Bhagavad Gita Chapter 04

• Chapter 04, Text 01
  • Enrich yourself with the supreme legacy of immortal love
  • What is beyond being dated is beyond becoming outdated
  • Don’t just punish lust-dominated individuals; purify lust-tormented individuals
  • Those who see in history only their own reflection can’t see the trans-historical
  • Gita 04.01 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 02
  • To comprehend the Gita, focus on its original originality
  • Living the Gita is not about turning back the clock, but about turning on the compass
  • The harmony of the sword and the word
  • Cherish the power of love, not the love of power
  • The divorce of the raja from the rishi perverts the ruler into an exploiter
  • Gita 04.02 explained
  • Time makes the imperishable inaccessible
  • We may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in us
  • Power needs to be kept out of the hands of those who worship power
• Chapter 04, Text 03
  • The best translation of the Gita is its translation into life
  • The revelation of the revelation comes from the living tradition 
  • Gita 04.03 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 04
  • The call to faith is for focusing,not forsaking, of intelligence
  • Be curious, not superstitious; be cautious, not suspicious
  • When we give Krishna the benefit of doubt, he gives us the benefit of freedom from doubt
  • Gita 04.04 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 05
  • The reincarnation of avatar in English is a revealing distortion
  • Gita 04.05 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 06
  • Krishna is not a dictator, but a benefactor
  • Our incarnation is an incarceration — Krishna’s isn’t
  • Krishna’s avatara is not actually an incarnation
  • Gita 04.06 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 07
  • My message of love, Will you ban?
  • Krishna descends to delineate, demonstrate and disseminate dharma
  • Gita 04.07 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 08
  • Krishna is a trans-cosmic enjoyer; don’t reduce him to a cosmic constable
  • The purpose of establishing dharma in the world is to establish us in dharma
  • Spirituality is meant not just for transcending the world but also for transforming the world
  • Gita 04.08 explained
  • How we can learn from history to shape our history
  • Why fear of God is healthy — and when it becomes unhealthy
  • Is God partial?
• Chapter 04, Text 09
  • Krishna’s pastimes are not just amusing – they are amazing
  • Those who let reason usurp Krishna in their heart end up worshiping a false god
  • Give yourself permission to love Krishna by suspending disbelief
  • Unravel the mystery of the Infinite’s descent into the finite through love
  • Devotion raises our knowledge of Krishna from superficial familiarity to substantial understanding
  • The goal of spiritual life is to make spiritual life our goal
  • Krishna’s pastimes are the trailer and the trail
  • Krishna descends to offer not just protection but also participation
  • Study pastimes not to swoop down on their meaning, but to be swept up by their emotion
  • Love God, not the concept of God
  • Krishna is the ultimate knight in shining armor
  • The spiritual lies beyond both the logical and the psychological
  • The divine descent is meant to inspire the human ascent
  • The unborn takes birth to save us from rebirth
  • Evaluating action without understanding position causes delusion
  • The more we comprehend Krishna’s transcendence, the more we cherish his munificence
  • To understand God, begin with definition, not depiction
  • Gita 04.09 explained
  • Krishna is not an optional source of entertainment – he is the indispensable source of shelter
  • The theatrical Krishna takes us to the transcendental Krishna
  • See Krishna not just as an object of entertainment, but as the objective of enlightenment
  • Krishna retains his divine position even while he reclines in a supine position
  • Devotion is not just about bringing God into our life; it is also about letting God bring us into his life
  • How Krishna descends to civilize and spiritualize humanity
• Chapter 04, Text 10
  • Krishna ends the misdirection and frustration of our love
  • The Gita offers not just another worldview, but also another world to view
  • To let the nourishing water of truth irrigate the heart, break the dam of misconception
  • In scriptural dissemination, the problem is not in transmission but in reception
  • Gita 04.10 explained
  • The bhakti cure works for sure, for it connects us with the all-pure
• Chapter 04, Text 11
  • To get devotion in our life, let’s put life in our devotion
  • When strengths make us weak and weaknesses make us strong
  • Might we be protecting our heart from Krishna instead of for Krishna?
  • From our place, at our pace, Krishna offers his embrace
  • No one owns the truth table except God – and he has many invitees
  • For the cynic, the truth lies in the heart
  • Harmonize conceptions of the divine with revelation by the divine through surrender to the divine
  • Why bother whether the glass is half-empty or half-full when you can drink from either?
  • Even for those who think God is the last thing they need, God remains the first thing they need
  • Respecting religious pluralism doesn’t require disrespecting religion
  • Gita 04.11 explained
  • Everyone is equal in God’s eyes, but God is not equal in everyone’s eyes
  • Without going deeply into one tradition, we can’t deeply appreciate any tradition
  • Why the Gita is misunderstood — and how it can be understood
  • How God is rational and reciprocal — and is more
  • How appreciating other spiritual paths can distract us — and inspire us
• Chapter 04, Text 12
  • Seek not success in karma – seek success beyond karma
  • Gita 04.12 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 13
  • Caste by birth is the perversion of class by worth
  • Learning according to leaning nurtures growing
  • Genealogy shapes mentality, but doesn’t determine it
  • Gita 04.13 explained
  • What brings us to the world is not as defining as what we bring to the world
  • Equality that is imposed doesn’t raise everyone up, it brings everyone down
  • Why all equalities are not equal
• Chapter 04, Text 14
  • Seek to know Krishna not theoretically but transformationally
  • Gita 04.14 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 15
  • Gita 04.15 explained
  • Ask not why bad things happen to good people, ask what good people do when bad things happen to them
  • How following tradition literally may defeat the essential purpose of following tradition
• Chapter 04, Text 16
  • Understand scripture through devotional dedication, not linguistic specialization
  • Gita 04.16 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 17
  • Ask not “Why this?” but “How now?”
  • Should we be happy when we are happy?
  • We need Krishna’s experience more than Krishna’s explanation
  • Gita 04.17 explained
  • Karma is not like a mysterious contagious disease – it is logical, not diabolical
  • To get the consequences of our wrongdoings may feel like misfortune, but it can save us from misfortune
  • Focusing only on suffering’s immediate cause makes us short-sighted, focusing only on suffering’s remote cause makes us hard-hearted
  • How to persevere amid uncertainty?
  • The importance of complexifying things
• Chapter 04, Text 18
  • Gita 04.18 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 19
  • Are we mistaking the causal to be casual?
  • Gita 04.19 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 20
  • Gita 04.20 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 21
  • Gita 04.21 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 22
  • Gita 04.22 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 23
  • What raises motion to action is motivation
  • Devotion brings knowledge into action and action into knowledge
  • Bhakti is pragmatic, not dogmatic
  • Gita 04.23 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 24
  • The material is not spiritual, but it is spiritualizable
  • Devotion centers not on renouncing the material, but on reclaiming the spiritual
  • The spiritual in application leads to the spiritual in constitution
  • Gita 04.24 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 25
  • Gita 04.25 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 26
• Chapter 04, Text 27
  • Gita 04.27 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 28
  • Gita 04.28 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 29
  • Gita 04.29 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 30
  • Fire-sacrifice is literal, metaphorical and transformational
  • Gita 04.30 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 31
  • Failure is no disaster; failure to try is
  • Gita 04.31 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 32
  • Gita 04.32 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 33
  • Gita 04.33 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 34
  • Tap HIS grace by Humbleness, Inquisitiveness and Service-mindedness
  • Be not just inquisitive but also submissive
  • Devotion blossoms in a personal culture, not a personality cult
  • The point of scriptural study is not to prove our point, but to improve our viewpoint
  • Our connection with Krishna is reinforced, not restricted, by the guru
  • Don’t be like soldiers fighting a past war
  • Seek a guru to show the way, not to sanction your way
  • Gita 04.34 explained
• Chapter 04, Text 35
  • Bhakti is not just about believing in God – it is about belonging to God
  • Loving the unlovable is the characteristic of God – and the character of the godly
  • Are we outsourcing our thinking?
  • Go beyond sectarianism and non-sectarianism to trans-sectarianism
  • Enlightenment means to replace oneself with Krishna as the center
  • Our belonging is more important than our belongings
  • Gita 04.35 explained
  • A missed apostrophe can be a catastrophe – we are God’s, not Gods
• Chapter 04, Text 36
  • Don’t blame gravity for the sinking of the boat
  • Tap the power of devotion that supersedes nature, nurture and culture
  • God keeps the door to him unlocked from his side till every soul, however degraded, comes to him
  • We have snakes inside us, but we are not one of them
• Chapter 04, Text 37
  • Spiritual knowledge elevates us above misery – and eliminates misery too
• Chapter 04, Text 38
  • Patience is humility, not apathy
  • Seek pleasure in the pursuit of meaning, not meaning in the pursuit of pleasure
  • Don’t depress yourself – depress your expectation from yourself
  • Momentum manifests by movement from moment to moment
• Chapter 04, Text 39
  • Delight in the devotional chain reaction of faith and knowledge
  • Faith bridges the gap between personal realization and scriptural revelation
  • Choose not faith in the eyes; choose the eyes of faith
  • Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs
  • Knowing begins with believing
  • Be faithful, but be watchful too
  • Faith is the reason for reason
  • Faith is the bridge between our finite reason and Krishna’s infinite reason
  • What the moonlight of reason shows dimly, the sunlight of revelation shows clearly
  • Between naiveté and cynicism is the courage to trust
  • Seeking requires believing: believing that something worth seeking exists and that we have the capacity to find it
  • Don’t be so afraid of the irrational as to deny the possibility of the transrational
  • Is faith irrational?
• Chapter 04, Text 40
  • See skepticism with skepticism
  • No prison imprisons as badly as the prison of doubt
  • Don’t think things to death; think of the thing called death
  • If let cynicism rob our power to trust Krishna, we rob ourselves of our greatest power
  • Choosing doubt as the means for knowing is like choosing immobility as the means for traveling
  • Rejection of all faith as blind faith is blind faith
  • Get out of the drought of doubt
  • To lose one’s reason is bad, but to lose everything except one’s reason is far worse
  • Learning by doubting is like driving by braking
  • Doubt is a disease that makes the patient believe the doctor is sick
• Chapter 04, Text 42
  • Don’t let the sword sleep in the hand
  • Are we putting too much faith in doubt?
  • The inner war is the bigger war
  • To remember to remember, refine your reminder
  • Fight for your faith within more than without
  • The inner war may feature coronation or insurrection, but let it not feature execution
  • A weapon in the tent is of no use to a warrior in the fight