"Action as love for action itself." - Marco M.

Action as love for action itself

The Bhagavad Gita, like many ancient religious texts, is a source of remarkable insights that must be reviewed with the sensitivity of a matured conscience and a changed linguistic figure.  What follows is an interpretation of one of the most remarkable verses of the text.  

"The superior man is the one who, controlling the senses with his mind, devotes himself with detachment to action for the love of action itself."

First of all, the superior man is entirely comparable to Nietzsche's superman. He is the one who transcends the biological machine (body and mind) and experientially identifies himself with the soul or at least with a transcendent entity. It would be necessary to know Sanskrit to understand if the translation is correct, but if the Italian edition at my disposal were correct, the author would have made a mistake in the cited verse. It is not the mind that controls the senses, but the consciousness that controls the mind and the senses as one. Put as above, it would look like a verse from a text of the horrid Enlightenment. The mind is a biological mechanism, a very powerful tool that must be trained, but those who identify with it remain lost. In the liberated being (or superior or who has gone beyond himself) the action is spontaneous and in tune with the here and now, disconnected from small egoic needs. 

He who is free does not act for a purpose and remains the sole judge of himself. On closer inspection, however, we understand that the action of a liberated being becomes part of what is there, it seems to be an action without a center, the actor (the one who acts) evaporates in the absence of intentionality.

All that remains is the gentle breeze and the scent of nothingness.

m.m.