The dialogue of Bhagavad Gita takes place in the depths of consciousness and Krishna is the spark of divinity that lies at the core of the human personality. “I am the Self in the heart of every creature, Arjuna, and the beginning, middle, and end of their existence” (10:20). “Truth is one,” says a famous verse of the Rig Veda; “people call it by various names.”
Brahman, the Godhead (my words: the state of consciousness or enlightenment); Atman, the divine core of personality; dharma, the law that expresses and maintains the unity of creation; karma, the web of cause and effect; samsara, the cycle of birth and death; moksha, the spiritual liberation that is life’s supreme goal. For these ancient sages, they were exploring the mind, testing each level of awareness by withdrawing consciousness to the level below. In this state (of enlightenment), the supreme climax of meditation, the seers discovered a core of consciousness beyond time and change. They called it simply Atman, the Self. In the climax of meditation, the sages discovered unity: the same indivisible reality without and within. It was advaita. “not two.”. Atman is Brahman: the Self in each person is not different from the Godhead.
Nor is it different from person to person. The Self is one, the same in every creature. In the unitive experience (state of consciousness/enlightenment), every trace of separateness disappears; life is a seamless whole. But the body cannot remain in this state for long. After a while, awareness of mind and body returns, and then the conventional world of multiplicity rushes in again with such vigor and vividness that the memory of unity, though stamped with reality, seems as distant as a dream. The unitive state has to be entered over and over until a person is established in it. But once established, even in the midst of ordinary life, one sees the One underlying the many, the Eternal beneath the ephemeral.
In the Gita, maya becomes the creative power of the Godhead, the primal creative energy that makes unity appear as the world of innumerable separate things with “name and form.” On this level of experience, separateness is real. Our mistake is in taking this for ultimate reality, like the dreamer thinking that nothing is real except his dream. When the mind is transcended, we enter a higher mode of knowing – nirvana, the fourth state of consciousness – in which duality disappears. The illusion is the sense of separateness. The “experience” itself is called samadhi. And the state attained is moksha or nirvana.
In this state we realize that we are not a physical creature but the Atman, the Self, and thus not separate from God. To such a person, the Gita says, death is no more traumatic than taking off an old coat (2:22). Life cannot threaten such a person; all it holds is the opportunity to love, to serve, and to give.
The word dharma means “that which supports,” Karma means something that is done. It can be translated as deed or action. The law of karma states that every event is both a cause and an effect. Thoughts breed actions of the same kind, as a seed can grow only into one particular kind of tree.