Picture the battle that stands before Prince Arjuna. With both sides ready to raise arms and fight, Arjuna lays his weapons down. He cannot stand to watch father, brother, teacher, and son fight and kill each other. Lord Krishna then convinces the prince to go into battle by discussing Wisdom and Action. I chose to look at Arjuna's dilemma in an allegorical sense. It seems as if the actual physical battle is not between men at all but rather a single man's battle between ignorance and enlightenment, between what he has known as truth and what he is being shown as truth. As Arjuna surveys the battle field from his chariot he sees people he knows, people he would not want to see die and says he'd rather be killed than any of their blood be shed. Think of this in another light. Arjuna has a fundamental decision to make. He can continue in a path of ignorance or enter the path of wisdom and correct knowledge. He can leave his life the way it is or choose to pursue something different. The battle then becomes one inside himself; one where he wants to choose to lie down and do nothing rather than deal with the presentation of a new path. He thinks it better to be overcome with ignorance than to accept knowledge. The imagery of his kinsmen to me represent a connection to the past; a connection to a previous way of life and a previous way of thinking. The battle than becomes one aimed at resorting to this old way of doing life or pursuing the path of the new one.
I very well could have missed the mark on my interpretation and think I may have but let's go with it for a minute. These chapters remind me of that point in my university career where new ideas, new paths emerged and conflicted heavily with what I had been taught to be true. I can remember sitting in World Cultures III as a sophomore contemplating the nature of God and watching the towers of knowledge I had built for myself crumble at the feet of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno. These were not particularly easy ideas to wrestle with and sent me down an increasingly difficult path. At times I wanted to lay down (and still do) and let my old convictions consume me but always someone wiser would point me back to the path of wisdom in the same way Lord Krishna does with Arjuna.
At this juncture between correct and incorrect knowledge, between ignorance and enlightenment the deciding factor becomes self knowledge. Krishna speaks of freeing the self from desire, of finding happiness in the self, and being content with nothing but the self. These things create a union between the individual and the divine, between the temporal and the everlasting. The goal of man should be to abide within his Self and be satisfied. Until one reaches this point the battle continues to rage.
I very well could have missed the mark on my interpretation and think I may have but let's go with it for a minute. These chapters remind me of that point in my university career where new ideas, new paths emerged and conflicted heavily with what I had been taught to be true. I can remember sitting in World Cultures III as a sophomore contemplating the nature of God and watching the towers of knowledge I had built for myself crumble at the feet of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno. These were not particularly easy ideas to wrestle with and sent me down an increasingly difficult path. At times I wanted to lay down (and still do) and let my old convictions consume me but always someone wiser would point me back to the path of wisdom in the same way Lord Krishna does with Arjuna.
At this juncture between correct and incorrect knowledge, between ignorance and enlightenment the deciding factor becomes self knowledge. Krishna speaks of freeing the self from desire, of finding happiness in the self, and being content with nothing but the self. These things create a union between the individual and the divine, between the temporal and the everlasting. The goal of man should be to abide within his Self and be satisfied. Until one reaches this point the battle continues to rage.
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