Bhagavad Gita

Even though it may sound attractive or may be easier to understand that God is formless energy, as far as I'm concerned, it's not possible to exchange love with formless energy

It is an unfortunate aspect of my experience within the Hindu tradition that I have experienced prejudice towards the gay community. It has always made me quite uncomfortable.

The soul is the spiritual spark that creates consciousness. It can also be said that it is consciousness. Without the soul, the body is just a lifeless lump of matter that starts decaying.

By my rough estimation, we spend perhaps 50 percent or more of our waking hours in storytelling. Humans make stories but, in some sense, we are also made by our stories.

As a Hindu who espouses a non-dual worldview, I understand intellectually that God is on, in and of the field. But it wasn't until last Sunday, while watching the Super Bowl, that I was jolted out of my TV-induced zombie state to experience it.

It wasn't until I worked on a film about the Bhagavad Gita that I realized it's everywhere. It has influenced so many things I already knew about.

State prosecutors in the Siberian city of Tomsk are trying to ban the Russian translation of the Bhagavad Gita, an important Hindu scripture, because ...

Suffering doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It can help us grow and mature in ways we can't even imagine. It can give us realizations about life which otherwise would be difficult to acquire.

Watch Deepak talk about the primacy of personal identity in the universe.

We need not look far to find the Ravanas of our time... They are us -- at our weakest, basest, and grossest; people of faith, in our darkest moments of hypocrisy.

Our desire to love and be loved comes from God. For the most part, no one wants to be alone, at least not permanently. The thing everyone is chasing after is love. We all want to know that there are people out there that love us.

In this culture, I have grossly and subtly ingested the notion that I should not have any weakness -- so much so that when I came in touch with my natural human limitations, it was painfully embarrassing.

The root of the problem is that right from our childhood we've been driven and pushed to achieve material success and social status. We've almost completely ignored our spiritual needs.

Free speech, open dialogue and respect for those who differ ought to be prized values in any society, and when absent, travesties like the horrific reactions to "The Satanic Verses" occur.

The Hindu scriptures explain that we come into this world with a certain number of breaths and the countdown begins the moment we exit the womb. Every moment should be lived to prepare our consciousness for the final moment.

The system of varna insisted that the law of social life should not be cold and cruel competition, but harmony and co-operation. Society should not be a field of rivalry among individuals.

The Bhagavad Gita explains that we can either become liberated with the help of our mind or completely degrade our consciousness. Believe it or not, the choice is ours.

The ancient Vedic texts encourage us to live by dharmic principles and furthermore struggle through despairing contradictions to seek deeper answers on responsibility, integrity and duty.

Mahatma Gandhi articulated his sva-dharma ("my dharma") using a few key Sanskrit words that do not have an exact English equivalent. One of these is satya, his practice of truth.

When we share food in a spiritual setting, we imbue it with a meaning that draws us closer to our creator and closer to one another.

Recently, our local center of worship announced a Bhagavad Gita chanting contest. In light of a growing concern over my shrinking memorization capacity, I signed up immediately.

Because my spiritual reference point was more Hindu than Judeo-Christian, the Gospels seemed more like the Upanishads or the Bhagavad Gita than the churchy dogma I expected to find.