Daily Battles

Today we are going to start getting into The Bhagavad Gita!  The Bhagavad Gita is a sacred Hindu text centered around a battle between the families of two half-brothers; Dhritarashtra (the blind sense-mind), and Pandu (pure discriminating intelligence). They are fighting the battle of Kurukshetra for control of the Bodily Kingdom. The sons of Dhristarashtra represent vainglorious desire and the one hundred sense tendencies (the negative aspects of these tendencies include material desire, anger, greed, avarice, hate, jealousy, wickedness, lust, abuse, promiscuity, dishonesty, etc.). The sons of Pandu are the five tattvas or vibratory elements that inform all matter. When mastered they represent calmness, life-force control, the nonattachment of self-control, the power to adhere to good rules, and the power to resist evil.  In battle, they are joined by good habits and spiritual inclinations. 

The battle of Kurukshetra is fought every single day within ourselves on three levels; moral, psychological, and spiritual. 

Few men are even aware that a state of constant warfare exists in their kingdom.  Usually, it is only when the devastation is nearly complete that men helplessly realize the sad ruin of their lives. The psychological conflict for health, prosperity, self-control, and wisdom has to be started anew each day in order for man to advance toward victory, reclaiming inch by inch the territories of the soul occupied by the rebels of ignorance.

For the Soul's armies to win the war, we must be brutally honest with ourselves. Every night we should ask our intuition whether our spiritual faculties or our physical inclinations of temptation won the day's battle "between good and bad habits; between temperance and greed; between self-control and lust; between honest desire for necessary money and inordinate craving for gold; between forgiveness and anger; between joy and grief; between moroseness and pleasantness; between kindness and cruelty; between selfishness and unselfishness; between understanding and jealousy; between bravery and cowardice; between confidence and fear; between spiritual and material desires; between divine ecstasy and sensory perceptions; between soul consciousness and egoity."

Who's winning your battle now?

Quotes taken from The Bhagavad Gita and commentary by Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda