Raghunath Cappo on Truth in the Bhagavad Gita

We still never got to the Bhagavad Gita. Sorry about that. We turned. A hard, a hard, a hard, a hard picture. I want to know why you think that that's real and what you think is going on in those stories. Well, first you've got the dialogue itself, which is cool wisdom for all people. Yeah. But it's like hyperbizarre, like what Oppenheimer quoted at the detonation of the atomic bomb. Right. I am become death. Kaloshmi lokshaya krit pravidho. Is that the... That's the Sanskrit. How does he say it? Kaloshmi lokshaya krit pravidho. Is that why... Time I am the destroyer, time I am the great destroyer and I've come to destroy all worlds. So that's one... Oh, that's the actual translation. That's the actual translation in English. Because his translation, Oppenheimer's was I am become death. Is that because of an issue with the translation between Hindu and English? It's just different people translated, slightly different. But it's similar, meaning in that particular section that you pulled out that was Krishna explaining like God is beautiful, God is charming, God is your best friend. He's also death personified. So he's saying in that particular place, I'm actually also the destroyer of all the worlds. When we think of the yogis explaining God is everything. Both the beauty and the destruction as well. And so Krishna just is sharing his attributes and in that particular chapter, chapter 11, the most almost intimidating. Where do you think all these stories come from? What do you think the origin of the Bhagavad Gita, of the Mahabharata, of all the ancient texts, what do you think the origin was? What was the motivation to put this stuff down? What was the original concepts that led them to write this? And where did it all come from? There has to be an origin of these, these wisdoms, right? Yeah. What do you think that is? You know, to even answer the question, I have to take myself out of Raghu and just answer like a yoga teacher. Okay. Because to answer of what do you think, it's one thing you're sort of trained not to do as far as what is your personal opinion. I can give you my personal opinion, but I have to separate it from what the stories themselves say. Okay. Well, give me your personal opinion. My personal opinion is I hear what the stories have to offer. I find some value in the stories and I try to apply wisdom to my life. It helps the direction of my life. It helps me escape potholes. I understand. The stories themselves say these are all real. They're way beyond your perception. They're orally transmitted. At a certain time historically, they understood people are getting dumber. See, we have a tendency to think we've got the pinnacle of evolution, but the Vedic teachings is that as we go on in this age, we get more and more disconnected. There was a time where architecture was more evolved, where the sciences were more evolved. Wait a minute. Stop. The sciences were more evolved? The sciences, like for example, the building of these Vimanas, which when we read them now, we just think that's mythological. Even weaponry. Weaponry, they say we're done with sound. If you study, there's one book called the Donneri. Okay, but do you think this is real? Do I think it's real? I think it could be. I don't think it's definitely... I definitely don't know. So you think at one point in time, human beings had Vimanas and they flew around the sky, and then they had weapons that used sound. Could. Could. Why not? What is our evidence? Archaeological evidence that there was a flying craft or that there was ever any technology that allowed people to leave gravity. Yeah. Sometimes there may not be evidence. Just like this. Right. What's your guy's name? Hill? The... Barney Hill? Barney Hill. Barney Hill. What's your evidence? You could just say, well, it's my own experience. I mean, he's just laying... That's a totally different thing. He's just relaying his personal experience. He could have had some sort of a psychotic break. He could have had... Right. I mean, there could have been mass psychosis with him and his... I mean, with two people. Well, I... Group psychosis with him and his wife. I can say that there are things that make no sense to me, yet I sort of tried the many way and then after time they made sense. Like, well, wait a second. That does make sense. Or at different vantage points of my life, it didn't make sense when I was 20, but at 50, that makes a lot of sense. So there are certain things that are huge leaps of faith that I can't say, I definitely know that to be true. Just like chanting on munchers. Made no sense. Made no real sense. But over time, I realized actually that helps in this particular way. But it is... She has a state. A state of consciousness. Not forever. That meditation in general achieves certain states of consciousness and you can actually, with fMRI, you can actually monitor the changes in the way the brain is... See, this is what I like about you. You're one of those guys, you get into these very interesting, like, subtle sciences and then you find, like, hard evidence for these things. And just hearing that thing with James Wilk and breaking all these things down. I'm more of a simpler guy. I find people where I trust the way they live and they've applied stuff and walked the... It's more like I can tell time, but I don't know how to take apart a clock and put it back together. No, I think exactly the same way. I'm fascinated by watches. But then you see all the gears behind a watch, like a self-winding watch and you're like, I don't know what the fuck is happening here. I'm sure I could find it out eventually. I'm like that with a lot of things and I'm always impressed when you dig into it with people like this. But truthfully, if you want to know the honest truth, I was like, oh man, I hope Joe doesn't dig into it with me because I'm not that kind of hard science guy. You don't have to be... There's people... You don't have to be... Even all the stuff I did in yoga... I'm concerned with you as a human being. That's why I asked you very specifically, what do you think? Right. Well, I can say, like, the stuff that you liked about me fighting was endurance, flexibility. I give all the credit that to yoga... You did at the time too. Pronium and fasting. I've told many people that you had crazy cardio and your cardio was... You never did cardio. You just did breathing exercises. Never did cardio. Just sat down. You always did great cardio. You always led really good endurance. And my cardio was even better. I remember being at the bomb squad once on day 17 of a 21 day fast. Wow. Day 17 and I remember fighting... I can't remember his name, he's a cool guy. He's like, what? I don't know how jujitsu class ends when we're all tanked. And I just kept on going. And he's like, man, what is up with you? I was like, I don't know. I haven't eaten solid food in 17 days. So it's not like I'm a genius. It's just that these are sort of like yoga, fasting, deep breathing. I just been doing them. I'm sure there's people that can give you the modern take on what the benefits are and... Yeah, but that's not what I'm asking you. What I'm asking is why you believe the Bhagavad Gita is real. So my point is there's reasonable amounts of faith in these other things that I've applied that have made me take a next step. So whether I believe it's real, I just believe the truths I can extract from it are real. Whether the war actually happened, there's a leap of faith. The benefits of following those scriptures you apply and you feel those benefits. So that's enough. That's enough to make me move forward towards those. Just for example, the idea of faith. Because especially in America, we don't like the concept of blind faith. But if I saw you walking in downtown... Let's take it the other way. You saw me, you're driving, you're Porsche, and you saw me walking in Manhattan. And you say, hey, Raghu, how do you get to Times Square? And I say... So the first step is I could lie to you. People lie all the time when you ask them for directions. But you have some reasonable faith. I know him. He's a friend. Why would he give me bad directions? So there's a reasonable amount of faith. But even still, people get into their egos and they just want to be the knower of directions. But I say you go up the 14th Street and you're going to see a McDonald's, you take a right. Then you're going to go down all the way to... Whatever, I can't remember Manhattan anymore. Union Square and take a left and go up third. And then at Union Square, you're going to see a park. At that park, you take a hard left. So again, you have some type of extended faith towards me. Not blind faith. But you'd go up the 14th Street and there's that McDonald's. As you go to McDonald's or that next signpost, you realize, okay, maybe he does know where he's going. Then you go farther. There's Union Square. Okay, I think he actually knows what's going on. And all of a sudden, you see the Times Square in the distance. So faith isn't just like, I believe. And if anyone wants to say, I believe this, I believe in these Vmanas, I believe in mantras, I'd start to question them. But it happens with small degrees of things being just shown to you. That you want to take... All right, what's the next step here? What do they say about this? What do they say about that? And then you apply and see, well, does that work with me? And like I said, sometimes things didn't make sense. I remember when I first met monks and they said, and they said, question about, or not even monks, but people were just like following very strict with their sexuality, even in family. And the guy said, I don't have sex. I was 17. And I was like, you don't have sex with your wife? Were you crazy? He's like, no, we do other things. And I just couldn't understand that as a 17-year-old boy or 18-year-old boy. I couldn't understand why would you be with a person, if not for that. What were their answer? He was... Because they said, we're practicing detachment. We're practicing going internal to find our pleasure. And he said, I said, what do you do for fun? And he goes, you go for a drive? I was like, you go for a drive? Are you crazy? But it was where this person was on his path of really controlling the senses and finding his pleasure internally. At different... At time in my life, it made no sense whatsoever. Maybe he really didn't like having sex with his wife. Or that. Or some sort of an excuse. Or maybe there was... We're going internal, baby. She's like, what? What's happening? Maybe there was trauma. We don't know the whole story. I see what you're saying, though. Applying this stuff, whether or not you break it down scientifically and objectively and try to analyze each and every word and whatever the translation is, you could actually you could actually apply those truths, air quotes, to your life and have real benefits. And other things are just... Does it make a difference if Vimanas exist or not? No, it makes no difference in my practical life. Could they exist? Sure. It could... All these... Yeah, it could answer a lot. I think a lot of these things we've talked about, like life on other planets and aliens, they all are very much explained. Or here's another good one. What do these spiritual paths have in common? We train ourselves to find the differences in all of them. And the Vedic teach and say, don't you understand? You should be able to walk into a mosque, into a church, into a synagogue and say, how nice these people are trying to connect. Not that we got to win these people over to our team. Because they're all an illusion and they're all going to hell forever. Right. Everyone's on a type of path and I appreciate them trying to surrender. And the only thing that's going to get in their way, because people say things like this all the time, yeah, it's religion that caused all the problems in this world. And it's not religion, it's the ego that goes with joining a particular church, synagogue, ashram, etc., that we have it our way. And everybody else, they're a problem and we got to fix it. That's what gets in the way. Because you could say materialism causes lots of problems as well in the world. So I don't think it's, the ego's sneaky. It'll sneak into your diet, it'll sneak into your God, it'll sneak in. And that's why there's an appreciation instead of a condemnation of people that are different than us.