Written sometime between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D., the Bhagavad Gita consists of some 700 poetic verses of a conversation between the god Krishna and the warrior prince Arjuna, who was wrestling with a moral dilemma -- whether to wage war against his own family. In a larger context, Arjuna is on a quest for self-discovery and a route to the divine. The "Yoga Journal" states, "The Gita, like all truly great works of literature, can be read on many levels: metaphysical, moral, spiritual, and practical; hence its appeal."
The Self-Realization Fellowship, founded by guru Paramahansa Yogananda, who helped popularize yoga in the West, explains that yoga means the union of your consciousness, or soul, with "the inexhaustibly blissful Spirit." Yogananda believed that the highest path toward enlightenment, raja yoga, is contained in the words of Krishna in Bhagavad Gita. However, there are a number of other central branches of yoga that are supposed to lead you along the path toward enlightenment.
The word "yoga" is used over 100 times in the Bhagavad Gita, both as a noun and a verb, according to the Elephant Journal website. References to yoga are almost all-encompassing, which is one reason why the Bhagavad Gita is so intriguing, perplexing and mysterious. Yoga is described as a practice of not just philosophy but of action as well. It is connected to light and the eternal. It involves sacrifice in order to attain achievements of higher value, and it encourages connections with other people and outpourings of love. Yoga exalts the beauty and wonder of life. It leads toward an eternal and blissful state of connection with the universe as a whole.
One of the central themes in the Bhagavad Gita is the illusion of control. The book emphasizes the lack of control you have over your life and your fate. By trying your best and then letting go of the results, you relieve yourself of the stress of expectations or the pain of disappointing results. This is how the Bhagavad Gita resolves the dilemma between renouncing the world, a practice often associated with spiritual enlightenment, and being an actor in the world. Acknowledging your limited ability to determine the results of your actions enables you to proceed on a path toward higher consciousness.
The "Yoga Journal" notes that when Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb and a reader of the Bhagavad Gita in its original Sanskrit, observed the detonation of the first nuclear bomb, he famously quoted Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." It was a reference to the awesome force of the weapon and an acknowledgment of Oppenheimer's inability to control the consequences of his creation.