The Gita Dham Explained in Detail: Part A

A)   A General background note:

It is very unwise to ignore the power of religious faith in bringing social and economic transformation, where people are still rooted in religion. The Gita Dham is an attempt to harness this power to create a centre for total development in every Panchayat (A Panchayat is the lowest administrative unit of self-governance in India, consisting of a few villages). The Gita Dham Centre will have three main structures in the first phase as mentioned above. These Centres will translate into reality the age-old Indian idea of a life in which the four main life-values of money, religion-and-human duties, worldly desire and spiritual liberation (arth-dharm-kaam-moksha) are evenly balanced. The Gita Dham will not just have a spiritual mandate: it will be equally responsible for bringing an economic transformation in the lives of all people coming to it; and for taking care of all their basic educational needs for their total development. As the name might suggest, these may be centres dear to a particular community - the majority community - in India. Even if this were the case, there would be no need to be apologetic about it, since transformation of the lives of eighty per cent of the people of India will itself be a great achievement. However, these centres will do more than what first meets the eyes: they will be open to all communities who want to avail of the benefits of educational and employment programs being run at the centre, irrespective of whether or not they wish to fully avail of the spiritual benefits at the Centre.  In other words, these centres are not meant to transform the lives of only one section of the society. The Gita treats all humans – in fact all living beings - equally as incarnations of God and fractions of the divinity. And this is the philosophy that is going to be preached and practiced at the Gita-Dham Centres everywhere. The Gita Dham will seek to bring out this divinity in each human being in its vicinity. The Gita Dham has been conceived based on the assumption that without creating good and integral human beings, the goal of poverty alleviation and a harmonious and peaceful society may be very difficult to achieve.