- Chapter 16, Text 01
- Anxiety: is it coming from insecurity or from gravity?
- Why fearlessness is the first virtue in the godly nature
- Dealing with our inner demons
- Courage to fight our inner demons
- Conviction due to courage of conviction?
- Courage by regulated and regular exposure to fear
- How to grow in courage
- How to be courageous in the presence of fear
- Feckless? Reckless? Fearless
- Why Krishna speaks the sixteenth chapter without being prompted
- How being courageous is different from being fearless
- To be brave, we don’t need to be free from fear, we just need a purpose bigger than fear
- Fear boiled down to its barest is the absence of God
- Courage centers not on standing up to others but on staying true to your self
- Charity is not just an activity but also a mentality
- Fearlessness comes not by the absence of fear, but by the awareness of a presence that dwarfs fear
- Chapter 16, Text 01-03
- How to identify insecure people
- When others disturb us...
- How to deal with loss
- Proving point or improving viewpoint
- When people behave strangely...
- Why understand a wrongdoer
- The difference between forgiving and trusting
- Dealing with our inner demons
- Gita 16.01-03 explained
- Chapter 16, Text 02
- A three-step formula to give negative feedback positively
- How not to deal with a person whom we consider a necessary evil
- Why seeing the good in bad people can be a double-edged sword
- Three tests to counter rumor-mongering
- Three ways to differentiate between punishing and scapegoating
- Three reasons for differences of opinion
- Focus on who will be responsible not on who was responsible.
- How to identify insecure people
- When others disturb us...
- How to deal with loss
- Proving point or improving viewpoint
- When people behave strangely...
- Why understand a wrongdoer
- How to use the fault-finding mentality constructively
- Three benefits of hearing open-mindedly
- Ahimsa: Gita insights on nonviolence and deterrence
- The scapegoating tendency
- How gossip can go dangerously out of control
- Are we rude to the crude?
- What the faults we see in others tell us about ourselves
- How to hold others accountable without becoming judgmental
- To be truly non-judgmental, stop being judgmental about those who are judgmental
- Passing blame is easy but disempowering, accepting responsibility is tough but empowering
- To be nice is not to be naive — it is to be free from the control of vice
- The desire that the dark be darker defines a dark mind
- 16.02 Even if people are not faultless we can still find faults less
- To know people’s backgrounds means to know what’s on their back and what’s under their ground
- The most dangerous jumping is jumping to conclusions
- Replacing addiction to sinfulness with addiction to self-righteousness is not progress
- Give others as much benefit of doubt as we give to ourselves
- Those who obsess over what is wrong overlook what is right
- The Gita is not an exhortation to war; it is an exposition on dharma
- Don’t point fingers – move fingers on prayer beads
- Know when to doubt and when to give the benefit of doubt
- The better way to feel better about ourselves is by appreciation, not denigration
- Don’t use the axe of criticism where the scalpel of correction is needed
- When we best serve Krishna by keeping out of his business
- What we speak about others speaks about us
- Don’t assume that faultfinding is an obligation – it may well be a temptation
- Chapter 16, Text 03
- Be upright not uptight be gentle but not fickle
- The difference between forgiving and trusting
- Godliness is both a decision and a disposition
- Forgiving is not forgetting – it is a fresh way of remembering
- Forgiveness means relinquishing our right to get even
- When generic envy becomes specific envy, it becomes doubly dangerous
- Searching for the villain can’t help us in finding the hero
- Chapter 16, Text 04
- How pride blinds and brings as down
- Why some people seem to be perpetually outraged
- How the divine and the demoniac have opposite conceptions of courage
- How ego blocks self-improvement and humility aids self-improvement
- Why to identify with villains in scriptures?
- Self-importance or importance of the self?
- Gita 16.04 explained
- When black-and-white analysis helps and when it harms
- Pride comes before a fall but does pride fall?
- Those who don't respect themselves are most agitated when others don't respect them
- To make people suffer for the sake of making them suffer is the very essence of evil
- Arrogance keeps us not just in ignorance, but also in ignorance about the extent of our ignorance
- Humility learns even from success; pride not even from failure
- Being a wizard brings the hazard of belittling others as dullards
- Don’t see through others; see others through
- People who are too full of themselves are empty
- Inability to stand others’ weaknesses is our weakness
- We may be wired to explode, but we can change our wiring
- To think that we may become proud suggests that we may already be proud
- Those who anger us conquer us
- Don’t let offense towards others’ faults become a pseudo-defense of one’s own faults
- Being unconscious of our faults is the worst unconsciousness and the biggest fault
- Obsession with fame deprives us of prema
- Are we trying to control without because of being uncontrolled within?
- Is the knife cutting to heal or to wound?
- Pride (P + Ride) takes us on a Perilous Ride
- Chapter 16, Text 05
- Chapter 16, Text 06
- Gita 16.06 explained
- Why couldn’t the Pandavas resolve their conflict peacefully?
- Some people get many insights from one sight, others don’t get even one insight from many sights
- Better to speak less and say more than to speak a lot and say little
- Chapter 16, Text 07
- Cheating is not cheating when I do it?
- Gita 16.07 explained
- We may forget gravity but gravity won’t forget us
- Chapter 16, Text 08
- Gita 16.08 explained
- How doubt can’t live without faith (Dealing with doubt 7)
- To love values is good, to value love is better, to love the source of all values and love is the best
- If we gauge how good we are solely by how good we feel about ourselves, we rob ourselves of our goodness
- Moral relativism makes wrongdoing tough to identify, tougher to rectify and toughest to purify
- Everyone has values, but not everyone’s values reflect real value
- Even if our worldview stays out of view it shapes our every view
- To argue that the truth is unknowable is to presume that it is knowable
- The comfort blanket of rationalization keeps us willingly in the cage of illusion
- Spiritual desolation triggers sensual obsession
- The existence of evil points to God, not away from him
- What defines us is what lies at the top of our being, not at the bottom
- To see through everything is to see nothing
- To claim that nothing should be generalized is to generalize something
- If anything can mean anything, ultimately nothing means anything
- When we desert Krishna, our heart becomes a desert
- Materialism reduces life to a disrelation of unrelated events
- Belief founded in the illusion of all belief is an illusion
- Chapter 16, Text 09
- Senseless shameless soulless
- How the worldview of desire has been exaggerated and exacerbated by technology
- The danger of absolute relativism
- Gita 16.09 explained
- How atheism affects our actions
- When skepticism is healthy — and when it becomes unhealthy
- Sensuality + Technology - Spirituality = Recipe for self-destruction
- Why progress is accompanied by distress ...
- Capitalism, communism, materialism
- The value of our life doesn’t require anyone’s recognition not even our own
- Materialism reduces you to a number and glamorizes things that make you number
- There is no scientific proof that you exist but scientific proof exists because you exist
- Materialism reduces human life to an inhuman race from nowhere to nowhere
- For humanity to not work against humanity, spirituality is a necessity
- Our conscience is like an automatically customizing security device - customize it intelligently
- The emptiness within empties everything without
- The claim that consciousness is an illusion proves that it is not an illusion
- We are not programmed machines – we are the possessors of programmable machines
- To reject reality because it is not found in the map is absurdity
- Lifestyle is often more style than life
- We need to evolve if we are not to dissolve
- We have nothing to lose except our non-existence
- Materialism makes the materialist non-existent and materialism meaningless
- Fanatical materialism banishes materialists to the Siberia of hallucination
- The belief that what science can’t explain doesn’t need explaining is blind and blinding
- An emptiness that is worse than loneliness
- Why sentence ourselves to meaninglessness, purposelessness and joylessness?
- Why put faith in faithlessness?
- Emptiness, Loneliness, Pointlessness
- A talk that no one walks
- Are we being fooled into giving ourselves a collective pat on the back?
- Materialism is wrong – and wrongheaded
- Ignorance with intellectual wings is the worst ignorance
- The immaterial is not immaterial
- Chapter 16, Text 09-10
- Chapter 16, Text 10
- Gita 16.10 explained
- Attachment makes us blind arrogance keeps us blind
- Illusion misdirects our determination to drive us deeper into illusion
- Taking shelter of lust amidst problems is like taking shelter of kidnappers when threatened by thieves
- Don’t care so much for desire that it doesn’t care for the desirer
- When one makes lust a god, lust makes one a devil
- The great achievement of materialism
- When style violates sense, style deserves to be violated
- Chapter 16, Text 11
- Two ways attachment torments us
- How our worldview shapes our capacity to be grateful
- Three ways sensual desires imprison us in misery — Desire management series 4
- Free entertainment expensive entanglement
- Why material progress is deceptive and dissatisfying
- As long as we are bound by desire we will be bound to fear
- Free will is the distance between impulse and response
- What we fear reflects what we hold dear
- Circumstantial anxiety can be addressed materially, but existential anxiety needs to be addressed only spiritually
- Anxiety is not incidental to materialism – it is intrinsic
- Those who don’t think philosophy don’t live without philosophy – they live with an unthought philosophy
- Attachment actuates and aggravates anxiety
- Improving the hardware can’t remove software problems
- To those living sensually, living simply seems simply boring
- Others don’t endanger our liberty as much as do we ourselves
- The starting point of happiness is selflessness
- Our ability to tap our ability is enhanced by our spirituality
- Anxiety is caused not as much by outer uncertainty as by inner instability
- The more we crave, the more make ourselves a slave
- To evaluate advancement, examine anxieties
- Filling our mind, emptying our pocket, starving our heart – is this progress?
- Is our culture preventing us from growing up?
- Chapter 16, Text 11-12
- Chapter 16, Text 12
- Does surrender take away our free will
- Might we all be bound by something worse than ropes?
- How can spirituality protect our mental health? (Mental health series 6)
- How desire takes control of our life — Desire management series 1
- If we lack freedom or willpower what can we do?
- How to respond when someone hurts us?
- How to choose the lesser pain and how to make that pain lesser
- Unspoken threats to our freedom
- From mean actions to the meaning of actions
- Technological advancement without spiritual advancement makes us powerfully powerless
- Better to endure cravings that seem unbearable than to endure consequences that are unbearable
- Even if we cover the tracks we make externally, the tracks we make internally still cover us
- In dealing with our urges, if we don’t consciously choose responsibility, we unconsciously choose slavery
- What we initially indulge in casually we eventually indulge in compulsively
- Indulgence decreases our capacity to push against desire and increase desire's capacity to push us
- Seek freedom from weakness not freedom in weakness
- Why crave for any pleasure that makes us a slave?
- When our desires change suddenly from spiritual to sensual, know that the lasso of illusory desires has fallen on us
- Morality may be relativized, but the consequences of immoral indulgence can’t be relativized
- What is craved within gets carved within
- Indiscriminate indulgence makes the impulsive compulsive
- Even if we win the rat race, we still remain rats
- Our free will is never lost, but it is constricted by misuse
- Just because we can’t live without something doesn’t mean that we can live with it
- The capacity to choose is itself not freedom – the maturity to choose wisely is
- Temporary relief from self-inflicted torture is not pleasure
- Freedom is most endangered by the illusion of freedom
- The source of misery is not frustration of desire, but domination by desire
- We may not be caught for our wrongdoings, but we will be caught by our wrongdoings
- Indulgence makes our bonds thicker, rougher and tighter
- Our bonds are not prisoner’s shackles, but puppeteer’s strings
- A liberty that ends in slavery
- A prison of promises and pretenses
- Your desire is your power – don’t waste it
- Cry, Vie, Lie, Die, Fie – Tie
- Chapter 16, Text 13
- Intelligence is meant to be the mind’s instructor not its instrument
- Drive the mind’s chariot – don’t be driven by it
- Seeking more is often the cause of our problems, not the solution
- Don’t equate the essential with the exclusive
- Money is one measure of value, not the only measure of value
- Happiness comes not by collecting the material, but by recollecting the spiritual
- Growth for growth’s sake is cancerous
- Money talks – and walks away as it is talking
- Money unmakes those who make making money their life's purpose
- Chapter 16, Text 13-14
- Don't just condemn the demonic; contemplate how they became demonic
- How to develop deep friendships
- Wealth of the world without wealth of the heart wrecks the world
- Beware of the universal solvent that dissolves everything including us
- Our convictions are far more important than our possessions
- We can do better than to join the society of materialistic fanatics
- Chapter 16, Text 13-15
- Chapter 16, Text 14
- Don't just condemn the demonic; contemplate how they became demonic
- How to develop deep friendships
- The second test of friendship
- Three kinds of misdeeds
- When life ruins our makeup …
- Those who don't find the reprehensible reprehensible, are reprehensible
- When nothing feels filthy, everything may be tidy – or everything may be filthy
- Be terrified about how terrible you can be to never become that terrible
- Weakness makes us hotheaded wickedness makes us cold-blooded
- Artha divorced from dharma leads to anartha
- Humans who pursue subhuman goals become anti-human
- To not feel bad on doing bad is bestially bad
- Obsession can make the covetous murderous
- Majestic loneliness is still loneliness
- One person’s diversion can be another person’s devastation
- Those who boast that they can do anything can do nothing as they should
- The value of what we drive doesn’t matter as much as the values that drive us
- Those who don’t have money are poor, but those who have only money are poorer still
- Those who don’t see weakness as weakness degrade to meanness
- Evil never wins as thoroughly as when it wins in the heart
- Chapter 16, Text 15
- Let our activism be transformative, not performative
- How delusions of omnipotence become increasingly dangerous
- How can we know others properly?
- Are we living inside an echo chamber?
- Exploiting others’ weaknesses doesn’t make us strong – overcoming our own weaknesses does
- Satisfaction comes most reliably not by accumulation or appreciation but by absorption
- To mistake attention to be affection is delusion
- Go to the temple to take darshan, not to give darshan
- Blind people can be cured – people proud of their blindness can’t be
- To convert a prison into a kingdom is a fool’s errand
- The defining characteristic of humanity distorted by ignorance is inhumanity
- Those who crave to look big are small
- You are meant for more than a weary, dreary and scary reality
- We cannot get pure devotion by more donation
- Is the purpose of eating to get fatter?
- Chapter 16, Text 16
- Gita 16.16 explained
- Why conserving the energy of our consciousness is difficult
- The more our consciousness is crowded the more our conscience becomes clouded
- Manifesting our individuality should fill our heart not empty our pocket
- Mindless feeds don’t feed our mind, they feed our mindlessness
- Illusion can cover everything, even the way out of illusion
- A pile of toys is not worth a pile of troubles
- To be distracted is to be disempowered
- Don’t let the wealth without wipe out the wealth within
- Don’t lose the purpose of living for the sake of living
- The key to happiness is not having it all but having the One who has it all
- When desires crowd the mind, dilemmas cloud the intelligence
- Are we living our life at the center or at the periphery?
- Why life seems so complex…
- Don’t let inconsequential possibilities paralyze you
- Chapter 16, Text 17
- Are we dismissing as problems the people who point out problems?
- Gita 16.17 explained
- Fanatics use God’s name to give God a bad name
- Humility arises from acknowledging our vulnerability
- Do yajna of nama, not yajna for nama
- Our purpose is to serve the Name, not to make a name
- The purpose of religion is not cosmetic, but cosmic
- Arrogance perverts the wings that free into nets that bind
- Is our religion a sanctuary for the soul or a gymnasium for the ego?
- All bluff, no stuff; that’s enough
- Chapter 16, Text 18
- Gita 16.18 explained
- Envy targets the envied but torments the envious
- When the ego says go tell the ego to go
- The ego shifts our focus in “I am so fallen” from “fallen” to “I”
- Ego is not the problem – false ego is
- What characterizes civilization is not the presence of comforts, but the purification of consciousness
- Chapter 16, Text 19
- Chapter 16, Text 20
- Chapter 16, Text 21
- Supervise vice or It Will Catch Us in a Super-Vise
- Gita 16.21 explained
- Why Krishna uses the word ‘soul’ non-literally
- What Krishna never mentions to Arjuna in the Gita
- Why anger should be used sparingly … (Anger management series 7)
- How to use anger without being used by anger (Anger management series 6)
- How to use anger constructively (Anger management series 5)
- Pointing the finger or pointing the way? (Anger management series 4)
- Choosing our battles in dealing with anger (Anger management 3)
- Angry about being angry? (Anger management series 2)
- Why absence of anger may not be good … (Anger management series 1)
- Avoid hell in the mind avoid hell in the world
- Why two similar wrongdoings may be entirely different
- Is the dark side stronger than the bright side?
- Living with a red zone
- How to ensure that anger is constructive, not destructive
- Shortsighted, shortsighted squared and shortsighted cubed
- Why some fears are healthy ...
- When we react to atrocity with fury we give the forces of illusion control over both sides of the war
- The more outer power we get, the more inner power we need
- The causes of anger rarely hurt us as much as the consequences of anger
- Just because we have a right to be angry doesn’t mean we are right to be angry
- Inner enemies are more to be given up than killed
- Multiple metaphors magnify meaning
- The Gita is not always literal – it’s also literary
- When we remember Krishna, we dismember illusion
- The soul is indestructible in constitution but destructible in cognition
- Greed makes the wealthy needy
- Hell is not meant to cause us suffering but to save us from suffering
- Don’t let parasites suck your mental energy
- Chapter 16, Text 22
- Gita 16.22 explained
- To understand what is wrong in the world, look first in the mirror, not the newspaper
- To bring out our best, we must beat down our worst
- Bring out the best within, not the beast within
- Anger-aggravating religion is the antithesis of religion
- Anger makes our response to a problem a bigger problem than the problem itself
- Chapter 16, Text 23
- Gita 16.23 explained
- If we put gravity to test, gravity will put us to rest
- See the world through the Word, not the Word through the world
- The obnoxious is obnoxious because it is noxious
- Chapter 16, Text 24
- Temptations are like precision-guided missiles
- Why some people can't manage change
- Gita 16.24 explained
- Two powerful motivators: desire and fear
- Isn’t life too complex to have a manual?
- What Krishna’s analysis of divine and demonic natures means for Arjuna
- Can we order our desires ? (Desire management series 13)
- Two ways to deter ourselves from wrongdoing
- A God who pretended we had no shortcomings would be a God who did not take our potential seriously
- Scripture is meant to be not just mapped but also mined
- Read scripture and read from scripture – don’t read into scripture
- Study scripture as a scuba diver not a surface swimmer
- Knowledge that is inert can’t make us alert
- Let our life’s script be shaped by scripture
- We need to know that which we can’t not know
- All consciences are not born equal – nor are they bred equal
- When we steer by stars that are in motion, our motion simply causes commotion
- Experience is intelligence’s rear light; scripture, it’s front light
- End the tradition of abuse with the tradition of love
- Scriptural study strengthens the intelligence, stabilizes the mind and sustains the heart
- Look towards the fixed lighthouse, not the moving lighthouses
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 16Chaitanya Charan2021-07-07T13:47:29+05:30