By: BK Usha
Source: The Daily Guardian https://epaper.thedailyguardian.com/view/2107/the-daily-guardian/15
Dated: March 1st, 2025
The Bhagavad Gita is accorded the highest status among Hindu scriptures, with its teachings regarded as the distilled wisdom of the Upanishads. The Gita explains the concepts of the soul, God, consciousness, the duties of an individual, the qualities that make one divine or evil, and the path to salvation. In effect, the Gita tells us how we should live, the qualities we should have, and how, on the basis of divine qualities, we can create an elevated state of mind and a happy future for ourselves.
The war in the Mahabharata, of which the Gita is a part, is an allegory for the struggle between good and evil. It represents the battle that takes place in the mind when desires, expectations, and vices challenge the innate virtues of the soul. The Gita tells us how we can win this inner battle and ultimately overcome our weaknesses.
Chapter 16 of the Gita dwells at length on the qualities that make a person divine or demoniacal. It says that those of a divine nature are fearless, clean-hearted, steadfast in yoga and knowledge, truthful, peaceful, compassionate, modest, and free from crookedness and hatred.
Describing the qualities of those given to evil ways, the Gita cautions against hypocrisy, arrogance, self-conceit, harshness, and ignorance. Further, it says, anger, greed and lust are three gates to hell.
But despite these teachings in the Gita, and notwithstanding the reverence the pious have for it, we find that evil is on the rise in the world while righteousness seems to be in retreat. The wisdom of the Gita, it appears, remains in the book and fails to enter the minds of those who read it.
In fact, God, represented by Shri Krishna in the Gita, knows that this will happen, and says in the Gita that no one can reach Him by reading scriptures or performing other religious rituals. He can be known only when He manifests Himself to humans, the Gita says. And this, the Gita says, happens when human souls have sunk to extreme depths of degradation and are completely in the grip of vices. Then, God incarnates Himself in this world to remove all evil, end the suffering of His children, and restore them to their original state of purity, peace, and happiness.
He does this by reminding human souls of their true identity and their relationship with Him – that they are His children and all that is His belongs to them. When human souls become aware that they are not bodies, the influence of vices, which are born of body-consciousness, begins to weaken. And when they start to remember God, the souls draw power from Him, which enables them to resist and, ultimately, overcome their negative traits.
Souls can overcome the debilitating effect of vices only when they draw power from the Almighty. Reading scriptures may teach us what is right and what is wrong, but it does not empower us to tread the right path. In fact, merely reading scriptures empowers us no more than reading about medicines cures a patient of his illness.
Regular practice of soul-consciousness and remembrance of God empowers the souls and develops the virtues latent in them, so that from ordinary humans they are transformed into divine beings. When those of a demoniacal nature are thus transformed into divine beings, the world turns from hell to heaven.
BK Usha is a Rajyoga teacher at the Brahma Kumaris
headquarters in Abu Road, Rajasthan.
