Gita lite 1 – Chps 1-2

[Online course on Bhagavad-gita]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna Arjuna has a determined intention but there is perception he has a desire to go to the no man’s land and there he sees and he gets deluded so his confusion is being overwhelmed because of two duties pulling him in two different directions his warrior duty and his dynastic duty and he decides I can’t fight because I will be killing the people of my own dynasty at that time although at one level he is undecided he has decided I won’t fight I talked about the significance in the battlefield setting it is literal but the point of the literal is not that to incite war but to show that even a person who is a go-getter like Arjuna needs to know where to go and what to get so it is to show the urgency of spirituality and then I talked about the metaphorical understanding is that the body is like a chariot and for all of us God Krishna is with us but just as Arjuna loses his will to fight and puts aside his bow we also lose our will to fight in the battle of life we let perceptions overwhelm us and the metaphysical understanding is that Bhagavata represents the inversion of the chain of command rather than the soul ordering God the soul receives the will of God and tries to do the will of God that was the first chapter. In the second chapter I talked about how first it begins with Arjuna moves from argumentation to submission and then to understand what the Gita message is we have to understand what question it is answering and the question is what is the right thing to do what is Dharma Dharma is to answer this question Krishna doesn’t just give a simple answer Krishna gives Arjuna a world view which helps him to put his values in the right hierarchy so we need not just the right values to guide us we need values not impulses to guide us we need the right hierarchy of values and Krishna gives to Bhagavad Gita the right hierarchy of values it begins first by saying to determine what you have to do to determine who you are first and I talked about how our existence Bhagavad Gita reveals our existence to be longer and broader before this life and beyond this life and beyond this body to the mind and beyond the mind to the soul when we understand that we are souls then we rise above our situations our circumstances are like carpets which we want to keep below us not above us I also talked about how the idea of a soul is not just a religious belief there is strong inference that we can draw from the three things from the fact that our core sense of selfhood remains unchanging although our body changes from how consciousness doesn’t come from the brain but the brain is a tool for the consciousness I talked about the experiment by Dr. Wilder Benfield and thirdly it is an inference from our longing for immortality that nothing around us lasts forever and if you want to last forever that doesn’t come from our material situation it comes from our spiritual core and then understanding this, this is 11 to 30 then spiritual vision leads to material victory that means Krishna tells Arjuna that if you fight and win, you gain here if you lose, you gain the spiritual world sorry, you gain heavenly pleasure then I talked about how there can be a materialistic conception of the afterlife which can be cynically manipulated to mislead people into doing terrible things so that they can enjoy better pleasures in the high next world as is done to religious accepted as is done with respect to terrorists by their leaders so the Bhagavad Gita offers, first it talks about profit loss and then it says go beyond profit loss and that is because spiritual vision can lead to better than material victory for spiritual victory and for that he says, be detached from the results because your work can give you something much bigger than the results just like studying can give some grades but studying can give knowledge, mastery of a subject an educated mind that can do so much more for the world I talked about medical knowledge, I talked about my experience with writing writing helps me to share some message with others but writing helps me to absorb myself in Krishna also and lastly, Arjuna has a question this person is spiritually victorious what will they do? this is a metaphorical question of how does a person speak and how do they sit and walk? Krishna answers by telling how they stay equipoised and to stay equipoised the Bhagavad Gita gives two metaphors one is, make your consciousness not like a puddle but like an ocean that is by expanding the size of what is present in the consciousness not small worldly things but a supreme being within it and secondly, it says that there are storms which arise in our consciousness and they begin by our indiscriminate contemplations and searches so get out of the storm’s way by not contemplating so if we live in a way that we contemplate the divine instead of the spiritual then we will attain the spiritual at the end of our lives so on hearing all this, Arjuna has certain questions which he will ask in the start of the third chapter and that we will discuss in our next session next Monday.
Thank you very much