Emerson and Yoga The First Book of Yoga http://www.yogajournal.

com/wisdom/2509 The Bhagavad Gita has influenced great Americans from Thoreau to Oppenheimer. Its message of letting go of the fruits of one's actions is just as relevant today as it was when it was first written some two millennia ago. By Stefanie Syman At the sight of this, your Shape stupendous, Full of mouths and eyes, feet, thighs and bellies, Terrible with fangs, O master, All the worlds are fear-struck, even just as I am. When I see you, Vishnu, omnipresent, Shouldering the sky, in hues of rainbow, With your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring All my peace is gone; my heart is troubled. Doctor Atomic (act 2, scene 2, chorus) Had you attended any one of the performances of Doctor Atomic, a John Adams opera about the detonation of the first nuclear bomb near Los Alamos, New Mexico, you would have heard those words and perhaps been terrified by the image they painted of the Hindu god Vishnu. But the verse is not original to Adams's work; it was respectfully pilfered from the Bhagavad Gita (in this case the 1944 translation by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood). Adams is hardly alone among Americans to have found inspiration in this work. Rather, he's operating in a long tradition of borrowing and appropriation. If you know where to look, you can find the Gita in some of the most famous and revered works of American literature and philosophy, from Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "Brahma" to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, not to mention British pop songs that topped the American charts. As it turns out, the Bhagavad Gita has appealed to Westerners in general and Americans in particular almost since the moment they got their hands on an English translation in the middle decades of the 19th century. The Gita is the sixth book of the Mahabharata, one of India's most famous epic poems.

It's unclear exactly when the Gita was composedestimates vary widely, but a number of scholars suggest it was completed around 200 CE and then inserted into the larger work; many see it as the first fully realized yogic scripture. Curious though it may seem that such an ancient text from a foreign culture has been so enthusiastically received by Westerners, the Gita, like all truly great works of literature, can be read on many levels: metaphysical, moral, spiritual, and practical; hence its appeal. For those who haven't had the pleasure of reading it, the Gita recounts a dialogue between Arjuna, one of five Pandava princes, and the Hindu deity Krishna, who in this epic serves as Arjuna's charioteer. Arjuna and his brothers have been exiled from the kingdom of Kurukshetra for 13 years and cut off from their rightful heritage by another faction of the family; the Gita takes up their struggle to reclaim the throne, which requires that Arjuna wage war against his own kinsmen, bringing his considerable military skills to bear. The story begins on the dusty plains of Kurukshetra, where Arjuna, a famed archer, is poised to fight. But he hesitates. He sees arrayed against him friends, teachers, and kin, and believes that to fightand likely killthese men would be to commit a grievous sin and could bring nothing good even if he were to win the kingdom back. Krishna chides him for his cowardiceArjuna is from the warrior caste after all, and warriors are meant to fightbut then goes on to present a spiritual rationale for battling his enemies, one that encompasses a discussion of the karma, jnana and bhakti yogas, as well as the nature of divinity, humankind's ultimate destiny, and the purpose of mortal life. Borrowed Poetry A work of luminous and startling intensity, the Gita offers what Henry David Thoreau described as a "stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy...in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial." While no single thread has been picked up and woven into Western culture by the various thinkers, poets, songwriters, yoga teachers, and philosophers who have been drawn to the Gita, three main themes seem to have intrigued its readers: the nature of divinity; yoga, or the various ways of making contact with this divinity; and finally, the resolution of the perennial conflict between a renunciation of the worldoften considered the quickest path to spiritual enlightenmentand action.

Take Ralph Waldo Emerson. In November of 1857, Emerson made one of the most dramatic declarations of affection for the Gita imaginable: He contributed a poem titled "Brahma" to the inaugural issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The first stanza reads: "If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again." The poem owes a great debt to the Gita as well as the Katha Upanishad. The first verse in particular seems to have been lifted almost verbatim from chapter 2 of the Gita, when Krishna is trying to persuade Arjuna to fight: "The man who believeth that it is the soul which killeth, and he who thinketh that the soul may be destroyed, are both alike deceived; for it neither killeth, nor is it killed." Taken with a few lines that appear later"I am the sacrifice; I am the worship" and "He also is my beloved servant...to whom praise and blame are one"you have many elements of Emerson's poem. Emerson's journals confirm the Gita's impact on him. In the 1840s, not long after he got hold of Charles Wilkins's 1785 translation (the first English rendering of it), Emerson wrote what became the opening lines of "Brahma." A decade later the rest came to him. "Brahma" appears as an exhalation of verse between long paragraphs he had copied out of the Upanishads. What's striking about this poem, which may be somewhat lost on modern readers, is how radically different this conception of divinity was from the mainstream view of God and even from the more forgiving Unitarian God of the religious liberals who held sway in Concord and Cambridge, Massachusetts, during Emerson's life. "Brahma" the poem was a meditation on what we refer to today as Brahman, or the "Absolute, behind and above all the various deities...beings, and worlds." In Emerson's day, the names for this vast inclusive idea of divinity and the name of the creator deity of the Hindu trinity were barely distinguishable; but his description and sources give him away. Emerson was not merely trading one trinity for another. He was celebrating an idea of a God that animated everything (both slayer and slain) and dissolved all opposites ("Shadow and sunlight are the same").

Emerson's audience was less offended than bewildered by his insertion of this bit of the Gita into the Atlantic. They found his poem impenetrable and comically nonsensical. Parodies were published widely in newspapers across the country. And yet, if taken seriously, this version of divinity might be either a tremendous relief (if Brahman is behind everything, humans have far less agency than we tend to believe) or incredibly disturbing (what happens to morality when "shadow and sunlight" or good and evil are the same?). A Glorious and Ghastly God In the Gita, the most powerful articulation of this idea comes not in the second chapter, echoed in Emerson's poem, but in the 11th, when Krishna shows his true nature to Arjuna. To do this, he must temporarily give Arjuna the gift of mystic insight, for it is impossible to see Krishna in his glory with the naked eye. What Arjuna sees is a multiform image that can barely be described. It's boundless, containing all the worlds and gods, and stupefyingly beautiful, with garlands and jewels and "celestial ornaments," and it burns with the radiance of a thousand suns. At the same time, this being is terrifying, for it has "countless arms, bellies, mouths, and eyes" and brandishes divine weapons. Even more horrifying was this: As Arjuna watched, thousands rushed through the being's fangs and were crushed between his teeth, Arjuna's foes on the battlefield among them. Arjuna sees the being "lick at the worlds...devouring them with flaming mouths" (these quotations are from the Barbara Stoler Miller translation). That is, he sees endless holocausts and violence, untempered by any force known to humankind. Arjuna nearly faints. It was this very visage, at once glorious and ghastly, that J. Robert Oppenheimer invoked on one of history's most fateful days, July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer headed the team of scientists that detonated the first nuclear bomb. Upon witnessing the fireball blazing over the New Mexico desert, Oppenheimer quoted Krishna in the moment that he displays his true nature as Vishnu: "I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." Words failed Arjuna in the face of Vishnu's destructive nature, but the Gita gave Oppenheimer a language to match the power and fearsomeness of the atomic bomb. The quote has been memorialized in many articles, books, and films. And so it was that

Oppenheimer seared a piece of this yogic scripture into the minds of another generation of Americans. In fact, he had long been a student of the Gita, reading it in translation as an undergraduate at Harvard and later in Sanskrit with Arthur W. Ryder when Oppenheimer taught physics at the University of California at Berkeley. The experience was exhilarating, he said, and he found reading the Sanskrit "very easy and quite marvelous." (Albert Einstein, in contrast, was moved by the Gita's depiction of creation, and once remarked, "When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.") But what of seeing this divinity for oneself? Krishna gave Arjuna the gift of a divine eye. There's hope for the rest of us, of course, and that's in yoga. The Gita can be read as a user's guide to various types of yoga, all of which will lead to illumination and liberation. Thoreau found this possibility so compelling that he tried to practice yoga based solely on his reading of the Gita and other Indic texts in translation. By the time he wrote Walden (during the late 1840s and early 1850s), Thoreau had fairly precise ideas about yoga, which he inserted into the essay's conclusion as if recounting a hoary Hindu parable. There the American essayist tells the story of the artist of Kouroo who possessed a rare and complete single-pointed concentration and set out to carve a perfect wooden staff. Eons had passed by the time he finished, but the artist had, by his devotion to this simple task, made "the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff." The Game of Awakening More recently, people like Ram Dass as well as contemporary yoga teachers have conveyed, in supremely accessible vernacular, this more practical element of the Gita. In the summer of 1974, Ram Dass, who had been a professor of psychology at Harvard until 1963, taught a course called the Yogas of the Bhagavad Gita. The setting was historica summer session of the newly created Naropa Institute (today a university) in Boulder, Colorado, founded by Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist. Ram Dass treated reading (and teaching!) the Gita as a spiritual exercise and encouraged his students to read this work at least three times, with a slightly different perspective in mind each time. He also assigned exercises based on the Gita that could "evolve into a complete sadhana," or program for spiritual practices. These included

keeping a journal, meditating, kirtan (chanting), and even "going to Church or Temple." Over the course, Ram Dass peeled back the layers of the Gita, one by one, but he summed it up thusly: "It's about the game of awakening, about the coming into Spirit." In this context, he presented the karma, jnana, and bhakti yogas as different, if completely interrelated, ways of playing that game. Karma yoga was, in Ram Dass's formulation, an injunction: "Do your work...but without attachment." Besides giving up your attachment to the fruits of your labors, he said, you must also act "without thinking of yourself as being the actor." Personally, Ram Dass relied most on bhakti, or devotional, yoga, specifically Guru Kripa, in which the practitioner focuses on the guru and relies on the guru's grace. That summer he offered his students some ideas about how to cultivate a devotional attitude; he told them how to set up a puja table (similar to an altar) and how to know when they'd found their guru. But the point for Ram Dass was that all methods, or types of yoga, had their pitfalls and "traps"; it was the practitioner's job to use even the "traps" themselves as tools of awakening. Many contemporary yoga teachers, including Mas Vidal, the spiritual director of Dancing Shiva Yoga and Ayurveda in Los Angeles, turn to the Bhagavad Gita to balance the overemphasis on the asana practice in the West. Like Ram Dass, Vidal sees the Gita as a practical guide for "raising consciousness." He is also quick to emphasize the coherence of its approach. He presents the "four main branches of yoga" to his students as a single system: "It was never intended to be practiced as a fragmented system," Vidal insists. The branches are bhakti (love), jnana (study), karma (service), and raja (meditation). Above all, Vidal teaches the Gita as a metaphor for spiritual struggle in which the practitioner learns to use the mind and body as tools for awakeningtools that don't have much value in themselves. There is still another element of the Gita: Krishna's insistence on the value of acting in this world rather than shirking its demands, a value that has long appealed to Westerners. This concept underlies karma yoga and Krishna's insistence that Arjuna fight his kinsmen, dreadful as that seems. True, Arjuna must renounce the fruits of his actions, but he also must give up the idea that it is ever possible not to act. As Krishna explains in chapter 3 (from Barbara Stoler Miller's translation):

A man cannot escape the force of action by abstaining from actions... No one exists for even an instant without performing action Historian James A. Hijiya argues that this teaching of the Gita solves the riddle of Robert Oppenheimer's career: that he created the bomb and advocated its use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only to become a leading critic of nuclear weapons and war. Just as Krishna insisted that renouncing action was far worse than taking disciplined action (and was ultimately not possible in any case), so Oppenheimer rejected the ivory tower, and its illusion of remove, for the Manhattan Project. According to Hijiya, Oppenheimer believed scientists should "act selflessly but effectively in the world" and once said, "If you are a scientist you believe...that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world." Oppenheimer never shrank from what he considered his professional duty and was quite able to detach himself, at least in the short term, from its untoward consequences. It was, he believed, for humankind, not him, to deal with the awesome power he helped unleash, "according to its lights and values." That American thinkers, poets, and yoga teachers have drawn so much inspiration from the Gita over more than a century is a testament to this scripture's power. That they have pulled out different strands and woven them into their lives and our culture is even more remarkable considering how apologetically that first English translator presented this work. "The reader will to have the liberality to excuse the obscurity of many passages," Charles Wilkins pleaded in his translator's note to the Bhagvatgeeta, "and the confusion of sentiments which runs through the whole in its present form." Wilkins, for all his efforts, felt he hadn't fully lifted the veil of the Gita's mystery. Undeterred by such difficulties, Americans have long sung this celestial song, harmonizing it with the peculiar temperament of each era. Stefanie Syman is the author of Practice: A History of Yoga in America, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and is the editorial director of Lime.com.

19th Century Transcendentalism And The Yoga Sutras Of Patanjali: Separate Paths, Same Destination By Annie Moyer The philosophies expressed in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali contain timeless wisdom. If not, we wouldnt still be reading and contemplating its teachings thousands of years after it was first handed down by the sages of ancient India. Though the practice of yoga didnt reach this side of the Atlantic until the late 19th century, there were philosophical schools of thought prevalent in the U.S. even prior to then which were consistent with the philosophy of yoga. In particular, the Transcendentalists writings of the mid-1800s are strikingly similar to yogic teachings. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of Transcendentalism, and his most famous disciple Henry David Thoreau actually practiced yoga, their essays and poetry contain ideas and perspectives which clearly mirror those found in the Yoga Sutras. Furthermore, both Emersons and Thoreaus writings make several references to Hindu texts, which lends even more validity to the suggestion that they knewif not in practice, than certainly in intellectwhat the ancient yogis knew. Transcendentalism emerged in the 1830s with writings and speeches by a former clergyman named Ralph Waldo Emerson as an expression of his own differences with the Unitarian Church. Specifically, Emerson believed that traditional Unitarianism, and Christianity in the larger sense, alienated humanity from divinity. Instead of supreme enlightenment as something that could only be found through believing in such things as miracles performed by Jesus Christ, Emerson believed that one could find God through ones own inner striving toward spiritual communion with the divine spirit. Writings describing the movement even make reference to the ideal of a conscious union of the individual psyche, or Atman in Sanskrit, with the over-soul, life-force, or prime mover and God, or Brahman in Sanskrit. In an introduction to his translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Sanskrit scholar and meditation teacher Alistair Shearer explains the ideas behind Book One. The first challenge in the practice of yoga says Patanjali (via Shearer), is to understand and gain control over ones own mental modifications. In doing so, the aspiring yogi must not let his own perceptions of reality cloud his true nature, or he will never find truth or happiness. The individual intellect is merely the result of infinite consciousness being reflected through a particular nervous system . . . if the intellect is . . . purified by yoga . . . it becomes able to discriminate between itself and the unlimited consciousness it

reflects. The petty limitations of egoism are transcended . . . we no longer make the mistake of seeking security outside ourselves. Sutra 1.8 refers to the delusion that stems from a false impression of reality (Shearer translation). Thoreau says virtually the same thing in an essay called Life Without Principle, published in 1863. He decried what he called a devotion to trade and commerce, in which he observed his peers worshiping primarily material possessions, and believing that happiness could be found therein. He says we do not find at home our standards; because we do not worship truth, but the reflection of truth. Thoreau often advocated the contemplation of things non-material. One of the reasons Thoreau went to live for two years in a cabin he built in the woods of Walden Pond, an experience he describes in his famous essay Walden, was to escape the grind of living in a community ceaselessly concerning itself with commerce and all things associated with the production, sale, purchase, and consumption of material goods. He describes this lifestyle as a world filled with nothing but the noise of my contemporaries...all transient and fleeting, and he says he would prefer not to walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to walk even with the Builder of the universe not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. (If Thoreau saw his own times as restless and trivial, just imagine what he would say about our world today!) The second book of the Yoga Sutras contains the practical recipe for those on the path to enlightenment, and each ingredient seems to have lent its flavor to Transcendentalism. As described more generally in Book One, the aspiring practitioner must eliminate the causes of suffering, and the root of this suffering is the previously described tendency to perceive as real or permanent things that are not. Thoreau has clearly mastered this challenge, shown in his description of his peers and their fleeting lifestyles. Another cause of suffering that must be eliminated, according to the Sutras, is egoism and attachment to pleasure, whereby people ascribe their happiness to the worldly things which give them pleasure. Thoreau was the master of letting go of selfish attachment to worldly pleasures, demonstrated by his two-year stint in the woods. Ralph Waldo Emerson makes direct reference to this same letting go in his 1836 essay Nature, when he describes the essence of his own transcendence as the moment when all mean egotism vanishes. In Sutras 18 through 21 of Book Two, Patanjali describes the interaction of the gunas,

or universal energies of light, motion, and mass, and how they form sensual (e.g. relating to the senses) experiences for human beings to discern, experience, and then rise above in order to find liberation. Sri Swami Satchidananda, in his 1978 commentary on the Sutras, explains how all life is a passing show, and we should learn to enjoy each change and recognize beauty in each phase, but not to become wrapped up in any one phase. It is only for the sake of the Self that the world exists, states Sutra 2.21 (Shearer translation). In Nature, Emerson concurs. In its ministry to man, [nature] is not only the material, but also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each others hands for the profit of man . . . in divine charity. He is not saying that man owns nature, but that each event in the cycle of nature (he describes the wind sowing the seed, the sun evaporating the sea, the rain feeding the plant, the plant feeding the animal, etc.) is one in which man can rejoice, appreciate, and from which man can then move on. The catalogue [of acts of nature] is endless . . . this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he may work, says Emerson. In other words, the bounties of nature exist not for selfish enjoyment or glutinous consumption, but to nourish man along his quest for enlightenment. The opening of Emersons essay consists of a six-line verse which encapsulates this idea: A subtle chain of countless rings The next unto the farthest brings; The eye reads omens where it goes, And speaks all languages the rose; And, striving to be man, the worm Mounts through all the spires of form. Nature is simply one act of God after the next. The eye to which Emerson refers is comparable to Patanjalis Purusha (seer in Sanskrit), which sees each of these acts/results of nature, but must not get stuck in any one of them in particular. Each act of nature each rosespeaks to all of us equally with simple, fleeting beauty. Our challenge as enlightened beings is to see the events of beauty (and of darkness) as they come, and let them flow through us without hindering us. The basic substance of truth, like Emersons worm taking on different forms, never changes.

Also found in Book Two of the Sutras is the description of the eight-limbed path of yoga, including the yamas and the niyamas, often regarded as the yogic Ten Commandments. The first of those paths lists the yamas, or ethical disciplines. Topping this list is the practice of non-violence, stated in the Sutras as ahimsa, meaning without harming. Satchidananda explains that it does not simply mean to avoid direct violence to others, but to consciously and purposefully avoid any word, deed, or thought which has the capacity to cause pain. The practice of non-violent protest made so famous by Mahatma Gandhis fight for Indias independence from English colonial rule, and later in the U.S. by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, was widely credited to Henry David Thoreaus actions in protesting his governments stand on slavery. Although Thoreaus home state of Massachusetts was a non-slaveholding state, it did not specifically outlaw slavery; furthermore, it supported the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, in which a runaway slave could be legally returned to that slaves home state, and state of slavery. This infuriated Thoreau. In his widely noted 1849 work Civil Disobedience, Thoreau narrates his experience of being jailed for a night for his refusal to pay his state taxes, and he explains his reasons for not doing so: If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood . . . Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a mans real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now. It is not enough for Thoreau to avoid literally shedding another mans blood. He sees consequences in all of his actions, and he refuses to engage in any action from which the end result would bring harm. In addition to ahimsa, another of the yamas comes across clearly in the transcendentalists writings. This is aparigraha, which means to be free from hoarding or collecting. The Sutras teach us not collect things we do not need or cannot use. In a poem titled Each and All, first published in 1839, Emerson describes the lesson of aparigraha, which is that so often, once we acquire things we think we want or need, they lose their ability to please or satisfy us, and we simply move on to acquiring the next thing we believe will bring us happiness. I thought the sparrows note from heaven, Singing at dawn on the alder bough;

I brought him home, in his nest, at even; He sings the song, but it cheers not now. The delicate shells lay on the shore; The bubbles of the latest wave Fresh pearls to their enamel gave . . . I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. In this poem, he falls in love with the beauty of the sparrows song and the treasures he finds on the beach, so much so that collected them all in a 19th century poetic equivalent of a shopping spree. But as soon as he owned the things that brought him so much joy, that very joy and beauty were gone. By the end of the poem, after narrating half a dozen similar experiences, Emerson concludes that he cannot, nor should not endeavor, to own what his senses desire: Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole. In Sutras 22-26 of Book Two, Patanjali describes the relationship between Purusha, the seer, or the conscious human mind, and Prakriti, what is seen in nature, e.g. everything in the material world. He instructs that once humans learn to discriminate between their true Self and everything else in the physical world, they will experience liberation. Satchidananda elaborates: If we think we are bound, we are bound. If we think we are liberated, we are liberated . . . It is only when we transcend the mind that we are free from all these troubles. In Civil Disobedience as he describes his night behind bars, Thoreau elaborates on this idea of the transcendent power of the mind: I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar . . . I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance . . . As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body.

Emerson, too, writes about the power of the mind to affect ones own reality in his 1857 poem Brahma. Here are the first two quatrains: If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain thinks he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same;Bhagavad-gita, or Gitopanisad (the essence of the Upanisads), as it is often referred to, is a classic text delineating yogic, or spiritual, discipline. It is found within the epic Mahabharata, and is comprised of a dialogue between Krsna and Arjuna, primary figures of the Mahabharata. The setting for their conversation is on a battlefield just prior to an immense battle, a place where one often finds the weightiest subject matters discussed. Arjuna asks Krsna why there is suffering, not only on the battlefield, but also everywhere in life. Krsna answers Arjuna's questions, and ultimately Arjuna surrenders to Krsna, and receives instruction from Him. What Krsna describes in the Gita are the principles of Bhakti yoga, i.e., the ABC's of yogic, or spiritual, life. Included is the explanation of the principles on which the entire world is based, and how one can act within it in a manner that frees one from samsara, or the cycle of birth and death. In a sense, Arjuna is representing us all. True, we're all not on a military battlefield, but our lives here in the world are a struggle to keep our heads above the water physically, emotionally, intellectually, ethically, and morally. Ultimately, each of us will leave this world, just as an unfortunate soldier will die on the battlefield. How much better if we have lived a life of true knowledge and understanding. The Gita's teachings give a foundation for a life of purpose and realization, something sorely lacking in the world at this time in history. The knowledge contained in Bhagavad-gita can direct us to realization of the yogic principles, knowing which we can perfect our lives reestablishing our individual and eternal relationship with the Absolute Truth.

The American Transcendentalists were readers of the Gita. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journals of the Gita, I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions that exercise us. Thoreau took the Gita with him to Walden Pond. Of it, he wrote: The reader is nowhere raised into and sustained in a bigger, purer, or rarer region of thought than in the Bhagavad-gita. At the Bhakti Yoga Club get-togethers we use the Bhagavad-gita to explore the breadth of Bhakti thought, and it is through its study that the subtle precepts of Bhakti can be easily understood. The version we use is Bhagavad-gita As It Is, with translations and explanations by A. C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the foremost practitioner of Bhakti Yoga in this age. This translation has won the acclaim of scholars and is the most widely used translation in the world, with over 32 million copies in print. The club has enough copies for everyone to use during class.

The vanished Gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. The title itself, a Sanskrit word translated by Satchidananda as the un-manifest supreme consciousness or God, suggests the idea expressed in yoga that this divine power is one which resides within each human being, accessible to all who tread the path toward enlightenment. Those who believe they are bound by their relationship to the physical worldbeing a slayer, or one who has been slain, perceiving objects as far, forgotten, dark or light, or being attached to feelings of shame or pride will be trapped by this belief. Those who know the subtle ways to achieve freedom by adopting meditative, transcendent states of mind will never be imprisoned by circumstance or emotion. In the introduction to his book Light on Yoga, B.K.S. Iyengar, one of the foremost practitioners and teachers of yoga in the world, speaks to the concept of freedom. He refers to it as a deliverance from contact with pain and sorrow, which one can achieve

only when ones mind, intellect and self are under control, freed from restless desire. Thoreau, too, speaks of freedom in his 1862 essay Walking. He quotes ancient Hindu scripture on the topic of knowledge and its relationship to liberation: The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws both of heaven and earth, by virtue of his relation to the Law-maker. That is active duty, says the Vishnu Purana, which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation; all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge, is only the cleverness of an artist. So man has the ability to know many things facts, figures, other people, and any other superficial aspect of his own world. But this sort of knowledge is simply a reflection of true knowledge. And true knowledge can come only from act of turning inward (active duty the practice of yoga or, in Thoreaus terms, taking the liberty to live). This is the way the only way to achieve true freedom. Sutra 1.13 states, The practice of yoga is the commitment to become established in the state of freedom. And Sutra 1.16: Supreme freedom is that complete liberation from the world of change that comes with knowing the unbounded self. (Shearer translations). In Nature, Emerson he explains how important it is for human beings to take time away from daily society and contemplate not only nature, but the supernatural. He speaks of adjusting his inward and outward senses, and creating a mental state for himself in which nothing can befall me in life . . . Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space . . . I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The most important concepts of yoga are found in this short passage: grounding the physical body, letting go of the ego, allowing the prana and the consciousness to rise up through an unhindered body, and becoming one with a divine spirit. I can just picture Emerson now, in a tadasana-like stance, gazing out at a beautiful New England sunset, chakras aligned, mind turned inward, having found that so-often elusive free-flowing union of body and spirit. Bibliography Reuben, Paul P, Chapter 4: Early Nineteenth Century - American Transcendentalism: A Brief Introduction. PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap4/4intro.html (login Dec. 17, 2002) The American Tradition in Literature, 5th edition. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Croom

Beatty et. al. 1956, Random House, New York, NY. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Translated and introduced by Alistair Shearer. 1982, Bell Tower, New York, NY. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Translation and commentary by Sri Swami Satchidananda, 1978, Integral Yoga Publications, Yogaville, VA. The Thoreau Reader. Richard Lenat. http://eserver.org/thoreau/thoreau.html (login Dec. 20, 2002) American Literature: Readings and Critiques. Ed. R.W. Stallman and Arthur Waldhorn G.P Putman Sons, New York, NY 1961 http://www.sunandmoonstudio.com/YogaArticle/transcend.shtml

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Share: Patheos.Com: The Bhagavad Gita's True Intent Washington, D.C. (January 16, 2012) - Professor Ramesh Rao, HAF's Human Rights

Coordinator, is a regular contributor to Patheos. Below is his latest piece. Please post your comments directly on Patheos by clicking here. These days when it seems everyone is talking, and everyone else is relaying whatever everyone is talking about, truth seems to be scarce and difficult to find, even at a premium. And since everyone is talking, the media, which once acted as gatekeepers and minders of truths, now find that the only way to get the attention of the jabbering masses accustomed to "free newspapers" and "limitless talking" is to resort to hyperbole, to add "masala" to bland news, and to curry the favors of their distracted and disgruntled "fly by" readers. And when everyone can weigh in on anything and usually does, the experts, the scholars, and the careful observers also have to do their trapeze acts to get the attention that they once had taken for granted. So it is that I read The New York Times these days with a chuckle, when there is a long analysis on how yoga can wreck your body, and why you better not take it up at all, or whether yoga is for narcissists, and wonder whether the "Old Gray Lady" has just become even more of an old curmudgeon or whether she has begun to wear her blouse low, in her old age, so that like the rest of them, she too can display her cleavage and get some attention from some chance passersby! And so it is too that I find an economics professor, an Indian to boot, indulging in the kind of juvenile analysis of the Bhagavad Gita that only juveniles do, or either fundamentalist Bible thumpers used to do, or snide "Hinduism experts" did hiding behind "I was misquoted" excuses. The economist and professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, Lord Meghnad Desai, held forth on the sacred Hindu treatise, and questioned his fellow Gujarati, Mahatma Gandhi's, endorsement of the Bhagavad Gita. Desai, an avowed atheist, and now it seems an avowed demagogue, was speaking on "Gandhiji's views on violence," at the twelfth Prof. Ramlal Parikh Memorial Lecture series. We do not know how the old, the wizened, and the very Gujarati audience in India responded to Desai's "literal," and it seems superficial reading of the Gita, or to the criticism of the most well-known Gujarati and proponent of nonviolence by a frizzy-haired Gujarati "Lord" of whom very few Indians have heard or know about. Below is a summary of Desai's commentary on Mahatma Gandhi, and more

dangerously, against the Bhagavad Gita: "Bhagavad Gita justifies violence," he said, and ". . . if it does so, then why did Gandhiji approve of it?" "Gandhi argued that Arjuna was blinded by his relationship with the opponent during the Mahabharata war, which was nothing less than a holocaust . . . Arjuna (in Gandhi's opinion) deserved to be re-educated by Krishna that killing was his 'Dharma' (duty) and not a bad thing." "Is there a justification in casting Arjuna as if in darkness? Gandhiji singling out the relationship angle as the objection to Arjuna's doubt is what I find surprising." "Gandhiji's over-all attack on Arjuna's reluctance to kill is which I think is not proper. . . . Argument that killing does not matter because you are duty-bound to do it is a highly dangerous argument." One wonders if Dr. Desai did his homework, and if he did, countered the evaluations by men and women greater than him, including Mahatma Gandhi, on the true nature and import of the Gita. Here is just a small selection of what others, more sagacious than Desai, have said about the Bhagavad Gita: "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial."Henry David Thoreau "The Bhagavad Gita is an empire of thought and in its philosophical teachings Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged montheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanishadic absolute."Ralph Waldo Emerson "The secret of karma yoga which is to perform actions without any fruitive desires is taught by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita."Swami Vivekananda "From a clear knowledge of the Bhagavad-Gita all the goals of human existence become fulfilled. Bhagavad Gita is the manifest quintessence of all the teachings of the Vedic scriptures."Shri Adi Shankara "When I read the Bhagavad Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous."Albert Einstein "The Bhagavad Gita has a profound influence on the spirit of mankind by its devotion to God which is manifested by actions."Dr. Albert Schweitzer

"The Bhagavad Gita is a true scripture of the human race a living creation rather than a book, with a new message for every age and a new meaning for every civilization." Shri Aurobindo "The marvel of the Bhagavad Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion."Herman Hesse "The Bhagavad Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity."Aldous Huxley "In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad Gita with full understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it."Rudolph Steiner There is even a careful thesis on how the Bhagavad Gita influenced Thoreau, and Dr. Desai could have downloaded it on Kindle for a sum of less than ten dollars. In his book, The Gita within Walden, author Paul Friedrich unpacks the connections between these two spiritual classics, Henry David Thoreau's Walden and the Bhagavad Gita. It is said, and there is evidence, that Thoreau took the Gita with him when he moved to Walden Pond. Friedrich argues that Walden and the Gita have "much in common, touching on ultimate ethical and metaphysical questions." In both books, Walden and the Gita, according to Friedrich, the "fundamental problems of good and evil, self and cosmos, duty and passion, reality and illusion, political engagement and philosophical meditation, sensuous wildness and ascetic devotion" are pondered. Reviewing Friedrich's book, Steven Schroeder observes that in each case (Walden and the Gita), ". . . the poet is a seer, and 'seeing' is a matter not just of the eyes but of the whole body, the whole body of the text, the whole body of a world embodied in text that is self-consciously . . . marked . . . by the interplay of uniqueness and antecedent sources." Thoreau too realizes, just like in the Gita, "violence is bad, but social evil is worse." Schroeder finds Friedrich's reading of the Gita and the Walden, correct, careful, and sensitive, and " . . . as Gandhi and King would both insist . . . social evil is violence." Social evil is radical violence in the sense that it penetrates to the root of humanity and the violence it breeds will have to be confronted rather than people "simply succumbing to it." This is what Thoreau, Gandhi, and King realized and this is why Lord Krishna warns Arjuna about shutting his eyes to social evil. He tells Arjuna that you cannot afford not to tackle social evil just because it means that you may have to use violence

even using violence against your own kith and kin, if indeed they are the perpetrators of social evil. Michel Danino too cautions us about the discussion of violence in the Gita, and asks us to think carefully: "The Gita's answer is 'spiritual works.' This means, first, no egoism in our action, no expectation of any gain or reward. . . . Not so easy in practice, yet a most soothing way to admit that our intellect is simply incapable of gauging the workings of the universe. We may erect systems of philosophy and speculate forever, but in the end we cannot know what is really good or bad, right or wrong. We remain pitifully ignorant of what we are or who we are, why we do what we do, and whether our action is of any use at all, or just some passing ripple on the great ocean of life. . . . But 'spiritual works' also means that we must surrender our petty limitations and unite our consciousness with the Divine consciousness in the very midst of action. This surrender to oneness with the Divine vision and action is the cornerstone of the Karmayoga of the Gita. It asks us to be 'with our consciousness founded in the Self, free from desire and egoism'." Danino has tackled what may seem to some, including the glib Dr. Desai, as well as to Prof. Wendy Doniger, an advocacy of violence in the Gita. The Gita, he reminds us, is not a simplistic and superficial treatise. There are no simple oppositionsgood/bad, just/unjust, violence/nonviolencebut to "the Gita the truth is neither one nor the other, but the conscious use of force to protect dharma. This third way is both a noble and a practical solution." Till such time "soul force" can be used to thwart the evil designs of murderous jihadis, for example, what should good people do? That is the fundamental question in the Gita, and Lord Krishna is giving courage to a man who at the point of doing battle is overcome with queasiness about tackling evil. Alas, for the glib economist it seems that sensing, sense-making, and sensitivity have become alien, and thus, at least going by the media accounts, he has become illiterate too in matters of the grandly spiritual and philosophical. Did Lord Desai do his homework before he decided to pontificate in a pugnacious way, imitating the other and more well-known British atheist, Richard Dawkins, on the Bhagavad Gita? Dawkins at least has had the wisdom to keep away from Hindu texts and philosophy in his attacks on religion, tackling only Christianity because he is most comfortable and knowledgeable about the history of Christians and their use of the good book to make tall claims. But where the good scientist feared to tread, the pretentious

"social scientist" tramples all over the place. Listen to Lord Desai at your own peril. Meanwhile, read the Bhagavad Gita carefully, thoughtfully, fully and come to understand the challenges of being human, of being good, of acting without desiring the fruits thereof. IMPACTAchievements and Milestones JOIN USBecome a member online or via check DONATE TODAYMake an online contribution now About Issues Resources Events Membership Contact Us 2009 HAFsite.org - Powered by \\Verritech http://www.hafsite.org/media/pr/patheoscom-bhagavad-gitas-true-intent The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson By Ralph Waldo Emerson, Modern Library; 2000 Modern Library Pbk. Ed edition, 560 pages. (Emersons essays are also available as free downloads at the kindle store and public domain websites and other eBook sites) Back to Basics: Reading Emerson Reading Emerson might make readers slightly sad (more about that later), not that Emerson expresses gloom in his most influential essays: Nature, TheDivinity School Address, and Self Reliance. His words reflect the optimism he felt for the power of the individual to understand how they fit into the world and how they might serve their community and country. A child of the American Revolution, he and his audience lived with parents and grandparents who had fought the revolution and still carried the stigma of being less civilized than residents of England and the other mother countries. The United States citizenry must have reveled in national pride when reading that wisdom did not depend on the dogma of the old country. Advertisement When Emerson says, Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, he aptly draws the reader into a contemplative state. We readers are easily convinced that we are capable of a reasoning life and original thoughts. We can go on walks, escape the salesmanship of civilization, and figure out our place in the world. We reflect along with Emerson as he

enjoys his happy catharsis. In the presence of nature a wild delight runs though the man, in spite of real sorrowsNature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. Our reasoning mind traces Emersons thoughts. His ideas seemed chiseled into fine points. These essays were refined during sermons, and the author noted where the audience was captivated, provoked, or disinterested. We can almost here the Amen, after the deep and simple aphorisms that punctuate Emersons essays: A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer. Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. God enters by a private door into every individual. Emerson appeals to the readers ego, and he appeals to those who think a nature walk is the best place to plan and examine a life. He says: In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. He cleverly opens our minds to his ideas. Whenever his thoughts have a familiar edge, we think, ah yes, the genius of my mind has also nibbled on this idea. We feel as if we are letting Emerson complete the thought that we began. Borrowing his genius, and imagining it as partially our own, is quite gratifying. Rereading Emerson, a decade or so after your first reading is also satisfying. Why the sadness mentioned earlier? Reading Emerson, and his constant theme of individual thought and the sanctity of nature and the human mind, leads us to believe that humanity can be brought to a higher level when each individual exploits his or own mind and acts according to his or her own ethics. Emerson can so convince the reader of the highest aspirations of the human potential that we expect to look up from his text, written in the 1830s, and find a nation with his brand of self reliance the prominent theme of the land. Instead, the rugged individualism, which makes up much of the character of our national culture, seems more selfish than enlightened-- more imbued withaggressive foreign policy and political policies that are more concerned with corporate rights than peoples rights, bold in excesses of capitalism and consumerism, exploitative of natural resources and predatory business practices-- than influenced by an Emersonian philosophy. This philosophy could be interpreted as: let every person find their own best self by reflecting in and upon the harmony found in Nature.The mere fact that we believe Emersons words should have created a more perfect society

speaks to the power of his prose over our thinking. Yet, to some extent, his words still live, still change minds, and still guide his readers. His words may yet convince the nation "It is the vulgarity of this country to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use of design, is merit." Emersons optimism, now churning in many despite a measure of sad skepticism, can make us believe in our power within our own sphere. A thoughtful reading of any of his essays reveals words and ideas with sensitivities towards peace, social justice, and stewardship. Emerson essays are essential. They remind us that being our best is a conscious act that has nothing to do with power or aquisition, but rather is about finding a way to walk in harmony with our gifts, so we may serve others and find happiness. Amy Lou Jenkins is the author of Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting winner of the Ellis / Henderson Award for Outdoor Writing. See excerpt in Wisconsin People and Ideas.This review appeared previously in The Sierra Club's Muir View. If you have a book or film youd like Amy Lou to review, contact her through her website at www.AmyLouJenkins.com. http://www.examiner.com/review/the-essential-writings-of-ralph-waldo-emerson-whyare-they-essential