Knowledge and Realization: Bhagavad Gita Chapter Seven, Lecture 76

Swami Jyotirmayananda opens the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita by doing something the chapter's own title invites and most readers skip. The chapter is called Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga, the yoga of knowledge and realization, and almost everyone treats those two words as a pair of synonyms stacked for emphasis. He separates them in the first two minutes and spends the rest of the hour showing why the distance between them is the whole spiritual problem.

Jnana, he says, is leading the intellect to understand the Truth. Vijnana is being immersed in it. His image for the gap is a river: you can understand perfectly well that your destination is the ocean, and understanding it is not the same as arriving. He offers a second image that is sharper still. If you are dreaming, and inside the dream someone convinces you that it is a dream, you now know. But knowing has changed nothing. To make the knowledge effective you have to wake up, and waking is a different order of event from being told.

From there the lecture takes up the chapter's first verse, in which Krishna asks Arjuna to fix his mind on Him and practice yoga with Him as refuge. Swamiji stops on the word attached and finds something odd in it. In ordinary life, he observes, the people we are attached to are not the people we find adorable, and the people we adore are usually people we are not attached to. Attachment and adoration run on separate tracks. Krishna is asking for both at once, directed at the same object, which is a movement the mind has no practice in.

The greater part of the lecture is then given to the practical answer: sadhana-chatushtaya, the fourfold qualification. Discrimination, dispassion, a sixfold treasure of inner disciplines, and an intense longing for liberation. He works through all four, with the longest stretch spent tracing discrimination through the five sheaths of the personality until it arrives at a positive statement rather than a negative one. Along the way he defends the practice of hearing the same teaching repeatedly, notes that the mind never complains about eating a food it likes twice, and asks why it complains about hearing a truth twice.

This guide follows the lecture in the order he gave it.

Passage index

The still lake, and why the lecture opens there

Before any verse is recited, before the invocation, the lecture opens on an image. When a lake is calm, what do you see in it? The whole sky. When it is not calm you see frogs jumping here, fish jumping there, birds going after them. Swamiji says plainly that he is dramatizing, and the exaggeration is the point: an agitated mind is not merely a less pleasant mind, it is a mind that has lost the capacity to reflect anything larger than its own disturbance.

He returns to this image forty minutes later, when he reaches serenity as the first of the six inner treasures. The lecture is bookended by it. What sits between the two appearances is the answer to the question the image raises but does not settle, which is what actually stills the water. His answer is that the first move is not effort. It is discrimination.

Jnana and vijnana: the difference between knowing and being

Two terms are used in the chapter title, and Swamiji takes them apart at once. Jnana leads the intellect to understand. Vijnana, he says, is one step further: "Vijnana, one step further, is to be immersed in the Truth." He gives the traditional term for the first, parokshajnana, indirect knowledge, the kind confined to the intellect. The second is intuitional, and reaching it is not a matter of the intellect acquiring more content. The intellect itself undergoes a transformation.

He calls this the profound challenge in studying scripture. Intellectually you get what the scripture says, and getting it is genuinely something. But you then need patience and strength enough to assimilate what you have learned, and assimilation is not easy. The dream image lands here. Being told inside a dream that you are dreaming produces accurate knowledge that changes nothing about your situation. Only waking does.

This distinction reframes everything that follows. The fourfold qualification is not a set of moral prerequisites you satisfy in order to earn the teaching. It is the description of what assimilation actually consists of.

What Krishna asks for in the first verse

The verse is recited in Sanskrit and then rendered: with your mind attached to Me, with Me as your refuge, practicing yoga, you will know Me fully and without doubt. Swamiji notes in passing that Partha means Arjuna, son of Kunti who was also called Pritha, and that the teachings of this chapter are highly condensed, which is what gives them their sense of suspense.

Then he stops on the request itself. How can the human mind be attached to God? The difficulty is not devotional enthusiasm but structure. The attachment the mind already knows, he observes, is not so pleasing. In family life people become attached to one another, and along with that attachment there is generally no sense that the person you are attached to is adorable. You may be deeply attached and still not consider them so. Conversely, someone whose teaching inspires you, or whose work inspires you, you turn to as adorable, and there is usually no attachment in it. Attachment and adoration do not travel together in the practical world.

Krishna asks for an attachment that is not the type you are used to, and asks in the same breath that you consider Him the greatest. Both at once, toward the same object. Swamiji does not present this as a paradox to admire. He presents it as work: "This you need to work it out." And he gives the shift its full weight: "The shifting is the secret of your spiritual progress." Not the intensity of the attachment. The shifting of it.

Why he repeats himself, deliberately

Before entering the fourfold qualification he pauses to defend repetition, and the pause is worth attention because it explains the shape of his teaching across decades. These points have been given before, he says, and he always takes the opportunity of repeating the same thing. The traditional name he gives it translates as hammering again and again.

His argument is by comparison with food. You enjoy a certain food and go on enjoying it repeatedly and never once complain about the repetition. But hear the same insight in satsanga and the mind says, why am I hearing this, he said the same thing five years ago. If your mind works that way, he says, you must know your mind has not understood it. A mind that had assimilated the teaching would enjoy hearing it again and would draw increasing insight from each hearing. He calls this nutrition at a different level: nutrition for the body, nutrition for your thought.

Viveka: discrimination as a quality of the intellect

The first qualification is viveka, and Swamiji is careful to locate it. It is a quality of your intellect, and the intellect is the greatest aspect of your personality, because understanding comes from buddhi and understanding is what makes the difference. "Misunderstanding keeps you groping in darkness." Understanding takes you out of it. He calls the greatest blessing of God to humanity the fact that there is potential understanding in every heart, and cites the Vedic prayer asking that good understanding be given to everyone, and the Gayatri, asking that the illuminating aspect of God shine on our intellect.

An intellect being enriched begins to ask a specific set of questions. Who am I? What is the nature of this world? What is my goal? Of these he makes the first central. Your identity becomes the most important point, and he observes wryly that wherever you go, before anyone asks anything else about you, they ask for identification.

His method for exposing the problem is not argument but observation. Notice, he says, that your sense of identity keeps shifting. Something has to be done physically and in that moment the physical body is your identity. Then hunger arrives, and hunger comes from somewhere else. When you are going out you groom yourself carefully; when you are hungry you do not, because your identity has moved. Become anxious and pondering, and it moves again, into the mind, where the stress lives. Discover that you have been ignorant of something obvious and it moves once more, to the intellect, and the ego arrives with it: the intellect tells you that you did not know, and the ego tells you that you are a miserable wretch. His image for that particular misery is a person who suffers for years while sleeping on ground with treasure buried beneath.

The five sheaths and the three bodies

To give the shifting a map, Swamiji lays out the five kosas. The physical sheath, annamayakosa, called the food sheath because the body is sustained by food. The vital sheath, pranamayakosa, without which the body has no life, and which produces hunger, thirst, and the energy behind sense pleasure. The mental sheath, manomayakosa, mind and senses together, which manipulates the vital sheath: when the mind is happy vitality flows joyously, and the moment the mind is distressed vitality is withdrawn and the face reports it immediately. Behind the mind, vijnanamayakosa, intellect and ego together. Behind that, anandamayakosa.

He spends real time on the last one because its name misleads. Literally it means the bliss sheath, but it is the unconscious within you, and what makes it blissful is deep sleep, where you move away from physical, vital, mental, intellect and ego and rest in a joyous condition, a kind of recharging. He asks what the name of that restful tub is and answers: ignorance. This is why being woken abruptly, even with wonderful news, produces annoyance first. "You are closest to your own essential nature." But you are separated by the veil of ignorance, and what you were experiencing was worth more than any news of the world.

The five sheaths are then grouped into three bodies, with an image of a box: three compartments, the middle one holding three sections, so five sections and three compartments describe the same object. Physical sheath is the physical body. Vital, mental and intellectual sheaths together are the sukshma sarira, the subtle body. Anandamayakosa is the causal body.

From I am not this to I am That

The point of the map is that all of it is covering. Swamiji brings it into daily life with an ordinary question: look at how you appeared ten years ago, how you appear today, how you will appear in twenty or thirty years. The body is your instrument and you are not to depend upon its looks. He is careful to prevent the obvious misreading, and says that in order to understand that the body is not you, you must keep the body in order.

Viveka proceeds negatively at first, knowing I am not this, and not this, and not this. But as the intellect becomes intuitive the movement reverses and arrives at a revelation, and the revelation is positive: I am That. That is defined as Sachchidananda, Existence, Knowledge, Bliss Absolute. As the intellect begins to show the difference between the Self and the not-Self, and to shine more and more, viveka is developing. He calls it the greatest wealth, and says that without it, no matter how much you acquire or how remarkable your life becomes, you are living under a deluded mind.

Vairagya: looking at life without sentiment

The second qualification follows from the first. Viveka tells you what endures and what does not; vairagya is not developing attachment toward what does not. He anchors it in the traditional formula about birth, death, old age and disease, and asks that you not keep your mind shut against the terrible experiences every life must pass through.

He treats birth and death together and notes something exact about them. At birth there is tremendous agony on the part of the soul, and everyone around is delighted. At death the soul has a sense of exquisite relief, and everyone around is in pain. The table turns between the two, and in each case you are out of tune with the people around you. On the fear of death in ordinary life he is almost comic: someone you love takes a flight and the mind immediately supplies hijackings, and walking down a street you never know what traffic may do, and standing in a mango grove you never know what mango will fall.

Old age he traces to karma, and karma to the swing of raga and dvesha, attachment and hatred. A mind schooled in that swing expects something to happen every day to keep the swing going. Pleasant news arrives and the mind climbs, and near the peak some wrong news comes and it drops, and the drop is stress, and the recovery is another kind of stress. A mature mind, he says, does not expect anything to happen, because things are well already. The joy available to a mind is not on the basis of what has happened but on the basis of the reality ever present.

Then the crucial qualifier, which is what keeps this from being morbidity: "Gaining insight into all these in a profound way, in a mature way, not in a sentimental way." That, he says, is vairagya. What grows out of it is not gloom but a taste for liberation.

He closes this stretch on relaxation and surrender. God is your source, and you come in tune with your source when you learn to relax physically and mentally, allow the ego to bow down, allow the whole personality to be at rest. And the reason it is always available: "God is not a matter of historical happening." He is an ever-present reality.

The sixfold treasure

The third qualification is a set of six virtues, shat-sampat, the word sampat meaning wealth. Swamiji names serenity first. Shama is allowing the mind to be unagitated, calm, relaxed, and here the still lake returns in full. He also connects it outward to the Yoga Vasistha, where four gatekeepers stand at the palace of liberation: serenity, contentment, good company, and a reflective mind guided by wisdom that keeps asking who am I.

Second is dama, control of the senses, and his illustration is domestic and merciless. Imagine a house with wonderful pets, and imagine that out of too much love the pets have taken over: you resign from your office and sit from morning until night watching their faces, and they become calm for no reason and agitated for no reason, and you never know what will set them off. Then the turn: "Your senses and mind are your pets." A life spent asking them what they would like produces lists of hotels and lists of thrills, costing money, effort and eventually health, while the larger question of how to live a life of enrichment day by day quietly leaves the mind.

Third is uparati, which he defines as not developing a desire for karmic involvement, not seeking to change your condition by means of karma. All karmic fruits place you in the world of time and space; the goal is reached by destroying the source of karma through wisdom. His compression of it is memorable: "Karma is keeping you in dream." Jnana is waking up from the dream.

Fourth is shraddha, faith. Fifth is titiksha, endurance. He binds the two: as faith grows you are not shaken by apparent adversity or prosperity, because you understand that each benefits you. Adversity gives willpower. Prosperity, rightly taken, gives humility. Sixth is samadhana, which he describes as developing a mind that stops the habit of complaining. Otherwise the mind always has complaints, and you can hear a whole hour of good news and end on the one thing that keeps you on edge.

Mumukshutva: the hunger that carries no stress

The fourth qualification is aspiration, an intense hunger for attaining liberation, and Swamiji distinguishes it immediately from every other hunger the mind knows. "That hunger is not psychological, it doesn't create any stress." It gives instead a sense of zest. The image he chooses is the one he opened the lecture with, now completed: "A river that knows it has to reach the ocean. Hungry for the ocean." It flows with vitality and with joy.

He is honest about what this does and does not promise. It does not mean your life will always be wonderful in appearance. Your life can be challenging, with situations you have to endure. But a sensitive mind notices what strength it was given to pass through them, and becomes grateful for having been let through and having survived and having been benefited by the austerity. His phrase for it is the last teaching of the lecture: "making adversity turn into austerity."

The class closes with the shanti mantra.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Chapter Seven (Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga), verse 1. Lecture 76 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation.

The complete archive of Swami Jyotirmayananda's lectures is free to listen to at yogaresearchfoundation.org.

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