Chapter 6: The Yoga of Meditation

About 15 minutes

So far Krishna had shown Arjuna the road of karma and the road of knowledge. In this sixth chapter he opens the subtlest inner science of them all, the science of meditation. How to sit. How to hold the mind. And above everything, how to turn the mind from your enemy into your friend. Nowhere in the whole Gita does the practice of yoga receive a fuller or gentler telling.

Who is the true renunciate

First Krishna cleared away a confusion. Giving up the sacred fire and the rites it feeds does not by itself make a man a renunciate, he said, Arjuna, and abandoning all activity does not by itself make him a yogi. The one who does the work that falls to him and asks nothing of its fruit is at once the true renunciate and the true yogi. What people name renunciation and what they name yoga come to the same thing in the end, since neither can be reached until a man has laid down his selfish designs on the world. Whoever loosens his grip on the fruit of action has lit the one fire that counts, the fire within. For the seeker still climbing toward the practice, action itself is the ladder; for the one who has gained the summit, inner stillness becomes the ladder.

Your own rescuer

Then Krishna laid down the deepest sutra of this chapter.

Raise yourself by your own strength, and do not let yourself sink. The atman alone is its own friend, and the atman alone is its own enemy.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 6.5

No rescuer is coming from outside. The promise folded into these words is bolder than it first sounds. However heavy the destiny a man has carried out of his past lives, it cannot block his road; the power to rise or to fall stays in his own hands. The man who has brought his body, his senses, and his mind under his own command finds in that same self his closest friend. The man who has let them run loose finds the same self turned against him, working like an enemy from within. Friend and enemy keep a single seat, and that seat is inside you.

The seat of meditation

Now Krishna gave the method, and he gave it in fine detail. Find a clean and solitary place, he said, a quiet corner far from the traffic of people, and there set a seat for yourself that is neither too high nor too low: kusha grass laid down first, a deerskin over it, a clean cloth on top. Sit, and grow still. Hold the trunk, the head, and the neck in one straight line, steady and unmoving, and let the gaze come to rest at the tip of the nose and stay there, no longer wandering from thing to thing. Rein in the senses, gather the scattered mind to a single point, and, holding to fearlessness and the vow of continence, fix that mind on the Divine within. Meditation of this kind is undertaken for one purpose only, the cleansing of the self. Then he added a rule of measure. This yoga does not come to the man who eats too much, nor to the man who starves himself; not to the one who oversleeps, nor to the one who keeps vigil night after night. When a man’s eating and recreation, his sleep and waking, and his daily work all move in balance, this is the yoga that draws the sorrow out of a life.

As a lamp set in a windless place does not so much as flicker, such is the likeness given for the yogi who has mastered his mind and settled into the yoga of the atman.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 6.19

Where no wind reaches, the flame of a lamp burns straight and unmoving. A mastered mind burns the same way. A stillness settles within, and seated in it the yogi sees the Supreme inside his own self and takes his joy there and nowhere else. It is a joy past the reach of the senses, one that only the cleared and quieted mind can touch, and once a man has tasted it he counts no other gain worth the name. The heaviest sorrow that can fall on a life will not shake him loose from it. One glimpse of that state, and the greatest pleasure the world holds out turns pale beside it.

The restless mind

Krishna had been describing a mind held perfectly even, unmoved by joy or sorrow alike. Arjuna heard him out, then set down the question that rises, sooner or later, in every seeker.

Krishna, this mind is restless, churning, strong, and stubborn. Holding it seems to me as hard as binding the wind in a fist.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 6.34

Krishna did not wave the honest complaint away. Yes, he agreed, the mind truly is restless, and holding it is hard. Then he gave the remedy that has steadied every seeker since.

Arjuna, there is no doubt: the mind is restless and yields only with great difficulty. Yet through practice and dispassion it is held after all.

Srimad Bhagavad Gita 6.35

Two instruments, and only two. Practice: bringing the mind back daily, patiently, as many times as it strays. And dispassion: loosening the inner grip on things. Let the two work together, and even the most restless mind settles one day into that straight flame of the windless lamp. For the man who leaves his mind unbridled the goal stays out of reach; for the man who has brought it to heel and keeps working at it, the goal comes within grasp. That, Krishna said, was his settled conviction.

No effort is wasted

At the end Arjuna set down a tender fear, the kind that lives quietly in many hearts. Suppose a man sets out on this road with real faith, he said, and gives it everything, and still cannot master himself in time, so that his mind slips from the path and he comes to the end of his life short of the goal. What becomes of him? Does all that striving simply drain away? Torn loose from both worlds, having missed the joys of heaven and missed God as well, does he not scatter into nothing like a shred of cloud pulled apart by the wind?

Krishna’s answer holds some of the most consoling lines in the whole Gita. Dear one, he said, no such ruin waits for him, in this world or the next. No one who sets his hand to good ever comes to a bad end. A man who falls from this path still rises to the worlds that the doers of good have earned, dwells there for uncounted years, and is then born again into a pure and prosperous house. And the one who carried genuine dispassion out of that former life is spared even the long detour through those bright worlds; he is born straight into a family of realized yogis, and no birth on all the earth is rarer than that. Wherever he lands, the unfinished practice of his past life stirs awake on its own; the old momentum takes hold and turns him back toward God even against the pull of his senses, and he takes up the climb again from the broken link. Life after life the work gathers and compounds, until at last, washed clean of every fault, he reaches the highest goal.

Then Krishna ranked the yogi over them all: over those who punish the body with penance, over those who have mastered the scriptures, over those who act only for a reward. Become that yogi, he told Arjuna. And above yogis of every kind he lifted one figure highest of all, the one who, full of faith and love, holds Krishna himself in the depths of the heart and worships him there. That thread of love is the one that will unwind into bhakti in the chapters ahead.

The gist of this chapter in a single sentence. The mind stays an enemy only as long as you have no hold on it, and the day you learn to hold it, that same mind becomes your greatest friend. The way to hold it is plain: daily practice, and an inner distance from things. And on this road, no step ever goes to waste.

Source: Srimad Bhagavad Gita