Gita
Panchamrit

Overview

The verse map

The teacher labelled these Verse 1 to Verse 5. Verses 1 to 3 sit under Karma yoga, Verse 4 under Bhakti yoga, and Verse 5 under Jnana.

Section 1 · Foundation

Who am I? Identity and the Self

This is the foundation the whole course rests on, and it sets up the final teaching of 18.66.

Two kinds of dharma

• Essential. That without which a thing cannot exist.
• Non essential. That which a thing can exist without.

What defines me? The B M I

The apparent self splits into three instruments.

This whole bundle is Identity, which equals Ego, which equals individuality.

The conclusions drawn

• I have an identity beyond my B M I.
• But I do have a relationship with my B M I.
• My body, my mind, my intellect. I call them mine, so I am not them. I am not the B M I.
• Therefore the B M I cannot be my essential dharma.

Section 2

Why sorrow comes, and the role of perspective

The chain. Sorrow leads to grief, grief to suffering, and then to a choice. Sorrow comes to everyone, and every experience comes to an end.

Why suffering takes hold

• Misunderstanding.
• Lack of perspective. Hanging on to things, the baggage we carry from past experience.
• Ignorance, meaning identification with the B M I.

Stories and images used

• The monk and the woman. A young monk frets for hours that the master carried a woman across a river. The master says, "I picked her up and put her down ten kilometres back. You are still carrying her."
• If it affects you, you are inside the problem and cannot solve it. The fix is the fly on the wall perspective, stepping outside.
• Passengers on a flight. Everyone shares the journey, yet we each have our own destination.

When we lose perspective, we grieve

• Of the law. Live in alignment with the law of nature. What is born will die.
• The grief comes when we hang on to what is naturally passing.
• Akbar and Birbal. To make a line shorter, you do not rub it out. You draw a bigger line beside it. The biggest line, the widest perspective in life and action, is devotion to God.

Raise yourself by your own self. The verse is about meditation and self effort. A note on the Sanskrit: the conjugation is built so that the instruction is also the answer.

How do we lift ourselves?

1. Self awareness. Know where we are and where we want to get to.
2. Define it. Set a target.

The world is a mirror

The world is a precise reflection of you. Polish your mirror daily, meaning polish yourself. When "I get annoyed", ask "what is this telling me about myself?" Everything then becomes an opportunity for self reflection, which raises self awareness.

Introspection cycle: reflect, then negate, then substitute, then practise.

Friend or enemy of the self

The heart of 6.5 and 6.6.

No matter what people or circumstances say, it all depends on what I think. So you must learn to befriend your own mind. Do not run away from it.

Intellectual and spiritual lift

• Doubt becomes faith and conviction.
• Inconsistency becomes abidance, meaning being firm, with focus and concentration.
• Before you make any change, you first have to be convinced that the change is important.

Why lift ourselves at all?

• For motivation, to harness our dissatisfaction.
• Because our destiny is success, greatness and affection.
• Because we have the potential to be and do better and greater. To live in denial is a waste of potential.

It has to be by yourself

• No one can do the work for you. We are each unique, so the change can only come from within.
• A warning. Being naturally good at something without working at it can become a problem, breeding arrogance and pride. But if you keep growing that talent, you grow along with it.

Section 4 · Bridge

Becoming a friend to yourself first

Three steps to befriend yourself

1. Have optimism. Be positive. Hold the belief "I can change."
2. When you spot a limiting belief, work on it.
3. Stop comparing. When we compare, we are comparing ourselves to an appearance, not to reality.

Two failure modes the Gita points at: thoughtless action, and actionless thought. The question "but how do I actually act?" is what Verse 2 answers.

The optimal mind

A mind that operates optimally gives original creativity, deep insight and radical efficiency, plus fulfilment and contentment in the moment. In short: a strong mind, in the moment, with no chatter.

You only have a right to action. You do not have a right to its results.

• Do not get tied to results.
• Do not even get tied to the thought of the action.
• What is in your hands is the choice of which action to perform and how to perform it.

The questions that follow

• What should I do? For that we have to know what is right for us.
• What purpose does the action serve? The purpose of action is to purify the mind. If we forget that, we can keep performing the action yet stay unfulfilled.

kriti, the point of right action. Contribute to society, and get closer to moksha.

Why the human birth matters

In human life we have access to the tool of karma across the fourteen worlds, the power of self effort. Only as a human being, one out of 8.4 million classes of jiva, are we capable of self evolution.

Four kinds of action

1. Roles that simply come to us, our duties and responsibilities.
2. Actions we do to enjoy some result.
3. Actions that harm or injure.
4. Penance and atonement. The most effective atonement is the remembrance of God, carried out through our duties.

Section 6 · Practice

Duty: knowing it and doing it

What is a duty. The activities I must do that pertain to my stage in life and to a given life event. Duties differ for everyone.

How do I know my duties? Five marks, per the Gita

You have a choice, but the choice comes bound to a duty.

1. They come unasked.
2. We are expected to know them.
3. We should not be thanked for doing them.
4. They come with no reward.
5. They grow with our age and stature.

My duties, by domain

Duty versus the noise around it. Distinguish true duty from other people's expectations, my own expectations, my desires, my whims, and mindless doing. Whether to marry, whether to have children, these are choices. But once chosen, they bring duties that come unasked.

Reflection questions, rate yourself

1. How well do I do each duty without complaining?
2. What could I do to improve?
3. For each duty, which altar am I dedicating it to? If none of the four, then what?
4. How well do I live up to my altar, and how can I improve?
5. To what extent do I have cheerful acceptance, and how can I improve?

Section 7

The four altars of dedication

Why do my duty at all? When I do my duty I train my mind to do what needs to be done, not what I feel like doing. I stop feeding the restless craving mind. This builds mental strength.

How do I do my duty? Through attitude. The why of it is dedication and acceptance, that is, purpose rather than desire.

The four altars

These altars inspire the intellect and are loved by the mind. The results of dedicating to them:

• Work becomes fulfilling and inspirational.
• It becomes easy to let go of outcomes, which transcends selfish desire.
• A strong mind. Efficient. Able to stay in the moment. Detached from outcomes.

Tradeoffs. The skill is learning how to interweave your many duties. The freeing realisation: I can dedicate anything at all to a higher altar.

Whatever you do, offer it to Me. The note flags it as a direct instruction, kuru, "do this." Find a way to make the duty joyful. Be happy in the action.

"Do it for me"

• When we do things for others we take more care. Cooking for the family versus cooking only for yourself.
• We raise our standard of action the more people we do it for.
• So imagine doing it for Bhagwan.
• If you cannot manage that yet, just raise the action to a higher cause.

Why God makes the safest altar

Smaller causes can fail. A climate ideal, for instance, can disappoint. But Bhagwan as an altar can never fail. Beyond that you can serve a cause, a community or country, your parents. People who dedicate themselves to a higher cause naturally fall away from petty personal attachments and rise above their preferences, once they have something genuinely important to them, an ideal. This is acting from totality. Enthusiasm and inspiration let you envision much greater things.

Sewa versus labour

So do what you are doing, and do it with love, and the result is joy.

Limitation is only an attitude

A limitation is a notion, an idea about what is possible or not. The more attention we pay to a limit, the more real it becomes. When we have something important to give our time and energy to, the limits stop mattering, until they stop being real. The action can stay exactly the same. Change the attitude and the limitation drops. As you do more with dedication and love, the dedication grows, and that growth is the true measure of attitude. If you can find no other motivation, do it for Bhagwan out of gratitude, or dedicate it to your Guru.

Section 9

Giving back

My duty is to give back to wherever and whoever I have gained from. The list is endless: parents, school, company, community, friends and teachers, nature, country.

Give back to

1. Nature.
2. People around us and society, through charity.
3. Teachers.
4. Bhagwaan.
5. Ancestors and those who came before us, across past lives.

Rights versus duties. We tend to think in terms of our rights. We should think instead in terms of fulfilling our duties. What is dharmically ours will come to us anyway. The point of action is to give, so do not expect anything in return.

Here kshema is what we acquire, our possessions, and yoga is the protection of what we have. We spend our whole life acquiring and protecting. Bhagavan gives the assurance that He will carry both, but the assurance is conditional.

The conditions

• ananya. Think of God single pointedly. Relate to Him as the Absolute, and recognise "I am not different from God."
• Think of no other. The example is Mirabai, and Vitthala, whose presence resonated even in her cowdung cakes.
• Consistency of purpose, which links to Verse 3. A single goal, held by a mind trained to listen to the intellect.
• Where there is clarity of thought, every action becomes efficient.

You must do your part

Links to Verse 2. Do everything you are capable of to meet the goal. Without that effort we give up at the first hurdle.

The instruction underneath it all

Make one desire strong enough and all other desires fall away. Self control comes from constant remembrance of the goal. When you obey the law, the law protects you. When we are sincere about something, what we need comes to us, often through routes we could not have anticipated. God, the law, takes care of us through our own field of activity. Sometimes simply understanding why the mind does what it does is enough to calm it.

Section 11

Forms of God: how God can be seen

God is not someone sitting somewhere, and not a particular name or form. God can be approached at four levels.

Reading the deities. Take Ganeshji, with names like Lambodara and Mahakaya. The forms come with associated stories and leelas, and each has a purpose. You connect to a deity at the transcendental level through a personal relationship. The qualities run through all of it: all knowing (sarvajna), all powerful, omnipresent, the giver of the results of all actions, the remover of obstacles, intelligence itself.

Section 12

Adversity as opportunity

• Kaunteya means son of Kunti. The Pandavas were raised in exile.
• Kunti asks for more problems. Why? Because when she has problems she remembers God, and so He comes to her.
• A true devotee does not shy away from problems, because they grow from them. For Kunti, adversity is an opportunity for remembrance, so she actually asks for it.
• Hanuman ji is the model of one who is not afraid of adversity.

Section 13

Being present

If you stop resisting and simply stay present, you can be happy even inside an unpleasant experience, even while ill.

Why we cannot stay present

1. Anxiety about the future. The fix is to plan for it and then act.
2. Regret and worry carried over from the past.

Handling the future

Plan, be aware, anticipate, surrender the anxiety, then do. Be ready to accept whatever comes, and treat that readiness as part of the plan.

Handling the past

Hindsight is 20/20.

1. The past is dead and gone. Accept it and forgive.
2. Use the past to motivate and to learn for the future. Let it guide the present.

Section 14

Self improvement

There is always room for improvement.

1. If you can see room for improvement in someone else or in something, that itself implies there is room for improvement in you.
2. Improvement always starts from a starting point.
3. So you have to recognise and acknowledge reality, your actual starting point.

Physical level · purpose of the body

The body exists to let us fulfil our duties in this world. If our capacity to fulfil our roles is being diminished by the body, there is room for physical improvement. A barrier of the body, when acute, becomes a real limitation. The body should not get in the way of doing your duty.

Mental level

Tackle indecisiveness by streamlining and becoming efficient. Ask where am I, check the patterns, rethink them. A useful test of mental strength: how easily do you get agitated or thrown off by the people and things around you? Getting thrown off can ruin your whole day. The aim is to be harder to knock off balance.

Intellectual and spiritual level

Covered under Verse 1. Move wrong thinking to right thinking, doubt to conviction, inconsistency to firm abidance.

The dharma named here is specific. It is the Law of Being.

Two instructions in one verse

1. Give up all dharma, meaning give up the Law of Being as you have wrongly fixed it on the B M I.
2. Take refuge in Me alone. That is, know that you are the pure Self.

The two routes the teaching offers

• Give up what is not essential. Give up identification with the B M I and separate yourself from it.
• Through knowledge, know directly that you are the pure Self.

Why self knowledge, and not just being a good person?

Because doing good things alone does not hold under pressure. When the desire for happiness overpowers the sense of right and wrong, we commit self insulting actions, harming ourselves or others, acting beneath the dignity of a human being. The result of such action always comes back to us. So the deeper protection is not good behaviour but self knowledge, knowing that I am happiness already, which removes the desperate desire that corrupts the sense of right and wrong in the first place.