How Many Legs Does this Elephant Have?
posted by Madhava Gosh @ 6:26 AM
4 comments
View From a New Vrindaban Ridge
An unofficial, eclectic, mostly tangential, view of aspiring devotee life.
Best viewed with Sense of Humor 8.0 or higher.
Cows may come, cows may go, but the bull is always here.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
About Me
- Name: Madhava Gosh
- Location: New Vrindavan, West Virginia, United States
Trying to reclaim scripture from the hands of the empiricists and dogmatic analyzers. Scripture is poetry, not a collection of essays.
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Srimad Bhagvatam 11.2.41:
A devotee should not see anything as being separate from the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krsna. Ether, fire, air, water, earth, the sun and other luminaries, all living beings, the directions, trees and other plants, the rivers and oceans -- whatever a devotee experiences he should consider to be an expansion of Krsna.
Thus seeing everything that exists within creation as the body of the Supreme Lord, Hari, the devotee should offer his sincere respects to the entire expansion of the Lord's body.
Rabindranath Tagore:
A mind all logic
is like a knife all blade.
The hand that uses it will bleed.
4 Comments:
This might sound dumb but I think it's 8.
It really depends - it's kinda subjective, do you include feet if you can't see it's toenails? Well anyways that's my guess! What's the answer MG?
The answer is that we have imperfect senses subject to illusion. We "know" an elephant has 4 legs, yet looking at the picture, the illusion is easily created that it has 5 or more. Sometimes, it looks like 4, sometimes 5, or if we try to be too inclusive, 8.
Analyzing scripture empirically will yield the same type of results. Practically we see that those thinking there is One Right Answer will tend to be self righteous and always in an argument with someone else who sees the One Right Answer differently.
Hence the necessity to cultivate tolerance and humility.
And who's to say that it doesn't have eight legs, but we perceive only four....
Yes I agree MG, trnad and taror - I forgot this too often so do many other ppl.
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