SRIMAD BHAGAVAD-GITA
The Bhagavad-Gita is one of the most noblest and read scriptures of India, even
one of the deepest sacred scriptures of the world, really meant for all ages, even
more in this time and age, as it is a "psychology of the consciousness" in its
threefold phase. The dialogue of eighteen discourses {chapters), 700 verses
altogether, is a written contribution to the transformation of the embodied soul,
the whole man, or as the Bible puts it in "Genesis" the "man, the living soul".
The Bhagavad-Gita represents the soul-knowledge, the heart-love, the mind-
knowledge, the vital-dynamism and the body action.
According to the Psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, consciousness, seemingly the
sine qua non of humanity is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath consciousness
lies a much larger substratum of forgotten or repressed personal memories,
feelings, and behaviours, which Jung termed the personal unconscious. And
beneath that lies the deep sea of the collective unconscious, huge and ancient,
filled with all the images and behaviours that have been repeated over and over
throughout history of not only the world, but life itself. Jung was a scientist who
believed in objective evidence. However, he felt strongly that the attempt to
make psychology a statistical science was misguided. For him, a growth in
consciousness is always a heroic effort by the individual, straining against the
yoke of what everyone else assumes that they already know. Any growth in
mass consciousness comes about through the effort of many such individuals.
Consciousness develops in spurts, both in the individual and in the species. In
the species, as long as our current level of understanding seems adequate to the
problems at hand, little change occurs. But when new circumstances emerge,
consciousness takes a jump. The collective unconscious contains information
that can be accessed by anyone at any time. It appears to have no limits in time
and space. That is, it can access information that was recorded by primitive
people, or it can access information about events that have not yet taken place in
your life. Consciousness, only a tiny part of the psyche, is not a recent scientific
development as you may think, it is as old as the world, brought forward in the
Vedas, and above all in the Bhagavad-Gita. Beneath it lays the personal
unconscious and below that lays the vast expanse of the collective unconscious.
All sensory experience is first filtered through the collective unconscious -
archetypes {patterns, components) - which gather our life experiences that make
up a complex to find the archetype within, like peeling away the layers of an
onion. Archetypes are "components" of knowledge, "sources" of knowledge,
and heavily involved with the "development" and "deployment" of our
knowledge of reality.
Some quotes from famous personalities across the world on the Bhagavad-Gita:
Albert Einstein
"When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this
universe everything else seems so superfluous."
Aldous Huxley
"The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual
evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and
comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence
its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity."
Mahatma Gandhi
"When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I
see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to Bhagavad-Gita and find a
verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of
overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh
joy and new meanings from it every day."
Henry David Thoreau
"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal
philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern
world and its literature seem puny and trivial. "
Dr. Albert Schweitzer
"The Bhagavad-Gita has a profound influence on the spirit of mankind by
its devotion to God which is manifested by actions."
Carl Jung
"The idea that man is like unto an inverted tree seems to have been
current in by gone ages. The link with Vedic conceptions is provided by
Plato in his Timaeus in which it states 'behold we are not an earthly but a
heavenly plant.' This correlation can be discerned by what Krishna
expresses in chapter 15 of Bhagavad-Gita."
Herman Hesse
"The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's
wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-Gita. It was the first of books;
it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large,
serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age
and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which
exercise us."