Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2 Verse 5

Chapter 2, Verse 5

“Better to spend the rest of my life as a pauper,
Begging for food,
Than to kill these honored teachers.
If I kill them,
All my earthly pleasures
Will be smeared with blood.”

[Arjuna's enemy on the battlefield symbolically represents the enemy within, those old tapes that run in our minds, keeping us out of the moment, the eternal now.]

Paramahansa Yogananda:

"Arjuna's concerns and fears point out the persistent power of habitual attachments that assail the advancing student. Arjuna states his fear that (spiritual) victory would mean a desolate existence. Without his old habits, will he then, for the rest of his life, look upon all material things and sensory experiences as being permeated with evil vibrations ('smeared with blood')? The answer is no. Transgression lies only in the misuse of the powers and products of nature. The senses touched by the joy within will spiritualize the perceptions. The enjoyment of possessions will be unsullied by attachment. The inclinations, free of old habits, will seek fulfillment in the noblest achievements. But even though the student knows this as a promise in the scriptures and from the lips of the God-knowing, old attachments stubbornly persist, woven as they are into the very fiber of human nature."