The combination of the three qualities of nature within each of us effects the way we do everything. They influence the kind of food we prefer, the way we worship, whether we choose to take on self-discipline and even how much we give to charity. With regard to food, for example, people with a pure and harmonious nature will tend to prefer foods that promote longevity, increase vitality and improve their health. Those foods tend to be mild, substantial and agreeable to the body. Foods that are bitter, sour, salty, spicy hot and heavily seasoned are preferred by people whose nature is dominated by restless energy. People who have a tendency toward laziness and ignorance will choose foods that are overcooked, nutritionally worthless, stale or even spoiled. These different types of food also exert their influence on the person who eats them. By choosing fresh and wholesome foods you can foster a healthy appetite and a cheerful mind.

While the scriptures recommend self-discipline and control of one’s senses, some people take this to an extreme and practice severe austerities. They senselessly torture their bodies and actually offend God by their efforts because He dwells within them. They become hypocrites who are motivated by ego and attachment to their achievements.

Chapter 17 begins: The Threefold Nature of Faith

Since everything has elements of the three qualities of nature and everyone’s thinking is influenced by a combination of those three elements within themselves, the expression of one’s faith in God reflects that threefold nature as well. The way we express our devotion is in agreement with the natural pattern of our inborn being. Those who are endowed with a primarily pure and harmonious nature will worship one form of God or another for the divine qualities embodied in that deity. Those who are ruled by restless dynamic energy will tend to worship God because he can grant them wealth and other benefits in life as well as fear Him because of His great power to punish the wicked. Those who are influenced by ignorance and a lack of spiritual zeal will think that their ancestors, spirits of the dead and the elements of nature are gods. However one worships, it will be reflected in their lives and influence their spiritual progress or lack thereof.

The threefold gate to hell

The gate that leads to self-destruction has three locks. The keys that open the gates to hell are lust, anger and greed. You should renounce them. Whoever is good and does good bypasses this gate of darkness and will continue on the path to ultimate freedom. Those who ignore this wisdom and follow the impulse of their selfish desires will not find true happiness nor real success in life. In order to know what to do and what to avoid in life, develop an intuitive understanding of the world’s scriptures and you will learn to live happily by doing what is inherently right for you and those around you.

The qualities of those who are deluded by the illusion of the world

Those who exhibit qualities that lead to spiritual decay are grandiose, arrogant, conceited, angry, and harsh, thus displaying their ignorance of reality. They don’t know the right path to take through life or when to refrain from acting at all. They lack truthfulness and believe that the world has no abiding truth in it. They say that there is no God or moral foundation and that life’s sole purpose is the pursuit of lust, power and greed. With such feeble thinking their distorted views destroy their very soul. They are cruel to others and ruin people’s lives, causing suffering and making enemies. Filled with insatiable desires, all their actions are motivated by selfishness and disrespect. They are burdened by one anxiety after another because they see this world as all there is, so they think that seeking physical pleasure is the only goal of life. Confident that the only way to happiness is to amass wealth, they seek their fortune through dishonest means. Tied to their earthly cares and concerns by countless fetters of selfish hopes and expectations, they stay engrossed in satisfying their desires and acquiring more wealth until the moment of death. Their vanity causes them to think that they are better than other people, so they take pride even in their charity. Blinded by pride and intoxicated by wealth, they become bound by their own greed and become trapped in their false thinking, deluded and completely out of touch with reality. They become malicious, filled with hatred and are easily angered. They sink to a deplorable state.

Characteristics of a spiritually inclined person

The characteristics of someone who lives a spiritual life are fearlessness, purity of intention, perseverance in acquiring discriminating wisdom through regular meditation no matter what happens, charity, control of one’s senses, self-sacrifice, study of the scriptures, self-discipline, straightforwardness, non-injury, truthfulness, free from anger and greed, peaceful, compassionate, gentle, modest, calm, forgiving, patient, free from hate and never proud or egotistic. These make up the spiritual wealth of a divinely inclined person.

God exists both within and beyond the created universe. In His highest form He is infinite and eternal, but part of that eternal being pervades and sustains everything created. All of creation has two aspects; that which seems to be subject to change and destruction and its true essence which is made up of the imperishable Holy Spirit. With just a fraction of God’s divine energy, He is present in the earth and all beings while bringing forth growth in all of the plants. God is present in everyone’s heart, having taken an eternal part of Him to acquire a body with its mind and senses. Our true inner soul-self, which is God, enters into this world as an individual soul and interacts through the mind and senses to manifest an ego and its personality. Thus, it becomes subject to the illusion that the created world expresses. Those who remain deluded do not see the living presence of God within themselves, but through intuitive insight gained in meditation He can be recognized. Understanding this, one is free to perform all the actions necessary in this world while knowing that they have already successfully fulfilled every required duty.

Those spiritual seekers who, with the sword of non-attachment, have cut away the roots that bind them to action after action in this world are no longer deluded by the illusion of creation and are thus liberated from pride and craving for honor, free from selfish longings and remain even-minded in the presence of all the pairs of opposites that generate pleasure and pain. They abide in their true soul-self and are immutably established in the supreme bliss of union with God.

How does someone go about rising above the influence of the three qualities of nature? How do they act? What are the signs that distinguish someone as having transcended these three qualities? When someone has become completely undisturbed by the three modes of nature’s influence, he or she will not want to feed in to their effect nor treat their presence as being evil. All experiences should be seen as the natural result of the interaction of the three characteristics of creation, so the enlightened person is not inwardly stirred by the things that agitate or elate the average person. Having abandoned the egoistic notion that one is responsible for the outcome of his or her actions, the wise person remains unconcerned that they have been presented with joy or sorrow, praise or blame, pleasant or unpleasant people, respect or insult and they remain firmly identified with their true soul-Self. Secure in his or her divine reflection of God’s image, those who have risen above this triad remain the same in attitude whether they are given a clod of earth, a stone or a piece of gold. They treat friends and enemies alike. They are operating in the midst of creation without ego involvement. Ultimately, then, the way to achieve this is by unswerving devotion to God because He alone is the immortal, indestructible source of eternal truth that brings unalloyed bliss.

Those whose minds stay focused primarily on harmony and goodness will find their spiritual evolution uplifted. Those who, like most everyone else, go through life seeking pleasure and material gain find their activities result in a combination of good and selfish outcomes so their spiritual evolution is largely mired in the middle. If one persists in being lazy and ignorant, he or she can lose ground spiritually. The spiritually evolved person can see that everyone’s actions are just a result of their perception of the three qualities of creation, so they begin to seek the wisdom of the One who is beyond the illusion and they accelerate their spiritual development until they eventually unite with God. Having transcended the influence of the three qualities of nature which bind people to their physical bodies, they become free from the cycle of birth, old age and death by fully realizing their spiritual immortality.

When these qualities exert their influence on your mind, your actions will reflect it and you will become bound by the results of those actions (your karma). Those who think that they will be reincarnated believe that these actions influence the kind of birth they receive in their next life on earth. If the mind is predominantly pure, the soul goes to the pure realm of the wise. When passionate energy prevails at the time of death, a person is reborn into a family which encourages activities that satisfy the senses. If one’s mind is permeated with darkness and decay at death, he or she will be reborn into a family which is deluded by the illusion of the world and thus are ignorant of the truth, so they teach their children the same. Therefore, the fruit of goodness begets harmony and happiness in one’s life. The fruit of actions driven by passionate energy is ultimately pain and suffering. The fruit of an action born of delusion is ignorance and will cause one to mistake what is unreal for reality.

Everyone and everything is a result of the interplay of the three qualities of nature. Sometimes or in some things, one attribute predominates over the other two, but all three are always present. When the light of wisdom shines above the lure of the senses, the quality of purity predominates. Whenever someone or something encourages the desire for greedy behavior or the restless compulsion to seek sensual pleasures, the quality of passionate energy is dominant. And when the quality of delusion is overshadowing the other two, a tendency toward laziness, neglect of responsibilities and ignorance will manifest itself.

How the three qualities of nature keep us bound to our bodies

Of these three constituents of nature, even the stainless quality of purity, harmony and goodness that brings enlightenment and health will bind you to your physical body by giving rise to happiness and knowledge which your mind becomes attached to getting and keeping. The quality of restlessness, passion and dynamic energy gives birth to desire and compulsive behavior which strongly binds the soul to the physical body by encouraging it to perform selfish actions. The quality of darkness, inertia and decay is born of ignorance about reality and will bind you to your body by creating delusion, carelessness, laziness and dullness. Good, bad or indifferent, they all lead to attachment to the illusion of the world in their own way.

The three qualities of everything in creation

According to the cosmology of the Bhagavad Gita, everything in creation is imbued with a combination of three qualities in varying amounts. The name for these qualities literally means “a strand within a rope” which gives a good analogy for what amounts to a primary constituent of everything in nature. The concept that creation has inherent in it these three attributes, or strands, is more ancient than any of the classical systems of philosophy and was already a widespread part of Indian culture by the time any of the oldest oral traditions were first put into writing. Because the names for these three qualities have been used in many contexts over thousands of years, their meaning is difficult to translate especially since they encompass both psychological as well as physiological influences. In simplified or general terms, we can use a few words to translate the concept that each of the qualities represents, then let the text of the Gita explain them further. First there is the quality of purity, harmony and goodness. Secondly, because nothing is inherently all good or all bad, there must be an element of darkness, inertia and decay. Then there is the force or amount of energy that is a part of the other two qualities. It is translated as restlessness, passion and dynamic energy. All three are the natural result of the universal cosmic energy becoming creation itself and each of them contributes to the illusion that binds us to and keeps us imprisoned in our physical bodies.

The path of descriminating wisdom (jnana yoga) is described

Those who have the ability to discriminate between reality and illusion can see the ultimate truth which is that God is behind all of creation, that He is equally present in all creatures and exists without end amidst all we see that perishes. That wise person can see that his soul is part of the imperishable Spirit and that all of one’s actions are really a result of the vibratory energy of your created body and mind. Your soul, the image of God within, is a silent witness. The full realization of that truth is accompanied by the conscious recognition, the actual experience beyond intellectual knowing, that the whole variety of creation is existent in God. When that happens, you will understand beyond doubt that your true soul-Self has none of the qualities of creation, that it is deathless and that it is not affected by anything done in this world. You will have reached the ultimate goal of life and will forever more be absolutely free from the bondage of nature’s hypnotizing spell of illusion.

Three Main Paths to God Realization + One

God is, therefore, present in your body and mind. In order to recognize this, i.e. realize this in a conscious way or actually behold this image of God within, some people follow the path of meditation, some develop the wisdom to discriminate between reality and the illusion that the world presents, and still others by living a life of selfless service to others. But even those who cannot follow one of those three main paths for whatever reason will still find God if they take to heart the words of a spiritual teacher and become moved to worship with true devotion, following the edicts of one of the world’s scriptures.

The ocean and the wave

The Gita once again tries to describe the indescribable essence of God. He is both existence and non-existence. He is knowledge itself, that which is to be known, and the goal of all learning. He is both within and without everything making Him simultaneously near and far, yet imperceptible because of his subtlety. God is unmanifested transcendent spirit beyond creation, without attributes that can be categorized. He is consciousness itself, therefore He is aware of all of the thoughts and perceptions of every human being. He is omnipresent to anyone who understands this, yet seemingly nowhere to be found by those who do not believe. God’s manifestation in creation is like a wave in the ocean. The wave is a part of the ocean, but it is not the ocean itself. It is made entirely of the ocean and yet is identifiable as separate from the rest of the ocean. It is from that wave of God that all the qualities of creation exhibit themselves.

Characteristics of the wise

The wise are humble and do not do anything to hurt others in any way. They are forgiving and virtuous. They serve their spiritual teachers with devotion. They maintain purity of both body and mind with steadfastness of conviction and self-control. Wise people are indifferent to what their senses are telling their minds because they understand that their bodies are connected to the painful cycle of birth, suffering, old age and death. They are, therefore, free from their ego identification with their bodies and see their oneness with all of humanity. They do not see their children, spouse or home as being their own and they remain constantly even-minded in the presence of either desirable or undesirable circumstances. They enjoy practicing meditation with devotion to God and naturally seek out quiet places while avoiding the company of worldly people. They persevere in their quest to know the image of God within because they recognize that it is the essence of their knowledge of the truth. To do otherwise is to pursue ignorance.

The "field" and its "knower"

In the philosophical school of thought which developed in India known as Sankhya (a parallel philosophy to classical Yoga), everything that we can know about the created universe is a combination of the following: the five great elements (earth, water, air, fire and ether); the ten senses (a combination of the five senses we know in the West and the five organs of perception) what is known as the “sense mind” (manas) that perceives them; discriminating intelligence; egoism; the five results of the sense mind (desire, hate, pleasure, pain and an aggregation of other diverse emotions); consciousness; and persistent will power.

Remain even-minded in the face of the dualities of the world

Those who want to follow the path of devotion should not disturb the world or be disturbed by the world. Do not be too excited by joy and be free from jealousy, fear and worry. Make your mind pure by being utterly detached from personal desires and worldly expectations. Remain fair to everyone and unconcerned by circumstances. Undertake nothing with ego, pride or vanity in mind. Do not rejoice at good fortune or loathe bad times so you can be free from grief and cravings. Transcend the whole concept of good and evil. Be tranquil in the presence of friend or foe, adoration or insult, heat or cold, pleasure or pain. Relinquish attachments and take refuge in silence. Keep your mind balanced no matter what the circumstances and remain content no matter what happens. Those who take this eternal wisdom to heart will become full of faith and devotion to seeking God as life’s highest goal.