Gita

Yesterday I was very fortunate to catch wind of a class being offered by a westerner on the Bhagavad Gita. The class is at his house in Lakshmipuram, which by auto rickshaw takes about 10 minutes from Gokulum. I met Kumar who is a rickshaw driver that Mike and Erin recommended to me. He is very very friendly, and has very distinct mannerisms, that include quite the tilt of his head combined with the shrug of his shoulder as he says "no problem madam", and he knows most of the usual places that the western yoga students go which makes things much easier.

So Kumar ( I will take photo of him today) took me and my flatmate Jen (not Jennifer - she doesn't get here until Tuesday) to the class which meets on Mondays / Thursdays 1:30-4:00pm - it is on the second chapter of the Gita. I missed the first class but it was okay because we re-capped what they did during that first class. I can't find James last name but what I've learned is that he is English and he is a professor at the University of Thailand (not sure of what) and he is pursuing his doctorate - or another doctorate in Sanskrit here in Mysore. He is another one of the super smart types who live these lives of study. My only concession when I get depressed at how smart and studied these intellectual world travelers are is that I think to mysore - well of coarse they don't have children, and since I absolutely love my children and my family and always wanted to be a mother - as soon as I say that to myself I feel better. So I learned that the second chapter is when Arjuna submits to Krishna as his student and Krishna begins his teachings. James gave us a handout with the slokas (pronounced shloka and which is a two line verse) in transliteration and is making sure we understand what the markings mean, though I am usually spending more time trying to say the words in the right meter than remembering to change my tongue postion etc. So similarly to the way we've worked on chanting the Yoga Sutras with David, we will go through each sloka, 1st line, 1st half of the line he chants, we repeat 2x, 2nd half of the line he chants, we repeat 2x, whole 1st line he chants, we repeat 2x, 2nd line 1st half he chants etc.... He has a very nice voice and he repeats with us which makes it a lot easier - also the people in the class seem to be familiar with the slokas so that made learning much faster. After we'd chant a section of 10, we'd go back through and he would go through the commentary as he'd learned from his teachers. They did the first 10 on monday, and today after going through those we continued on until 21. The major theme's so far as I understand from this chapter are that Krishna is teaching the difference between the permenant enduring spirit or essential nature that we possess, and the imperment outer or physical body. The body dies but the spirt is undying - I think this is a pretty important theme because Krishna says it over and over again in different ways in particular by saying what it is to NOT have this understanding and how it is the cause of much suffering verses what it is to have this understanding. He tells Arjuna that he must be still so that he can't start to see the truth - stillness like in meditation - implying that when we are not still it is more difficult to see what is truth. (yoga citta vritti nirodaha from the sutras is saying the same) And that the body/mind must be trained to be able to acqire stillness (sound familiar?). Okay one other thing, that came up, that it is thought, and was taught by Shankara that being born in the human body form is the highest of births because humans have the ability to reach samadhi - so taking care of the human form is regarded highly in the teachings. I think at some point soon we will here Krishna talk more about this if I remember.