Excerpts from “The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita” 4.0

Namaste Divine Soul,

Sharing the next part of excerpts from “The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita” Explained by Paramhansa Yogananda, as remembered by his disciple Swami Kriyananda.

With due respect and uprightness towards the scripture; this is to mention that no tempering, whatsoever, has been done with the original material and the excerpts has been put as it is from the holy book.

– When one is fully satisfied in the Self, desireless and free from every attachment, one no longer sees himself as a separate wave on the ocean of Spirit, but realizes his true Self to be infinite, and one with the ocean.

– Spiritual progress is achieved not by the tense effort demanded for material success, but rather by a process of upward relaxation.

– The key to right meditation is relaxation- physically, emotionally, and mentally. The energy is drawn up the spine in response to another kind of “gravity”: the upward pull of Spirit, which one feels first in the heart, and then between the eyebrows, the seat of the spiritual eye. This is the pull of divine love.

– The symbolism of Kurukshetra as a war is to “fight” and conquer one’s own devil tendencies. The “war” fought, however, is primarily to rechannel upward the energy in the spine which, so far, has activated those downward- pulling tendencies. The upward flow of energy releases it from whatever tendencies, in the worldly person, have been pulling it downward.

– All the effort one invests spiritually should be in the direction of effortlessness- “when efforts end in ease”.

– Sometimes it takes a very great effort of will to resist some particular habit or temptation and throw it out of the mind altogether.

– Divine bliss is the most fulfilling of all possible attainments, and therefore the only “thing” worthwhile to desire.

– High truths cannot be learned: they can only be remembered in the Self. Divine enlightenment is attained by a process of smriti: divine recollection.

– The Cosmic Lord said, “at the beginning of creation, I established two means by which man could achieve salvation. The first one was by wisdom; the other was by right action.”

– Gita points the way for everyone to find the fulfilment of happiness, then joy, then perfect bliss that all men seek- most of them, alas, blindly, groping in darkness with no sense of direction. The Gita says, “This is the way you are all seeking! Nothing sought in any other direction will ever give you what you yourself so ardently desire! Blindly though it be, and in ignorance of what life is all about, what you seek is the mystery of your own being!”

– The goal of Karma yoga is not to please God: it is, in a true sense, to please one’s Self: that is to say, it is to find bliss in own’s, divine Self! This is also the message of every true scripture: Do that which will bring you, not pleasure, and not even mere human happiness, but bliss!

– Ultimately, the true Heaven which all seek is Satchitananda : ever existing, ever conscious, ever- new Bliss.