The Bhagavad Gita is a scripture on the topic of Self realization or enlightenment, which it defines as freedom from dependence. In spite of being over 2000 years old, it remains immensely popular and continues to set people free to this day. Self realization is the hard and fast understanding that there is only one Self and that it is free of the crippling sense of limitation imposed upon it by a mind conditioned to believe in incompleteness, separateness, and inadequacy. An individual in whom this non-dual vision is established is untouched by existential suffering as he or she looks out through an ever-changing body at an ever-changing world.

The Gita systematically covers all topics related to enlightenment—freedom from attachment and dependence: the cause of suffering, the correct understanding of renunciation, the practice of karma yoga, the nature of personal dharma, universal dharma and situational ethics, the value of values, devotion, the discrimination between the ever-present unborn Self and the “not-self,” the nature of the three energies that create, sustain and destroy the word, spiritual experience, the practice of meditation, and the qualities present in an enlightened being. Owing to its exhaustive treatment of both spiritual practice and self-inquiry, the Bhagavad Gita is perhaps the most important Vedantic scripture.

The Gita is one of Vedanta’s three source texts along with the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras. Vedanta is an experience based means of Self knowledge, a systematic and profound body of teachings that provides a detailed map of the well worn road to liberation patiently removing doubt about the nature of the Self. Although it appeared after the Vedic Age it has the status of an Upanishad. The Upanishads are texts appended to each Veda that are humankind’s most ancient documents concerning the non-dual nature of reality. In the Upanishads the Self is presented in its essential nature as nameless and formless Awareness. In the Gita it is personified and appears as a person with non-dual vision who is willing to reveal it to Arjuna, the quintessential human whose need for Self knowledge is revealed during an existential crisis.

Arjuna is the general of an army of righteous men confronted with an unsolicited civil war. When he sees teachers, friends and relatives in the opposing army and realizes he will have to destroy them he breaks down and turns to his lifelong friend, Krishna, the personified Self, for advice. The seven hundred verses that follow offer a subjective solution to the eternal inner war that each of us wages with the army of self-limiting thoughts that compromise our happiness in this world.

Although James has taught the Gita world-wide for many years, only recently has he had the opportunity to teach the complete Gita, with the exception of the first Chapter, which describes in detail the battlefield and the warriors whose names and complex pasts would only be appreciated by a lover of the Mahabharata itself. The first verse, however, is significant because it lets us know that the battlefield on which this war is about to be fought is the field of dharma. Dharma is the Self in the form of the complex and intricate web of physical and moral laws that make up the world in which we live. It is the dharma or duty of each individual to appreciate this moral and physical order and respond appropriately, if he or she wishes to be happy.

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