Bhagavad Gita Discussion Groups
Very Interesting!
You are getting an inside view of the general approach to the Gita.
One thing is how people first get to the Gita. Usually one is primarily influenced by the first book about it which one reads. I found previously that the Gita is used mainly to support preconceived notions about reality. Especially among Indians (India), the Gita's authority and fame are essential to many discussions because it gives credence to the speaker's points even when such points are against the grain of the text.
I attended many temple programs and discussions at Hindu temples and meetings, where someone would get up and make a point and then quote a Gita verse in support of that point. In some presentations like this the quoted verse was not in the Gita or the translation of the quoted verse was obviously distorted.
Another way of looking at it is that if a speaker cannot stand up on his own, he may use the Gita to add legitimacy to his conversation.
You can imagine that this is done even by people who hail as devotees, or pure devotees of Krishna, where they will whitewash or twist a Gita verse to support their ideas about devotion to Krishna.
All in all it is a great education to attend a Gita class as you described. Much can be learnt about people's psychology as they run parallel or in contrast to the Gita.
I found that the Gita cannot be understood and integrated by someone who has not read the Mahabharata. This is because it is an extract from that text. The applications of its principles are given there by the author of the text. But it is interesting that even devotees of Krishna do not or have no read the Mahabharata.
They do so on the basis of the fact that the author of the Mahabharata got a critical review of the text from his guru. The guru is named Narada. The author is named Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa.
As a result of this criticism, Vyasa wrote the Srimad Bhagavatam in which the tenth canto is the biography of Krishna. So these devotees say that one should read that book about Krishna and not the Mahabharata which was criticized by Narada, the writer’s guru.
However there is one little fact which upsets their idea which is that Narada, the same critic guru repeated the same composed Mahabharata which his faulted disciple composed to the assembly of celestial people in the Swarga angelic world. If he really did not want anyone on earth to read the Mahabharata why did he repeat it in that heavenly world?
In addition the Mahabharata is the great (maha) history of the Bharata dynasty. It is really the biography of the Pandavas (Arjuna and his brothers), of the Kuru clan.
Its value is that it explains what happens in sequences of lives of a particular person so that we can understand the intrigue which are set upon us by material nature. It is very clear in the Mahabharata how this transpires. The theory of it is best explained in the Anu Gita [Follow-up (anu) Gita]
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Anyone who practices inSelf Yoga and who does not read the Mahabharata is to be considered as being cursed. But hey, this life is for stalling a yogi. Such is the nature of this creation.
