The word and

Krishna told Arjuna to be centred in the absolute and fight. Jesus named the greatest commandment and then added a second. The swami says the small word is the whole teaching.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-21 · Nondual

Chapter 15 of 18 in Ninety minutes with a swami

The obvious difficulty with the Gita is this. In it, a prince who does not want to fight is counselled by God, and God tells him to fight. What is anyone supposed to do with a God who says that.

Swami Sarvapriyananda's answer was that the war is not the point and never was. Millions of Hindus across thousands of years were not inspired by the Gita because somebody won a battle. What the book is for is the sentence underneath the story, which he compresses to this: be centred in me, and fight the battle of life. And then he does something I had not seen done before. He says, look at the and.

You could have either half on its own. Be centred in the absolute and forget the world, which is the cave and the mountain. Or do your duty in the world and forget the absolute, which is most of us most of the time. Krishna says both, joined. And the swami's argument is that non-duality forces the join. If the absolute really is limitless, then it is not limited by the world, which means the world is not somewhere else, which means you cannot pursue one by leaving the other. Walking away from life to find reality is a category mistake dressed as renunciation.

Then he does it again with Jesus. Asked for the most important commandment, by people whose religion was commandments, Jesus gives the first one, love God with all your heart and strength. That is the answer. It is in the Torah. He could stop. He does not stop. And love your neighbour. The swami says that if he had left out the and, it would have violated non-duality, and I found myself slightly shocked that a Hindu monk was the person who made the gospel sentence make structural sense to me.

The motto Vivekananda gave his monastic order is for one's own liberation and for the welfare of the world. Two goals, apparently. The swami says they are one act seen from two sides, because serving people and pursuing your own realisation are both, in the end, attending to the same non-dual reality. This is the same move as the last piece, the street as the object of worship, but stated as grammar.

I spend my days in the second half of the sentence and I read about the first half at night, and I had been treating those as two lives, with the hours split badly. The and says they are not two. I am not sure I believe it. I am sure I had not considered it.