The Examined Life : Artwork 6

The sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita contains one of the most psychologically precise passages in world literature: the instruction to take the self as one's own ally rather than one's own enemy. Krishna is speaking to Arjuna about the practice of yoga — not yoga as physical posture but yoga as the discipline of self-knowledge — and makes the argument that the self is capable of being raised by itself or degraded by itself, depending on the quality of attention it brings to its own nature. This piece takes only the first half of that verse: the soul is the friend of the soul. It is the harder claim. Most people have some relationship with self-criticism; what the Gita proposes is a relationship of genuine friendship with oneself — curious, honest, patient, not demanding perfection but not colluding with avoidance either. The tradition of self-knowledge runs through every collection in this range — from Descartes' cogito to the Upanishadic tat tvam asi — and this piece is its most intimate expression: not consciousness at the scale of the cosmos, but the soul in simple, everyday relationship with itself.