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We must act in a selfless spirit, Krishna says, without ego-involvement and without getting entangled in whether things work out the way we want; only then will we not fall into the terrible net of karma. We cannot hope to escape karma by refraining from our duties: even to survive in the world, we must act.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action — just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of “consecrated action.
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Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
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you are all bound by the law of Karma, the Upanishads admit, but they declare the way out.
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Vivekananda (Lectures on Bhagavad Gita)
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That Bhagavad Gita instruction to be unattached to the fruits of your actions is the key. If you are a parent raising a child, don’t get attached to the act of raising the child. That doesn’t mean you’re not a loving, active parent. Your job is to love and nurture, feed and clothe, take care and guard the safety of the child, and guide him or her with your moral compass. But how the child turns out is how the child turns out. Ultimately he or she is not your child; who they turn out to be is up to God and their own karma. Your
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Ram Dass (Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart)
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The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results; all his selfish desires have been consumed in the fire of knowledge. 20 The wise, ever satisfied, have abandoned all external supports. Their security is unaffected by the results of their action; even while acting, they really do nothing at all. 21 Free from expectations and from all sense of possession, with mind and body firmly controlled by the Self, they do not incur sin by the performance of physical action. 22 They live in freedom who have gone beyond the dualities of life. Competing with no one, they are alike in success and failure and content with whatever comes to them. 23 They are free, without selfish attachments; their minds are fixed in knowledge. They perform all work in the spirit of service, and their karma is dissolved.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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without ego-involvement and without getting entangled in whether things work out the way we want; only then will we not fall into the terrible net of karma. We cannot hope to escape karma by refraining from our duties: even to survive in the world, we must act. True,
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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Karma means law, and it applies everywhere. Everything is bound by Karma.
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Vivekananda (Lectures on Bhagavad Gita)
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Man is a slave of nature, and slave eternally he has got to remain. We call it Karma. Karma means law, and it applies everywhere. Everything is bound by Karma.
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Vivekananda (Lectures on Bhagavad Gita)
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Ma’s pet peeve was how the Western world misunderstood the theory of karma. “I mean it’s the Bhagavad Gita they’re bastardizing. What is all this ‘karma’s a bitch’ nonsense!” Ma loved to say. The entire “what goes around comes around” thing was a backward view of karma. Karma was simply Sanskrit for action, and the theory was that your actions are the only thing under your control, as opposed to the fruits of your actions, which are not. And since actions always bear fruit, you were better off focusing your energy on your own actions, rather than worrying about the results you wanted them to produce.
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Sonali Dev (Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes, #1))
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The law of karma states simply that every event is both a cause and an effect. Every act has consequences of a similar kind, which in turn have further consequences and so on; and every act, every karma, is also the consequence of some previous karma. This
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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Only what is done as duty for duty’s sake ... can scatter the bondage of Karma
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Vivekananda (Lectures on Bhagavad Gita)
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The law of karma says that no matter what context I find myself in, it is neither my parents, nor my science teacher, nor the mailman, but I alone who have brought myself into this state because of my past actions. Instead of trapping me in a fatalistic snare, this gives me freedom. Because I alone have brought myself into my present condition, I myself, by working hard and striving earnestly, can reach the supreme state which is nirvana.
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Eknath Easwaran (The End of Sorrow (The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, #1))
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Potent Quotes “Whatever you do, or eat, or give, or offer in adoration, let it be an offering to me; and whatever you suffer, suffer it for me. Thus you shall be free from the bonds of Karma which yield fruits that are evil and good; and with your soul one in renunciation you shall be free and come to me.”—Bhagavad Gita
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Ram Dass (Be Here Now)
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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 ourselves; we can take our destiny into our own hands.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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Gurdjieff used to say, “If you can serve a cup of tea properly, you can do anything.” That is, if you are able to perform any act in a true karma-yogic fashion, it’s because you’re acting from a place where you’re free of attachments and not busy being the actor—and being in that place will shape every act you do.
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Ram Dass (Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita)
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The law of karma states simply that every event is both a cause and an effect. Every act has consequences of a similar kind, which in turn have further consequences and so on; and every act, every karma, is also the consequence of some previous karma.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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So do not be concerned with the fruit of your action-just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice. In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, non-attachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of "consecrated action.
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Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
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the Upanishads agree on their central ideas: Brahman, the Godhead; Atman, the divine core of personality; dharma, the law that expresses and maintains the unity of creation; karma, the web of cause and effect; samsara, the cycle of birth and death; moksha, the spiritual liberation that is life’s supreme goal. Even
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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I believe a lot in karma. One has to work towards realizing one’s ambitions. Your actions make your future. I also believe that God helps those who help themselves. I also believe that whoever does what they ought to do in life, not caring for the Fruit / result of action….such actions are perfect – Srimad Bhagavad Gita.
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Shallu Jindal
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Krishna tells Arjuna about the Self, the forces of the mind, the relationship between thought and action, the law of karma, and then concludes, “Now, Arjuna, reflect on these words and then do as you choose” (18:63).
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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Lord Kṛṣṇa declares in Bhagavad-gītā, sarva-yoniṣu … ahaṁ bīja-pradaḥ pitā: “I am the father of all.” Of course there are all types of living entities according to their various karmas, but here the Lord claims that He is the father of all of them.
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Anonymous (Bhagavad-gita As It Is)
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Brahman, the Godhead; Atman, the divine core of personality; dharma, the law that expresses and maintains the unity of creation; karma, the web of cause and effect; samsara, the cycle of birth and death; moksha, the spiritual liberation that is life’s supreme goal.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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begin with, Krishna often tells Arjuna to “renounce the fruits of action” (karma-phala): You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself – without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is perfect evenness of mind. (2:47–48)
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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Everything we do produces karma in the mind. In fact, it is in the mind rather than the world that karma’s seeds are planted. Aptly, Indian philosophy compares a thought to a seed: very tiny, but it can grow into a huge, deep-rooted, wide-spreading tree. I have seen places where a seed in a crack of a pavement grew into a tree that tore up the sidewalk. It is difficult to remove such a tree, and terribly difficult to undo the effects of a lifetime of negative thinking, which can extend into many other people’s lives. But it can be done, and the purpose of the Gita is to show how.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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Material nature itself is constituted by three qualities: the mode of goodness, the mode of passion and the mode of ignorance. Above these modes there is eternal time, and by a combination of these modes of nature and under the control and purview of eternal time there are activities, which are called karma.
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Anonymous (Bhagavad-gita As It Is)
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Man gets dependent on what he choose, God never decide the “Karma” of human. It’s the human that choose their own preferred activities.
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Kishan Barai (Bhagavad Gita Made Very Easy: Read & Understand Complete Bhagavad Gita in Short Time)
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Karmanye vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana,Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhur Ma Te Sango Stv Akarmani
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Krishna (The Bhagavad Gita)
A.C. Prabhupāda (Bhagavad-gita As It Is)
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we stated that of the five items (īśvara, jīva, prakṛti, time and karma) four are eternal, whereas karma is not eternal.
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A.C. Prabhupāda (Bhagavad-gita As It Is)
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Renounce and enjoy.” Those who are compulsively attached to the results of action cannot really enjoy what they do; they get downcast when things do not work out and cling more desperately when they do. So the Gita classifies the karma of attachment as pleasant at first, but “bitter as poison in the end” (18:38), because of the painful bondage of conditioning. Again,
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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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 ourselves; we can take our destiny into our own hands.
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Eknath Easwaran (The Bhagavad Gita)
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In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the oldest and most beautiful spiritual teachings in existence, nonattachment to the fruit of your action is called Karma Yoga. It is described as the path of “consecrated action.
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Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
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Meditation has also been proven scientifically to untangle and rewire the neurological pathways in the brain that make up the conditioned personality. Buddhist monks, for example, have had their brains scanned by scientists as they sat still in deep altered states of consciousness invoked by transcendental meditation and the scientists were amazed at what they beheld. The frontal lobes of the monks lit up as bright as the sun! They were in states of peace and happiness the scientists had never seen before. Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge. Meditation, in this sense, is a fire that burns away the old or conditioned self, in the Bhagavad Gita, this is known as the Yajna;
“All karma or effects of actions are completely burned away from the liberated being who, free from attachment, with his physical mind enveloped in wisdom (the higher self), performs the true spiritual fire rite.
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Craig Krishna (The Labyrinth: Rewiring the Nodes in the Maze of your Mind)
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In the Bgagavad Gita why should God ask us not to expect the results? Is He aware that the systems in nature, that is, the order of the world created by Him, do not have a fool proof provision for it? Then is it not a rational world ensuring justice to all the actions delivered by man? One wonders why God, the supreme creator of this universe, does not have a system in place for ensuring a matching reward for all our actions.
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Nihar Satpathy (The Puzzles of Life)
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In this sense life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind. As long as a debt of karma remains, however, a person has to keep coming back for further education. That is the basis of samsara, the cycle of birth and death.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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The ignorant (uninformed about Atma and without faith) waste their lives. Through their disbelief they alienate themselves from the Self and thus from true unity with others. As miserable people, they cannot be happy either in this world or any world beyond.
People who really know Divinity, who have renounced attachment to the fruits of their work by offering it to the Divine, who have used the sword of knowledge to cut to pieces their doubts regarding the truth of their Atma — no bonds can hold these people. Though they are ever occupied with action, karma cannot taint them.
O Prince, your ignorance of your True Self Within is the cause of your present reluctance to act, just as the opposite of ignorance, Self-knowledge, would bring fearless action. So with the sword of wisdom sever the doubts in your heart. Arise, O best of men, take your stand. Be a warrior!
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
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Bhagavad-gītā the subject matter deals with the īśvara, the supreme controller, and the jīvas, the controlled living entities. Prakṛti (material nature) and time (the duration of existence of the whole universe or the manifestation of material nature) and karma (activity) are also discussed.
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A.C. Prabhupāda (Bhagavad-gita As It Is)
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Baldly put, the law of karma says that whatever you do will come back to you. No one, of course, has the omniscience to see the picture fully. But the idea of a network of connections, far from being occult, is natural and plausible. 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 ourselves; we can take our destiny into our own hands.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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Indians like to classify, and the eighteen chapters of the Gita are said to break into three six-chapter parts. The first third, according to this, deals with karma yoga, the second with jnana yoga, and the last with bhakti yoga: that is, the Gita begins with the way of selfless action, passes into the way of Self-knowledge, and ends with the way of love. This scheme is not tight, and non-Hindu readers may find it difficult to discover in the text. But the themes are there, and Krishna clearly shifts his emphasis as he goes on using this one word yoga. Here he focuses on transcendental knowledge, there on selfless action, here on meditation, there on
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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These differences are not important, and the Upanishads agree on their central ideas: Brahman, the Godhead; Atman, the divine core of personality; dharma, the law that expresses and maintains the unity of creation; karma, the web of cause and effect; samsara, the cycle of birth and death; moksha, the spiritual liberation that is life’s supreme goal.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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First of all he makes a determination to act in a certain way, and then he is entangled in the actions and reactions of his own karma. After giving up one type of body, he enters another type of body, as we take off and put on clothes. As the soul thus migrates, he suffers the actions and reactions of his past activities. These activities can be changed when the living being is in the mode of goodness, in sanity, and understands what sort of activities he should adopt. If he does so, then all the actions and reactions of his past activities can be changed. Consequently, karma is not eternal. Therefore we stated that of the five items (īśvara, jīva, prakṛti, time and karma) four are eternal, whereas karma is not eternal.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (Bhagavad-gita As It Is)
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If I become free from anger and shake off ignorance, if I become more vigilant and alert, I would be doing no karma even when occupied in some karma. This illustration explains both the ideas, of a person doing no karma even when occupied in karma and of another who, though he believes that he is doing no karma, is in fact weaving the bonds of karma round himself.
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Mahatma Gandhi (Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi)
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Warriorship is an infinitely nuanced subject. A true warrior desires nothing so much as to be perfectly appropriate, “in sync” with space and time in each and every moment. The perfection of warrior timing results in a kind of invisibility. Walking between the super strings of karma, or bound activity, the warrior engages in kriya, or spontaneous action. This is the actionless action spoken of so eloquently by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Only the natural perfection of kriya ensures that a warrior’s actions will be of real benefit to those she serves. Walking between and in a state of total non-distraction, a warrior’s invisibility is identical to her invincibility. In the warrior heart is a dynamic stillness that is unperturbed by any arising of this world, by any impediment or seeming obstacle. Even when we have not realized this perfection, it is our warrior hearts, still mostly unknown to us, that lead us steadily on to realization.
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Shambhavi Sarasvati (Pilgrims to Openness: Direct Realization Tantra in Everyday Life)
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That Bhagavad Gita instruction to be unattached to the fruits of your actions is the key. If you are a parent raising a child, don’t get attached to the act of raising the child. That doesn’t mean you’re not a loving, active parent. Your job is to love and nurture, feed and clothe, take care and guard the safety of the child, and guide him or her with your moral compass. But how the child turns out is how the child turns out. Ultimately he or she is not your child; who they turn out to be is up to God and their own karma. Your attachment, your clinging to how the child is going to turn out, affects every aspect of how you parent. A lot of our anxiety comes because we are attached to how a child is supposed to come out—smart, successful, creative, whatever it is we want for our child. Of course, you parent your child as impeccably as you can. “Parent” is your role to play because that is your dharma, and naturally you become immersed in your role in life. But it is also important to remember you’re a soul playing a role. Who your child is and who you are are not roles.
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Ram Dass (Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart)
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According to the law of karma, souls reincarnate in environments befitting their spiritual attainments. Good people (even those who have veered from the spiritual path) go, when they die, to the heaven of those who do good deeds. They dwell there for a number of years and then take birth again, this time into a home that is pure and prosperous. A few of them will be born into a family that is spiritually advanced, but such births are difficult to obtain. When this happens, the good environment draws out their latent spirituality and leads them rapidly toward liberation.
The ones born into the pure and prosperous houses have the opportunity at first to enjoy the relatively tame desires they held in their former bodies. But as soon as those pleasures are done they feel irresistibly drawn to spirituality by the force of the good habits they strove for in the previous life.
Even those who showed only a faint interest, merely inquiring about spiritual matters, progress further than the ones who merely follow the rites and ceremonies of their belief systems unthinkingly, and thus stall their true spiritual advancement.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
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The Self-realized person, however, has no karma to work out, no personal desires; at the time of death he or she is absorbed into the Lord: But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion, these I will swiftly rescue from the fragment’s cycle of birth and death, for their consciousness has entered into me. (12:6–7) Such a person, the Upanishads stress, can actually shed the body voluntarily when the hour of death arrives, by withdrawing consciousness step by step in full awareness.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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As the traditional chapter titles put it, the Gita is brahmavidyayam yogashastra, a textbook on the supreme science of yoga. But yoga is a word with many meanings – as many, perhaps, as there are paths to Self-realization. What kind of yoga does the Gita teach? The common answer is that it presents three yogas or even four – the four main paths of Hindu mysticism. In jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge, aspirants use their will and discrimination to disidentify themselves from the body, mind, and senses until they know they are nothing but the Self. The followers of bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, achieve the same goal by identifying themselves completely with the Lord in love; by and large, this is the path taken by most of the mystics of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In karma yoga, the yoga of selfless action, the aspirants dissolve their identification with body and mind by identifying with the whole of life, forgetting the finite self in the service of others. And the followers of raja yoga, the yoga of meditation, discipline the mind and senses until the mind-process is suspended in a healing stillness and they merge in the Self.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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In dreamless sleep, the Upanishads say, a king is not a king nor a pauper poor; no one is old or young, male or female, educated or ignorant. When consciousness returns to the mind, however, the thinking process starts up again, and personality returns to the body. According to this analysis, the ego dies every night. Every morning we pick up our desires where we left off: the same person, yet a little different too. The Upanishads describe dying as a very similar process. Consciousness is withdrawn from the body into the senses, from the senses into the mind, and finally consolidated in the ego; when the body is finally wrenched away, the ego remains, a potent package of desires and karma.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
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One important aspect of the Gita which remains is that even though it presents to us some diverse paths as a way of life, such as action, devotion, knowledge and meditation, it does not impose any of these paths on an individual. Rather, it leaves the choice to the people, because the followers of all these paths are essential for the smooth functioning of the world, and any en masse inclination towards only one of them would jeopardize the society by causing an imbalance in its system. The Gita also recognizes that the path that one should follow is determined primarily by the free choice of man as well as his inherent nature, which can be interpreted as a genetic inheritance he is endowed with.
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Nihar Satpathy (The Puzzles of Life)
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I am the father, mother, and grandfather of this universe. I am the one who dispenses the fruits of people’s actions, their karma. I am the one thing worth knowing, and I am the enabler of all knowing.
As water gets purified by filtering through earth, and other things get purified by being washed in water, mankind gets purified by contact with Me. I am the syllable Om, the very sound of Divinity. I am all the scriptures ever written.
I am the goal at the end of all paths. I am the landlord of all creation. I am the inner witness in every human. I am your only lasting shelter; all beings dwell in Me. I am your best friend who lives in your heart as your conscience. I am the beginning of creation, the well-wisher of it, and the dissolution of it. I am the storehouse into which all life returns when creation dissolves — and I am the everlasting, imperishable seed from which it again springs.
I give the heat of the sun. I let loose the food-giving rain, and I withhold it. I am both immortality and death (doled out based on the fruits of one’s actions). I am both being and nonbeing. In My visible form I am the cosmos; in My invisible form I am the germ that lies hidden.
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Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
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La práctica del yoga de la Gītā no exige tanto un esfuerzo descomunal como una actitud inteligente, resoluta y atenta con una firme determinación (vyavasāyātmikā buddhiḥ) a no apegarse al resultado de las acciones. Hay que tener en cuenta que todos somos deudores de nuestra naturaleza y que llevamos a cuestas una herencia determinada por el karma y las energías (guṇa). Hay que actuar conforme a la naturaleza, sabiendo al mismo tiempo que los verdaderos enemigos son la pasión y la aversión, hijas de esa misma naturaleza.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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The Buddha explicitly rejected a creator God, yet Buddhism is counted as the fourth largest world religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism—suggesting that the hallmark of religion is not a belief in a creator God, or any god, but a belief in the conservation of values, that is, in something like karma, about which the Indian religions, especially Jainism, have a great deal to say. Karma is the greatest constant in Indian thought, lending a family resemblance to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Gandhi, for one, regarded Buddhism and Jainism as traditions of Hinduism, which has adaptively assimilated the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu, after Rama and Krishna, and before Kalki, who will preside over the apocalypse. In Hindu thought, the universe has a moral order that is independent of the gods, who are less than omnipotent. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Indra, the king of the gods, is made to wait 101 years before being told the secret to the self—not a bad deal, considering. Towards the end of the Mahabharata, Krishna is killed by a hunter who mistakes him for a deer.
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Neel Burton (Indian Mythology and Philosophy: The Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Kama Sutra… And How They Fit Together (Ancient Wisdom))
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Arjuna, you have control over your action alone, not the fruits of your action. So do not be drawn to expectation, or inaction.—Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2, Verse 47 (paraphrased). Those who believe in karma do not blame. They do not judge. They accept that humans live in a sea of consequences, over which there is limited control. So they accept every moment as it is supposed to be. They act without expectation. This is nishkama karma.
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Devdutt Pattanaik (My Gita)
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The doer does not feel the burden of the action. Such disinterested action results in purity of the mind, the effects of the action evaporate. The mind remains calm, and still ardent.
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Vinoba Bhave
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Nishkâma Karma, or work without desire or attachment.
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Vivekananda (Lectures on Bhagavad Gita)
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Para el advaita vedānta, las tres secciones de la Gītā representan las tres palabras de la gran sentencia o mahāvākya: tat tvam asi («tú eres eso»). Así, la primera sección que abarca los seis primeros capítulos se refiere al tvam («tú»), la segunda al tat («eso») y la tercera al asi («eres»); es decir, a la relación que se da entre el tú y el eso. Los primeros seis capítulos se ocupan, pues, del Tú, es decir, del ātman, y también del hombre de conocimiento, el practicante de yoga, en pos de conocer tanto el ātman inmortal, como el tat, el Eso, el brahman absoluto que, según la Gītā, se manifiesta como un Dios personal: Kṛṣṇa. Los seis capítulos siguientes, del séptimo al duodécimo, se ocuparan justamente del Eso, del Dios absoluto, al mismo tiempo remoto y personal, omnipotente e inmanente. Si en el primer sexteto se describe la inmortalidad del alma y la importancia de la práctica del yoga, tanto del yoga del conocimiento como del karma yoga, el segundo sexteto se ocupará del yoga de la devoción o bhakti yoga, que es el medio natural para alcanzar al Dios personal, Kṛṣṇa.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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La Gītā es una elaborada respuesta al desaliento y a la indecisión de Arjuna. Una respuesta tan elaborada que contiene en sí misma un sistema filosófico y abre las puertas a un nuevo modo de entender la espiritualidad, un modo personificado en la figura del karma yogui entregado a la vida activa, eficiente en sus obras, inasequible al desaliento, ecuánime ante el éxito y el fracaso, con su mente concentrada por la meditación y la práctica del yoga, lleno de pasión y del entusiasmo propio de una exaltada devoción (bhakti). El karma yogui de la Gītā es al mismo tiempo un padre de familia y un monje, un yogui y un guerrero, un hombre de acción y contemplación y sobre todo un devoto. En ese elaborada respuesta, la Gītā efectúa una síntesis de la tripe vía: la de la acción, la del conocimiento y la de la devoción, inaugurando el camino de esa espiritualidad devocional que tanta importancia tendrá en la India de los siglos posteriores.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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la Gītā ofrece un nuevo principio original, el karma yoga, que junto con la bhakti conforma una vía nueva que invierte el significado de karma, pues en lugar de ser causa de atadura, se convierte en motivo de liberación. Esta reformulación del karma, junto con la introducción de un Dios personal, objeto de culto, crea la figura del nuevo karma yogui: participando activamente en los asuntos mundanos, consagrado a la acción y realizándola con eficiencia, pero internamente desapegado del resultado, ecuánime ante el éxito y el fracaso, pero no por ello inactivo, sino todo lo contrario: diligente, lleno de energía y con una devoción inquebrantable hacia el Señor.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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La nueva acción desinteresada y liberadora, el karma yoga, se equipara no solo con el yoga, sino también con el yajña, el sacrificio. Así pues, karma, yoga y yajña se convierten en diferentes formas de referirse a una misma técnica, a un mismo yoga, que es la novedad que presenta la Gītā.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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Gradually, as our perspective deepens, we begin to experience our own lives in the context of a wider purpose. We begin to look at all our melodramas and our desires and our sufferings, and instead of seeing them as events happening within a lifetime bounded by birth and death, we begin experiencing them as part of a much vaster design.We begin to appreciate that there is a wider frame around our lives, within which our particular incarnation is happening. One of the first things that kind of perspective does for us is to calm us down a great deal. The whole game isn’t riding on this one lifetime! Whew! There’s a great feeling of release inherent in that; it removes the anxiety and the sense of urgency. We don’t have to do it all right now—and in fact we see we’re not “doing it” anyway! It’s the lawful continuity of karma and reincarnation flowing through us lifetime after lifetime, kalpa after kalpa. What a relief!
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Ram Dass (Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita)
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La gran novedad de la Gītā es el karma yoga. La verdadera renunciación no es la renunciación externa de las cosas, sino la renunciación interna. Necesitamos de la comida, de la ropa, de las medicinas, necesitamos de la riqueza para completar el viaje del cuerpo (śarīra-yātrā), el viaje de la vida. El cuerpo es la ventana del alma y el objetivo de este viaje corporal es justamente el conocimiento de nuestra divinidad interior, pero este conocimiento solo se puede conseguir a través de nuestro cuerpo y de nuestra mente, aunque al final este conocimiento acaba trascendiendo tanto los límites del cuerpo como los de la mente.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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Por lo tanto, la renuncia verdadera es interna, es mental, y alguien que finge meditar, pero en realidad se está recreando mentalmente en los objetos de los sentidos, es un hipócrita. La receta para el karma yoga es controlar con la mente los cinco sentidos, mientras se emprende con los órganos de la acción (los pies, las manos, el habla, los órganos de evacuación y procreación) la práctica del yoga. Control interior, movimiento exterior de una mente desapegada que se aplica a la acción sin pensar en los resultados.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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la Gītā es importante por su novedosa síntesis de las vías de la acción, el conocimiento y la devoción. La Gītā consigue esta síntesis reformulando en primer lugar el concepto de acción y, por lo tanto, la vía misma del karma, convirtiendo el antiguo ritual y el sacrificio en el karma yoga.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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El karma yogui es al mismo tiempo un asceta entregado a la meditación, un hombre de acción envuelto en la trama mundana y un devoto que ofrece todas sus acciones a la divinidad. Para la práctica del karma yoga, es necesario un nivel de conocimiento elevado. Al mismo tiempo, la ecuanimidad mental del karma yoga favorece la aparición del conocimiento. Hay una relación de dependencia muta entre el conocimiento y el karma yoga y por eso el yoga del intelecto resoluto o buddhi-yoga es la primera herramienta para la práctica del karma yoga que ofrece la Gītā.
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Òscar Pujol (LA BHAGAVAD-GITA (Spanish Edition))
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The Buddha believed in reincarnation, which means he thought that something reincarnates. The Pali literature says: “There are no real ego entities hastening through the ocean of rebirth, but merely life waves, which, according to their nature and activities, manifest themselves here as men, there as animals, and elsewhere as invisible things.” “Life waves”—that’s a nice image. In Hinduism they’re called vasanas, subtle thought-forms. Every act we do creates vasanas, life waves, based on the desires connected with the act. Those life waves go out and out. Even when we die, they continue; the physical body dies, and what remains are those subtle life waves, those mental tendencies that function like a kind of psychic DNA code to determine your next round. In Hinduism that’s called karma. Karma is basically a pattern of life waves, or desire waves, that keep going and going, life after life, until they spend themselves. When they do, there’s no more individual desire, no more separation, and therefore no more incarnation. The game is over.
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Ram Dass (Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita)
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Krishna: Man gets dependent on what he choose, God never decide the “Karma” of human. It’s the human that choose their own preferred activities.
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Kishan Barai (Bhagavad Gita Made Very Easy: Read & Understand Complete Bhagavad Gita in Short Time)
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The likeness of the blue-skinned, flute-toting god, blessed with an unspeakably beautiful face and midnight-black curls, has been replicated in countless sculptures, often clad in colorful clothes and adorned with gold and silver jewelry, relief carvings, paintings, and other artistic mediums, otherwise known as “murti.” Hindus and subscribers of the Bhagavad Gita, as well as practitioners of bhakti yoga, ashtanga yoga, jñana yoga, and karma yoga are intimately familiar with this god of unconditional love, compassion, and tenderness, who has also been crowned “Yogesvara,” the master of yogis and all things mystical.
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Charles River Editors (Krishna: The History and Legacy of the Popular Hindu Deity)
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The Bhagavad Gita presents us with a unitary system of Yoga, one clear and systematic path, wherein all four Yoga techniques of jnana, karma, bhakti and classical ashtanga are - together – all considered crucial for spiritual realization. These four supposedly different paths, in actuality, represent four aspects of one, unified, integral Yoga system. They are akin to the four sides of a square. If one of the sides of the square is missing, then the very structural integrity and being of the square is itself compromised. Indeed, it no longer is logically qualified as a "square" at all. Similarly, the complete
and authentic path of Yoga spirituality must include all these four components of Yoga in order to be fully appreciated.
It is true that these four Yogas are linked by their common emphasis on devotional meditation upon, and the ultimate loving absorption of our awareness in, the Absolute. However, it is also inarguably clear that Krishna considers bhakti-yoga, or the discipline of focused devotional consciousness, to be not merely one component of these four branches of Yoga, but as the very essence and goal of all Yoga practice itself. Unlike the other aspects of the Yoga path, bhakti (devotional meditation) is distinguished by the fact that it is not only a means (upaya) for knowing God, but it is simultaneously also the goal (artha) of all human existence. As the means, bhakti designates devotional meditation; as the goal, bhakti means devotional consciousness. At no time does one abandon the practice of bhakti, even upon achieving liberation. Rather, devotional consciousness focused with one-pointed awareness upon the Absolute represents the very goal of the entire Yoga system.
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Dharma Pravartaka Acharya (Sanatana Dharma: The Eternal Natural Way)