“This doesn’t make sense.” We may get such doubts while studying Gita wisdom.

To ensure that doubts don’t swamp our spiritual prospects, we need to focus on the Gita’s essential message: a call for endless spiritual love between us and Krishna. The Gita elucidates this eternal message with contextual examples drawn from the culture in which it was spoken. For example, its tenth chapter illustrates Krishna’s opulences through metaphors drawn from the Vedic cultural and cosmological worldview.

As we have been educated in a different worldview, those metaphors may raise many doubts. Such doubts are peripheral; obsession with them can distract us from the opportunity to relish Krishna’s love by practicing devotional service. And life is too short and too precious to be wasted in doubting.

If we are sick, we don’t delay medical treatment till we get comprehensive understanding – something that requires a lifetime of study. If the treatment comes from a medical authority and makes basic sense, we take it and become healthy. The Gita offers a spiritual treatment for healing our heart of the malady of misdirected love. It comes from the greatest authority in all of existence: God himself. And its message makes profound sense; it resonates with our deepest intuition that we are meant for love and happiness and life eternal. Gaining comprehensive understanding of the Gita requires a lifetime of study. But we don’t have to delay our spiritual healing till then.

Arjuna illustrates this spiritual pragmatism when he accepts the Gita’s message (10.14) based not on a hair-splitting evaluation of all its statements but on the omniscience of its speaker and the coherence of its essential message.

We too can be similarly intelligent. Why let peripheral doubts deprive us of the essential love that can satisfy our heart’s deepest longings?

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 10 Text 14

“O Krishna, I totally accept as truth all that You have told me. Neither the demigods nor the demons, O Lord, can understand Your personality.”