There are some instances in your life, which you can’t forget because on that day you comprehended some of the complexities around you, which bothered you for a long time. Today I will talk about one similar experience of mine, which changed the way I used to think about our mythologies; ceremonies and philosophies associated with any religion.
I grew up in a family where my mother used to tell me stories of our mythological characters such as Arjuna, Krishna and many more in greater details. When I grew up, I found myself in a constant debate about the existence of such characters, whether they exist it or not, and arguments against it were also making sense to my rational mind.
When I inquired further, complexities just increased.
It took me a greater deal of time and understanding of philosophy, academic courses and explanation of Mahabharata by one organization to understand the situation and that is what I will present to you today.
There was one chapter in the BIO course, which talked about emotions and moods of an individual. It talked about the dozens of basic emotions can be possible inside the human being starting from love, joy, anger, frustration, pride surprise and many more. Next chapter talked about the formation of personality in which emotions play a significant part. I want you to place this information somewhere back in your mind for some time.
Next, I will present an alternative explanation Mahabharata for two reasons. First, the size of army mentioned in the text was close to 100 crores and it was difficult to have such population in Kurukshetra alone. Second, Names of all the kaurvas started from “du”, means Duryodha, Dushashan, and Dushala which is highly unlikely. The names of all the characters also have a negative meaning, for example, Duryodhan means the one who uses wrong means to achieve something, Dushashan which means who rules not abiding by laws.
What if it was not an actual fight and it is something subtle. It might have to do something about us. Consider yourself and your body as a war field (Kurukshetra) and imagine there is a fight going on inside your body. There are 100 bad emotions such as hatred, jealousy, anger that is in a constant struggle with 5 good forces such as concentration, dharma, and commitment. Fit the emotion and personality part in this scenario. Then identify which emotion is prevailing at a certain point of time and which emotion has a greater effect on your personality. This fight goes on for years are we are struggling to find out the reality and ways to win this perennial war. This fight is going within every 100 crores, individual. To resolve this, some supreme soul like Krishna is giving us the true knowledge and showing what is truth. This explanation made much more sense to me.
To understand the fundamental and the reason for existence for such mythology we now will move to explanation of religion from Vedanta philosophy. It described that every religion is made up of three parts- philosophies which explain the basic principles such as do not do bad things, second is mythology that helps in reinforcing the philosophy with the help of stories such that idea remains there for longer times. This is for the general masses, who can not understand the philosophy and therefore, they can these principles with the help of underlying characters and stories. The third is a ritual, which further reinforces these core principles and attaches it with our daily lives.
This was the story I wanted to share with you all. It helped me in solving some of the complexity, which we are a part of. It also helped me looking at the reality with a particular framework to make more sense out of it.
There are multiple lessons I learned with the help of this incident.
- Whatever we are seeing around has some explanation towards it.
- Believe in the core philosophy of any religion and it is more or less same across the nations. Mythology and ceremonies change with time and highly depends on the particular way of life.
- Have faith in yourself and explore yourself for eternal truths because mythology represents the complex world inside you
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