Verse
13
Mahaatmaanastu maam paratha
Daiveem prakritimaashritaah;
Bhajantyananyamanaso jnaatwaa
Bhootaadimavyayam.
But the great souls, O
Arjuna, partaking of My divine nature, worship Me with a single mind (with the
mind devoted to nothing else), knowing Me as the imperishable source of beings.
Lord Krishna describes the mahatmas or
great souls whose hearts are not full of trivial, mundane desires. This is
because all their sins have been eradicated by the multitudes of meritorious
deeds performed in thousands of previous lifetimes and thus their hearts have
been cleansed of all dross and impurities and they possess the divine nature.
These mahatmas have naturally qualified
themselves for contemplation and meditation on the ultimate absolute truth
associated with the Supreme Lord.
Exclusive devotion of the mind denotes that exultant state of
consciousness where one is imbued with ecstatic waves of love for the Supreme
Lord where if without such a mood and feeling of worshipful devotion not only
in the mind and by the external senses but from the atma as
well then life would become without support and untenable.
Such great souls worship the Supreme Lord with such intense one-pointed
focus that this worship alone constitutes their sole aim and complete goal.
The great souls are those who have woken up from their ignorance
and brushed aside material consciousness like a bad dream.
Released from the grips of the material energy, Maya, they are
now under the shelter of the divine Yogmaya energy. Such
enlightened souls have woken up to the spiritual reality of their eternal
relationship with God.
Just as God has both aspects to His personality—the formless and
the personal form—His Yogmaya energy also possesses both
aspects. It is a formless energy, but it also manifests in the personal
form as Radha, Sita, Durga, Lakshmi, Kali, Parvati, etc.
All these divine personalities are manifestations of the divine
energy of God, and they are all non-different from each other, just as Krishna,
Ram, Shiv, Narayan, etc. are non-different forms of the one God.
Krishna says, “Knowing Me as the Origin of all things, knowing
Me as Supreme beyond all things, knowing Me as All-in-all, knowing that in Me
everything can be found, knowing that I am the source of immortality, these
great souls, mahatmas, resort to Me, being endowed with the highest quality
of sattva.
They adore Me in their spirit, they worship Me in their spirit,
they praise Me in their spirit, they concentrate on Me through their spirit,
and wish that their spirit gets merged in My spirit.” Ananyamanasaḥ:
Those whose mind cannot be distracted in any direction other
than My Universal existence, such people I consider as mahatmas, the great
souls that inhabit this cosmos.”
Such great souls are very few in number, as the Yoga Vasishtha
tells us. It is said that they are very few in number because the earth cannot
bear the weight of such great people.
Great souls are very few in number; wicked people are
multifarious. In one of his commentaries, Sankaracharya says that gods are
lesser in number than demons.
Love.
