creates entanglement is the idea that I am the doer, if I am the doer I can do things and I can get the results and I can enjoy so therefore I will do these things more and I will enjoy more but when one understands that I am not the doer then the impetus to do entangling things decreases so how does one get the realization that I am not the doer, the way to get that is by recognizing one's spiritual nature and recognizing that the spirit is transcendental to matter and therefore spirit cannot act the way matter acts that means that spirit in and of itself is transcendental whereas matter is material and the soul cannot manipulate matter, so the body is like a machine and the machine acts according certain programs and those programs at one level we can say they are the scripts in the body they are like the programs for a computer they are our past conditionings but at generic level they are the three modes of material nature and these modes impel people to act in different ways and thereby become entangled and the way to counter this is by learning the principles for being disentangled and the foremost among those principles is the principle of working with detachment and working with detachment means recognizing that I am not the doer sometimes when we are working on a computer we press a particular button for a particular program to start and it is very easy to think that when just by pressing one button a lot of things start happening, it's easy to think that I am the doer but actually all that we have done is just pressed a particular set of buttons over here and then many things start happening inside the computer things that we are not even aware of so how do those things happen we may think I made it happen but actually speaking sometimes we do the same things and we press the same set of buttons, we use the same set of commands and still nothing happens because there is something wrong inside the some software is missing or some software has become corrupted or some hardware problem is there basically we do the same thing but it doesn't work so say for example at a simplest level I want to send an email message then all that I have to do is type the message and press the send button and it goes but then there are so many things that may go wrong, internet connection might not be there or the program for sending the email itself may not work on the computer or send me some virus because of which I will not be able to turn on the computer only properly there are many ways in which things can go wrong so the important thing is to recognize that things don't necessarily happen the way we expect them to happen in terms of imagining that we are the doer of those things so for example I am speaking right now now all that I know is that I desire to speak something but then there is a whole complex mechanism by which speech happens and I have no knowledge of that mechanism how the thoughts in my mind get expressed even at a physical level if I say through the sound that I produce through my voice box this is practically impossible to understand and what to speak of for a person for a non-specialist person even for specialists the process of voice synthesis in all its individual nuances is not very well understood and that is the main reason why even sophisticated programs although there are some programs which can produce voice but a machine's voice is decidedly different from a human voice and the main reason for that difference is that the human voice has so many inflections which convey so many emotions so pauses inflections means emphasis on certain words de-emphasis on certain words and like that gradation of sounds which convey meaning and that sort of gradation is something which is extremely rare it's almost impossible for a machine to do and that's why machines are not suited for producing speech so this is of course a very gross and physical example of how activities in which we think we are the doers we are not the actual doers we may be partial doers so the point of this verse is not to argue that we are not doers at all no we obviously are doers but as Krishna will explain in the 18th chapter that we are not the only doers so we may we are doers in the sense that we initiate the action but we are not the doers in the sense that we can do all of it and therefore when we understand that I am not the doer then working with detachment becomes easier because we understand that I am not the producer of the result although I am a participator I am the initiator of the process which produces the result I am not the producer of the result and therefore I should not be attached and I should simply do my duty and because that is in my hand and if I do my duty I will be going spiritually irrespective of whether I get the result or not irrespective of whether that result is to my liking or not so Arjuna even if you in this particular stage don't like to fight don't think you alone are fighting and killing the relatives your body is a mechanism which will act according to material nature and you act in such a way that you grow spiritually and you let the body act in a way according to the principles of dharma and irrespective of whatever results come you will grow so to act non-egoistically is the way to stay free from bondage Krishna has talked about nirahamkara once in 2.71 nirbhavo nirahamkara sasvatipati achyati to work without ego and Krishna is repeating the same message over here when he tells Arjuna work without ego he is saying that those who work with ego are deluded mudhatma and they will become bound if you work without ego knowing that you are not the only doer of the action you will stay free from entanglement.