The Yoga of Meditation

The sixth chapter is the most concretely practical in the book, and it is also where the Gita comes closest to the older meditative literature. It describes a seat that is neither too high nor too low, in a clean place, on cloth and skin and grass; a body held with trunk, neck and head in a straight line, the gaze steady; a mind gathered and made single. It prescribes moderation rather than austerity, and says explicitly that yoga is not for the person who eats too much or too little, or who sleeps too much or keeps awake too long.

The chapter's best known image compares the disciplined mind to a lamp in a place without wind, which does not flicker. The comparison is doing more work than it first appears. A lamp in still air is not being held still by effort; it is simply not being disturbed. The state described is an absence of interference rather than an act of concentration, which is why the chapter spends so much time on the conditions around the practice.

Arjuna's interruption is the honest part. This yoga you describe, he says, I do not see how it can last, because the mind is restless, turbulent, powerful and obstinate, and holding it seems as hard as holding the wind. Krishna does not deny it. The mind is hard to restrain, he agrees, but it can be held by repeated practice and by dispassion, and for someone whose mind is not governed it is hard to attain at all.

The atlas describes this practice; it does not instruct anyone in it. What the chapter prescribes belongs to a living tradition with living teachers, and reading a description is not the same as being taught.

Near the end of the sixth chapter Arjuna asks the question nobody in a devotional text is supposed to ask. What happens to the person who has faith but cannot hold to the practice, whose mind wanders away, who fails to reach perfection? Do they perish like a torn cloud, having lost both the ordinary rewards of the world and the goal they were reaching for, with nothing to stand on?

The answer is the Gita's only sustained treatment of spiritual failure, and it is unusually generous. No one who does good comes to a bad end, Krishna says, either here or hereafter. Such a person attains the worlds of those who have acted well, dwells there for a long time, and is then born in the house of the pure and prosperous, or, rarer than that, into a family of practitioners of yoga, which is a birth harder to obtain in this world.

The crucial clause follows. In that birth the person regains the mental disposition of the earlier body, and from there strives again toward perfection. The effort is not lost and does not have to be repeated from the beginning. Even wishing to know about this discipline, the chapter adds, carries someone past the merely ritual observance of the scriptures.

That is a doctrine of accumulated progress across lifetimes, and it changes the emotional temperature of the whole practice. The chapter has just finished describing a discipline that almost nobody completes. Rather than treating incompletion as damnation, it treats it as an interrupted apprenticeship, which is one reason this passage is quoted so often to beginners.