In the Bhagavad Gita, our hero, Arjuna, finds himself in a position of either fighting his cousins and elders, who have gone to war against him, or losing his kingdom and abandoning his duty as a warrior. As he surveys the battlefield, he turns to Krishna, who is taking the form of his charioteer, and inquires about how to make this decision and the nature of the good life.
The answer is a recipe: realize that pursuing happiness and pleasure is a trap. The fulfillment of a craving simply results in another craving. You might be tempted to solve this by getting really rich and then fulfilling all your cravings, but then you will find that old age, disease and death are not solvable through wealth ^yet.
The solution presented to the trap is to cultivate tranquility and serenity, through ample heaps of loving-kindness meditation (on the figure of Krishna). To be unattached from the fruit of one's actions but nonetheless do one's duty. And to orient one's life around a combination of attaining wisdom, loving devotion, and doing good actions.
Therefore, Arjuna should kill his cousins and regain his kingdom, following his duty. In so doing he should regard Krishna in awe and hold him in constant adoration.
This recipe is presented mostly in the first six chapters and the last two, with some but not great detail on the specific methods and mediations. Beyond that, there is a whole lot of religious trappings. But these trappings are useful, because they give examples of beliefs whose resulting emotional valence I could test out and play with. I read the whole thing asking myself three things: what is the belief that is being stated? what are the effects of this belief? How do I feel in my body holding this belief? Is there something close that is true and insightful?
For instance, consider the doctrine of karma and reincarnation. The belief being stated is that you are reincarnated after you die in a better or worse form depending on your actions. The effect of this belief is to work harder towards being a better person. The true and insightful part of it, I find, is that my personality and characteristics are pretty close to that of my father, and my life is influenced by his actions in the same way I will influence the life of possible future children. So the pattern lives on, and past instantiations of the pattern affect future instantiations. But it's not the case that you are literally reincarnated[^phenotype].
Here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?country=<del>IND&tab=line is a chart of the population of India. Under a stable population regime, the number of souls is constant and so reincarnation, and the notion that souls are eternal (neither appear nor disappear), is more plausible. But under an exponential population regime that is less plausible.
Some other beliefs and their implications that caught my attention were:
- One who thinks of Krishna at the time of his death goes to Krishna (a better state, essentially heaven) => people will think more of Krishna
- Nature of Krishna as a divine principle, and need for devotion to it => some very soothing and relaxing effects when meditating on it as an icon
- Emphasis on disciplic succession => strengthens the formal institutions who are able to provide access to that succession
- Belief in an afterlife => fighting more bravely => group succeeds
- acceptance of one's duty according to caste => greater social harmony
Anyways, a few decades ago, an Indian monk took this story and built a religious movement atop it, the Hare Krishnas. From the preface to his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, recommended to me by a very attractive Hare Krishna adherent:
The forgetful living entities or conditioned souls have forgotten their relationship with the Supreme Lord, and they are engrossed in thinking of material activities. Just to transfer their thinking power to the spiritual sky, Krishna has given a great number of Vedic literatures. First He divided the Vedas into four, then He explained them in the Purāṇas, and for less capable people He wrote the Mahābhārata. In the Mahābhārata there is given the Bhagavad-gītā.
I find it interesting that there is some level of design for this religion, where more advanced concepts that are not literally true are presented through metaphors and fables so that their beneficial consequences are accessible to the broader population. Followers of the Hare Krishna end up being extremely happy moment to moment (very good), but also end up believing the literal content of those fables (bad when it touches on real world decisions). For me, the challenge is to translate the 70 IQ fable version from 200 BCE to the 150 IQ version today, mining its insights. This might be changing something like worship of an icon into something like receptive contact with reality and ongoing gratefulness for its fruits, and implementing the mental motions behind the beliefs rather than adopting the beliefs themselves. Or meditating on an icon without believing in it literally.
In comparison with other ideologies I've been exposed to in my life, I notice I'm grateful to EA (Effective Altruism) for getting the part about happiness not coming from an attachment to material delights. But they didn't yet combine it with the part around orienting one's mind towards holding love (maybe towards some icon) moment to moment, and so depression is, or was, pretty common in those circles when I was more involved. I also notice that my interpretation of the core story here is very influenced and very colored by past Buddhist readings, perhaps too much. And I'm disappointed in my time spent on Greek and Western philosophy, because it just doesn't come out and give you as convincing[^nico] an anwer to the nature of the good life like that, and even the question it gives is more muddled.
These last years, I've been drifting around after Effective Altruism ceased to be a great container. I think pairing good actions with knowledge about the mental architecture I'm working with, and the mental motions that lead to satisfaction and towards stepping off the hedonic treadmill provide some of the answer I've been looking for.
[^phenotype]: I'm actually currently fairly confused about this, because besides having kids, you could also support people like you who are similar but don't share your genes.
[^nico]: E.g., compare with the Nicomachean Ethics.
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Notes -
Maybe it is just a metaphor, but for my western brain that this is presented as virtuous/moral is very alien and even evil.
Are we sure the charioteer was not the devil fanning the flames of war? He is quite known in another story for trying to seduce people with kingdoms.
To provide more context, the war was the result of succession crisis. Both Yudhishthira(Arjuna's brother) and Duryodhana had a solid claim to the throne and both group of cousins had a rivilary dating back to their childhood. To avoid a civil war the kingdom was divided among them(after seeing Duryodhana's willingness to try baltantly assassinate the cousins). After the division, Duyodhana still unable to let go of his jealousy insitigates plots to take the divided kingdom wholly for himself, triggerring an inevitable War. Now in this war everyone on the subcontinent is forced to choose a side.
Arjuna here is more than willing to kill the evil cousins that took quite unjustly the kingdom of his brother. But when he comes to the battlefield he not only sees his cousin but also people he cares about, his grandfather, mentor, teachers, students, close friends who due to bad circumstances, misplaced loyalty, bound by their words side with his cousins.
That's where his dilemma comes from. He has to fight and possibly kill people he cares about and he asks what the fucking point of the war. He is willing to let his cousin have the kingdom if he is so fucking desperate for it that he would rather have the kingdom burn than let them have even a sliver of land(a compromise of just 5 villages was proposed in the negotitation to stop the war, but duryodhana rejected it saying this). He feels it is better for him to live destitude than to kill the very people he feels compelled to protect, after all "Ahimsa parmo dharma"(non-violence is the highest duty, which is often repeated in the Mahabharata)
Krishna's opinion is simply that, he is foolish to choose that. Like the people in front of him have chosen to fight him for their own reasons, he also has his Dharma(duty). Not only to the people who he has sworn to protect but for the principle of dharma(justice and fairness). The reason for this war is not limited to Duryodhana's envious desire to not let them have anything but is a result of larger malaise in the society to be subservient to their desire(which is shown repetedly through the story as it goes back 6 generations) at the cost of their Dharma(duty).
Krishna's asks Arjuna to trascend that and act according to Dharma regardless of his desires. He tell him to fight because 1. He is a soldier and it is his duty to fight, and Fate, not Arjuna will determine who lives and who dies, and he should neither mourn nor rejoice over what fate has in store but should be sublimely unattached to such results. This dispassionate action devoid of attachment to the result is what is advocated, fighting the war is just the action what is his Dharma in that context.
It is difficult to convey fully the context because I am missing so much, the whole story is like 200k to 100k verse poem. Adding to that words Dharma which are difficult to fully translate in english
I would highly recommend this paper regarding th Gita https://ia802907.us.archive.org/8/items/gitaandoppenheimer/Gita%20and%20Oppenheimer_text.pdf
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