Bhagavad Gita As It Is (Pocket Edition) – Hindi

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re alive and conscious. Meanwhile, your body is gradually, imperceptibly changing. Still reading? Then you’re still alive and your body is still changing. How about now? You’re still living, still conscious, and your body has changed yet again. Notice a pattern?

Beyond Birth and Death addresses this pattern, and challenges the reader to rethink what “life” means. We tend to think “life” is a brief event occurring between birth and death. We celebrate a birth as “a coming into life” and mourn for the “dead.” But really, life is our permanent condition, and what we call “birth and death” are merely bodily changes.

This is Krishna’s beginning instruction in the Bhagavad-gita; the self is never born and never dies. We all exist forever, but we’re now heavily involved in a temporary existence in a temporary world. What to do? If we can begin to understand the difference between our self and our material covering, the joy and relief we experience can be life-changing.

Beyond Birth and Death was prepared from transcripts of lectures Srila Prabhupada gave in 1966 on the second and eighth chapters of the Bhagavad-gita, which discuss in detail the important differences between us (the immortal, spiritual self) and our temporary material outer coverings (bodies).

Since birth and death deal with the essence of our being, it is a subject of the utmost relevance to everyone.
Our reincarnation after death is a predetermined fact until we choose to break the bondage. First we must become open to the possibilities of life outside our empirical understanding.
Harvard biophysicist D. P. Dupey writes, ?We may lead ourselves down a blind alley by adhering dogmatically to the assumption that life can be explained entirely by what we know of the laws of nature. By remaining open to the ideas embodied in the Vedic tradition of India, modern scientists can see their own disciplines from a new perspective and further the aim of all scientific endeavor: the search for truth.?
Coming Back gives common examples from the Vedas that point to the truth of reincarnation and how we can make progress toward releasing ourselves from coming back.