(This article resumes the Gita summary series that had been started a few months ago. You can read the previous article here)

To stay untouched by the world [the way a lotus leaf is untouched by water], yogis do their duties, engaging their entire being — their body, mind, intelligence and even their senses — for the sole purpose of purification (11). Those who stay thus connected with a higher spiritual reality and detach themselves from the fruits of their action — they attain unshakeable peace; in contrast, those who are driven by desires and enamored by the results of their action — they can’t connect with higher spiritual reality and become karmically entangled (12).  

By thus mentally renouncing all action and treating the body like a nine-gated city in which one is temporarily residing, a yogi can live happily, neither doing karmically implicating action nor causing others to do such action (13). Actually, the soul — the master of the bodily city — is transcendental; the soul doesn’t do karmic action, or cause others to do such action, or create the results of such action — all that is done by the material nature of the body-mind machine that the soul is occupying (14). That material nature does such actions doesn’t mean the Supreme is responsible for those actions, be they bad or good; the soul, being covered by ignorance, becomes bewildered and passively goes along with the actions induced by material nature (15). All this becomes clear to the soul when its ignorance is dissipated by the awakening of knowledge, just as things are clearly seen when darkness is dissipated by the rising of the sun (16).

Being thus enlightened, the soul fixes all its faculties — intelligence, mind, faith and life-aspiration — on the ultimate reality, thereby becoming cleansed of all impurity and attaining the eternal destination from which there is no relapse (17). Such an enlightened soul sees the Divine in everyone and therefore sees all living beings equally, including spiritually elevated individuals such as humble and wise brahmanas as well as spiritually dissipated individuals such as undiscerning consumers of animal flesh — and including even all living beings belonging to the animal world, spanning the entire gamut from the sacred cow to the regal elephant to the stray dog (18). Those whose mind is thus fixed in seeing the same spiritual reality everywhere are free from all impurities, and are thus qualitatively similar to the pure spiritual reality (brahman) — indeed, they are themselves situated in that spiritual reality and have conquered the illusions of material existence (19).