The center of the Gita is 'Nishkamta'—desireless action stemming from self-knowledge. Whereas popular religion is all about the fulfillment of desire. We go to a supernatural power and beg him to grant our desires. That is popular religion. You can either have the Gita or the entirety of religion as practiced in common culture. They are totally incompatible.
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Acharya Prashant: We will be going into the relationship between the ego and knowledge. This will cover aspects of action, worship, imagination, prayer and much more. Verses 45 and 46 of Chapter 2 of Bhagavad Gita are revolutionary, unpalatable, unacceptable, indigestible to those who do not understand what spirituality or wisdom are all about. Whenever one talks of the Gita, rarely does it happen that one brings up these two verses.
In fact, It is quite a miracle that these two verses and a few more, we'll come to them later, have survived the tyranny and deceit of time. Otherwise what usually happens is that the part of a spiritual text that doesn't agree with or support the popular perceptions about religion, that part is somehow silently and deceitfully cut off, deleted, truncated from the scripture itself.
So, given how polemical these two verses are, I find it, indeed, a matter of fortune rather grace that these two verses have survived because these strike at the core of what I refer to as ’Lok Dharm.’ You can either have the Gita as represented by 2.45 and 2.46 or you can have the entirety of religion as it is practised by the common man in the common culture. These cannot go together.
