Gita Acharan

S amatva or equanimity is the crux of the preachings of every enlightened soul that has ever roamed this planet. Words, languages and methods could vary but the message is to attain samatva . Any preaching or practice contrary to this is dogmatic and needs to be discarded. In the context of the mind, it is the balance between the senses on one side and intellect ( buddhi ) on the other side. If one leans towards senses, one gets drenched in desires. When intellect dominates, one would be an aware person but might look down on others as they may lack compassion. That’s why Krishna says that the best yogi is he who feels for others, whether in grief or pleasure, as he feels for himself (6.32). It’s the coherence of awareness and compassion. Krishna told us to treat things like gold and rock as the same; a cow, an elephant and a dog as the same. Later he told us to treat all people including friends and enemies as equals. Another way to look at this aspect is that there a...

  S amatva (equanimity) is a common thread that runs across the Gita. Lord Krishna highlights samatva-bhaav , samatva-drishti and samatva-buddhi at various places. Samatva is easy to understand but difficult to internalize. The degree of samatva within us is an indicator of our progress on the spiritual journey. The Gita begins with our relationship to things, gradually extends that understanding to people, and ultimately teaches us to remain balanced in situations such as praise and criticism. Krishna asks us to regard gold and a stone alike, and to look upon a cow, an elephant, and a dog with equal vision -without assigning greater value to some and lesser value to others. In the case of people, the difficulty is that we tend to identify with one or more artificial divisions based on culture, religion, caste, nationality, race and gender. The ability to overcome the divisions and to treat two different people equally is the first step towards samatva. Krishna te...