Understanding Arjuna’s ethical dilemma resulting from misdirected identification – Chaitanya Charan

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
of people in the world some people are wise and some are otherwise so the Bhagavad Gita is a guidebook which can help people to change from otherwise to wise and the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita begins with a universal question that universal question is what are we meant to do in life what are we to do Arjuna asks Krishna a defining question dharma samudha cheta, I do not know what I am to do dharma refers not just to some religious codes but dharma refers to the right thing to do now all of us have certain path set for our life say if we are students then ok we pass this grade and then go to next grade and next grade that’s the path set for us if we have a job this is how our life gets oriented around the job if we have a family then our responsibilities are accordingly set for us so normally when we are going by one road we don’t think too much about which turn to take as long as the road is straight but once we come to an intersection hey should I go here or should I go there that’s the time when confusion comes up similarly for us sometimes life brings us to intersection points where should I do this or should I do that we just don’t know and things can become very confusing at that time now what should we do that depends on ok so what should I do depends on who I think I am that means that suppose say somebody is a judge in a court and then they normally there are cases which come before them the accused is brought in front of them, the plaintiff complainant comes and a judge hears the case now imagine if a situation is there where the judge’s own son is there as accused now at that time what should the judge do the judge knows in advance this case the evidence is very strong against my son now if the judge identifies oneself primarily as a judge then the judge will say that no I am a judge, I have to do my duty I have to punish somebody who is a wrongdoer but if the judge identifies as a father he says this is my son how can I send him to jail I have to do what it takes to protect so then in that time of course practically speaking the judge would have to recuse you cannot judge a case like this because there is a conflict of interests but if there were no alternative then what the judge would do depends on who do we think we are so the judge identifies with being a judge more than being with a father the judge will say no, let the person be punished the judge identifies more with being a father than being a judge then the judge will then they will say that I will get my father the son off the hook somehow or the other so basically at the start of the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna faces a similar conflict there are different kinds of conflicts when you come to an intersection point, say for example today you came for a program now some of you had the option to do something else but you chose to come for the program so whether to come for or not that was a decision it was an intersection and you chose in a particular way now that could depend on your interest it could depend on your your plan for what you want to do in your how you want to grow in your life and you felt maybe this could help you learn something we all have certain basis on which we make some decisions and usually if we put a little bit of thought we can arrive at an intelligent decision but there are some situations which become very complex where there is like in this case it’s an ethical tension ethical tension means there are two courses of action and neither of them is clearly right or clearly wrong so at that time what do we do? so Arjuna had two duties pulling him he had his Kula Dharma and he had his Kshatriya Dharma his Kshatriya Dharma told him that you are a martial guardian of society therefore you have a duty to punish the wrongdoers whoever may be the wrongdoers even if they are your relatives even if they are your elders but this Kula Dharma is a part of a dynasty the Kuru dynasty the Kula Dharma made him feel how can I attack my how can I cause the destruction of my own dynasty that’s not to be done whatever I gain by that is it worth it so by his reasoning he comes to the conclusion initially that he is not worth it but in things if I don’t fight I won’t kill my loved ones but here also my loved ones are there they will have to suffer they will be killed because the opponents are bent on war or they will be disgraced and we will have to live in poverty in the forest and these rulers are unjust and they will do much more atrocities if they have no one to challenge them so at this point his question is what is Dharma so two Dharmas are pulling him to different directions he has come to an intersection and he asks what should I do and now Krishna’s answer so this is a universal question the specifics of some battle that happened 5000 years ago may not seem relevant for us but the Bhagavad Gita has been found relevant by millions for millennia because the question it addresses has very little to do with the specific historical context the question it addresses is universal so we could say the first section is there is a confusion about duty and to get to resolve the confusion about duty the first thing Krishna does is clarification of identity what we should do is determined by who we are now we can have various levels of identity say for example we might say that I am a male or a female I am an Indian I am an American I am a South Indian I am a North American whatever so if we consider our identities we could frame them in different contexts if we connect with our parents we say this is my surname this is my name so now Krishna so these are we have various what we could say functional identities functional identity means in terms of the function that we do in life so I might say I am a software engineer that is my functional identity somebody might say I am a mother that is my functional identity now the same person who says I am a mother or a father before they had a child they were not a mother or father so based on a function we might get an identity similarly we can say that based on the kind of body that we have which country which I am short person I am a tall person we have various identities so Krishna says that below underlying all these functional identities is our fundamental identity and at the level of functional identities there can be confusion Einstein said that problems can’t be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them so Arjuna’s confusion was one level of functional identity is I am a Kurunandana I am a member of the Kuru dynasty another level of functional identity is I am a Kshatriya I am meant to fight against aggressors so both are at the same level of consciousness because in both cases he is identifying with his external physical situation so Krishna says below these two functional identities there is a fundamental identity and fundamental identity remains unchanging no matter how many functional identities change you might say I am an Indian but we might get American citizen we become American we might be software professional we might decide to become a professor so we can change so many things I was in Canada I met one person person has changed his or her whatever his or her gender six times till now there are people who change the gender but six times they changed not this this this so now so we can change so many things about ourselves but beyond all this there is a fundamental identity which remains the same and that identity is at the spiritual level this comes from a fundamental level of I-ness that I who is the I who says I am an Indian I am an American so we can see that the externals keep changing our roles in society keep changing our self conceptions according to the role keep changing but below that the self remains the same and that self is the soul the soul or Atma in the Bhagavad Gita says that is who we essentially are and Krishna says if you understand yourself as the soul that is where your growth in knowledge begins and then what happens if you understand we are the souls basically we go deeper into our own identification