The Gita's first chapter ends with its hero sitting down. Arjuna, the finest archer of his age, puts down his bow in the middle of a battlefield and refuses to fight. Tradition still calls the chapter a yoga: Arjuna Viṣāda Yoga, the yoga of Arjuna's despair.
Read psychologically, the chapter is a case study in three parts: the problem Arjuna faces, the denial with which he meets it, and the symptoms that follow. Anyone who has faced a conflict they could not avoid and did not want to fight will recognise all three.
The problem: two fights, one question Arjuna's crisis contains two problems. One is a fight within: the struggle to know what is right. The other is a fight against his own people, the teachers, elders and cousins drawn up in the opposing army.
Most of us meet both at some point. An inner conflict over right and wrong is hard enough, and it is harder when doing right means opposing family or friends. Psychologists Kurt Lewin have called this an avoidance-avoidance conflict: every option repels, and the strongest pull is to leave the field altogether.
Beneath both fights lies one question: what is right? The usual answer is action according to dharma. Taken as a rulebook, that answer runs into a difficulty Then the question comes: Is Krishna wrong? If right means following the rules of dharma to the letter, Krishna's own conduct is hard to defend. In the war that follows, he arranges the half-truth that leads to Drona's death and signals the foul blow that brings down Duryodhana. Measured against the rulebook, Krishna is in the wrong. The answer here is that right action is action for the greater good, and that what serves the greater good changes with time and circumstance. Indian ethics has terms for both ideas. Deśa-kāla-pātra holds that right action depends on place, time and person, and āpad-dharma, the dharma of emergencies, has a whole section of the Mahabharata to itself. The two great avatars are often taken as two models of right action. Rama, maryādā puruṣottama, keeps within the bounds of dharma whatever it costs him. Krishna acts for the greater good, even when that means stepping outside the rules. The same test applies to both of Arjuna's fights. Whether the conflict is inside one person or between people whom they love, the question is what the situation requires, which the rule alone may not answer.- Not pure, but required
The hardest point in this reading is that some necessary actions are not pure. The Gita does not pretend otherwise. Near its end, Krishna says that all undertakings are clouded by some fault, as fire is by smoke (18.48). "The greater good" is also a dangerous phrase, and a great deal of harm has been done in its name. The Gita's safeguard is motive. Arjuna fears that killing his kin will bring sin upon him (1.36); Krishna answers that if he fights with equanimity, treating pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat alike, he will incur no sin (2.38). The fault, in other words, sits less in the act than in the personal stake. An action that is required, taken with open eyes and with nothing to gain for oneself, is as clean as human action gets.
Denial: the first step When a problem like this arrives, the first response is usually denial. The familiar "five stages of grief", though real grief rarely moves in neat stages. Denial takes a different form depending on where the fight is. When the fight is outside, we invoke relationships: he is family, she is an old friend. So we avoid the confrontation, refuse to accept the situation and keep postponing the fight. Arjuna does exactly this. "How shall I fight Bhishma and Drona with arrows," he asks, "when they are worthy of my worship?" (2.4). Better, he says, to live on alms than to kill such teachers (2.5). When the fight is within, denial looks different. We find a reason outside ourselves to blame, or we cast ourselves as the victim. Arjuna does both: he blames the Kauravas' greed (1.38), and then pictures them killing him, unarmed and unresisting, an ending he calls better for him (1.46). Knowing, and refusing to know What makes Arjuna's denial instructive is that he knows the truth. In the same speech he calls his opponents ātatāyinaḥ (1.36), the law books' term for violent aggressors such as arsonists and poisoners. He knows the Kauravas once poisoned Bhima, tried to burn the brothers alive, cheated them at dice and humiliated Draupadi in open court. And still he argues that fighting them would be the sin. That is denial in its plainest form: knowledge held at arm's length. Psychology has long counted denial among the mind's defences against anxiety, and Arjuna's is an eloquent one: he speaks at length of family traditions collapsing and ancestors left without offerings (1.40–44). Krishna answers the feeling under the arguments. He calls it petty weakness of heart (2.3). When Arjuna keeps arguing, Krishna points to the gap between his words and his state: "You grieve for those who should not be grieved for, and yet you speak words of wisdom" (2.11).
Why awakening has to take your hand
In a state like this, reasoning alone rarely gets through, and someone has to take you by the hand. In this reading Krishna is awakening, and his task is to show Arjuna what the fight is for. Arjuna has said he wants neither victory nor kingdom nor pleasures (1.32). He would not kill these men, he says, even for the three worlds, let alone for the earth (1.35). He is right that no piece of land is worth this much grief. Read inwardly, the field is the self, and the prize is peace of mind. Avoiding the fight only postpones the war. Modern anxiety research describes the same cycle: avoidance brings relief in the short term but keeps fear alive, which is why facing feared situations, known as exposure, sits at the centre of cognitive-behavioural treatment for anxiety. When the mind refuses a conflict, the body carries it.
Symptoms and condition: the signs of panic Arjuna's body reports what his arguments deny. सीदन्ति मम गात्राणि मुखं च परिशुष्यति । वेपथुश्च शरीरे मे रोमहर्षश्च जायते ॥ १.२९ ॥ गाण्डीवं स्रंसते हस्तात्त्वक्चैव परिदह्यते । न च शक्नोम्यवस्थातुं भ्रमतीव च मे मनः ॥ १.३० ॥ sīdanti mama gātrāṇi mukhaṁ ca pariśuṣyati vepathuś ca śarīre me romaharṣaś ca jāyate gāṇḍīvaṁ sraṁsate hastāt tvak caiva paridahyate na ca śaknomy avasthātuṁ bhramatīva ca me manaḥ My limbs give way and my mouth is parched. My body trembles and my hair stands on end. Gandiva slips from my hand, my skin burns all over, I cannot stand steady, and my mind seems to reel. Read today, the passage describes something close to a panic attack: a reeling, foggy mind, trembling, and legs that will not hold him. Trembling, unsteadiness and sudden heat all appear on the standard clinical list of panic-attack symptoms. The chapter ends with Arjuna sunk down on the seat of his chariot, bow and arrows cast aside, his mind overwhelmed by grief (1.47). In this reading, panic is the typical condition of denial. The body raises the alarm about a conflict the mind refuses to face, and the mind answers with arguments for avoiding it. The panic and the denial are two sides of one refusal. Arjuna's panic is of a particular kind: it comes from a truth he already knows and will not accept.
Why despair is a yoga Problem, denial, panic: on its own, the sequence reads like the case history of a collapse. Yet the chapter's title calls despair a yoga, a discipline and a way in. Each part of the sequence carries information. The problem tells Arjuna that something real is at stake. The denial shows where he is unwilling to look, and the symptoms show that his body already knows what his mind is avoiding. The breakdown is also what finally makes Arjuna ask for help. "My mind is confused about dharma," he admits. "I am your student; teach me" (2.7). The teaching begins where denial ends, and the question this chapter raised, what is right, can at last be asked honestly.