The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran

╭ introduction
According to this analysis, the ego dies every night. Every
morning we pick up our desires where we left off: the same
person, yet a little different too. The Upanishads describe
dying as a very similar process. Consciousness is withdrawn
from the body into the senses, from the senses into the mind,
and finally consolidated in the ego; when the body is finally
wrenched away, the ego remains, a potent package of desires
and karma. And as our last waking thoughts shape our
dreams, the contents of the unconscious at the time of death
– the residue of all that we have thought and desired and lived
for in the past – determine the context of our next life. We
take a body again, the sages say, to come back to just the conditions
where our desires and karma can be fulfilled. The Selfrealized
person, however, has no karma to work out, no personal
desires; at the time of death he or she is absorbed into
the Lord:
But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all
work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with
single-hearted devotion, these I will swiftly rescue from the
fragment’s cycle of birth and death, for their consciousness
has entered into me. (12:6–7)
Such a person, the Upanishads stress, can actually shed
the body voluntarily when the hour of death arrives, by withdrawing
consciousness step by step in full awareness. Some of
the Gita’s most fascinating verses, for those who can interpret
them, are Krishna’s instructions on how to die (8:12–13).
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