Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)

Great article, confirms what I always believed about Oppenheimer and many others in that time.

My grandma used to read the Gita to me every day when I was a toddler before I started school. She had a stroke in December and in her final days, I would read verses from the Gita to her returning the favor. Death is the greatest teacher of all, teaches us the value of life and power of decision. Since her passing, I've grown a lot and feel much like Oppenheimer as I work on my 'science project' for the sake of all beings on this planet. It may succeed, it may be ignored. It doesn't matter, I will be dead soon and all that will matter is that I fulfilled my 'dharma'.

Gandhi always kept his copy of the Gita with him and it was his guidebook for his satyagraha movement which led to India's independence.

Some Gita verses that help me, might be helpful to you too:

“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”

“Show good will to all, Be fearless and pure; never waiver in your determination or your dedication to the spiritual life. Give freely. Be self-controlled, sincere, truthful, loving, and full of the desire to serve.

Realize the truth of the scriptures; learn to be detached and to take joy in renunciation. Do not get angry or harm any living creature, but be compassionate and gentle; show good will to all.

Cultivate vigor, patience, will purity; avoid malice and pride Then, Arjuna, you will achieve your divine destiny.”

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It's important, in my view, to not only study but to sincerely experiment and eventually embody the teachings. I also read the Upanishads and the Dhammapada often to get the full message of Vedanta and living in accordance with Dharma.

I also study Greek and Egyptian wisdom, it's amazing how much overlap there is when you put all of them side by side.

I've spent a good deal of my 20's exploring the American National Parks and Native American plant medicines, the end result brought me closer to Dharma too.

This will be a lifelong study and metanoia is an ongoing process as I transform lead (anger, lust, greed, pride, vanity, sloth, etc) into gold (peace, love, creativity, humility, earnestness, etc).

Working for the welfare of all by creating economic value for them that is rooted in empathy is, in my opinion, the wisest way forward for capitalism.

I've wanted to study Sanskrit for a while now but nobody around where I live can teach it. So I've been nibbling at at occasionally. Some points of pronunication are a bit vague such as there being two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me. I've read the Gita and the Uphanishad s in English (Eaknath Easwaran's translation). Here's my impression. It's definitely worth reading through a translation. You can read it not as philosophy or religion but simply to read it. That's why I read it. To climb the mountain of life a little bit higher to see more. To see a tiny bit of what men like Oppenheimer, Ghandi, Thoreau and 1.3 billion others have been inspired. I can now read most Devanagari characters, enough to recognize simple words when they appear to me in stores like "Dharma", "Karma" or "Tantra" etc. That said, I identify more closely with Judaism than anything else. You need a place to call home. Still, the Sanskrit language is fascinating and the Hindu scriptures have made a deep impression on me.

If you know German, Latin, or Greek it helps for understanding inflection in Sanskrit. Otherwise learning the eight cases of Sanskrit nouns is going to be really hard. I studied Sanskrit for a while many years ago in a Classic dept where I'd been studying Greek and Latin (alas, I can barely read Devanagari now), and it was mostly straightforward to understand the structures for the nouns and verbs - learning all the forms takes time and work and you need that to parse the syntax. But it's Sandhi that makes the language unusually hellish. If you've got a critical text or something with the works broken out, it's so not hard to read and get basics of syntax. But the originals of the classics the words are all compressed into long unbroken lines with subtle and difficult rules for joining words.