God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita

Yogananda wrote that Sri Yukteswar had told him in his early years: "You perceive all the truth of the Bhagavad Gita as you have heard the dialogue of Krishna and Arjuna as revealed to Vyasa. Go and give that revealed truth with your interpretations: a new scripture will be born." Yogananda left India in 1920 for America and gave his first speech at the Congress of Religious Liberals. During this time he gave more than 150 talks and wrote articles. He also gave weekly classes in Boston that would consist of a half-hour exposition of the Bhagavad Gita, a half-hour exposition of the Gospels, and a half-hour discourse demonstrating their unity. A serialization of Yogananda's commentary on the Gita started in Self-Realization Fellowship’s magazine in 1932. His allegorical interpretation of the Gita allowed him to talk at length about a wide variety of spiritual and philosophical topics, and he generated so much material that the serialization was able to continue until nearly two decades after his death in 1952. According to Daya Mata, Yogananda began to revise and compile the material into a book in 1948, with the help of his editor, Tara Mata (Laurie Pratt). Daya Mata said that in addition to editing, their work included "addition of new inspirations — including many details of yoga's deeper philosophical concepts that he had not attempted to convey in earlier years to a general audience..." The labor involved was extensive. Yogananda finished the first draft in 1950, but the book was not completed until 1995, after Yogananda's disciple Mrinalini Mata took responsibility for the project. ==Reception==

Publishers Weekly's review of the two-volume work stated that Yogananda's commentary "penetrates to the heart of the Bhagavad Gita to reveal the deep spiritual and psychological truths lying at the heart of this great Hindu text." Indologist Georg Feuerstein in Yoga Journal wrote of the work, In The Bhagavad-Gita for the Modern Reader: History, Interpretations and Philosophy (2016), author M. V. Nadkarni notes that God Talks with Arjuna is significant in that unlike other explications of the Bhagavad Gita, which focused on karma yoga, jnana yoga, and bhakti yoga in relation to the Gita, Yogananda's work stresses the training of one's mind, or raja yoga. Nadkarni notes that Yogananda states that the real background of the Bhagavad Gita's message is not the ancient battle observed by Arjuna, but rather the continuous and universal conflict between opposing forces, particularly in the human mind. According to Yogananda, the Gita intends to guide people in resolving these conflicts in a way that helps them achieve spiritual goals and real and lasting happiness, by raising the level of consciousness to a higher plane of detachment to resolve them. This entails consciously maintaining calmness. The Bhagavad Gita, according to Yogananda, metaphorically lays out specific steps to achieve this. In the International Journal of Yoga Therapy, Richard C. Miller notes that Yogananda identifies the psychological components symbolized by various characters in the Bhagavad Gita such as Yuyudhana (divine devotion), Chekitana (spiritual memory), Drupada (dispassion), Kuntibhoja (right posture), Kashiraja (discriminative intelligence), Kripa (individual delusion), Bhishma (ego), Karna (attachment), and Ashvatthaman (desire); in addition, these characters also represent movements within the various bodies of consciousness, including the koshas, the chakras, the bodily energies, and the five elements, plus the different sensory functions and bodily activities. Miller writes, In a 2013 article on the Bhagavad Gita in the Journal of Conscious Evolution, Sadna Chopra wrote, ==Translations==

The original SRF book in English has two volumes (). Both volumes were translated into the following languages as of January 2019: • Spanish (). • German (). • Portuguese () • Thai (). • Hindi (). On 15 November 2017, the President of India, Ram Nath Kovind, accompanied by the Governor of Jharkhand, Draupadi Murmu and Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Raghubar Das, visited the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India's Ranchi Ashram in honor of the official release of the Hindi translation of Paramahansa Yogananda's book God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita. The book The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita is a 180-page abridgement of the two volumes, and is available in English, German, Italian, Thai, Portuguese and Spanish. == Awards ==

• Honored book as one of the three best books of 1995 in the religion category Benjamin Franklin Awards. • Winner Best Spiritual, Religious, New Age and Nonfiction book in Spanish like Portuguese 2011, 2016 such as 2020 International Latino Book Awards. ==See also==