This was my third time reading through the Bhagavad Gita, and while I learned more than I did than my two previous readings, much of the Gita just seems untouchable. Perhaps it’s a translation issue and certain words/concepts just don’t translate that well into English, but the material in the last few chapters (11 to the end) are far from clear.
I wish that we had gone through the Gita before World Cultures I did; I would have been much better equipped to teach my students, but this is more of a personal wish than any sort of complaint. It’s hard to teach a text that you barely understand yourself, but reading it for this Capstone course cleared up a number of issues that I couldn’t previously wrap my mind around.
For instance, I could not fully comprehend the Gunas. I understood the differences between Tamas, Rajas and Sattva, but I didn’t understand that the Gunas are not entirely ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ If I’m honest, I still don’t fully understand how Sattva (which seems to be the quality of being good) can even be considered a bad thing, but I do have a fuller and more accurate overall understanding.
I also didn’t appreciate just how far the concept of moderation was taken. In my mind, I understood it as “All things in moderation, even moderation” but it seems like the correct way to interpret the Gita’s stance on moderation is “complete detachment from emotions and physical objects in favor of pursuing God.” That’s radically different from my previous thoughts; the Gita is actually teaching how to be free from earthly desires while I thought it just meant to balance the different aspects of one’s life.
I really like the way that Krishna talks about Maya, or illusion. Illusion is the word used in the translation, but I think ‘perspective’ might actually be a better word. Krishna says that most people only ever see Maya; they never see Brahmin in everything, they just see things for what they are. A dog is nothing more than a dog to people stuck in this perspective. Once they transcend Maya and gain a new perspective on the world, they are able to see the truth. I don’t think illusion works as well as perspective, because it doesn’t seem obvious (to a majority of people) that an object like a rock has any sort of divine nature, so there’s not really an ‘illusion’ of the rock being just a rock. If anything, it means that people are missing a key truth about the nature of the world – they’re essentially stuck in a cave looking at shadows on a wall – and as they learn more about the true nature of the world, their eyes are opened and they gain a new perspective. They’re finally able to see the way that Brahmin is present in things like dogs and rocks.
butwhydoyouwantfrieswiththat 