I liked this Tika very much and especially phrase "hunger for flesh", which epitomizez sick and perverted cravings of jiva under the hammer
of Avidya.
of Avidya.
नारीस्तनभर नाभीदेशं दृष्ट्वा मागामोहावेशम् ।
एतन्मांसवसादि विकारं मनसि विचिन्तय वारं वारम् ॥ ३॥
Translation: "Seeing at the full bosom of young maidens and their navel do not, fall a prey to maddening delusion. This is but a modification of flesh and fat, Think well thus in your mind again and again. (Seek Govind, Seek Govind................)"
Tika by Swami Chinmayananda
In the previous stanza a true seeker is adviced
to give up all covetousness for the wealth of the world, and here he is advised to give up lusty passions for women.
From the days of the Upanishad, to our own times, we find in all masters this constant warning against wealth (काञ्चन - kanchana) and woman (कामिनी - kaminee).
No insult is meant to either.
This is a statement of a scientific truth. All intelligent living creatures have these two irresistible urges, "to possess more" (wealth) and to enjoy" (woman).
All living organisms in the world move towards the one Great Harbour, seeking peace and harmony. All are always instinctively whipped up by two definite urges (a) to escape pain (dukha-nivritti) and (b) to attain happiness (sukha-prapti)
It is only to end all anxieties and sense of insecurity that man runs after "wealth"; to him possessions are barricades against his enemy, "Fear".
Against the besieging troops of uncertainties in life man builds imaginary fortresses around him with money and wealth.
Even a millionaire is found to be not really happy because he wants more! When he feels relatively a little secure from fears, he feels fully the other urge more and more power viz., the attainment of happiness.
It is under this urge that man readily falls to the irresistible enchantments of the flesh and runs after the bosom of woman.
Here the statement of man's natural attraction to woman must be understood to include woman's equally natural attraction to man. In both the cases sorrow alone is the ultimate destination where they both reach hand in hand!
Biologically nature has made man and woman with a natural affinity for the charms of the opposite sex. This natural urge is to be controlled, disciplined, nitrified and sublimated. An intelligent intellect alone can achieve this.
An animal cannot; to act according to its instincts and impulses is but its privilege. The glory of man is that he call, by his rational intellect, curb and control the flow of his instincts for carnal pleasures and redivert them, thus ultimately can sublimate himself into something nobler and more divine.
Seekers in their early days of practice should find this rather difficult, since it is against the very nature of their flesh.
Human body can seek its fulfilment only in the fields of sence-objects. It is the intellect that always gets visions of the higher possibilities. For the attainment of these visions, with the help of a trained mind the intellect comes to curb the passionate flow of the flesh, and thus turn the entire current personality into the more rewarding channels of spiritual upliftment.
It experiences, as time passes on, a divine unfoldment, within this technique of reversing the process of instinct to flow in the direction of rational contemplation is called in the Yoga Shastra as Pratipaksha Bhavana.
Throughout among the scriptural texts, we meet with many advices based upon this technique.
Here Shankara gives us a line of thinking which can be an efficient antidote to the fanciful price that the body gives to the objects of the senses.
The soft inviting bosom of your beloved, if scientifically analysed and mentally seen in its reality, will reveal to be composed of only abhorrent flesh and fat, packed in a scaly skin.
If these component parts are brought before your mental vision, spiritually the mind shall immediately retreat from the disgusting ugliness of it all.
Through the practice of this Pratipaksha Bhavana we can re-educate our mind not to run away with its imagined picture of happiness in the perishable softness of the filth-filled body.
Shankara thus, with the very opening stanzas of Bhaja Govindam cures the student of his two most powerful fascinations - his thirst for wealth and his instinctive hunger for flesh.
When these two are eliminated from a personality, it will have no more fuel to jerk it out on to the outer fields of its enchantments. This cannot come about very readily; even when it comes it cannot be maintained so easily.
Millions of lives have we lived in the lower realm of evolution, and each one of us have gathered this powerful instinct of self-preservation: preservation of the indisidual and the race. To rise above them is an achievement in itself and for this, repeated (Varam Varam) practice is unavoidable.
In Vivekachudamani also we meet with the same idea (dosha drishtya). The objects of the world exist and play their pranks upon us; but do we ever see them as they are?
Each one has a knack of throwing a veil of his own fanciful imaginations to decorate the objects with his private mental likes and dislikes.
Thus, we see not the world as it is, but gaze at a world splashed all over with our own mental contents.
Through close observation, diligent enquiry, scientific analysis we can remove the unnatural colour that we have thrown upon the objects around us, and see them in their native beauty and in their natural forms.
In the gathering dusk of a dusty evening, we may misunderstand the things we perceive in front of us at a distance; but on moving nearer the objects with an enquiring mind, we shall realise their true worth and learn to drop them as useless.
Money and women in themselves are not a threat to man, but in our false imaginations we give them both a ridiculously inflated value, and striving for their sake, we come to lay waste our powers.
It is this hallucination in man, and the consequent illusory fascination for the world which he entertains, that exile him from his own inner Kingdom of Joy.
