Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

PART I: Keys to the Gita’s Wisdom

1. Introduction to “The Song of the Spirit” . . . . . . . . 3

Wisdom From an Ancient Higher Age of Civilization
Cracking the Code of the Gita’s Yogic Symbolism
Bhagavan Krishna, Lord of Yoga: Divine Teacher of the Gita
2. The Spiritual Battle of Everyday Life . . . . . . . . . 16
Using the Power of Introspection for a Victorious Life
The Spiritual Battlefield of Man’s Body and Mind
Material Consciousness Versus Spiritual Consciousness
Taking Sides in the War of Good Against Evil
Soul Versus Ego
3. Yoga: The Method of Victory . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Activating the Soul’s Powers Through Meditation
Spiritual Effects of the Practice of Yoga
Awakening the Eightfold Essence of Yoga Within Yourself
4. The Psychological Forces That Oppose the Soul. . . . . 46
Egoism (Symbolized by Bhishma)
Kama (Lust) — Symbolized by Duryodhana (Material Desire)
The Good and Bad Power of Habit (Symbolized by Drona)
5. The Triumph of the Soul Through Practice of Yoga . . . 55
Raja Yoga: The Highest Path
Outer Renunciation, Scriptural Study, and Serviceful
Action Are Bypaths
Raja Yoga Is the True Culmination of All Religious Practices
Kriya Yoga: The Essential Technique of Raja Yoga
The Reign of King Soul in the Spiritualized Bodily Kingdom

v
vi The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita

PART II: The Bhagavad Gita (translation by Paramahansa

Yogananda)
I: The Despondency of Arjuna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
II: Sankhya and Yoga: Cosmic Wisdom and the Method
of Its Attainment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
III: Karma Yoga: The Path of Spiritual Action. . . . . . . 85
IV: The Supreme Science of Knowing God . . . . . . . . 93
V: Freedom Through Inner Renunciation . . . . . . . . 100
VI: Permanent Shelter in Spirit Through
Yoga Meditation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
VII: The Nature of Spirit and the Spirit of Nature . . . . 113
VIII: The Imperishable Absolute: Beyond the Cycles
of Creation and Dissolution . . . . . . . . . . 117
IX: The Royal Knowledge, The Royal Mystery . . . . . . 122
X: The Infinite Manifestations of the Unmanifest Spirit . 127
XI: Vision of Visions: The Lord Reveals
His Cosmic Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
XII: Bhakti Yoga: Union Through Devotion . . . . . . . 144
XIII: The Field and the Knower of the Field . . . . . . . . 148
XIV: Transcending the Gunas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
XV: Purushottama: The Uttermost Being . . . . . . . . . 158
XVI: Embracing the Divine and Shunning the Demonic. . 161
XVII: Three Kinds of Faith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
XVIII: “In Truth Do I Promise Thee: Thou Shalt Attain Me”. 168
Conclusion: “Arise! Before you is the royal path!”. . . . 178

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction to “The Song of the Spirit”

T he Bhagavad Gita is the most beloved scripture of India, a

scripture of scriptures. It is the Hindu’s Holy Testament, or
Bible, the one book that all masters depend upon as a supreme
source of scriptural authority. Bhagavad Gita means “Song of
the Spirit,” the divine communion of truth-realization between
man and his Creator, the teachings of Spirit through the soul, that
should be sung unceasingly....
The entire knowledge of the cosmos is packed into the Gita.
Supremely profound, yet couched in revelatory language of
solacing beauty and simplicity, the Gita has been understood and
applied on all levels of human endeavour and spiritual striving —
sheltering a vast spectrum of human beings with their disparate
natures and needs. Wherever one is on the way back to God, the
Gita will shed its light on that segment of the journey.

Wisdom From an Ancient Higher Age of Civilization

India has preserved in her literature her highly evolved
civilization dating back to a glorious golden age. From the undated
antiquity in which the Vedas first emerged, through a grand
unfoldment of subsequent exalted verse and prose, the Hindus
have left their civilization not in stone monoliths or crumbling
edifices, but in architecture of ornamental writing sculpted in
the euphonious language of Sanskrit. The very composition of
the Bhagavad Gita — its rhetoric, alliteration, diction, style, and
harmony — shows that India had long since passed through states
of material and intellectual growth and had arrived at a lofty peak
of spirituality.
v v v

3
4 The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita

Its verses are found in the sixth of eighteen books that con-
stitute India’s great epic poem, the Mahabharata....This hoary
epic — perhaps the longest poem in world literature — recounts
the history of the descendants of King Bharata, the Pandavas and
Kauravas, cousins whose dispute over a kingdom was the cause of
the cataclysmic war of Kurukshetra. The Bhagavad Gita, a sacred
dialogue on yoga between Bhagavan Krishna — who was at once
an earthly king and a divine incarnation — and his chief disciple,
the Pandava prince Arjuna, purportedly takes place on the eve of
this fearsome war.
The authorship of the Mahabharata, including the Gita
portion, is traditionally assigned to the illumined sage Vyasa,
whose date is not definitely known....Tradition involves Vyasa in
many literary works, primarily as an arranger of the four Vedas,
for which he is referred to as Vedavyasa; compiler of Puranas,
sacred books illustrating Vedic knowledge through historical

India’s Ageless Wisdom

The testament of the Hindu scriptures is that India’s civilization goes back
far earlier than contemporary Western historians acknowledge. Swami Sri
Yukteswar, in The Holy Science (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship),
calculates that the Golden Age, in which India’s spiritual and material
civilization reached its pinnacle, ended about 6700 b.c. — having flowered
for many thousands of years before that. India’s scriptural literature lists
many generations of kings and sages who lived prior to the events that are
the main subject of the Mahabharata. In the Gita itself, Krishna describes
the long descent of India’s spiritual culture from a Golden Age to his own
era, as the knowledge of yoga gradually was lost. “Most anthropologists,
believing that 10,000 years ago humanity was living in a barbarous Stone
Age, summarily dismiss as ‘myths’ the widespread traditions of very ancient
civilizations in Lemuria, Atlantis, India, China, Japan, Egypt, Mexico, and
many other lands,” a passage in Autobiography of a Yogi reads. Recent
scientific research, however, is beginning to suggest that the truth of ancient
chronologies be reevaluated. (Publisher’s Note)
Introduction to “The Song of the Spirit” 5

and legendary tales of ancient India’s avatars, saints and sages,

kings and heroes; and author of the epic Mahabharata, which
purportedly was accomplished nonstop in two and a half of his
latter years spent in secluded retirement in the Himalayas.

Cracking the Code of the Gita’s Yogic Symbolism

The ancient sacred writings do not clearly distinguish history
from symbology; rather, they often intermix the two in the tradition
of scriptural revelation. Prophets would pick up instances of the
everyday life and events of their times and from them draw similes
to express subtle spiritual truths. Divine profundities would not
otherwise be conceivable by the ordinary man unless defined in
common terms. When, as they often did, scriptural prophets wrote
in more recondite metaphors and allegories, it was to conceal from
ignorant, spiritually unprepared minds the deepest revelations
of Spirit. Thus, in a language of simile, metaphor, and allegory,
the Bhagavad Gita was very cleverly written by Sage Vyasa by
interweaving historical facts with psychological and spiritual
truths, presenting a word-painting of the tumultuous inner battles
that must be waged by both the material and the spiritual man. In
the hard shell of symbology, he hid the deepest spiritual meanings
to protect them from the devastation of the ignorance of the Dark
Ages towards which civilization was descending concurrent with
the end of Sri Krishna’s incarnation on earth.
Historically, on the brink of such a horrendous war as that
related in the Mahabharata, it is most unlikely that, as the Gita
depicts, Krishna and Arjuna would draw their chariot into the
open field between the two opposing armies at Kurukshetra and
there engage in an extensive discourse on yoga. While many of
the chief events and persons in the compendious Mahabharata
indeed have their basis in historical fact, their poetic presentation
in the epic has been arranged conveniently and meaningfully (and
6 The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita

wonderfully condensed in the Bhagavad Gita portion) for the

primary purpose of setting forth the essence of India’s Sanatana
Dharma, Eternal Religion.
In interpreting scripture, one must not, therefore, ignore the
factual and historical elements in which the truth was couched.
One must distinguish between an ordinary illustration of a moral
doctrine or recounting of a spiritual phenomenon and that of a
deeper esoteric intent. One has to know how to recognize the signs
of the convergence of material illustrations with spiritual doc-
trines without trying to drag a hidden meaning out of everything.
One must know how to intuit the cues and express declarations of
the author and never fetch out meanings not intended, misled by
enthusiasm and the imaginative habit of trying to squeeze spiritual
significance from every word or statement.
The true way to understand scripture is through intuition,
attuning oneself to the inner realization of truth....Through the
help of a God-realized guru, one learns how to use the nutcracker
of intuitive perception to crack open the hard shell of language
and ambiguity to get at the kernels of truth in scriptural sayings.
My guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, never permitted me to read
with mere theoretical interest any stanza of the Bhagavad Gita
(or the aphorisms of Patanjali, India’s greatest exponent of Yoga).
Master made me meditate on the scriptural truths until I became
one with them; then he would discuss them with me....In this way,
during those precious years in the blessed company of Master, he
gave to me the key to unlock the mystery of scripture.
v v v
The Mahabharata story begins three generations before the
time of Krishna and Arjuna, at the time of King Shantanu....
The genealogical descent of the Kurus and Pandus from
Shantanu parallels in analogy the step-by-step descent of the
universe and man from Spirit into matter. The Gita dialogue
Introduction to “The Song of the Spirit” 7

concerns itself with the process by which that descent may be

reversed, enabling man to reascend from the limited consciousness
of himself as a mortal being to the immortal consciousness of his
true Self, the soul, one with the infinite Spirit.
The genealogy is diagrammed in [God Talks With Arjuna],
along with the spiritual significance of the various characters as
was handed down from Lahiri Mahasaya. These esoteric mean-
ings are not arbitrary. In explaining the inner meaning of words
and names, the primary key is to hunt for it in the original Sanskrit
root. Terrible mistakes are made in definitions of Sanskrit terms if
there is no intuitive ability to arrive at the correct root, and then to
decipher the correct meaning from that root according to its usage
at the time of the origin of the word. When the basis is correctly
established, one may then also draw meaning from the various
sources relative to the common meaning of words and the specific
way they were used to form a cogent connective thought.
It is remarkable how the author of this great Bhagavad Gita
has clothed every psychological tendency or faculty, as well as
many metaphysical principles, with a suitable name. Each word,
how beautiful! Each word growing from a Sanskrit root! A prolif-
eration of pages would be required to delve fully into the Sanskrit
underlying the metaphors....
It will become evident to the reader after thoughtful perusal
of the key to a few stanzas in the first chapter that the historical
background of a battle and the contestants therein have been used
for the purpose of illustrating the spiritual and psychological battle
going on between the attributes of the pure discriminative intellect
in attunement with the soul and the blind sense-infatuated mind
under the delusive influence of the ego. In support of this analogy,
there is shown an exact correspondence between the material and
spiritual attributes of man as described by Patanjali in his Yoga
Sutras and the warring contestants cited in the Gita: the clan of