The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita
Explained by Paramhansa Yogananda
As Remembered by His Disciple Swami Kriyananda
Chapter Four : Allegory in Scripture
The mixture of fact and fiction for allegorical purposes is common in scripture. It suggests the same blend in life itself: the dreamlike quality of life on earth mixed with the deep truths of the soul. An example of this literary device may be seen in the Book of Exodus of the Bible, and the Jewish people’s escape from years of bondage in Egypt. Their escape is a historical fact. In Exodus, however, the details of that escape are elaborated on, and contain much allegory. Exodus describes the Jews, for example, as wandering for forty years in the Sinai desert. Surely they cannot have literally spent forty years in that search. A simple glance at the map of the area shows a desert far too small for such a long trek—unless, indeed, the whole people were under a dense cloud of delusion. To believe that it took the Jews forty years to cross it demands too great a stretch of the imagination! The time can only have been so stated deliberately in order to suggest a deeper meaning behind the quest for the Promised Land. Wilderness, in spiritual writings, is often used allegorically to describe the inner silence, enjoyed in soul-communion. In that silence, no cultivated flowers of sense-pleasure bloom. The forty-year journey through the Sinai desert describes the long quest required to attain spiritual enlightenment.
In Exodus, all who had been born in captivity had to die before the new generation could enter the Promised Land. The meaning, here, is that every characteristic that was born in the “captivity” of ego-consciousness needs to be transcended. Only soul-qualities, developed in the expansion of divine communion, are able to enter the Eternal Kingdom. The Promised Land described in the Bible is union with God: the land of cosmic consciousness. Delusive qualities, born of ego-consciousness, are rooted in the consciousness of separateness from God. The ego is not the true Self. All of us are made in the image of God. The Bible, in the first chapter of the Gospel of St. John, tells us that we are all the sons of God. If we define ourselves as being different from Him, we must transcend this self-definition before we, as pure souls, can enter into the divine realm. Such egoic qualities as selfishness, hatred, passion, greed, personal ambition, covetousness, jealousy, and anger are weights that prevent the balloon of awareness from soaring up into the sky of Spirit. St. John therefore tells us also, “No man hath seen God at any time.” Never, in other words, by human, egoic consciousness can the Divine be perceived. The divine truth is far above human realities. As the Bible states also, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.”
The Promised Land is the reward bestowed, eventually, on all who seek God earnestly. Exodus contains an esoteric hint which reinforces this truth. The Promised Land is described as a “land of milk and honey.” The Bible tells us, “And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt . . ., and I am come down to deliver them . . . and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey.”
Indeed, certain aspects of the spiritual path are subtler than ordinary knowledge—that is, than what can be comprehended by anyone who lacks personal experience of inner realities. Those aspects are familiar, however, to yogis and to others who meditate deeply. These truths are hinted at in both the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. Let us consider momentarily this specific anecdote in the Bible. In deep ecstasy it so happens that the tongue turns automatically upward toward the brain. At the tip of the tongue there is a positive magnetism which, when united with its negative complement in the nasal cavity, “short-circuits” (in a manner of speaking) the flow of energy in the body and keeps it in the brain. With this physical union is formed a kind of “nectar,” described by yogis as the inner counterpart of outer sexual union. The Hindu scriptures describe this nectar as having the taste of a blend of clarified butter, or ghee—milk in its purest form—and honey. The Hindu Vedas named this “nectar,” soma. An entire scripture was named Soma Veda. This soma nectar is able to sustain the body for long periods of time while the soul remains rapt in ecstasy, known in the yoga teachings as samadhi.
The Promised Land, then, is no mere earthly location. Israel symbolized the soul’s true land: cosmic consciousness. It must be stated here that the Jews were not, as a whole race, the chosen people of God. For of course there were and always have been good Jews and bad Jews: the same mix that one encounters everywhere on earth of saints and sinners. The Jews in this story symbolize the sincere aspirants in every country and religion who forsake sense-slavery, and commit themselves to realizing the kingdom of God within. As Paramhansa Yogananda often put it, “God chooses those who choose Him.”
The story of Moses and the exodus of the Jews from Egypt contains other mystical symbols as well, yogic in nature since they relate to truths more often considered part of the yoga teachings. Moses, for example, is described as raising the serpent power of Kundalini: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” Here two kinds of serpent energy are described: the downward moving force, which draws the consciousness toward worldly and sensual indulgence; and the upward flow, which liberates one’s consciousness from delusion.
The “pole” described here is the spine. Many swamis in India carry a danda, which is a staff they use to remind themselves to remain ever centered in the spine. This “pole,” so described in the story of Moses, is made of brass. The serpent upon it is fiery, suggestive of the inner light which ascends with spiritual wakening. Only when this light, or Kundalini energy, is uplifted can the “poison bite” of delusion be healed.
Thus, Jesus Christ said also, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of man be lifted up.” (John 3:14) Jesus was not speaking of his coming death on the cross. That was an event which no one, as yet, could anticipate. It had to be a later commentator, therefore, who suggested this meaning. What Jesus was saying, rather, was that human consciousness must be lifted up, even as Moses lifted up his own consciousness in the “wilderness” of inner silence, by raising the power of Kundalini in the spine.
The present author once asked Paramhansa Yogananda whether Moses was a spiritual master. “Yes, certainly,” Yogananda replied in an affirmative tone of voice. “The Bible says he ‘lifted up the serpent [that is, the Kundalini power] in the wilderness.’”
These brief excerpts from the Bible are offered here to prepare the reader, especially if he is Jewish or Christian, for similarly deep teachings in the Bhagavad Gita. Even Hindus, after pondering the universality of those teachings, may find it easier to relate to the deeper aspects of this great Hindu scripture.
