Interpretting the Mahabharata

I personally have 3 ways to interpret the Mahabharata:

1. As a historical document - I believe that the Mahabharata actually happened and that Dwarka, ElDorado and Atlantis are the same city. Also the Mahabharata indicates the time in history when humans nearly reached extinction. God probably saw fit to give us a second chance to see if we would not screw it up again! Lets see. This is ofcourse my conjecture based on the facts I have been informed about.
2. As a description of various feelings and their interactions with each other. It is a nice story to study emitions, feelings and people management.
3. As a spiritual guide to a true seeker.

In this blog, I present my detailed view of Mahabharata as point 3.

Some unique things about Mahabharata

• All characters consistently seem to display the same characteristic throughout the story. This I believe is unique to the epic.
• All human characteristics you can think of are present in this epic.

Onto the interpretation
I believe the story of the Mahabharata happens in the human mind. The real story starts from the beginning of the Kurukshetra war (before the Bahagawad Gita) and completes at its ending. You are Arjuna - the entity controlling your mind. The entire story is about what happens to you. Therefore Arjuna should be equated to the Jeevatman. All the characters in the Mahabharata represent some characteristic of your mind. So Karna would represent sacrifice, Shakuni envy etc.

Till the Kurukshetra, you as Arjuna are living a normal human life, interacting with all your feelings and emotions (or a victim of them). This part of the story shows how various feelings and emotions affect you during your lifetime.

At the start of the Kurukshetra, when Arjuna asks Krishna to take his chariot to the middle between the 2 armies, he has reached the point of complete dis-illusionment with the world. This is the critical point of awakening to the spiritual path. The Bahagawad Gita states that unless you use knowledge to reach the point where you realize the world to be Maya, you are not ready for the true teaching. As they say: When the student is ready, the master will appear. This is the state the student should reach to be ready. To get to this point, a seeker needs to overcome religion and science by realizing their incompleteness and incorrectness. I have another blog post on that.

So, Arjuna has come to Krishna at the right time, a student to the Master. He then proceeds to get the discourse of the Bhagawad Gita and gets educated on the 4 paths to liberation. He is then encouraged to get onto one of these spiritual paths to free himself.

Arjuna then gets back to the fight. All the forces are on the corresponding sides. The Kaurava army has the feelings and emotions to be overcome, while the Pandava army has the feelings and emotions to use to overcome them (they are also the feelings and emotions to cultivate as they do not interfere with liberation). Krishna the paramatman will not take part directly in this war (in this sense Mahabharata is more accurate than Ramayana). Arjuna the jeevatman has to do the figting himself.

The war then starts. The first person to kill is Bheeshma, the bondage to the ideas of the illusory world - the concepts which we have filled our minds with, which do not let us see the truth as it is. Bheeshma has iccha mrityu! So Shikhandi has to help you with freedom from him! That is why the first step of awakening is so tough. It is not easy for a seeker to fight the intelligence of Einstein, Aristotle etc. to overcome their logic.

The next to go is Drona, bondage to knowledge of the mind. Again, he can not be killed directly. You cant use knowledge to kill knowledge as that is a logical trap. You need to evolve beyond knowledge to see its failure. This can also be interpretted as understanding the true nature of knowledge!

The next to go is Karna - sacrifice! This is easy if you understand that others are also God! What can you (the ego) offer a beggar that the Supreme almighty can not offer Him! Note that overcoming Karna is in your mind. You should help others as part of God's plan and not as your ego to achieve gain!

The next to go is Kripacharya! Then Shakuni. Until finally the ego (Duryodhana) is left naked to be killed.

Note that after the Kaurava army is killed, most of the forces of the Pandava army are also dropped!!! Only the five Pandavas are left to finally carry on in the state of true liberation with Krishna.

This is a useful framework to understand the process of liberation for a sincere seeker. Hope this helps.

Understand Love!

For the seeker
Love is the only motivator for everything in life in one form or other. If you think about it, everything you do in life is in some form, trying to fill the void inside you created by missing Love.

Why is this void there? It is there because you have disconnected from the Master. The Master is complete Love and by disconnecting from Him, you stop experiencing His Love fully, which creates a void within you!

You then desperately seek the Love outside to fill the void within. This can take many forms - a spouse, a lover, a girlfriend, a hobby, a passion, a whatever. None of these however leave you fulfilled. How can they? Only the Master has what you seek. The non-fulfilling leaves you with all the negatives, the anger, the hate, the non-in-love feelings (Love has no opposite, but in-Love has).

When you connect with the Master, you can then remove the need for all these external small things and feel fulfilled inside. Then you can radiate that complete love on all the incomplete beings around you when you relate to them.

The easiest way to feel completely fulfilled is to get up in the morning and say, "I love you completely and fully my Master (and feel it). Without you I am nothing" and to realize that He loves you more than you can ever love Him. In quantity, His Love is infinite. You just need to open your Heart up to Him so He can fill you up.

Whenever you feel pain, realize that the Master will not leave you with that pain because He Loves you completely! Accept the pain without reservation and let His Love show you the pain's insignificance in comparison.

Only when you complete the Love within you can you be whole and engage with others meaningfully. Otherwise your engagement with others will always be selfish, seeking Love from everything and everyone else till you find it. That engagement will take many forms - in-Love, hate, greed, jealousy, joy, pleasure, sadness, etc.

Which of these is real

Here is a question to trigger the mind of the inquisitive one:

1. Let us say there is a table in your dining room. Lets say the table is perceived using the following ways:

• You go into the room and see the table
• You sleep and dream about the table
• You think about the table in your office and make imaginary modifications to it
• Your neighbour talks about the table in your dining room (he has never seen it)
• You dream that your neighbour goes into the dining room and sees your table

The question to the reader is: Which of these tables is real?

2. Now lets say there is no tiger on the table, but you perceive a tiger using all 5 of the above ways. (For the first way, you see a tiger like you see a snake in a rope - kids often have imaginary friends).

Now the same question, which of these tigers is real?

3. If you say that the table in your dream is real (way 2) and the tiger in your dream is NOT real (way 2), can you perceive real and false objects using the same way?

4. What are the implications for scientific experimentation from the above answers you have arrived at?

Destroying the illusion

As mentioned in my previous post, here it is...

The Bhagawad Gita says that knowledge will make a person realize that the world is Maya. Only after this realization can one understand the true nature of the world and move beyond it. I completely agree with this idea.

Broadbased, most people use one [or more] of three ways to interpret life, the universe and everything. This is true, even if they 'chill' i.e. don't take the bother of spelling out what their philosophy is. The main philosophies are:

• Religion
• Science
• Spirituality

Religion is pretty easy to get over. There are 2 ways to do this. Either you can study Spirituality and realize that religion is just a 'localized' attempt to implement spirituality. In this process, you reject religion. Or you can go deep into religion by trying to understand it deeper, which will lead you to the underlying spirituality. For eg. understand what Jesus meant when he said 'the kingdom of God is within you', or 'understand what Prophet Muhammed was trying to convey in the Kuran', or understand what Buddha meant when he said 'Desire is the root of all evil'. You get the idea... Either way Religion is a very superficial philosophy and easy to discard as a way of life.

Science is a different animal. The fundamental problems with science are 2:

1. It was created by very smart people. If your intellect has to compete with the intellects of Aristotle, Ptolemy and Einstein, you need to be atleast as smart as them to constructively question their ideas and reject / move beyond them. That probably means an IQ of 160+.
2. It is a very complicated logic trap. The way I got my head around this was to keep seeing inconsistencies in the scientific approach and theories. Then I grouped all the inconsistencies and was trying to search for a way out of them. I finally found it after 13 years.

Today I view science as a branch of study, like a scientist views Chemistry. It is a very small branch of study and pretty insignificant. Today I believe Astrology is more important than Science in the grand scheme of things!!

Spirituality is the right way to understand the world. Once you go deep into it, you find the ultimate objective of life. Anyone who is chasing this objective is who I call a seeker. Those who are on this path will understand this. The point I am trying to make to seekers in this post is that if you probe hard enough, you will realize that this is the right path!! So be confident and move forward.

From my next post, I will start posting about Step 3 (refer my previous post for details)...

My process to become a seeker

A quick introduction to those who want to understand what a seeker is and whether or not to become one...

I started off with a lot of questions bothering me. Most of them deep and none of them simple. I found that most people would tell me to 'take it easy or light' and would ignore these questions. Unfortunately my constitution did not allow me to do that! Some of the questions I had were:

• What is the purpose of Life?
• What is Life?
• Why is death mandatory and what is it?
• What is the composition of the universe?
• etc.

The process to answer these questions was pretty long and took me 23 years. 16 years were spent in determining my philosophy of life and the rest in understanding the philosophy after I was clear which one was correct. Most of the time - close to 13 years, was spent in disproving alternate philosophies.

Broad-based, my learning phase went through 3 phases:

1. Destroying the illusion - where I rejected my understanding of the universe as taught by humans! This took me 16 years.
2. Rebuilding the framework - where I understood what the solution actually is. What is the Universe and what is my role in it. This took me about 2 years to understand
3. Implementing the solution - where I figured out how to bring the concepts in step 2 to real life. How could I live in the human world when I didn't agree with anything that they are doing!

My focus in this blog will be primarily step 3, but I will provide a guideline to step 1 in my next post. Hoping people who are interested and smart will be able to move beyond 'Maya' and become seekers of the truth like me!

Achievement?

I have always been bothered by this concept. Never understood the purpose of it! Everywhere I see, there is always talk about 'doing something', or 'setting and achieving goals' or some such objective. Yet I have only seen this concept fail both in personal life and in my role models!

For the seeker
Service, not achievement, should be the central purpose of life. The key question you should ask both of yourself and others is - how much have you done for others and at what cost.

Service should be selfless, i.e. without expectation of returns. This helps reduce the ego and sets one free from the result.

I do have my doubt about whether service should be for profit OR not for profit. I believe that a for profit service, with the genuine intent of benefiting your customer is the best way to do service. It ensures optimal use of innovation and resources to maximize the customer benefit. It would also be a great philosophy to run a company by. You can read 'Henry Ford - My Life and Work' for understanding how this concept can be put to reality.

Role models of the 'Life for service' philosophy would be Steve Jobs, HH Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Warren Buffet, Mother Teresa etc.

For the non-seeker
The biggest question I have for the non-seeker is 'What happens after you achieve something great?'. There is no joy in repeating the achievement, so why does the original achievement provide you joy? Examples I have for this concept are:

• Michael Jordan quit basket ball after winning 3 years in a row
• Michael Jackson after he became famous
• Gary Kasparov after winning a little too much

You can counter with examples like Sachin Tendulkar and Roger Federer, who seem to enjoy achievement, but were they really achievers? Federer on clay court, Sachin and his match winning are not the same as facing Michael Jordan on the basket ball court!

In short, 'Does it make sense to live your life to 'achieve' a purpose?' OR 'Does it make sense to live your life to follow a philosophy you believe in?'

Justice is a failed human concept

Humans have tried to artificially apply the concept of justice to create a society. That will never work.

For the seeker

1. Justice is a human concept created by the Buddhi and must be rejected. It requires acceptance of duality for its existence.
2. Justice is actually in-built in the universe through Karma. If I slap you, the Karma of slapping you binds to me. So I have to work to undo its binding. The interesting thing is that I may have to undo the bad Karma of slapping you by doing good instead to compensate for it.
3. If in the mistaken name of justice, you slap me back, then you are also binding the Karma to yourself and you also have to undo it. So, it is better for you to ignore the slap. The notion of doing something bad to me, to return the bad I have done, does not make sense!

For the non-seeker

1. Be very clear whether this is a one life deal or a multiple life deal. The last thing you want is to assume that you have only one life, live like crazy for 70 years, die, and find that you have to spend 10,000 years undoing the crap you just did! Very few people have had the grace of a Guru, to guide them through this problem. Very very few people have been able to use reason to figure out this answer! Without this answer, be very scared to make a mistake.
2. Think about what is the purpose of justice. Is it to deter others in society from committing the crime? Is it to hurt the perpetrator as much as the victim suffers? Is it to punish the perpetrator in proportion to the mistake he has committed? Is it to prevent the perpetrator from repeating the crime? What?
3. Think about the complexity of delivering Justice. Is it ok to only deliver punishment for cases that are reported and proved? Can any judge or jury know 'for sure' what occurred and what the intentions were? If for a particular case, one type of behaviour and judgement was delivered, is it fair to demand the same thing for another case?

I know of a case which went on for over 40 years, after which both parties died! Is it fair for me to demand that every case go on till both parties die? Is it not unfair if a judgement is delivered before death of both parties?

6 men raped and killed a girl in Delhi. This case got a hell of a lot of media attention. Should media be forced to give similar attention to all cases? If you find out that the girl who was raped was heading a WWII concentration camp in her previous life and the 6 men were victims she killed then, does that change your picture of what their punishment should be?


Overall the concept of justice is incorrectly designed and will always fail. The court can only deliver a Judgement, not Justice. The only tangible measure of success of this concept is how comfortable it allows people to be in a functioning society.