The Death of Duryodhana

Duryodhana said, "O Krishna, if I have been defeated, it is only by your cunning deceit and your violation of the rules to which we all agreed before we joined in battle."

Krishna said, "I was no party to your rules, nor present among you to ratify them."

Duryodhana said, "Be honest, at least; you knew the rules and urged the Pandava to violate them."

Krishna said, "This is true."

Duryodhana howled in derision. Krishna silenced him, blazing like the sun before the dying prince, saying, "Do not confuse the laws and rules made between men for proper conduct with My conduct or the conduct I enjoin, nor yet engage in action on My behalf, except that I have explicitly commanded it."

His celestial throne

Who can ever imagine
     the music we will hear
          around His celestial throne?

Who cannot wish for death
     having heard in life
          only a single note?

Before the spoken word, awareness had no self-awareness. Creation did not know itself.

As we look back upon the ancients and wonder at their barbarous customs, so too will our descendants look back upon us and wonder how it is that we choose our representatives for their purely political skills. They will consider inconceivable that anyone with sense would fail to choose, as the people’s representatives, any but poets, philosophers, scientists, and artists. Yet we appoint instead liars and charlatans, the most debased and ignorant, depraved and fanatical, who delight in power for the sake of power, and serve for the sake of serving themselves. 

How ridiculous we will surely seem.

Be detached from success or failure

If God wills that you should be successful, you will enjoy success. If He wills that you should fail, you will fail. His will likewise transcends all actions that may ensure or prevent success, or may assure or avert failure. His will is not contingent on your intention, nor is it bound by your action. Nor is the desired outcome contingent on your innocence or your guilt.

Yet if success is based upon some expectation, and you anticipate this success, and engage in no action, then you have abandoned your duty. You engage in action, good or evil; His will may be to require good or evil. Thus, if you act appropriately and perform your duty, the action in which you engage may take the form of success or failure—success because you have merited it, or failure when your endeavor is innocent but misguided.

Understanding this, it is possible to glimpse some understanding of the command to be detached from success or failure, but likewise always to engage in action, sacrificing the outcome always to His will.
Always He wills it but, as the people of Nineveh understood, our actions aren’t without consequence, and He is aware of our intentions, our actions, our guilt, and our innocence.

Nothing whatsoever keeps Him from any other thing.

He Looks Upon a Spark

In terms of sin and redemption, sin is absolutely acknowledged. Yet punishment for sin doesn't take on a necessarily eternal form, but a definitive time-limited one in which punishment is in proportion to the sin. That punishment may be hellish or rebirth in the life to come in a lowly form.

Hinduism putatively solves the problem of equitable and proportional punishment for sin, and that even after death there is the possibility of God's redemptive grace. One may possess good karma or bad karma and enjoy heavenly peace or hellish agony. But these states both have their ending in time. And when that karma is burned away? Here mysticism begins, but only insofar as the mystic speaks figuratively of mysteries otherwise inconceivable, even to the mystic himself. He looks upon a spark, and speaks of the Sun.

The forests hint the Tree of Life,

And the waters hint His fathomless love,

And the mountains hint the height of His majesty,

His creation is His sign, having made nothing without meaning.