The Mahabharata and the Song of the Lord

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0:00 Thank you everyone for showing up. A myth in essence is a cosmic story. Meaning it's a story that paints not just characters and drama, but it colors the entire world, the entire cosmos. A really good myth will answer three questions. Who are we? Where did we come from? And where are we going? There are different levels of these cosmic stories. You begin with the whole universe or at least the universe experienced by a people. So to map it, you would have to map the heavens and the hells, the world of mundane life that we live in here.

1:10 And the story will also involve the most powerful beings in that universe. The defining characters, the paradigms examples would be Jesus, Buddha, Krishna as we'll soon discuss Arjuna in India, Confucious, Plato, Lza, Schwangza, so on and so forth. And these are people who either explain reality as a whole or they participate in that reality in a way that all people should look at them as an ideal person and perhaps a person to emulate. In the west, we know the characters Adam the first man, Moses the lawbringer, David the king, prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, so on and so forth. And in Christrysendom, this culminates with Jesus and his apostles.

2:26 The three layers I want to point out here, you've got the cosmic story. Where does the world come from? Where are we now in it? Where is the world going? Below that though, you have the civilizational story. Who are we as a people? Where did we come from? Where are we going? And with each person within that civilization, each person is going to have that question answered. There are different ways of of looking at myths. Some think of myth as just a fiction, a madeup story. the Marxist or atheistic hyper sexual uh secular culture that we live in tends to dismiss these stories as nothing but as just stories. I don't see

3:28 it that way at all. Part of it is because I'm biased, because I've spent so much time in and among religious people and religious places buried in these texts. But also, I I do believe that just like a really good piece of fiction should inspire a person to be more realized, to be more whole, so the great cosmic and civilizational stories do the same on a collective level. stories that everyone can share. Before we get into the the real meat of what I want to convey to you um which is one of the central stories of India, the Mahabarata and a small section of that story, the Bavad Gita. I just want to lay out familiar stories from the west that hopefully will spark a lot of

4:32 memories, hopefully a lot of good memories and give us something to compare these Indian stories to and also just to get a sense of who I'm talking to. Have any of you heard of or read or are familiar with the Mahabara or the Bhagavad Gita? Just don't Well, that's there only a few. So, I'm I'm going to keep it as as basic as I possibly can while still hopefully conveying the the real richness of the story. But in the west you have two basic foundations building up to our modern culture. Uh the one side you have Greece, the other side you have the Hebrew story that culminates in Christianity. It's oftentimes been said, you know, on one pole you have Jerusalem and on the other you have Athens. And the combination of those two make up

5:40 Christianity and the evolution of Christianity is what produced modern secular philosophy, science and even in some sense Marxism which would seek to eradicate it and its origins to cut the culture off at at the root. You're probably familiar with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and this is the deep structure of Greek culture conveyed by a probably mythical poet, Homer, dated somewhere around the 12th or 13th century BCE or BC. So, we're talking about over 3,000 years ago. And the story, the story of heroes, of warriors, an honor culture, an honor culture in which the warriors seek to take vengeance on their enemies and to retrieve a woman. The story was passed down orally,

6:44 generation after generation after generation. And I know some of you here are part of various organizations in which an oral tradition is extremely important. So that the story is not just externalized but is internalized completely and that oral tradition forces the person who is a part of it to embody in some sense that story. And of course, the the aim of these homeriic tales, the aim of the story of Agamimnon leading the Greeks to retrieve Helen from Troy. It's meant to inspire men, inspire them to bravery, inspire them to loyalty, and of course to inspire them to commit horrific violence on other men with some sense of dignity and and respect for the other

7:52 side, but still a willingness to gut another man, spear him in the ground and according to some interpretations to ravish the dead body explaining I guess a lot of the later Greek motifs of man-on-man love. That story is the basis I believe of the early phases of what we call civilization. the story of men banding together to get bounties, to take revenge, to take territory. You see it in the Old Testament. You see it in the myths of China, Africa, Native Americans, so on and so forth. But in a few cultures, you have a kind of theoretical layer that gets built on top of it, a philosophical layer. So in the case of Greece, that would be the culmination of

8:56 this this honor culture, this warrior culture in Athens, in Sparta, and in the various philosophical schools that spring up around the Mediterranean. So that they still are conveyed in story. Plato, for instance, is full of stories, but there's an analytical layer on top of it. And you'll see in India, this is extremely important. In India, there's this very unique fusion of that that story, those those questions. Who are we? Where have we come from? And where are we going? Not just in the tale with a beginning and an end, but a kind of eternal form or series of forms to which those stories adhere or conform. Across from Athens, you have Jerusalem. And I think that many people aren't as

9:59 familiar with the Greek stories unless they've had the privilege of a classical education. But most people in America, most people in the West are very familiar with the the Hebrew stories that culminate in the story of Jesus. They're very different from the Greek stories by and large, but there are certain similarities. One of the key differences in the Greek origin story of the cosmos, where did we come from? The commonly held theme of ancient Greek Greek origin stories was a theme of of battle between the Titans who were the original high gods and the Olympians. The Olympians of course being Zeus, Athena, Mars. And so the in the in the beginning of the Greek story of where the universe came from, it is a battle. It's a battle and it's a conquest. So that by the time you arrive at the story of of Homer in

11:05 the Iliad and the Odyssey, these are not all powerful gods. These are gods that are very very human in their their personas, in their desires, in their pettiness, in their propensity for trickery and violence. In the Hebrew story, on the other hand, you have the one God or the Elohim, a council of gods. But whether we interpret the Elohim as a sort of a way of saying one god or some maybe primordial sense that there was a council of many gods. This is an all powerful entity that simply effortlessly just speaks the cosmos into existence. So when God says let there be light and begins to build our world layer upon layer upon layer, it is simply through the effort of speech. And again, these stories, these ancient Hebrew stories were passed down through

12:11 oral tradition. In a sense, you could say that that the ancient Hebrews spoke Genesis into existence continually, ritualistically, passing down then the story of Adam and Eve, the fall in the garden in which the blame for the horrors of life, death, old age are the blame is put on human beings. Where do we come from? Who are we? We are fallen beings and it's in some sense our fault or at least the fault of primordial man. And while I myself I don't think a uh a strict literal interpretation of of these these Old Testament stories is appropriate. Not to say that they're all entirely made up, but I do think they they represent a compression of many many many different stories into one continual theme. You can see something like the scientific story of evolution and

13:21 cultural evolution that most people take for granted now. So you know in the beginning is the cosmos and then you have the basic elements of the sky, the sea, the land and into those are layered various animals and beings and then humans sitting at the pinnacle and then the unfolding of a tribal society through the book of judges and so on and so forth into a kingdom the kingdom of David Saul. Saul, David, Samuel, and then the overtaking of that kingdom by empires. You had in the the beginning in Exodus, you have the the escape of the Hebrews from an empire. there in the empire there's this theme of an overpowering and doineering and unfair ungodly entity that the Hebrews are

14:23 contending with. And that that theme that theme of the pagan gods and the the domination against the will of God of this people of God continually over and over again. You see in Once you get to or past the the kings into the first the north kingdom being destroyed by the Assyrians and then the the whole of Jerusalem being destroyed by the Babylonians. You get this sense in the story that God has chosen these people but unlike the other civilizations around them in which when they asked why are we here? Why have we been destroyed? Typically the response would be because the other gods are stronger. In the case of the Hebrews, it's something very unique. You have this introspection and they refused in their stories to admit that these foreign gods were more powerful and that's why they

15:29 had been defeated. They insisted that God did it on purpose, that their God, Yahweh, the Elohim, that their God was simply punishing them. Again, it's this this introspection, this questioning of not only the the larger social structure, but also questioning one's own culture is something that's very very unique in history. You only see it really in early civilization four times in what's known as the axial age. You see this process unfold in the philosophical schools of Greece in which culture is relativized, power is relativized, fairness and the sense of an anchored permanent law or permanent morality is held aloft. And then you

16:36 have the same in the prophetic movement of the Hebrews. You have something very similar in the Zarastrians of Persia. You have something very similar among the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Janes of India. And you have something very similar in China with Confucious with Lza with the Mohists and so forth. This is known as the axial the axial age. Are you familiar with this term just really quickly? No. So this was coined really by u Carl Yaspers a German philosopher 1948 the end of the world of the second world war and he like many Germans was trying to reckon with the horrific violence and social control of Nazism of communism even the excesses of liberal democracy uh say in the bombing of Dresden the nuclear assault on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he was looking for some

17:44 sort of some sort of constant moral structure across civilizations that could give an answer to the problem of tribal identity and tribal and national struggle. And what he identified building on the work of others, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead had a very similar sort of outlook but not as systematic. What he found was that in those cultures I just mentioned, basically between the years 200 and 800 BC that there arose the philosophers in Greece and the flowering of the school of Athens with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle that you saw something very similar again this relativism in the sense of an the culture being relative but the morality and the anchor of reality being absolute. You found the same among the Hebrews and particularly their

18:51 prophets among the priests of Iran descending from Zoraster among the uh aesthetics or the renunciates of India and then the sages of China. So again, Confucious, Moza, Lza, Schwangza, and it's it's almost like uh some sort of alien civilization began beaming the earth with some some consciousness elevating energy because it's before that you only have for the most part tribal cultures and then god king cultures. god king cultures in which the gods are basically identified with the ruler of the state and suddenly you have this questioning of the state you have this questioning of everything and if you're familiar with Plato in particular all of his dialogues are just

19:57 continual questioning there's never an answer given not really the creation stories for instance in Plato They don't make sense together and they're not necessarily intended to. If you look at the Taeus, you just simply have these eternal forms, this this divine design. And then God is a craftsman, a demi urge that is trying his best to create what is in those eternal forms and is obviously beautiful. You look around, it's clearly beautiful, but it's flawed. It dies. Everything gets sick. You have very similar ways of thinking in India, very similar ways of thinking in China in this axial age, that period leading up to the one of the major historical events of history, Jesus. Do you have this kind of premonition or foreshadowing of this this one sort of

21:05 divine reality of which what we see is is nothing but a sort of pale imitation. But back to the stories. I mean, if you're familiar with the Hebrew story, you know that after the northern and southern kingdom are destroyed by empires, the Jews are taken captive in Persia by a Zorastrian emperor. It would appear that some of those stories had a deep impression on the writing of the Hebrew Bible. And then they were released by King Cyrus to rebuild the temple in the Levant. That of course leads up to the story we all know with Jesus. And that story in particular is like one of the essential paradigmatic stories. You have a birth narrative something like a growth narrative. You have struggle, personal struggle in the

22:10 desert for instance, against Satan in temptation. You have the struggle against the powers of the civilization, the powers of the Jewish king, the power of the Pharisees, the power of Roman authorities culminating then in a crucifixion which becomes an image for the civilization that we now live in. And that that image is completely counterintuitive to what anyone at that time or any time would expect from a king. Right? Christ is called a king of kings, but he's the loser of the battle. Something completely counterintuitive. There are other similar stories. Dian Isis for instance or you have stories in which in the Greeks I'm sorry in the uh Egyptian myths of Osiris the dying and rising god but in general the story of Christ is the story of giving up worldly

23:16 power of losing to worldly power and yet overcoming overwhelming now there's something very similar that happens in India So if you think of Jesus as a continuation of that story of the Hebrews, a story in which the loser is still the winner because the loser has the blessing of God and the winners are in fact against God on this plane. But the true winner is the winner in another realm. You have something very similar that unfolds in India. And I want to the real point of this talk is to hopefully convey to you the importance of the myth of the Mahabharata but especially the Bavad Gita which is the ultimate revelation of God to the people of India at least of the Hindu persuasion. But I want to give you kind of a background of the cosmic view like where

24:19 they believed the world came from, where they thought they were and where they thought they were going. Before the axial age, before 800 AD, most of the Indian high culture for which we have records of is the the Vadic culture. You guys have you're familiar with the vadas very long collection of poems and and hymns. A lot of creation stories. There's many many different creation stories. One, for instance, in which all of reality emerges from a a golden egg that is floating in a cosmic sea. And so that the world begins to evolve out of this primordial oneness, evolving of its own accord. Very different from the Jewish story of God speaking to matter and bringing existence into being. But this is paired with another story. And there's one hymn in particular where

25:25 they talk about this this difference. Another in which a craftsman, not unlike the demiurge from Plato, a craftsman simply sculpts the world into existence. And another in which the beginning of the universe is is the divine sacrifice of a primordial human, the Perushia. And the writer of this of one of these particular vadas notes this is very puzzling like some say this some say that and ultimately concludes there's really no way we can ever know but they still these these Hindu seers these rishies the composers of these vas which are something like you could say it's something like the old testament of India the these Seers were very comfortable with that ambiguity. They didn't need a rational stepby-step logical progression. Maybe part of it was they

26:34 were high. Uh the vadas are full of these stories of soma, some plant. Nobody really knows exactly what it was. some plant that would inspire visions, that would inspire warriors to go into battle bravely, would take one to the gods. The high god of the vadas, the storm god Indra, which is very much like the storm god Yahweh in the Old Testament, was always munching on the stuff. He he couldn't get enough of it. And it's perhaps due to that kind of meditative psychedelic culture that India developed in its pathway uniquely as opposed to say the more uh hardcribbled uh Hebrews or the refined Athenians. But this this the vadas form the background but it's really like the

27:34 the core of Hindu civilization is the at least in my opinion the the philosophical Hindu civilization is what grew out of these vadas these vdas in which the emphasis was on sacrifice and on warfare. The emphasis was especially on the fire sacrifice in which various goods were burned and sent to the gods for good karma which would allow a king or a ruler. Basically, it would imagine there was a circle of wizards that were building up the karma and the power the worldly power of the king that could lift him up to heaven. And that was the way in which a a king could get his immortality. But you can see a progression in the the speculation. Well, what if that energy runs out? And that was the conclusion that one could perhaps storm the gates of heaven in that sense, but eventually the energy would wear off basically and they would descend back to earth. There had to be some other way. And you see these new

28:40 stories forming in the uponads. The terms aren't as important as the concept. The Upupanicads are sort of like what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are to the Homeriic myths. Socrates, assuming he was real, Plato and Aristotle built off of the home story, but they built this idea of a form, a formal world. And in a very similar way, you had in India these people who would kind of drop out of society, these syasan renunciates and they would give up any claim they had to worldly power, worldly wealth and they pursued meditative practices and they completely rethought what the vadas had taught them. This is often come oftentimes called the vdanta. Vdanta basically meaning after the vadas and the Buddha would be an airir to this. So Buddhism as an

29:46 offshoot of Hinduism uh is in essence a a kind of vanta but it completely discards it. We'll get to that in just one moment. But as long as we have the map here, pretty much all of this is occurring along the Ganes and Hindu culture spread out from there. But the real centers of cultural and intellectual life were in and around cities like Veronasi or Benaris as it's oftentimes called uh what's now Delhi and of course the Himalayas right a lot of these syasan a lot of these aesthetics these these monks would disappear off into the Himalayas and there's all these stories of course of the wise men on the mountain that had been able to see what reality is beyond just the the day-to-day mundane life of slaves, work, toil, kings, war, and even the priests who are casting these

30:53 spells. So, I'll give you the the quick and dirty of kind of like the world of the Hindu, the world of the vidanta, which begins with the vadas. And you had, like I say, in one of the the main stories, this idea of the Perushia, a person. And you'll also notice that Perushia and person sound somewhat similar. And that's no coincidence. The the Indo-European languages coming down from the steps east or west of Russia, the Indo-European language is shared all across this whole region. So, not only are there a lot of similar words, but you have similar gods. Again, the storm god Indra, very much like the storm god Yahweh, very much like the storm god Zeus, whose main weapon was a lightning bolt. And in this this paradmatic creation story, this this perushia, this person is everything. It's

32:02 all and somehow without getting too hung up on the illogic of it, these beings show up to sacrifice this person. And so at the very beginning of the Hindu story or at least this branch is a human sacrifice in which this person is killed, his body burned and from the ashes his skull becomes the sky, his eye becomes the sun, if I recall correctly, a piece of his brain becomes the moon. And all of these other elements that we see in the world are formed from this human sacrifice, this primordial human sacrifice. But then the humans are formed from different parts of his body. So that the cast system, you're probably all familiar with the Hindu cast system in India. this very rigid hierarchy with the priests at the top and the warrior kings below and the merchants below and the servants below

33:10 and the untouchables completely outside of it. In this story, nobody knows how ancient probably more ancient than the homeic myths. The Brahman come from the mouth. The Brahman, the priest is the one who tells the story, who speaks reality into existence. And they believe this so much that in some Hindu schools they believe that if the Brahmans ceased to chant, the sun would cease to rise. And in some Hindu schools they believe that the vadas are so important these vdas that are also like the homeriic myths being passed down word of mouth that they actually form the structure of reality itself kind of like mathematics and physics the vadas are this underlying structure to reality. The Hebrews had a very similar belief. The Hebrews believed that the Torah was eternal and that the Torah was this sort of

34:14 linguistic structure of the world. So the brahinss come from the mouth. Thehatria come from the arms, right? The warrior, the enforcer. The vasha, the merchants, the farmers, the productive class come from the the thighs and the and the balls, the loins. They're the the productive energy of society. And of course the sudra are the feet. And so even as they saw the whole cosmos as this primordial human sacrifice, they also saw all of society as one organism in which you had the head, the arms, the heart, the legs and balls and all of it resting on the servants. Plato had very similar beliefs. He saw it as a three-fold structure but very very similar. Plato believed at the top should be the philosopher king where he suggested it in his dialogue. Uh in the middle should

35:14 be the productive class and at the bottom the slaves. And Plato shared a lot of other beliefs in common with the the Hindus. It it one imagines even with this great distance perhaps there was some communication. Just for instance, Plato at the end of the republic speaks of reincarnation. And of course, the Hindus are famous for their concept of reincarnation. The very last story of Plato's republic is a story of a warrior who's killed in battle and wakes up on the funeral p. They ask him where he'd been, what he'd seen. And he described souls descending from heaven and being reborn or ascending from hell to be reborn or people dying and going into the same. These are again cosmic stories that just like our heaven and hell these these give meaning to one's life. How did in the at the end of the republic? How did one go to heaven? Good deeds. How did one go to hell? Bad deeds. In the Hindu conception, you're very

36:21 familiar with the idea of karma. The same idea. What originally in the ancient vadas was simply ritual came to be seen as moral code. If one's moral code was proper, then one would ascend to the heavens. And if one's moral code was evil or at least flawed, one would descend to the hells. But once one's karma was burned off in the hells or burned off in the heavens, inevitably one would be reborn. And this idea they called samsara, this cycle, an endless cycle of death and rebirth, death and rebirth, all driven by karma, both good karma and bad karma. One more element I I want to bring up before I ask a question of you and then get into really the meat of the talk. In the the developed the fully developed Hindu world view, you had this concept of the all

37:28 beyond of the one and also the one within. So that these forest dwellers and mountain dwellers as they speculated or as they told it experienced the true ground of reality as they looked out and looked out at all the phenomenon and the phenomena around them. They saw beyond it tying it all together a oneness the Brahman. The fire that's within the sun the fire that's within the wood. the fire that's within the earth, the water, so on and so forth. The one, it mirrors in some sense the one God of the Hebrews, of the Christians, and of course of Plato himself. And there was another group of seers who saw something very similar within. As they meditated, perhaps they ate the soma and they looked inward, they saw that what was inside was eternal. That the the body was a sheath and that that thing that is

38:36 experiencing inside the body, the otman, the self, the breath, that that thing would pass on and on from life to life. And then at the full fruition of this was the notion that okay well if I look into you or into anything and see that there is a one inside of it and I know there is a one inside of me then that must mean that the one beyond is also the one with the one within that the the same God that animates each person is the God that animates the whole universe, a sort of pantheism that God is experiencing through all of us. Not that they didn't still hold to gods though. They did. They believed in all sorts of gods. Famously, India is a land of 300 million gods. But in the higher philosophical schools, they believe that all of these gods are mere faces for the one God, for

39:44 the Brahman. And the three classic faces were the creator, Brahma. You've probably seen his statues. He's got four heads, four arms. He fades into the background because after the creation, there's really not much for him to do. And then you have Vishnu, the sustainer, the god that or the face of God that holds all of this together. One of the the highest and most revered gods in India because it's really the only one with anything to do at the moment. And then of course the destroyer as as all of this comes to a close the face of God that will become dominant is is Shiva the destroyer. And all of this they believed again in the same sense that all time and all life is a cycle and a cycle of rever rebirths. They also believed that history was a cycle. So that in the beginning of creation you would have a golden age and God would basically dream all of this into being. The God with within us and the God

40:49 without would dream all of this into being and would be mostly perfect. And that golden age would descend into a silver age which was pretty good but not perfect and then descend into a bronze age which was getting pretty crummy and then into what Hindus by and large believe we're in today the iron age the age of kali the age of death the end of the cycle in which the honor of the priest would be in question the power of the king would be subverted and ultimately the interest of the slave and the the rule of the slave would be the norm. All right. So this is just I I felt it necessary to give you a kind of sense of what that world is that they're living in in India. And I hope that the review of Homer and just to think of the stories of the Old Testament, the story of the New Testament

41:54 stories would hopefully give you at least some some sense of what the story is of your life. And perhaps you don't believe in any of that. Perhaps like many maybe most people in the modern world, you believe something more in line with the scientific. So that there is no need for gods. Nature is sufficient unto herself. And the true story, the true cosmic story is one of a big bang and the consolidation of galaxies and planets, the evolution of life, the cultural evolution that led us to here, including the false stories of religion, uh, leaving us as kind of hopeless and helpless meatags with nothing much to hope for than to perhaps create a data center big enough to upload our souls into. But whatever story you hold, I just want to pause here for just maybe

42:56 five 10 minutes and if you would just write down, even if it's just a word or a paragraph, what is the story that your personal story is embedded within? And if it's multiple stories like my own, then just three of them, two of them, whatever it is. Don't don't wear yourself out with it. But think your life, your story from your birth and your family, your community that you were raised in, the direction that you believe your life is going, and especially the meaning of that life. What is that story? Is it a Christian story? Is it a philosophical story? Is it, as in our now degraded age is so common, a political story and a political meaning or are you going to be uploaded? But just um if you'll just take five minutes and anybody who wants to talk about it

44:04 when this whole thing is over with um I would actually like to hear it. I would like to know. doesn't have to be on the camera but I would like to know like what what is the story the background story in which your own personal individual life is unfolding. So just five minutes and I'll I'll leave you alone. I'll leave you to it. All right. 101 is always the hardest part. You never know what people already know. Laying that foundation is is is a daunting task. I remember the first religious studies class I ever taught. I wrote down phenomenology, cosmology, epistemology, ontology, axiology, began breaking it all down, and these kids looked at me like, "What the is wrong with you?" I never made that mistake again. But the main myth of India, first things first, why would you

45:09 even care? What is this page mysticism? And why does it even matter? For me, it was my path back to Christianity. I had become pretty disillusioned, especially with the kind of fundamentalist Southern Baptist approach to Christianity, which I found to be very thin. And somehow through reading some of the introductory texts like Houston Smith or Joseph Campbell and then people like Murcia Eliotti, it brought me back. I realized that the Hindus whatever problems modern India has that the Hindus had arrived at something very beautiful, very comprehensive and that reflected in many ways the the western tradition that I was starving for and it led me back in.

46:11 So personally that was why I found the Hindu myths to be so important. On a civilizational level though, you have two different things that have happened with colonialism and as more and more scholars began pulling these texts, these Sanskrit texts out of India and translating them and comparing them and doing that side by side with western texts, doing that side by side with Chinese texts, they found this this whole world of beauty that wasn't particularly obvious from the kind of demoralized and degraded culture that the the early British and other European colonists found in India. And then by the time you get to the 60s in America and in Europe, Britain especially, you had this this influx of Hindu gurus and this explosion of kind of

47:19 Hindu and Indian fetishism. Much of the 60s aesthetic comes out of India. Like if you go to India today, you'll see paisley on everything and you'll see the the the incense and so on and so forth. You'll see that much of what we now take for granted as hippie culture is an extension of Indian culture into our own. And it's had a profound impact. It's been cheapened. It's I think really cheapened by American pop culture, but it still has a major impact. Maybe not least of which is the kind of tolerance and acceptance of other belief systems. India is notoriously tolerant. It's the mother of three major religious traditions and all of these different subtraditions within. So building from just that world of the early vadic culture and the the perusia and the cast system so on and so forth

48:21 you had Hinduism in which the cast system is is preserved priest at the top king below that productive class below that merchant class and the servant class at the bottom and the outcasts on the outside. But you really have the elevation of the syasan, the syasi, the renunciates, the people who went out into the forest to meditate, the people who went up to the mountain to meditate. And it's from that culture, from that renunciate culture, the wandering minddicant, the person who has renounced violence, who has renounced physical power and status, has renounced sex and marriage, and has dedicated himself solely to the pursuit of unity with ultimate reality, unity with God. It's from that that you get the Jane culture, if you're familiar with it. It's much smaller in in in so far as the number of

49:26 adherence in India but still quite prominent and janes are an extension of the Hindu ideal of going beyond this cycle of birth and death and rebirth and death and rebirth and death to achieve liberation to achieve moia to achieve unity with that ultimate reality. ity that sits behind the illusion of this dying decaying world that we now inhabit. And the person who founded it, whether he's real or not, Mahaviraa, the name Mahaviraa means great warrior. So it's it's an irony built into it. This great warrior wasn't making war for conquest. wasn't making war to save Helen from Troy or making war to drive out the Canaanites or making war on the Jewish state as the

50:26 Romans did. The Mahaviraa was making war on the lowest parts of the self. So that that urge for violence and conquering and domination was turned inward to free that inner self, that otman or ja as the James called it. And the Buddha was also an heir to the Hindu culture. People talk about Buddhism as if it's atheistic in a sense, sort of. But the Buddha himself, if you look at the ancient Buddhist stories, it's taken for granted that the gods exist. It's taken for granted that there are heavens and hells that a a no self in the case of the Buddhists is descending into and going up to and descending into endlessly until you can get off that path. The Buddhist path famously was a middle way. It was between the excesses of hedenism and the excesses of aestheticism that the Hindus were

51:31 performing in which one would mortify oneself. You can see it even today in India now. There are men who will live their whole life with their arm in the air or men who mutilate their bodies or starve themselves. It's Buddhism is an extension of that renouncer culture the syasan but without the extremity of selfmortification. Yeah. Did you tell me what the definition of mortify? um just uh damaging oneself or um uh denying oneself to an extreme. So you've literally starved yourself into a a walking skeleton and the purpose is so yes. So so this this comes out of Yeah. And please any questions like that you especially brother uh any questions like that uh definitely. So the this renunciate culture is is kind of evolving out of the vadic priest culture and you have these people that are going out into the forests and dedicating their life to again you're trying they're trying to get to that ultimate

52:35 reality. They're trying to get to that Brahman or they're trying to realize that otman inside themselves and the the obstacle is desire is the human form, the human flesh, hunger, you know, the feeding, fighting, these are like the the real barriers to true enlightenment in Hinduism. And the Buddha picks that up but just gives it a somewhat different slant. Uh the Buddha Buddha simply means awake and the Buddhists rejected the vadas and the vadic sacrifices even if they still believed that the gods existed but they did not believe those gods were the highest being. The Buddhists believed that Nirvana, the total escape, the blowing out of the candle, Nirvana means to blow out the candle. And it's the candle of desire. And for the Buddha, it's not that different from Hinduism, but think

53:40 of it more as as an elaboration on Hinduism. The Buddha was born a king. He renounced or a prince and he renounced his heir to the throne his inheritance in order to pursue meditation with a Hindu meditation with a Jane. He achieved the highest realization of the oneness with reality with the Hindu and he achieved total control over his hungers with the Jane. But he realized that wasn't enough. What one had to do, both of those represented still a desire. It went from feeding, fighting, and to freedom. And what he believed or what he discovered was that one had to even give up the longing for freedom. One had to completely eliminate desire to blow out that candle. And once that candle, that flame that burned for something out there had

54:48 been extinguished, then one achieves enlightenment. One achieves nirvana, the blowing out of the candle, and one is no longer reborn into this eternal endless cycle. So that's the satisfaction of the karmic loop and the exit from it. Yes. It's and it's not satisfaction, it's the elimination of that's the important part. It's it's a good point. So it's not as if once you get to this renunciate culture, Buddhism, the the Hindu mystics, the Jane mystics, it's not a satisfaction of karma. Because the karma, whether it's good or bad karma, is what's keeping you in this cycle. It's the elimination of karma, the negation of karma that they believed was the true freedom. It's not dissimilar to the monks, the extreme monks in Christianity, St. Anthony in the desert for instance. Uh but the the today's monks with the monasteries developing centuries after Buddhism are much more like the Buddhists in that they're not

55:55 starving themselves to death. They created these communities, the SAS, in which they pursued the Buddhist path. SA and the SA just means community of monks. and they pursued the Buddhist path which the dharma and they saw it as a wheel a technological uh metaphor as it were and what was also really important about the Buddha as long as we're on that the the development of these communities they accepted people from any cast so for the Hindu they saw reincarnation beginning in the lowest of beings plants and animals and so on and so forth And one would move up through the servants and the merchants and the kings and the priests and so on and so forth until one emerged out the top through successive incarnations. And you might wonder where the women in all this in the kitchen. And this was this path upward that was only open really ultimately to the highest people. The Buddhists believe

57:03 that someone from any of the casts, including the outcasts, including women, could join them, and they would renounce the desire for power. They would renounce the desire for profit and privilege and would achieve enlightenment outside the system. The Buddha of course his existence is in the shadow of the Himalayas here on the Ganes roughly 400 BC. And yeah I I just that going back to the the realization of of Buddhism to eliminate even the desire for enlightenment and to achieve nirvana. It's always something that's been confusing to me because it that to its ultimate form would mean that you sit and do nothing ever and you just wither away and die. And so I'm I'm curious if there's anything that you've found that can that offers drive once you've discovered that. What what drives you past that point when you've eliminated all desire? Do they have an explanation? Um so it's the

58:05 attachment that's the problem. Um, and so in a in a Buddhist context, and of course Buddhism, there's so many different forms, so many different versions, all variations on the same theme. But the idea is that once one has attained true enlightenment, one can kind of continue on in their life as a monk. They don't just disappear and die. They will kind of flicker out into nirvana, but it's not necessarily nothingness. So for instance, in one of the Buddhist texts, the Buddha is asked, "When you die," he's getting close to death, and they ask him, "When you die, where will you go? What is Nirvana? What is this place?" And he said, "It is neither existence nor non-existence, nor is it not existence, nor is it not not existence. It's just can't handle it. It's just something else." Another time he was asked and he just produced a flower. Kind of a jerk or a smartass. Um I've

59:08 heard a great answer to that question of um it was on a show actually um and it was described really well. It was like when when the water when the wave crashes in the ocean, a droplet rises up and then once it's reached its peak, it just falls directly back into the earth joining back again with the source that it came from. And you know, some Christian mystics would say very very similar things. Jewish mystics um similar things. Yeah, there are like a lot of different versions of there's no one one thing about Hindu and Buddhist and just Indian religious culture. All of them basically believe that they were right and that their view was better than the other one. But they were very accepting of the existence of them and they kind of embraced the arguments with the exception of Buddhism. And I guess it brings brings me to kind of the connection to the Mahabara, right? Because with these Buddhists, the Mahabarata was composed most of the ancient stories probably go back as early as the Iliad in the Odyssey,

1:00:14 right? So most of the ancient stories probably go back many thousands of years, 3,000 years probably is, maybe four, who knows? Maybe they grew up with the Vadas. Nobody really knows because all of it is being passed down word of mouth till very very late when it's starting to be written down in Sanskrit. Then just incidentally on that you know people talk about all the time like with the Bible oh it's the telephone game people are just telling the story and it's getting exaggerated it's getting changed around yes but India provided this laboratory that's really interesting the vadas and the Mahabarata and and the Ramaya the other great epic of India as they were beginning to be written down they found variations for sure but there weren't nearly as many as you would think it it kind of proved proved that strictly oral transmission of culture has really high fidelity in a very disciplined culture. Um but so this

1:01:14 idea this Buddhist idea is and the Buddhists really took hold very very fast. So that some 200 years after the Buddha began preaching and converting people to Buddhism and bringing them into the monastery and out of the society into these subcultures. You had King Ashoka who's kind of like the Constantine of Buddhism and he began to spread Buddhism basically by force across India but with this this gentleness, right? this this demand that people no longer eat animals for instance that um you know his conversion to Buddhism came according to legend after a mass slaughter of his enemies and this this horrible guilt at having killed all these men and so he then instituted a kind of pacifism upon of course penalty of death with soldiers but it's still you know pacifism under

1:02:16 penalty of death yeah same with Janes, the Janes, notorious warriors, and they influence or power. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, you could say it would be like, you know, they talk about the woke and the libs now, you know, I mean, kind of like that, but with much better art and deeper philosophy. I remember if a guy in college got in an argument with an anti-war activist once about how important it was to not use violence to solve problems, and the argument ended with the with the the non-violent activist punching him in the face. Yeah. and he was a martial artist that could have destroyed the guy and he walked away peacefully and just didn't hit him back. It's kind of funny. He he would have been he would have been a supreme Buddhist. Ashoka would have been ashamed. But so but you have these people that are like dropping out on mass and the Hindus begin to drive the Buddhists out. By the time you get to the the era when the Mahabarata is really really taking hold. So that being around 200 BC into around the time of

1:03:18 Christ, nobody's really sure because the Hindus for all their brilliance were not big on keeping detailed histories. Uh or at least not chronologically. They just kind of told the stories over and over again. Nobody really knew. But you had this massive push. It seems that there was like an ethnic cleansing of Buddhists. And one of the reasons most likely was because all of these people were pursuing the Buddha's dharma, the Buddha's path, the Buddha's wheel of enlightenment rather than the Hindu dharma. In in Sanskrit, in the in the Hindu tradition, Dharma is extremely important. Dharma means a lot of different things. Just like you know, a lot of words will mean many things. Dharma means law. as in the law of the land. Dharma means law as in the law of the cosmos, the universe. Dharma means the structure of the universe. And maybe most importantly, dharma means duty. As in,

1:04:19 if you are a Brahman priest and you were born into your Brahman cast, you must pursue the dharma of your cast, the duty of your cast. You must do the rituals. You must keep doing the chance. You got to make the sun rise and fall. And if you're a king, you have to protect your people and you have to fight. And if you're a visha, you have to, you know, sell stuff. And if you're a servant, you have to serve and be a slave. And that is your dharma. That is your duty. But for the Buddhists, same word, but the dharma is focused outside of this this cast system. Yes, sir. Um why do most of the the words on there end with an A? Is it like some kind of ongoing theme? Yeah. Uh you know the Hindus um or the you know Sanskrit is kind of singongy like that. A lot of A's, a lot of I's don't I don't know. There's probably meaning. I also have another question about Okay. the I don't know if you went over this or not, but the thing under

1:05:26 sun kind of looks like a like a backwards nausey symbol with dots on it like Yes. Did the Nazis like copy that? Like they did actually. So um you'll notice that like in India as you walk around India, I've often times joked um it looks like uh Nazis crashed a UFO into the Ganes and came out and dominated everyone and put their swastikas everywhere. When you walk around India, there are swastikas everywhere and some of them are this way, some of them are like the Nazi symbol and it just means the sun. This it's it's a sign of luck. It's a sign of power and it goes back millennia, right? And you you find it all over the world actually. But what the Nazis did is they took, you know, Hitler sent Oh, they took that turned it backwards and made it their temporary. Yes. Like we're the like we're the power. Yes. And you know the the idea they are right um the the the Aryan ideal of the Nazis right that also is taken from the Indians because the Indians had this concept of Arya. Arya just means noble and Arian is a

1:06:31 blood nobility, right? This is a digression from the Mahabarata, but it's a great one. Arians as best as linguists or phologists, as best as geneticists, as best as archaeologists have been able to tell, the Arians came down from the Russian steps or these steps above the Caucasus mountains here. And this would have been five four 4,000 5,000 years ago. Anybody's guess. And these were people with blonde hair and blue eyesish mostly. And they begin to pour down into what's now Iran. And Iran takes its linguistic root from Arian. It simply just means noble, the noble people. And these are the people of the vadas, right? These are the warrior tribes. And they they at some point had uh really refined the chariot so that the the two- wheeled chariot with a driver and an archer became

1:07:38 extremely important for their domination of their neighbors. And as they moved down into Iran, they dominated the peoples there and developed what would become Zorastrianism. As they moved into India, they dominated the dark-skinned Dravidian people. So that in north India even now you can see among the Brahman they are much lighter skinned. Uh and as you go down into the lower casts they're much darker skinned. that doesn't hold true the further south you go, but it's just it's a piece of evidence, right? And then you also have very good evidence uh linguistically, if not um through genotype mapping that in Greece, the same Indo-Europeans, the same Arians that culture spread. So the word aristocrat, which means noble, most likely has its root still in Arian. And it may well be all the way out to Ireland or Aaron. Uh in Irish or in Celtic, Ireland is Aaron or Iran or Arian. What Hitler did was basically he

1:08:49 was kind of like the first hippie uh in a sense like you know hippies. Yeah. Because like hippies became obsessed with India. They wanted to imitate the Indians. They're like these guys are really brilliant. We need to do things more like them. And uh he became obsessed with Buddhists and Indians and Indians obsession with bloodline and the Arya and magical kind of pagan powers. And so hence the adoption of the swastika, hence the adoption of this this Arian ideal, this idea of blood and soil. But so long as we're on that. Oh, so is that why he said that his race is like the master race? That's why he said that. Yeah. Oh, cuz like he took all the Yeah. Yeah. kind of a kind of a chauvinist that guy. um as as were the you know as are the Brahman as are the uh the the whatever the heirs are in the UK as are you know technically like the the Sue and the Comanche you know I mean it's kind of a typical tendency among especially warrior cultures to say my culture is the best my bloodline should exist

1:09:57 instead of yours or at least dominate and enslave yours now the Buddha obviously a peacemaker right now it's really interesting how you can see the concept of Arian. this concept of Arim which began with a bloodline began as this they wouldn't have called it race necessarily but it was racial right like it's it's a descent of blood and the Buddha's ministry the Buddha's preaching the Buddha's dharma the essence of the Buddha's dharma is what's called the four noble truths and that word the reason we say noble is because it's the the Arian truths in Sanskrit. But what the Buddha did, because remember the Buddha accepted lowcast people or foreigners. The Buddha accepted women. What the Buddha did is take what was an inheritance of nobility through blood, right? father and son, so on and

1:10:58 so forth. Rape and conquest women, and elevated that to the level of of spirit or culture, and said that the true nobles are not a race, that the true nobles are those who accept the four noble truths. There's four noble truths. Long as we're veering around. The first noble truth and you'll recognize it from Samsara. The first noble truth is that all is suffering. Duca. The second noble truth is that suffering is caused by desire. Tana. The desire for that which you may obtain but you'll lose. Uh the desire for things you will never obtain. Always reaching for a horizon you'll never ever get. That's the cause of all suffering. Desire. The third noble truth quite logically like the physician that he oftentimes described himself as to eliminate suffering you must eliminate

1:12:07 desire. blow out the candle of desire and craving. And the fourth noble truth is the eight-fold path which various things like right speech, right mentality or internal thought, right action, kindness, uh the five precepts, don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, don't take intoxicants, don't be a sexual pervert. Um so in essence the Buddha did something very similar to what Christianity did what Christ did because without a doubt even though you you begin to have that that that critique that self-critique in the Hebrew tradition it's very clear up to the end of the Hebrew Bible in the Hebrew arrangement one of the last motifs of the Hebrew Bible is a commandment Remember, again, I don't want to get too far a field, but the Persian king Cyrus

1:13:11 has released them to go rebuild the temple in in Israel. And so, they had to come back and kind of retake over the land that they had been pulled out of. And so, these people, these half breeds as they saw, the Samaritans or the people of the land had to be cleared away and they had to keep the Hebrew bloodline pure. And so one of the last passages in the Hebrew Bible as it's arranged in the Tanakh, the Hebrew form is a commandment never to breed with the people of the land. So that if one is caught, they should be if they're caught in the act breeding or mating with a person people of the land, a spear should be driven through them both, you know. So this is this Yeah. And so there's a sense of bloodline being very very very important. Whereas Jesus, you know, the blood is this thing that is now ephemeral. It's etern is it's something beyond the physical. And so the covenant that the the the Jews had with God, with Yahweh or the Elohim

1:14:13 is now expanded out of the Hebrew bloodline to the Greeks. And as it moves out, it begins to blend with the Greeks and their ideas. So that when you get the later church, it's literally just a a combination of Hebrew scripture, Hebrew law, Hebrew morality and logic and history with Greek philosophy and Greek culture. So the Buddha did something the same. And just as long as we're on it, and I'll get back to the Maha Barata. It's very interesting because you have two really dominant religious traditions that are centered on personalities, charismatic personalities. The first emerges roughly 400 BC in India in the shadow of the Himalaya. It spreads across India all the way down to the island of Sri Lanka and is driven out but it begins to flourish by the time you get to the time of Christ. You have uh Buddhism is now spreading into China and Buddhism is now one of the most if not the most dominant

1:15:15 religious traditions in Asia. And so you have the Buddha, the wheel of the Dharma spinning out into Mongolia, into Siberia, all the way down into Indonesia and it goes east and then and this is a bloodline religion that is now made spiritual and is open to any bloodline. Hence most the Buddhas you see look Asian but Buddha would have looked much more Indian, right? Or would have been Indian. The same a similar thing happened with Christianity some 400 years later. So that from this tiny little v uh kingdom on the the east of the Mediterranean this personality spread the the gospel or the spirit or the the story of the the Jews in Christian form through Europe, North Africa and eventually all over uh the world. It's just it's an interesting thing. But why is the sky blue?

1:16:16 Refraction of light. Boom. All right. What were we going to ask? I was going to say while you're right there, going to have a comeback. Dude, I got to pay extra for this. I do think it's interesting that you said with the Buddha the the distinction that he was he's so often depicted as Asian, but he was likely more Indian. I think about that a lot with Jesus as well. how our culture has depicted him as a white man very roughly fairkinned. Yeah, he was very likely much more he was because of the geography of where he lived. I would imagine he was more the Nazis had an Aryan Jesus. There's this whole alternate version of Jesus that the Nazis tried to push through the Lutheran church in which Jesus was like literally an Aryan and not and that was why the Jews wanted to kill him or some something to that effect to that effect. U it's also interesting though um you know you go to a black church a lot of times black Jesus um in Asia you go to a church in Asia oftentimes very often Asian Jesus um India maybe I suppose

1:17:22 there's a church the church of enunciation in I think Bethlehem and uh I remember I went there many well some years ago and they have uh paintings and mosaics all around the courtyard and this one's from Vietnam this one's from Africa or you Ethiopia. This one's from here. This one's from there. And in all of them, Jesus is and Mary and all of them are represented in the racial uh genotype of the of the place. They project themselves onto it. Yeah. And you know, ultimately, if it is something beyond bloodline, it may not be historically accurate, but it's it may be in some sense more accurate because it represents, you know, that transcendence from above, the the blood What time we at, fellas? 4:12. 412. 4:12. Getting close to Well, um, all right. I'm going to move on. Speed this along. I don't know how how much you guys need to know about the Mahabrada, but I boy, I did. Um

1:18:32 the um there's a lot to know. U my my first introduction was a man James Fitzgerald who um was a a very noted scholar of Sanskrit and Indian religion. And the first book that he recommended was this one uh Anand Kumar Swami and his telling of the Ramaya the Maharata so on and so forth. Uh when I was at Boston University, I had uh Harvard envy like you know every Boston University kid does. So I uh took some classes over at Harvard and there's a woman anmonious and she recommended this one. is a lot more in-depth and rich is this guy William Buck and um William Buck died very very young I think of alcoholism and anmonius said that you know I didn't I was really surprised to hear this she said that people who study Hindu scripture the scholars the deep scholars tend to die very young and a year later

1:19:35 she died so how about that and then um and you want to study the mahabara It's too late. I've already I've already been tang, you know. I'm not I I'm not These are Sanskrit scholars. I've got no hope. It's too late for me. My brain's too rotten uh to uh to master Sanskrit. I learned a bit but never uh mastered it. But um JB Van Bhin, huh? Maybe it's like some curse. Maybe you dare read my secret. your forbidden but JB um van uh Butinan um he he was really this he was my adviser William Fitzgerald or I'm sorry James Fitzgerald um he he they they partnered to do the um what I think is probably the stand or the uh the gold standard of the translation of the Mahabarata. This is book one. The full Mahabarata is basically 15 times bigger than the

1:20:35 Bible. Massive, massive, massive text, massive story. Uh the Bavad Gita is sort of like, you know, the sermon on the mount which I consider to be the most important part of the Bible aside from the crucifixion. Uh the sermon on the mount is just this little sliver in the Bible. And the Bavad Gita is in essence the uh a kind of similar thing kind of it's kind of like a sermon on the mount of the the Mahab Bara. Now I'll give you the the quick run on this. You know the Mahabarata begins and most many Hindu myths begin this way. The Ramaya begins similarly. It's not like it just drops down from the sky like the Hebrew text or you know even with the evangelists you have like one evangelist I you know Matthew, Mark, Luke and especially John I saw this this is what happened. It's very clear this sense of progression. So in for instance Buck's rendition he kind of narrows it down. You have this guy Saudi. He comes uh

1:21:39 across a friend. He's like, I just heard this story at a snake sacrifice at the, you know, that was being done by the priests and the king. Um, what was it is the Mahabarata, the Mahabra, the great king or the the great emperor or also just it also means India, right? The great land, the great kingdom. But and then it turns out that he heard it from someone who's reciting the story that Ganesha, the elephant headed god, wrote down. And the elephant-headed god wrote it down because a seer, not like unlike the seers of the vadas, a seer kind of intuited psychically that this had occurred. His name was Viasa. Not that it matters all that much but um and Viasa wanted to recite it and Ganesha said I you know he summons Ganesha will you write it down and Ganesha says yes but only on the condition that you do

1:22:39 not stop speaking it uh as I write the minute you stop speaking I will stop writing he says okay but on the condition that if you have any questions about what's going on like our friend uh here um then then you have to stop if you have a question and so he would often times confuse Ganesha with the story so you get a break and get a little breather so the whole story itself is again it's not just dropped down it's like there's a sense that it's being passed down word of mouth word of mouth and it begins not unlike the gospels or uh the early stories the birth of Cain and Abel it begins with birth but it begins with these strange kind of immaculate conceptions so there's all these bizarre scenarios And one of them you have one of these syasans, one of these renouncers, and he's meditating out by a river and he becomes very excited and his seed jumps into the water onto a leaf and a fish eats the seed on the leaf and they a fisherman catches the fish and cuts it open and a the girl comes out and the

1:23:44 girl becomes the progenitor of some of the main characters. This sort of thing, right? And it's that soma. And and and I got to say too, I mean I I the to me I the Bible is the most precious text. But uh as far as metaphor and richness, uh you you really can't compare uh the Bible to the Mahabrada and its elaborations. And the Mahabrada is a story of a war, a cataclysmic war that is going to usher in our degraded age, the Kaliuga. And the war is fought between two branches of the same family, cousins in essence. On one side you have the Pondivas under King Pondu and the other the Caravas. You could say that the Pondivas are the good guys and the Caravas are the bad guys. But they're very morally ami ambivalent. Like you you you're never really sure. like that there's all this scheming by

1:24:44 the good guys and the the bad guys have do a lot of good things for the other side. So but ultimately the heroes are the pondivas and the caravas are the bad guys. The firstborn like Moses the firstborn becomes a bastard in a basket. The firstborn cara uh from the pond of a family um is an immaculate conception. And here's how it happened. Pondu the king of the good side is he's got his ladies he's a king right so he's got two main squeezes and he goes out hunting as kings at the time were want to do and he comes upon these two deer and the buck is just rooting it and before the the buck can finish he shoots the buck and the buck as he's dying curses him that since you killed me before I completed my my pleasure. The next time you complete your pleasure, you'll die. So now the king of the good side

1:25:52 has this curse that he can't copulate or he'll die. And his wife wants babies as women tend to want. Um, and so they consult one of the the priests or really more of a renouncer and the renouncer gives her a magic formula by which she can call any god of her choosing to come and impregnate her. And the first god that she calls just messing around was the sun god Sura. And she because it's a god's baby. It's just like one day the god comes and the next day but now she's got this baby and she kind of freaks out and so she uh puts him in a basket and sends him on down the road. He becomes one of the main warriors in the bad guy army cara the incarnation of the son. And then the next one who is the true firstborn right the one who will inherit the kingdom Udhisra she calls down the god of

1:26:58 dharma. Remember the importance of dharma. She calls down the god of law. The god of law is the god of kings. And what is the king's most important power? He has the dundest stick. The the the ability to say you live and you die. And she calls Dharma down. Boom. firstborn Udhisra. Well, over across the way, the queen of the bad side, the Caravas, is getting word about this. And she's been pregnant now for two years, and she doesn't know what's going on. And her husband is also born under a curse. Her her husband's blind, but she's such a devoted wife that she lives uh blindfolded just so that she can be kind of crippled like him. But she's really freaking out. She's like, "Okay, now our children won't be first born. They won't inherit the kingdom." And in frustration, she aborts this 2-year-old fetus. And out comes this big lump of flesh. And one of these syasins, or you know, the renunciates are wizards. Is

1:28:02 this the Indian? This is the Indian story. The Mahabara, the great king or the great kingdom. So this is the great king. And and again, what does everybody want to be, right? Everybody wants to be the great king. And so being the firstborn is really important. And so this this this woman gives birth to this big ball of flesh and they bring in the the town wizards basically. And they pour cold water onto it or in other versions they cut it up into a hundred pieces, but there's actually one extra piece. So 101 pieces. And they take these bronze jars and they fill them full of ghee or butter and they stick the pieces of flesh in each one of them. So these are basically like artificial wounds. So it's just straight flesh. Just little little It's said to be the size of a thumb. Like not even like any blood or just There's probably some blood. There's probably some flesh. There's probably some blood. I'd say there's goo and stuff like that. Um and um so yeah, they they put them in these jars to gestate, but it's already they're

1:29:10 behind, right? They're already screwed. They're already in trouble. They're not going to have a firstborn unless they can knock off utra. And meanwhile, while these babies are just shading in these jars, uh the the good queen, her name's Kuni, by the way, it doesn't really matter. The good queen continues to call the gods down. And so next she calls down the god of the storm Indra kind of Jehovah Zeus like god and gives birth to Arjuna who is who's like the kind of general uh she calls down the god of wind or power and get bema who's like this big bruiser and then so the king's other lady is getting a little jealous and she's like look I you know I gota I got to get some too right and so She gives her the spell and she she gives birth to twins. These kind of divine twins, medicine, agriculture, but they're pretty broad-based. And uh boom, now you got five brothers, right? And the five brothers on the good side are

1:30:15 again, they're the incarnation of these gods. And yet it's kind of like in Christianity where Jesus is in the in the garden of Gethsemane and this human is still praying to a god that he is in the orthodox theology. The same sort of thing is happening all throughout the Mahabarata. So Indra is still out there being Indra while Arjuna is down on earth being Indra's son or Indra incarnate. And then you have Krishna who we don't find out but Krishna is also uh the incarnation of a god and Krishna is a lowly charioteer. He's he's from the village way out. He becomes an ally though and remember how important it is for the Arians these chariots right and so the chariot driver is the guy that's turn you know he he's basically the servant of the real warrior. And in the case of the pondivas, it's Arjgina who's shooting all the arrows right in these wars. Krishna incidentally is said to be

1:31:20 blue skinned, dark skinned. So there's this sense that not only is he a villager and you know he's he's kind of lowcast. And so kind of in the same sense of Jesus being a carpenter from Nazareth, you have this incarnation of a god that is outside of what the social structure is supposed to be. And they go on all these adventures, right? Um they get a wife and they all marry one single wife. Drop is her name. Again, name isn't that important. But what it that's not like an arrangement that's normal in India. They do it some out in Tibet. I think the Hopi did it a bit. But in general across the planet, you almost never have multiple men marrying a single woman. At least not until like the internet made it popular with like blue-haired chicks everywhere. Anywhere. Yeah. Um, so the the the thing is is like

1:32:22 there's this this sense of unnaturalenness. Well, is that in the story only or is that also something that was happening in the culture that gave us the story? most likely wasn't happening in the culture and in fact nobody like it it so then what is it symbol symbology I think you know because this story represents the transition into the kaluga the story represents a transition into a degraded area era and so kind of like the decadence of everyone trying to be the great king that's that's part of it but mainly it's just that it's just weird right like it's something that's unnerving for any Indian any Indian man wants like a lot of wives. Um he doesn't want to he definitely doesn't want his wife having God's babies, right? This is like all these are like un unfortunate circumstances. But series of unfortunate Yeah. But based but based on karma, right? Because he he wouldn't have he wouldn't this would have never happened had he not killed that deer. By the way, when his the second uh lady has the

1:33:22 child or has the twins, he can't help himself and he he ends up like making off with her and uh and that's it for him. The the killing of the deer while it was fornicating was symbolic of denying nature its ability to create naturally. I love it. I love it. Yeah. But that was the butterfly effect, right? Because if that one little thing hadn't happened. Yeah. Right. And and and there's a series like that's one of the things that's also really rich about the Mahabrada is that you see if you really trace it out you can find all these different karmic threads that cause each thing to happen both the good and the bad. And it it it's all woven into a one hole. But you're still left with a problem that all Hindus and all Buddhists and all James were left with. What do you do about constant eternal death and rebirth and death and rebirth and death and rebirth? And I mean these guys, these five brothers eventually, you know,

1:34:26 they're in line for the throne. The bad side eventually they're born. Another two years goes by and these artificial wombs basically begin to crack open. And when the first one emerges, durana emerges kind of like did you ever see gremlins? you know, when they come out of the pods, it's sort of like that. Imagine that sound like, and that's the way it's described in the text. In the text itself, it says that as soon as these babies are born, the jackals begin praying and that the babies are born squalling like donkeys. Wait, isn't a jackal rabbit half deer? Uh, a jackal is like a dog. It's a canine, but it's a carrying. It you thought thought of it is it's a it eats only the dead. And the vultures began screaming like all the carrying creatures began screaming. Huh? Like like baby are you refers to the babies? The god babies. All the god babies got born out of the jars. Yeah, the god babies are being born out of the jars. Kind of like the gremlins eating the dead. No, no, no. But in in response

1:35:27 just just to give you to give you an idea of like some live action. See, you need to know the the the writer of the Mahabharata or the the many writers as they're telling the story need you to know that this is all bad news, right? And so all these omens, there are three eclipses, for instance, that are happening at this time. Well, this why did they like protect it in a jar full of butter? Uh because they need to have the king. They they need to they want to have a king and they're pretty sure they can knock off like even if the king's like some gremlin. Yeah. Yeah. And and most of them are. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. And you know, and so to fast forward to the battle itself, they they do their best to knock off the rightful heirs of the throne, right? They first there's the dice game. You know, they they they lure Udhisra, the king or the wouldbe king, into playing dice and wagering everything that he owns, including his brothers, including himself, and last his wife, their wife, Dropy. Now, what's interesting though is

1:36:34 again, this is a culture where women in general are in the kitchen, right? But you have these strong female characters over and over again. In fact, you have a transgender uh female, a female who becomes a male knight. Uh, and then you also u there's a there's a whole like year saga where uh Arjuna the warrior dresses up like a woman to conceal his identity for like years and like got guys hitting on him and all this other stuff. So there's like every step of the way the the kalyuga is obvious. It's obvious that the moral order has been subverted. There's something off. Something's wrong. And again, no matter what all this karma means, everyone's going to be reborn. Everyone's stuck in their respective identities. They're exiled. Okay. They get Dropy back. Dropertity argues rightfully so that if the king had already become a slave and wagered himself away, then he couldn't rightfully wager her away because she was free and a slave can't wager a free person. So, they just exiled him 13 years. They come back and then here's

1:37:38 the big fight. And this is literally the end of the world. This is going to usher in the kalyuga, but it is the end of the world. It's a civilization destroying Atlantislike event. And what's also really interesting in the Mahabarata is you have in Hindu myths in general is you have these technologies that resemble modern technologies. So you have the vimmana, a machine that flies around at the speed of wind. uh you have artificial wombs as we just saw or heard and you also had the brahastra and the brahastra remember Brahma the god of creation the brahastra is an arrow that will destroy everything around it will shatter it will it will rumble the mountains until they crumble it will boil the seas and it will leave all the earth around it dead and unable to grow crops so like a nuke in essence it's a nucle Lear warhead. So they have UFOs, nuclear weapons, and genetic artificial

1:38:39 wounds. And you don't say you believe in UFOs. Didn't say I didn't. I'm just saying, you know, when I asked about the I'm just saying that that I'll reserve judgment until better evidence is presented. They identified it. They said they said what it was. Yeah, it's a vimmana. I believe in I believe in vmanas, not necessarily vammanas from from Venus. But this is really interesting and this is why for instance uh Oppenheimer taught himself Sanskrit and was obsessed with the Mahabrada and the Bavad Gita. And of course many people like pretty much anyone from the modern era who read the Mahabrada and saw the Brahmastra was like yes clearly this is this is a nuclear weapon that they're talking about. Does Daro have evidence of nuclear catastrophe in the streets? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, there's stories told, but I don't know. So, why is she doing a dance of destruction at Cern?

1:39:41 I don't know. I got a question. So, yes. How much of this do you take as as uh literal strings to go find these things versus phenotypes of stories? For example, the the you know, the baby on in the little basket that sounds like Moses. Do they have a flood story? Do they have Do they have Gilgamesh type stuff? This would be in in in a sense you could say that this was their flood story, but instead of a flood, it was just a world cataclysmic war. An apocalypse. An apocalypse. Um we're seeing things that over and over again showing up. That's like this sounds familiar. Yeah. Why does it sound so familiar? Uh because it sounds like World War II except for it's occurring in in their minds. Again, these are like stories after stories after stories. These are happening thousands millennia ago actually many millennia ago. If you look at the the beginning of the Kaliuga they have ridiculously large time scales you know like bazillions of years for the early yugas. So uh but they this is in essence their kind of Atlanta story.

1:40:44 Uh because by the end of the war they have destroyed everybody except for just a small few survivors who are the the good guys obviously win. Um so they can write the story and tell the story. So the the point about the nuclear um the nuclear weapon there's like a nuclear weapon kind of interesting because if you go to Egypt there's like a pyramid that looks destroyed like as if like it's been like eroded. Yeah. But if you look closely and really inspect the rocks it's looks like it's been blown up. And even more if you reach your hand like feet into the sand you can pull glass balls. Maybe maybe it was the nukes from the the Mahabra the Brahmastra the Brahma the the the arrow of Brahma and they're obsessed with arrows and projectiles almost as obsessed as they are with like weird forms of conception. I have a couple of questions that you can help me with. Yes sir. Um in your in your studies what what is the more

1:41:49 ancient writing Sanskrit or Kuneaoiform text? Kaoiform is definitely the most ancient writing but Sanskrit is probably or the the ancestor of Sanskrit is probably a more ancient language. Um but nobody really knows until you get the writing. But the KDA form is the first real written text. the Sanskrit I don't remember the exact date it starts getting it starts appearing it's late like um you know before the Buddha but definitely after the Iliad so and like linear be I think that's my understanding too but I just wanted to make sure so have you ever read any of the Zachariah Sitchin books the Earth Chronicles planet 12th planet 12th planet Yeah. Yeah. But but well, I I just think it's really fascinating. I've read them all and I'm contributing in thought because you're pulling up a lot of stuff that's

1:42:50 cross referenceable. the the the argument that Sitchin makes is that uh canform Mesopotamian pre- Mesopotamian source writings are the origin stories for um almost everything that's in the Bible and are similar in in more sort of western traditions revisited. I mean definitely the flood story. Definitely the flood story. Definitely. Was it Utna Piston? Yeah. Um, so I'm I'm I'm I'm real curious about that. We don't have to explore it. But well, I'll tell you what the Brahmans would say. They would be furious at the concept that their religion came from anywhere but India. Like they get really really assed up about this, like big time. Like this whole theory of the the the Indo-Uropeans or the Arians coming down and invading India and all that. They're like, "This is a horrific racist projection of European supremacy because obviously we are the supreme people and all religions come from here,

1:43:53 from India, from mother India and um our noble blood is homegrown and you are all descendants of us." How were the Titans considered demigods? Were the Titans considered prehuman? Were they considered mixtures of gods and men? No. Right. Yeah. Um, no. So, it's very interesting. It's very similar in India by the way. The Indians also believed. So, just as the Greeks had the Olympians and the Titans, right? The kind of good guys and the bad guys or at least the winners and the losers. The Hindus had a similar concept that the Assuras or the evil gods or the bad gods anyway uh were ascendant and that the Davas who you know Dharma and Indra and so on and so forth that they eventually dominated them and demoted them. So you have a similar sort of tale there. So, no. I mean, basically, they're very humanlike, but like the Titans, the original Titans were like Kronos. Um, Uranus, I believe, was considered a Titan. Uh, yes.

1:44:58 Um, Gaia, but you know, it begins with like, oh man. Um, I'm have to go back. And by the way, all these stories of the the Titans and all that that they come down kind of later. They're written down, so nobody knows exactly how old they are. But basically, the Titans uh are considered to be gods that were just simply they didn't have what it took to stay in power and the Olympians over overcame them. Um and you know, and there's all these stories in the ancient Greek, especially like Plato, but al all you know, you have um the story of uh Prometheus and the gods feel threatened when he steals the fire bring down to earth. You know, there's son of a god and a human. Yeah. So he was a demigod. Yeah. Oh, so the Titans would have been more god gods, but but like loser gods. Loser gods. Um but you had this but but that idea like comes up over and over again among the Greeks. Like if the humans get a little too uppidity, then

1:46:02 they'll overtake the Olympians just like the Olympians overtook the Titans. And so they're always trying to keep keep us down. man. Mhm. I just had an epiphany when you were talking about the the Indian culture saying that we're the one true race and everyone descends from us. Yeah. That is all of the major religious and the religious cultures tend to believe that and that's very reminiscent of this story of every one of these groups believing they have the one true king and it's the only one and that leading to the decadence that none of us are coming to some sort of agreement and we're all ending up at odds with each other leading to the Kalyuga. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I you know as far as the kalyuga um the the the the essence of the golden age was that it was very much like the Bible in in the sense that people lived you know bazillions of years u everybody was nice. So the king one of the really critical parts the the golden age before the silver age and the bronze um was that um they had long lives but the king

1:47:06 lived to serve the people. So all the people were happy. Um there was he was still a king and the king was also in direct alignment with God's will. And then the one of the defining points of like the silver age and then the bronze age and the kaluga was that lifespan it shortens. Uh people's dharma is more and more corrupted right and their their adherence to the gods and the cast system begins to shift. Like there's this great passage from the Vishnu piranha that describes what the Kalyuga the true depths of the Kalyuga will be like and it'll be it's like the barbarians have come right the the outsiders the foreigners have come and encroached on our soil the priests are just priests in name only they they do the chance but they don't believe uh the kings are pil plundering the people the

1:48:20 and the uh inversion of what they consider to be that natural order. But but again with like the Buddhists though, I mean the Buddhists believe and each Buddhist sect believes like they they wouldn't be what they were if they didn't think they were right. And the other ones are mostly maybe they're like partly right, but they all basically I mean I don't know of any religious tradition some are more chauvinistic than others but I don't know of any religious tradition that doesn't ultimately say like we're right even like the most liberal religious traditions now it's like our tolerance is better than yours you know and it's like uh yeah one of the things about the cast system is you know the Indians are the most exacting like the the Indian and they called you know each cast the Indians called each one a varna a color um and the the the whole color scheme of what they considered to be like the intellectual was white uh the passionate is red the the the indolent or the lazy or the slow is black um like it's really

1:49:24 kind of encoded across the Hindu culture what we would call now racism right um but what really distinguishes it is how elaborate and specific they were. So there's like all these specific jotties within the the varnas, like these little subcasts. But and by the way, a woman can marry up, but a man I'm sorry, a man can marry Yeah. a woman can marry up, but a man can't marry up. A lot of the cast systems about keeping, you know, a brother down basically. Um but that the idea of cast like what we see as a cast system in India totally elaborated again in Plato in um I cannot recall which dialogue maybe it's the republic but I believe it is the republic uh you know he describes something very very similar the warrior I the philosopher king the warrior the slaves um and then you know in China you had something very similar really the only difference is feudal Europe right feudal Europe is very very clear this is the priest, this is the

1:50:25 king, these are the lords and the vassels and so on and so forth. Uh and then these are the surfs and you know America until even now still America still has it like own cast system. It's just more fluid and less specified. So that that hierarchy I think is is the only human cultures that were roughly egalitarian at least that I know of. I mean I you know hell people maybe it's wrong but tribal societies so far as the the missionaries and anthropologists and colonists uh described them and people discovered them like when they were still kind of virgin before they were corrupted you know and given guns and horses and things like that. They were almost all down to the last uh egalitarian and they enforced their equality by way of violence. So this is all described by a guy who wrote a book called hierarchy in the forest and also moral origins is his name will come later but um what he did is he he he he codified

1:51:32 and put in a database all of these different cultures you know are they equal are they not and the way that they enforced the equality was again by murder by extreme violence shaming first murder second and they would usually like this is a very common thing to happen from Africa to Indians to so on and so forth. They would have their own family members murder them so that there wouldn't it wouldn't start a blood feud. Christopher Bone Christopher Bone um now maybe maybe he's wrong, maybe not. But it's it's an interesting concept. After that though, any any agricultural civilization, you start to see the uh the diversification into uh the division of labor. And it's it's very remarkable going back to the conversation about uh usocial insects, the termites, the ants, the bees, uh wasps, they also divide into something very very similar in in regard to hierarchy and role. Uh it's it's you know it's as if there is a form

1:52:34 in nature that a sufficiently large civilization requires. It it is colony. Yeah. tribe colony survival of the reproduction the queen that that's interesting yeah I mean and it's not to say it's ideal you know is is an ought but it is it is um and then I mean like even communism uh communism is a an attempt at equalizing it but every communist society you still have a hierarchy um it They say it's equal. Yes, sir. Um, I have two questions. Yes. Again, um, and I'll wrap up after this. I know you guys have been you guys have hung hung in here for a long time. What's the song of the Lord? And also why are all the Indian um and Hindu gods like elephants and like snakes and animals and like um like turtles with like cat faces for like tails um kind of like Egyptians, right? Uh and

1:53:43 yeah, the Greeks um they call they call it zumorphism. It's um means uh humanlike beings with animal qualities like crocodile heads and so on and so forth. The elephant head guy, I can tell you right now how he got his head. Uh Shiva, you remember the god of destruction we were talking about before. Uh Shiva is he represents kind of the kalyuga, right? He rep so Shiva is one of these syasins. Shiva, if you look at images of Shiva, he's always on a rug. He's naked. He's dirty. He's got dreadlocks. He's smoking dope. He's like he's a bluer, right? Um but he's a magic loser and he um is always like yeah and he's always going out into the Himalayas, right? Like Shiva is always depicted as being out at the Himalayas oftent times at the the head of the Ganis. So this is where Ganja came from. And and so um he he comes home and he's left his wife home pregnant. She has their baby, Ganesha, who would

1:54:43 eventually become the elephant head, but he's just like a normal kid at this point. And uh she goes to take a bath and tells him to guard the door. And Shiva comes home from a long wander and he's, you know, ready to see his wife. And he's like, "Nope, halt." And he's like, "I'm your dad. Get out of my way." And he's like, "Nope, I don't care. You look like a loser. Get out of here." And um so he takes his blade and cuts the the kid's head off and throws it uh you know, beyond the horizon. And you know his his wife Yeah. So his wife comes and uh Yeah. Don't call me a loser, Trey. Yeah. And his his wife um comes and finds the kid headless and she freaks out. She's like, "You know, you you never do anything. You're never here to do any work. You don't bring money home. You never do anything. And now you've killed our only kid." Uh and he said, "Okay, don't worry." and he chops off an elephant's head and he puts the elephant head on the kid's body and boom, the god Ganesha is born. How did he become a god? Well, he's the son of a god and the

1:55:45 two gods. Wait, so is the guy that chopped the kid's head off the guy that that that is that sat on a rock and smoke dope? That's him. That's him. That's horrible, though. And you know, he was he was a little bit violent. He was a little on the violent side. Yeah. Um I mean you remember all the other stories of where all these guys came from. You know these Hindus had some some wild ideas about where people came from. Now something you got to remember too though right now just if if I leave you with any two ideas we we I know we have gone all over the place. If I could leave you with two ideas it is this. Number one, the Hindus similar to Plato and and a few other Greeks and of course similar to Jews and Christians believed at least the most developed philosophies or you know later philosophies believe there is one God. But unlike the Jews or Christians, they did not think that the other gods were fake. They thought the other gods were just lesser

1:56:49 representations. Like a rainbow. Like a rainbow. Perfect. Perfect. Yes. Like the prism. Yes. Yeah. Um and they also believed that that that God is in each one of us. Right. So even if you know you do have like a a system in which the the lower cast don't have you know they're just basically slaves and the kings are super privileged they still believed that they were all one person right the perushia they were all ca they all came from the same place and ultimately would all go to the same place. So salvation might take a long time for some but with you know to the extent was thought out there was a sense that everyone had the potential to be saved meaning that you would be off the wheel of birth and death and rebirth and you just had to work at it. The Buddhists thought it'd be easy. Now again there was this big problem with the Buddhists, right? the Buddhists and the Hindus didn't get along so hot

1:57:51 because the Buddhists were taking all of these princes like the Buddha uh away and people were like, you know, I'm not I don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to go live with the Buddhists and get enlightenment. You know, this is this is garbage. And they disrupted the society. And so the Hindus had to come up with something to draw people back to duty, back to dharma, back to the law. What was your duty as a priest, duty as a warrior, duty as a merchant, duty as a servant? Now, this is the scholarly interpretation. This is not how Hindus see it. Hindus do not believe this way. But you asked and I'll answer. This is the very last part, the only part really. We all, this whole thing was all just to get to the song of the Lord. And what is the song of the Lord? Right? You've got two armies arrayed against each other. Good guys, bad guys. But even the bad guys are family. And the good guys know this. And so you've got Arjgina, the warrior war. It's basically like the civil war. It is a civil war. And so Arjgina, they're all getting

1:58:57 ready to This is a war, too, by the way. They they're talking about it up to this point. They're like, "This is a war that will end civilization. It will end everything." And you know, we shouldn't going through it. Exactly. And so Arjuna, the son or incarnation of the storm god, the warrior god, is starting to have second thoughts. And he's telling his chariot driver, this this dark-skinned lowly chariot driver, you know, hey man, um, I'm going to get terrible karma for killing my kin. And this is just awful. Anyway, some of these people are like they're teachers, right? These are some of the some of people they grew up with and played with. So he's telling his chariot driver and this is the main theme of the Bavagita. The Bhagavad Gita is just one little section in which the war may go on and the world is ending or not. And Krishna, the chariot driver, the dark-skinned villager, the troublemaker, turns around

1:59:57 to him and tells him, "You need to understand I'm not just some lowly villager. I am God. I am not just a god like you, just a lowly storm god. I'm the god Vishnu, which is a face of the god Brahman. I am the god. And in you know Arjun is like I what? And he he he says if you want he's he's like this is what you need to understand. So is he acting God or just like acting want? So he's he's the the the the charioteer turns to him and he says to him you are a warrior. You are a king. You have to do your duty no matter what the karma is. Your duty is devotion to me to God. He's like

2:00:59 Arjuna is obviously the warrior is a is a bit skeptical and so he says if you want I'll show myself to you and this is one of the most beautiful passages in all world religion and that is the song of the Lord. He turns and he asks Ar, he shows himself to Arjuna and he says to Arjuna, "What do you see?" And Arjgina is freaking out. You would think he had been eating Soma. And he says, "I see you as beginningless, middleless, and endless. I see you with a thousand eyes and a thousand mouths and a thousand arms and a thousand feet, meaning infinite arms. You are everything. I see your body stretch from one end of existence to the other. And most in most importantly, wait, what? Like a sausage sausage. And and most importantly, he could see the future in God. And what he saw was all of the armies that were arrayed against

2:02:06 him being devoured in the in God's thousands of mouths, fangs dripping with blood, flame flicking out of his breath. And then he saw himself and his own family and all living creatures and everything disappearing into the mouth of God who chewed up everything in creation. And he said, "What you have to understand is this is not something to be afraid of because inside of you is an eternal soul. And no matter what happens, no matter what you do here, no matter what happens to you here, that eternal soul will go on. And what you need to worry about isn't whether or not you're going to get blood on your hands or whether you're going to lose or whether you're going to win. What you need to worry about is the condition of that eternal soul." And so Arjun is like okay what do I have to do and Krishna says you have to do your duty and if you do your duty without any other thought than that you are doing your duty as a

2:03:11 dedication to me then you will have heaven. So the chariot driver opened up and like showed his true self or was it true self? wasn't a chariot driver, but he was like the the god, the god, the big god. And remember, he was a dark-skinned chariot driver, a villager, midcast, but yeah, I mean, complicated. Basically, basically, not a brahman. Wouldn't they have known? Huh? Wouldn't everybody have known like when he was born like that? He was a Well, there's stories, but but that was the that was the big reveal. And so Arjgina does what you would expect him to do. So he says, "Okay, let's do this." And the war commences and it's just like, you know, like I say, the Mahabarat is 15 times bigger in the Bible. And a big part of it, like a lot of it is literally just this guy's getting chewed up by that guy. This guy's getting stomped. There's like all these anamatapas because the the ground is so full of blood of like all the blood on the ground. And they kill everybody. There's only just a few left. And in the very end, and this

2:04:16 is I think one of the most interesting parts about the story, they kill everybody. They inherit their kingdom with the few remaining survivors. Thus begins the kalyuga, our age, the degraded age. And of the Lord is chaos. The song of the Lord is do your duty with love for me. Now this is also an answer. Duty is dharma. So unlike the dharma of the Buddhists, unlike the dharma of going off into the monastery, this is the dharma, the salvific dharma of being a warrior or being a slave or whatever it is you were born into and and staying true to that. Then at the end, you know, they live out their lives and as would often happen in Hindu culture, it was time for them. They're in old age. They're going to go off into the wilderness. They're kings with one queen. They decide they're going to go up the mountain to the the highest peak and they're going to try to get into heaven before they

2:05:19 die basically. And so they're all marching up the mountain and one by one, first the wife, then the four brothers, except for Udhisra, the king, they all die, but Udhisra is undaunted. He keeps going and there's a dog trailing behind him and has followed him this entire way. And he finally gets to the gates of heaven and there's Indra, the storm god. And he's the one guarding the gate to heaven. And he says, "You can come in. Here's your chariot to go into heaven." And he's like, "Okay, but the dog the dog can't come." And he says, "Well, then if the dog can't come, I won't go, you know, and the the dog, you got to understand, the dog is more unclean than even the most unclean lowass person in the Hindu mind." And so Indra says, "Okay, fine. You you have shown your loyalty. You're like the greatest thing the greatest duty of a king is to be kind to those who are loyal to him. And you were even

2:06:19 kind to this lowly dog. You will you will both go to heaven. But when he gets to heaven, it's just all of the the bad guys, the bad army. They're all the ones that died. Well, the other guys died on on the trip up, right? And his family, the good guys, the pondivas aren't there. And so Udhisa says, you know, I would rather be in hell than live in heaven with these people. And so the god said, 'Okay. And sends him to hell. And he goes into the the darkness and the wailing. And he can hear the voices of his family and they're all screaming in pain and torture and but he's like, you know, it beats being in heaven with those And it was a twisted and and and then it it's as if the the whole scene kind of cracks open and he had proven himself twice to be loyal to his own. And suddenly the veil is lifted and it turns out that he is in fact in heaven because he is in the presence of

2:07:22 those whom he loved like that those who were in his tribe. It's like the third to Yeah. And um and then basically it just kind of tapers off from there. Krishna dies just by accident. somebody accidentally shoots him in the ankle kind of like Achilles. Um and um so on and so forth before before you know it, somebody's buying a gas station and doing all the coding and uh but that is but that is uh you know I appreciate you guys hanging in with me and I you know I hope I answered your questions. That is the Mahabarata. That is the Bavad Gita. Wow.