(March 26, 2018 at 4:00 pm)Khemikal Wrote: A quran, and the vedas, and the gita, and the edda, and a couple shelves worth of mythological anthologies and collected superstitions from around the world...some are even in english..and i've read a couple pages!
The rest are just there to make me look smart to guests I never invite and in case I run out of firewood.
Since you brought up the Gita...
I think it's wonderful spiritual poetry. Sometimes when I get stoned, I'll crack it open and let my mind be absorbed in it. Other times, on a pretty day, I'll take it out into a field and read it, using as a lens to interpret the bright and sunny portion of the cosmos that stands before me.
Henry David Thoreau Wrote:In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
I've studied several literalist commentaries on the Gita. They are foul. For instance Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's commentary echos Biblical inerrantists--it reads the verses as authoritative. But, aside from this (if you ignore the commentary) Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's translation is pretty good. But in all his expertise concerning Hinduism, his words seem little more than insignificant baggage when laid aside the Gita's profound words. Thoreau's commentary is more apt, more free, more prone to harmonizing with the Gita, than encapsulating it into a wretched doctrine.
We all know how the wizard of Oz claimed he was a "good man" but a "bad wizard." Likewise, The Bhagavad Gita is a "good poem" but a "bad doctrine." Perhaps it is so with all religious texts. Maybe even the Christian Bible would have something to teach us all if it were not so confounded, strangled, and made obscene by those who would want to shape its moral profundities into a ball and chain which they would attach to the ankle of the world.
In case you are wondering what prompted this post:
