As the Rig Veda puts it: "By law (rta) the herds of the universe (i.e. A friend of the late Michael Stone reflects on the teacher’s struggle with mental illness. All rights reserved. asked the Rig Veda seer. concerning the "several sorts of Karma." . However, despite his killing of Hector, Achilles’ renown comes from his quarrel with Agamemnon and his following defection from the army, which is not the action one would associate with such a man, especially not in the social context. In this way, one can see that, aside from dharma, a valuable trait in a hero is loyalty to others, no matter what the cost to themselves. Both contexts in which these epics were written have their own take on what constitutes a heroic society. As the Mahatma K. H. pointed out to Sinnett, "We have several sorts of Karma and Nirvana in their various applications . is the challenge which causes man to measure himself against standards more than human . And it is that pattern, that ordering, which we may discover and which, I suggest, constitutes one of the most exciting—if not the most challenging—concept inherent in the theosophical worldview.
So long as we refuse to share, so long as we refuse to forgive, so long as we find excuses to justify our greed, war will happen and heroes will never find peace. It goes without saying therefore that I’m one of those who started off with Amar Chitra Katha’s blue-skinned Ram, graduated to Rajaji’s stodgy (and sometimes spin doctored) prose and thought myself clever for scheduling doctor’s visits while the rest of India watched Ramanand Sagar’s creation to avoid endless delays in dreary waiting rooms. The heroic journey, the great adventure on which we are embarked, is the journey of the soul throughour humanity to the realm of the gods; it is the journey from the bondage of nonknowing to the nirvanic freedom of luminous wisdom; it is the adventure of the spirit involving both a descent into hell and the ascent into heaven, stages symbolized in all the mystery schools and reexperienced in our lives as the painful and the happy moments produced by our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Hero's Journey, Inner Alchemy October 25 - 30, 2015 info & registration here. Nor to the “management-philosophy-from-ancient-wisdom” neophytes who have abandoned Jesus CEO or Chanakya on Management for a regular dose of management fable in Pattanaik’s ET column.I much prefer Pattanaik on Ram to centuries-old literary predecessors – from Valmiki to Michael Madhusudan Dutt. 10 Chapters in Freedom. "; as already noted, I am suggesting that Nirvana in that context—the snuffing-out of the personal, egoistic self—is nearly synonymous, or at least correlate, with the concept of dharma as the fulfillment of one's nature, a fulfillment in which the personal, egoistic desire-self is altogether dissolved. So long as we refuse to share, so long as we refuse to forgive, so long as we find excuses to justify our greed, war will happen and heroes will never find peace. And we participate in that; we are held by that; we move in accordance with that divinely appointed ordering; and ultimately we are one with that, the Truth of our being, the Supreme Order whose very heart is bliss and peace.What is the heroic journey? No, not really relevant. While we've done our best to make the core functionality of this site accessible without javascript, it will work better with it enabled. For we are destined to be world-redeemers, as the Self-redeemed of the world.So dharma is the other half of the key that unlocks the meaning and purpose of existence. To walk the world in that knowledge is to know what St. Paul called "the fruit of the spirit," that love, joy, peace, goodness, which is to realize nirvana, the extinction of the personal self, the bliss of the One Self, here and now. We fail to see that karma is merely the lawfulness of existence itself and therefore productive only of what is in harmony with the causes we ourselves set in motion.H. This code can, and does, change both over time and according to the culture in which the epic is set or written. Please consider turning it on!