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hopeandcoffee 's review for:
How does one rate or review a book that has been lauded for thousands of years as a keystone religious text and piece of beautiful poetry? 5 stars seemed the only option. The introduction to this particular edition is great, very accessible and insightful (coming form someone with no background in Hinduism).
This does seem to be a book that would speak differently to different people depending on what they are looking for, especially for the novice. As a young parent, I found pieces of this philosophy particularly confounding.
The idea of finding the supreme Self through meditation, a self that is beyond the veneer of daily life and that is unchanging through all things, what some people could call god, is an alluring concept. And it is one that I don't disbelieve. The connections between us all seem incredibly real at times. I like this idea of finding, as this book puts it, "the eternal beneath the ephemeral." It's also refreshing to read a faith text that assumes an original goodness rather than original sin.
But moving to the next step of this philosophy, resting your mind on that supreme Self in order to shrug off the dichotomies associated with the rest of life on earth - meaning loving friends and foes the same because they share the same core self and being affected by great joy and great sorrow the same because they are both external to the self - just didn't speak to me. While detachment may seem very ideal/pure/calm, whatever, it has some serious flaws. For one thing, love, pain, joy, grief... that's life, that's being human. A life without those things would be boring, and devoid of all of the wonderful things about this world. Beyond boring, it would be stepping outside of human experience... which for these sages is probably the point, so whatever.
More concerning to me at this particular point in my life (mother of a 2 year old and 7 months pregnant), is that this sort of detachment as the ideal form of existence seems to speak to non-parents exclusively. What two-year-old would survive a day if its parents were detached to the point where their love for their child were no more intense then, say, their love of watching CSPAN.
If anything, I got a great new favorite quote out of it... "Our lives are an eloquent expression of our belief: what we deem worth having, doing, attaining, being. What we strive for shows what we value..."
This does seem to be a book that would speak differently to different people depending on what they are looking for, especially for the novice. As a young parent, I found pieces of this philosophy particularly confounding.
The idea of finding the supreme Self through meditation, a self that is beyond the veneer of daily life and that is unchanging through all things, what some people could call god, is an alluring concept. And it is one that I don't disbelieve. The connections between us all seem incredibly real at times. I like this idea of finding, as this book puts it, "the eternal beneath the ephemeral." It's also refreshing to read a faith text that assumes an original goodness rather than original sin.
But moving to the next step of this philosophy, resting your mind on that supreme Self in order to shrug off the dichotomies associated with the rest of life on earth - meaning loving friends and foes the same because they share the same core self and being affected by great joy and great sorrow the same because they are both external to the self - just didn't speak to me. While detachment may seem very ideal/pure/calm, whatever, it has some serious flaws. For one thing, love, pain, joy, grief... that's life, that's being human. A life without those things would be boring, and devoid of all of the wonderful things about this world. Beyond boring, it would be stepping outside of human experience... which for these sages is probably the point, so whatever.
More concerning to me at this particular point in my life (mother of a 2 year old and 7 months pregnant), is that this sort of detachment as the ideal form of existence seems to speak to non-parents exclusively. What two-year-old would survive a day if its parents were detached to the point where their love for their child were no more intense then, say, their love of watching CSPAN.
If anything, I got a great new favorite quote out of it... "Our lives are an eloquent expression of our belief: what we deem worth having, doing, attaining, being. What we strive for shows what we value..."