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Re: Atmaa : Do I have one ?
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To: soc-religion-hindu@uunet.uu.net
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Subject: Re: Atmaa : Do I have one ?
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From: dchakrav@netserv.unmc.edu (Dhruba Chakravarti)
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Date: 14 Feb 1996 00:34:01 -0600
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Newsgroups: soc.religion.hindu
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Organization: University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE, USA
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References: <4eumgs$cl6@babbage.ece.uc.edu> <4f0v5b$t00@babbage.ece.uc.edu> <4f6drh$eep@babbage.ece.uc.edu> <4fbmpb$9qa@babbage.ece.uc.edu> <4fj626$kio@babbage.ece.uc.edu>
Roy Raja (rajaroy@ecf.toronto.edu) wrote:
: In article <4fbmpb$9qa@babbage.ece.uc.edu>,
: Dhruba Chakravarti <dchakrav@netserv.unmc.edu> wrote:
: >So you prefer to start with Samkhya. Samkhya will not satisfy you. You
: >will have to discover for yourself how the old Samkhya of Purusha and its
: >Prakriti impression is blended in the SBG with yoga, and then becomes
: >able to answer questions like you have.
: Dhruba ji,
: Could you please elaborate a little on this, or give the verse number
: of SBG you have in mind.
:
: Raja
Dear Rajaji:
Thank you for asking. I will try to answer in a way that answers
Prewienji's question on yoga too. I hope he reads this also.
The SBG has a very distinctive style that makes it so popular. Everywhere
else in Scriptures you will read warnings that speculations and
rationalizations will deviate a person from realizing God, and one must go
from one realization to another. Yet, in the SBG, Sri Krishna gave us a
discourse in a very rational way. This is the method of Samkhya, the
analytical way. The usual method is yoga, the style that is described in
various catch words in the Upanishads such as, "tattvamasi shvetaketo",
"tapasA Brahma vijijnAsasva, tapo Brahmeti" and such non-analytical core
statements.
The SBG is by material, divided in three groups of six chapters each. You
will need to read the first six chapters to understand this issue. In
the SBG, God described what He called the "uttamam rahasyam"(4.3), by
using Samkhya, Yoga and Vedanta. In the SBG, like the maturation of
Samkhya (bringing it up to describe Divinity), yoga too was expanded to
go beyond the mind calming exercises, and included the karma-yoga, jnana-yoga
etc. For example, for Vedantins, karma yoga would have meant only religious
rites, but in the SBG, God said that one could count everything one does,eats,
donates etc. as yajna.
I hope that you get some ideas from the above discussion, perhaps someday
you will be able to tell us how you discovered the Gita. If you'd so
like, I will try to write about these issues in more detail.
With best regards,
Dhruba.
