Alan Watts & Ram Dass: Essential Teachings from the Gita

This podcast episode offers a profound exploration of the Bhagavad-Gita, combining insights from Ram Dass and Alan Watts. Ram Dass begins with a user-friendly introduction to the text, reflecting on his personal contemplative experience studying the Gita at the Naropa Institute. He presents the Bhagavad-Gita not merely as a scripture but as a living dialogue between the seeker and the divine, emphasizing its practical application to daily life and spiritual evolution. Ram Dass highlights the importance of experiential wisdom over intellectual knowledge and encourages a contemplative, iterative approach to reading the text, treating it as a guide for deepening consciousness and self-awareness.

Following this, Alan Watts delivers a mid-20th-century radio lecture on the Bhagavad-Gita, elucidating its historical, philosophical, and ethical dimensions. He explains the setting of the text—a dialogue on a battlefield between Krishna (God incarnate) and Arjuna (a warrior)—as symbolic of the internal spiritual struggle within every individual. Watts unpacks the core Hindu concepts of Atman (the inner self or soul) and Brahman (the ultimate reality), emphasizing their unity and the eternal, indestructible nature of the soul. He contrasts Western and Hindu views on the soul, reincarnation, and the nature of existence.
Watts also addresses the ethical challenge posed by the Gita: Arjuna’s reluctance to fight his kin and Krishna’s response, which urges action without attachment to outcomes—karma yoga or the “yoga of selfless action.” Watts critiques sentimental pacifism as rooted in fear rather than genuine moral conviction and highlights the importance of performing one’s duty (svadharma) with equanimity and detachment. He reflects on Gandhi’s paradoxical devotion to the Gita despite its battlefield setting, explaining that true moral action transcends fear and desire, rooted instead in freedom from motive and attachment.
The episode concludes with Watts emphasizing the Gita’s timeless wisdom, encouraging listeners to integrate its teachings into their lives through meditation, community, and daily acts of service, presenting the Gita as a spiritual manual for Western seekers facing existential dilemmas.

• [02:54] 📚 Ram Dass introduces the Bhagavad-Gita as a practical spiritual text relevant to modern Western life.
• [06:59] ⚔️ The battlefield in the Gita is explained as a metaphor for the inner spiritual struggle.
• [09:09] 🧘 Ram Dass describes three ways to read the Gita: as a story, as the seeker’s dialogue with God, and as identifying with the divine itself.
• [16:12] 📜 Quoting Gandhi on the Gita, highlighting how the text provided solace amidst hardship.
• [20:38] 🕉️ Krishna’s teaching on the immortality of the soul: the soul neither kills nor is killed.
• [34:48] ⚖️ Krishna’s argument against sentimental pacifism and the importance of acting from duty, not fear or desire.
• [39:48] 🔄 The principle of karma yoga: act without attachment to the fruits of action, embodying equanimity.

• [03:46] 🌱 Experiential wisdom over intellectual knowledge: Ram Dass stresses that the Bhagavad-Gita is not just about intellectual understanding but about transmitting a feeling or being. This transmission of consciousness is fundamental to spiritual growth, suggesting that the text’s true power lies in lived experience rather than theoretical study. This challenges modern Western tendencies to prioritize knowledge accumulation over inner transformation.

• [07:48] 🔄 Multiple layers of interpretation: Ram Dass advocates reading the Gita multiple times from different perspectives—first as a narrative, then as the seeker’s voice, and finally as the divine speaking. This layered approach reflects the multifaceted nature of spiritual texts, inviting the reader to move from external understanding to intimate identification with the ultimate reality. It also models a contemplative practice that deepens over time.

• [18:59] 🕉️ The inner battlefield as symbolic of human struggle: Watts explains that the physical battlefield of Kurukshetra represents the internal conflict between duty, emotion, and morality. This symbolic interpretation universalizes the Gita, making it relevant beyond its historical context to anyone facing ethical dilemmas or spiritual crises. It redefines war as a metaphor for personal evolution and self-mastery.

• [22:12] 🔥 The doctrine of the eternal soul (Atman): Krishna teaches that the soul is eternal, immutable, and beyond birth and death. This teaching challenges the common Western view of a finite, individualized soul by proposing a supra-individual essence identical with Brahman, the ultimate reality. The concept calls for a shift in self-identity, encouraging detachment from the transient body and ego.

• [34:48] 💡 Critique of sentimental pacifism: Krishna’s rebuke of Arjuna’s reluctance to fight based on fear or sentimentality introduces a nuanced ethical position. True moral action, according to the Gita, requires acting from duty and spiritual insight rather than emotional avoidance. This insight complicates simplistic notions of non-violence and suggests that courage and commitment to one’s role are essential aspects of spiritual integrity.

• [39:48] ⚖️ Karma yoga and detachment from outcomes: Watts highlights the Gita’s central ethical teaching that one should act without attachment to the results. This detachment allows for moral freedom, where actions are not driven by fear or desire but arise from alignment with one’s higher self and duty. This teaching resonates with contemporary ideas about mindfulness and presence, emphasizing action as a form of spiritual practice.

• [43:38] ⏳ The eternal now and freedom from past conditioning: The Gita’s philosophy upends linear causality by positing that the present moment (the eternal now) is primary and that the past is a trailing consequence. This radical view suggests that spiritual liberation involves transcending conditioning and acting freely in the present, a concept with profound implications for understanding karma and personal responsibility.

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thank you [Music] thank you for joining us for the Alan Watts podcast being in the way I'm your host Mark Watts and today we're going to go back to the origins of this podcast and rejoin the ROM dust be here Now podcast Network for a special program that's a mix of ramdas and my father Alan Watts and it's about the bhagavad-gita and first we're going to hear from ramdas a course that he did at the naropa institute in Boulder where he's going to talk about his own experience with the bhagavad-gita and


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the different stories and perspectives within it and how he read each of those it's really interesting commentary gives you a very user-friendly introduction to this text then we're going to go on to a radio program that my father did as part of the great books of Asia this was in the mid 50s it was broadcast from kpfa in Berkeley and it's a really interesting talk he not only gets into the history and some of the background of the Gita but he also takes it to its sort of logical conclusion on how this can


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impact motivation and action and he also describes a form of yoga which I have heard him talk about elsewhere is intellectual yoga but here it's more specifically in the context of what we would call Karma or you're doing this comes about 20 minutes into his presentation and I think you'll find it very interesting so today it's the bhagavad-gita we're going to start off with ramdas and then we're going to go to my father this podcast is made in cooperation with the ramdas be here Now podcast Network our


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theme music is by Zakir Hussein courtesy of moment records and it's from his rhythm experience album and now here's Alan Watts and ROM Das from the bhagavad-gita I'd like to introduce you to a course entitled The yogas of the bhagavad-gita this course has been given at The naropa Institute in Boulder Colorado which is an Institute that was founded by chogiom trunkpa rinpoche a Tibetan Buddhist Meditation master and um I was invited to come here and teach a course during the first session


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the reason I've chosen to teach the bhagavad-gita first because it uh it represents in the most General sense a tradition that I have been steeped in for some years namely the Hindu tradition but um equally relevant because it concerns a form of discipline or yoga or method that is very suitable to our predicament in the west at this moment I should say at the outset the spirit or the rules of the game about teaching a course and even calling it The bhagavad-gita [Music] this course is more concerned with a


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commentary about certain points in the bhagavad-gita as they relate to our daily lives um the Gita as I understand it is a way of making one's entire life a vehicle for becoming conscious or coming into the spirit or coming to God whatever metaphor you would particularly feel comfortable working with I think we might consider a moment the issue of figure and ground um when we relate to one another we relate around forms and we are talking about Concepts and the bhagavad-gita and ideas but that is merely the vehicle that's


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the stuff through which you and I are relating um and if we keep in mind that the transmission is uh meta conceptual the transmission is a transmission of feeling it's a transmission of being that is all I really understand by teaching that one can share is one's being you can't uh that if I talk about love but I'm full of hate you won't experience the love and it won't do you much good you just end up with a lot of dead butterflies to add to your collection on the other hand uh whatever it is that


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I've evolved into whatever words I use you will experience a transmission of being from one person to another and that will be useful to you or not as your heart dictates so I can understand quite clearly that the work I can do to make this course productive is to remain as conscious and as open as I can be as a being because I understand this work as the work on myself this is an exercise in my own Consciousness teaching this course I'm not a fully realized being I'm somebody working on myself just as I assume you


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are and we are coming together to on the path to meet to recognize one another and to share Maps and to uh realize that the maps are part of it but behind the maps here we are the um the Gita is uh very simply a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna and Krishna is a form of God an avataric form of God and we'll talk more later about what all happened and arginine is a very pure Warrior he's a very uh straight solid being a very good person and this is a dialogue on a Battlefield and and moment I'd like to tell you


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about what that Battlefield is from a historical point of view at a symbolic level what the Gita is is a dialogue between God and the Seeker and the battlefield turns out to be the inner Battlefield the battlefield of our uh of our own evolutionary being so I have suggested to students and I've certainly done it myself that you read the Gita a number of times it's a very uh small book it can be read in a matter of a few hours it can't be understood in a matter of few hours but it can be read in a matter


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if you are but it's kind of fun to read it from different angles uh you read it first as a fascinating story of A Sort of a melodrama of a Wheel Creation Of Fire will arjunified or won't he and will creation to convince him and that kind and the unfairness of it all and you go through all the social political issues inside yourself about it then it's very useful to read the Gita from the point of view of identifying with Arjuna that is experiencing once you have appreciated that the conflict is not


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unique to a historical period and to a few people but rather is uh a conflict that's in each of us and that the reason that you're even attracted to watching this at this moment is because of the relevance of the conflict inside you the relevance of the conflict inside yourself then you read it as Arjuna with God talking to you and as if your inner voice the inner inner what the Quakers call is the still Small Voice Within is speaking to you and uh you're just open to the way uh that you're being guided or instructed


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the inner Guru within is guiding you the third reading is even father out and this is very very difficult for those of us that have grown up in Western religious traditions because the third reading is to read it as if you're Krishna is speaking to Arjuna that means uh now you're being asked to identify with God and um that merging of the Seeker and that which is sought the merging of the Beloved and the lover the merging of the devotee and the guru uh those two things coming together is very difficult for most of us to


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think to experience the place in you where you in fact already know all the answers and that's the very uh as you'll see as we get into the philosophy underlying the Gita and issues of the Atman and Brahman that um from a what would be called The Mystic tradition point of view you already know every answer you could possibly be seeking you already are the answer and so in fact when you read the book the third time you will read a line that Krishna says and then you'll feel strange about it


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because how could you have said that and then you will sit with it and really This concerns the method of contemplation the way you study a book like the Gita is really not um reading it through very quickly that first but then later you take it shloka or a little paragraph by paragraph and the way I did it was I started studying the Gita in about 1967. in a temple in India and after I'd read it a number of times I just sat with I would in the morning I'd make my tea and I'd sit down in a


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very quiet space and I would take one little paragraph and I'd read it I read it a few times and then I put it down and I'd reflect on it and I'd reflect on it in relation to my life in relation to my inner being I just sort of work with it I'd float around it I'd come back and read it again and then I would quiet and quiet and quiet until the words took on a almost interluminous quality and they started to become living words rather than just an intellectual exercise and then usually I tried to keep that


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particular paragraph in mind on and off through the day so that I could keep relating back what my life was like in relation to that one paragraph and then the next day I'd read the paragraph I had used the day before again to see how much I had forgotten in terms of my melodrama of each day and then I go on to the next one and when you finish the 18th chapter you go back and start the first one and you just keep building because these are books of wisdom they're not books of knowledge and our game is now the game of


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we are in training to become wise women and wise men not to become knowledgeable women and knowledgeable men knowledge is easy to collect wisdom is a matter of being and you have to steep yourself in wisdom you just can't grab it and wear it like Joseph's Coat of Many Colors you have to become it literally becoming let me tell you a little bit about the um well before I tell you about the history of the Gita a few more words about the application that if you are going to go along with us through the


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these lectures through this course I think if you're really looking for the payoff in terms of your own evolution it really isn't enough to just listen that's one level but it's also possible to make the Gita into a very um living experience for you in your own life yeah if uh you are studying it over a period of time you um you may want to introduce this contemplation into your life as you start work with Akita those of you that are not familiar with formal methods of meditation may find


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that you are starting to seek them as ways of deepening your connection after you start to reflect on the philosophy underlying the Gita you may want to make that connection yourself um you may want to explore your own feelings about giving and receiving things and relationships to other people in view of this philosophy you may want to find ways to serve other human beings as exercises in what's called karma yoga which we'll be considering shortly you may find yourself looking around for other


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beings who are sharing this journey because at some point satsang or the community of beings on the path becomes very important and uh for those of you that have the opportunity you may want to set up in your home a special little space that is connected with this quieting and deepening and opening process uh I call it a Puja table Place the little Puja area a Puja means worship or ritual place and it might just be a little table with a candle or a piece of stick of incense or one flower or a rock or a bowl of water


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or a picture of beings who are models for you of what these higher states of compassion and Consciousness and uh presence are about picture of Christ picture of Buddha Etc that is it's it's much more when you're really absorbing the wisdom then just doing a head trip about it there really is a process of opening your being to the possibility of growth and you can take your daily life just the way it is and start to transmute that energy you can start to get it so that everything in your daily life is


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feeding in to this enriching wisdom in 1925 Mahatma Gandhi wrote the following words I find the solace in the bhagavad-gita that I miss even in The Sermon on the Mount when disappointment stares me in the face and all alone I see not one ray of light I go back to the bhagavad-gita I find a verse here and a verse there and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming tragedies and my life has been full of external tragedies and if they have left no visible no indelible scar on me I owe it all to the teachings of the


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bhagavad-gita In this passage that I've just quoted to you Mahatma Gandhi was referring to what is perhaps the most famous of all the spiritual Classics of India the bhagavad-gita or Bhagavad the Lord Gita song the song of the Lord it is spelled b-h-a-g-a-v-a-d Bhagavad Gita g-i-t-a the song of the Lord the Lord in this case being SRI Krishna who in Hindu mythology is regarded as an Incarnation an embodiment in the Sanskrit language an avatar our Vishnu the Supreme Lord the personification of the Ultimate


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Reality underlying this universe the bhagavad-gita was probably compiled about the 5th Century BC and it forms a part of a great epic called the Mahabharata it's attributed to a sage by the name of vyasa and contains a complete epitome of the whole Central doctrine of Hinduism known as the vedanta it's very fascinating and to us puzzling fact that Gandhi preeminently the man of non-violence in modern times was so devoted to this book because the scene with which the book opens is a Battlefield


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the field of Kuru where a young prince by the name of araduna is riding in his chariot and SRI Krishna the Incarnation of Vishnu is his charioteer as the opposing armies face each other and the battle is about to begin and Arjuna is faint in heart oppressed with the senselessness of this struggle and of internessing warfare and the Gita says in the first chapter he was overcome with great compassion and uttered this in sadness when I see my own people arrayed and eager for fight o Krishna my limbs Quail


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my mouth goes dry my body shakes and my hair stands on end and I see evil Omens o Krishna nor do I foresee any good by slaying my own people in the fight I do not long for victory o Krishna nor Kingdom nor pleasures of what use his kingdom to also Krishna or enjoyment or even life and having spoken thus on the field of battle Arjuna sank down on the seat of his Chariot casting away his bow and arrow his Spirit overwhelmed by sorrow and to this complaint his Chariot here the Lord Krishna replies


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whence has come to thee this stain this dejection of spirit in the tsar of crisis it is unknown to Men of noble mind yield not to this unmanliness for it does not become thee cast off this Petty faint-heartedness and arise o oppressor of the foes and to give point to his words Krishna goes on thou grievst for those for whom thou should not grieve and yet thou speakest words about wisdom wise men do not grieve for the Dead nor for the living never was there a time when I was not nor thou nor these Lords of men


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nor will there ever be a time Hereafter when we shall cease to be as the soul passes in this body through childhood Youth and age even so is its taking of another body the sage is not perplexed by this heat and cold Pleasure and Pain come and go and do not last forever these learn to endure the man who is not troubled by these o chief of men who Remains the Same in pain and pleasure who is wise makes himself fit for eternal life of the non-existent there is no coming to be of the existent there is no ceasing to be


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the conclusion about these two has been perceived by the seers of Truth know thou that that by which all this is pervaded is indestructible of this immutable being no one can bring about the destruction it is said that these bodies of the Eternal embodied which is indestructible and incomprehensible come to an end therefore fight or Arjuna he who thinks that this slaves and he who thinks that this is slain both of them fail to perceive the truth this one neither slays nor is slain he is never born nor does he die at any


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time nor having come to be does he again cease to be he is unborn Eternal permanent and primeval he is not slain when the body is slain now it's obvious I think to those of you who have listened to any other of these programs what Shri Krishna is talking about here when I was talking to you about the upanishads I explained at several points the fundamental doctrine of the Hindus and that is that the innermost reality of man is not quite quite and what we who have been brought up in a Christian tradition called the soul


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we have an inherited teaching of course of an immortal and individual soul which is the root principle of every human being but in the Hindu doctrines the soul is not individual the soul is Supra individual or as they would say in their technical language the Atman the soul or self is really a better translation than so the Atman is identical with Brahman and Brahman is the name which they use for the Ultimate Reality which underlies this whole universe I don't want you to think of Brahman as


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a sort of vast blob of perfectly transparent Jello which penetrates the whole world I I think that's what many people imagine when they hear this kind of thing the whole point of the Brahman idea is missed when you form any image of it in your mind at all even Jello even empty space or boundless light Brahman is what we ourselves really are what this whole universe is fundamentally and actually there is no way of thinking about of imagining that for a very simple reason that as water cannot rise higher than


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its own level thought cannot think what is higher than thinking it cannot conceive the mind which thinks and still less the power which generates the mind our symbols for uh ideas about this supreme reality are vagueish and voidish not at all because that reality is vague and void but because thought and Imagination are annihilated in trying to grasp it the essential teaching which the Gita is trying to convey is that the real Center and soul the basic reality of you and I is not the superficial Consciousness


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which we ordinarily call myself what we are fundamentally is this Unthinkable source of life and existence named Brahman the expansive nor must we confuse this Unthinkable center of our lives with a sort of inner stuff a so-called blind Force for one doesn't derive life and Consciousness feeling and reason from Mere stuff as if the dead were able to give birth to the living you know this notion of blind force is the Ultimate Reality which has been popularized by a facile scientism is merely the result of the fact that


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when the human mind gets out of its depth it drowns and vomits up a lot of dead ideas and so SRI Krishna goes on he who knows that it is indestructible and eternal uncreated and unchanging how can such a person slay anyone or Arjuna or cause anyone to slay just as a person casts off worn out garments and puts on others that are new even so does the embodied Soul cast off worn out bodies and take on others that are new weapons do not cleave this self fire does not burn him Waters do not make him wet nor does the


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wind make him dry he is uncleivable he cannot be burned he can neither be wetted nor dried he is eternal or pervading unchanging and immovable he is the same forever he is said to be manifest unmanifest Unthinkable and unchanging therefore knowing him as such thou should not grieve even if thou thinkest that the self is perpetually born and perpetually dies even then o Mighty armed thou shouldsts not grieve for to the one that is born death is sudden and sudden is birth for the one that has died


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therefore for what is unavoidable thou shouldst not grieve perhaps that last passage needs a little bit of interpretation for to one that is born Death is certain is a statement of course which is obvious enough but not so obvious to us is and certain is birth for the one that has died I should try to explain this a little bit because it's a passage expressive of what is called in India the doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation if you will think for a moment of what you were before you were born


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you will come to the rather puzzling conclusion that you before you were born are impossible to think about before you were conceived by your father and mother in the womb you can't remember anything you don't even remember Darkness or even a blank your background your past history right at its beginning seems to be a state of complete annihilation of your ego of your personality and yet oddly enough here you are after you die you may presumably go again into a state which we can imagine only as complete annihilation


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of complete nothingness and if so you will won't you be in the same sort of condition as you were before you were born you came out of that state though should you be afraid to return to it this is perhaps a rather Elementary way of expressing the Hindu doctrine of rebirth but I don't want to give the impression that the Hindu Doctrine is as it is imagined to be by many people in the West a doctrine of the reappearance again and again in this life of an individual soul I think it is true to say that according


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to the strict doctrine of the vedanta there is not an individual soul which passes from Life To Life the one who transmigrates is precisely this Atman or Brahman and this is why we have to imagine the state before birth and after death as blank annihilation because thought is annihilated in trying to grasp the reality which lies deeper than thinking the finger that struggles to touch its own tip finds only the empty air and so Krishna goes on the dweller in the body of everyone or araduna is eternal and can never be


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slain therefore thou should not grieve for any creature further having regard for thine own Duty thou shouldsts not falter there exists no greater good for extra than a war enjoined by Duty I think it is just at this point that we puzzle about this book in relation to Mahatma Gandhi let me explain the passage that I've just read ikshatria is a member of one of the three great casts of Hindu Society those castes being respectively brahmana which is the Priestly caste the sacadodium the cast of Warriors and rulers


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vaisha the cast of merchants and they're roughly equivalent to the Lord's spiritual the Lord's temporal and the commons of medieval European Society and each cast has its proper Duty in life which in Sanskrit is svadharma and this is the phrase which Krishna uses here when he says having regard for thine own Duty for thine own svadharma self Dharma function is probably best translated into English as vocation the khatria is one who has a vocation to fight that's his job whereas a brahmana or more particularly


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one who has gone beyond cast altogether one who in India is called a sannyasin corresponding in the medieval West to the monks and Hermits those who have gone outside Society they do not have the vocation or the duty of fighting I think the clue to the problem of the Gita especially in relation to that great non-violent man Gandhi is this primarily arjuna's objection to taking part in war is a Sentimental one he is unwilling to fight in the battle because of his depressed emotions in regard to slaying his Kinsmen or we


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would say in regard to slaying one's fellow man if one would be a pacifist because one is merely squeamish and is the kind of person of whom one would say well he couldn't even hurt a fly then surely there is something phony about such pacifism because it is sentimental this does seem to be arjuna's objection and this is why Krishna says in effect your objection to slaying is a fear of slaying a squeamishness to slay and because of this you do not have a genuine objection to slaying


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if you refrain from taking part in battle because you were frightened of so doing or because you are sentimental you are not the kind of person who really has a right to abstain from Battle now why does he say this the reason is that to the Hindu mind one who abstains from what might be an evil action through fear has not really liberated himself from evil vishna would say that so long as our conduct is motivated by fear on the one hand or by desire on the other we are incapable of performing a truly


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moral action only those actions are truly moral which are unmotivated because if you are motivated to do good by fear your good May under other circumstances be evil this is the case with origina he wants to refrain from War for the same reason for which many other people would engage in war many people engage in war because they're afraid and not at all because they hate the world situation at the present time might be said to be a situation of mutual fear where the only reason why someone might


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start a war would be for fear of the other side starting it first after all we all know now that Modern Warfare is something in which neither side wins it is then fear more than anything else fear that the other fellow should send the Bombs Over first is what starts a war and thus you see fear is no deterrent to war at all a person who's reluctance to fight is based on fear or squeamishness does not then in krishna's view have the right to renounce it and you see here the view is one which


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would probably commend itself to a man like Gandhi because you could turn it round in the other way and say that a person who has to take the step of being a non-violent man a man of Peace a pacifist he would have his vocation and his duty to do in exactly the same way as the shatriya The Warrior he must not be non-violent on sentimental grounds but rather because he sees it as his father that is to say his vocation in life and so a moment later Krishna formulates the principle of action he says


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therefore arise o son of kunti Arjuna resolved on Battle treating a like Pleasure and Pain gain and loss Victory and defeat to action alone has thou a right never at all to its fruits let not the fruits of action be thy motive neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction fixed in yoga that is to say in Union with the principle with the self do thy Work O winner of wealth abandoning attachment with an even mind in success and failure for evenness of mind is called yoga one who has yoked his intelligence with


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the divine casts away even here both Good and Evil therefore strive for yoga yoga is skill in action the principle you see which he enunciates is to act without attachment to the fruits of action to do what you have to do without seeking either evil or good from it now this is simply another way of saying to act without motive of course from our point of view impossible that a human being should act without motive in our Western way of thinking about ethics we judge the quantity of inaction by the


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quality of the motive and the whole notion of an action without a motive at all seems to be extraordinarily foreign to us okay but as a matter of fact if there is no such thing as an action without motive there is no such thing as a free or moral action because so long as we have a motive our actions are not actions they're simply reactions surely it's obvious that our motives are determined by our conditioning by our environment our heredity our social structure they give us motives and these motives


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of the past determine the way in which we Act now if my motive for doing good is for the sake of some sort of a reward whether it's in the ancient sense of going to heaven or the modern sense of being a real person or a regular guy or whether it's fear in the ancient sense of going to hell or in the modern sense of being a cad I act motivatedly and therefore the things which I Do by way of moral action are not actually free foreign as we in the west have rather inconsistently but nevertheless rightly


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insisted a moral man must be a free man a free man must be an unmotivated man in Western Christianity it has always been thought that there is only one unmotivated being and this would be God in the words of the ancient hymn in the Catholic bravery God Is creation's Secret Force thyself unmoved all-motion source God then would be the one who would act without motive who would act spontaneously from himself without having to be pushed around the point you see of the Hindu teaching is that in reality each one of us is


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that unmoved one that unmotivated one the root and ground of our soul and mind is the same as the root and ground of this whole universe 4. one in whom this is fully realized in an unmotivated way in studying the philosophy of the Hindus we have to get used to the idea that it's really an illusion to suppose that every event is motivated determined or caused by the past what they call Karma or causation by the past is in fact Maya or unreality for in the Hindu philosophy the present of the universe or the


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Eternal now of the universe is not the consequence of its past but rather the past is always the consequence of the present of the Eternal now it Trails behind it like the wake of a ship it does not stand before it and push it and thus it is through the realization that he is that Eternal now not his past that Arjuna is able to act in a free way in an unmotivated way and thus go into battle not because he is moved to fight by Hate by squeamishness or fear but because he carries out his appointed place


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in a society in which it's his vocation to be a warrior we may think it regrettable that societies exist in which there is a vocation to be a warrior but let's not be sentimental in this respect also because every one of us is unable to live at all without killing something some of us would like to rule out altogether the killing of our fellow men but you see in the Hindu view of life there isn't this rigid distinction between man on the one hand and animals and plants on the other which exist for


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us in the West therefore there are times in the Hindu view when killing is an unavoidable condition of being alive and this is one of the problems which the Gita sets itself to solve I've read these selections from the translation of the bhagavad-gita that's spelled b-h-a-g-a-v-a-d hyphen g-i-t-a translated by Dr s radhakrishnan r-a-d-h-a k-r-i-s-h-n-a-n as you may know Dr Radha Krishnan is the vice president of India the translation is published by Harper and brothers of New York it is one of the best of the many


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translations that I know and is provided throughout with an excellent commentary [Music] thank you for tuning in today for this exceptional recording and this duet between ramdas and my father Alan Watts I hope you've enjoyed it this podcast is made in cooperation with the ramdas be here Now podcast Network you can find the original recording by Alan Watts at the ellenwoods.org site part of our classic Radio album which includes a dozen such talks recorded in the 50s most of these are actually from


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the being in the way series the one you heard today was from the earlier series The Great books of Asia but they're all great very enjoyable as are the many albums that you'll find at the Alan watts.org website thanks again for joining us [Music] foreign [Music]