PNTV - The Bhagavad Gita by Krishna

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on the Bhagavad Gita, one of the core texts of Hinduism. And this book is translated. This edition is translated by Eknath Eswaran, who also did the translation for the Dhammapada, which is another one of the old school classics that we cover in the Hundred Philosopher's Notes. One of the ten old school classics and just a beautiful human being. Eswaron was, and his translations I find amazing. So if you haven't read either the Dhammapada or the Bhagavad Gita, I highly recommend Eknath Eswaron's translation. You can check out the spelling of his name in the note. This guy rocks. And the Bhagavad Gita rocks as well. So the Bhagavad Gita is a smaller part of the Mahabharata, which is one of the cortex of Hinduism, a larger text. And it's set in the context of a warrior, Arjuna, going to battle, and his family is actually going to battle against another family, and he's reluctant to go to war. And Krishna, a God, appears to him and guides him in the process of living his destiny, essentially. And the battlefield is a metaphor for the battle going on within ourselves. There's a constant battle that all the teachers talk about between our lower selves and our higher selves. And it's this battle, this combat, this struggle that in Islam is called the jihad. The greater holy war is the greater struggle against ourselves, the lower and higher selves. The lesser war is against the external oppressors. But there's this battle within us, and the challenge is, can we master ourselves? Can we overcome those smaller tendencies to become all that we're destined to be? And the Bhagavad Gita is essentially a guidebook within the context of Indian Hindu culture of how we can achieve that oneness with the universe through certain practices. So let's look at a few of my favorite big ideas from the book. And again, what we have here is Krishna advising Arjuna. Little tangent as well, if you've heard of the book Bagger Vance and the movie Bagger Vance by a guy named Steven Pressfield, who's awesome, who wrote a book called the War of Art, which I highly recommend, the War of Art. And he wrote this book which became a movie called Bagger Vance, which is essentially the Bhagavad Gita. On a golf course where a golfer is struggling and doesn't want to golf and doesn't want to do part of what his destiny is. And Vance, this caddy, comes and counsels him and mentors him and supports him in the same way that Krishna supports Arjuna. It's a really cool story. Check it out. Watch the movie if you haven't. Will Smith, some other great actors in there. Matt Damon, I think. Pretty good stuff. But back to the Gita. So the Gita talks about the importance of living our Dharma right? And that we're going to suffer if we strive to live someone else's Dharma. If we compete in someone else's Dharma, we're going to struggle. We need to discover what our true destiny is, what our true path is, and, and honor that and live consistent with it. And the word Dharma, I mentioned in the note, what it means, the word Dharma literally comes from the word dri, I believe is how it was pronounced in Sanskrit, which means to support, to hold up or bear. So Dharma is literally the substance that holds things together both within ourselves and within the universe. It's kind of the truth and the rightness, the essence of, in our case, our lives and who we are. And if we're not in integrity with that essence, we're literally going to disintegrate and we're going to suffer. So we want to find a way to get in integrity with our Dharma consistently. Really powerful idea. And it's echoed again throughout the literature. Abraham Maslow talks about the need to self actualize, to become what we're destined to become. Deepak Chopra talks about it in his seven Spiritual Laws of Success. The seventh spiritual law is the Law of Dharma. And Deepak says, we have a unique constellation of gifts and experiences and strengths and visions that are our calling. Our Dharma, our purpose, our destiny is to bring those together in a way that no one else in the history of the world can give to the world. It doesn't need to be huge, external, you know, publicly recognized great things. It can be within our family and within our communities. But there's a calling to be a great parent, or to be an artist, or to be an entrepreneur, or to be a political leader, whatever it is, we've got to find that and honor that path. Krishna also advises Arjuna to remember that as we're on that path and we're living and striving to live in integrity with our higher purpose, we're going to make mistakes. There's going to be some errors in the process. He describes that metaphorically as a fire having smoke. Every fire has a bit of smoke. Same with us as we strive to live on purpose. We're going to have some smoke, we're going to have some oops moments. That's okay. Not only is it okay, that's just part of how the process unfolds and how it works. Got a beautiful quote from, from the Gita in the note you can check out. But the idea here is that no one's perfect again. Abraham Maslow talks about that. He says, and he studied the greatest people of his generation, Eleanor Roosevelt and a bunch of other awesome people. And he discovered 19 characteristics of what he called self actualizing people. And one thing that he noticed was there are great people, seers and sages and people who are truly extraordinary. But none of them were perfect. None of them. All of them had their own faults. Whether it was petulance or impatience at times or whatever it was, no one was perfect. And Maslow says, look, let's get rid of our illusion of perfection doesn't exist. Rumi tells us the same thing. All the teachers talk about this. There's no such thing as a perfect human being. In one of the notes we do on a great book called the Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben Shahar, awesome guy, positive psychologist, former professor at Harvard. I raved about it all the time. He says, we need to quit being perfectionists and start being optimalists. Optimalists. So an optimalist optimizes their lives. They know that perfection is never going to be achieved. We have ideals that are like guiding stars. It's not a distant shore. We're never going to get to a place called perfection. That place doesn't exist. But we can have our ideals and move toward them. That's what this book is about. That's what all this stuff is about. And then we embrace this process and celebrate the process of becoming the Gita, the Dhammapada, the Dao de Jing, all these great books. Of course, the Stoic philosophers talk about the importance of our will. We've got to exert our willpower. We've got to overcome these tendencies that don't serve us. One of the key ways we do that is through meditation. They talk about meditation a lot in the Gita. We need to be able to still our mind, bring our minds into a single point of focus. I've been meditating now every day for going on two years. In three months it will be two years. And it's by far been the most transformative practice of my life. I did it for an hour a day for over a year now. I'm doing it for 30 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes or 20 minutes in the evening and oftentimes another time during the day for whatever period of time. And it's just amazing to learn to still my mind and to see that my ability to see the bigger picture, to see the interconnectedness of everything and of myself to you and to everyone else, and not be so triggered and respond so habitually has been amazingly served through my meditation practice. So as I say in every fifth one of these, meditate, meditate, meditate in whatever form makes sense for you. And I'm going to talk about this a lot more in optimal living 101. But for now we'll get back to the note. One other big idea is this idea of non attachment. So one of the things that Krishna advises Arjuna to think about is just do what needs to be done. Do not worry about the results. Suffering comes when we're attached to the results, right? If we need things to happen in a certain way for us to be happy, we're going to suffer because it's not always going to go our way now. So we want to be free from attachment, from the results. That's the essence of being free from suffering. Whatever is, is what we want to be right now. That doesn't mean that we don't act. It doesn't mean that we don't set goals that inspire us. Gandhi had a goal of freeing India, yet he was not attached to the results. Coming on a certain timeline, he showed up day by day by day by day in integrity with his values. That's what we need to do. Focus on our process. Have the same audacity and passion that we've had in the past. But let go of the attachment to the results. Focus on the next step, not on the destination all the time. Really powerful idea. I talk about another way to look at that from Russell Simmons in the Note. But we're already out of time. That's a really quick look at a few of my favorite big ideas from the Bhagavad Gita. Hope you dug it. Share more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See you.

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