Bahagavad Gita has 18 chapters – and 700 Slokas. The first chapter describes the sorrow (Vishaada) of Arjuna. The rest of the 17 chapters describe the methods of acquiring self-knowledge that solves the problem of sorrow for the human beings.
Every human being is full and adequate - but being deluded by Maayaa, he thinks that he is limited and inadequate. This is the fundamental human problem. When we discover, that we are full and complete, the problem of grief gets resolved automatically. The Bhagavad Gita addresses this human problem of grief.
Gita says that grief is illegitimate – because it is caused by ignorance. Grief is not natural to you. Aananda, which is the opposite of grief, is natural to you. You are not your body-mind complex – you are the Aatma (Awareness) pervading the body-mind complex. There is no sorrow in Aatma and therefore, sorrow does not belong to you. If you mistake, for instance, a rope lying on the road in the darkness of the night for a snake, it is due to ignorance. There really is no snake there. If you see the snake in the rope, it is an illegitimate problem. Similarly, there is no sorrow in the Aatma. If you are sad, then, it certainly is an illegitimate problem.
You cannot get rid of sorrow by any amount of effort. Any amount of action (Karma) cannot rid you of your illegitimate problems; knowledge alone can get rid of illegitimate problems for you. The snake problem, for instance, which was an illegitimate problem, cannot be solved through action, such as beating it with a stick. It can only be solved through knowledge. The moment you focus a torch on the so called the snake, it would disappear - because there was no snake there in the first place; it was only a rope appearing as the snake all along. Similarly, when you discover that you are not the body-mind complex but you are the Aatma, the problem of sorrow would automatically go away. That is all you have to do to get rid of the problem of sorrow, which was bothering you all along.
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