What Happens When People Sit Down with the Bhagavad Gita?
By Akosua Yeboah
How a group of strangers became a Satsang (community of truth-seekers).
It often starts with a question: “Where do we find the Divine? Is it within us, or is it outside of us?” The question came up during a session at the Honest Weight Food Coop Sanskrit and Bhagavad Gita Study Group. And the remarkable thing was, nobody rushed to Answer.
That’s what happens when you sit with the Bhagavad Gita and listen to spoken Sanskrit. The Bhagavad Gita is one of humanity's oldest living scriptures.
What We’re Studying
The Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of the Divine,” is a 700-verse dialogue embedded in the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata. On a battlefield, on the morning of a great war, a warrior named Arjuna freezes. He can’t fight. He turns to his charioteer, who turns out to be Krishna, a manifestation of the Divine, and asks: What should I do?
What follows is one of the world’s great spiritual conversations. Over eighteen chapters, Krishna addresses not just Arjuna’s existential crisis but every human crisis: duty, fear, grief, the nature of the self, what happens after death, what it means to act rightly in a broken world. We started with Chapter Two and have since continued to Chapter Five. Each chapter reveals a more nuanced layer of Understanding.
How Our Group Works
We meet at the Honest Weight Food Coop, a fitting home for a text that is nothing if not cooperative in spirit. We read slowly. A few verses, then we discuss them. We look at multiple translations and commentaries. We explore the original Sanskrit, because the ancient language often reveals something that English can only approximate.
Take the word “atman”, often translated as “soul” or “self.” But the Gita uses it in a way that stretches its meaning: the self that is individual, but also the Self that is universal. Is there a difference? Is the atman inside you, or are you inside the atman?
Which brings us back to the question that was asked.
In the Gita, Krishna doesn’t give a neat answer and that’s the point. He says: “The Divine is the light of lights, beyond darkness. It is knowledge, the object of knowledge, and the goal of knowledge, dwelling in the heart of all.” The question itself may be based on a boundary that doesn’t really exist.
Many traditions wrestle with the same paradox. Christian mystics wrote of finding God at the “ground of the soul” (Meister Eckhart), and yet also encountering God in the face of the stranger. Jewish thought holds the divine spark (nitzotz) as present in every human being, and yet HaShem as utterly beyond. Buddhism shifts the question entirely: not where is the Divine, but what do we even mean by “within” and “without” when the self is fluid?
The Gita doesn’t resolve these tensions. It inhabits them. And so do we, during our sessions at the Coop.
What Happens When We Meet
What strikes me most about our group is the quality of attention and sincere curiosity. People come having wrestled with the text, having compared it to their own experience and their own tradition. They come with reverence for knowledge. A teacher brings the rigor of decades in a classroom. A practitioner of yoga brings body-knowledge that pure philosophy can’t quite reach. A librarian brings the discipline of investigation. A skeptic brings the best possible gift: honest doubt. The questions tend to stay with us between meetings.
The Bhagavad Gita does that. It’s not a book you read and finish. It’s more like a conversation partner and that partner speaks to us from antiquity. Sometimes it comforts us. Sometimes it unsettles us. Always, if you let it, it asks you to examine your own life more closely.
Join Us
The Honest Weight Food Coop Sanskrit and Bhagavad Gita Study Group meets on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of each month at 1 pm. No background in Sanskrit or Indian philosophy is needed only curiosity and a willingness to sit, not with the answers, but with the questions. After all, the best questions are the ones that won’t leave you alone.
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