Interval 7
Presented on: Saturday, September 29, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come today to the Bhagavad Gita, Interval Seven and it's appropriate that there is construction going on across the street, with jackhammers and compressor machines, because the Bhagavad Gita takes place in the middle of a war. And even deeper, it takes place in the middle of the middle of the war and even more precise, it takes place as a dialogue that pirouettes in two great spirals that interweave together and create a tapestry within the middle of the middle and so the Bhagavad Gita is one of the great classics of spiritual wisdom. We live in age where games take the place of learning and where indoctrination and induction and initiation take the place of education. But the maturation of our completeness and our perfection requires learning and requires an education. The games that are played play a very important part, a trigger part, in the great epic the Mahabharata. This is a translation in 12 volumes, one of the rare times that someone lived long enough to complete the entire translation of the Mahabharata out of the Ancient Sanskrit. The greatest of all the translations would have been that done by van Buitenen, J.A.B. van Buitenen and University of Chicago Press had published three volumes of it and he was just ready to work on the Bhagavad Gita and he died. And in the 40 years since, no one has come forth to finish it. It's interesting because in the trigger point of the early Bhagavad Gita there is a game of dice and a professional gambler, who's a relative of the mother of one of the competing factions of young men, challenges one of the young men of a competing faction to a game of dice. And of course the professional gambler cannot lose, he always wins and in betting constantly, raising the stakes to try and recover, the figure losing everything and his name is Yudhisthira. And Yudhisthira becomes later the great king of ancient India. His father is Dharma, 'Truth,' because his father could not in any way have sexual relations with either of his two wives, he was under a curse that if he did he would die. And so he goes into a retreat and the two wives, Kunti and Madri, decide to stay with him, to tend to him, to maintain the quality of relationality, without having any hope for children, except that one of the wives, the first wife, named Kunti, had had a very special tie, yogically, with the sun and that the sun had shown that there was a magical way for her to have a child and gave her a son by the sun and his name was Karna. And in the Mahabharata Karna, as a babe, is put into a little basket of reeds and set adrift on a stream and a chariot driver, just like a cab driver, sees the baby in the basket, rescues it and raises the child, who turns out to be an enormous warrior, the 'Son of the sun.' He does not know his mother, or his father and he does not know that his mother now has remarried and has gone into retreat with Pandava and Pandu and Kunti and Madri are talking and all of a sudden Kunti reveals that she knows a secret mantra from the sun, by which children can be conceived magically. And so she conceives three sons with this mantra and the first son that she conceives is Yudhisthira, he becomes the oldest. The second is a monster warrior named Bhima, which means 'The fearful one' and the third is Arjuna, the greatest warrior of all time, particularly famed for his accuracy with the bow. The other wife, Madri, realises that she would like to have a magic with the mantra and it is loaned to her and she has twin sons, Sahadev and Nakula. And so these five sons of Pandu have all come magically, three and two and as a five they now constitute a royal challenge, because Pandu was the legitimate king of the whole complex of kingdoms, but because he could not have a son he gave over the rule to his brother, Dhritarashtra, who unfortunately could never have been a king under any special circumstances because he was born blind. And blind Dhritarashtra then holds not the kingship so much, but the stewardship in case and when Pandu returns, or his sons return, if he is able to ever have a son, to take over the kingdom again. The five sons of Pandu, when they are mature, when they are in their twentieth year - they are all born about the same time, they are all magical, so they're all about the same age - and when they come back to claim their right to the kingdom and Yudhisthira as the king, the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra and his wife, led by a very fierce young man named Duryodhana, refuse to give it up. And one of the lines in the Mahabharata, he says, 'I will not give them an inch. I will not give them enough soil to occupy the point of a needle. If they want anything they will have to fight for it. And we have all of the power figures of our time. We have as leader of our side, Bhishma, who would have been the king except that he took a vow never to have relations with women, therefore never to have a son.' And Bhishma is this fabulous, old warrior, a general of great strategic capability and right next to him is the teacher of warfare, Drona and then who comes into the household, but Karna, who strikes up a special relationship with Duryodhana. And so you have pitted against the five Pandavas, three of the greatest warriors of the time and while Yudhisthira is a very special person and obviously a king, royal, he is not the kind of warrior who's a match on the field, whereas Bhima is, Arjuna is, but they have a third ally who makes it even and the third ally that comes in is Krishna. Krishna, who has taken the form of a man to be able to participate for a while in this great threshold drama. The threshold drama was a war that actually took place in ancient northern India, near where the Yamuna River, large river that flows down now to where it flows into the Ganges and New Delhi is located there. And further up the Yamuna is the land of the Kurus and the field of the Kurus, Kurukshetra, is where the great battle of the Mahabharata, the Great Indian War, takes place and historically it took place in 3102 BC, 5,000 years ago.
The quality of Krishna, he offers to Duryodhana, 'What will you choose if you have a choice between me as myself - and I will not fight - and all of the special legions of devas and spirit beings and they will fight and fight to the death for you. Which will you choose?' And Duryodhana says, 'Well, I choose all of these figures.' Arjuna looks over to Yudhisthira and he says, 'I choose you.' He says, 'Knowing I will not fight, yes, I choose you.' Because there is something about Krishna who is able to evoke and bring out very special extra efforts, extra powers and the central figure for whom he does this is Arjuna. While Arjuna, while he is training with Drona, Drona sets up a fake bird, like a hawk, on a spinning wheel, way up on a pinnacle and he has all of the young men raise their bows and arrows. Peter Brook's great film, six hour film, on the Mahabharata has their arrows and their bows drawn. This...then Drona asks, 'What do you see?' And they see the bird, they see the sky, they see the pinnacle, they see the bow, they see their arm, they see the arrow and he dismisses all of them, 'Go back, sit down.' Arjuna, when asked, says, 'I see the eye of the bird.' 'And what else do you see?' 'I cannot see anything but the eye of the bird.' 'Shoot,' says Drona. And Arjuna sends an arrow completely through the eye. Watching this is the entrance of Karna and he comes in and says, 'I can do just as well.' And takes a bow, has the bird spin and puts the bow behind his head and without looking, shoots and then says with great warrior pride, 'I hit it in the left eye.' And so one gets the sense that there is an imbalance slightly, where the Pandavas, though they have right on their side, dharma on their side, the strength, the authority, the machinations of the gurus are going to win, they're going to be greater. Except that with Krishna and with the deep capacity to go even deeper than dharma, or one should say in the ancient tradition, it was never so much deeper, it's not that the spirit is an inner life, but that the spirit is Himalaya Ranges of outer capacities, resonances of oneself, that can be evoked, can grow, can increase. And so it is called then not just the field of dharma, which is complete. The natural cycle of our four phases, from Nature, to Ritual, to Myth, to Symbol, is a complete circle. It is completed. The mind in its symbols can complete the cycle of nature and this is truth, this is dharma, but there is beyond that something further and it is traditionally called in India, the 'High Dharma.' It means that there are qualities that can be matured, dimensions that can be expanded, that there becomes more capacity to you than you would ever have been able to think of more and these are orders of power that have a set, which is a harmonic that extends its resonances into the infinite. 'Pashupata' is the ability to step up your energy beyond completeness, into realms of perfection, that perfection exceeds completeness. That completeness may be the target and it may be the centre of the target. It may be the point of the bullseye in the target, but the High Dharma has always said and it was used as a title of a book by Laura Huxley, when writing about her deceased husband Aldous Huxley, her book is entitled You Are Not the Target. You are real beyond this and the reality as it extends, your powers become transformative. They are not just big powers, but they are powers of powers and so your capacities grow ordinally. And so the four phases that come in our second year are High Dharma phases of an ecology of differential consciousness, that when it comes into its really High Dharma play, is known as history and history is a kaleidoscopic consciousness. In Sanskrit, history is 'Itihasa' and itihasa is the perfection of the capacities for action beyond completeness of the world, for the prismatic spirit person to transform whatever needs to be transformed. To create the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history and when that is created, what fades, what evaporates, is the power of mythic horizons. Myth loses its power and history gains its power. The portrait of a person becomes an expansion of the character of someone in a methos and with the expansion it includes the character, so the character is not lost, but stereotyped characterisations are lost, because one knows more, one knows better, one is more, one is better. And so in this way, history brings an evaporation of the process by which the mind symbolises in the first place, brings itself together into forms and now the mind must learn, instead of looking back to the world, must look forward out to the stars, must look out to possibilities and that its source now becomes not myth, but vision. And when vision is the source of the symbolic mind, symbols now learn not to aim for a completeness, but to aim for a reasonable completeness that leaves openings whereby change can happen, whereby the circle is not completed, but is extended and the form that does this is the spiral. And so with the mind now able to source itself in vision, instead of a circle and its geometries, one has a spiral and its chiral, kinetic, magnetic qualities and dimensions. And as that spiral continues, it opens out more and more and so you get a universal form of a spiral, that at each turn opens further and further and its extension is to carry the field of consciousness into play, such that at any point on the spiral one also is accessing the field of, in our Western tradition, we call that the 'Cosmos.' In India it is called 'Brahman.' And the portrait of the spiritual, prismatic, personation of Brahman is Brahma. And it is Brahma who comes and finds a special sage named Vyasa, who is getting set to compose the Mahabharata and to put it into writing once and for all and that the Mahabharata will not just be the war, but all of the details, kaleidoscopically, like a crystal that has facets of every aspect and the Mahabharata then will be 100,000 verses. In Sanskrit they're called 'Slokas,' 'Twin lines' and that these tuned twin line slokas, when twinned together we call them 'Quatrains' and they will be able then to assume a very special kind of poetic, a poetic which cannot be really translated into English. The first successful translation of the Bhagavad Gita into English was done by Sir Edwin Arnold and he called it The Song Celestial. And he wrote this:
There is little else to say which The Song Celestial does not explain for itself. The Sanskrit original is written in the anu??ubh metre, which cannot be successfully reproduced for Western ears. I have therefore cast it into our flexible blank verse, changing into lyrical measures where the text itself similarly breaks. For the most part I believe the sense to be faithfully preserved in the following pages.
And The Song Celestial is the first time that it was able to be presented in such a way that the Bhagavad Gita, shown as the prism of the person at the point in which the Mahabharata has a very interesting structure. These 12 books blocked together are the Mahabharata. The little paperbound is inserted where the Bhagavad Gita is in the Mahabharata at about the same proportion. It is this prism that is able to take the field of the Mahabharata and present it in such a way that the human being who has brought their dharma to this, not this point, but to this prismatic capability, is able now to take whatever light comes, shedding light on something and to prismatically show the whole rainbow of what that light is composed about, so that one now has a rainbow mind. One does not just see by the light of day, one sees by the full spectrum of light, in its cosmic capacities. Now one can see into, one can see through, one can see beyond and around and in all the colours of the possibilities of light. It is this seeing that shows that sight, now with insight, has a very special, unlimited capacity. It can be refined forever, there is no limit to the refinement that we are capable of. You don't have to evolve to aliens in the future, of any kind.
Now, The Song Celestial came out in 1885 and it was the anniversary of the very first translation of the Bhagavad Gita into English by Charles Wilkins, 1785, in London. And it was this version of Wilkins' from 1785, that most people had read up until Edwin Arnold's Song Celestial. It was, for instance, the copy of the Bhagavad Gita that Emerson read throughout his life. He never changed, he never stepped himself up to other translations to compare, he just relied on that one. And it's interesting because when a man named Thomas...it's pronounced 'Chumley,' but it's spelled 'Cholmondeley.' When Thomas Cholmondeley came from England to Concord, Massachusetts with letters of introduction from people in London, people on the Continent, to Emerson, Emerson said, 'If you're going to stay for a while, you'll need to have a place to stay and one of the townspeople, Sophia Thoreau, rents out rooms to lodgers.' And of course this was Henry David Thoreau's house, it was his mother and he lived in the attic of the house. And so while Cholmondeley was there he discovered Thoreau, he had never heard of Thoreau. This was 1854, September, about this time of year, 1854. 123 years ago, 1-2-3. Cholmondeley realised that there was something about Thoreau, a tone, an essence, a quintessence that was different. Emerson was learned, he was eloquent, Thoreau was primordial, he was magnificent. And so a year later, Cholmondeley wrote to Thoreau. He said, 'I am, because of the British Empire concerns, I have to go off to war, to the Crimea, the Crimean War. And I'm sending you a box of oriental classics which I have collected and translations in various languages and in the original. Translations into Latin, Greek, French, English and the original Sanskrit.' And of course, we're reminded that Thoreau by this time was also a very great linguist, he was quite learned. When he was 19 at Harvard, he made his own translation of Aeschylus, out of the Greek, so he's not a country bumpkin by any means. And so Cholmondeley sent him 44 volumes, 21 different classic works, some of them as many as nine volumes making up a work. And this package that was sent to him, he prepared for a month and went out and collected wood, special wood and made his own box for this collection that was coming. Because in his attic he had made all of his bookcases himself out of wood and this was the special jewel that would occupy like a prism, the very centre of this target. It was at this time that he found that the gift of these evoked from him the High Dharma; he became extraordinary where he was already incredible, extraordinarily incredible. And it was about this time that he began to seriously look at writing and publishing. The first book he did was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a sacred seven day...with the Sabbath at the end. The experience of going with his brother John on these rivers that came down from the mountains of New Hampshire, from the mountains of Maine and Vermont and that the Merrimack and the Connecticut River and all of these rivers had sources back into ancient Indian America. That he and his brother John had always collected arrowheads and various things that they could find and now what he was looking for were the relics of eternity that were here on earth, that one could see the penetrating depth and so one finds the excursion is an eternal excursion of discovery, that one is discovering how to discover. And that you can raise this now to an incredible height and Walden is that height. Walden is an American Indian vision quest of going out by oneself to find out about finding out, in ways which are now newly pulled out of you, so that at each day and each week and each month one is having to go through everything all over again because it's all fresh, with new capacities. And at the same time as the American Indian vision quest, he was doing an ancient yoga. And one of his central works that he read and prized was the Bhagavad Gita, included in Cholmondeley's box. This quality of the Gita is that it is able to pull, not from the dialogue written between Arjuna and Krishna, but to pull out your capacities to hear that dialogue in expanded resonances until you begin to kinaesthetically, kinetically, kaleidoscopically, begin to get that this is not just sound, but it's sound and silence, it's not just noise, but it is an expression that to most people is scrambled as a cacophony because they are not able to hear with discernment. They are not able to see with discernment, they are not able to feel with discernment. And that all of the senses now are added. The five senses become quintessential because consciousness enters in and interpenetrates within and their psychic capacities on the mythic level are pulled into spiritual capacities on the vision level and then raised in the High Dharma to cosmic capacities on the historical level. When beings who have real persons participate, they participate in worlds without end. They're as real, thousands of years later, as they were at the particular time they lived. Don Quixote is as much a knight of the great quest in 2007 as he was in 1610, when Cervantes first published it. Odysseus is still the man of many miles, who learns that he must never lie to the goddess Athena, who's able to see him with ocean horizon eyes. In the Bhagavad Gita such seeing is called the 'Yoga of mind,' evenness, evenness is the yoga of mind. When eyes are able to see with ocean horizon, evenness, that's Athena's look and she says to Odysseus, 'Never lie to me. I know you. I am your guide not only to get to your home, but to recover your kingdom against all odds.' He has 105 suitors he has to fight and he has two men to help him, an old servant, Eumaeus and a young son, Telemachus, who's just 21. And Telemachus says to Odysseus, 'But father, there are too many, we have no chance.' And Odysseus says, 'We have allies. Athena will be there.' And the son says, 'Well, she's just mythic.' Odysseus says, 'No. Now I want you to bolt the doors, not to keep them out, but to keep them in so that they cannot get away.' It is this in the Bhagavad Gita that Arjuna learns from Krishna. He learns that no matter how incredibly complex and horrific the whole spectacle is going to be, not only brothers against brothers, relatives against relatives, teachers against teachers and that the entire young manhood of all of northern India...the estimates run as high as 2,000,000 men brought together in a massive confrontation. And as the confrontation begins, the conches, the conch shells blow on the backs of elephants and the plumes wave, as the most powerful men in that part of the planet get ready to vie between each other in two great lines, making much more noise than cement diggers. Are shouting at each other and in the midst of that final shout, the battle cry, the victory cry, the special conches that have all names, are all blowing. In that din of the world, Arjuna, who's the greatest warrior of the day, has his charioteer, Krishna, ride out between the two armies, in the space in-between the open space and in a fraction of a fraction of a second, the entire Bhagavad Gita takes place, but is spread out to 18 Parvans, so that we may slow it down enough for us to follow what is being said and seen and when that split moment is over, we are shown that no time has elapsed whatsoever. That the Bhagavad Gita never takes place in time, its occurrence is kaleidoscopically in eternity, in Brahman. And it is Brahma who comes to help Vyasa write and he says, 'You need to think of a scribe to write this down.' And so Vyasa says, 'I choose Ganesha, who will be the scribe. The Elephant God, the Lord of Obstacles.' To overcome the obstacles of a written language, of a completed mind, of a close circled, to overcome those and to write a spiritual language in a poetic, takes someone like the Lord of Obstacles to overcome. And so Vyasa and Ganesha, with Brahma nearby, invisibly and a young boy who is constantly asking, 'Well, who does this involve?' And at the beginning, in Peter Brook's Mahabharata...and here's a C.D. of the Mahabharata soundtrack. Peter Brook has Vyasa say to the young boy, 'It is about you and everyone and their future and their past realised fresh, so that the present moment becomes an eternal presence.' And when it does, the capacities for spiritual resonance for everyone are established. The contact does not stop with your mind, it is not finished with completeness. It is able to be prismatically resonant so that visionary capacity becomes now itihasa, becomes historical doing. So that the actions are no longer karmic, but they are transformative of all karma, including the karma that is organised into completeness in the mind and once the mind learns that the identification of the completeness of the mind, in its logic and its geometry, referenting back to the completeness of the karmic actions that have been done and the karmic laws that are in play, that that entire ensemble is now transformable. And transformable in such a way that the mere opening of a door, while it lets in the cacophony of the world, it also gives us a chance to slip inside the silence within a silence and a poetic language dances through the mirror of the mind and performs not as a shadow on the wall of a cranium, but performs the kaleidoscopic involvement of itihasa, of history. And in this way, Vyasa's poetic, through 100,000 verses, gives us a prism of the Bhagavad Gita to show us the orders that are evocable now through all of us. More as we take a break.
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Let's come back to Interval Seven, which articulates for us a transparency between the presentations of the harmonic set of History and the presentations of the harmonic set of Science. Science is about the cosmos, History is about our kaleidoscopic consciousness, which is able to lift us through the prismatic rainbows of our persons, to a harmony with the cosmos. And the median in-between is a higher power, a higher order, a higher dimension than the process that links the mind and the person. In-between the...and you can see the utility of our phases. In-between the Symbols phase and the Vision phase, we used as the articulate, open, opening of the frame, we used Patañjali's Yoga S?tra. Yoga is the capacity to bring out from nature the spiritual powers of higher orders, higher dimensions. In nature, the Sanskrit word for how that originates, its field, its emergence, energetically, vibrantly, vibronically, iteratively into existence, constantly, which churns a flow of energies, of feelings, of language, the mythic horizon, which is then integrated in symbolic structures of the thought, what we call the mind, all of that in Sanskrit is called 'Prakriti.' When I was first delivering formal lectures on the Gita in 1970, I used to pass out handwritten notes and I called her 'Ma prakriti.' She invites us to be and to experience and to bring it altogether with meaning and know what it is. But even with prakriti is 'Purusha' and purusha is not in the square of attention that prakriti completes, it's not in the circle that then has its completeness. One is able to look into the circle and see that the space circumscribed by the circle is not at all given a conditioning of boundedness, except as the mind's designation of a geometry. And like the space of a circular window, one can look through the window out to the space beyond the window, behind the circle. And that space beyond is not distinct from the space within, except by the provision of the limited conception of the perception. Purusha is that higher aspect of ourselves that can see that the inner of what is bounded, is the same field as the outer that is not bounded whatsoever. And that circles literally float suspended within a field of openness, at all times. In terms of existence and in terms of ideas, we have to be limited, rationally and prakriti invites us to do this, but she also issues an invitation to a different kind of dance. And that different kind of a dance has the ability to have the dancer now not limited to the figure that it makes in actions and in existence, not limited to the configurations of experience, with the character of the configuring being understandable as someone and not at all then curtailed by the completeness of the mind's ordered structures, but to accept the invitation for a quintessential dimension of visioning, of differential consciousness. And of being able then for the purusha to be able to come into a special, prismatic form. It's not an existential form, that has a karma, it's not at all a conceptual form, which has a referential back to karma for its certainty of existence and it is not dependent upon what the experience has delivered out of the karma and has integrated out of the understanding of the meaning of that. And so one of the great deceptions is half learning where one thinks the integral completes everything. And the response from the High Dharma is 'Yes, it completes everything, you're halfway there.' And so Krishna invites Arjuna to see that there are two ways: the one in ancient India, the rational way of specifics of karma, of limited, exact completenesses of thought. That was called 'Sankhya, sankhya.' The other, which was an evenness with it, equal to it, is called 'Yoga.' And that yoga is able to take the sankhya of your hatha yoga, your karma yoga, your jnana yoga and put them altogether in a raja yoga that invites an opening into consciousness. And that opening into consciousness through a raja yoga shows that the completeness was exactly complete and it is only a circle. And that now with higher orders of dimensions, that circularity of completeness is able to transform to the spiral of perfection and its perfection is not to integrate, but to differentiate. And so its higher power is not just differential, but kaleidoscopic. One now is not just differentiating a rainbow, but one is able to differentiate colours without end, rainbows without end.
The Gita, occupying a prismatic, jewel like setting in the Mahabharata, is like the jewel that is there in the setting of the Great Indian War. It's called 'Bharata' because the origin ancestor for all of this was named Bharat and his mother was named Shakuntala. And Shakuntala is the one who gives birth to the whole higher orders of history of man in India, somewhere around 3200 BC, about the time that in Ireland they were building New Grange. About 500 years before the Great Pyramid. That this is the way in which if we understand the focus of the jewel, of the prismatic jewel, we are able then to participate in the entirety of the Mahabharata, not as someone who's karmically enfolded in it, not someone who's ideationally limited to try to find what is the meaning of the correlations of the geometry, of the integrals, but is free to explore, forever, meanings without end. And so Krishna invites Arjuna to, in a flash of timelessness, to understand that this war is not about two factions, that one will win with social authority. It's about the reality of our spiritual person, the purusha, stepping freely into the kaleidoscopic play of history, beyond the limitations of a karma, beyond the limitations of a mind and its mentality, to explore the transforms that are now invited forth. Any species that cannot do this for itself regresses back, cannot find its way in the cosmos, cannot live a history, cannot prism the art of the spirit, cannot enjoy the differential conscious field of vision and falls back in regression to where its highest capability is the completeness of a mind's understanding of something and a experimenting by toying with existence to find out what kinds of experiences would come out of that, rather than experiments. The classic case of this are the abductions by the Greys of UFO aliens. To have to abduct people and animals to find out what makes them tick, is like trying to take apart the watch to find out what time is. It is indication of truncated, regressed uselessness. Our species specialises in spiritual teaching, well known. Well known beyond star systems so far encountered.
We're looking at a very particular way in which a world, faced with the transforms of history and science to such an extent that from 1785 to 1885, was a jump from the Enlightenment, through the Romantic revolution, to the Industrial Revolution and the power of the modern state to rage a technological, mechanical war. The first technological war on the planet was the American Civil War. In old times there were lots of casualties in war. There was never a technological, industrial war until the American Civil War. More than 1,000,000 men died. That's more than the population of most empires ever in past history. They were killed, they were massacred. No matter how good a bowman you are, you cannot match a Gatling gun, even in its origins, of killing hundreds, if not thousands, in just minutes. You cannot expect that now cannons are not just nine pounders or larger cannons, but now are industrially able to be ratcheted up until they become the kind of destructive power we saw initially in the twentieth century, in the First World War, which was very much like the Mahabharata. Two great sides that could not move either way and were frozen for years on end. Imagine a line stretched from the North Sea inland, almost all the way to where Switzerland is now. Trench warfare, but hardly ever moved. And now that trench warfare, stepped up through the Second World War, through the development of atomic weapons, through the development of missiles, through the development of incredible, technical weapon systems, obliteration is a certainty and the only way to obviate that is to transform the entire field. All of it must be changed. But if we depend upon a limited mentality to do the change, it's like hiring the executioner to acquit us. The limited mind is an assassin and becomes so because it is constantly having to defend its authority, its completeness, its certainty against incursions. And the biggest incursion is the threat of learning something new. The threat of learning that there are no enemies, that the conflict, the struggle, the violence is completely fictive and made-up. And the great karma yogi of our time was Gandhi, in India. And one of the great books by a very high-class writer, Haridas Muzumdar, with a foreword by Will Durant, who with his wife Ariel, wrote A History of Civilisation in many, many volumes, ten or 15 volumes. They lived here in Hollywood, in a big, beautiful house up north of Hollywood Boulevard. Gandhi Versus the Empire and the book is dedicated to Henry David Thoreau: 'Is dedicated to the memory of the almost forgotten American hero Henry David Thoreau.' And one of the peculiarities of Thoreau, as we saw in the first part of the presentation, was that he was someone who was able to step up beyond the even extraordinary, yet limited capacities of Emerson. When Emerson was 17 he wrote a book on Indian superstition, The Superstition of India and castigating Brahma and Brahmanism as the worst kind of slavery and primitiveness and it was only later that he was able to discover that the Bhagavad Gita in the Wilkins translation of 1785 showed him that there was more to it than he had supposed. But it was Thoreau who constantly grew, who in his resonances became a founding, kaleidoscopic theme that was taken up right at the end when Emerson, as an old man was curtailing, no longer lectured, no longer wrote, was becoming enfeebled, was perishing, as someone who was old and worn out. Thoreau's legacy was gaining its purusha and became an emphasis in Concord of what was called the Concord School of Philosophy. And its founder was Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott and several others. And we'll put this in the presentation notes. This is the garden scene of Orchard House and the hillside chapel that was built with contributions and in here you find, incredibly, when they opened the doors in 1879, you begin to find a curriculum which is extraordinary. You begin to find the powers of the person in the descending scale, the same in the ascending scale. The incarnation, powers of personality in detail and so on. And many of the great teachers of the time...William James came and delivered three early lectures on psychology, that became the foundation of his great world textbook Psychology, in two volumes, 1890. He was here ten years before, lecturing at the Concord School of Philosophy. And almost every year you find presentation of Thoreau's writings that had never been published. It was the first time they were shown and it's the first time that the Bhagavad Gita is shown in a curriculum of a Western institution, not just America, but Europe, anywhere in the West. It's the first time that there's beginning realisation that the Bhagavad Gita is ours if we can read into it. And so the first really great translation of the Bhagavad Gita was not published in Europe, it was published in Boston, in 1887. It was published because Mohini Chatterjee realised that Boston was the prismatic place where the ancient great wisdom, the great spiral of the High Dharma had its strongest traction and so it was published there. And it's interesting just to show you a little bit of a geometric insight. The word 'Individual spirit,' if interrupted by a Bodhi tree bookmark, it covers all of the word except 'i-t,' 'It.' If you stay with individuality, in the dimensions of the spirit, you will automatically end up with an integral geometry of 'Itness.' The Gita knows that, because in ancient India the sankhya system did exactly that, more than 6,000 years ago. It precisely, accurately ended up with 'Itness.' One understood completely, mechanically perfectly, mentally precisely that all of this was explainable thus and so. And the development of yoga was to pull us through that delusion into the realms of the real. And by pulling ourselves through to the realms of the real, someone has to address the art of presenting war in such a way that it's not the victory of the war that counts. It is the victory of truth, of dharma.
This is Peter Brook standing in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of extras. Brook was very famous as a director of Shakespeare's plays and the man who did the screenplay for him of the Mahabharata, his beautiful...Garry O'Connor, he was the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. And so the whole screenplay of the Mahabharata has a Shakespearean quality to it, because Shakespeare's all about the purusha. It's about the play that has its lines, is blocked out in its choreography, but when it is presented in a purusha way, the magic of the theatre lifts the lines off the page, lifts the lines out of the mouths of the actors, out of the ears of the hearers and begins to build that pulsation of a living field of differential consciousness, all the world that is a stage and that the kaleidoscopic, chiralling, spiralling of the performance takes itself completely out of the limitations of the circle. That's why Shakespeare's theatre was called The Globe; it's the whole globe, it's not just a stage, it's not just a circular building. And the prism of it of course was over The Globe stage was the zodiac. So that all of the action took place under this halo of the celestial cycle of the sun, but outside of the celestial cycle of the sun, is the whole starry field of the entire Milky Way, the galactic reaches. One of Peter Brook's great books, about theatre, very thin, about 140 pages, is called The Open Space. And if you cannot perform in an open space, no matter where you are, you're a two-bit actor, you're rote, you're just playing a role, you're just doing a part. But there is such a thing as a magic of the theatre that lives on. The Bhagavad Gita is just such a conversation, such a dialogue. It is like the Dialogues of Plato. When they really get their kaleidoscopic elan, the Dialogues of Plato become a scintillation where one ascends and rises in dimensions of what is really going on, what is really possible. The Hermetic treatises are that kind of a dialogue and it's the same with the Bhagavad Gita. It is a conversation that has an internal resonance and not only are we using some of the early translations to show you how the Bhagavad Gita came out, but in the Second World War Gandhi was put into prison as they usually did and his secretary, Mahadev Desai, who was imprisoned with him, put together The Gita of Selfless Action: The Gita According to Gandhi. He called it 'Anasakti yoga,' that the whole import was not to win the Second World War, but to bring a technique by which war could be evaporated away by a higher dimension of historical and visionary capacity for human beings, for man. The successor to Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, who did a great deal of work, did a book called Talks on the Gita as well. All of these are remembered, all of them are of a living, kaleidoscopic history that is still here. One of the great 1930's books, just at the beginning of the Depression, in Columbia, was called The Orient and American Transcendentalism: A Study of Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott. And he points out that at the time Emerson's 1785 copy of the Bhagavad Gita was one of two copies of the Gita available in that whole area. The other copy was in Harvard's library and that Emerson's copy was lent out to more people than the Harvard copy. And when Chatterjee's The Bhagavad Gita or The Lord's Lay came out in Boston in 1887, all of a sudden you had an explosion of comprehension of persons around as to the purusha qualities of Asian civilisation. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was headed by one of the great Indian savants, Coomaraswamy, Ananda Coomaraswamy, whose Collected Works in three volumes is published by the Bollingen Series by Princeton. You had the whole interest of people like W.B. Yeats in the Upanishads and the Gita and by his working with several Indian swamis to make his own translation of the Gita and of ten of the Upanishads. And the way in which then Rabindranath Tagore, one of the great figures in the Indian renaissance that was coming alongside of Gandhi...the young Vinoba won the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1930, nominated by Yeats. And three of the songs in the Mahabharata by Peter Brook are Rabindranath Tagore songs, the words and the music. And presented because Tagore wrote more than 2,000 songs and composed all the music for them and there are singers that have been there for 100 years now in India, who sing Tagore songs. It is the quality of expanding to the full globe that was huge, now we're expanding to the star system, so we need to reconnoitre all of the treasures.
For a detailed look, An American Reading of the Bhagavad Gita in 1991. Because of the threshold of time change, I presented the Gita in nine presentations. They exist on tape and all of the notes are here. The words 'Satyameva jayate' in Sanskrit means 'Truth is victory.' And for the Gandhians, when there was a satyagraha, the call was 'Gandhi ki jai.' It means that the living victory is assured as long as this is happening, because this is real and eventually everything else will falter. Through its own karmic base, through its own mental limits, through its own constrained experience, it will finally yield over to the transform. The Gita makes it very clear there only needs to be one, universal yogi and victory is assured. Vyasa says this of himself, that in his time, he was that...his mother, Satyavati, was a very special kind of a woman though she was a fisherman's daughter and that she smelled horribly of fish and no one would touch her except a sage, Vishvamitra, who knew how to transform the smell of the fish into the perfume of an oceanic woman. And Satyavati had a son, Vyasa, who knew sageness that could transform all and a mother who had transformed herself out of the limitations of the world into being of cosmic beauty that she really was. She emerged.
Next week we're going to go a little further. There are books like The Big Bang and the Bhagavad Gita, there are books like Easy Journeys to Other Planets, concerning the Bhagavad Gita. And next week we're going to take a look at two of the purusha figures of the early twentieth century: Einstein and Niels Bohr, the beginnings of quantum and the beginnings of relativity. But we're taking it paired, because it is the tuning fork pairedness, that when struck with someone who is working with a harmonic, brings forth the evocations for us of higher dimensions, of further capacities and the limitations that were there no longer obtain. One of the keys to it of course is language and one of the great translators of the early Bhagavad Gita, published it in 1875, in The Sacred Books of the East. The Sacred Books of the East were 50 volumes. It was the first time that there was a great books of Asia series in the West and the editor of it was Max Muller. And in his life most Europeans criticised Max Muller as being vain, as being somebody who really stepped out and made himself special and he was special. This is A Tribute to Max Muller by Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru and the President of India at the time. Published by the Shakuntala Publishing in Bombay. 'Many European scholars enabled the modern world to discover the grandeur of ancient Indian thought and gave Indians themselves a new pride in their heritage.' They had let it languish for centuries.
Max Muller's name stands in the forefront of such scholars. Not only was he a student of the sacred books of the East, he had deep sympathy for the aspirations of the peoples of India and he befriended many of our country's leaders. The 150th birthday anniversary of this great scholar of Germany, who came to be considered a rishi by Indians, is an occasion for all to express our gratitude to him. My good wishes for the success of the commemorative celebrations which are being organised in Delhi.
Max Muller was such a genius he did his own translation into English of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, among many other things. But for us, the most indelible exemplar is the way in which Thoreau, accompanied by Bronson Alcott, to try to do something in New York City about his eyes, was staying in a hotel room and in came a young poet named Walt Whitman, who'd just published a little fascicle called Leaves of Grass, not more than a couple dozen pages. In several days of conversations with Thoreau and Alcott, Whitman exploded into the Whitman that became legendary. And by the third edition of Leaves of Grass, it attained the size that you can buy all over the world, hundreds and hundreds of pages. And in India, Whitman is called the 'Maha Yogi.' This learning is a maharaja yoga. It will be there and it will work, indefinitely. The more that you participate with it, its layers, its relationalities, like having learned the octaves and the tones, one can now make music of any kind. There are great songs, great symphonies and great spirals ready to be performed. Next week, Einstein and Niels Bohr.