Letter # 89: "Friends And Foes"

If India is your cup of tea, you can have a strong taste of it in Wes Anderson’s movie, The Darjeeling Limited (2007; starring Owen Wilson). Grieving their father’s death, three brothers are on a quest for the love of their mother who had abandoned them to preach Christianity in India.
The movie will roll you across the “real” India on taxi and rickshaw; and you will run breathlessly with the brothers to barely catch the train leaving the station. The best part is that you will experience all this without exposure to the Indian heat, strong smells, and the inevitable traveler’s diarrhea. People’s suffering, love, spirituality and antics, and animals, domestic and wild, will tantalize you.
Complete submersion in the rawness of life in India is the “guru” that helps the brothers to affirm their love, acceptance and trust.
According to Vedic philosophy, the mind sits at the boundary of the material and the spiritual but pays more attention to the material. The mind immerses itself in thoughts and philosophies, feeling and planning, and willing and acting. It’s a restless creature that it’s owner must learn to soothe through a new mode of thinking, a new philosophy. Naveed, a reader, wrote a comment on Letter # 88, asking if philosophy was “perception” or “narration”. Here are my thoughts on the matter.
The word philosophy comes from the Greek words philo "loving" and sophia "knowledge or wisdom". According to my limited knowledge of the subject, philosophy can be subdivided into “ideology” and “metaphysics”.
The word ideology is the English version of a word that was coined by the French philosopher Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) – idéologie. The word comes from idéo "of ideas," from the Greek, plus logy “study”. We usually reserve the term ideology for knowledge derived from the senses.
Metaphysics, the other subdivision of philosophy, is about knowledge beyond the senses. The Online Etymological Dictionary defines metaphysics as a "branch of speculation which deals with the first causes of things". The word came from the Greek “ta meta ta physika", which means “The Works After The Physics," which is the title of Aristotle's 13 treatises. Originally the word meant the order of Aristotle works but later Latin scholars misinterpreted metaphysics as meaning "the science of what is beyond the physical." That error, like many other errors of translation, has stuck with us.
Our ideologies today are material more than spiritual. In Biblical terms, we are still munching greedily on the forbidden fruit of the "tree of knowledge of what is good and bad". The Holy Koran states that true knowledge was revealed to the prophets: “Indeed, We bestowed knowledge upon David and Solomon.” [27:15]. Colossians 2:8 offers us re-direction: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”
Redirection of the mind is the purpose of all spiritual texts, including the Vedas, the ancient and encyclopedic Indian spiritual texts. The search for that knowledge was part of the brothers’ purpose in their trip on The Darjeeling Limited.
Dhyana (Attention) Yoga (Union with the Ultimate Spirit) is a discipline to help the mind to focus attention on spiritual matters. Verse 6:10 of the Bhagavad Gita explains:
“By transcendental knowledge one can remain steady in his convictions, but by mere academic knowledge one can be easily deluded and confused by apparent contradictions. It is the realized soul who is actually self-controlled, because he is surrendered to Krishna. He is transcendental because he has nothing to do with mundane scholarship. For him mundane scholarship and mental speculation, which may be as good as gold to others, are of no greater value than pebbles or stones.”
In that state, a wonderful transformation takes effect. Guru Nanak sings, “Brahm-giani kai mitr satr(u) saman(i); Brahm-giani kai nahi abhiman,” which verse can be rendered as: “The knower of the Ultimate sees friends and foes alike; The knower has no pride.” [SS Asht 8; P 83].
Yes, the mind perceives and narrates many ideologies but the philosophy of attainment of the Un-measurable Being requires more than ordinary mental processes. The roads to that Place of Bliss are intuition, meditation, and revelation.
In The Darjeeling Limited the brothers found that Place of Bliss by losing their pride and by seeing friends and foes alike.

God Bless; Allah Hu Akbar; May The Forces Of The Universe Bring You Harmony; Hare Krishna; Radha-Swami; and Nanak Naam Chardi Kala Tere Bhane Sarbat Dha Bhalla.

I wish to express my gratitude for your comments, which inspire me to carry on writing. Please forgive my fallibilities in presenting this material. Also, feel free to send this message on to someone that you might think would like to receive it. If you do send it on, my only request of you is that you send it as it is, in its entirety, and to not alter or modify any of the text, references or authorship information. Thus you will help to give credit or liability to where they are properly due.
Jas Bhopal
Copyright© 2008References: "The Holy Bible" Online version; "The Koran" as translated by SV Mir Ahmed Ali 2005 ISBN 0-9761870-0-0); "The Bhagavad Gita As it Is" as translated by Srila Prabhupada ISBN 0-89213-268-X; The Srimad Bhagavatum as translated by Srila Prabhupada ISBN0-89213-259-0; "I Am That. Talks With Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj” ISBN 0-89386-022-0; The Dhammapada ISBN-10:1-84483-344-5; The Sacred Sukhmani ISBN 81-7205-098-4; Wikipedia.