LORD KRISHNA: THE ETERNAL MOTIVATOR

 

LORD KRISHNA: THE ETERNAL MOTIVATOR

This year Lord Krishna’s birthday was celebrated on August 12^th. I did not celebrate the day with any ritual about him but I did think of his role as an eternal motivator in the Gita. His student in this sacred book is Arjuna, a reluctant warrior, unprepared to fight against the wicked opponents including his own kith and kin. The issue was whether it is morally fair to kill one’s own relatives.

Lord Krishna seized this occasion to motivate and inspire Arjuna with true knowledge about human life and death.

I hold that the best way for a motivator is to uproot the inherent ignorance of his audience and liberate them from untenable beliefs and false fears.  Fears bred by ignorance demotivate and discourage even those who are otherwise heroic persons. That is why Tagore prayed to God to bless the Indian people with a mind without fear and a head that can be held high.   

            The words with which Lord Krishna transforms the hesitant Arjuna into fully charged war hero read as follows:

The unreal has no existence, and the real never ceases to be. Both he who knows that the soul is capable of killing and he who takes it as killed are ignorant. The soul being unborn is primeval, eternal and everlasting.  It is the body which is slain, not the soul. The body is perishable but not the soul. To tell Arjuna that man is eternal, the great Lord says:  Just as a person discards worn out garments and puts on new ones, so does an embodied soul gets rid of its exhausted body and enters into a new one. These enlightening words about the reality of the soul enable Arjuna to shed his earlier notions of human mortality and empower him to fight the impending war with indomitable courage.  

              Arjuna in the Mahabharata symbolises every human being on this planet.

To ensure human beings that their souls do not die and they continue to live on in new forms is a unique motivational gift of Lord Krishna. After being thus ensured, everybody starts passing his days and nights without any kind of fear whatsoever.   

 As a supplement to what has been said above, here is a part of an unknown poet’s English composition:

 

THERE IS NO DEATH        

            THERE is a plan far greater than the plan you know;

            There is a landscape broader than the one you see,

There is a haven where storm-tossed soul may go ----

You call it death --- we, immortality.

You call it death ---- this seeming endless sleep;

We call it birth -- the soul at last set free.

‘Tis hampered not by time or space – you weep.

Why weep at death? ‘Tis immortality.

 

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14^th August 2020                                                           G. R. KANWAL