DISCUSSION POINTS 1

Namaste !

It's been some time since I have updated this blog. I am going to post two items today, December 30, 2008, introducing a new feature which will, hopefully, continue on a regular basis.

The new feature, to be called "Meeting Highlights and Commentary," will highlight a few points and offer my commentary on them. The points will be drawn from the meetings of the Gita and Hinduism Group and the Upanishads Study Group.

The first group meets every Sunday at 3:00 p.m. at the Dayton Hindu Temple in Beavercreek, Ohio, except that on first Sunday of each month, we hold a meditation session rather, at the house of Krishnakant and Yogini Patel. This group started meeting on July 3, 2002 and has met regularly since. It started as Sanskrit grammar class but after a while we decided to turn it into studying Sanskrit through the verses of the Gita for one hour of meeting and discussing Hinduism, reading from my book called Philosophy of the Gita, for the next hour. On average we do one or two verses of the Gita each session, devoting most of the time to discussing each and every Sanskrit word in the text. We are in the tenth chapter of the Gita currently. We have read sections 1, 2, 4, 8, 3 and 5 of my book, in that order. We are currently on the section 6 dealing with metaphysical vision of the Gita, being the toughest section there. The book was written for Indology scholars and professional philosophers. I try to explain it as we go on. We do about a paragraph or two per session.

The second group meets every other Friday in my library at Command Motel, 130 N. Broad Street, Fairborn, Ohio. It started in December, 2007, as an offshoot of the first group in order to serve the needs of those who wanted to learn and discuss Vedic philosophy of Madhusudan Ojha. The group was called the Vedic Philosophy Group at the time. Ojha offers a captivating original interpretation of the Vedic thought that vies with the great systems of philosophy East and West. He wrote about two hundred books but because he wrote them in Sanskrit he is not widely known.

After familiarizing ourselves with Vedic philosophy as well as my own philosophy which I dubbed MF, we renamed the group a few months ago as Upanishads Study Group. We started our study of the Upanishads with the Isha Upanishad. We analyze each and every word of the text and discuss its import in relation to anything that anyone brings up as worthy of discussion. We use S. Radhakrishnan's Principal Upanishads as our text, studying Upanishads in the first hour and discussing Radhakrishnan's massive introduction in the second. We are presently studying verse 14 of the Isha Upanishad.

In every post of the new feature I plan to highlight one point from each hour's discussion that took place at the meetings of the two groups. I will narrate the points together with the issues involved. A commentary on each point will follow, clarifying and expanding the point of discussion and advancing the discussion further if the scope of the point allows it.

The discussions at the meetings range on a wide spectrum of subjects and handle very difficult issues that have engaged great thinkers for centuries. We feel challenged by them and seek each other's input to fathom their depth. I am sure you will find them intellectually challenging as well.

I sincerely hope that this new feature will be useful to readers of the blog. Especially, it should be of interest to those who live away from Fairborn, Ohio here and cannot attend the meetings but want to know what goes on there.

Needless to say, I will appreciate all comments, positive and negative, but preferably with supporting reason. You can post them here on the blog or email them to me at rpatel45324@yahoo.com.

I regularly send out group emails on the upcoming meetings. If you want to subscribe to these emails, please ask me to add your email address to the group by sending an email to the above email address.

OM TAT SAT !

--Ramesh