Introduction

The Bhagavad Gita is a teaching for living a fuller, happier, and more meaningful life. It does this by changing how you see yourself, and how you interact with the world around you.

Most of us look outside ourselves for what we need. We look to success, to the people we love, to our health and our possessions, hoping they will finally make us secure and complete. They help, for a while. Then they change, or fade, or are lost, and the search starts again. The Gita says the problem is not that we chose the wrong things. It is that we are looking in the wrong place. What we are looking for is found by looking within, at our own nature.

The Gita's teaching does two things to bring about this change. It tells us what we are, and helps us see it for ourselves. And it tells us how to live, so that the mind becomes ready to hold that knowledge.

At the heart of the teaching is a remarkable claim about who you are.

The Gita says that what you are is not the body, and not the mind. What you are is atma, the self. Atma is the awareness in which everything else appears: your body, your thoughts, your feelings, the world around you. It cannot be seen or felt, because it is what does the seeing and feeling. It takes up no space and does not exist in time. It was never born, and it will never die. The body passes from childhood to youth to old age; the one who is aware of all of it does not change. And atma is whole. It lacks nothing.

This is not offered as something to believe. The Gita points it out, and you check it against your own reasoning and experience.

This knowledge makes all the difference. As long as you take yourself to be the body and mind, you feel small, temporary, and incomplete, and you keep looking to your circumstances to complete you. The Gita calls this pattern samsara, and traces it to one root cause: not knowing what you are. When you know that you are atma, you see that the source of your peace and happiness was never in your circumstances. It is what you are. Life's problems remain, and you still deal with them. But they no longer threaten you.

Understanding this once is not enough. What you understand does not go away, but the old habit of taking yourself to be the body and mind keeps returning. For the knowledge to become conviction, the mind has to be ready: calm, steady, and not pulled about by wants and fears.

So the Gita also tells you how to live. At the center is a way of living it calls karma yoga. You give your work, and the people in your life, your full effort and care, and then meet whatever result comes with an even mind. You still care about the result. You stop letting it decide what you are worth.

The Gita also teaches you how to understand the world you live in, and how to relate to it. It speaks of ishvara, the intelligent order that runs everything, including your own body and mind. Seeing how much of your life was given by that order, rather than made by you, softens pride, eases the need to control outcomes, and brings gratitude. From this grows bhakti: doing your work as an offering. And a short daily sitting, meditation, steadies the mind further.

Living this way loosens the hold of your likes and dislikes, raga and dvesha: the wants and aversions that pull the mind in many directions. The mind becomes peaceful and steady. And a mind like that is ripe for self-knowledge. When it hears the teaching, the knowledge takes hold easily.

A few things the Gita is not. It is not a matter of blind faith: its central claim can be examined against reason and your own experience. It is not a religion you have to join, and you don't have to approach it as scripture. It does not ask you to accept any particular image of God. It is not a technique for managing stress; a calmer life comes along the way, but it is not the goal. And it does not ask you to withdraw from life. It removes anxiety, not action, and a mind that is not afraid for its own worth works better, not worse.

The Teaching on this site takes all of this up in detail, step by step. To go further, study with a teacher. That is how this knowledge has always been passed on. Every school that teaches the Gita agrees that you are atma; they differ on what follows. I was taught in the tradition of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the Advaita Vedanta of Adi Shankaracharya, which to me is the most logical and complete understanding of the Gita. But go wherever you find a teacher you trust.