Kurukshetra: the battlefield of life

A golden sandstorm engulfed the arian chariot opening up the cloud of orange dust on the top of a deep blue hill. Down in the valley, the fighting armies facing each other. Your family and your friends fight in both sides. Arjun wants an explanation for the nonsense of life, of battle. Reality seems simply like a cosmic mistake, an error.

What shall we do with our lives? How are we going to live them? Simple basic questions. One direct path is the “Path of Beauty”, to move from fear to wonder, to awe and amazement. Beauty leads the restless and tireless navigator in you to pursue the fugitive horizon, the threshold of Greatness, and leads the horizon to be the rising Light, and answer to the desire to navigate.

An arrow might kill us tomorrow, but today we have the wine of love and poems of old epics, when the gods rumbled the earth, Krishna and mighty Vishnu, drunk and starving rishis dreaming the heavens. So pour some more wine from last night and sing for me that immortal song of the war between the Kurus and the Pandavas.

What could be awed?

Old Norse: awe is agi, a feeling of great respect and liking.

Let’s add: a sense of expansion and greatness, a blissful state which includes surprise, and the arousal of the will to play, for awe is active…the conscious creation of an identity by expressing objects and actions which produce awe.

In the fight for Hastinapura, Prince Arjun transformed fear before Brahman into awe before existence, awe before the experience of the sublime.

What is Sublime?

 The Kantian way: sublime is the starry night above us, the unending ocean, whatever overcomes our sense of individuation.

 Beyond that: “Sublime” is a very complex emotion. It is the experience of dissolution into something greater, ampler, wider, newer, everlasting.

 In the Bhagavad-Ghita, the sublime as Brahman, with and without attributes produces the reaction of the deepest fear, the fear of dissolving. But there is also awe and wonder

 The experience of the sublime is overwhelming and dissolves the ego, which surrenders before the beauty of the fleeting spring of the rose, the slow streaming strings of Mahler at the end of the summer, the flocks of birds at sunset.

 The concept of the “sublime “ is related to traditional religious experiences. Can we free our experience of the sublime from the images of the past?

Falling star

The frog from the lotus

Into the bottomless instant