Lesson 1 – Introduction to the Bhagavad Gita

 Lesson 1 – Introduction to the Bhagavad Gita

It may be that several of us are shy to begin, and this is

normal. Even a few sentences is welcome. Questions are always

better than answers, especially at the beginning!

In his first time, in Gita 2023, Bailey shared the essential

teaching Nataraja Guru gave while he was with him: “Only

understand.”

Bailey also sent an update to his bio, and it’s very relevant to

the introductory material, so we’ve added it here. Bailey’s is the

very last entry.

What has been sent so far is so excellent I don’t have to add

anything. You are an amazing class, and I hope you can find time

to read what your classmates have sent in.

Probably only a few of you read Why I Bother, so here is the

crucial part. Guru Nitya taught the Gita as his favorite work all

through the 1970s, mostly here in Portland. I began working with

him on his early book about it, but a large amount of his wisdom

came later, and wasn’t in the book. I always regretted this, and

after he died I began to teach and comment on the Gita myself.

Eventually I began a verse-by-verse examination:

As I worked painstakingly through the Gita, I began to

suspect that my own guru had left a door open for me to bring

his vision to full fruition. I felt that he was looking over my

shoulder with a critical eye, and I should be as careful with my

own thoughts as I had been with editing his books. And then,

toward the end of Nitya’s massive, three volume commentary

on the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, I ran across this:

In India, tradition allows a disciple to complement the

writings of his guru by supplementing the guru’s writing with

what the guru should have said but did not say. Secondly, the

disciple has the permission of tradition to rephrase the

argument of his guru if the latter’s words do not properly

serve to establish and arrive at the conclusion intended by the

guru. (440)

What a relief, a tacit blessing! It allowed me to relax. I

definitely did feel I was recording what Guru Nitya meant to

say but hadn’t gotten around to.

Ali sent two excellent questions, and I have spoken to them

after his response.

I’m glad Ali mentioned the song aspect of the work. That

section of the Introduction was one of my major revelations from

working on the Gita, and the section on song begins with a crucial

teaching:

The word gita means song. The Gita is a song in the sense that

it is to be lived, not just read. Ideas, like words, are only

symbols. We have to reanimate the ideas as living realities, and

only then is their secret revealed. Great composers convert their

cosmic music to lines and dots on paper. We can admire those

books of sheet music, and see how the lines and dots make

pretty patterns, and even collect stacks of them. But only when

musicians play the music does it come back to life and the

meaning stand revealed. This is the task of all students of

religion or philosophy: to reanimate the ideas by bringing them

to life in ourselves. It marks the difference between spiritual

and academic attitudes.

Bindu’s starts us off with a bang; along with Vivek’s, the

basic premise is well covered. Check them out.

Bindu Johny

Going through the introduction, the phrase tat tvam asi —

“The Absolute is what I am” struck me deeply.

It immediately reminded me of my son, who always says “I

am God.”

When I ask him to come to the temple, he refuses, saying he

himself is God.

Even though he doesn’t believe in traditional worship, he still

went to a tattoo artist and chose to draw a Devi on his back.

He went through so much pain to complete it, and I kept

wondering:

If he does not believe in God, then what power placed

that thought in his heart —

to choose a Hindu Goddess and carry her on his body

forever?

It made me realise something:

We all hold a light inside.

How much that light shines depends on how we live and how

we connect with ourselves.

I was never a big follower of the Bhagavad Gita before.

To me, it was just a story of a battlefield, and I never gave it

much attention.

I don’t even know what made me join the Gita class.

But once I understood that the battlefield is actually inside

the mind,

everything changed.

Everything we fight…

Every confusion…

Every fear…

Every “why do people behave like this”…

It is all inside the mind.

For the first time, I could relate the Gita to my own life.

I am starting to get answers for the questions that troubled

me.

I am finding a kind of peace I never felt before.

Earlier, I was like Arjuna—

wanting to run away from problems,

holding the negativity of others,

questioning why people behave the way they do.

Now I feel more relaxed, lighter, and becoming a better

version of myself.

“The Absolute is what I am.”

This sentence feels like a truth I am slowly beginning to

live.  

Vivek Kapur

Key points I took away

 

Never forget why you study the Gita. It is a means to reconnect

with our authentic self  

·      It is part of the literature of Brahma Vidya, the science of the

Absolute

·      The teachings focus on individual freedom and the realization

of our original free spirit that has been hidden under layers of

compromise with societal roles

 

Everyone and everything is a reflection of the Absolute

·      The Absolute is ultimate reality, the ground of all that exists

·      As the ground of what senses and what is sensed, the Absolute

is beyond the senses. But it can be known, it is our very own self

·      So, the goal is not to realize a remote object or deity but to

know ourselves 

·      When all is sacred, we don’t need divine intervention, we are

already miraculous

 

Yoga unites polarities on the ground of the Absolute in a

transcendental vision

·      Much of the conflict of human life traces to being attracted to

half of a polarity while rejecting the other half

·      The Gita teaches us to see the entire dynamic of a situation for

expertise in action

 

Follow the Alpha and the Omega

·      Gita begins (the alpha) with Arjun’s worldly predicament that

impels his questioning, and ours. The story ‘ascends’ with

Krishna’s transcendental teaching and returns to ground to apply

the teaching to Arjuna’s life

·      The transactional orientation is the horizontal aspect of life;

the timeless wisdom and ideals are the vertical. Their combination

in the flow of the Gita leads to the shape of the Greek letter Omega

 

Make it real

·      Read it as a guidebook for personal liberation, not of duty,

religion, convention 

·      Make each verse practical...how will you think and act

differently

Saila Anandan

Dear Scott, and all friends on this journey - hope you are all well. I

am excited to start this new study, and from what I have read so far

from the introduction and the prologue, this study is a fresh look at

the Gita, and I welcome a universal consideration rather than a

religious one.

As you suggested I read the introduction a few weeks ago, and

now have come back to it - I agree that it gives time for the reading

to percolate like a machine running in the background, but must

say that I forgot the detail. So this second read is most necessary to

enable me to provide a thoughtful response.

Krsna teaches Arjuna how to transcend action through cultivation

of the unitive way of reasoning . Mere repression of action will

produce only inner conflict and as a consequence more action of

the wrong kind. Wisdom lies in knowing  the secret of the impetus

of the action and the phantom like manifestations of the

phenomenal world. Darsana Mala page 317. To transcend pain and

pleasure, to face fear, to come to equanimity of sort, and the

journey towards the Self, and all aspects, a chance to remove or

dissolve the mask, and to be more and move towards the fullest

potential, to be free of restraint, and to move softly and with

precision, to walk bare footed and let the grass tickle the feet, for

life can once more be easy as when I was a child - these are

exciting and magical possibilities that I am ready to work towards,

to embrace.

Having grown up as a Hindu, I was a little hesitant in the past to

delve into the Gita, as I had thought of it as a religious book

teaching duty, but now to hear of liberation, I throw my arms in the

air with excitement to turn each page and inquisitive to know

more. As a therapist listens and allows the Self to be, Gita as guru

reawakens the suppressed parts, and gives wings for it to lift to

expression. 

To embark on this journey together, the boat is leaving the

harbour!

With love,

Saila x 

Gopica

Greetings! and thank you!

The prologue and 'Why You Bothered to Comment on the Gita'

provided an orientation for viewing the Gita as a philosophy of

life.

Honestly, I found the language highly proficient, almost elevate

while still deeply enjoyable. I frequently consulted an online

dictionary to grasp many of the phrases.

I am looking forward to experience Gita to cultivate universal

consciousness and transcend my personal fears.

Thanks & Warm Regards!

Gopica

Ram (Ranganathan)

Reading the prologue and the intoduction left me with more

questions than answers. I intend to keep these questions alive as I

embark on this study. Sorry for the delay in my response. 

We assume a social mask to obscure our naked face - this line in

the prologue caught my attention and made me wonder - What is

the mask that I assume ? What is the nature of the difference

between my naked face and the mask? My attempts have always

been to reduce the difference between the two, be my true self in

my relationships, at least in personal relationships irrespective of

social circumstances. This in turn brought up more questions,

What is my true face or self, Didn't I use my social mask on

multiple occasions, without batting an eyelid? What is my

authentic self that seeks to express itself? 

Arjuna and his brothers, the Pandavas, symbolize our authentic

nature

- I have never thought of this way and I wondered if we all possess

the valor, righteousness, physical strength, embodied by these

brothers? The assertion that this is a universal predicament helps to

see that I am not alone in this. 

The meaning of life, epitomized in terms like God or the Absolute,

is an eternal mystery, not a fact, and as such will defy description

for all eternity. But the attempt to pin meaning down does throw

light on it, light which can improve and illuminate our lives.

- How true! the quest to understand the absolute or god or meaning

of life, that effort in different ways through science, art, literature

has produced the best of humanity in my opinion. Personally,

questions like - who we are ( am I), what is matter?, what is mind,

what is our place in this grand scheme of things, Is there really a

god somewhere?... questions at different points in my life helped

me to take certain actions that have immensely helped to illuminate

my own life and in that process, I sincerely hope, touched other's

lives as well.

The game here is to rectify the damage and dispel the confusion

with clear thinking and action.

- Often the right decision in difficult circumstances needs clear

thinking and action. In my life, during difficult situations the action

I took sometimes worked and failed some other times. Looking

back what guided me to those decisions, was it clear thinking?

The amalgam of structure and formless creative inspiration is the

dialectical expression of life at its best.

- The importance of structure acting as a matrix on which new

ideas/inspirations sprouting is something very basic but most often

missed. 

Ali Nuit

Hello Scott, I hope you are well. Sorry for sending this email a

little late; I had fallen behind on reading the introduction and I only

just finished it.

I really enjoyed reading it. It reminded me of your way of writing

that I saw in your book Krishna in the Sky with Diamonds and in

the pieces you have on your site. It made me very happy. I feel like

it speaks exactly to what I need in my life right now: learning to

decondition myself from the social programming we have

absorbed, finding freedom, finding courage, entering what feels

like a kind of heroic rebirth.

That heroic rebirth that Krishna lives through is something I want

to live now. I am at a turning point in my life where I have been

preparing, for a long time, my metamorphosis, my transformation,

my rebirth. Now I am at the end of that preparation. I have decided

to isolate myself a little from social relationships and from the

internet and to spend much more time meditating. I converted one

of my two bedrooms into a room of total darkness so I can spend

serious time in darkness, meditating, writing, spending time with

myself, talking to myself, and being in nature. I truly want to

completely undo the conditioning. Over the last ten years, since I

discovered psychedelics, meditation, and practices of inquiry, I

really worked a lot on deconditioning, but never absolutely. This

time I would like to move much closer to the absolute, even

though, as you say, a realization can never be fully absolute.

During these coming months of isolation I plan to dive very

deeply.

I downloaded your commentary on the Bhagavata Gita to have it at

hand and to be able to work with what you say in relation to what I

am looking for. I also see many common points between the

notions you discuss in the Bhagavata Gita, such as paradox and the

absolute, and the ideas in the Kibalyon, a hermetic, alchemical

treatise I have explored a lot these past years.

  I’d like to add that I was very moved to see that what you point us

toward is not conformity or religiosity, which we so often

encounter; there is frequently an academic or religious reading that

is not liberating. And the fact that the Gita is called a chant, a

song,  I find that very beautiful, because my only real experience

of death-and-rebirth, of awakening or whatever you want to call it,

was my biggest trip more than five years ago. In that experience,

by letting go completely and plunging fully into the unknown, I

felt as if the universe was singing a music, a song, a chant to me

that explained the source. I am truly glad; I feel the Bhagavad Gita

will give me tools to undo the conditioning I am entangled in,

because even though at times in my life I went very far in

deconditioning, today I feel I have fallen back into conditioning,

and that is not something I like, I want to recover the freedom of

my soul. I feel these tools are available through the story of

Krishna and Arjuna. I also greatly appreciate the way you speak

about polarities, about the universe-as-a-whole and the absolute,

because those notions resonate with me deeply, and I feel they are

perfectly suited to what I am seeking now, and I am very grateful.  

I have two small questions I would like to ask. First, about the

Bhagavata Gita. We see that Krishna is Arjuna’s guru, but in the

end, for Krishna to attain liberation he must have had a guru

himself. Do we know if Krishna had a human guru, or did he, as

you suggest, have as guru nature, the universe, or the realizations

around him? I am curious because having the chance to have a

human guru is not obvious, and yet everything can be a guru, every

event that happens to us.

Second, since in your book Krishna in the Sky with Diamonds you

talk about psychedelics, I permit myself to ask this question. In

Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, which is based on

the Tibetan Book of the Dead and therefore stays within Eastern

frameworks, he describes that during a rebirth, whether

psychedelic entry or another kind, one can be reborn at different

levels. One can be reborn at the ordinary human level, or at lower,

painful levels, like the animal realm or the realm of psychosis. One

can also be reborn at higher levels. The step just above ordinary

humans is the heroic level he called the asuras , and then there is

the highest, the level of saints, sages, called devas. I read and re-

read Leary’s book a lot. I have oriented myself toward a heroic

rebirth. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna, though represented as a

sage we might call a deva, seems to guide Arjuna through a

transformation that feels like a heroic rebirth: Arjuna moves from

an ordinary human to someone who becomes a hero, who enters

battle. My question is whether there are stages in this rebirth. Does

a heroic rebirth precede, or lead to, a rebirth in wisdom, in purity,

in the search for transcendence, peace, and love, while the heroic

rebirth also brings desire and passion? 

Sorry if my question is fuzzy, but these are the questions I have.

Thank you very much for the time you give us, and again sorry for

the delay.

With gratitude,

PS : What a beautiful picture !

Nuit - Ali

Scott: This is terrific, Ali. I think you will find much of use to you

in the study. Your questions deserve some input.

Krishna only appears to be Arjuna’s charioteer, but in the

Gita he represents the Absolute. He is the Absolute—disguised as

the image of a person. Because Krishna is often literally

personified in other places, many people make the fatal mistake of

thinking the Gita is the same. None of it will make sense if he is

other than absolute.

The One at the center of everything has no second, and that’s

the essence of unitive thinking. There can be no other, not even a

guru. I’m just working today with the other class on Gita IX.11:

The foolish misunderstand Me because of My adopting the

human form, ignorant as they are of My being that is beyond,

as Lord of all beings,

And in X.2:

Neither the hosts of the gods, nor the great sages know My

origin; for I am indeed in every way the source of the gods and

the great sages.

Great sages are gurus, of course. These affirmations come later in

the work, because Arjuna is slowly going to realize what’s going

on. He starts out as deluded as everyone else.

For us, you’re quite right Ali, everything can be a guru.

Whatever removes our darkness. Even darkness can remove our

darkness, as you’re exploring with your dark room meditations.

As for Leary and Alpert’s book on The Tibetan Book of the

Dead, it’s right here on my shelf, but I’ve never managed to get

very far in it. As amazing and intelligent as they were, they were

mostly guessing, making their own connections, which is okay,

even exemplary, but they wandered pretty far off base from my

perspective. That’s why they call it tripping.

All those levels! Very Tibetan, and they may even exist, but

for attaining unitive consciousness, we aren’t going to speculate

about them. They are too distracting, too self-obsessed, therefore

too inhibiting. Relax! If there are levels, they come to you when

the time is right, not when you try for them.

Humans are drawn to competition and hierarchy, and we’re

aiming to rise above those kinds of aspirations. It will be an

extended learning process. I found a new way of looking at rebirth

that fits the Gita very well, without imagining future states, and

we’ll get to it pretty soon. Guru Nitya always insisted we have no

idea what comes next; what we need is to apprehend what is

happening now. Let’s live fully in the present, and in the next life,

we’ll get into what’s present then.

It’s easy to mix up levels. The asuras are demons, lower than

humans, though come to think of it we have humans in power now

who are much lower than humans, and even put asuras to shame.

We’ll meet some asuras in chapter XI, as you know. Anyway,

who’s doing the grading? Krishna only has one rant about demonic

types, in chapter XVI, otherwise it’s about Arjuna’s—and

our—education.

It’s a little like Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, which

I and my contemporaries loved, but Nitya despised. It was an early

place we bumped heads, though now I can see the weaknesses that

were obvious to him. At least it served to get us started.

Forgive me for criticizing your beloved book. I’m a big fan

of Leary and Alpert, possibly the two most important gurus from

my era.

Nita Pettigrew

Bailey Young

     Greetings fellow seekers and Gita students!  Inspired by

Scott’s remarks on why and how he came to study the Gita and

to offer to share (with the tacit blessing of Guru Nitya) what it

has taught (and keeps on teaching) him, I am going to share

with y’all a piece of memoir recently written for a blog that

since Covid began has served to keep in contact my college

classmates (Williams College 1966).  Since my retirement (Jan

1, 2022) I have been interested in figuring out how my life has

developed so far, and how to keep going. 

     So, I love, have always loved, reading books – before Williams,

at Williams, ever since.  So, at Williams I majored in English. As

graduation approached I didn’t know what I wanted to do next

with my life, but I did know one thing: that I didn’t want to go on

with English in grad school.  Try teaching literature, then, at high

school level?  My old prep school in Honolulu, Iolani, said sure,

come back here and give it a try.  That summer, though, before I

set off, my old Philosophy professor Nathaniel Lawrence looked

me in the eye one day, said: Chip, you should study history. That’s

what you’re good at.  That’s what you care about.  So, I went on

with the immediate plan to teach English at Iolani but I knew, deep

down, that this philosopher was speaking  truth-for-me, and when

by October it became clear both to me and to the Iolani English

Department that the gig there not for me a good fit, Prof

Lawrence’s counsel rang in my head loud and clear.  I applied for

the History PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania and

was accepted.  Now what?

Penn assigned me as advisor Prof Werner Gundesheimer, a rising

star in Renaissance Studies (he would rise to direct the Folger

Shakespeare Library) but when we talked I smiled and shook my

head: no, ‘tis the Middle Ages that interests me.  There wasn’t

even a medievalist at that point in the endowed medieval Lea chair

– a retired Brit was filling in that year while they searched for one. 

Well, the Late Middle Ages prepares the Renaissance, Werner was

pointing out, and again I was shaking my head: no, it’s the Early

Middle Ages that interests me, the overlap with Antiquity – what

happened to the Roman Empire?  Why did it “fall”, how did that

happen?  And how can archaeology help us understand what it

means now, for us?  (Where did it come from that day, my

confidence that this path was for me?). Ah, archaeology, says

Gundesheimer, a literary man to his eyebrows.  Go over to the

University Museum—I hear Anthropology has just hired an early

Europe guy who goes from the Iron Age into the Early Middle

Ages.  And so I came to sign on with Bernard Wailes, Oxford PhD,

who would soon be taking me along with him to Ireland to start a

new, ambitious project: excavating one of the four pre-Christian

“royal sites” attested in the earliest written sources.  The next year

the new young Lea Professor, not much older than I, came on

board at Penn: Ed Peters, trained at Yale. Ed introduced his grad

students to the broad range of documentary sources, and the host of

exciting new research perspectives that were then transforming

medieval studies.  I can’t help you with the archaeology, he told

me (Ed was becoming known for his innovative work on law and

politics in the High Middle Ages, on witchcraft and torture too):

you’ll have to figure out where you need to go and what you need

to do.  Bernard and I will support you.  So, with a $3000

fellowship to live on (gosh, what a lot of money that seemed!)  off

to France --used to be Gaul back when the Roman Empire was

declining and falling—in June of 1970 I went.  My research

subject, where was it lurking, how was I going to find it?

My luck led me to the Ardennes forest, to the door of a young

amateur archaeologist, Patrick Perin, whose for enthusiasm for the

Merovingians (then little studied) was matched by a keen critical

intellect, tireless scholarly energy, lively imagination, abundant

generosity, and delight in the shared pleasures of research well

done (among these pleasures, most definitely, good food and

drink). At the end of the weekend I had my topic: what had

funerary practices archaeologically detectable (or inferable) to do

with Merovingian “culture”, with “paganism” and the rise of

Christianity? Patrick put me on a little train winding down the

Meuse Valley to Namur, whose little museum was rich with grave-

goods, and had booked me into the major Frankish archaeology

museum and study center in Mainz.  My two years of high school

German was going to be called on – my four years of French at

Williams was making great strides, merci!  The sailing from there

on was no means all straight and straightforward –at one point I

despaired, fled to India*—but I came back to join Patrick’s

pioneering Merovingian seminar held up some back staircase in

the maze of the Sorbonne, to excavate with him in search of a

pagan temple atop Montmartre, to be among the founders of the

international Merovingian Archaeology Association and --with

Bernard Wailes and Ed Peters covering my back, as promised, at

Penn—to submit my dissertation in 1975.  By then Williams had

summoned me back as well: Whitney Stoddard and his son Brooks

had invited me to join their team excavating Psalmodi Abbey, near

Montpellier. Never mind that the prospects for a freshly-minted

PhD in History (or should he apply in Anthropology?) were

suddenly grim -- the bottom abruptly dropped from under the job

market.  Never mind! I knew now that my fealty was pledged to

the Lady Clio, History’s Muse. Psalmodi was teaching me that I

am a good archaeologist. Keep courage up, heart high and carry

on!.  A way will be found.                       

                                                                                                            

                                                                                                            

                                    *Christine –then girlfriend, subsequently

wife—and I travelled overland to India in the Fall of 1971, fell

in with a rather wonderful band of hippies called the Rainbow

Gypsies, spent January 1972 living on the beach at Goa, came

more or less by chance upon the Fernhill Gurukula in March

and ended up deciding to stay.  Nataraja Guru accepted us as

qualified to study philosophy and, after his morning teaching

time I did some basic reading, with the Word of the Guru and

his autobiography as serialized in Values as fundamental texts. 

Gradually the problems I had been wrestling with –how to

turn my disorganized research into a dissertation—began to

seem manageable, and after Guru’s samadi in March 1973 I

was confident I could write the thesis, returned to France, and

did so.  Though I never discussed history with Nataraja Guru

–indeed had very little direct personal conversation with him at

all—I had no doubt, and have no doubt, that finding my way

back onto my path, and having the confidence to keep pursuing it

in the face of adversity, count as gifts of the Guru.

Later—thoughts on religion:

November 30, Advent I) Scott particularly insists, in his Introduction,

that the Gita should not be mistaken (as it so often has been and

continues to be) as a religious text – I have a vivid memory of

Nataraja Guru saying “Don’t confuse me with religion”.  Vedanta is an

approach to Truth –the Absolute—rooted in philosophic traditions, in

open-minded inquiry informed by intellectual method.  But does

the Gita “discredit religion in no uncertain terms”?  If religion is viewed

reductively as “a guide to duty and conformity”, emphasizing social

obligations and superstitious behaviors which seek to imprison the

spirit-in-search-of-understanding within in a set of imposed thou-

shalt/thou-shalt-nots not to be questioned, then I would quite

agree.  But religion is vaster than that, and potentially also a path of

liberation.  Religion “properly understood” – a qualifier I often heard

Nataraja Guru use.  What might that mean?  Didn’t Narayana Guru,

asked what is the better or best religion, reply “Any religion is a good

religion if it makes a better human being”? This supposes an

existential rather than a prescriptive understanding of religion.

     When I travelled in India I resisted definition of myself as a

Christian, partly for the wrongful and individuality-stifling reasons to

which Scott points, and partly from revulsion at the horrors inflicted in

the name of religion over the course of history.  At the same time I

refused to be anti-religious.  Anti-religion, sometimes identified with

atheism though they are not always the same, is one of the principal

intellectual heritages of the 18 th  century Enlightenment,  and of the

Scientific Revolution too.  The philosophers and historians Voltaire in

France, David Hume in Scotland, Edward Gibbon in England mocked

Christianity as superstitious and historically obsessed with power --

guilty of abusing (or condoning abuse of) human freedom and

happiness; the biologist T.H. Huxley, contemporary and friend of

Charles Darwin, denied the existence of a God he could not find in

his test tube. Religion more generally was denounced as an

instrument of oppression.  Marx famously and tellingly derided

religion as the “opium of the people”.  In 20 th  century America the

conviction that Religion was against Science was enacted in the 1926

Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, updated today as Creationism vs

Evolution in so many places which vote right-wing.   By the 1960s

and 70’s in the circles in which I, thanks to my education and

professional choices,  moved, professing and practicing religion had

become possibly, even probably, if not wrong-headed and harmful, at

any rate uncool.

      Today I profess and practice Christianity within the Episcopal

Church, the principal American branch of the Anglican Communion.

As a young man I had drifted away from, rather than rejected, the

religious traditions to which I had been exposed in childhood and

adolescence—when I attended a school linked with the Episcopal

Church and was confirmed in it.  It was my second wife Kitch –not yet

my wife, but living with me in Paris in the early 1980s—who

persuaded me to accompany her to the American Cathedral one

Sunday.  I was surprised how much I felt at home.  We were married

in the church in her home town (Chapel Hill, North Carolina); our

daughter Emma was baptized at the American cathedral (a Hindu

friend, Usha, came as a witness; so did a Jewish friend and

colleague, Bernie) and later our son Zack was baptized in Worcester

Mass.  Not long after my Jewish-heritage-but-very-secular mother

was also baptized there at age 77.  I offer all these details at the

outset of study as context for where I stand on the religious-non

religious to anti-religious spectrum.  Nataraja Guru made his strict

neutrality clear: I am a philosopher, do not confuse me with

religion.  One can approach the Absolute from a theistic, as from a

non-theistic standpoint.  He did from time to time mention the

Goddess speaking to him in dreams, which I found comforting, and

my sense of the warmth and comfort of the feminine side of Christian

tradition (the Virgin Mary, to be sure, but we have lots of female

saints too) is a benefit I derive from my time in India.

December 11 update:

(Dec 11)  Thinking about why I want do this study again, a phrase

which keeps recurring is “trust the science”.  One saw it a lot during

Covid. It was a kind of sheep-goat separating code: we the

reasonable folks, heirs of the Enlightenment (thus of confidence in

Reason, belief in human perfectibility, problems can be solved –B.

Obama victory speech 2008: “Yes we can!”); they the suspicious folk,

clinging to fundamentalist faiths, trusting in authoritarian measures to

protect their privileges, or their hope of gaining some, or more, at the

expense of the less-or-un-worthy.  But am I really a trust-the-Science

type of guy?   The Nazis trusted science and technology, didn’t

they?  They were building rockets before anyone else.  Sure, they put

wrongful and cruel ideas first –“racial science”!!!—but they and their

Japanese allies came much closer to success in gaining and

consolidating world power than most people who haven’t studied the

history seriously grasp.  I’ve already identified myself as a History-

guy.  An hundred years ago most people who studied History

seriously bought into, whether they admitted it or not, realized it or

not, what’s called the Whig theory of History: that Progress toward a

better world, informed by Reason, ultimately drives the trajectory.  To

cite Obama again: the arc bends, in the long run, toward a better

world.  Me, I’ve never been so confident about that.  Romantic

escapism drove my attraction to history in childhood and youth, and I

am far from alone in wanting to idealize earlier times.  The Myth of a

Golden Age is potent in Chinese and Indian, as well as in Western

civilizations.  Not happy with how History is trending?  Late capitalist

global world doesn’t turn you on. Science and technology—where are

they taking us?  Eight billion of us now—or very soon?  And how

many elephants?

     As a student, as a young man these things seriously worried me,

to the point where I faltered.  Nataraja Guru gave me confidence that

I could keep seeking Truth and go ahead with my life.  I did, and here

I am: husband, father to two wonderful children, retired professor

(make that distinguished professor) of history, enjoying the comforts

and privileges of the American middle class.  Has my uneasiness

dissipated, my doubts about History’s (our planet’s) trending been

dissolved?  No.  But doing this whole class first time around was

tremendously helpful to me as I confronted all kinds of challenging

changes.  The stories of my fellow students dealing with their

challenges, Scott’s perceptive feedback—all enlightening, all

sustaining.  We are all in this story, whatever our individual paths,

together.  As the Isa Upanishad puts it: By the Lord enveloped must

this all be...