Answering Arjuna's objections There are two kinds of answer to these objections to taking part in this family war.

It does not matter, the objections are groundless It is a positive good, you should go in there and do it Krishna offers both kinds of answer, in urging Arjuna to overcome his faintheart edness and accept the battle. Negative: irrelevance of death He speaks throughout one body to another s, ages and dies and s precious, the body of the Atman, the inner spirit, the soul that migrates from through eternity, and sets this against the body which grow is left by the Atman to move into another body. The Atman i worthless and not worthy of any serious concern.

The truly wise mourn neither for the living nor the dead. There was never a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings. Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be?.That which is non-existent can never come into be ing, and that which is can never cease to be. Those who have known the inmost Re ality know also the nature of is and is not ?Bodies are said to die, but That wh ich possesses the body is eternal. It cannot be limited, or destroyed. Therefore you must fight. No problem, says Krishna, do not worry about shooting your arrows into mere bodi es, they do not matter. Do not worry about killing as the lives of bodies do not matter. Only the eternal Atman matters. This is a serious argument, with profou nd implicat-ions. If one accepts it, then the work of doctors is valueless, the efforts to rescue anyone from danger or death are pointless, the effort to make others comfort-able or even physically healthy all involve missing the point of existence, which is to ignore the mere body and concentrate on the Atman. The ef fort by parents to nurture the bodies and minds of their children, see them thro ugh to adulthood, is a waste of time as all these bodies are of no value. Even g iving birth s an activity of no value as it just creates another worthless body. Some say this Atman is slain, and others call it the slayer: they know nothing. How can it slay or who shall slay it? Know this Atman unborn, undying, never cea sing, never beginning, deathless, birthless, unchanging forever. How can it die the death of the body? Knowing it birthless, knowing it deathless, knowing it en dless, forever unchanging, dream not you do the deed of the killer, dream not th e power is yours to command it. Krishna urges Arjuna to revere the Atman and concentrate on its eternal virtues. But he never tells anything about it, other than contrasting its change-lessnes s with the ever-shifting evanescence of the physical world and its sensations. W hat are its characteristics, why is it worthy of any notice at all? Krishna does not say, except that it is a part of himself (chapter 15) Part of myself is the god within very creature. Keeps that nature eternal, yet s eems to be separate, putting on mind and senses five? If it is changeless, how do you know it is even there? All Krishna says is The A tman cannot be manifested to the senses, or thought about by the mind. So it is entirely abstract, secret, undetectable, unthinkable, no human can know anything of it, yet it is somehow the only thing in the universe of any value and all th e physical objects of our experience are worthless, not to be taken seriously as of any importance in the long term. If it never changes, and therefore does not take part in the ever-changing daily round of human life and relationships, what is its role in human society and hu man development and developing of mature adult values? How does this changeless

thing interact with the human body in which it mysteriously seems to be housed f or a few decades? Krishna says nothing of this, but apparently it doesn't intera ct at all as interaction implies change. Changelessness is presented as superior to change. What is superior about being changeless? Krishna takes it for granted this is so, but does not explain, just repeatedly expresses contempt for things that appear and pass away and do not en dure. He gives no criteria to help anyone understand how he ranks things as supe rior or inferior. The Knowledge of this simple idea is presented as a revelation , not as something a human can investigate and learn about, just something revea led by a god. In chapter 10 Krishna says I am the Atman (along with everything else) In chapter 11, Arjuna begs Krishna to show him his Universal Form, a vision not usually granted to humans who cannot handle such an awful spectacle. Krishna gra nts the request and there is a description of a multi-bodied monster, creating a nd devouring millions of humans, including all the senior warriors on the other side of the coming battle. All yonder sons of Dhritarashtra together with the hosts of kinds and also Bhism a, Drona and Karna along with the chief warriors on our side too are rushing int o thy fearful mouths set with terrible tusks. Some caught between the teeth are seen with their heads crushed to powder. As the many rushing torrents of rivers race towards the ocean, so do these heroes of the world of men rush into thy fla ming mouths?. The reason for including this tremendous vision becomes clear in a statement by Krishna I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples, ready for that hour that ripens to their ruin. All these hosts must die; strike, stay your hand - no matter. There fore strike. Win kingdom, wealth and glory. Arjuna, arise ?.seem to slay. By me these men are slain already. All this is saying really is that in the long run we are all dead. It becomes a syllogism All men die, sooner or later When you kill, you only kill men already doomed So go ahead, they may as well die now as later The conclusion from this little bit of reasoning, that killing is of no importan ce, as all humans are already doomed by Krishna, is devastating. Try applying it to your own life - your spouse, your children, siblings, parents will all die e ventually, doomed by the gods, so why not now? Get it over with. It is an attempt to derive a moral position from the large-scale nature of the u niverse, a bit like the efforts in the 1930s and 1940s to derive a human moral s ystem from the fact of evolution. That one did not work either. If it is a prope r moral system, then there is no point in having any ethical code of behaviour t owards other humans, as they are all doomed to die. Do whatever you like, let yo ur nastiest impulses have free rein, it matters not a bit. Interpreted as a guid e to daily behaviour towards fellow humans, it can be seen as not just wrong, bu t as evil, justifying all those criminal actions for which we punish people in a n effort to protect human communities from violence and oppression. Homicide is not the worst of crimes, it is something of no importance at all, nothing to be bothered about.

Much of the Gita is introduced in this second chapter on the Yoga of Knowledge. The idea of reincarnation, of the eternal changeless Atman that briefly occupies a human body and when the body dies passes to another one. Bodies are said to d ie, but That which possesses the body is eternal. Just as the dweller in this bo dy passes through childhood, youth and old age; so at death he merely passes int o another kind of body. The implications of this idea of reincarnation are that bodies are of no consequ ence, just temporary passing outer garments discarded one after another by an et ernal soul. Arjuna has no memory of his previous incarnations and Krishna comments on this i n chapter 4: You and I, Arjuna, have lived many lives. I remember them all, you do not rememb er. So, if humans cannot remember their past lives, how do they know they had any? O f course, as with all religions based on revelation from gods, the answer is tha t gods told some humans about it and they spread the word. Not the sort of thing humans can work out for themselves. Krishna's conclusion Therefore you must fight is a negative conclusion. There is no good reason not to fight. If this is so, then there is no good reason to hol d back from any violence to any other body at any time, as bodies do not matter at all. So all the human con-cerns about violence and destruction are misguided as they do not matter. This is turning ordinary social morality on its head. App arently the only evil is taking bodies and their pains and death seriously, when you should be thinking of more serious matters like the Atman.