In Class Activity or Online Discussion: Bhagavad Gita Literary Quick Take
Overview
The literary quick takes are weekly discussions and in-class activities that I use to frame the text for the students. This is mostly formative and graded based on engagement.
Literary Quick Takes
I use this for group discussion in both online and in-class formats. It is intended to allow students to explore the meaning of the text in relation to themselves and to engage in meaningful discussion with peers.
In the analysis for the Gita, we ended discussing this:
The fruits of your actions are not for your enjoyment. To perform actions is an integral part of human nature. While performing these actions, we must remember that we are not the enjoyers of the results. Thus, a primary determiner of what is right, or moral, is intent rather than the result.
We also explore how Krishna is outlining why and how it is wrong to desire to kill an idea, and what that means:
We often mistake our distaste for emotion or an idea as a dislike of the person; for example, if someone makes us feel angry, we may think to ourselves, "I want to kill this person." However, the thing we want to "kill" is that angry thought within our heads. We wish to eliminate the thought that vibrates within the person's head, not necessarily the person we may end up killing. If we are part of a party, like a political party, for example, and then someone stands against the party's ideals, the consensus may be to kill that person. However, we could not stop with one, could we? Since it is the idea, we wish to kill, it would require killing every person who had that idea.
Please reflect on the moral concept Krishna outlines: that the morality of our actions is determined by intent. How do the concepts Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah highlights within the video support the idea that intent drives our actions and how they can pervert our perceptions of reality?