The goal of knowledge and the goal of service are the same; those who fail to see this are blind.

When you keep thinking about sense objects, attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession that burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgment; you can no longer learn from past mistakes. Lost is the power to choose between what is wise and what is unwise, and your life is utter waste. (2:62 –63 )

Then Arjuna asks a rather surprising question: what happens to the person who believes in a spiritual goal but does not pursue it to the end? What if one of his more powerful compulsive desires gets the better of him, scattering his resolution the way a cloud is scattered by the wind? Arjuna must be at least partly convinced that there is something

On a larger scale, dharma means the essential order of things, an integrity and harmony in the universe and the affairs of life that cannot be disturbed without courting chaos. Thus it means rightness, justice, goodness, purpose rather than chance.

As the heat of a fire reduces wood to ashes, the fire of knowledge burns to ashes all karma. 38 Nothing in this world purifies like spiritual wisdom. It is the perfection achieved in time through the path of yoga, the path which leads to the Self within.

These, Krishna says, are true yogis. They cannot harbor any malice, cannot even bring themselves to look upon anyone as an enemy. They are samabuddhi, “of equable mind.” The true yogi, the person who is truly integrated inside, looks upon and feels everyone else’s joy and sorrow just as if it were his own. He sees the Self in all beings,

In profound meditation, they found, when consciousness is so acutely focused that it is utterly withdrawn from the body and mind, it enters a kind of singularity in which the sense of a separate ego disappears. In this state, the supreme climax of meditation, the seers discovered a core of consciousness beyond time and change. They called it simply

8 Still your mind in me, still your intellect in me, and without doubt you will be united with me forever. 9 If you cannot still your mind in me, learn to do so through the regular practice of meditation. 10 If you lack the will for such self-discipline, engage yourself in my work, for selfless service can lead you at last to complete fulfillment.

The law of karma states unequivocally that though we cannot see the connections, we can be sure that everything that happens to us, good and bad, originated once in something we did or thought. We ourselves are responsible for what happens to us, whether or not we can understand how. It follows that we can change what happens to us by changing