What follows is a different way of understanding and reasoning about the message of a Hindu classic called the Bhagavad Gita. It is just one illustration of a different general approach to understanding mythological ideas in religious classics, which can be described as follows:
Mythical ideas involving unseen supernatural entities need to be understood as part of a larger complex, mainly (1) human experiences and concerns that make certain mythical imagery attractive and motivate belief, and (2) practical consequences of believing, the difference it makes in human life to hold certain beliefs and make them central to one’s worldview and way of life
We should be able to describe these other elements in terms of humanly understandable experiences and concerns, understandable without any mention of supernatural imagery. We should understand mythical imagery as interpretations of this humanly understandable complex; their function is to provide an alternate “otherworldly” evaluative context for seeing one’s life, higher than the normal “worldly” context in which most people otherwise see themselves and their lives, determining what counts as a “successful” life, a life well-lived.
“Higher” here should be understood in terms of what Plato calls “the Good,” what Wittgenstein calls “ethics” defined as “what is valuable, what is really important… the meaning of life, what makes life worth living, the right way of living,” including also what Viktor Frankl speaks of as a “meaningful” life, a life experienced as meaningful.
I assume here a radically pluralist view of these matters: there is no single view of what is valuable, really important, what makes life worth living, what counts as a right way of living. There are many different ways of living a meaningful life. But this is also a critical view, based on applying Socratic questioning to any given concept of what is valuable, really important, etc. Any particular set of ideas on these subjects must prove its validity by its ability to withstand sustained Socratic questioning by counterexample. This prevents supernatural beliefs from being invoked in support of ways of being and acting that are obviously not ethically good, valuable, meaningful, etc.
These latter ideas constitute a rational way of arriving at a very idealizing concept of any given set of religious beliefs, what a way of life centered on these beliefs would be at its most perfect, its “Platonic Form.” This provides an ideal standard for evaluating a way of life centered on a particular set of beliefs. Such a way of life merits being regarded as centered on something “transcending the world” in the perfection of its goodness, to the degree that it is able to approximate this ideal standard. This way of life is what we should reason about, not the existence/non-existence of particular supernatural entities (God, Brahman, Dao, etc.)
This approach is spelled out in more detail in Understanding Mythologies in Religious Classics
The Bhagavad Gita
I now go on to show what it means to apply this approach to the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu classic probably achieving written form sometime around 100 b.c. Like most other writings from this period in human history, the Gita was most likely not the work of a single author. The material in it probably first arose in the context of oral communication by many teachers and handed down orally for many years before someone or some group gathered the material together and gave it written form.
Two kinds of human experiences are important here: (1) An experience of meditative bliss achieved by a community of meditators, through prolonged meditative concentration, and (2) intense emotions experienced in rituals centered on a divine figure Krishna.
Meditative Bliss and the Brahman-myth.
Meditative bliss is the most important of these experiences. It is interpreted as union with Brahman, the Supreme Being in the Bhagavad Gita. Meditative bliss should be seen as an alternate way of fulfilling man’s quest for meaning. More normally, most people seek to fulfill this quest for meaning through external involvements, such as achievements, involvement in social life and connections to other people, and so on. This outward-looking tendency comes under strong criticism in the Bhagavad Gita, something that this writing has in common with roughly contemporary early Buddhist writings. The community of meditators responsible for developing the teachings in the Gita found an alternate, internal way of fulfilling man’s quest for meaning; this is how we should understand experiences of meditative bliss. At their (Platonic) best, these would not just be very pleasant but passing experiences, but would lead to a transformation in a person’s basic way of being in the world and relating to the world. Mainly, this internal fulfillment would make a person less dependent on and attached to particular kinds of external involvements to give meaning to their lives. Meditation Instruction in the Bhagavad Gita consists in an excerpt from the Gita giving meditation instruction, ending with a mention of “… bliss of unity with Brahman.”
For a full understanding of the Gita, it is helpful to understand that this the experience of meditative bliss is also sometimes interpreted as experience of one’s own True Self, or Atman. This can be an important experiential clue as well, as when the Gita speaks of “a self satisfied in the Self alone.” My normal experiencing “self” finds satisfying rest and piece in experiencing some internal state described as a kind of higher “Self,” which is ultimately identical with the Supreme Being, Brahman (and with Krishna as privileged representation of Brahman). I’ve included in an Appendix below an explanation of a further complex of ideas related to Atman in the Gita.
The Gita brings up a particular kind of “counterexample” in relation to these interpretations of mediative bliss: A person might be so taken up with these experiences of internal meditative bliss that they would regard themselves as relieved of any responsibilities toward other members of their society. In the Gita, this comes up in the form of polemic against meditators who would refuse to perform the duties assigned to their particular caste. (The Gita begins with problems that a warrior-caste person Arjuna, is considering a situation calling on him to enter a battlefield.) The authors of the Gita regard the caste system as absolutely essential to social order. In their minds, the only alternative is chaos. But they also provide an answer to the more general problem here: Even though a meditator would no longer need social involvements and external successes to give meaning to his life, he should fulfill his social responsibilities “to maintain the order of the world.” He should get engaged in purposeful projects aimed at achieving goals beneficial to his society just because this is a good thing to do; it is just that he would no longer be deeply dependent on success in these projects, but could face failure with equanimity. He should engage in activities pursuing beneficial goals, “without being attached to the fruits [success] of these activities.” This essentially advocates internal self-criticism by a community of meditators, devising a more perfect and flawless ideal connected with meditative bliss, by uncovering possible flaws and devising remedies for them.
So, following the approach that I advocate here, the question we should ask is not about the literal existence/non-existence of Brahman, whether Brahman is or is not an objectively existing entity. We should consider the relation of Brahman to other aspects of a believer’s life. First, what good motivations could a person have for interpreting the experience of meditative bliss as union with a Supreme Being? A good motivation might be that a meditator would experience this as fulfillment of a yearning for some higher kind of meaning-fulfillment, higher than ordinary worldly sources of meaning. Secondly, we should consider the more general issue of the practical difference it makes in a person’s life to have such experiences and place the highest value on them. I would say that the difference here consists in a lasting personal transformation, consisting in a fundamentally new way of relating to the world, for example as one who does not need to get from the world some particular kinds of meaning-fulfillment, but who is able to have a more fundamentally giving relation to the world.
What a “good” motivation consists in, and what “good” practical results might result from experiences of meaning-fulfillment associated with meditative bliss, are questions that can be approached on a rational basis through Socratic/Platonic reasoning. Good motivations and good ways of relating to the world are motivations and ways of relating that can withstand all Socratic self-questioning by counterexample. As explained above, the Gita already engages in something like this kind of questioning in the case of meditators refusing social responsibilities, considered as a possible flaw in the meditative way of life, which must be remedied in service of formulating a more flawless ideal.
Meditative bliss and emotional devotion to Krishna.
Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita presents some excerpts from the Gita about Krishna.
Another issue of major concern to the authors of the Gita has to do with the fact that they live in a wider society in which there probably existed a number of temples devoted to a number of different deities. The authors seem to know of others in their society who are devoted to other deities (male and female), but they themselves are particularly devoted to a particular deity called Krishna. I think they probably regularly participated in rituals centered on statues or paintings of Krishna, and in this context regularly experienced relatively intense emotional feelings engendered by felt personal connection to the God Krishna represented in these statues or paintings. (In later Hindu tradition such religious feelings were given the special name of bhakti.) These feelings are not radically different from emotions generated by any “cult figure” in our own culture, in the entertainment industry and in politics.
One major issue of concern to the authors is the relation of how to conceive of the relation between (1) these emotional experiences of personal connection with the God Krishna who given such visible external representation in statues and paintings, and (2) their internal experiences of meditative bliss, interpreted as union with Brahman who lacks any such visible representation. They are also concerned with the problem of how to view others in their society who are devoted to other deities. Again they seem to know of meditators whose experience of meditative bliss connecting them to an invisible higher deity, causes them to look down on the whole institution of temples and rituals centered on particular visible deities.
Because the authors value bhakti–their emotional experiences connected with Krishna-ritual–they look on this as another “counterexample,” a “bad interpretation” of the experience of meditative bliss raising one’s life to a higher level. They devised (or found attractive) a solution to this problem: Meditative bliss does indeed put one directly in touch with invisible Brahman, the Supreme Being. But the authors propose a view in which Krishna, and all the other deities of Hindu polytheism, should be seen as diverse visible manifestations of invisible Brahman. So, in their view, worshipers at the shrines containing visible images of various gods and goddesses, are indirectly paying reverence to Brahman. Members of the community of meditators should do this knowingly. Other worshipers at this shrines who do have no contact with Brahman through meditation should not be looked down upon, but should be regarded by more advanced meditators as worshiping the invisible Brahman “unknowingly” (a-vidya). This can be seen as another example of internal self-criticism in a community of meditators, finding possible flaws in the worldview of meditators and remedying them in service of formulating a more flawless ideal, fitting for those devoted to the “highest” being.
As an added note: This idea that all the gods and goddesses of popular religion are manifestations of a single higher but invisible being, has served in modern times as one important model for dealing with the diversity of religions which we today have become much more aware of. Some Hindu thinkers, for example, have been able to take a positive view of Christianity by regarding Jesus as one more visible manifestation of the invisible Brahman, along with Krishna and many other visible deities worshiped in India or in other cultures.
In a more general way, some philosophers of religion like John Hick, follow this general Hindu pattern, and regard what appear to be particular diverse teachings of different religious as all converging on a single center transcending all cultural and religious particularity, something like Brahman in the Bhagavad Gita. Hick and other advocates of this view have appropriated the name “pluralism” for this approach, since it moves in the direction of tolerance accepting the validity of many different religious traditions. In my view, this is a very surface-level pluralism, since ultimately the particularity characteristic of each religion must be transcended, so that plurality and diversity is swallowed up into a unity constituting the one true religion. This is very different from the much more fundamental and radical pluralism I advocate in these essays, in which particularity and diversity “goes all the way down.”
Appendix on Atman in the Bhagavad Gita.
Atman (usually translated “Self”) is a another concept used to interpret meditation-experiences. If a person concentrates for prolonged periods on just being aware of her own inner being, this produces a feeling of deeply satisfying peace (“bliss”), and this is thought of as experiencing and uniting not only with the highest being, Brahman, but with one’s own True Self or Atman. This Atman exists in everyone, but not everyone is in touch with this True Self, which is only experienced in deep meditation. In the Gita, this experience of meditative bliss can be alternately interpreted as union with this Atman, with Brahman, or with Krishna.
But Atman belongs to another important idea complex in the Gita, revolving around a contrast between Atman on the one hand and Prakriti, or “the gunas of Prakriti” on the other hand.
Prakriti refers to everything that is not Atman, which the person identified with Atman wants to be liberated from. Prakriti is the world as an impersonal machine, run by impersonal stimulus-response mechanisms. The Gunas of Prakriti are the basic elements and forces that constitute and run this impersonal machine. When a person is deeply and inflexibly independent on specific conditions in the world, this causes un-free, involuntary reactions to Guna-caused changes in these external conditions. These reactions themselves are attributed to other Gunas which are part of this person’s internal psychology. This is described as “gunas acting upon gunas” – impersonal gunas in the external world causing involuntary reactions in impersonal gunas that are part of the person’s internal psychological makeup. “Gunas acting upon gunas” describes pure stimulus-response mechanisms – a person simply responds to external stimuli however she is “programmed” to respond. She has the illusion she is freely deciding how to respond, but she is really being “helplessly driven by the gunas of prakriti.”
Insofar as a person defines her identity in relation to some particular conditions in the world (a job, achievements, etc.), she is making the mistake of identifying herself with the world of Prakriti, and subjecting herself to being deeply disturbed by changes in the world beyond her control. Identifying herself with her Atman (through meditation) instead will put her in a deeply satisfying state beyond all disturbing change. It would make her free of all involuntary responses. Achieving this state is the #1 priority in life, and this is expressed by saying that there is no being higher than the Atman. Atman is the spiritually supreme being, expressed by saying that Atman is the same as Brahman (and with Krishna as a privileged visible representation of the invisible Brahman).
