the Dravidian culture of the Tamil people in the south.
They have a special kind of literature which
is often written from the woman’s point of view.
Whether this view of God’s love for humans and
God’s grace that lets humans love God came from
the mystical experience of the Tamils of Southern India
or from a Judeo-Christian influence is hard to say.
In any case, the transpersonal monistic view
was discovered in mystical experience and
the active meditative effort and the passive
contemplative receptivity remind one of John of the Cross.
The Gita’s Self-Realization Ethics
The metaphysical, the ethical and the devotional pathways
in the Gita are jnana yoga, karma yoga, and bhakti yoga:
the ways of right knowledge, right action and right love.
Both the great religious ways of The Gita
and the six orthodox systems and the three
heterodox systems have a self-realization ethics.
As with all the philosophies of the Greeks
the main point is to become all one can be.
The meaning of virtue is one’s own excellence.
The Jewish love of ahava in the Hebrew Bible
is concerned with the love of God and of neighbor.
But only with Jesus, as Mark shows us,
is there a completely altruistic love ethic
which loves the other as more important than self.
The pathway of bhakti or true love
that mysteriously appears in the Gita
also has an ethics of self-realization.
God loves us and gives us the grace
that we might love him with our whole
heart, mind and soul but there is no mention
of loving your neighbor as yourself or
loving others as more important than yourself.
Bataille following Kierkegaard sees in Jesus
the torment of this love and yet the glory
of sacrificing one’s ego and oneself.
Bataille clearly sees the limits of Hindu mysticism
in that it gets rid of persons in its monism,
but even in its personal salvation theology
it does not get beyond a salvation ethics.
In order to get beyond the scandal of
the caste system you need to love others as yourself.
Getting Beyond the Caste System
The transpersonal mysticism of the Gita
which is the predominant view of the Hindu systems
can bring one to great religious perfection
as we see with Guru Nanak of the Sikhs.
One can live in the sweet presence of the name of God
and be taken beyond all illusion and this name
can help the Christian understand herself when she says,
“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”
and when she says “Our father who art in Heaven
hallowed be thy name” which may not be
that meaningful for the Christian who says “name” so often.
But the caste system is deeply rooted
in the Hindu belief system for there are
four character types with which we can be born
according to the wheel of rebirth
depending on how we have lived our past lives.
Jnana, or wisdom, is the character type of Brahmins.
Karma yoga is natural for the warrior caste
and a lower form of it for farmers and workers.
Finally, the masses of the people have deserved
to be untouchables and if they accept this
gracefully with devotion and bhakti
they will be reborn into a higher caste.
The religion of both kinds of Hindu mysticism
promotes the politics of the caste system.
Ghandi who learned of Jesus’ altruistic love
does try to free Indians from it with non-violence.
Mother Theresa shows how agape can fulfill bhakti
and many lovely Indian ladies joined her
as sisters of charity to help the poorest of the poor.
Bhakti brings so much to agape and agape to bhakti.
Bataille
Love’s Nine Great Secret Things
As one ponders Bataille’s book Inner Experience
one can find there agape’s nine unique traits
and see how Bataille connects them
with his nine great secret things.
His book is all about altruistic love
and the secrets of sex and its ecstasy.
It is about an eternal love for all
and the secrets of death and its torment.
It is about universal love for every other
and the secrets of religion in its missionary
task and in the varieties of its mysticisms.
It is about child-like love in its play
and the secrets of art especially in surreal poetry.
It is about unconditional love in its self-sacrifice
and the secrets of a sovereignty which
let us get beyond the servility of any subject.
It is about celibate love in its sublimation
and the transgressions against the workers’ taboos
and the secrets of its mysticism of sin.
It is about missionary love in its mission
and the secrets of sacrifice even of
the sacrifice of literal meaning in Proust’s poetry.
It is about purgatorial love in its purification
and the secrets of the violence that justice demands.
It is about loving love and the God who is Love
and the secrets of the gift in its pure giving.
For Bataille the nine great secret things
help us better understand agape’s nine unique traits.
He learned this from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
and all the great Catholic mystics.
Bataille