The Bhagavad Gita

"IT dwells in all, in every hand and foot and head, in every mouth and eye and ear in the universe. Without senses itself, it shines through the functioning of the senses. Completely independent, it supports all things."

The Bhagavad Gita

Historians believe that sometime between 1000 and 700 BC a great battle took place in an area not far from the city of Delhi in India.

The Mahabharata tells the story of this battle. Within it's pages, lie one of the most important spiritual conversations between student and disciple ever to be recorded. The Bhagavad GIta was this epic. It is the story of Prince Arjuna and his spiritual master Krishna. It is the eve of battle between Arjuna and some of his relatives. Arjuna finds it difficult to reconcile that he is being forced to go against his own blood. Prince Arjuna loses his nerve and asks his charioteer, Krishna what to do. 

Krishna, no ordinary charioteer, but an incarnation of GOD - enters into some seven hundred verses of sublime instruction on the nature of the soul and its relation to God, the levels of consciousness and reality, the makeup of the phenomenal world and so on, culminating in a stupendous mystical experience in which he reveals himself to Arjuna as the transcendent Lord of life and death. He counsels Arjuna to be compassionate to friend and enemy alike, to see himself in every person, to suffer others' sorrows as his own. Then the Gita is over, the narration picks up again, and battle is joined - a terrible, desperate slaughter compromising everyone's honour, by the end of which Arjuna's side emerges victorious but almost every man of fighting age on both sides has been slain. 

But although it may seem that the story in some way justifies war, this is not the case. The very heart of the Gita's message is to see the Lord in every creature and act accordingly, and the scripture is full of verses to spell out what this means:

I am ever present to those who have realised me in every creature. Seeing all life as my manifestation, they are never separated from me. They worship me in the hearts of all, and all their actions proceed from me. Wherever they live, they abide in me. (6:30-31)

When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union. (6:32)

That one I love who is incapable of ill will, who is friendly and compassionate...who looks upon friend and foe with equal regard...(12:13)

He alone sees truly who sees the Lord the same in every creature, who sees the deathless in the hearts of all that die. Seeing the same Lord everywhere, he does no harm to himself or others. Thus he attains the supreme goal. (13:27-28)

But it seems that the whole great Mahabharata epic can be seen as a metaphor for the perennial war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in every human heart. Arjuna and Krishna are then no longer merely characters in a literaray masterpiece. Arjuna becomes Everyman, asking of the Lord himself, Sri Krishna. Thus read, the Gita is not an external dialogue, but an internal one: between the ordinary human personality, full of questions about the meaning of life, and our deepest Self, which is divine.

But even so, it is more, much more. To read the Bhagavad Gita is to have so many questions answered. For the spiritual aspirant it is an essential read. Many ideas are gleamed from the first read, but it is not until the second or third that you truly start to glimpse a different perception of the reality of life, of the truth of who we really are.

Extracts from "The Bhagavad Gita", translated by Eknath Easwaran ISBN 0 14 019008 2

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