u/appspalais

There’s an image in the Bhagavad Gita I can’t shake.

The body is the chariot. The senses are the horses, pulling in every direction, toward pleasure, away from pain, restless, never satisfied.

And the soul? It’s supposed to be the one holding the reins.

But here’s what Krishna was really saying beneath the poetry: in the ordinary human condition, the charioteer is not driving.

Krishna uses the chariot as a map of the human condition. The body is the vehicle. The senses are the horses, restless, pulling toward pleasure, away from pain, never still.

The mind has seized the reins.

And the soul, the only part of you that arrived whole and was never built by what happened to you, sits in the back of its own vehicle. Present and alive, carrying something vast but overruled.

https://preview.redd.it/2t8c8o63oh2h1.png?width=1672&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e8af8608b25fc4351c9e0c964b553bee6281d11

The Divine Energy in us, what some call soul or spirit, is supposed to be the one driving. But it isn't. The mind is.

Think about what that means practically.

Every decision you believe you’re making freely, how much of it is actually the mind running its old programming? The fears it accumulated years ago. The desires it formed before you were old enough to question them. The inherited beliefs you never chose but somehow became yours.

The soul didn’t make those. The mind did. And then the mind handed you the bill and called it your identity.

Most of us are being driven. The mind is loud, relentless, and fully in charge. And somewhere beneath all of it, the soul sits quiet. Waiting and unasked.

What allows this to happen?

The soul is not a small thing. It is a fragment of the Divine, the Creator’s own breath inside a human frame.

And yet the mind overrules it daily. How?

Ignorance. Not stupidity. The Sanskrit term is avidya: not-knowing.

We do not know what we actually are.

We have forgotten, or perhaps never been shown, that the current running through us is divine.

So we identify completely with the receiver and forget the signal entirely. We mistake the appliance for the source.

We think we are the mind, the personality, the accumulated story of who we’ve been told we are. And from that mistaken identity, the mind runs unchecked.

We inherit its fears without question. We chase its desires like they’re our own. We carry its wounds and never think to put them down.

The question Krishna leaves Arjuna with, and leaves us all with, is not theological.

It’s practical: who is actually holding the reins in your life?

There's an image in the Bhagavad Gita I can't shake.

The body is the chariot. The senses are the horses, pulling in every direction, toward pleasure, away from pain, restless, never satisfied.

And the soul? It's supposed to be the one holding the reins.

https://preview.redd.it/2urhf3bbkw1h1.png?width=1672&format=png&auto=webp&s=3d008a5fef97eed77417475983c6f30aa91c3ccd

But here's what Krishna was really saying beneath the poetry: in the ordinary human condition, the charioteer is not driving.

The mind has seized the reins.

And the soul, the only part of you that arrived whole and was never built by what happened to you, sits in the back of its own vehicle. Present and alive, carrying something vast but overruled.

Think about what that means practically.

Every decision you believe you're making freely, how much of it is actually the mind running its old programming? The fears it accumulated years ago. The desires it formed before you were old enough to question them. The inherited beliefs you never chose but somehow became yours.

The soul didn't make those. The mind did. And then the mind handed you the bill and called it your identity.

Most of us are being driven. The mind is loud, relentless, and fully in charge. And somewhere beneath all of it, the soul sits quiet. Waiting and unasked.

What allows this to happen?

The soul is not a small thing. It is a fragment of the Divine, the Creator's own breath inside a human frame.

And yet the mind overrules it daily. How?

Ignorance. Not stupidity. The Sanskrit term is avidya: not-knowing.

We do not know what we actually are.

We have forgotten, or perhaps never been shown, that the current running through us is divine.

So we identify completely with the receiver and forget the signal entirely. We mistake the appliance for the source.

We think we are the mind, the personality, the accumulated story of who we've been told we are. And from that mistaken identity, the mind runs unchecked.

We inherit its fears without question. We chase its desires like they're our own. We carry its wounds and never think to put them down.

The question Krishna leaves Arjuna with, and leaves us all with, is not theological.

It's practical: who is actually holding the reins in your life?

There are passages in religious texts where God apparently commands the destruction of entire cities. Kill everyone, but keep the virgin girls. Look it up, numbers 31:17-18

Did God actually say that, or did men just do what men have always done.

Invoking God is the perfect cover. Nobody questions or punishes when it's declared as a decree from the sky. The violence gets written into sacred text as obedience and the men who did it, walk away clean.

It didn't stop at Canaan... crusades, colonial conquest, genocide.

Today history is repeating itself with some world leaders starting wars and using the same pretext.

"God told us to" has been used to justify all the bloodshed that was witnessed before us by our ancestors and continuing till today. Nothing has changed. Only the scenarios and our costumes.

Pope Leo said it,

"God cannot be enlisted by darkness and that his name should not be used to justify violence."

He also quoted the Bible to criticize leaders who wage war, stating,

"Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood".

A God who put love in us and built conscience into us, would have ordered the keeping of young girls as war prizes?

Unbelievable right??

There is a difference between doubting God and doubting the men who claimed to speak for him.

Men just wanted what they wanted, took it and then spun a story that made them untouchable by invoking that they were obeying God's commands.

They ended up being pious and obedient in the eyes of followers.

We have just been reading human cruelty and calling it divine instruction all along.

That's the version most of us were handed, but I think something got lost in the translation.

This is my personal view.

When Jesus said that, I don't think he was saying "I am God, worship me."

I think he was describing something that happened inside him.

An Awakening.

Something he arrived at over time and his whole way of being had moved so close to God that at some point the distance just disappeared.

Not that he became God the way you become a doctor or a king.

More like he stopped being separate from him in any way that mattered.

Here's the simplest example I can think of.

The sun. When you look outside, you'll see the sunlight falling on everything. The road, the trees, your hands. Those are all rays from the same source. They're not the sun itself, but they come from nothing else.

Take the sun away and the rays are gone.

We're all like that. Rays of the sun. Jesus was a ray too, except he knew it completely.

Most of us walk around not knowing where our light comes from. He did.

So when he said "I and the Father are one," he wasn't drawing a line between himself and everyone else.

He was describing what he had realized, that there was never really a wall between him and God to begin with.

This makes me wonder what this means for the rest of us.

And if the world is expecting a return, how would we receive him now.

We were violent then. Faith back then wasn't a concept but it was everything. Identity, law, life and death all in one.

Now we carry two thousand years of arguments, broken institutions and everyone convinced that they have the right version. The people who missed him last time weren't the skeptics.

They were the ones who had spent their whole lives preparing for exactly this. They were so sure they knew what it would look like when it arrived.

That hasn't changed much.

That's the version most of us were handed, but I think something got lost in the translation.

This is my personal view.

When Jesus said that, I don't think he was saying "I am God, worship me."

I think he was describing something that happened inside him.

An Awakening.

Something he arrived at over time and his whole way of being had moved so close to God that at some point the distance just disappeared.

Not that he became God the way you become a doctor or a king.

More like he stopped being separate from him in any way that mattered.

Here's the simplest example I can think of.

The sun. When you look outside, you'll see the sunlight falling on everything. The road, the trees, your hands. Those are all rays from the same source. They're not the sun itself, but they come from nothing else.

Take the sun away and the rays are gone.

We're all like that. Rays of the sun. Jesus was a ray too, except he knew it completely.

Most of us walk around not knowing where our light comes from. He did.

So when he said "I and the Father are one," he wasn't drawing a line between himself and everyone else.

He was describing what he had realized, that there was never really a wall between him and God to begin with.

This makes me wonder what this means for the rest of us.

And if the world is expecting a return, how would we receive him now.

We were violent then. Faith back then wasn't a concept but it was everything. Identity, law, life and death all in one. Now we carry two thousand years of arguments, broken institutions and everyone convinced that they have the right version.

The people who missed him last time weren't the skeptics.

They were the ones who had spent their whole lives preparing for exactly this. They were so sure they knew what it would look like when it arrived.

That hasn't changed much.

EDITED: May 5th, 2026 : A reader raised this and I wanted to share my thoughts on it.

If Jesus and God were truly one, who exactly was he praying to in the Garden of Gethsemane? And how do we explain him saying not my will but thine. That sounds like two distinct beings with two different opinions. The cry from the cross, my God my God why have you forsaken me, only adds to that. Even within Jewish tradition the expected Messiah was never understood to be God himself. The Christian insistence on Monotheism while simultaneously holding a Trinity has always felt like a contradiction that never got resolved.

My thoughts on this are that they actually point toward the same thing I was trying to say rather than away from it. When Jesus prayed in the Garden, when he said "not my will but thine", when he cried out on the cross, I don't read that as two beings in conversation.

I read that as a man who had known what it felt like to have no distance between himself and God and now feeling that distance return under the weight of what he was going through. That's not incoherence. That's the most human thing in the entire story.

That cry on the cross, "My God my God why have you forsaken me", that's not a theological statement. That's a man in agony.

Anyone who has ever felt close to something greater and then felt it gone knows exactly what that sounds like. It doesn't disprove the union. It shows what losing it feels like from the inside.

On the Monotheism point, I agree. Three persons, one God has never fully held together as a logical proposition. That's not Jesus. That's the doctrine built around him centuries later. He never wrote a creed. He never called a council. The incoherence being pointed at belongs to the institution not the man. We've spent two thousand years arguing about the doctrine and barely touching what he actually said.

Now for those who say God doesn't exist, that's fine. Let's take that word completely off the table. However, science keeps bumping into something it can't fully name.

Here is what science has found.

The Higgs field is an invisible field that permeates the entire universe and gives matter its mass. Everywhere and in everything. It cannot be seen but its effects can be measured.

Quantum entanglement where two particles separated by billions of miles instantly affect each other the moment one is observed. No signal passes between them nor any physical connection, yet they respond to each other instantly across impossible distances.

Science has no clean explanation for what connects them.

This fine tuned universe where the mathematical constants that govern all of physics are so precisely calibrated that the slightest variation, even by a fraction of a decimal will result in zero existence. No stars, planets or life. The odds of that happening randomly are so astronomically small that even hardcore scientists quietly admit it gives them pause.

NASA confirmed that the universe has a measurable hum. A vibration. A frequency running through everything. Not silence or emptiness but a sound.

Pythagoras heard it and called it the music of the spheres, and Kepler mapped it mathematically. Christ called it the Holy Ghost. The Vedic tradition calls it Nada Brahma, or the sound in the universe.

Now strip the word God, religion and everything that makes people defensive.

What's left is something intelligent and precise, that was vast enough to build a universe and small enough to be inside every atom of it.

Random doesn't produce this and Chaos doesn't calibrate physics to the last decimal. Explosion doesn't create consciousness that can sit and question its own existence.

Something is behind all of this. Call it what you want. But it's there. And what is this force exactly.

It's not a man sitting on a throne making decisions. It's not a deity that can be bribed with prayer or appeased with ritual. It's something far beyond what any religion has ever been able to fully contain in words, buildings or books.

Think about what this intelligence actually means.

The Intelligence with the ability to conceive, design, organize and execute with precision and purpose. Look at what this force did.

It started with absolutely nothing, no raw materials or any existing template. From nothing, and then suddenly everything that which science calls the Big Bang.

The rules it set haven't shifted once.

Gravity works the same way on the other side of the universe as it does here.

The speed of light hasn't changed in fourteen billion years.

Everything it built connects to everything else. Pull one thread and the whole thing unravels. The smallest particle and the largest galaxy are part of the same system. Not loosely connected but deeply, precisely and unavoidably connected.

It didn't do any of this one thing at a time. All of it from the smallest quantum interaction to the largest cosmic structure happened together.

Then as if that wasn't enough, it placed inside one small species on one small planet in one ordinary galaxy the ability to become aware of all of this.

It made us, human beings.

We look up at the stars and ask where did we come from. We look inward and ask who am I. We feel love, compassion, conscience, awe.

No random process produces awe and no explosion generates the desire to understand itself.

That ability to look inward, to love, to choose right over wrong, it didn't just appear. Something put it there, that understood it mattered.

That is the intelligent creative force.

Not God in the religious sense that makes people defensive.

Not the bearded figure that atheists correctly point out makes no logical sense.

This is older than religion. Older than any name any human being ever gave it. Every tradition in every corner of the world has independently pointed in the same direction, using different words, rituals and stories.

That admission that we don't fully know what's running all of this is honestly the closest anyone has ever gotten to describing it accurately.

Finally, you don't have to look far for evidence of this. The most extraordinary example of intelligent design isn't in a lab or a telescope. It's you, me, all of us, our bodies running clockwork every single day. 

Something has always bothered me about the way this question gets asked.

We were given a conscience. The ability to choose. The capacity for love. All of us. Built in from the start. Yet every time things go wrong - wars, suffering, a child born with disease, the question that gets asked is where was God.

Not where were we. Not what did we do with what we were given. Where was God.

That's the assumption I want to sit with.

No offence meant to any religions' God for this analogy, but just imagine if God actually worked like a vending machine. Insert prayer, receive miracle, all problems solved. No miracle, machine's broken, God doesn't exist. Case closed.

But that was never the picture.

My position is simple. The intervention was never meant to come from outside. It was always placed inside us. And the question of where God was during every atrocity is actually the wrong question entirely.

Think about what the question is actually assuming. That God is sitting somewhere outside all of this, watching it like a TV show, finger hovering over an intervention button and just choosing not to press it.

Asking why God doesn't intervene is like asking why water doesn't intervene when you're drowning. The water is what everything is happening in. What if God isn't separate from any of this at all. Not some entity sitting far away watching it all unfold, more like the ground under everything. The thing everything is resting on without even realizing it.

The intervention was never going to come from outside. It was always in us from the start. The conscience. That thing that kicks in when you're about to do something you know is wrong. Human beings were given that. All of us. Every world leader, every person handed control over other people's lives have that same faculty. Same ability to discriminate and to choose right over wrong. Look at where the world is heading, the consequence of the collective choices.

So when a war starts, when cruelty wins, the question isn't where was God. The question is where were the people we handed the wheel to. What did they do with what they were given.

The obvious objection is the child born with disease. That one doesn't get answered by human choice and everyone knows it. If intervention was placed inside us — what did that child do wrong. That's the fair question.

Here's how I think about it and I hold all three of these loosely because honestly nobody has the full picture.

Think of existence like an online game played across multiple levels.

Each life is a new level. And we don't start fresh instead carry forward everything earned or owed in the levels before.

Good deeds stack up credit and that credit comes back around. Better health, better circumstances, the right door opening at the right time.

Bad deeds build debt notes which don't disappear. They follow you into the next level and get paid back through hardship, loss and difficult circumstances in the game of life.

So the child born with disease from this angle isn't random cruelty. It could be a soul arriving carrying debt notes from a previous level. Paying back something that was already on the books before this life even began.

Or it could be a soul that chose the harder level on purpose.

Similar to a gamer choosing a difficult play setting, because harder levels build something in us that the easy ones never can.

Then there are cases where the only honest answer is something else is at play that we just cannot see from inside the game.

Some of us are arguing against a "vending machine" type of God, the one that should be intervening, fixing things, answering every prayer, stopping every suffering on demand. And when that doesn't happen they doubt the existence.