Understanding Bhagavad-Gita
What His Holiness Swami Haldhar Ji Maharaj used to say- The three gunas of prakruti—sattva, rajas and tamas—constitute everything in the world.
Thus, be spiritual in mind. Do not think about the past who have gone away from this samsara, from our lives, what we have lost, place, objects, and wealth, consider it this way.
Lord has freed us from all those things.
They are gone. Next, do not worry about future. It has not come. We need not imagine, fantasize, or be scared about future. Forget it. You are expecting something which is not real. Fill your time and space in the presence of deity for an allotted time and say mantra or prayer which your Guru ji has given to you.
- The Bhagavad-Gita is a system of meditation. It is not a story that is being told to us of what might have happened centuries back.
- It is a concentrated spiritual guide which takes us from the very level in which we find ourselves at any given moment of time, and enables us to rise from that level to the next higher level, from the next higher level to a further higher level, and so on, in a graduated manner.
- There is no double promotion or sudden jumps in the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita.
- In a way, we may say that the Bhagavad-Gita starts with the worst of conditions that we can think of. What can be worse than battle?
- We know that the Gita was not taught in a temple or in a church or a monastery, which would have been the proper place for a teaching on Eternity. Is a battlefield the proper place for a teaching on timeless existence?
- The reason the Gita was taught on a battlefield is that a spiritual life is not merely an idealism of human aspiration, a possibility of future attainment, but a realism of the present moment.
- There is no use having ideas of a possible attainment in the future without appreciating its connection with the condition existing today. As it is said, we cannot jump out of our own skin. We are planted on the earth so firmly.
- Our feet are so sunk in the mire of this physical existence that whatever be the power with which the mind soars into the empyrean of the transcendent, it will not allow us to forget that our feet are in clay.
- That is the reason why the situation that can be considered as most abominable has been taken as the venue for the teaching of that which is the best of all teachings.
- Spiritual seekers who are honest in their pursuit will begin to feel a sense of internal fear and tremor after years of spiritual practice, due to various questions that will arise which did not arise earlier because they had a wrong notion that the things they have to fight against are totally outside.
- The experience in spiritual meditation, living with Gurus, doing austerities in ashrams, etc., will slowly bring out the facts of the inner components of nature, and after years of living a monastic life or a spiritual life under a Guru, a fright of an unknown nature will take possession of the individual.