![srimad bhagavad gita by realized swami srimad bhagavad gita by realized swami](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rl6oKwYriEE/maxresdefault.jpg)
The extreme positive and the extreme negative are always similar. This is a great lesson for us all to learn, that in all matters the two extremes are alike. In reading the Bhagavad-Gita, many of you in Western countries may have felt astonished at the second chapter, wherein Shri Krishna calls Arjuna a hypocrite and a coward because of his refusal to fight, or offer resistance, on account of his adversaries being his friends and relatives, making the plea that non-resistance was the highest ideal of love.These forms, and all the various steps in religion will remain, and we understand from the Lord Shri Krishna why they should. You may bring the sword or the gun into play, you may deluge the world with human blood, but so long as there is a necessity for idols, they must remain. The day when that necessity will cease, they will vanish along with the cessation of that necessity and so long as that necessity remains, they must be there in spite of your preaching, in spite of your criticism.
![srimad bhagavad gita by realized swami srimad bhagavad gita by realized swami](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/12/92/75/129275ffeb1335d9f1b9e26dbed1cf4d.jpg)
They are all here to satisfy the hankering and thirst of different classes of human minds, and you need not preach against them. They are the outcome of the necessity of the human soul. However reasonable that explanation may seem, it is not true, and they were not invented that way at all. For worship is valid and leads to the goal if the heart is pure and the heart is sincere and all these various modes of worship are necessary, else why should they be there? Religions and sects are not the work of hypocrites and wicked people who invented all these to get a little money, as some of our modern men want to think. Even the Karma Kanda is taken up, and it is shown that although it cannot give salvation direct but only indirectly, yet that is also valid images are valid indirectly ceremonies, forms, everything is valid only with one condition, purity of the heart. They are all right, says the Lord for slowly and gradually the human soul rises up and up, step after step, from the gross to the fine, from the fine to the finer, until it reaches the Absolute, the goal. But you find in the Gita there is no attempt at torturing any one of them. If a dualistic commentator comes, there are so many nondualistic texts which he begins to torture, to bring them all round to dualistic meaning. For what do you find in the Gita, and what in modern commentators? One non-dualistic commentator takes up an Upanishad there are so many dualistic passages, and he twists and tortures them into some meaning, and wants to bring them all into a meaning of his own. It is a wonder that subsequent interpreters of the scriptures, even commenting upon the Gita, many times could not catch the meaning, many times could not catch the drift. Then the Lord himself comes, He who is the inspirer of the Shrutis, to show us the meaning of them, as the preacher of the Gita, and today India wants nothing better, the world wants nothing better that that method of interpretation.
![srimad bhagavad gita by realized swami srimad bhagavad gita by realized swami](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LWR5nYej8s0/maxresdefault.jpg)
The essence of the Shrutis, or of the Upanishads, is hard to be understood, seeing that there are so many commentators, each one trying to interpret in his own way. Than the Gita no better commentary on the Vedas has been written or can be written.