#brahman

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two cows standing side on facing each other. the cow on the left is a large brown brahman with long floppy ears. the cow on the right is a young black angus heifer. she is very fluffy

The girls are friends

I’m a little behind but I’ve got a couple of days off that I think will allow me to work through some material this week. This chapter starts with Krishna speaking about how if you devote your whole mind you will be granted an understanding without doubt. He says that “(his) Prakriti is of eightfold composition: earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intellect, and ego” I still think of Prakriti as stardust which seems to include all the elements of reality and life. “I am the birth of this cosmos: Its dissolution also” or in other words stardust as a creative and destructive force.

I love that idea because it can and does encompass all religions and science. It is followed with a common claim that there is “No other beside me.” If you are everything and everything is you, that would be a true and understandable statement in a multi-god universe. This kind of knowledge it appears to me is power and is something that many elderly people find as they live and experience- that all life is connected.

Later he says that the man who know him, “Knows that Brahman is all” and that it doesn’t matter which deity you worship it is good enough. This feels right and part of a universal concept that we find later in Christianity when before the split between the groups who fought over the power of the church vs individual relationships with God. I find it interesting that we are still finding these questions central and foundational to our relationship to the divine. If anyone can remind me who the Roman attorney was who lost that argument I’d appreciate it.

There is a passage in the Bhagavad Gita that has Krishna tell all the efforts he’s made to help mankind grow in knowledge. He taught Vivaswat who taught Manu (Noah) and then through that line of training he led the Seven Sages which I’m convinced is a college of knowledge not seven people. We didn’t maintain the knowledge though and it was lost. He also confirms that he has always been here as Vishnu and he is the master of his Maya (stardust you might say). He says that when man becomes weak, as it had at the start of the Mahabharata, he makes himself a body and returns to the world to “to deliver the holy, To destroy the sin of the sinner, To establish righteousness. He tries in each age to teach the path to man since all paths lead to him.
 
When walking the path men you understand the nature of Vishnu will never become slaves to the fallacy of action and sense. "He who sees the inaction that is in action, and the action that is in inaction, is wise indeed.” He will be in touch with his Atman and he knows that doing and being is enough. He is contented with the acts of the world as the hand of God. True knowledge of the Atman and Vishnu leads to Brahman in all things and shows that the act of living is a right thing. You follow one of the many paths to God and once you know your path, your relationship with your soul and its relation to the universe you are free. “The fire of knowledge turns all karmas to ash.”
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