The Bhagavad Gita

by Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

whose real drive, we might say, is not so much to know the unknown as to know the knower.

Most important, he urges us that it is our destiny as human beings to make this journey ourselves. Everything else is secondary.

The world of the senses is just a base camp: we are meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality.

What a powerful message that we are not physical beings having a spiritual experience, instead we are spiritual beings have a human experience,

Addressed to everyone, of whatever background or status, the Gita distills the loftiest truths of India’s ancient wisdom into simple, memorable poetry that haunts the mind and informs the affairs of everyday life.

The battlefield is a perfect backdrop, but the Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious.

This is the battle I am currently fighting within myself.

(1) there is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change; (2) this same reality lies at the core of every human personality; (3) the purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially: that is, to realize God while here on earth.

In every case, this clothing of the Infinite in human form serves to focus a devotee’s love and to provide an inspiring ideal. But whatever form is worshipped, it is only an aspect of the same one God.

Brahman, the Godhead; Atman, the divine core of personality; dharma, the law that expresses and maintains the unity of creation; karma, the web of cause and effect; samsara, the cycle of birth and death; moksha, the spiritual liberation that is life’s supreme goal.

Well, this appears to be something to learn to understand the religion, right?

they found not a world of solid, separate objects but a ceaseless process of change – matter coming together, dissolving, and coming together again in a different form. Below this flux of things with “name and form,” however, they found something changeless: an infinite, indivisible reality in which the transient data of the world cohere. They called this reality Brahman: the Godhead, the divine ground of existence.

What a brilliant concept. It is non ending and enduring, I love this concept.

Just as the world dissolves into a sea of energy, the mind dissolves into a river of impressions and thoughts, a flow of fragmentary data that do not hold together.

In profound meditation, they found, when consciousness is so acutely focused that it is utterly withdrawn from the body and mind, it enters a kind of singularity in which the sense of a separate ego disappears. In this state, the supreme climax of meditation, the seers discovered a core of consciousness beyond time and change. They called it simply Atman, the Self.

The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life.

Yes, this is truly my belief as well. We all come from the same source and are indelibly connected to one another.

The sages called the dream of waking life – the dream of separate, merely physical existence – by a suggestive name, maya. In general use the word meant a kind of magic, the power of a god or sorcerer to make a thing appear to be something else.

What a lovely term for waking life, Maya, it appears to respect the work that went into displaying a world of difference when there are no differences.

turiya, the fourth state of consciousness – in which duality disappears. This does not mean, however, that the phenomenal world is an illusion or unreal. The illusion is the sense of separateness.

Those who disidentify themselves with the conditions of perception in maya wake up into a higher mode of knowing in which the unity of life is apprehended directly. The disciplines for achieving this are called yoga, as is the state of union: the word comes from the root yuj, to yoke or bind together. The “experience” itself (properly speaking, it is beyond experience) is called samadhi.

In this state we realize that we are not a physical creature but the Atman, the Self, and thus not separate from God.

This is such a lovely and simple concept, why can’t we all get behind this idea? It shows that we are all deeply connected.

Life cannot threaten such a person; all it holds is the opportunity to love, to serve, and to give.

This is so empowering! Why wouldn’t we follow this feeling?

The word dharma means many things, but its underlying sense is “that which supports,” from the root dhri, to support, hold up, or bear. Generally, dharma implies support from within: the essence of a thing, its virtue, that which makes it what it is.

I love this definition. How do we use this in the yoga class as an incentive for right living?

“Of course,” the sage replied. “It is the dharma of a scorpion to sting. But it is the dharma of a human being to save.”

This is a brilliant story to bring into my teaching and Dharma talks.

On a larger scale, dharma means the essential order of things, an integrity and harmony in the universe and the affairs of life that cannot be disturbed without courting chaos. Thus it means rightness, justice, goodness, purpose rather than chance.

for every kind of violence is a violation of dharma, the fundamental law of the unity of life.

This reminds me of the internal power of ahimsa.

The law of karma states simply that every event is both a cause and an effect. Every act has consequences of a similar kind, which in turn have further consequences and so on; and every act, every karma, is also the consequence of some previous karma.

Wow, this makes karma so powerful, that is just a folding over of more and more karma from previous decisions. The more of the same decisions we make the more the karma get solidified.

This refers not only to physical action but to mental activity as well.

Wow this is even more powerful and something I want to remember.

there is not merely an accidental but an essential relationship between mental and physical activity. Given appropriate conditions to develop further, thoughts breed actions of the same kind, as a seed can grow only into one particular kind of tree.

The law of karma states unequivocally that though we cannot see the connections, we can be sure that everything that happens to us, good and bad, originated once in something we did or thought. We ourselves are responsible for what happens to us, whether or not we can understand how. It follows that we can change what happens to us by changing ourselves; we can take our destiny into our own hands.

If we consider the importance of this statement, we can see how we each have ultimate power over our circumstances.

Everything we do produces karma in the mind. In fact, it is in the mind rather than the world that karma’s seeds are planted.

This is so powerful, the start of all karma is in the mind and this is where it is built into something destructive, if not healthy.

Karma is sometimes considered punitive, a matter of getting one’s just desserts. This is accurate enough, but it is much more illuminating to consider karma an educative force whose purpose is to teach the individual to act in harmony with dharma – not to pursue selfish interests at the expense of others, but to contribute to life and consider the welfare of the whole.

Okay, after years of confusion, I think I have finally gotten my head wrapped around karma and it is beautiful. Almost a necessary part of life!

That is the basis of samsara, the cycle of birth and death.

According to this analysis, the ego dies every night.

What a brilliant concept, the ego dies each night.

Sankhya philosophy posits two separate categories: Purusha, spirit, and prakriti, everything else.

For practical purposes – at least as far as the Gita is concerned – Purusha may be regarded as a synonym for Atman. Purusha is the Self, beyond all change, the same in every creature.

never really encounter the world; all we experience is our own nervous system.

Gita says they are just as intimately related. Just as a seed can grow into only one kind of tree, thoughts can produce effects only of the same nature. Kindness to others, to take just one example, favors a nervous system that is kind to itself.

Tamas, the lowest level, is the vast unconscious, a chaotic dumping ground for the residue of past mental states. “Unconscious”

There is no choice in tamas, no awareness; this is complete ignorance of the unity of life, ignorance of any other need than one’s own basic urges.

Rajas is what we ordinarily mean by mind, the incessant stream of thought that races along, desiring, worrying, resenting, scheming, competing, frustrating and getting frustrated. Rajas is power released, but uncontrolled and egocentric.

Woof yes I certainly recognize that white it is real and I am sure had something to do with my current illness.

Sattva, finally, is the so-called higher mind – detached, unruffled, self-controlled. This is not a state of repressive regulation, but the natural harmony that comes with unity of purpose, character, and desire. Negative states of mind do still come up, prompted by tamas and rajas, but there is no need to act on them.

Yes, this is the one that I want, let’s get to work!

Yet all three are always present at some level of awareness, and their proportions change: their interplay is the dynamics of personality.

As long as he identifies with his body and mind, he is at the mercy of this play. But the Self is not involved in the gunas’ interaction; it is witness rather than participant:

They not only explain differences in character; they describe the basic forces of personality and allow the possibility of reshaping ourselves after a higher ideal. Because personality is a process, the human being is constantly remaking himself or herself.

This is lovely because it makes you realize we all have the potential to be better and better with each passing moments we don’t have to accept things rather we have the power to make changes.

Evolution, according to the Gita, is a painfully slow return to our native state.

when all this passionate energy is channeled into selfless action. This state is marked by happiness, a calm mind, abundant vitality, and the concentration of genius.

But even this is not the end. The goal of evolution is to return to unity: that is, to still the mind. Then the soul rests in pure, unitary consciousness, which is a state of permanent joy.

jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge, aspirants use their will and discrimination to disidentify themselves from the body, mind, and senses until they know they are nothing but the Self.

bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, achieve the same goal by identifying themselves completely with the Lord in love; by and large,

In karma yoga, the yoga of selfless action, the aspirants dissolve their identification with body and mind by identifying with the whole of life, forgettin...

raja yoga, the yoga of meditation, discipline the mind and senses until the mind-process is suspended in a healing sti...

it means a poise of the soul which enables one to look at life in all its aspects and evenly.

As always, its emphasis is on the mind. It teaches that we can become free by giving up not material things, but selfish attachments to material things – and, more important, to people. It asks us to renounce not the enjoyment of life, but the clinging to selfish enjoyment whatever it may cost others. It pleads, in a word, for the renunciation of selfishness in thought, word, and action – a theme that is common to all mystics, West and East alike.

The Gita teaches simply that this selfish craving is what makes a person feel separate from the rest of life. When it is extinguished – the literal meaning of nirvana – the mask of the transient, petty empirical ego falls, revealing our real Self.