I’m hosting a sangha contemplating the Bhagavad Gita the first Monday of each month, one book at a time. Yesterday I provided some of the context and background of the first book, Arjuna’s sorrow.
One of the difficulties of texts like the Gita is the slippery bluntness of mythology. Mythology is absurd. It’s raises more questions than it answers. No matter how you look at some of the stories, you can’t make them resolve to fairness, right, or even a very pretty picture. Why is it okay for some humans to consort (that’s a euphemism: I mean love and have sex with) gods, but other people are karmically punished for it? I don’t know. Why does a mother need to drown her infant children to absolve past karma? I don’t know. How can a person be both an animal, a god, and a person?
I simply don’t know.
Some of the stories upset me. They hurt. Whatever little sense I can pull out of them doesn’t feel edifying. I can’t find virtue in it. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t understand the myths, but I feel them. I feel them as an actual clenching in my body and tightness in my throat. Why are such upsetting things passed on as spiritual wisdom? Why on earth would a person assent to these stories, let alone glorify what they do to your blood pressure?
Myths raise so many questions. Maybe that is their point.
As always happens after teaching, some of the topics stay with me for several days. The thing lingers like the smell of a dead person you loved hangs out in their jacket for awhile, and you know it will disperse, and you are both saddened and gladdened by the fact. Influence is a little bit cognizant, but mostly not. Influence is emotive and atmospheric, more of the instinctive than of the intellectual.
Bhisma! I keep thinking today. Bhisma is the grandfather of the entire war. He loves and advises both sides, though he sticks to his responsibilities and the Kuru kingdom. He sticks with the bad guys even when everybody knows they are the bad guys. He sticks to his responsibilities of state, but he also allows the Pandavas to win by telling them exactly what they need to do to kill him and thus shift the balance of power; he bows out to let the younger generation ascend to the throne. He bows out, but on his deathbed he passes on all the wisdom of statecraft, ethics, spirituality, and dharma to the incoming regime. Bhisma is, the tradition holds, a good man. He is the epitome of a good man. He is the root source of ancestor reverence. But how is this possible? How can a good person be on the wrong side of history?
I remembered a conversation with a friend in which we discussed our remaining, ouchy love for people who hurt us. We all have some people we needed to break with for our own sanity if not survival. In quiet voices, we talked about how difficult it is to sever when you hoped that the break, if nothing else, would cause them to change their ways. But we did the right thing. We took care of ourselves and moved on. We set boundaries. We went on to live a better life.
We talked of how much we still love them, though we wish things were different.
After about sixteen years of a contemplative life, a thing happens. We start to feel compassion, - even, sometimes, a mournful kind of gratitude - for the folks who raised us. We become much more honest and aware of our own imperfections. Done right, this widens into a more cogent self.
I also thought, smelling Bhisma in the spring dirt, of the perennial question of historic wrongs. Our ancestors were assholes. The founding fathers were slaveholding misogynists. Old literature and history baffle us with their antiquated standards. We don’t know how to appreciate the past, love what we love, and similtaneously know the wrongs within it. Our ancestors also suffered. The founding fathers did, actually, wrest out one of the most noble projects of human history. I personally will always have a soft spot for William Faulkner.
“Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though.”
One of the things that kicks me into bafflement and wonder every time history and patrimony comes up is the fact that Toni Morrison read - I mean contemplatively and compulsively reread - the King James Bible. I mull this endlessly. Most of us dismiss such a text. But I dare not say we are smarter than Toni Morrison was.
The religious answer I’ve been given regarding Bhisma holds that somebody had to play that role so that we could learn the lesson and restore things to right. In his heart, Bhisma knew god wanted him to play this role, so he was willing to be the bad guy in his actions. You can’t know other people’s hearts, the teaching says. Search your own.
Religious answers don’t help me much. Not if I take them as religion. I mean rules to follow. It’s like the story of Abraham in the Bible, willing to sacrifice his own son: the only possible moral here is taking the intervening Angel as as aspect of Abraham’s absolute love for his own kid, while the dictate of the previous angel presses Abraham to stay open to the will of god. An allegory, in other words, of the scary asks devotion requires and the building of trust that comes when we’re willing to consider the asks.
I thought of bell hooks, too. Her own childhood was a violent and morally disappointing one. She left this world with a desire that her family know she still loved them.
Bhisma! He is the story of love being messy, and the shortcoming of passing judgement lest we be judged (our age will also appear barbaric), and the ultimate fact that people are more than one thing. This doesn’t absolve, but opens to both forgiveness and accountability.
Stories like the Gita and the Bible aren’t rules to follow. In the conversation (not recorded, but the best part of these Mondays), we talked about the danger of moving through the world with the lens of good versus evil. If we do that, it’s too easy to believe god is on our side. It’s easy to forget that god is on the other guy’s side, too.
The only slightly less dangerous way of moving through this world is to constantly reexamine your own heart.
Rather than being ‘lessons’, mythology (literature, history, the contemplative life) hit us with feelings, regurgitating themes we recognize in ourselves. Sometimes they give us new ways to think about the stories we tell ourselves. Maybe - and I think this is valuable - they make us realize we’re telling stories, pause for a second, and gaze into the screaming silence behind the stories.
There is a clash and constant, ongoing flood of events, individual wills, and circumstances in this life. Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though. I think they do this more by emotion than reason. Funny thing is, the process doesn’t berate reason. It elevates reason.