The Gita or the Bhagavad Gita is a holy book from the great epic poem
Mahabharata, the largest epic.
The Bhagavad Gita is the story of the warrior-prince Arjuna and his mentor
and friend Krishna, a reincarnation of the God Vishnu. In the great battle
of Kurukshetra, Arjuna and Krishna ride out into the middle of the battlefield
and as Arjuna sees his friends, teachers and relatives fighting for both armies,
he is sad at the thought that he must kill these beloved people. He turns to
Krishna for advice.
Krishna counsels Arjuna on a wide range of topics, beginning with the tenet that
since souls are immortal, the deaths on the battlefield are just the shedding of the body,
which is not the soul. Krishna goes on to expound on many spiritual matters,
the paths to devotion, action, meditation and knowledge. Fundamentally, the Bhagavad Gita
proposes that true enlightenment comes from growing beyond identification with the ego,
the little self, and that one must identify with the truth of the immortal Self,
the soul, to achieve the ultimate divine consciousness.