Social Distancing and Self Introspection

During the social distancing we can learn something from Henry Thoreau. Thoreau studied Bhagavad Gita from his cabin in Walden pond. https://vedabase.io/en/library/bg/

His quote is very famous:

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

Recently there was a review in New York times. "He used his semi-seclusion at Walden, which began in July 1845 and ended in September 1847, to pursue an intensive course in self-education, one that required undistracted reading. “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written,” he wrote. The list he compiled was long, ambitious and culturally far-reaching, stretching from Classical Greece to Vedic India.

"In a letter to a friend he wrote: “The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.” He made his time at Walden one of those intervals".

So let's go into introspection during Covid 19 and derive true meaning of life......

Personally this has been a time of soul searching. I have been meeting less people, spending more time contemplating what is life, love, and liberation from the cycle of birth and death.