Yatharth Geeta -Swami Adgadanand 14

Yatharth Geeta -Swami Adgadanand Ji

PREFACE How to account for this all too common failure io comprehend the true meaning of the Geeta? Even after a great deal of hair-splitting and cramming, all that we succeed in getting hold of, is nothing more than the external framework of its syntactical order. Why perforce, we should find out, do we find ourselves deprived of truth ? As a matter or fact, with his birth and growing up a man inherits the paternal legacy of home, shop, land and property, rank and honour, cattle and other livestock, and nowa-days even machinery and appliances. Pretcisely in the same way he also inherits certain customs, traditions, and modes of worship: the evil legacy of all the three hundred and thirty million Hindu gods and goddesses who were identified and catalogued long ago as well as of the innumerable various forms of them all over the world. As a child grows up, he observes his parents’, his brothers’ and sisters’, and, his neighbours’ way of worship. His family’s beliefs, rites, and ceremonies are thus permanently imprinted on his mind. If his heritage is worship of a goddess, all his life he recites only the name of that goddess. If his patrimony is worship of ghosts and spirits, he cannot but endlessly repeat the names of those ghosts and spirits. So it is that while some of us adhere to Shiv, some others cleave to Krishn, and yet others cling to this or that deity. It is beyond us to forsake them. If such misguided men ever get a propitious, sacred work like the Geeta, they fail to grasp its real import. It is· possible for a man to give up the material possessions he has inherited, but he cannot rid himself of inherited traditions and creeds. He can relinquish material belongings that are his legacy and go far away from them, but even there he is doggedly pursued by the thoughts, beliefs, and usages that have been ineradicably engraved on his mind and heart.