Bhagavad Gita 4.36

api ced asi pāpebhyaḥ

sarvebhyaḥ pāpa-kṛttamaḥ

sarvaṁ jñāna-plavenaiva

vṛjinaṁ santariṣyasi

 

“Even if your sins are dark and vast,

More than all who sinned in the past,

The boat of wisdom, when you firmly ascend,

The ocean of illusion, you will surely transcend.”

 

You, my Lord, are revealed in your full glory through the wisdom that removes illusion.

When this illusion is being dispelled, step by step, the first misconception I need to reject is the self-congratulatory and simplistic notion that I have hardly committed any serious wrongs. Your wisdom helps me see how, under the spell of ignorance and illusion, I have committed many wrongs—if not knowingly, then unknowingly. However, this awareness often makes me vulnerable to a second, more subtle, yet more sinister illusion—that my wrongdoings are so many that I have no hope of being redeemed.

Protect me, O Lord, from both these extremes—the belief that my wrongs are so small as to be negligible, and the belief that my wrongs are so great as to make me incorrigible.

Bring me, O Lord, to the balanced understanding that my wrongs are significant, but far greater than my failings is your compassionate capacity to free me from their toxic effects.

The wisdom you provide assures me that even if my wrongs are like an ocean, that wisdom itself is like a sturdy boat. Bless me, my Lord, to internalize the two implications of this moving metaphor: that you are potent enough to free me from the burdens of my past, and that I need to be patient enough as the boat of your wisdom takes its time to carry me across the ocean of illusion.

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04.36 Even if you are considered to be the most sinful of all sinners, when you are situated in the boat of transcendental knowledge you will be able to cross over the ocean of miseries.