Essays on the Gita

“This is the deepest and most intimate truth of your real, your spiritual existence.”

Bhagavad Gita, also simply known as The Gita, is one of the most sacred Scriptures in the world. This philosophical poem focuses on a conversation between the Pandava prince Arjuna and the Beloved Lord Krishna, an Avatar of the god Vishnu. They converse about a variety of theological and philosophical issues (wisdom, devotion, self-knowledge, self-realization, ego, inner power, karma and dharma…). Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher, yogi, guru, poet. He developed a spiritual practice he called Integral Yoga. In this masterful study of the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Aurobindo explained the spiritual realization that not only liberated but transformed human nature, enabling a divine life on earth. The main objective of his teachings was to increase the level of consciousness of people and to aware people of their true selves. This book is a synthesis of many of the most important Indian spiritual philosophies, and is by far the most relevant to modern humanity and the most inspiring to westerners.

EXCERPT : THE GITA then proceeds to unveil the supreme and integral secret, the one thought and truth in which the seeker of perfection and liberation must learn to live and the one law of perfection of his spiritual members and of all their movements. This supreme secret is the mystery of the transcendent Godhead who is all and everywhere, yet so much greater and other than the universe and all its forms that nothing here contains him, nothing expresses him really, and no language which is borrowed from the appearances of things in space and time and their relations can suggest the truth of his unimaginable being. The consequent law of our perfection is an adoration by our whole nature and its self-surrender to its divine source and possessor. Our one ultimate way is the turning of our entire existence in the world, and not merely of this or that in it, into a single movement towards the Eternal. By the power and mystery of a divine Yoga we have come out of his inexpressible secrecies into this bounded nature of phenomenal things. By a reverse movement of the same Yoga we must transcend the limits of phenomenal nature and recover the greater consciousness by which we can live in the Divine and the Eternal.