Lessons from Mahabharata -- Ep.5

The Geetha Theory of Control Systems

Law of Karma is the most spoken and popular part of the Bhagavad Geetha. Krishna spends ample of time in explaining the law of Karma to Arjuna and keeps coming back to this central idea of Karmic cycle. Arjuna too repeatedly introspect on the aspect of Karma. Though we always think we have understood it, it teases us in a big way. We often have lot of questions popping up around our own understanding and we find those inevitable gaps, and when we try hard to fix those gaps, we create new logical gaps and our journey to find answers continues. When you get obsessed with understanding the most sacred song of god using your incorrigible, materialistic logical brain there are some crazy outcomes. Here is one..... What I am about to present is only my current thought process around the concept and am sure in few days I will question this very perspective of mine.

Looking at it from an engineer's lens, if my life is a control system which produces the result or effect as an output at regular intervals, the inputs or causes are far too many. Birth, parents, demography, friends, family, society, economic status, others actions, DNA etc. etc. A portion of the result or effect also feeds back in to the cause side and affects the next cycle of causes.

This whole control system and all it's causes that we can think and list are simply controlled by the one absolute truth Krishna (Brahman/Universe) himself. However, it seems like (seems like..) there is one special cause element that can be somehow fractionally influenced by me. That one another special input to this system is, our Karma or actions or work.

Oh yeah and the system itself is a function again of Krishna (Brahman/Universe) and it simply looks like its an automated, self sustained system functioning at a gigantic scale with the cause and effect and all being controlled by same truth: Krishna! However, the Karma angle slightly leaves something for me to define my purpose. An input that can be seemingly influenced by me. The only possible thing that may be my choice. My Karma. One major question that pops up is if my Karma is my choice then doesn't Krishna play a role in it? The answer is a bit tricky. Look at the system again, I act I feed in as input but the way it influences the system is again through an error detector regulated by him. That's why I stress the point, the karma "seemingly" has an effect.

Now to the song. Big or small, lot or little, the only input to our life that is in our hands is our Karma. Nothing else, everything is him and him only. That's exactly what Krishna tells Arjuna. There is only one thing that is possibly your choice that can influence your life, Your Karma. That's the only thing I can concentrate on. My Karma; Does then the Karma fully control my life? Well no!

It's beyond our capability to know the equation of full function of life. As I said, how much does my karma control my immediate life and its results is not something that a human maniac brain can calculate. However, that's not even the point. The point is, how much ever it is, that's the only thing I can and I need to bother about. Bothering about other inputs only causes anxiety!

That's exactly what Krishna said repeatedly. Bother only about that which you can influence, how does the rest of causes pan out, how does the system process it and what exactly is the effect is out of your boundary and he simply said.... Leave it to me!