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God Is the Magician: The Two Natures of Creation in Bhagavad Gita Chapter 7

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Swami Jyotirmayananda opens this class before the invocation has even been chanted, with an image rather than an argument. Think of God as a magician. The magical power and the magician are not two entities; they are one and the same. But if you are deluded by the magic, you begin to study the phenomenon in terms of duality — there is the magician over here, and over there is his magical power. That split is the whole of what the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita sets out to close. The chapter is called Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga. Swamiji separates the two words at once, because the whole shape of the class depends on it. Jnana is intellectual knowledge. Vijnana is realization, intuitive revelation. You begin with the first and you end with the second. Stay only with the first and you become Bakasura — a demon of the Mahabharata whose name Swamiji turns into a diagnosis: lots of words, nothing to experience. From there the lecture works through verses four to eight in order, and each one does a specific job. Verse four takes creation apart into eight inert divisions. Verse five names the conscious nature that makes any of it perceive. Verse six draws the consequence: both natures rise out of Brahman and dissolve back into it. Verse seven gives the image the whole class is built to deliver — everything strung on a single thread, like gems on a string. And verse eight turns the abstraction into something you can taste, see and hear before the day is out. What makes this lecture worth an hour is that the second half refuses to stay theoretical. Having established that the world is a long dream, Swamiji does not leave you there. He spends the closing twenty minutes on where the thread is already touching you: in a taste, in sunlight, in the sound of Om inside every word you speak. The practical claim he makes is unusually blunt for a Vedanta class, and it is the sentence to carry home.

Passage index

The eight divisions of the lower nature

Verse four is a list, and Swamiji reads it as a list: earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intellect, ego. Eight divisions, and every one of them belongs to apara prakriti, the lower nature. The word that governs them all is jada, inert. He makes the inertness concrete rather than technical. “All the rocks stay together. They don’t know each other. They have never shaken hands with each other.” That is the condition of everything at the material level. There is no perception in it. The five elements are not the beginning of the chain. Their original state is subtle, and those subtle states are the tanmatras. Swamiji offers the literal sense: a tanmatra is a measure of tat, a particle of Brahman — and he notes drily that people now talk about God particles. Out of the subtle elements come the gross ones, the earth you walk on and the water you drink. Out of them, too, come mind, intellect and ego. That last inclusion is the one that unsettles people, and Swamiji states it without softening. When we talk of matter, matter includes intellect, ego, senses, mind and the vital forces. All of this has no intelligence in it. Intelligence arrives only through the soul.

Mind, intellect, and why a muddy mind cannot reflect

Having placed mind and intellect on the inert side of the ledger, Swamiji describes what they actually do. The mind stocks the information the senses bring in and offers it to the intellect for evaluation. Then it listens for the intellect’s verdict and carries that verdict back out to the senses. The mind sits between the two, working by sankalpa and vikalpa, turning a problem to and fro and bringing imagination into it. Into this he drops a Hindi phrase that carries the practical instruction of the section: amal karo. He opens it twice, deliberately. The first sense is to reflect on what you have received — a teacher has given you an instruction, so work on it. The second sense turns on the word itself: allow your mind to become free of impurities, of malice, anger and greed. To the extent that the mind becomes free, the mind grasps. The two senses are not separate instructions. They are one instruction stated from two ends, and Swamiji makes the connection explicit. How can you really reflect on something if you keep your mind muddy? A surface cannot show you an image while it is churned. The clearing is not preparation for the reflection; it is what makes reflection possible at all.

Viveka-buddhi, and the laughter that started a war

What that clearing produces has a name: viveka-buddhi. Swamiji is precise about what it is not. It is not cleverness, and it is not more information. It is the subtle, intuitive intellect that shows the difference between jada and cetana, between the not-Self and the Self — the intellect that reveals that you are consciousness, that you are not body, not mind, not intellect, not even ego. Then he does what this teaching does best, and turns the faculty into a character. Draupadi, in the Mahabharata, is viveka-buddhi. She is married to the five Pandavas: Arjuna is the soul, and his four brothers are the four purusharthas, the aims of self-effort — dharma, artha, kama, moksha. Duryodhana is tamasika ego. The episode Swamiji selects is small and famous. Duryodhana, wandering the palace that Yudhishthira built — the building raised by the higher Self within you — bangs his head against walls and slips into a pool of water. And Draupadi laughs. That laughter, Swamiji says, becomes the cause of the entire Mahabharata. Read allegorically, the sequence is exact. For a long time the ego has been bragging about itself unopposed. Then discernment develops far enough to shine in the mind, takes an overview of the world and everything the world can give, and sees that all of it is transient and dreamlike. At that point discernment laughs at the ego. Swamiji summarises it in three Sanskrit words that a discerning person eventually arrives at: “sarvaṃ duḥkhaṃ vivekinaḥ”. And he adds the line that reframes the whole allegory — now the real problem starts. The laughter is not the end of the trouble. It is the beginning of a life lived with purpose.

Three stages of prakriti, and the God who did not create anything

Verse five names para prakriti, the higher nature, the soul by which this entire world is sustained. Swamiji then goes one level deeper than the verse, into how the one Brahman produces the appearance of many. Prakriti comes in three stages, according to which guna predominates. Sattva predominating is maya, and through maya Brahman plays the role of Isvara, appearing as Brahma the creator, Vishnu the sustainer and Shiva the destroyer. Rajas predominating is avidya, and through avidya Brahman becomes the countless jivas evolving through the world of matter. Tamas predominating is tamasi prakriti, and through it Brahman becomes the panchabhutas and everything composed of them. Here the class makes its sharpest turn. The God who rules over the world with omniscience and omnipotence, attending to every detail — that, Swamiji says, is not the real description of God. To stop there is to degrade God. He explains it through the dream you had last night: inside the dream, the sky and the earth and the stars are real, and the mind can quite reasonably marvel at whoever made them. The praise is sincere and it is perfectly practical at that level. Then he breaks the frame in six words. “But God didn’t create anything. Wake up.” This was a magic show. The point is not that devotion is mistaken; it is that the God addressed from inside the dream is smaller than the reality, and waking is available.

Verse 6, the Upanishad, and the long dream

Verse six draws the conclusion. These two natures, apara and para, inert matter and conscious spirit, are the source of all beings; therefore Brahman is the origin of the entire world as well as its dissolution. Swamiji sets the verse beside the Taittiriya Upanishad, where Bhrigu goes to his father Varuna, who is also his guru, and asks to be taught Brahman. The answer is a formula rather than a definition: that from which all these beings are born, by which, being born, they live, and into which they return. The model he offers for it is again the dream. The entire dream world arises out of your consciousness, is sustained by your consciousness, and dissolves into your consciousness. The waking world differs from a dream in duration, not in kind. Swamiji calls it dirgha-svapna, the long dream, and offers a simple test that costs nothing: look at how things were ten years back, then fifty, then five hundred, then five thousand, five million, five trillion. Somewhere in that series the mind gives out. “Time, space are relative terms.” And once the world is seen as a long dream, the goal changes shape. Your goal becomes awakening. Live to attain enlightenment, or go on falling from one folly to another. He pairs this with the Upanishad’s next instruction, tapo brahmeti, and corrects the usual translation. Austerity is normally understood as physical hardship. Real austerity is not a kind of physical pain. “Real austerity is simply regaining your vision” — and if your vision is defective you see two moons, and everywhere there is trouble. The repair belongs to the seeing, not to the world being seen.

The thread

Verse seven is where the lecture has been going. There is nothing here higher, and all this is strung on Me like clusters of gems on a string. The mind, Swamiji notes, is built to see things as different — one is an enemy who should go to hell, one is a friend who should move into my own house. But consider the dream once more. Things in a dream seem to occupy different places at different times, yet the entire dream is immediate in a single consciousness. Your waking consciousness is what strings together all the multiplicity that goes to constitute the dream. He then applies it at a level that is easier to feel than to argue with. The buzzing of a little insect and the singing of mosquitoes, the dancing of peacocks, the rumbling of clouds, rising mountains, shimmering snows, surging oceans — the whole panorama is strung together. So are your fingers, your bones, your blood, your marrow, your nervous system. “That mystic thread is God.” And then the image that gives the section its warmth. Wear a mala and come to realize that the thread which has gone through it is cintamani, the wish-fulfilling gem, and find how the neck is thrilled by the touch of every bead. If you really knew this, he asks, would you be as miserable as everybody is?

Where it lands: joy is not a reward for better conditions

The closing third of the class is the part to return to. Swamiji states the claim directly: “The world experience should be thrilling to your mind.” Unless you evolve that art, he says, you are not doing something substantial for yourself — no matter how intellectual you may be, no matter how progressive. He then blocks the obvious escape route. Joy is not to be made conditional on happening. Something happened five years ago; if it happens again, then I will be happy. But who knows, maybe in ten years. He is equally unimpressed by the opposite habit, the daily diet of news that concludes the old days were good and the misery is increasing. He is careful here: he is not underestimating the problems or the misery of the world. He is pointing out that the world will always have all of this going on, and that alongside it your existence, your soul, your ability to look at things in a divine way, are not restricted by what happens. That understanding, growing, becomes bhakti, divine love, and it leads toward apavarga, liberation. Once liberation and bhakti become the goal, adversity becomes a challenge — the way examinations are a challenge that bright students face boldly. Swamiji goes further than most would: “Hell doesn’t exist.” The expansion he describes is concrete. A heart that no longer locates the family in one area. You look into the eyes of a bird, of a lamb, and you do not ask in what way this belongs to my family. Look at all living, at all life; you cannot be separated from any life, however much the mind may imagine you are totally different.

Illustration

Verse 8: taste, light, sound, and self-effort

Verse eight is the practical proof of everything above, and Swamiji takes it item by item. I am the rasa, the sapidity in the waters. Put sugarcane in your mouth and notice what happens; then try to have the understanding that a divine taste is resonating within it. Taste is broad — the taste of food, the relief of water when you are thirsty, and satsanga-rati, the taste of listening to good things in good company. You do not need to ask anyone whether you are having a good taste. You recognize it. And whenever you recognize it, be thrilled: you are being touched by God. This closes the door on a familiar complaint. Do not say to yourself, when will I have darshana of God, I have been practicing such a long time. Every touch of joy, every little opening to expansion, is coming closer to God. “God is All-Permeating. It’s a matter of becoming aware.” Then light. See the sun instead of naming it — the glorious sun showering its rays over us, filling the world with energy — and see that at night the same sun has turned itself into nectar in rays, soft and graceful. In the sun and the moon, whose light is it? Then sound. Among the Vedas he is pranava, Om, and Swamiji explains why Om can stand for all mantras: with ‘a’ you open the throat, with ‘m’ the lips close, so saying Om uses the entire vocal range. Alpha to omega. Everything you say is therefore permeated by Om. And sabda in ether: space relates to sound, and without space no communication in words would be possible. The verse ends on paurusham nrishu — in every individual there is potentiality for self-effort, and that potentiality also comes from God, who interpenetrates, permeates and sustains, the foundation of all that exists. Swamiji’s last instruction before the closing prayer is characteristically unglamorous: and we need to go on working on it.

Terms in this lecture

  • jnana — intellectual knowledge, the grasp of a teaching by the understanding
  • vijnana — realization, intuitive revelation; what jnana is meant to ripen into
  • apara prakriti — the lower nature, the eight inert divisions of verse four
  • para prakriti — the higher nature, the soul, by which the world is sustained
  • jada / cetana — inert and conscious; the basic twofold division of creation
  • tanmatra — a subtle element, literally a measure of tat, a particle of Brahman
  • amal karo — reflect on it, and clear the mind of impurity so reflection is possible
  • viveka-buddhi — the intuitive intellect that distinguishes the Self from the not-Self
  • maya / avidya / tamasi prakriti — sattva, rajas and tamas predominating in prakriti
  • dirgha-svapna — the long dream; waking life seen as a dream of greater duration
  • cintamani — the wish-fulfilling gem, here the thread running through the mala
  • rasa — taste, sapidity; in verse eight, the divine present in what you taste
  • pranava — Om, the sound that spans the whole vocal range and permeates all speech
  • apavarga — liberation, the goal toward which divine love carries the aspirant

Three questions to take back into the lecture

  • Where does your own discernment already see through something that your ego is still bragging about, and what would it mean to let it laugh?
  • The claim is that joy is not a reward for improved conditions but an art to be developed now — what in your day would have to change if you took that literally?
  • Which of verse eight’s four doors is nearest to hand for you today: a taste, the light of the sun, the sound of Om in your own speech, or your own capacity for self-effort?

Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 7, Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga, verses 4 to 8. Lecture 78 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation, founded in 1969. The complete archive of Swamiji’s lectures is free to all.

This study guide is drawn from the archived teachings of Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda.

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