SATTVA AND TAMAS

9th February, 2012

As I was recently reading the Bhagvad Gita for a yoga assignment that I had to do, something about the gunas caught my attention. As Arjuna stands emotionally distraught before his uncles and brothers and teachers, on the verge of a war that he now suddenly feels is completely unjustified, thoughts of leaving the battle field and going away into the jungle come to his mind. This powerful warrior who is both wilful and confident throughout the Mahabharata suddenly finds himself at the mercy of his emotional attachments. In his own eyes, he is being completely humane and compassionate in doing so. For killing his loved ones, he feels is sinful.
Krishna thinks otherwise. What Arjuna tries to call love or compassion for his kin, Krishna calls cowardice. He calls it adharma. For, he explains to Arjuna, the dharma of a warrior is to wage war against that which is evil or supports evil. And the Kaurava army that stands before them is made up of people who fall into either of these two categories. He explains to Arjuna how death is but inevitable for everyone and therefore, in killing his kin, he would become only an instrument of the infinite.

What is fascinating here is that Arjuna feels that at that moment on the battlefield he is dominated by sattva. He believes that by withdrawing from the war he will be following the path of ahimsa and will be professing compassion for even those who have caused them much pain in the past. But is this what sattva is about?
Swami Vivekananda in his commentary on the Gita points out that that which enters the mind in the guise of sattva could well be its nemesis- tamas. Rajas is easily distinguishable as the passionate energy that flows through a person with all recklessness. Tamas, on the other hand can easily be confused with Sattva. They both come with a certain amount of motionlessness. While in tamas there is a dull stillness, in sattva it is calm tranquillity. What Arjuna believes is his compassion for his opponents, could really be his fear to face reality. What he terms as an ahimsic path is actually a coward’s path. For by leaving the war, he would be encouraging injustice. Hence, Krishna calls him a coward.

I tried to think of my own daily practice in the same terms. Sometimes when I feel lethargic in the mornings and don’t feel like doing my yoga practice, I’m convincing myself that I should be accepting of my lethargy and therefore don’t need to do my practice. I’m content with the belief that I’m learning to be more aware of and accepting of my body’s needs when actually all I’m doing is giving into lethargy, which as Patanjali points out is one of the obstacles in the yogic path.
When I spoke to my guru about this, she told me, that acceptance of one’s state of mind or of one’s body is necessary but that only means that one can change one’s practice to accommodate how one is feeling on that day. Acceptance never ever means giving up your practice because of what it is bringing up in you. It just means staying with what comes up from time to time without any judgement and yet continuing with the abhyasa. That is the tapah that we need to do in the path of kriya yoga. This automatically leads one to introspect about what is happening with oneself (svadhyaya) and the acceptance itself is a form of surrender (isvarapranidhanani).

This is the difference between sattva and tamas. Just like in Arjuna’s case, true sattva requires that one follows one’s dharma and that too with a unified state of mind that is not caught up in the results of its action. The abhyasa is necessary. In Arjuna’s case it was to drop away all the attachments he had to his worldly relationships and constantly bring back his focus on a higher goal- which was to vanquish evil. And eventually, Krishna says to him, when one has done this enough, it becomes so instilled in the person that the gunas have no control over one’s mind. He says that it is at this point that one comes in touch with his true, permanent, indestructible, inner self or the atman.

In my world what I think this means is that, there will come a day when I wake up in the morning and go about my entire day knowing exactly what responsibilities or actions I may have to perform in the various roles that I play in life, and being able to do this efficiently, single-mindedly with a certain goal in mind for each of my actions, but with no attachment whatsoever to what may come out of those actions. My senses will have no effect on my mind, and my mind will be in my control rather than the other way around. I will not be reactive in any way and my every action will be done with no wastage of energy, or any selfish desires.

This is what I think it means! Lofty thoughts indeed!