09.02: Conformation brings confirmation
We may sometimes wonder: “Are the statements in the Bhagavad-gita about God’s existence and benevolence to be accepted on faith alone? Isn’t there any way to confirm them?”
Gita wisdom answers: There is indeed; confirmation comes by conformation.
The Bhagavad-gita (9.2) states that its message is pratyakshavagamam, directly perceivable by one’s own experience. Thus the Gita’s approach in presenting its wisdom is bold and beckoning; it invites and challenges us to try out its teachings by expanding our consciousness from matter to spirit and thereby experience the higher realities it talks about.
Gita wisdom asserts that there is more to reality than the material realm that we presently perceive and pursue. To access this higher spiritual realm of reality, we need to awaken our dormant spiritual faculty, our capacity to perceive the spiritual realm. As souls, this spiritual faculty is intrinsic to us, but it has been lulled to sleep by protracted disuse. This atrophy has been caused by our prolonged fascination with material pleasures and our resultant fixation in material reality.
Therefore, if we wish to arouse our spiritual faculty, we need to:
- Decrease our material fixation by minimizing and regulating material indulgences
- Expose ourselves in a disciplined and sustained manner to spiritual stimuli that prompt and prod our spiritual faculty into activation
When we thus conform our lifestyle to the model given in the Gita, then we start perceiving spiritual reality with increasing clarity and perspicacity. Gita savants assure us that the more our spiritual faculty awakens, the more we experience the existence, the beauty and the love of Krishna to be self-evident realities, as real as – in fact, more real than – the sun overhead at noon.