Thought of The Day 20th July

Originally posted by karoly aczel
Would you put the bhagavad gita in the same genre of lterature as the bible?

From what I've read of it so far, yes.

One has to remember that the Gita is poetry, and, as such, subject to multiple interpretations on different levels (perhaps deliberately so). The same for the Upanishads (or the Shiva Sutras, or the Tao Te Ching, or Seng Ts’an’s Hsin Hsin Ming).

One of my oft-used examples from western literature is Dylan Thomas:

“The force that drives the green fuse drives my green age.”

Now, does Thomas think there is a kind of actual elan vital that he calls “the force”? Or is that a metaphor that may just point to an aesthetic “as if”? Does he really think the stem of a flower is a “fuse”? Etc., etc. Is Thomas to be read as if he were offering propositional statements rather than poetry? Is he to be faulted for writing poetry instead of something else?

I would take Thomas’ poetic purpose as being to allude to, and perhaps to elicit feelings of, the sensations of being a living, pulsing, wondering—and transient—being. It is aimed at the aesthetic and intuitive levels of the mind. I take this kind of allusive, elicitive and aesthetic speech as being foundational to spiritual discourse. And words like “infinite”—used in poetic discourse—are not generally intended to be propositionally accurate, but indicative of, say, a sense of vastness, etc.
Literalists, of course, disagree.