The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary: Vols 1–3 (The End of Sorrow, Like a Thousand Suns, To Love Is to Know Me) (The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, 1)

The mystics tell us that if we can only succeed in throwing away this mask which has become part of our face, the physical-psychical mask that we now call our personality, then all our magnificent capacity for loving, acting, and serving will come into our lives.

In the language of the Gita, not only elation and depression, not only pleasure and pain, but everything in life is a duality; and in order to attain samadhi, one of the magnificent disciplines taught by Sri Krishna is evenness of mind.

it is by extending our capacity to love and support to a widening circle of friends that we transform our life into a permanent force for good in the world.

nitya and anitya. Nitya refers to that which is eternal and unchanging, and this is what we seek by forgiving those who harm us and supporting those who differ from us. Anitya is that which fades away and brings suffering in its wake, and this is what we seek when we give in to an angry impulse or do what leads to self-aggrandizement at the expense

This war is continually raging within every one of us, and the two armies in conflict are all that is selfish in us pitted against all that is selfless in us. It is a lifelong struggle between the demonic and the divine.

The mystic says, “I have stopped thinking; therefore I am.”

Preya, the passing pleasure that seems pleasing to the senses but soon fades into its opposite, is what we choose when we indulge in injurious physical habits or retaliate against others. Shreya, the good that leads to lasting welfare for the whole, is what we choose by cultivating healthy habits, by bringing conflicting parties together, and by pu

as long as our knowledge is limited to intellectual analysis, we will not have the capacity to make the world more peaceful;

what lasting joy there is in trying to complete one another rather than compete against one another.