A Comprehensive Guide to Bhagavad-Gita with Literal Translation by H.D. Goswami

Author:H.D. Goswami [Goswami, H.D.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Krishna West Inc.
Published: 2015-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

PART XII

Mukti (Liberation)

Negative Liberation (Freedom from)

Words like free and freedom have both a negative and a positive sense, with the negative indicating that one is free from unwanted restraint, control, slavery, subjugation, domination, etc., and the positive indicating that one is free to act and live as one wants.

Bhagavad-gītā speaks expansively about freedom from and freedom to, for Kṛṣṇa’s goal is to liberate the soul. We will first consider the negative aspect of freedom and then the positive.

Most generally, Kṛṣṇa speaks of being liberated [4.32, 18.71], or happily freed from bondage [5.3], adding that godly qualities conduce to liberation [16.5]. More specifically, Kṛṣṇa speaks of being freed from nature’s three modes [2.45, 14.20–26], and the term guṇātīta93 is a synonym for liberated.

The Gītā also teaches freedom from attachment [3.9, 4.23, 18.26], and from the negative qualities attachment produces: lust and anger [5.26]; desire, fear and anger [5.28]; or the three gateways to darkness—lust, rage and greed [16.22].

Kṛṣṇa speaks about being freed from dualities such as attachment and aversion [2.65], hating and hankering [5.3], exulting, intolerance, fear and affliction [12.15], or joy and sorrow [15.5].

He also speaks generally of becoming duality-less, nir-dvandva [2.45, 5.3], of going beyond duality, dvandvātīta [4.22], and of being freed from duality-illusion, dvandva-moha [7.28].

Kṛṣṇa speaks of being freed from all misfortune, aśubha, and from all sins or offenses [3.13, 10.3]; and He personally frees from all sins those who come to Him alone for shelter [18.66].

The Gītā speaks of being liberated from karma-bondage [2.39, 3.21, 4.14], which manifests as the unavoidable fruit (or consequence) of our mundane actions [9.28]. Thus one can act in this world without binding reaction [4.22] and achieve perfect freedom from karma [18.49].

It is karma that obliges us to repeatedly take birth and die in this world, and so to be free of karma is to free oneself from the cycle of births and deaths. Since re-birth entails re-death, Kṛṣṇa abbreviates by speaking sometimes of freeing oneself from birth and sometimes of freeing oneself from death.

Thus, on the one hand, Kṛṣṇa describes liberation as no rebirth [4.9, 8.15, 8.16] and the liberated person as one who does not take birth again [13.24], or who is freed from birth bondage [2.51]. He also speaks of successful spiritualists as those who go to non-return [5.17, 8.26].

Yet again, Kṛṣṇa speaks of one who qualifies for immortality [2.15], and of those who, by various spiritual paths, cross over death [13.26], who successfully seek liberation from old age and death [7.29], and who are freed from the miseries of birth, death and old age [14.20].

We should clearly keep in mind that all those things from which we are to gain freedom—the problem of bondage, nature’s three modes, attachment, anger, lust, greed, dualities, misfortune, sin, karma, birth, old age and death—are simply different facets of a single condition, which may be called illusion. Thus to be fully free of nature’s modes is to be free of dualities, which is to be free of attachments, which is to be free of binding karmic action, which is to be free of birth, death, rebirth and again dying.

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