Every year I read the Gita, but do I sing the Song of God? And I don't mean the Baptist Church Choir Song of God, I mean the quotidian one-woman a cappella ditty that expresses my connection however meagre to the divine. Or let me put it to you this way: ever have one of those moments where you're reading and your eyes and moving left-to-right across the page and you're following the words, but you're not quite taking them in? Or maybe, even though the words are in your native tongue, they have begun to resemble Aztec symbols rather that actual words. But you're there, you're getting the gist of the gist. You're reading it. You're soaking in it. And sometimes you light upon a sentence that resonates. "It's all temporary," you tell your roommate, your doorman or your cactus. "The heat, the cold, the pleasure, the pain. This too shall pass." And you feel it so much and you're ready to make it though all the rashes and the breakups, the head-cases and head-colds. Due to this aha moment, you sit down with the Gita, start reading and the same thing happens again. Only now you're peeved because Krishna spoke to you before. Is he on a yoga retreat? As Shirley Bassey would say, "Where do I begin?" I say, if you really want to read the Gita, practice bibliomancy; let the book fall open to a particular page and check in a sloka or two. Then close the book and meditate on said sloka for a few. How does one warrior's deep, deep doubt/fear on the eve of battle transliterate into my life experience? I don't have Krishna as my charioteer, I have the conductor on the F train and nice and s/he may or may not be, I am not having a dharmic dialogue with her/him. Only I am having a dialogue with myself which some would say is insanity but enlightened others would recognize as the first step towards understanding the ubiquity and transcendence of my divine.
One of the only things I learned in grad school is that the word is meaningless outside the context. What I learned reading the Gita is the context is meaningless outside the Word. This is called metaphor and it's akin to applying the use of historiography to the making of legend, or rather, dharma. Think of Achilles. Homeboy didn't want to fight the war either. He hid in his tent with his boytoy Patroklus and wouldn't come out even though the Greeks were needing them some Achilles. It wasn't until Hektor slew Patroklus that Achilles got amped up enough to go out there and so some serious damage. Goodbye Trojans, hello Rome. When Orestes was told to slay his mother for killing his father, he just did so without too much thought. He CERTAINLY weren't no Hamlet. My point is that somewhere between just do it and four days a week on the couch is a middle ground where the divine lives, breathes and blossoms. It's a resource which, if we open to it, can lead us to The Source. If the Source scares or annoys you, good. Just feel this fact: to everything there is a season. Every war has the eve before, the week before, the month before. Nothing is out of the blue. Yet every war also contains the during and the after: peace. The question is, could you see your divinity in during your regular life as much as you do in your martial advent so that just maybe, at the eleventh hour, you look up, breathe into your own divinity and you just do it. Thus you are no longer the blind-seer, you are insight itself. You are dharma. You are Krishna.
