The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran

╭ introduction
thought. We ourselves are responsible for what happens to
us, whether or not we can understand how. It follows that we
can change what happens to us by changing ourselves; we can
take our destiny into our own hands.
The physical side of karma, however, only touches the surface
of life. To get an inkling of how karma really works, we
have to consider the mind.
Everything we do produces karma in the mind. In fact, it
is in the mind rather than the world that karma’s seeds are
planted. Aptly, Indian philosophy compares a thought to a
seed: very tiny, but it can grow into a huge, deep-rooted, widespreading
tree. I have seen places where a seed in a crack of a
pavement grew into a tree that tore up the sidewalk. It is difficult
to remove such a tree, and terribly difficult to undo the
effects of a lifetime of negative thinking, which can extend
into many other people’s lives. But it can be done, and the
purpose of the Gita is to show how.
Karma is sometimes considered punitive, a matter of getting
one’s just desserts. This is accurate enough, but it is much
more illuminating to consider karma an educative force
whose purpose is to teach the individual to act in harmony
with dharma – not to pursue selfish interests at the expense
of others, but to contribute to life and consider the welfare of
the whole. In this sense life is like a school; one can learn, one
can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind. As long as a
debt of karma remains, however, a person has to keep coming
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