How does Bhagavad Gita helps to come out miseries and improve life better?

Bhagavad Gita helps us first by giving us information.

Based on that information we get a different way of looking at things.

Then it helps us by giving us a process to realise the information presented.

Happiness and distress are relative experiences. If someone throws a bucket of water over me for no reason I will be annoyed. If someone throws a bucket of water over me when my clothes are on fire I will be pleased.

How should I answer “Are you happy having a bucket of water thrown over you?”

The answer is, “It depends.”

What is miserable and what is an improvement in life nearly always depends on “it depends….” What they depend on is how we view things at that particular moment.

Bhagavad Gita gives us the view that miseries are not that significant in the long run. They have come upon us due to our past activities, they are temporary and at the most will last for only one life-time, and we are factually eternal. The greatest misery is perhaps the prospect that we or our loved ones will die. Krishna tells us that death is only a change of body, it’s not that everything is finished forever.

This life is just one out of billions that we have had. Billions and billions of different parents, friends, children, triumphs and tragedies, birth after birth, and this is just one more episode in the ongoing season of 2020. If we think it’s all we’ll get then it’s precious as hell and nothing could be more important. Anything that is unpleasant is a real problem. The daily struggle is to squeeze some happiness out of whatever comes to us in whatever way we can, and feel that we are making our life better.

If we think it’s a rare chance to get freed from the cycle of birth and death and go to a spiritual world where there is no anxiety (what to speak of misery), then it’s still as important as hell, but we are less bothered by the miseries that come and go because we are focused on where we are going and what we are doing to get there.

If we were to get an unexpected notification late in the day that our application for a post we had dreamed about for years had been accepted and we should be present for confirmation at 09.00 hrs the next morning, then, if we were a few hundred miles away and all that was available was an unreserved ticket on a crowded train, we would grab it and do everything to make sure we would be where we needed to be on time the next day.

The cramp conditions on the train, the lack of sleep and decent meals, the bugs in the seat would all be there, but our mind would be on what this acceptance means, and how everything would be different from now on. We would know that if we got to our destination on time, this train ride would be a thing of the past and nothing would remain of the discomfort. We may even feel how lucky we were that this train is running and we got to it in time.

Understanding Bhagavad Gita doesn’t remove what we call miseries, but it gives us information to view things differently. Krishna is the supreme proprietor, controller, beneficiary and enjoyer, and He is everyone’s well-wisher. We are His eternal fragmental parts. Devotional service to Krishna liberates us from the cycle of birth and death which is always accompanied by misery.

That’s the information part.

The process of devotional service is joyfully performed, it gives direct perception of the knowledge in BG, and insulates us from the miseries of the material world.

That’s the practical application of the knowledge.

Together they “help to come out miseries and improve life better.”