Bhagavad Gita (7.13 - 7.18): "Four Types of Devotees"

So we begin today on verse number thirteen in chapter seven.

As we saw in this chapter seven, Krishna begins by describing his two natures, para prakriti and apara prakriti, higher nature and lower nature.

And he says that [clears throat] this entire creation has come from the combination of these two.

The world that we experience is, although we tend to say it's-- the Vedantins will tend to say though it's unreal and it's an appearance, that statement has to be understood in proper context.

That everything we experience is a mixture, is a mixture of the real and the unreal.

If it is something completely unreal, we would never experience it.

If it is completely real, then we'll experience it, it as it is.

But somehow the real and the unreal [cough] when they get mixed up, we see something which is not as it is, but distorted in some way.

The example we often give is of a coiled rope in a semi-lit room with- without sufficient light, and we mistake it for a snake.

[clears throat] So the snake...

Then this is a big question that they ask in Vedanta text.

Is the snake real or unreal? And there are two words in Sanskrit they use for unreal.

One is called asat.

Sat is real, asat is unreal.

But they also have a, another one word called mithya.

Now, mithya also means unreal.

So there are, you could say, two kinds of unreal.

Uh, one kind of unreal is, like, totally unreal [laughs] in the sense no one has ever seen it.

Think in terms of, let's say if I say a square circle.

A square circle is unreal.

No one has ever seen it in the past or present or future.

It's totally unreal.

But the snake, you can't say it's real because when you switch on the light, you know it's a rope.

You can't say it's completely unreal either.

I mean, if it were unreal, how you are seeing it? And so they have this category called mithya, which is unreal but which appears to be real.