Besides, I Guess I Really Am...

...
Intellectual, that is. At least more than the average bear.

It must have been 16 or 17 years ago when the spouse and I were first living together that she got invited to attend an "Executive Development Seminar" that her company paid for and paid for spouses or spousal equivalents. There were maybe seven or eight people in it and it was taught by a brilliant lawyer who is, I believe, a specialist in intellectual property and entertainment law.

The content was interesting because it was all great literature or significant works from Before Common Era down through to the twentieth century. I'm writing this because a reader/friend suggested that I watch "The Legend of Bagger Vance," a modern retelling of the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu text, which was the first book we read. Some of the others were Aristotle's "Nicomedian Ethics;" the Book of Job; one of Paul's epistles; Shakespeare's "King Lear;" Hobbes "Leviathan;" Locke's "Treatise on Civil Government;" and John Maynard Keynes "The Economic Consequences of the Peace;" among a few others.

I suppose that I have read things like that might make one say I'm an intellectual, but I have to say that much of the discussion made me feel like I was treading water.

Two things about it. First, that it made me always want to teach something like it. I proposed it to a couple of places I worked and got no traction. I even added a couple of things to the list; Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism," and Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique." What it all was seemed to be to be about how one thinks. That if you can dig into that and see how you think, you can expand your ability to think more effectively in a variety of situations, see more options, and be less captive of your reactive system.

The second thing is about the Gita and dharma and karma. Karma has found its way into popular culture as "fate" or "kismet." Dharma is not so well known. I suppose that is because it is about duty, about one's obligation to support or align with the natural order of things and to fulfill one's obligations. If I remember correctly in the Gita it comes up when Krishna tells Arjuna that yes, it is his duty to battle against his cousins.

I suppose it contemporary terms this is something like those excercises about getting clear about one's purpose. The difference being that the human potential movement seems to favor the self-generated purpose, as opposed to discovering one's purpose in interaction with the social and physical environment one exists in.

Karma, dharma, dogma... ???