Sorry Old Bean. I refuse any cooperation when, as I perceive it (and you are infamous for on this forum) you resort to bad-faith game-playing. So if that is how you want it, that is the result you’ll wind up with.
Trust me here! I have every means to continue forward and to talk about what I desire.
IC wrote:I said it was a blending of the "divine and the demonic"...or, to put it another way, the spiritual and the nihilistic.
Here, you have misunderstood the gist of what is being communicated in the Twelfth chapter. You have read it with an a priori assumption that it communicates a nihilistic view. Thus, your prejudice is revealed.
I think most with even superficial familiarity with the schools of thought of the Indian subcontinent become quickly aware it (this school of thought) sees the phenomenal world as unstable and ultra-perishable — not to be depended on I might say. So the largest thrust in it is toward a realization of that which it defines as imperishable and, naturally, eternal. I suppose that someone viewing that mode of thought from a superficial perspective might interpret the communicated gist as “nihilistic” since there is a note of negation of the instability of the world, so seen, so described.
1. Philosophy The doctrine that nothing actually exists or that existence or values are meaningless.
2. Relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs
…but such an imposed interpretation cannot stand under any scrutiny.
Therefore here, and throughout the Bhagavad Gita, and in Vedanta, the larger emphasis is on self-realization. Or the realization of the Self. In this, it proposes and develops methodologies and practices useful for one interested in (drawn to) self-development and realization. In this area it is far more clear, and also aware of the variations in human types and (in the philosophy) offers and explains different, say, practical approaches for varied individuals.
And it is in this level of clarity and by way of a more developed and intricate vocabulary that it succeeds in communicating metaphysical ideas more successfully than, for example, in much but not all Christian thought.
What is interesting to consider — for you perhaps — would be What if Yahweh were to reveal himself
to you? Is God real for you? Or really an abstraction you refer to? You never talk about any
experience of God. Why is this?
And if the God you refer to were to reveal himself, what would that be like? Have you had any
similar experience?
You see, this is what the character in the narrative, Arjuna, asks Krishna (presented as the Supreme Lord) to reveal to him. And the Vision is, naturally, laden with symbols, since the reader is reading a verbal description.
In Vedantic thought, at least in a sense, the entire Creation is part-and-parcel of Divinity. Everything is of divine substance and origin. And everything in that sense represents God and expresses God. But there certainly is awareness that our World, our location in a scale, is as marvelous and amazing as it is terrifying and frightful. Universes exploding, colliding: its a mad-house. So, the totality of God, in the vision in that chapter, expresses these views or stances vis-a-vis The Manifest World.
My dear Exasperating Child! You are such a pain in the ass! But —
you are perfect for all this!
