II: 5

[Krishna Jaya]

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.  He is expressing symbolically 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 the 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."

 

Daniel Clark (a friend who got in on the ground floor of the Hare Krishna movement and who at one time was in charge of the Washington D.C. Krishna temple):

 

“For the peace-loving, it's easier to make this into a metaphor than to accept that Krishna is really ordering Arjuna to go ahead and kill his friends, relatives, and indeed his guru (Drona). I had to struggle with this for years, because I feel the Gita is both metaphorical and historical. That is, it describes an actual incident that has mythic depth. So I can't avoid the militarism, the violence, of the Gita. I only came to a conclusion satisfying to myself when I decided that even though Krishna is beyond the material world, when he advents himself, he does so in terms of the society of that time and place. In the India of 3000 BC (the traditional date), warfare was a well-respected political policy, with a moral and even spiritual dimension. In the chapters of the Mahabharata leading up to the Gita, we find that Krishna arduously pushed for peace. But when that failed, he was for war. In terms of Vedic culture, that was not immoral. But of course we do not live in a Vedic culture. We don't have to affirm Krishna's militarism. Personally, as a 21st Century American, I do not. But the rest of what Krishna says in the Gita has been ‘the bedrock of my faith’ for decades. In other words, I winnow out the social, cultural, economic, political, and ritualistic portions of the Gita and get my spiritual nourishment from the rest. I agree that they can be understood metaphorically. But I tend to read the Gita as a historical account - it makes for a more exciting story!”

 

[I also feel that both aspects are to be honored...that the evolving Dharma has both a collective component (outer battle) and an individual one (inner battle). As you point out, there are those who feel and have felt (Mahatma Gandhi for instance) that the battle on the field of Kurukshetra some five thousand years ago is to be understood only as a metaphor. Regardless, of more significance is Krishna's presence in the consciousness of his devotees and the transformative quality of that presence as it inspires them, and through them the collective, to further the evolving Dharma.]

[Krishna Jaya]

I knew my astrologer's Sun sign is Taurus (in Western system) which means he has a birthday coming up so I googled him to see if I could find out the exact date as I want to give him a birthday present. In the course of my search, not only did I find out the exact date, but I also came across a bio of him which included his favorite book. I knew the author to be a deep thinker and the title piqued my interest so I ordered a copy. Today I came across a passage which speaks directly to the above entry...

"Our world view is not simply the way we look at the world. It reaches inward to constitute our innermost being, and outward to constitute the world. It mirrors but also reinforces and even forges the structures, armorings, and possibilities of our interior life. It deeply configures our psychic and somatic experiences, the patterns of our sensing, knowing, and interacting with the world. No less potently, our world view – our beliefs and theories, our maps, our metaphors, our myths, our interpretive assumptions – constellate our outer reality, shaping and working the world’s malleable potentials in a thousand ways of subtly reciprocal interaction.

Perhaps the most concise way of defining the modern world view is to focus on that which distinguishes it from virtually all other world views. Speaking very generally, what sets the modern mind apart is its fundamental tendency to assert and experience a radical separation between subject and object, a distinct division between the human self and the encompassing world. This perspective can be contrasted with what has come to be called the primal world view, characteristic of traditional indigenous cultures. The primal mind not only does not maintain this decisive division, but it does not recognize it, whereas the modern mind not only maintains it but is essentially constituted by it.

Primal experience takes place within a world soul, an Anima Mundi, a living matrix. The workings of the Anima Mundi, in all its flux and diversity, are articulated through a language that is mythic and numinous. The particulars of the empirical world are all endowed with symbolic, archetypal significance, and that significance flows between inner and outer, between self and world. In this relatively undifferentiated state of consciousness, humans perceive themselves as directly participating in and communicating with the interior life of the natural world and the cosmos, emotionally and mystically. This Participation Mystique involves a complex sense of direct, inner participation of humans with divine powers by virtue of their immanent and transformative presence."

Richard Tarnas, "Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View," pp. 16, 17