The Knowledge After Which Nothing Remains

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter Seven, verses 1-3

The seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita carries a title that is really a pair of terms held in tension: Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga, the yoga of knowledge and realization. Swamiji separates them in the opening minutes and then spends the rest of the lecture showing why the distinction is not academic. Jnana is the intellectual grasp of a truth. Vijnana is being immersed in it. Theory, he says, and practical experience.

The promise the chapter makes is enormous. Krishna tells Arjuna that he will impart a knowledge after which nothing further remains to be known. But the first verse does not begin with the knowledge. It begins with the conditions under which such knowledge could be received at all: a mind attached to God, God as refuge, and the practice of yoga. Most of this lecture is given to unpacking the first of those, because it turns out to be the whole preparation of a personality.

That preparation is sadhana-chatushtaya, the fourfold qualification, and Swamiji walks it in order. Viveka, the discerning intellect. Vairagya, dispassion. The sixfold treasure of shama, dama, uparati, titiksha, shraddha and samadhana. And mumukshutva, the aspiration for liberation. He has covered these before and says so plainly, touching each one rather than expanding it, but the touch is enough to change how the verse reads. The attachment Krishna asks for is not a feeling that can be summoned. It is what is left over once a person has stopped being scattered.

Then the verses turn. Verse two brings the candle: increase its brightness and the darkness does not retreat, it widens, because a stronger light simply reveals more of what it does not reach. That, Swamiji says, is the predicament of intellectual knowledge. Verse three narrows further still, to one striver among thousands and one knower among those, which he reads not as a discouragement but as a summons. He ends with the least mystical definition of siddhi available: the point at which practice has become effortless.

Passage index

Two words that do not mean the same thing

Swamiji opens by naming the chapter and immediately splitting its title. Jnana relates to intellectual grasp. Vijnana relates to realizing it. He offers the simplest gloss he can: theory, and practical experience.

It is worth sitting with how much of spiritual life collapses when those two are treated as one. A person can hold an accurate map of Vedanta and be nowhere near the territory. The map is not wrong. It is simply not the same class of thing as arrival, and mistaking the one for the other is the specific failure this chapter is built to prevent.

The verse Krishna speaks is a promise made under conditions. With the mind attached to Him, with Him as refuge, practicing yoga, you shall know Me fully, without any doubt. Three conditions, then the promise. Swamiji takes the conditions seriously and spends the bulk of the hour there.

Viveka: a flashlight, not a mood

The first qualification is viveka, discriminative knowledge. Swamiji calls it a flashlight, and the image is deliberately plain. A flashlight is carried. It is used in the particular dark place you happen to be standing in.

He is emphatic that viveka is not reserved for meditation. Your entire life must be guided by it. Something happens, you are sent to deal with it, and you deal with it, but with viveka, which here means without losing patience and without becoming agitated by the situation.

The example he gives is unsentimental. Someone is drowning and you are there to help, but you do not swim well enough. So do not get yourself drowned. Acting without that reckoning, he says, is not working with viveka. The quality is not a warm feeling toward the good. It is an intellect that can tell what is real from what is not, what is eternal from what is not, and act accordingly under pressure.

At its full extent, viveka arrives at a specific recognition: that the real I am is not the body, not the mind, not the senses, but pure consciousness, Saccidananda, absolute existence, knowledge and bliss. Swamiji notes that this movement is progressive. Nobody acquires viveka whole. It develops.

He gives it a mystical face as well. Viveka is represented by Sarasvati, who rides a swan, because the swan of the old stories can sip milk from a mixture and leave the adulterant behind. He is careful about the allegory: try it with an actual swan and it does not happen. The point is that every experience is mixed. Every delight has an aspect that drags the mind down and an aspect that lifts it, and viveka is the capacity not to lean toward the first.

Vairagya: what a child does without being told

Dispassion follows discernment, and Swamiji is at pains to make it undramatic. You cannot become an absolute vairagi by decision. Detachment continues to occur.

His illustration is a childhood. A small child is attached to many toys. As the child grows, the baby bear is left behind, and so are many other things, not through renunciation but through growth. Living in the world, you are always growing. If spiritual growth is held in view, the same natural process extends into an insight about the worthlessness of much that delights the human mind.

He anchors it in the Gita’s own phrase for the objects of dispassion: the perception of the defect and suffering in birth, death, old age and disease. The very fact of being embodied is not the goal. Existence is for the sake of absolute fulfillment, which is liberation, and anything that distracts from that goal is what dispassion is directed at. Nothing else.

The six that come as a cluster

Once viveka and vairagya are developing, Swamiji says, certain qualities come in a cluster: shatsampat, the sixfold treasure, beginning with shama.

Shama is serenity, and his account of it is precise. The mind swings. A pleasant situation and it swings one way, building attachment; a painful one and it swings the other, building distaste. Raga and dvesha, and the swing continues. This swing needs to stop. If you can stop it even for a short duration, your mind will be tuning itself to eternity.

He describes the resulting state carefully to keep it from being mistaken for torpor: calm and serene as in deep sleep, but without a trace of sleep in the personality, without dozing, without sluggishness, in full vigilance. And of the joy in that state he says no amount of money, gain or fame can compare with it.

The method that gets there is not exotic. Satsanga, japa, good karmas, reminding yourself again and again, because the state itself is right in between your thoughts and keeps slipping through the fingers. Once tasted even slightly, he says, it fascinates the intellect the way a little honey is enough to send a bee mad after it.

Dama, control of the senses, follows from serenity rather than preceding it. Where there is serenity, he says, you find you already have great control over the senses, over physical moods, over anger and hate.

Uparati is the third and the most reframing. You are living in the world not to build up a karmic basis for your life but to terminate karmas. Every action has two results: an effect in the world of time and space, and an impact on the heart. When work is done with surrender, the goal becomes purity of heart rather than the fruit of the action.

Swamiji is careful not to turn this into indifference. Let my karmas help people, he says, is perfectly fine. What is not fine is the mind narrowing onto the fate of what it built, planting a mango grove and then worrying whose generations will hold it. The question that replaces that one is simple: I have done my duty; am I gaining purity of heart?

And then the line that gives the section its force. Your heart is crowded, and God does not know where to go. Hatred, negative thought, dejection and sorrow crowd it. God does not need a great deal of space, but He does need some.

Titiksha, endurance, is where the lecture’s opening joke came from. Everything requires patience, Swamiji says, and when there is a spiritual goal in view and a taste for spiritual joy, the ability to be patient becomes beyond measure. Without that goal and without the nourishment of mantra and satsanga, patience is fleeting, and then, in his own phrasing, instead of being patient you become a real patient in a hospital.

Shraddha is faith, which he calls the most profound divine quality in every soul, and he illustrates it with strength rather than belief. The mother cat defending her kitten comes up with tremendous strength, and that strength does not rest on calories. It has a spiritual basis, it is potential in every person, and sadhana develops it.

Samadhana, the sixth, is a mind that does not look at anything with a sense of contradiction. Adverse situations arrive and the taste is bitter; you are not asked to pretend otherwise. What you do not do is descend into I am ruined, nobody else gets adversity like mine. Underneath the bitterness sits the recognition that God has created you, is behind all that happens, and has arranged circumstances for the soul’s evolution.

He blocks the passive misreading immediately. This does not mean you abandon self-effort. If there is a thorn in your foot it hurts, so sit down and remove it, but while doing so, do not build internal turmoil.

Mumukshutva, and the appetite that is not a symptom

The fourth qualification is mumukshutva, intense aspiration for God-realization, and Swamiji spends his time on a single misunderstanding: that intensity must mean strain.

His comparison is appetite. A healthy person develops a good appetite, and it can be very intense, but the intensity does not signal that something is wrong. It comes with feeling more joyous, frisky. So it is with the aspiration for liberation. You are frisking your way to God-realization.

With those qualities in place, he says, you become attached to God, and God becomes your only refuge. He tests the word refuge against the alternatives. You are attached to many things, but the things you are attached to are not refuges. Even the closest members of a family are not refuge when the trouble is large enough. In a dream where something is hunting you, the closest relatives cannot help. God, he says, is an abiding, eternal support, and the traditions describe that as an eternal home.

Karma plus vikarma becomes akarma

The verse’s third condition is practicing yoga, and Swamiji reads it broadly: turn your attention to svadharma, do your duties, do not turn away from them. But bring special spiritual attitudes into the heart while doing them. The Gita calls these vikarmas and dresses them as yajnas, allegorical sacrifices.

The formula he draws out is compact. Karma plus vikarma becomes akarma. Duty performed while holding the attitude that God is working through you, that you are an instrument, that the work might bring a smile to God’s lips, produces a result of zero from the standpoint of karmic fruit, and produces expansion and purity in the heart instead.

Clay pots of many shapes drying beside the single bed of clay they were drawn from

The consequence is that nothing is left outside practice. If the mind is well set, everything becomes sadhana. You are exhausted and sit down: sadhana. You worked hard through the night and you sleep: sadhana. Nothing in your life is without sadhana.

The candle, the clay, and the gold

The second verse is Krishna’s promise in full: this knowledge together with realization, having known which nothing more remains here to be known. Swamiji calls it a profound statement and then explains why it is so difficult to credit.

The urge to know is limitless, and no matter how much is known there is more thirst. Put mathematically, the more you know, the more you become aware of the unknown. Then the candle. In dense darkness a candle knows darkness to the extent of its candle power, a circle a few inches wide. Increase the wattage and ask the same source how much darkness there is, and the answer grows to a mile, and then further. Increase the light and the darkness increases with it.

That, he says, is the predicament of intellectual knowledge. Intuitional knowledge is different in kind. It is not a brighter candle. It is the sun, and you are not removing darkness by increasing wattage.

The bridge between them is not mysterious. An aspirant gains the knowledge of scriptures such as the Gita and the Upanishads, and while gaining it intellectually also practices the qualifications, and the intellect turns into intuition.

For what such knowledge is like, Swamiji turns to the Upanishadic scene of a student who arrives proud of everything he has learned and is asked whether he was taught that by knowing which all is known. Knowing clay, you know every pot made from it. Knowing gold, you know every ornament, however many the names and forms. Behind all human experience, sensory and mental and intellectual, there is one substance, consciousness, and knowing that boundless consciousness, you know all. Knowing the sun, you know all illumination. Go on studying glow worms and you know very little.

One among thousands

The third verse states the arithmetic of it: among thousands of men one rare soul strives for perfection, and among those who strive with success, one perchance knows Me in truth.

Swamiji’s reading is the opposite of fatalistic. Spiritual movement, he says, is not dependent on mass mentality. You do not gather many people and take a majority vote on what to do. The majority remain backward and only some rare souls advance, and that should not surprise anyone. It happens in every educational system, where many work in a grade and one or two come first.

Then he turns it into an instruction. Try to understand that you have the capacity to become the rarest soul. You have the capacity to become a hero, a lion. Do not stay like rabbits. The lion is greater than thousands of rabbits. The verse is not discouraging; it is a statement to arouse inner strength.

He closes by clearing out what the word siddhi usually drags with it. Spirituality is popularly imagined as something miraculous, and the notion of psychic powers conjures up a great deal in the human mind, but these have nothing to do with it. For attaining liberation you do not need to know how large a thing you can do. Awareness simply goes more and more Godward.

The definition he leaves is exact and small. In sadhana you practice, with effort, the characteristics that appear naturally in a person who is advanced: control of ego, ahimsa, mastery of anger and hate. “While in the practicing state, it is called sādhana.” And then: “When your practice becomes effortless, it is called siddhi.”

That is the same distinction the chapter title makes. Jnana is the map. Vijnana is arrival. Sadhana is the effort. Siddhi is the effort no longer being required.

Reflection

Of the six qualities, shama, dama, uparati, titiksha, shraddha and samadhana, which one still takes the most effort from you?
Where in your day does the mind swing hardest between attraction and distaste, and what would it take to stop the swing even briefly?
What are you currently doing that would become sadhana if the attitude behind it changed, without the action changing at all?

Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Chapter Seven (Jnana-Vijnana-Yoga), verses 1-3. Lecture 77 by Swami Jyotirmayananda, Yoga Research Foundation.

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