More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
even if you believe the Self to be subject to birth and death, you should not grieve. 27 Death is inevitable for the living; birth is inevitable for the dead.
You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. 48 Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself – without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is perfect evenness of mind.
When consciousness is unified, however, all vain anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill.
They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them,
Neither agitated by grief nor hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger.
Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad. Such are the seers.
sense objects, attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire,
the lust of possession that burns to anger. 63
Anger clouds the ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
all your power to free the senses from attachment and aversion alike,
free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the ego-cage of “I,” “me,” and “mine”
Actions determine destiny: this is the basic idea of karma.
because we would seek it compulsively, tying ourselves tighter and tighter to the responsibilities and opportunities of the worldly life and forgetting our
perform those duties without selfish attachment to their “fruit,” or outcome.
without ego-involvement and without getting entangled in whether things work out the way we want;
We cannot hope to escape karma by refraining from our duties: even to survive in the world, we must act.
the world is that Arjuna will get caught up in his actions
anger and selfish desire are our greatest enemies. They are the destructive powers that can compel us to wander away from our purpose, to end up in self-delusion and despair.
Sankhya, one of the six traditional schools of Indian philosophy. In Sankhya, the phenomenal world of mind and matter is described as having three basic qualities or gunas: sattva– goodness, light, purity; rajas– passion, activity, energy; and tamas– darkness, ignorance, inertia. According to Sankhya, spiritual evolution progresses from tamas to rajas to sattva, and final liberation takes the soul beyond the three gunas altogether.
King Janaka,
no one can gain perfection by abstaining from work. 5 Indeed, there is no one who rests for even an instant;
control their senses through the mind,
But those who realize the Self are always satisfied. Having found the source of joy and fulfillment, they no longer seek happiness from the external world.
security.
guided by compassion.
All actions are performed by the gunas of prakriti. Deluded by identification with the ego, a person thinks, “I am the doer.”
Those who are deluded by the operation of the gunas become attached to the results of their action.
but competition in another’s dharma breeds fear and insecurity.
Controlling your senses, conquer your enemy,
The senses are higher than the body, the mind higher than the senses; above the mind is the intellect, and above the intellect is the Atman.
let the Atman rule the ego.
dharma, the law of life’s unity,
In this sense Krishna is the inner Self in all beings.
Many of Krishna’s words make most sense when we realize that when he speaks of himself, he is often not describing a transcendental reality so much as trying to tell Arjuna about the Self in every human being.
“Actions do not cling to me because I am not attached to their results,” he means, “Arjuna, actions do not cling to your real Self.” The Self in us is not touched by action; whatever we do, it remains unsullied. “Those who understand this” – about themselves – “and practice it live in freedom.”
The wise never act with selfish attachment to the fruit of their labor; they give their best in fortune and misfortune alike. Such people act in freedom.
in any case it requires a measure of self-sacrifice.
Yajna is a basic action, necessary to life, and those who do not perform some kind of selfless service find no home in this world or the next.
wisdom is the goal of selfless action: knowing is the fruit of doing.
The goal of all karma yoga or yajna is liberation and spiritual wisdom. The fire of spiritual awareness burns to ashes even a great heap of karma; thus true knowledge is the greatest purifier of the soul.
Those who know me as their own divine Self break through the belief that they are the body and are not reborn as separate creatures.
Actions do not cling to me because I am not attached to their results. Those who understand this and practice it live in freedom.
What is action and what is inaction?
The wise see that there is action in the midst of inaction and inaction in the midst of action.
person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results;
Their security is unaffected by the results of their action;
Free from expectations and from all sense of possession, with mind and body firmly controlled by the Self,
They perform all work in the spirit of service,
True sustenance is in service,