Krishna told Arjuna to exact capital punishment on ALL his relatives and just about the entire Kshatriya caste/race too. Killed most of them. If Arjuna was like Conan the Barbarian, he sure heard a lot of "the lamentations of the women." In the blink of an eye, Arjuna could shoot ten thousand arrows that killed ten thousand warriors shooting at him. Arjuna presumably also had this really big quiver of arrows and a cooling system that kept the friction of his rapid pulling out of arrows from setting the quiver on fire. Probably also had an automatic "bow string replacer."
The physics and engineering of the siddhis would have to be quite strange to make it such that we could begin to believe a man could shoot ten thousand arrows so quickly and accurately that ten thousand arrows shot at Arjuna would be targeted and met mid-air. The sound of the twangs alone would deafen anyone within earshot. Or, wait, did Arjuna have very very thin arrows? Maybe he shot all 10,000 in one twang? Then there's the fact that thousands of elephants, horses, chariots, etc. were destroyed in Arjuna's battles too. The logistics are so boggling, that, well, these stories of fabled warriors are automatically consigned to myth by almost any scholar. But here's my explanation: The mind is the battlefield. The arrows are concepts and feelings. The distance an arrow travels is the same as the distance between thoughts, and the arrow travels just as fast as you would travel in your imagination from one spot to another -- that is to say, almost instantly. I can just see myself standing on Mars, no wait, I'm now back on Earth. Fast, eh? Didn't even break a sweat. The speed of thought: wow! In a dream tonight, you could imagine being Arjuna and shooting the arrows, and it would not cause you the least dissonance in the dream. Physics, schmysics. Every thought in any mind in history that has ever occurred was the shooting of just such an arrow -- an arrow targeting other impulses of the mind that are untoward, or, egads, being an untoward impulse/arrow itself. I think Arjuna's battle was between the right and left hemispheres of his brain, and he and Krishna had their discussion in the corpus colloseum. The goal was to balance the two sides such that neither could win all the marbles. Failing to gain this balance, someone would lose their marbles, see? So, on that level of life, we're all killers. We're all smashing impulses that are "sins," errors of thinking, and at that level each wayward dynamic is a fully fleshed out astral being with a destiny and intent all its own. And the inner Arjuna of all of us is our best idealization of our potential to keep one's balance while moving forwards. Capitol punishment? We've all got the tee shirt. Burger anyone? New idea: if we're going to do capital punishment, we should at least find a good use for that robot meat. Soylent Green: it's what's for breakfast. This alone could reduce recidivism by 90%, I'm just saying. Then again, there's this consideration: The Leaden-Eyed -- Vachel Lindsay Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed. Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly; Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap; Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve; Not that they die, but that they die like sheep. Edg --- In [email protected], "jim_flanegin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "hugheshugo" > <richardhughes103@> wrote: > > > > > > Here's a thought, instead of judging rising consciousness purely > on > > what the dow jones is doing, why not judge it on how many things > like > > this are going on. > > > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2182952,00.html > > > > Surely any vaguely civilized society would have banned this a long > time > > ago. > > > Surely we would have. The problem with choosing some sort of social > improvement index to gauge rising global consciousness is the same > problem with trying to predict how an enlightened person will act, > much less a society. :-) >
