Bhagavad Gita
In my own little old life I keep in mind that the essential action in the Bhagavad Gita is that God gives the spiritual seeker a vision of God and that vision is transformative, transforming the seeker into a knower. I was lucky. I had a vision of God when I was fifteen, on a bike riding date with Walter Spiegel in Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx. The day was perfect. The park in Spring was glorious. The air was fresh, divine. We had biked for hours and finally just lay our bodies and our bikes down to rest.
I can’t tell you where my mind went. I can’t even tell you what the vision was. It’s not that I can’t remember it. I couldn’t have told you it a minute after I came down from it. It’s just that I FELT like I had been with God.
Years later when I told my friend Ronnie about it, her comment was that what I felt then was sex. But it wasn’t sex. I knew the difference. Sex was what I felt when I was kissing Ronald Schreiber in the balcony of the Loewe’s Paradise movie theatre on the Grand Concourse in The Bronx.
Feeling like I’d been with God was something else. And truth to tell, it actually did transform me. And that transformation lasted my whole life. And I’m a lot older than fifteen these days. And that vision that I can’t even remember but I remember feeling was probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole long life.
I love that the phrase Bhagavad Gita means Song of God. When I was a karma yogi at the Satchidananda Ashram in Virginia and I was writing A New Bhagavad Gita, I wanted to put that event, of feeling like being with God, into modern language. So I wrote the spiritual seeker as a young woman in modern day New York and I made a pun on Lord Krishna who was the original God in the centuries old Song of God. So instead of Krishna I called him Krishner. In the original he’s a charioteer so in my version I made him a taxi driver in New York, a New York charioteer I guess you could say.
I read every version of the Gita I could find and then left it up to God to give me the inspiration for my version, A New Bhagavad Gita - Krishner in New York. Krishner tells Trudy “I’m Harry Krishner, New York charioteer/ When things get bad I reappear.”
Things certainly have gotten bad enough. I feel honored and blessed that God enabled me to be part of bringing God back into the picture.
Trudy doesn’t believe Harry is God, she thinks he’s crazy and because we live in a scientific age, she wants to see proof. Krishner replies:
“The proof that you seek is a function of math
Just right for its use but no spiritual path
It’s like trying to prove that true love is real
It surely exists but it’s something you feel.”
By the way, if you look at Hindu spiritual art you’ll see that the original Lord Krishna was blue.
So cool.