Hari om everyone,
The class started with meditation and chanting of Chapter 4, Bhagavadgeeta.
The Kyun Kyun (QQ - Quirky Question) of the day was - Who am I? I am light as a feather, but even the strongest person in the world cannot hold me for more than 5 minutes?!
Our students were spot on. They answered, 'Breath'.
Yes, obviously, no one can hold their breath for a long time.
The breath is one of the 5 elements that our body is made up of - air. We asked our students to name the other 4. They were quick to answer - space, water, fire, earth, and of course, air.
Now that the body is made up of these 5 elements, would it be able to transact with the world without any special devices/organs? No! We need our sense organs to perceive the world. Our students named them - eyes, nose, ears, mouth, and skin.
These can be considered as input devices. We consume information about the world through our sense organs. What do we perceive through these organs? Students again - smell, taste, form, touch, and sound.
How do we interact with the world? (Let's roughly call it output devices.) Our students came up with the first 3 and we helped them with the other 2 - speech, hands, legs, excretory organs, and reproductive organs.
Who is the one perceiving all these stimuli from the world? The ego.
What do we do with all these interactions we have with the world? We keep it in our - memory.
What do we do with memories? It stimulates our - mind, and intellect.
All these factors are termed as kShetra (the field of experience). This was part of the answer to Arjuna's question at the beginning of chapter 13. Arjuna had asked Krishna to explain to him about - kShetra, kShetrajna, jnaana, jneya, prakRuti, and puruSha.
With leading questions, our students pretty much came up with all the answers collectively!
Our next question - But none of the above things that make up your body is the same from time to time. In fact, we don't have even A SINGLE CELL in our body today that we were born with!! Cells keep dying and getting rebuilt. Then what is it that makes us be the same person from birth to death? Why don't we become someone else along with the changing body? I don't wake up as my brother or mother or father one day. How is that?
Our students said, 'our identity'.
We asked, 'But I was a 1st grader once, then I am a high schooler and will be a degree holder one day. So, that identification is changing too! Then what is keeping us as who we are?'
Doubtfully, a couple of them asked, 'Consciousness?'
Yes! They were right. Krishna said this consciousness is kShetrajna (knower of the field).
At the microcosmic level, we understood kShetra and kShetrajna. When taken to the macrocosmic level of the Universe, the same becomes prakRuti and puruSha.
The noble values that we have to live by - is jnaanam.
The nature of Brahman is His all-pervasiveness - is jneyam.
Arjuna's 6 questions in the 13th chapter were answered.
Our students probably surprised themselves with how many answers they already knew today! They say 'Don't judge a book by its cover'. Rightly so, because...
Let us be rich with content always!
See you after Spring Break.
Regards,
Rashmi and Sirisha.
Rashmi and Sirisha.
