Chapter 2, Verse 19
ya enaṁ vetti hantāraṁ
yaś cainaṁ manyate hatam
ubhau tau na vijānīto
nāyaṁ hanti na hanyate
He who regards this (the soul) as a slayer, and he who thinks it is slain, both of them fail to perceive the truth. The soul does not slay, nor is it slain.
The Atma is in the killer, and the Atma is in the one being killed. But the Atma is not perishable. Those who think that the soul of the slayer or the soul of the slain are limited or perishable, are in deep confusion.
Krishna says that an ignorant man attributes the functions of the body to the soul. He says, “Look, you should not mix up the body and the soul. Your soul is the Great Observer, it observes things; it comes here and does its dharma, but it remains separate from the mind, the intellect, and the body. It is something apart from who you are. The one who thinks that the slayer is the soul is completely mistaken, and the one who thinks that the soul is killed, is completely mistaken.” This does not mean that now that you can think, that, “We are eternal. It’s okay to go and kill people!” No, it doesn’t mean that one can start killing others. Here Krishna is talking from the point of view of a warrior, a yoddha. He was on the battlefield. He says, “Look, how can you kill the soul? The soul is eternal, it’s not perishable. How can you say that the killer is the soul, or the person? Which one is the killer? The soul or the person? Neither. The killer is the body; but the soul has nothing to do with the body. The soul doesn’t kill; it is separate from this reality.”
Here Krishna explains that the soul doesn’t go through any modifications. The soul in itself is pure and is not even modified by the effects of karma. Even if it is always moving from one body to another, the soul is ever-free. Last week, someone asked me, “Are we liberated or not?” I said, “The Atma of everybody is realised. Everybody is free, because you are part of God. And that part of God which is present inside of you, is forever realised. It is ever-lasting and is fully realised.” In your sadhana, what you do is, you polish the outside to get rid of all the karma. Later on, Krishna explains this with an analogy: “If a mirror is covered by dust, the mirror is not touched by the dust; the mirror always stays behind the dust. But when the dust is cleaned away, then the mirror appears clear.”
This is the beauty of the Gita: here Krishna describes the soul as being like a mirror. This shows that people already knew about mirrors at that time. It’s true! In the west, they say that mirrors were invented 2000 years ago. They don’t know that 5000 years ago, Krishna had already spoken about mirrors in the Gita. Five years ago, scientists discovered a piece of glass that was 2000 years old. They came to the conclusion that this was the oldest glass that had ever existed. But in India, glass existed 5000 years ago! Imagine how advanced this culture was! In Krishna’s time, in Dwapara Yuga, people had a certain knowledge. That was why Krishna could talk about the Self. Arjuna knew about the Self; he had the knowledge that he was the Atma, that the Atma and the body were completely separate. Krishna was only there to remind him of this truth.
Bhagavad Gita
