The Mahabharat, in which the Gita is played out as part of, talks about the Brahmastra. A weapon that can destroy the entire universe. I don't know if this is what Oppenheimer thought he had rediscovered, nuclear power which has the power to destroy vast quantities of land.
Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#42[deleted]
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#43What I understood from Hindu philosophy - 1. Reality is advaita - it means single being or whole cosmos is one being. 2. Maya or illusion is 'consciousness without above knowledge'. This is a cause of suffering. 3. As long as you're in illusion, you will suffer because you consider yourself different than others. It is called 'I". As long as there is 'I', you're in Maya. 'I' give rise to you/he/she/they/animals. If i…
That's a really good summary of the workings of life and the universe. Learned a good many things from your post as well.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#44What I understood from Hindu philosophy - 1. Reality is advaita - it means single being or whole cosmos is one being. 2. Maya or illusion is 'consciousness without above knowledge'. This is a cause of suffering. 3. As long as you're in illusion, you will suffer because you consider yourself different than others. It is called 'I". As long as there is 'I', you're in Maya. 'I' give rise to you/he/she/they/animals. If i…
There is no single Hindu philosophy. This feels like a mix and match of multiple different versions.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#45Friendly reminder that, like all known religions, Hinduism fails to fit evidence & loses substantially on Occam's razor. It was most likely a means to preserve social order as society scaled up beyond small tribes. As someone who has deeply studied many of the Hindu religious scriptures when I used to believed in them, I'd say that one should look elsewhere for meaning and guidance and not take books like the Bhagava…
Occam's razor is a heuristic, not a commandment. The simpler explanation is more likely to be true, but it isn't always.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I took away from the Bhagvat Gita is that it is a treatise on why you should accept, internalize and submit to the role or place that society has assigned you.
> trianglem: What I took away from the Bhagvat Gita is that it is a treatise on why you should accept, internalize and submit to the role or place that society has assigned you. I've read the original paper linked in the article, and I agree with this interpretation. It seems the teaching of Gita is that one must follow the role the society has assigned to you, no matter what. > The Sanskrit word [...] “duty”is dharm…
"dharma is “group-centered and group-oriented."
Yes, I think the 'duty' that is being referred to is 'dharma' in the sense of 'true identity', and Arjuna's identity is a Kshatriya (warrior), as are all sons of kingly descent; and he's also trained as an archer. He was born and trained to fight.
"Dharma" also means 'truth'; the implication is that there is a kind of falsity in not being true to the identity you inherit, or that has been given to you (e.g. by military training).
FWIW, I don't agree that people get any permanent identity at birth, nor that they can acquire some kind of permanent identity by being trained as a soldier (or a thief, or an artist, or a comedian). Krishna/Vishnu is misleading Arjuna: we're all fluid, we can all change. Krishna knows this, and in fact he shows it, because he changes himself.
[I confess I'm not closely familiar with the BV - I think I read it in my teens. It's not that long, by comparison with other classic Vedic texts; or with western religious tracts, for that matter]
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#47I'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. Y…
I was trying to teach Hindi to a colleague of mine a few years back and the Ts and Ds really threw him off - I was so used to different Ts and Ds that I couldn't help him understand the difference. I think even English has the different sounds but it is not obvious.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#48Hinduism and ancient vedas is more of like a open source religion. So called guru's have created various meditation techniques using its knowledge and now selling it to the world. Damn i wish someone can decode it using AI and create an AI meditation guru.
My Commodore Amiga used to give it a shot now and again.
then? What happened?
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> trianglem: What I took away from the Bhagvat Gita is that it is a treatise on why you should accept, internalize and submit to the role or place that society has assigned you. I've read the original paper linked in the article, and I agree with this interpretation. It seems the teaching of Gita is that one must follow the role the society has assigned to you, no matter what. > The Sanskrit word [...] “duty”is dharm…
"dharma is “group-centered and group-oriented." Yes, I think the 'duty' that is being referred to is 'dharma' in the sense of 'true identity', and Arjuna's identity is a Kshatriya (warrior), as are all sons of kingly descent; and he's also trained as an archer. He was born and trained to fight. "Dharma" also means 'truth'; the implication is that there is a kind of falsity in not being true to the identity you inheri…
> "Dharma" also means 'truth'; the implication is that there is a kind of falsity in not being true to the identity you inherit, or that has been given to you (e.g. by military training).
Makes sense, thanks for the input.
I don't have any knowledge on philosophy or religion. But I recently found articles like this one, that analyzes the action of a particular person from the philosophy framework that (s)he adheres are very interesting.
Re: Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
#50I'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. Y…
"two kinds of T's and D's which sound almost identical to me"
Sanskrit is a dead language. Nobody has used it as a spoken language for nearly a thousand years; and even those Sanskrit speakers a millennium ago were using the language only for specialist discourse, not as a mother-tongue. I'm saying it was already a dead language a thousand years ago.
We don't really know how English was pronounced in London, England as recently as 400 years ago. Shakespearean English might have sounded a bit like the accents of some relatively-isolated East-coast US communities (Amish?). We can only guess.
We have clerical Latin pronunciation, and legal Latin; the Latin pronunciation that I acquired was "school" Latin, which I think is the same as the pronunciation used by lawyers in anglo-saxon countries. but we don't know how Latin was pronounced in 50 BC (say). For ancient Etruscan, we can't really even guess.
There is no correct pronunciation for Sanskrit.