Chapter 3 Karma Yoga Verse 30
Sloka
Evam buddheh param buddhwaa samstabhyaatmaanam aatmanaa;
Jahi shatrum mahaabaaho kaamaroopam duraasadam.
Translation
Thus, knowing Him who is superior to the intellect and restraining the self by the Self,
slay thou, O mighty-armed Arjuna, the enemy in the form of desire, hard to conquer!
Interpretation
This is the shloka where Lord Krishna does the summary of everything that He says in Karma yoga. This is the last shloka of Karma Yoga where the Lord advises Arjuna to restrain the lower self by the higher Self, subdue the lower mind by the higher mind. He says it is difficult to conquer desire because it is of highly complex and incomprehensible nature. But a man of knowledge, wisdom and dispassion, who does constant and intense Sadhana, can conquer these senses quite easily.
Extending Interpretation to Mankind’s Life!
As many things are already explained in the previous shlokas, I will touch upon the most prominent thing of desires and their nature. Desires are not as simple as we think they are. Suppose you feel like watching a movie. When you listen to a sadhguru or read speaking tree, which says control desire, we assume that stopping oneself from going to a movie is controlling desire. So, we stop going to a movie, study in that time and think we have overcome the desires. In reality we have not overcome the desires at all. How? Let me explain.
Overcoming the desires is not controlling them and doing something to forget those desires. Overcoming desires means genuinely losing interest in doing them. The day you actually feel like not going to a movie or playing cards or drinking alcohol you have come out of the desires. Desire is a thought, it is not the action. Thoughts leads to action. If you allow the thought but control the action, it is not overcoming the desire. You will overcome the desires the day you get over the thoughts also.
This, very few people understand and very few people can practice. That is why it is said that desires are highly complex in nature. The person who understands and overcomes them don’t need any external source to control these desires. Internally he gets that feeling of not getting those thoughts. The followers of Karma yoga should hence think, that controlling or doing an action is not enough. You need to get over the thought that you want to control and get in the thought on which you want to act. That is “karma Yoga” and that person is a “Karma Yogi”!
