Upanishads

Creations

According to the vedic view of creation, there are three fundamental principles that control everything: Birth, Life and Death.

Everything has a beginning, a middle and an end. The Vedas call these three fundamental principles the three gunas: sattwa or creation, rajas or maintaining, tamas or concluding/ending.

¶ One short story to understand to know how does it work:

Imagine three brothers: Sat, Roger, and Tom. They want to start a computer software company named Goo-Na. It was Sat’s idea, and he did all the groundwork to get the company up and go- ing. He got G.O.D., venture capitalists, to loan them the startup funds.

But since Sat loses interest in the daily activities and likes to move on to create some more dot-com startup companies, Roger was the perfect choice to run the company.

Roger doesn’t have much creative sense, so he was happy that Sat started the company; Roger’s God-gifts lie in management and organization skills. So he runs the day-to-day operation.

Sat and Roger talked Tom into leaving his job at his salvage company and use his cleanup skills for their new company. Some of Tom’s responsibilities will be clearing out old computers, furniture, cell phones, cars, software, and so on, since the company must stay on the leading edge of technology and fashion (to impress the clients).

Tom also has the personality to compassionately deal with people when they must be let go. He is also in charge of disbanding parts of companies that their company takes over. The people who work at Goo-Na have enjoyed their jobs, their salaries support their families, and everything runs smoothly.

As the company becomes larger and more powerful, the brothers, human nature being what it is, begin to lose their idealistic focus. Roger becomes power hungry, ie, busy with hostile takeover attempts. Tom has become lazy and sloppy, not clearing out old inventory, not showing up for work, preferring to sit and watch plasma screen TV all day. And Sat, well, he spends all of his time either creating new companies or reading scripture and meditating.

As a result, corporate ethics has slipped and customers are not get- ting quality products. Creative ideas to serve humanity have fallen by the wayside. Other companies are being harassed where they were previously community partners, and there are even some financial scandals afoot.

There remains one employee, Archie, who joined the company, and who is still inspired by its idealistic mission statement; however, he is quite upset that the company is not allowing him to truly help society. No one listens to his creative ideas. When he tries to talk to any of the brothers, they ignore him. Archie is stuck, trapped by the three brothers. The only way to get out of this predicament is to go over the heads of the Goona brothers. For this, he has to go to the only place that has influence on the Goonas — the G.O.D., venture capitalists.

G.O.D. holds the purse strings and decides whether to continue funding this company. Since Archie alerted G.O.D. about the loss of vision at Goo-Na, the G.O.D. company may be able to bring integrity, ethics, compassion back into this company by threatening to close them down (ie, stop funding them).

As a result of Archie’s devotion to helping people, G.O.D. succeeded in putting Goo-Na back on track. This story gives a brief idea of how the gunas work. Sattwa creates life. Rajas keeps things going. Tamas concludes the life cycle.
{
To avoid getting caught up in material life and really know the eternal, nonchanging Divine bliss, Arjuna is advised to go beyond the three gunas and to directly seek God.
}