Showing posts with label religious. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religious. Show all posts

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Objectivism vs. Bhagavad-Gita

The following excerpt is from AYN RAND’S book Atlas Shrugged
“Philosophers have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

Philosophers have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.

Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore?
Mind”


After reading this part of the book, I compared it with my own Hindu philosophy. In Bhagavad-Gita, god says he is everywhere but nowhere to be seen by ordinary humans. It goes on to say that all the world is MAYA (illusion) of the mind and the real truth lies within ourselves which we ourselves deny to understand. The self is covered by a screen of materialistic thoughts. To really understand the self, one should be truly devoted to god. The human body holds the soul in it unaltered, Unaffected and untouched by human actions and thoughts. Understanding of the soul gives a complete knowledge of everything in the world and it relieves the soul from this material bondage.

I really don’t understand whether I am taking all these stuff in right sense i.e., both the philosophies. I am confused but all along while studying my own philosophy I was reading simply through it without any direction but after reading Ayn rand’s philosophy, the answer to one important question that I really need know better and completely is
“what is the relationship between mind and body in Hindu philosophy (any philosophy)?”