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Chapter 15
Appendix:- Neither pleasure nor prosperity stays permanently with us - a man naturally has this discretion. But the people, who in spite of studying the scriptures, keeping good company and practising spiritual discipline, don't pay attention to their discretion and don't realize that they are different from pleasures and prosperity, are 'akrtatma' viz., they have not purified their hearts. Such people in the sixteenth verse of the eighteenth chapter have been called 'akrtabuddhi' (of impure or untrained mind) and 'durmati' (of perverse understanding). Though God-realization is not difficult, yet in spite of practising the spiritual discipline, they don't know God because of their attachment and desire for worldly pleasures. The reason is that discretion does not stick in those people who hanker after pleasures and prosperity.
In the preceding verse the people who have been called 'vimudhah' (deluded), here have been called 'acetasah' (unintelligent). Being deluded by modes, they neither know the division of sense-objects nor that of the Self viz., they don't know that the Self is different from pleasures of which there is supposed union and gradual disunion with it.
In this topic from the seventh verse to the eleventh verse, the Lord wants to explain that His fragment, the Soul, is totally different from the materials (bodies, objects and actions) which by an error he regards as his own - these materials are evolutes of prakrti—'praketisthani'. Both are totally different in the same way as are the sun and the darkest night of amavasya (last day of the dark half of a month). Their union is impossible. He who perceives that the sentient and the insentient are totally different from each other, is wise and is a Yogi (sage). But he who perceives the sentient (the Self), identified with the insentient (matter), is ignorant and a 'bhogi (voluptuary).
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