Bhagavagd Gita - Session 1 - Track 105

Let us first understand the meaning of Kurukshetra.

If Divine is the creator of the world, then one consequence could be that the world should be manifesting divine nature. If Divine is the creator, then the creation must bear the stamp of the creator. If the creation itself is the stuff of the creator, then in the creation also there must be the stamp of that stuff of the creator. If the creator is Satchitananda, we should expect in this world only ‘garden of Love’, this should be our expectation! If Divine is the creator who is Satchitananda, then his creation must be nothing but a garden of play! Everywhere there should be Satchitananda manifesting. This is the one logical conclusion that we can derive.

And yet we find the world is not like that! The world is not found by our experience to be a garden of play. On the contrary we find one very important phenomenon: struggle, battle, in which the very ‘life breath’ is produced by destruction: you cannot breathe without killing germs, constantly. Our own food is devouring: “anna” is the word, which is used in Sanskrit language for food that means that which is devoured. So, the very basis of our life, which is anna, is productive of life because it destroys itself: in the process of eating we destroy; and by destruction we live.

In the Upanishad there is a beautiful sentence to describe the world: “The eater eating is eaten”. You may think that you are eating something else, but you are not aware that you are also being eaten by somebody else: the eater normally thinks that he is eating somebody else, but he does not suspect that he himself is being eaten by somebody else. The whole world is nothing but “eater eating is eaten”. There is also a very great figure given in the Upanishads that God when He seats for His banquet, then ‘men of learning and men of war, (courage), are articles of His food, and that is the spice’. When He sits for His banquet, then Brahmins and Kshatriyas that means men of knowledge and men of war and courage, heroism, are the articles of His food. He lives by eating the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, and that is the spice in the food! His own food is dependent upon the articles of Brahmins and Kshatriyas and death is used as a kind of a sauce, so that the whole feast becomes very pleasant and tasty.

This is a great graphic picture of the world, as Sri Aurobindo says: “The Indian thought is bold and courageous; it does not shirk from deriving consequences from its premises”. If God is the only Reality, if the very stuff of the world is God and if there is this kind of a problem of ‘death, killing, eating, devourering’, then God must be in it! He Himself must be the ‘eater’; He Himself must be the producer of death. This consequence cannot be thought out or wished away, it is a necessary consequence and you must take it in our premise, in our solution of the problem. We should not run away from it, saying: “Oh! God cannot be like that”. But why not? Try to understand what this ‘massacre’ is. Try to understand what is this ‘eating’. What is death? Try to understand this, instead of running away from it, saying this is contrary of God.