Krishna, Arjuna, and Me: Ethical Dilemmas With the Bhagavad Gita
In the Bhagavad Gita, the warrior Arjuna asks the god Krishna how he can go and kill the enemy, which is compromised to a great extent of his own kin. Krishna then explains why it’s not only okay, but the right thing to do.

Rather than retelling it, I’ll assume the reader has some familiarity with the story.
While the Gita is certainly a profound text and contains many subtle truths, I’ve always had something of a problem with it, and I want to unpack my thoughts here. I’m not so much trying to reach a conclusion as explain the dilemma.
This came up as an issue for me recently while watching a video of Sadhguru speaking to an audience of Indian soldiers, in which he gave advice very similar to Krishna (although perhaps without Krishna’s bonafides).
Using the widest angle lens, I can see that what Krishna is saying is true: no one is really killing anyone, all is really a manifestation of the One, despite the appearance of separate selves. From this vantage point, whatever happens is fine, it’s all a divine play (lila) anyway.
Narrowing in a bit, it also makes sense that we all have our roles within the play of lila, and we should not shun those roles. Playing well — while realizing it’s all a game — is part of being ‘a spiritual being having a human experience’. For whatever reason, we’ve incarnated in this region of existence, with all of its grotesquities (life eating life, for example) and tragedy (impermanence, death, and so on). We need to embrace the realities of our material existence as part of our spiritual development, even if it’s hard to understand.
The problem comes in when we consider consciousness, and specifically human consciousness, as an evolutionary process. For Arjuna, the choice seems to be between playing his role and giving up entirely. He says that rather than fight, he will lie down and let his enemies kill him. What he doesn’t say — but what some of us might say now — is that the game he’s playing is pretty fucked up, and maybe we should find a better way to go about it.
The Gita is the product of a traditional era, where social stability was highly valued. While Hinduism assumes an ongoing evolution-and-devolution of the Cosmos on a grand scale, the societal constraints in place at the time (and to an extent, continuing) were hierarchical and rigid. Krishna even says he set up the caste system as a way to reflect the underlying psychological/spiritual gunas.
It was a society where kings ruled and obedience was paramount. Despite the evolutionary nature of the Cosmos writ large, it was steady-state at the level of society. Many of us no longer live in such a world, although given our post-truth reality we may occasionally hanker for simpler times when everyone was on the same page.
When Krishna (or Sadhguru) says suck it up, you’re a warrior, now go kill people, it doesn’t sound right to me. Because I live in a world that has been brought to the brink of extinction in so many ways, I am reluctant to participate in the systems that have wrought such horror. Those of us who grew up in the long shadow of the Second World War will recall that “I was only following orders” was a rather thin and ineffective excuse.
We are here to participate and the game has to be played: but it’s also true that the rules can change. We’re (hopefully) moving towards new perspectives that transcend the boundaries set up long ago. We can’t simply accept our roles, we have to create them — doing so is the task we’ve been assigned. It’s a kind of meta-task to create a meta-role, and it’s tough work — but I assume Krishna would say we shouldn’t shrink from it.