The Bible says, “Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die."
”The Guru Granth Sahib says, “One who has knowledge of God depends on God alone. Such knower of God never dies.” And the Bhagavad Gita says, “Having crossed over the three attributes arising from the body, the dweller in the body is completely freed from birth, death, old age and sorrow and attains immortality.”
Though all these holy texts have been read over and over again by us for thousands of years, we could not get to the real sense of the words contained in them. We could not ever imagine that the terms like ‘have eternal life’ or ‘never die’ appearing in the Bible and Guru Granth Sahib; or ‘completely free from sorrow, old age and death’ spoken by the Prophets literally mean living forever and not dying.
The Gita reveals that when we engage in actions with mind on their fruit, it gives rise to attachment, that in turn gives rise to desire, desire leads to anger, anger to delusion, delusion to confusion of memory and confusion of memory leads to loss of intellect. When the intellect is lost, we perish. Since, we are eternal beings, we leave the worn-out bodies and take birth in the new bodies. It may thus be seen that the ultimate cause of our death is loss of intellect; but the primal cause of death is performance of actions with eye on the fruits of action.
The Gita also reveals that the actions are performed by the attributes of nature, and not by the beings. But, the beings who are deluded by the ego, think, ‘I am the doer’. This attaches them to the attributes and result in their constant birth in good and evil wombs.
The sage Vashisht imparted the same gyan to Lord Ram in the following words: ‘You are not the doer of any action here, O Ram; so why do you assume doership? When One alone exists, who does what, and how? Do not become inactive either; for, what is gained by doing nothing? What has to be done, has to be done. Therefore, rest in the Self. Even while doing all actions natural to you, if you stay unattached, you are truly the non-doer. On the other hand, if you are doing nothing and are attached to that non-doership, you become the doer!’
The only change that is required to take place for our achievement of immortality is a change in our thoughts. We have to perform actions without contemplating upon their fruits and by mentally renouncing the actions to God, thinking that God is performing the actions. Just as we become bound to our actions by thinking that we are the doers, we get freed from the bonds of actions by thinking that we are not the doers.
This sacrifice of the ‘doership’ or the mental renouncement of actions to God has been declared the highest Yog in the Gita. Not to be confused with Yoga or physical postures, the path of Yog described in The Gita is very easy to practice and does not require any change in one’s actions or life style or daily routine. Becoming free from attachment and desire does not at all mean abstaining from sense objects or their enjoyments. Lord Krishna says that a person who abstains from the objects or enjoyments but keeps desiring them is an unintelligent who eventually loses his intellect and perishes. As against this, the person who enjoys all the objects but does not have desire and yearning for them will not perish but have eternal life. To practice yog, one has to bring change in one’s thoughts only and mentally renounce all fruits and actions to God.
If we sincerely fathom the import of Krishna's words, we can not only become free from sorrow, diseases and old-age, but also from death and can continue to live in the same body forever. The simple renouncement of all actions to God while performing the actions is the greatest secret science rendered in The Gita, that can free us from sorrows, diseases, old age and death.
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