Ep. 204: The Bhagavad Gita’s Hindu Theology (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So we've kind of hinted at, we've walked around a little bit of this interesting aspect of this that I did not expect, this sort of beyond good and evil aspect that, you know, you have something like that in Buddhism, in that you are escaping the cycle of rebirths and things. But part of what seems to go with that, the move toward atheism, away from a traditional morality maybe, is that I think the fact that Schopenhauer took that up so literally is maybe what one of the things that made Nietzsche come up with this idea of beyond good and evil.

But you have, in this text, you still have a very strong there's positive karma and there's negative karma. There's the goodness guna and there's the dark inertia guna and the passion one that's in between. You know, it sounds very much like Plato's distinction between the intellect, which is the best and the spirit, which is not as good, and the desires, the belly, which are with the animals. You're barely anything better than an animal when you let that lead you around. There's a definite just built into human nature. But with this, the Gita acknowledges that.

But ultimately we want to transcend that, that even getting good karma is ultimately bad. Because getting any karma at all is this accretion that then will lead to rebirth again. It might be in a heaven, it might be if you have a lot of good karma, but that's still you'd rather have your actions be entirely unattached, such that they're not accruing any karma, positive or negative, at all.

1:33 Wes: Can I just provide a little more support to your idea of the beyond good and evil? So it begins with sort of being beyond being and not being. So from the very beginning in chapter two, we get the presence that pervades the universe is imperishable, unchanging, beyond both is and is not. And then we find out later on that the famous passage quoted by OPPENHEIMER in chapter 11, it's 1131, 34, I am death, shatterer of worlds, annihilating all things. With or without you, these warriors and their facing armies will die. Therefore, stand up, win glory, conquer the enemy, rule already I have struck them down. You are just my instrument, Arjuna.

2:21 Sean: Well, it's a really interesting just war philosophy, right? Well, don't worry that you like about killing them, because I've already killed not only them, but everyone there are within the epic, there is sort of this mapping to a more conventional sort of just war theory, where the leader of the good guys begins whittling down his demands for the restored half of the kingdom until he's asking for only five villages and they're still turned down, and then they go to war. And there is, I think, even within the tension between the verses that you cited, between this cosmic sense of Krishna's role as this fundamental concept that will take all things in, and then this very earthly exhortation to win glory, which seems in almost direct contravention of nearly everything else that's inside the Gita, where the whole point is not to win glory.

He shouldn't care about the glory. His point is to become removed from the fruit of the war that he is about to fight. So I think that that's really interesting. Even amidst the most celestial moment, there's a very manifest implication and exhortation.

3:35 Mark: Yeah, so at times he does emphasize how he's positive and negative, but he also Chapters seven and eight. I saw a definite teleology there where he is identifying himself as the excellence in each thing. So if you are acting according to your nature, you are finding the piece of Krishna in yourself. So everything is Krishna, but some things are more Krishna than others, put it that way.

4:10 Dylan: Well, yeah, I mean, in chapter seven, right. He has these different levels of people, you know, says the lowest of men. Deluded sinners fail to take refuge in me. Their knowledge is ruined by Maya, their nature demonic. Four types of virtuous men worship me, the tormented, the knowledge seeker, the wealth seeker, and the wise. Of these, the Wise one excels being ever disciplined in yoga and of singular devotion. For I'm exceedingly dear to the wise and he is in me. All these men are indeed noble. But I regard the wise to be my very self, for he is self disciplined in yoga. He's established in me alone in his highest way. So that to me means that, yeah, there may be some acknowledgement that the different versions of souls are part of Krishna, but there's still this normative hierarchy.

4:59 Mark: Right. And I actually, yeah, I was thinking even more generally about nature. So this is in chapter seven, like starting verse eight. I am the taste in water. I am the light in the moon and the sun. I am the syllable om in the Vedas, the sound in space and manliness in men. I am the pure fragrance in earth, the radiance in fire. I am the life in all beings. And the austerity and ascetics know me to be the eternal seed of all beings. I am the intellect of intelligent men, also the splendor of the splendid heroes. So you could just say I'm the best in everything, that he's just self glorifying. But I was reading that as more specifically teleological, that when something pursues its proper end, then it's going toward the lighter, the more Krishna transparent side of it.

5:43 Dylan: Yeah, but there's this question there that if there are things that are by their nature putrid and so forth, is that part of Krishna? And is that the activity of Krishna or not?

5:56 Wes: He says somewhere that it is, I think.

5:59 Mark: But is it? I like the comparison to Platonic forms that what makes fire hot? What makes it fire is kind of how much Krishna is participating in it. If we want to just really import Plato's psychology. So we had the exact same question, like, what about filth? What is the filthiest? Filth has the most Krishna in it. Does that make it the. Were you saying? Yes, Wes, you think so?

6:23 Wes: Well, he's the most. So he's an interesting form because he's the most general of all forms and not even good. Not the form of good or the good of the form of being, but the form of something that transcends all that. And, yeah, you think of Spinoza here. It's a single universal substance with a bunch of different attributes that somehow show up in the world. So when they do show up, it is in virtue of this unitary being that they have the qualities that they have.

6:54 Dylan: But in being transcendent, it's not true to say that those distinctions of being the filthiest filth or the bestest best. Right. Even though that language is there in being transcendent, it would end up becoming a way of speaking about something that's transcendent that really is partaking of all of those characteristics, but is not really any of them, and in some ways is partaking of them in that kind of an overarching way, not as a constituent.

7:30 Mark: Yeah. The closest you come to making sense of this is just right after that, in verse 12. Know that all manifestations of lucidity, passion and dark inertia come from me alone.

7:39 Wes: There it is.

7:40 Mark: But I am not in them. They are in me.

7:42 Sean: Yes.

7:43 Mark: Is that helpful?

7:45 Sean: I think that this speaks to the fact that unlike most of the things that partially examined Life covers, the Gita was definitely not written by one person. I mean, sure, it was handed on down by the sage Vyasa, inscribed by God, Lord Ganesha, but it was created by humans in succession. And one of the big disputes within the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy was whether or not human beings and God were distinct. So the scholar that I mentioned earlier and something that we've been talking about a lot of, sort of the idea of humans being really indistinguishable from God is one of the schools of Vedanta.

But there's another school that is basically monotheistic, believing Vishnu is the one true God and that there is a second dependent reality that's the material universe, which is very much more so akin to things that people might be familiar with the Western tradition. And then there's a third school that sort of triangulates between the two of them that suggests that this absolute reality, God and the human soul are different, but they could yet become one. This is something where it's like they have the potential to be united and be the same thing, but they aren't necessarily the same thing when human souls are instantiated on Earth.

And so I think that not just the Ambiguity in the Gita. But the active contradictions are that some of these things are very much speaking to the idea of a God that pervades everything. But once you begin introducing these clear moral hierarchies and not just attaching them to sort of the material world that one should regard impassively, but to the nature of human souls, I think that that is where that begins, where you begin to see those other voices chiming in, saying, no, hang on a moment. We need a way to classify people. We need a way to classify things.

9:44 Wes: That's another really good connection to Stoicism. Right. Because it's the world out there. We're meant to think that there is no good and nothing really is good or evil except for human souls.

9:56 Mark: Except for thinking makes it so.

9:59 Wes: Well, yeah, so I can be virtuous or vicious. That is good and bad for the Stoics. But as far as anything external and the things that we usually think are good and bad, you know, pleasure or pain or a loved one dying or someone mentioned something putrid earlier, all that stuff, none of those ascriptions of good and bad to those things really hold up. So it's easier to see Krishna in all those things if we take that sort of stoic point of view in which they're not really good or bad anyway, that's just an illusion. But then we have to ask the question of, well, yeah, there is something that is. That can actually be really good or bad, and that's human souls or human actions, let's say. And then we have to ask ourselves about the relationship between that and the universal all pervading being. Then it gets more complicated, getting at

10:52 Sean: the idea of the inherent virtue or vice within human souls. I want to sort of throw this question out there. Do people. Because when I read this, when I was reading this, this time, this sort of idea, this conflict between sort of divine grace and predestination kept popping up to me because there's this idea that, you know, you can wipe off karmic residue through Krishna, and that's a really cool game changer that, you know, you don't have to renounce in order to do this. But who is this really open to? Because if there's all of these tamasic, inert people who Krishna keeps throwing into ever more demonic lots in life, is his grace accessible to them? It feels to me a lot like this, a Protestant idea of predestination with the divine will being demonstrated on earth as to who will attain salvation or not.

11:45 Mark: Yeah. Did we make the Supposed mechanistic connection clear that you perform actions that acquire karma and that determines whether you're going to be born into a bad womb or a good womb. So that determines what your gunas are going to be and what your social position is going to be. And so that those things are assumed to match because of your karmic activity, which your gunas then determine how you're going to act seemingly. And so how much karma you're gonna add. And it seems like this it's just a solidly deterministic system within the realm

12:23 Wes: of Prakriti and a vicious cycle.

12:27 Sean: Yep. The good people keep getting chances to try again and the bad people will just keep being. I mean, I don't know. Is there? I mean, this is my fundamental critique of this, which was Ambedkar's critique much later. The idea that there is no room for mobility. This is sort of the theological or philosophical distillation of the idea that there really isn't mobility. I don't know. Do people see the possibility for mobility in here?

12:55 Dylan: And if so, the only mobility that I see is the claim that if you are of a given caste or given role in life, that it is open to you to through devotion, get closer to Krishna. But it doesn't seem to be in those sections that it's any implication that you will progress through the sequence of life in your process of rebirth to get to transcendence. So there isn't enough detail in it to me to understand exactly what the details of the metaphysical process of rebirth so that you get to transcendence at which you stop. But there are those handful of cases where it seems very not that the meek shall inherit the earth, but even the lowest, regardless of station, can partake of God.

But it doesn't seem to be a mobility that has anything to do with the earth. In fact, it would seem to be kind of strange because your comment about glory probably notwithstanding, everything that's involved involves not associating anything with the fruits of our actions. So there's this lack of focus on how much better the life of Brahmins and a warrior class are going to be than the Sudras. Right. They just sort of ignore it. Right. It's like you're just the thing you do is fulfill your duty. But it's clear that there are sort of grave implications in your life on earth regarding that.

14:28 Sean: Well, in fact, they mention it like as a way of consoling or not. Maybe I don't know if it's consoling, but at the end of Sort of the Yoga 9, the chapter 9, verse 33. How much easier for holy Brahmins and devoted royal sages, having come into this transient, unhappy world, to devote yourself to me. There is even a direct acknowledgement that even though the lower castes and women might be able to reach him, that it is much easier for others. And I do think it's very interesting, the idea of divorcing yourself from the fruits of actions, like, well, then what is the reason to do what you do?

15:07 Dylan: Why would you do anything?

15:10 Sean: Well, I think that that comes back to sort of the idea of Dharma, which keeps popping up inside this book, the idea of purpose. And if you think about sort of where the Dharma sources are that are seen as legitimate, you've got the Vedas are the most unassailable. Then you've got the Smriti, which are sort of the recorded memory of the great sages. And that includes things like the Gita and the broader Mahabharata and the Ramayan and things like that. And those are really the two core sources of this Dharma. So it's basically what your duty is.

It's like, hey, look at those rule books. Look at these scriptures that we have. Look at this mythology. Look at these, like, instructions on how best to live and follow those. And this is the source, and you have God as the guarantor, that this is the correct path to follow. At least that's how I sort of. I interpret because that when through all these invocations of Dharma, and Dharma is sort of most commonly sourced as coming from either the Vedas or. Or the Smriti, this sort of vast corpus of theological literature, that it's this way of grounding sort of what Brahmans wrote about the way that society and theology should ideally function, and then saying, hey, turn to that.

16:32 Dylan: But I don't know any of those texts, and I'm very unfamiliar with the various duties that are involved here. The closest I get is at the end of 18 in verses 42, 3 and 4, what the duties are. He says the duties of Brahmins. Kshatriyas. Can you tell me how to pronounce those words?

16:58 Sean: Yeah. So Brahmins are the priests, Kshatriyas. Yeah. Are the warriors. Vaishya are sort of tradesmen and farmers, and Sudras are servants. And below this are Dalits, or outcasts, however you want to call that.

17:20 Dylan: So tranquility, self control, austerity, purity, forgivingness and uprightness. Knowledge, judgment and faith in the hereafter are actions of Brahmins born of their own nature. Heroism, majesty, resolves, skillfulness, and also refusal to retreat in battle. Charity and lordliness are the actions of the Kshatriyas born of their own nature. Agriculture, herding cattle and trade are the actions of the Vaishyas intrinsic to their own nature. Work that is essential service to others is likewise the action of the Sudras. It's hard for me to believe that you wouldn't read this and be in those different groups and understand that there were sort of deep political implications, economic and material implications in your life about those things.

18:11 Sean: I think that that's very true. But then the question is, who's reading this? Like who's literate when this is coming out? The people who are reading these texts predominantly are other Brahmins and there is a. Actually, so devotion is in other places called bhakti. That's the term. And there's this big devotional movement that becomes very popular amongst the laity that is also about a personal relationship to the divine that is much more passionate. That's about the divine sort of Krishna's childhood as a cowherd and about his friends who are the female cowherds and his family and his sort of basically his lower class roots.

And that's based on a very. On a much more sensual, much less sort of intellectual relationship with God. Those sorts of stories were the Hinduism that was very popular and the one that most people in India would have thought about and how they would have related to Krishna. The Krishna of the Gita was a Krishna that philosophers would write about and that Brahmins might debate about. But it wasn't necessarily being read to the masses in services. It doesn't quite have that same bent to it.

19:31 Dylan: So a Sudra wouldn't be reading this along and say, wtf? What the heck you talking about?

19:37 Sean: Exactly. I mean, the Sudra would be looking at it and thinking, oh, hey. Well, the most beloved of Krishna are his family and his friends, who he is a mischief like, mischief making, almost trickster figure in the forest and who's also incredibly compassionate and things like that. And they would have. That is the thing that people were more drawn to because it's more emotionally satisfying and it's empowering in a way that I think the Gita wasn't for those people.

20:07 Mark: So at the beginning, Wes was describing this dynamic of why you wouldn't just go into higher and higher heavens because as you get pleasures, then the pleasure is sour. They lead to anger, they lead to you always wanting more, basically acting poorly. So that would pitch yourself down Karmically. And I'm just wondering if there to be some similar kind. You know, he definitely talks like, I'll cast these people down. They'll be the lowest of the low. There doesn't seem like a lot of room for springing back up there. But in those descriptions that Dylan just read of the duties of all of the various classes are.

Well, if you are in the servant class, you're doing socially necessary work and in fact your time. Right. Idle hands cannot become the devil's plaything. So, like, this is specifically recommending a kind of yoga where you are active in the world and doing your duty and sacrificing it to God as you do it. And that is holiness and is a direct line to realizing your oneness with Krishna. So it would seem in that sense it's actually easier for people who have to work all the time to do that, that the higher on the social ladder you go, the more temptations there are, the more free time your mind can spin out and get into trouble.

21:26 Sean: A lack of agency frees you.

21:30 Mark: Yeah. Because if the point is to realize that you're not an agent, then not being treated as an agent would really make you realize you're not an agent.

21:42 Dylan: Natural slaves who understand their slavery is revealing to themselves their true nature.

21:47 Mark: Yeah, it's like a weird variation on this Hegel's master slave relationship of, well,

21:53 Sean: also Epictetus and the whole, like, idea of the mentality of the slave, what you have control over and what you don't.

22:00 Mark: Definitely. This might be a nice time to. Yeah. Talk explicitly about those comparisons when you're so concerned with, like, what matters is my reaction to things. Like, it's very self focused in a way that the Atman, actually, the Hindu self is not associated with these emotional reactions. So being so concerned, the way that the Stoic is in. Am I freaking out about this? Even though. Yeah, they. The Hindu here is recommending equanimity as well. Like, you end up having the same sorts of resisting desire and going with the flow, acting according to your nature. But the way that you think about yourself when you're doing that does not seem at all the same.

22:43 Sean: Yeah, I think that there's. I mean, there's the clear sort of cosmetic similarities. And I think that the obstacle to equanimity for both is false perception. But in the Gita, it's the false perception that these things even exist. Whereas for Epictetus it's more the false perception of the baggage that we've attached to certain concepts and the Lack of generality with which we view them.

23:11 Mark: Any other thoughts related to the Stoicism thing?

23:14 Dylan: I guess it just seems to me a big difference. Well, maybe Epictetus does this too, right? Epictetus is recommending his Stoic philosophy as a teaching to others in order to deal with their situation. But it seems to be one thing to be a slave and dealing with your circumstance stoically and being told by your owner that you ought to deal with your situation stoically. Those are two different things, right? Completely different things, yeah.

23:52 Sean: Agency seems to be present in Epictetus in a way that is not in the Gita.

23:58 Mark: I had referred to this idea of the Purusha as being the witness. So in other words, what is the self ultimately? It's not the mind which is ultimately under my control according to the Stoic, but it is, you know, the mind and the character are part of the nature, part of the Prakriti. So this is chapter 1320 through 22. So know that both the Prakriti and the Purusha are equally beginningless. And know as well that modifications of Guna spring from Prakriti. Prakriti is called the reason for agency, cause and effect. Purusha is called the reason for experiencing joy and suffering for Purusha seated in Prakriti, experiences of the gunas born of Prakriti.

Its attachment to the gunas is the cause of its births in good and evil wombs. Witness, consenter, supporter, enjoyer, and the great Lord. The supreme Purusha in this body is called the supreme self. So that sounds like epiphenomenalism. Like that, what is truly the mind? What is truly consciousness? It just floats there and witnesses. It's a point of view within, broken off from God and really doesn't have any qualities itself other than, I guess it is experiencing it's being. It's totally passive.

25:16 Sean: I'm not sure if it's quite passive because when Krishna begins speaking about the way that he keeps the universe in motion and how all of these things are generated through him, I guess I'm not sure if timeless and passive are necessarily the same thing. Maybe they are. I kind of wonder then what is the point of this generation and destruction constantly occurring within the lower realities if what's lying above has no.

25:45 Dylan: Is there an answer to that in the Gita? I wondered often what the real acknowledgement of the generation and corruption and the coming into and out of being are in the world and what to make of the force of attachment. Stuff like that and it was hard to come up with anything other than that it was sort of put in a box off to the side and not really dealt with in favor of focusing on the transcendent and the non attached. And to the extent that you focused on, you mentioned the role of desire and the coming into and out of being and transformation, that they were just things to be avoided. They were the contra examples to what you should be trying to attain. And even in the metaphysical examples of what the world really is like. The world is eternal and unending and that all of these are superficial activities. Did you guys feel like it addressed it?

26:44 Mark: I feel like it's papered over. I think there's just a statement, it's my higher nature, my lower nature. And, you know, I come back in human form whenever there's a need of me, which certainly sounds like the higher part has the divine plan that then the lower part enacts. But it can't be a causal relationship between those and the higher and the lower are yet aspects of one thing. So it's not like one aspect causes something in another aspect. No, all the causality is going on in the lower part. Yeah, I don't think this ultimately makes sense.

27:21 Dylan: Well, in the vein of beyond good and evil. Right. All of that stuff going on in the lower part that you called causal mark would be superficial or not real. Because if you were beyond all of that, it would just be whatever happens. Right. In fact, even the notion that it's causal in that respect is an illusion.

27:46 Sean: I'm not sure about that though, because the material reality is still Krishna's lower reality, which I think is something that's a little bit more than just the world is completely irrelevant because, you know, this is the eighth time he's come down to earth in order to save it. And the epithet that is most commonly attached to Vishnu, is, you know, the preserver, the one who is keeping things going. And I think that a lot of this might have something to do with this idea of cyclic time, which I don't know if we want to get into, but definitely the fact that there isn't a linear conception of time in Hindu cosmology, the same way that there is in a lot of others. The universe goes through cycles of creation and destruction. Civilizations rise and fall through successive ages, and then after the worst age, you begin anew with the best age.

28:40 Dylan: I guess we're just back at the notion that there is some sort of link between the lower and the higher. But what we have for it is that Krishna Is not the lower, but the lower is part of Krishna.

28:53 Mark: That makes sense. Like, they are in me, but I'm not in them. The I being the higher part that is talking.

28:58 Dylan: Yes, yes.

28:59 Mark: Wes, what did you make of all this metaphysical stuff? Did you just give up on this? We're trying to figure out how the higher part really, how the Prakriti and the Purusha, how can they be the same thing when the whole causal order is in the Prakriti? Why would stuff even happen? Like, what is the point of the phenomenal world? Is it just an illusion? Is it just the veil of Maya that we need to pierce and the truth is above that? Or is there a divine plan that is running this lower stuff? If the higher can't actually make things happen, how could it set in motion a divine plan, stuff like that?

29:37 Wes: I don't think there's enough information in here too. Just looking at this passage that you were referring to earlier. Nature gives rise to changes in the field and to gunas. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you used the word epiphenomenalism before. It could be, you know, you could think of this as dualism. Yeah. We'd have to foist some sort of philosophical theory on this to, you know, obviously, it's old classic philosophical question, right?

30:04 Dylan: Yep.

30:05 Mark: I guess just to compare it back to Stoicism, they also talk about if you see the truth of your situation, your relationship to the universe, then you will act in the ethically desirable manner. And for Marcus Aurelius in particular, that really was kind of, I am. I am just an insignificant little cog in the giant machinery of the universe. The only thing I'm really responsible for is my own will, you know, whether I act according to essentially duty, whether I continue to act respectably as part of this giant machine. And so it seems like that goes along with the be a good little sudra, be a nice servant, and to realize your place in the larger scheme is to sacrifice your personal desires toward the whole, toward God.

But it also seems like this text talks specifically. Like, if you really understand the truth, it's not that you see yourself, you know, like I was just describing, as a mote in a giant machine, but you see yourself as Krishna, as ultimately that this is the veil of Maya, the veil of illusion. And so this giant machine is just. It's an unavoidable property of the way things appear in the phenomenal world. But really, to see truth is to get beyond that.

31:27 Sean: I think I found something that might help us out actually in the yoga of action, third chapter, verses 22 through 24, when he's really beginning to outline things. There's no action in the three worlds that I must do, O son of Pritha, nor is there anything left to be attained. And yet I still continue in action. For if I did not always engage in action ceaselessly, O son of Pritha, men would follow my path at every turn. These worlds would collapse if I did not perform action. I would be the agent of confusion in society and would destroy these beings.

And I think that that hints at something we talked about very much earlier, which was the idea that even if you're doing nothing, even if you're just sitting there, you're still acting, things are still going on. And I think that maybe there's an analogous way to think about the way in which Krishna is operating in the world. Like, if Krishna was to be completely inert and passive and do nothing, then that would still be a form of action. It would just be a really undesirable form of action. So Krishna acts ceaselessly in order to maintain the dharma and to maintain the structure of the world, as is appropriate,

32:41 Mark: at least in his appearance as Vishnu, which, I mean, we've been talking about Vishnu as kind of being the highest, but, like, isn't Vishnu itself? In other words, Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu, but isn't Vishnu, in turn, an avatar of this ultimately undescribable, unnamable because it is the whole, the supreme Purusha is not Vishnu. Vishnu has a nature which is to preserve, which is to act and to preserve the world, which is what you described.

33:07 Sean: Well, I think that part of what the Gita is trying to do, especially, is ground Krishna as the supreme capital G God. I think that people who are familiar with Hinduism might be familiar with the idea of the Trimurti, like Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, Shiva the destroyer. But I think that this text is a text which is really trying to ground Krishna as being the highest in a way that it's, you know, it's a personal God, but sort of understood in a more intellectual way than the future sort of passionate bhakti movements are going to do, and sort of trying to bridge that gap between maybe people's desires for a personal God and these abstract, Upanishadic monist ideas of absolute reality.

That's even when they begin to say, you know, you can devote yourself to absolute reality or you can devote yourself to me, but they're both the same thing. And devoting yourself to Me is easier.

34:06 Mark: So before we wrap this up, it seems like we need to touch on the divine manifestation and read the quote from that. It's yoga and the vision of the cosmic form. This is number 11. So around page 108 is where that starts in our version. Oh, son of Preetha, O Arjuna, behold my forms by the hundreds and by thousands, manifold divine, of diverse colors and shapes. Behold the sun gods, the gods of light, the storm God, you know. So he's saying I'm all this stuff. Behold here today, the entire universe together with animate and inanimate things and whatever else you desire to see as they stand as one in my body.

But you cannot see me with your own mortal eyes. I will give you divine eye. With that divine eye, behold my divine yoga. The jump is for the first time in like 100 pages. And Sanjaya said so Sanjaya has been relating all this to the Blind King, but this is the first time where Sanjaya is no longer giving a dialogue, but he's describing the thing. And what's goofy about this is he gives this description that we'll give in a second of what the God unveiled looks like, and then the God at the end of that says, only you can see me like this because you are so awesome.

But wait, it's Sanjaya who's spying on them. So Sanjaya is not. Anyway, that seemed just a needless thing to throw in just to cause trouble. Like the one thing that Sanjaya should not have been able to simply overhear or oversee, because it's this amazing form that is accessible only to somebody as advanced as Arjuna is the only thing actually described by Sanjaya.

35:46 Sean: So the divine sight that Krishna gives Arjuna is something that Sanjaya already possesses. It's the reason why he can narrate this whole thing from the palace, why he can describe everything that's going on to the Blind King because he is the all sighted. So that is the explanation. I don't know why they felt the need to introduce his name in at that point in time. I do think it detracts from the momentum at a particularly climactic point. But there you have it.

36:15 Dylan: He has a superpower.

36:17 Mark: He does well, because I have to describe Arjuna as having his hair standing up on end when he's beholding this. So yeah, top of page 109. What does he actually look like? He revealed the son of Pritha, that is Arjuna, his highest sovereign form of countless mouths and eyes and many wondrous visions and many divine ornaments with Many divine weapons raised, wearing celestial garlands and garments, anointed with celestial perfume, comprised of every wonder, radiant, infinite, with faces in all directions. If a thousand suns were to shine forth in the sky all at once, the resulting splendor may be like the brilliance of that great Spirit there.

The son of Pandu saw the entire universe with its multiple divisions as united as one with the body of the God of the gods. There you go. And then he describes more about seeing serpents and the crown, mace and disc. You know, it goes on for more time here.

37:07 Sean: I mean, it kind of reminds me a bit of Dante and Paradiso when Dante's staring at God and completely unable to comprehend what he's seeing and seeing. Like, oh, I see these three circles and one circle. And how do I make sense of this? I think that there's definitely the human confusion of trying to comprehend and witness the divine directly, I think is pretty universal.

37:30 Dylan: Yep.

37:31 Mark: And so Arjuna goes mad and is locked up for the rest of the story.

37:36 Dylan: No, in the end, he says that he's all knowing and he's good with this and send me the battle.

37:42 Sean: And then he forgets. He forgets at the end of the battle.

37:45 Dylan: That's what you said.

37:46 Sean: Yeah. I think that one thing that's really interesting is I was listening to your discussion of Augustine and reading Augustine and thinking about what a different relationship with God, something like this entails, like with the idea of struggling to control oneself. Because this entire book is about a guy struggling to control an urge that is against the will of God. But it's through this sort of conversation of a friend, someone who. He's asking for advice and his friend is giving him advice and he's questioning him and the friend is giving him this answer. And it just felt to me very different than Augustine's. Like, woe is me. I am the lowest of the low. I am so bad all the time, but for you sort of thing. I don't know if anyone else thought of that or.

38:33 Mark: Yeah, well, yeah, that's just the extreme. Maybe we'll get around to reading William James Varieties of Religious Experience, which would be entirely apropos here, but just that, yeah, ultimately God is everything for Augustine or something, but it's really important that you don't then get to say, just because I have the divine spark in me or something like that, that I am God. You know, they're. The hierarchy of the parts is taken more literally. I mean, it's in here. Prakriti is the lower part of Krishna's nature. And there's the lowest of the low. And so yeah, you could imagine somebody following this and thinking that extreme humility before God is called for, but it's not, at least in this text. Arjuna being beloved of Krishna, being his personal confidant and the best archer in the whole place, maybe just does not feel that humbled and does not need to.

39:27 Sean: No, he's amazing. Well, I think that there is a note of humility though, because once there is that engagement with, you know, he's terrified when he actually sees Krishna. And in verse 41 he even says whatever I said, audaciously, thinking of you as a friend, addressing you as a hey Krishna, hey Yadava, hey friend. Unaware of this majesty of yours, either from carelessness or even through love. And if I have disrespected you for the sake of a joke while at play, like rest, sitting, or at mealtimes, da da da, I beg for that. I beg your forgiveness, oh unfathomable one. And then he proceeds to pay the appropriate respect. Yeah, exactly.

40:08 Mark: Bowing and prostrating. Yep. Oh shelter the universe, have mercy. So yeah, it's not exactly crawling on the floor like a worm, but it is going in that direction. Well, are there any other quotes or major portions of this or ideas that we haven't brought up already or should we just wind this to a close?

40:27 Dylan: I think we should wind it to

40:28 Mark: a close myself, but awesome, let me say as my closing. So I thought this Kmitra book, it was a nice spoon fed way to get the text because not only in her translation does she do stuff like make it clear who's being referred to. Like there's a lot of stuff that's

40:46 Dylan: in parentheses now all the epithets that you would have to keep track of, she kindly clarifies them for you.

40:53 Mark: Right? There are only two people talking. You should be able to figure out who's talking, but not necessarily, O son of Pritha, O son of Kunti, oh Dahara. These are all referring to Arjuna, oh handsome haired one. That's my favorite. For Krishna, it's very often used. I didn't know his hair in particular was so handsome. But also the chapters are usually pretty short, just a few pages. And then she throws in a little philosopher's corner, chapter analysis and questions for consideration, which, you know, it was nice that those were there to break things up.

And so she makes explicit connections to like, oh at least raises issues like how is this paying attention to duty? Like Kant's paying attention to duty. She would often say Things like, there's so much more nuance in the version that we see in the Bhagavad Gita than we saw in Mill's Utilitarianism, which I did not agree with at all. There might be more, a lot of distinctions made, but this is not a philosophical text. It is not laying out in a clear manner, here's what the whole ontology is. It's more. Here's another fabulous thing, and here's this fabulous thing and this fab, and you can decide how they all make sense together.

That'll just be the task for a few thousand years of creating commenters to try to figure out how to write the philosophical works inspired by this, despite Maitre's efforts. I read this very much like a religious text. There was one argument which is, should I fight? Yes, you should fight. Because killing somebody doesn't really kill anything about them. That's important, because you're really your Atman. You're not your body, because it's your duty according to your caste, because it's destined anyway because of determinism. And I find all those three reasons for why you should fight terrible reasons.

So there's one total argument in this book, and it's my sights, a bad argument. And then in terms of the details fleshing out, it's just, here's more doctrine, more doctrine, more doctrine. It's interesting. And you could do comparison religion with it, compare it with what the worldview here is, with that of Stoicism and things, but there's a reason we're not going three and a half hours here. There's not that much philosophical meat that I was able to chew on.

43:01 Wes: Well, the more charitable version of the overall argument is assume there are other. There are good pragmatic reasons to fight outside of the frame of this. But then someone says, well, look, Scripture says this, and I. I've had this sudden conversion and I want to lay down my arms right here, and I don't want to fight. And then the whole point of this is to argue that action and whatever religious comportment one is supposed to have to the world are not in fact incompatible, and that they are related in certain important ways. So for instance, in chapter four, Krishna basically says, look, there are many forms of worship, but they're all achieved through action.

And action in general is even better than ritual, which I assume is what this is reacting to. Right. This whole text is reacting to a conventional piety in which adhering to scripture and performing certain rituals is considered the pious thing to do. And Maybe even being an ascetic and retreating from the world and not engaging in action. And this is the counter argument. And one of the counterarguments is that action, in fact, is the most important means of worship because it gives one the opportunity to experience that disengagement from the fruits of one's action.

Right. It's one thing to just be passive, to be tamasic, for instance, and depressed and give up all desire in that sense and just say, I'm not going to try anymore. It's another thing to be focused on action, to be. It reminds me of Aristotelian Energeia or Entelecheia. Yeah. Something being at work, being itself, where you're focused on action, divorced from the results that are simply going to satisfy you in some way or another, because that is the way to be connected to this higher thing. Not withdrawing, not refraining from action, but acting, and then having a certain comportment towards what one is doing.

So then action becomes this essential thing. And that's the argument of the text. It's not that, oh, you have to kill all these people, even though it would be dumb because it's faded and all that. It's just, let's assume you have good reasons to kill these people. And then here's why religion says, oh, no, you can't do that. You have to just withdraw from life.

45:22 Dylan: Yeah, but my experience of reading it is it did feel very much like an ancient sacred text. Just the structure of it and let's call it the rhetoric of it. I did like having the addition that we read by Maitre. I thought it was helpful, both in terms of the intro and in terms of the. The way she translated it. One of the signs of the success of it is that for me, I enjoyed the discussion we had about it because I thought there's a lot of interesting tensions there, that even if they don't get completely sorted out in the text, I felt like they were rich. There are a number of themes through there, like I said at the beginning. I wonder if how much of it is sort of my Western philosophical glasses that I inevitably end up reading just because of my background. Lots of things that reminded me of themes that I've read before with slightly different takes on them.

46:17 Mark: So, Sean, what do you think? If we were going to do more Indian philosophy, would it be something from the Upanishads to get. There's definitely room for a philosophical take on what is it that, you know, we are all Brahman and how do we make sense of that, that we are all one. I didn't really see that grappled with in a serious way here, other than just insisting on we are, we are, and here are the different aspects of Krishna. But would that be one of the kind of things in the Upanishads that would take up that explicitly?

46:45 Sean: Yeah, there's a couple of options. I mean, you could go to the Upanishads, certainly. I would think that maybe. Also I think that part of the reason why the Gita is a good starting point is then those commentaries that you mentioned, people like the philosopher Shankara in classical India who have epistemologies, who sort of try to build things up and defend things in a more substantive way. Because it is true that the people who are reading this book sort of like me. They sort of knew who these characters were and all the stories and the ways that these various things play out in a way that makes it, I think, very difficult.

And it definitely feels. I mean, it is a religious text, so it feels that way. I think that there's something that's quite rich about the ways in which knowledge, action and devotion are equated. I think there's something that's interesting that I do think that although I would like to have it fleshed out more, I still find the Prakriti Purusha distinction and the idea of including the mind and emotions within physical matter, but then allowing room for something extra to be an interesting and different take than the idea of, oh, we are all just the product of these natural processes.

Or there is this hard and fast distinction between what I'm thinking and my body and my physical surroundings or whatever. So I think that those have value, but I think that there's always more to read and there's plenty of people who have written about this and written about other things. If you're going to read the Upanishad, it's definitely a selection. Don't try to read all of them, but yeah.

48:19 Mark: All right. Well, next time we're going to read a series of things about suicide. Dr. Drew will be back with us, and we're going to revisit Camus on suicide and the absurd. And we'll have a whole list@pre partiallyexaminedlife.com upcoming so you can read exactly what we read. Hey, tell us. If you're interested in more Indian philosophy or more non Western stuff that we haven't gotten to, please tell us exactly what you think we should read. You can comment on this at the blog post corresponding to this episode@priallyexaminelife.com you can chime in via our Facebook page.

We would love to hear what you think of this podcast. Just give us a nice review through the Apple podcast app, the itunes store through stitcher wherever you listen to this. Or just email us@pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com Our closing song is called Om Hari Om 1 featuring Michael Manring. It's from Tim Jordan Kirtan's album Heart and Spirit from 2014. The music is by Shawn Johnson. Michael Manring is the bass player here. You can hear me talk with him about his amazing work on Nakedly examined music episode 31@neckledly examinedmusic.com so thanks so much again, Sean.

49:31 Wes: Thank you.

49:32 Dylan: Thanks a lot for coming on.

49:33 Sean: Thank you. This is a lot of fun.

49:35 Wes: All right.

49:35 Mark: Good night, everybody.

49:36 Wes: Good night.

49:36 Dylan: Good night.

49:37 Sean: Good night. Sam.

50:10 Wes: Sa.

50:35 Sean: O.

51:01 Mark: Oh o. Hari. Sam harm.

55:22 Wes: Ha.

56:33 Sean: Sam.