You have the right to fulfill the duties that fall to you, but not to enjoy the fruits of your actions. Never believe yourself to be the cause of the consequences of action, and at no time seek to shirk your duty. Be firm in yoga. Do your duty without being bound by either success or failure. This equanimity is called yoga.
Free yourself from all material actions through devotional service, absorb yourself in it. “Misers” are those who yearn for the fruits of their actions. Devotional service can, in the present life, free those who engage in it from the consequences of action, good or bad. Therefore, strive to attain the art of action through yoga. Absorbed in devotional service, the wise man takes refuge in the Lord and, renouncing the fruits of his actions in this world, frees himself from the cycle of death and rebirth. He thus attains the state beyond suffering.
When your intelligence has penetrated the dense forest of illusion, everything you have heard, everything you might yet hear, will be indifferent to you. When your mind is no longer distracted by the flowery language of the Vedas, when it is completely absorbed in spiritual realization, then you will be in union with the Divine Being. When a man frees himself from the thousands of material desires created by his mind, when he is satisfied in his true self, it is because he is fully aware of his spiritual identity.
He who is no longer affected by the three forms of suffering here below, no longer intoxicated by the joys of life, who has abandoned attachment, fear, and anger, is considered a sage of firm mind. He who, free from all bonds, neither rejoices in happiness nor grieves over unhappiness, is firmly established in absolute knowledge. He who, like a tortoise that retracts its limbs deep into its shell, can detach the senses from their objects, possesses true knowledge. Even when separated from material pleasures, the embodied soul may still feel some desire for them. But let it taste a higher joy, and it will lose this desire, remaining in spiritual consciousness.
Strong and impetuous are the senses. They delight even the mind of the wise man who wishes to control them. He who restrains his senses and is absorbed in Me, demonstrates a sure intelligence. By contemplating the objects of the senses, man becomes attached, from which arises lust, and from lust, anger. Anger calls forth delusion, and delusion leads to the straying of memory. When memory strays, intelligence is lost, and man falls again into the ocean of material existence. Whoever controls his senses by observing the regulating principles of freedom, receives from the Lord his full mercy, and is thus freed from all attachment as well as from all aversion.
Let us renew the bond that unites us to God and enter into true life.
Whenever spirituality declines and irreligion rises anywhere in the universe, I descend in Person. I appear from age to age to deliver my devotees, annihilate the unbelievers, and reestablish the principles of spirituality.