Bhagavad Gita (7.25 - 7.30): "At the Hour of Death"

And so the chapter begins with Krishna describing his nature, and he says... divides it into two, calls it the lower nature, apra prakriti, and higher nature.

And very briefly, the lower nature is everything, the, the material world, everything that is matter, both subtle and gross.

And the higher nature is just pure consciousness.

So God's nature, lower and higher, is a mixture.

Is a mixture partly because God as simply as pure consciousness cannot be known intellectually.

What we are grasping with our senses and our mind as much as we can is something a little bit more tangible, the universe, the thoughts, the emotions, which are different from consciousness, but which seem to have emerged from that.

And so what Krishna points out is that the world in which we live is... seems to be a mixture of both matter and spirit, if you like.

Of... by spirit, that simply means consciousness.

Of these two, that which is material, in Sanskrit, the word material is called jada.

That which is material is perishable.

It's constantly changing.

It comes into-- seems to come into being and then disappears.

It's just particles of matter coming together.

That's composition.

Being separated, that's decomposition.

But consciousness, that's eternal.

That's unborn, birthless and deathless, pure and perfect.

The question often is, can these two be ever together? And the answer is no, they can never be together.

Just as light and darkness cannot coexist, consciousness and matter cannot coexist.

If they cannot coexist, how then can we say that one is lower nature of God and the higher nature of God? And so the underlying message throughout the Gita is that they cannot be together, but if they seem to be together, that means it's only a seeming, it's only an appearance.

And by word appearance, we use only when something is not really real but appears to be real.

It's like all kinds of bizarre things can happen in our dream, defying all laws of physics as we know it in our waking state.

And when we wake up and say, "That's impossible.

Normally, apples are supposed to fall down, but last night I dreamt the apples are going up." And you cannot deny that you saw it, but at the same time, just because I saw it in the dream, I don't immediately say, "Well, that must be real." So just as the dream is an appearance of things which seem to have a reality but which are not really real, this entire human experience that we have, that experience is a combination of what is real and what is unreal.

And discernment primarily means being able to separate what is real from unreal.