Gita 04.06 – Don’t presume familiarity with concepts due to familiarity with terms

Material location Krishna is speaking here the essential wisdom about his nature about how he is transcendental to matter and material existence and how he appears within material existence ajo apisan avyayatma ajo is unborn avyayatma he is imperishable now ajo and avyayatma these are characteristics even of the soul but Krishna the next line, so 4.6b describes a characteristic that is universal bhutanam eshwaropisan he is the eshwara he is the lord of all living beings prakritim svam adhishthaya prakritim svam he manifests by his own prakritim prakritim adhishthaya so adhishtha is the controller so now adhishtha so he is the controller of that energy prakritim svam adhishthaya sambhavami krishna sambhavami the word sambhav literally means to create atma mayaya so krishna creates his own appearance within this world by his internal potency so he appears in this world but how does he appear it is by his internal potency so the concept of incarnation is there within not just the vedic tradition but also the christian tradition in fact the english word incarnation was first used for jesus appearance in this world and the idea was that in the christian tradition god is very remote and inaccessible so the unknowable god became knowable through the personality of jesus so in the nicene creed of the christian or the catholic church they say that the divinity of god manifested the humanity of jesus now what this means is the christians acknowledge that jesus came as a human being that means jesus had a body that shed blood and when he was crucified the nails did pierce his body and cause blood to come out so he had a material body and in that sense the word incarnation is appropriate because incarnation means flesh so we have carnal desires desires of the flesh, flesh desires for sense gratification or we have carnivorous animals the animals that eat flesh so incarnation means to come in flesh now unlike that conception of incarnation wherein somebody who is divine in some way he manifests within the material form the bhagavad gita's understanding of the appearance of the lord is different and although the word incarnation is used sometimes to refer to the lord's manifestation in this world it's not the most appropriate word why is it not appropriate because Krishna doesn't come in a material form that is one of the defining differences in the understanding of Krishna's form between the impersonalist and the personalist the impersonalist say that when the brahman accepts the contact of the mode of goodness then the brahman manifests as bhagwan in that sense they say bhagwan is also the conception of bhagwan and even the manifestation of bhagwan is a result of it is a result of it is something which has to be transcended eventually because it is also a product of illusion now how do we go beyond this illusion by realizing the impersonal brahman the formless undifferentiated truth to be the highest truth but Krishna has said Krishna will say there is no truth higher than me Krishna is nowhere in this section talking about some higher truth within himself so there he is saying he he is saying that he manifests through the material nature and by his internal potency so although Krishna comes in the material world he does not assume a material form he still remains transcendental and how he remains transcendental is by his miraculous internal potency so just as for a person who is in charge of electric power generator the electricity whether it heats using a heater or whether it cools using a cooler from the point of view of the electric power generator it is the same electricity and if the device at the other end is adjusted then the same port or the same output point where the cooling effect was happening there a heating effect can happen so similarly when we understand that from Krishna's point of view his material energy and his spiritual energy are similar they are both energies for him and although material energy in one sense clouds us with forgetfulness whereas spiritual energy clears us clarifies our conceptions with illumination but from Krishna's perspective both are his energies doing his will according to the desire of the soul so when Krishna wants he can just readjust things and he can manifest the material and the spiritual he can be in contact, he can be in this material world without becoming affected by its material atmosphere so it is by Krishna's miraculous potency that when he manifests even those with material vision can't see him in the sense that they do see him but they don't understand his position that requires special blessings so Krishna is telling over here it is I who take up who manifest according to my own nature now when we say that the word incarnation is not appropriate to describe the divine descent then why does Shri Prabhupada use it Shri Prabhupada had a very difficult task of presenting a philosophy to an audience that was culturally, intellectually religiously, linguistically educationally very different from the original audience of the Bhagavad Gita and to present the Gita's message to such an audience was an extraordinary challenge and Prabhupada succeeded in that challenge that itself is very remarkable and so he tried to keep things as simple as possible and that's why when Shri Prabhupada presented things in English he often chose familiar terms which were intelligible to his audience even if they interpreted them wrongly so Prabhupada used those terms and then clarified their meaning or redefined their meanings for the purposes of our philosophy so now if we imagine there is some big object, a big suitcase to be lifted now this suitcase does not have a handle it's very difficult to lift or the handle is hidden somewhere and we can't detect the handle it's difficult to lift the suitcase so the suitcase we have to lift is the inner understanding of the term so understanding the concept of avatar of the descent of the divine into this world as explained in the Gita and the Vedic literature that is difficult so that's like lifting a suitcase intellectually just as a handle makes it easier to lift the suitcase similarly having a term a handy term to describe the concept helps us to access the concept to analyze the concept, to verbalize the concept to comprehend the concept so Prabhupada would use Prabhupada offered familiar handles for unfamiliar ideas that means that instead of doubly overwhelming his audience with unfamiliar concept and unfamiliar term the concepts are internal, the concepts are mental or intellectual whereas terms are external, they are verbal so if both the verbal and the intellectual are unfamiliar then it's a double unfamiliarity which might be extremely overwhelming, people may stop reading the book I can't comprehend this only, there are so many unfamiliar Sanskrit terms so Prabhupada kept the terms familiar by offering familiar handles to people but then he offered them he offered them commentaries where he clarified the meanings and in that way he made the very difficult to understand message understandable that is his sheer genius so now if we want to be more cautious we can also use the word incarnation and we can clarify the meaning or another word which you can use is descent so that which is higher up in the transcendental realm that absolute truth manifests descends to this world now of course nowadays the word avatar has also become common thanks to video games or other such entertainment portals where people have their entertainment and other portals where people have their avatars so again the word avatar is used not in the philosophically precise sense but still the word has become familiar so we can use the word avatar also and clarify its meaning if required but the important point is to recognize that even when Krishna descends to this world he is not affected he still remains transcendental and when he descends and why he descends will be mentioned in the next verse, thank you.