Bhagavad Gita: A Song of Socialism and Slavery

I recently got turned on to a really profound podcast, linked below, where the host and guest converse about a religious text called the Bhagavad Gita. Written sometime in the first millennium BCE, the Bhagavad Gita is often referred to by yogis and many philosophers for its profound thoughts on seeking inner perfection.

I think the text is mostly trash. I’m not one to downplay religious scriptures, there are certainly some good lessons we can all learn from scriptures. I would even go as far as to say, its important that most people read and subscribe to a religious text so they gain, and willingly employ, some set of morals and something actually guides them.

I think the Gita is largely misunderstood today. I say that, because most of us don’t actually look at the Gita from the perspective of the average person of the time. During that time, life was absolutely miserable. There was little good about daily life. Every moment was centered around trying to ensure you had a meal for the following day. You were trying to make sure you had enough meat on your bones that the local tiger would think you were too much of a problem to take down. You farmed all day to feed yourself and your family, if you were even farming for yourself.

Listening to and reading about the Gita, I get an overwhelming feeling the entire thing was really written in an effort to control the masses. It was written to keep the miserable and the slaves calm. It gave them a holy reason to continue being miserable. The Gita taught we should just be happy doing our work, our duty, without worrying about how terrible it is. Its our duty because it is for the greater good.

The Gita is written as though god is talking to a soldier on the eve of battle. The soldier is afraid that he will have to fight and kill as well as being afraid of dying. The god he is talking to tells him not to worry about it. A warrior is to do a warrior’s duty. None of us die, because we will just be born again. Our lives never truly end, we are just born into another body. Also, if our duty is to die, we should die in the best way possible.

I’m still working my way through the Gita, yes, I’m actually going to read it after the podcast, but I can’t help but feel as though the whole thing is written to control slaves in a very socialist way. Bhagavad Gita was written to promote socialism and slavery.

Vengeance Will Only Hurt You

I’ve seen plenty of circumstances in life when people have felt truly wronged. I’ve witnessed men lose limbs and seen the sobs of men who have had their friends ripped from existence. I’ve seen the faces of once-warm people, turned cold with pain, suffering, and fear. I’ve seen what the pain of loss can do to a person. I’ve met hardened men and later thought to myself, “those guys are emotionally compromised; they are incapable of doing what they need to do.”

When you experience such extreme amounts of pain, if allowed, it will change you. Your heart will become cold. You will learn to hate. You will want vengeance. You must never allow yourself to become vengeful. Vengeance, retribution, retaliation; these actions will destroy you.

How can you tell if you are becoming a vengeful person?

A vengeful person seeks confrontation, berating people who remind them of those who did them wrong. If you are vengeful you seek to turn others against someone. You blame other people for everything that goes wrong. You avoid people and situations that remind you of terrible circumstances. You create disturbances or problems with people associated with individuals, or even try to get people in trouble at work. In extreme circumstances, if left unchecked, you become the kind of person that murders people who remind you of the one(s) who wronged you.

We all know the stories of various war crimes; atrocities committed against innocent people because they reminded the offenders of the subject of their hate. Hatred seems to lead to generalizations which equate to racism and end in hate crimes.

We all suffer from loss. None of us started the day expecting to receive the phone call which bore such terrible news. None of us thought we would see people we care about get hurt or killed. We don’t go through our day expecting crimes to be committed against us or our loved ones. Sadly, we all experience these pains to some degree or another. We lose family or friends in terrible accidents, atrocities, violent circumstances. The unforeseen, uncontrolled loss causes us to question our faith. These things, if we allow them, will destroy us and lead us down dark paths.

When you experience terrible things, you have to look inward. No, it isn’t fair these things happened to you. But you have to understand and come to accept the terrible things that happen. You fight back, by staying in control. Allowing your emotions to turn to hate will drive you to vengeance against a person or people that will never undo the past.

You can’t correct the mistakes of others by making your own. You cannot right the wrongs by wronging. You cannot understand by refusing to listen to and understand your own emotions. Seeking vengeance will only hurt you. Choosing to things you would otherwise be morally opposed to will change you forever in a way you don’t want to be changed. Acting only out of anger will make you into a person you do not want to be.

Vengeance will only hurt you. Vengeance will destroy you.

Vulnerability: Letting People Peel Back the Layers Makes You Stronger

 

Allowing other people to peel back your layers makes you a stronger person. We have a tendency to protect ourselves from everything outside. We want to believe we are right, we know what we’re doing, and we’re just. We often aren’t however, and may not know that until we’ve really asked ourselves hard questions about our actions past and present.

In Jordan B. Peterson’s book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Peterson devotes an entire rule to the idea we need to dig into our pasts and understand them to move forward without making the same mistakes (Peterson, 2021). Peterson tells us we have to peel back the layers of our emotions from the past. We have to know what decisions we made and why we made them. We have to understand how we ended up in situations that led to traumatic experiences. Knowledge and understanding the past, frees us to make better futures for ourselves.

We suppress traumatic experiences. We want to walk away and simply forget experiences that hurt us. We want to forget people that cause(d) us pain. Unfortunately, we never will. Those experiences will always hold a place in our minds. Man has yet to discover a way to erase memories, to undo the pain caused by extreme circumstance. Until that way is found, we must deal with the ghosts of our past. We will experience triggers and act according to those triggers because they bring up a sense of extreme dread, fear, even panic.

What’s worse, is it doesn’t matter if we were the victim in our past or if we were the villain. Terrible experiences bring terrible consequences to our emotional and psychological health. These traumas shape our present and are impacting our futures. There’s a way to get through them however, and learn to build a better future for ourselves. There’s a way to prevent making the same mistakes.

Digging into our past and uncovering all the emotions associated with traumatic circumstance can free us from the past. Seeking understanding of our own emotions allows us to see the triggers before they occur, recognize them, and make better decisions. Through understanding our past, we can shape our future.

Good friends and loved ones can help us with our healing. People you are close with often ask personal questions. You will resist them at first, but learning to be vulnerable with those important people will make you a better person. Questions answered honestly, openly, and without fear of judgment will lead to more questions. Some of those questions, you may have never asked yourself. Getting someone else’s opinion about something you’re doing or something you experienced can help you discover knew ways of looking at terrible circumstances. They will never take those experiences from you, nobody can, but talking through it, with the intent to understand, can save you from a lifetime of bad decisions in the future.

Open up to the people that matter; the people that care about you. Tell the story and answer the questions. You will discover you haven’t dealt with it yet, or that you looked at it wrong the entire time. You will find opening up and being vulnerable makes you stronger. Allowing someone else to guide you through the layers of your life, because they have a genuine interest and concern, will make you a better person. You will avoid repeating the past because you understand it. You will learn. You will be a better person.

https://whateverhappenedtohonor.blogspot.com/2021/04/vulnerability-strength-not-weakness.html

Dad Bod vs. Six-pack: Understanding Primal Urges

Last week’s post sparked good discussion. I was challenged in stating that Dad Bods are not preferred by the average woman. It’s worth expanding however, because my short statement does sound like I’m claiming we are all shallow.

I won’t say that attraction is purely physical. Attraction even complex on completely primal levels. Foregoing primal attraction however, writing it off and telling ourselves and each other that such things are shallow, doesn’t give due respect to what makes us human.

Before I expand, I need to define, in my way, primal attraction. The idea of primal attraction is based in the evolution of mankind and societies across the globe. Long ago, every day was a fight for survival. To be human meant to hunt, gather, and avoid death. Being human meant we constantly worried about our next meal as well as becoming a meal or someone else taking our resources forcefully. People fought and killed each other over lands that produced food and were close to water. People killed each other because they wanted to take what other people had.

For all these reasons, societies began to form. Tribes were created. People banded together for protection of loved ones, each other, and resources. With the evolution of tribes, man had time to think, tools were developed that made life even easier. We learned we could work the soil and grow food. We learned to craft weapons to make hunting easier and to better defend ourselves from other tribes that wanted what we had.

Tribal life was very different than the lives most of us experience today. Our ancestors had to be assets to their tribe. Each person was either asset or liability. Hunters were assets. Gatherers were assets. Resources were assets. The most import asset of all during ancient times were people. People held great value if they were an asset to their tribe. Assets were attractive on a primal level.

In ancient times, all that mattered to most people was primal attraction. Men were, and still are, attracted to women with large “childbearing hips” because on a primal level it means that woman is more likely to produce children. Those women are less likely to die during childbirth. Women were, and are, attracted to men that look strong. A man’s strength in primal humanity means he can defend the tribe and the family from aggressors. A strong man can defend his resources. He can fight off the Saber Tooth or the raiders from other tribes. He can work the land and producing food. A strong man is capable and an asset.

A fat man is slow and incapable. A fat man, the guy with the beer belly, didn’t know how to work, didn’t hunt, and would die quickly in a fight against most opponents. A fat man was incapable of defending his tribe. He was a liability and unwanted. A fat man was, and is, not attractive.

Today, most of us aren’t truly this shallow. We can look beyond someone’s physical appearance and see the other qualities a person has. We have time now to look for things beyond a man’s ability to fight or a woman’s ability to produce children. I am not suggesting we remain so primal that we cannot look beyond physical appearance. I am however, suggesting that none should discount the fact these primal urges remain.

Dad Bod is a very lose term. It is something between a guy with a six-pack and a guy that is completely obese. Nobody today will say an obese person is more attractive than a guy with a six-pack. If they tell you that, they are lying. If they believe that, they are lying to themselves.

I’m not saying you must have a six-pack to be physically attractive. I am saying you need to look strong to be physically attractive. You need to look like someone that can carry themselves. You need to look like you can defend your tribe if called to do so. You need look like you could work the fields if needed. You need to look like someone that can and will defend their family, their tribe.

We have all heard or read many women say they are turned off by a guy with the six-pack for various reasons. These are men that care too much about themselves. These are guys that spend more time at the gym than they do at work or at home. These are men that look too good, better than their women. The problem I have with these assessments, is they are completely intellectual or emotional, not physical, not primal.

Everyone is familiar with the movie Magic Mike. Do we honestly believe that movie would have done so well if all the actors had Dad Bods instead of six-packs? Are we really willing to sell ourselves on that lie? Women don’t go to Chippendale’s to see guys with Dad Bods. They go to satisfy their primal urges. Women watch that movie and go to male strip clubs because it appeals to their primal side.

I do believe we are all deeper than that. If we can be a little better however, why aren’t we striving for that? If I am emotionally and intellectually attractive to my partner, why not make myself an even more attractive partner? Why not be the very best I can be so I can always be attractive to my partner? I don’t want to just be eye candy for my girl. I would never suggest that, and it goes against most of what I write about and believe. I do, however, want to appeal to my girl’s primal side as well as her other sides. I want to appeal to her shallow side and her deep side.

Men, we know each other well. You know your lady’s worth. You also know how the minds of men work. You know there are men out there that see what you have and want it. There are men out there that want to take from you. If you aren’t prepared to defend what is yours, they will boldly come after it. If other men see you as weak, they will walk over you.

I challenge you to ask yourself and answer honestly. Are you an asset to your tribe? Do you appeal to the primal needs of your tribe? Or are you a liability?

https://whateverhappenedtohonor.blogspot.com/2021/05/grab-yourself-by-balls-and-be-man.html