Lessons from Bhagwat Gita and our Anatomy

Bhagwat Gita is, if anything is, a manual for life. It's like a SOP for living our lives. A standard operating procedure ( SOP) is a set of written instructions describing the step-by-step process that must be followed to perform a routine activity properly.

When Krishna is counselling Arjun and making him understand how to go through life with all its trials and tribulations, he is also talking to us, our inner Arjuns, to face and overcome our challenges. Krishna, the Universal Intelligence, the best psychologist the world has ever produced lives within all of us if we could listen to him. There are many paths that could lead us to our Krishna, like meditation, yoga, prayer, knowledge, and selfless work, but the onus is on us to travel on that path. Life has always been a great teacher and will remain so, but again, the onus is for us to learn from the lessons it imparts to us. Sometimes extraordinary, challenging situations force us to seek our inner teacher, our Krishna, for nothing works in those darkest times, but it doesn't always need to be that critical; we can always find our inner sea of peace, love, and joy if we care to stop and turn our attention from the ever-changing outside world to our inner vast universe. And your inner teacher, your inner wisdom, is not far from you. In fact, it's been waiting for an eternity for you to notice him.

Fortunately, Hinduism is a very rich culture where we are provided with an infinite amount of knowledge. However, we have to be our own sculptors, for we must break old habits and patterns that don't serve us and carve our own statues. We have to be our own surgeons and remove the part of us that we are very attached to but serves no purpose except to give us pain in the long run.   

To recognize and access that intelligence, we need to silence our Incessant thinking or analytical mind represented by the neocortex, a part of the cerebral cortex concerned with sight and hearing in mammals, regarded as the most recently evolved part of the cortex. In its human form, the neocortex is most complex and evolved. It is the region of our brain responsible for sensation, action, cognition, and consciousness. As human beings, we are very fortunate to have this thinking, logical part of the brain. However, it can be a boon or bane if, rather than going beyond it, we remain stuck in thinking and analytical mind, which invariably, if done in excess, leads to pain and suffering. Using various methods mentioned above, we can access our subconscious mind, which sits right underneath the neocortex in the middle brain. The subconscious mind generally includes the autonomic nervous system, emotions, and our program and habits. Suppose we have access to the subconscious mind by slowing our brain waves with any of the above methods. In that case, we can have access and dominion over our unconscious program and habits that rule our lives and invariably make us suffer if we have accumulated past traumas, hurt, and other unconscious emotional baggage. Also, our heart, a seat of our divinity, controls our subconscious mind through heart intelligence. 

As you must know, in the picture from Bhagwat Gita, Arjun represents all of us, our soul, our individual consciousness that inhabit the body represented by the chariot (rath). The path on which the chariot is racing is our desires and wants. The horses represent our five primary senses. The reins that are in the hand of the charioteer(sarathi), Krishna is our mind. Krishna represents Universal Intelligence that disciplines the mind by its power of vivek or discernment, thereby restraining our senses and unending desires, the source of our miseries. 

The beauty of the picture can be matched to our brain and heart anatomy and distribution in the body. As you can see, our soul, our individual consciousness, our awareness that resides in the neocortex represented by Arjun, sits on the top of the chariot. Krishna, Universal Consciousness, is sitting as a charioteer in the heart that is situated lower than our brain, but he has the reigns in his hand. Consider his other hand as our intelligence, the inner wisdom guiding our journey, helping us move beyond our chattering mind into our subconscious mind, thereby gaining control over it. Through the Bhagwat Gita, Krishna gives a message to us to have victory over ourselves where we don't let our past conditioning win over us and instead carve our new destiny with our knowledge and wisdom. ❤️🙏