Famous Reflections on the Bhagavad Gita

Albert Einstein:

When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so
superfluous.

Mahatma Gandhi:

When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the
horizon, I turn to Bhagavad-gita and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the
midst of overwhelming sorrow. Those who meditate on the Gita will derive fresh joy and new meanings
from it every day.

Henry David Thoreau:

 In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita,
in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.

Dr. Albert Schweitzer:

The Bhagavad-Gita has a profound influence on the spirit of mankind by its devotion to God which is
manifested by actions.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

In reference to the Trinity test in New Mexico, where his Los Alamos team first tested the bomb,
Oppenheimer famously recalled the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at
once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one." and "Now I am become Death, the
destroyer of worlds."
The word “trinity” of his “trinity test” – he learnt it from Vedic Sanskrit Word which means “trimurti”
three forces as one which is an essence of The Bhagvad Gita.

David Bohm explains his theory that there is something like life and mind enfolded in everything.  

Bohm was profoundly affected by his close contact with J. Krishnamurti. 

"Yes, and Atman is from the side of meaning.  You would say Atman is more like the meaning.  But then what is
meant would be Brahman, I suppose; the identity of consciousness and cosmos....This claims that the meaning and
what is meant are ultimately one, which is the phrase 'Atman equals Brahman' of classical Hindu philosophy."

Niels Henrik David Bohr

He is on record as saying that he goes into the Upanishads to ask questions. 

Carl Jung (German Philosopher):

The idea that man is like unto an inverted tree seems to have been current in by gone ages. The link with
Vedic conceptions is provided by Plato in his Timaeus in which it states..." behold we are not an earthly
but a heavenly plant." This correlation can be discerned by what Krishna expresses in chapter 15 of
Bhagavad-Gita.
Eugene Wigner

He became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, particularly its ideas of the universe as an
all pervading consciousness. [2] In his collection of essays Symmetries and Reflections - Scientific Essays,
he commented "It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way
without reference to consciousness."

Herman Hesse: The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life's wisdom which
enables philosophy to blossom into religion.

Erwin Schrödinger

As a result of his extensive reading of Schopenhauer's works, he became deeply interested throughout his
life in color theory, philosophy,[3] perception, and eastern religion, especially Hindu Vedanta. He had a
life-long interest in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, which influenced his speculations at the close
of What is Life? about the possibility that individual consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary
consciousness pervading the universe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Thinker): I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of
books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the
voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same
questions which exercise us.

Rudolph Steiner: In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-Gita with full
understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it.

Fritjof Capra (Austrian Physicist)

"Hinduism cannot be called a philosophy, nor is it a well defined religion. It is, rather, a large and complex socio-
religious organism consisting of innumerable sects, cults, and philosophical systems and involving various rituals,
ceremonies and spiritual disciplines, as well as the worship of countless gods, and goddesses. The many facets of
this complex, and yet persistent and powerful spiritual tradition mirror the geographical, racial, linguistic
and cultural complexities of India’s vast subcontinent. The manifestations of Hinduism range from highly
intellectual depth to the naïve ritual practices of the masses. If the majority of the Hindus are simple villagers who
keep the popular religion alive in their daily worship, Hinduism has, on the other hand, brought forth a large
number of outstanding spiritual teachers to transmit its profound insights. "
The Upanishads contain the essence of Hinduism’s spiritual message. They have guided and inspired India’s
greatest minds for the last twenty-five centuries, in accordance with the advice given by their verses: 

Taking as a bow the great weapon of the Upanishad,

One should put upon it an arrow sharpened by
Meditation.
Stretching it with a though directed to the essence of That,
Penetrate that Imperishable as the mark, my friend.

Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons
and in the birth and death of all living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. Modern physics has
thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a
pulsating process of creation and destruction.

"I saw cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were destroyed and created in rhythmic
pulses; I saw the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its
rhythm and I heard its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiv, the Lord of Dancers."

"The metaphor of the cosmic dancer has found its most profound and beautiful expression in Hinduism in the image
of the dancing Shiva." 

"The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of
patterns that melt into one another’’.

For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a
continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural
phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of
bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic
dance. The bubble-chamber photographs of interacting particles, which bear testimony to the continual rhythm of
creation and destruction in the universe, are visual images of the dance of Shiva equaling those of the Indian artists
in beauty and profound significance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious
art, and modern physics. It is indeed, as Coomaraswamy has said, ‘poetry, but none the less science."

"The idea of a periodically expanding and contracting universe, which involves a scale of tome and space of vast
proportions; has arisen not only in modern cosmology, but also in ancient Indian mythology. Experiencing the
universe as an organic and rhythmically moving cosmos, the Hindus were able to develop evolutionary cosmologies
which come very close to our modern scientific models. The Hindu sages were not afraid to identify this
rhythmic divine play with the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. They pictured the universe as periodically
expanding and contracting and gave the name kalpa to the unimaginable time span between the beginning and the
end of one creation. The scale of this ancient myth is indeed staggering; it has taken the human mind more
than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept."

"..the two foundations of of twentieth-century physics - quantum theory and relativity theory - both force us to see
the world very much in the way a Hindu, Buddhist...sees it."

(source: The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism
- By Fritjof Capra p. 85 - 245 and 17).

“One of my first excursions in Bombay was to the famous Elephanta (Gharapuri) caves, a magnificent ancient
temple dedicated to Shiva with huge stone sculptures representing the god in his many manifestations. I stood in
awe in front of those powerful sculptures whose reproductions I had known and loved for many years: the
triple image of Shiva Mahesvara, the Great Lord, radiating serene tranquility and peace; Shiva Ardhanari,
the stunning unification of male and female forms in the rhythmic, swaying movement of the deity’s
androgynous body and in the serene detachment of his/her face; and Shiva Nataraja the celebrated four-
armed Cosmic Dancer whose superbly balanced gestures express the dynamic unity of all life.” “I had a more
powerful experience of Shiva sculpture in the Ellora caves. The beauty and power of these sacred caves are beyond
words. “ 

Capra had shown Heisenberg numerous examples that the principal Sanskrit terms used in Hindu and Buddhist
philosophy – Brahman, rita, lila, karma, samsara etc. had dynamic connotations.

Lord Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.

Carl Sagan

It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology.  Its cycles
run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of
the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.  And there are much longer time scales still." 

Sagan continues, "A millennium before Europeans were wiling to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the
world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions"

Nikola Tesla:

Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy (i.e., Hinduism) teachings of the Swami Vivekananda; so
much so that, after his exposure to Hindu-Vedic thought, Tesla started using Sanskrit words to name
some of his fundamental concepts regarding matter and energy.

BRAHMAN = THE ABSOLUTE

||
||
MAHAT OR ISHVARA = PRIMAL CREATIVE ENERGY
||
+---------+ +---------+
PRANA and AKASHA = ENERGY and MATTER

Tesla understood the Sanskrit terminology and philosophy and found that it was a good means to
describe the physical mechanisms of the universe as seen through his eyes. It would behoove
those who would attempt to understand the science behind the inventions of Nikola Tesla to
study Sanskrit and Vedic philosophy.

Tesla apparently failed to show the identity of energy and matter.

If he had, certainly Swami Vivekananda would have recorded that
occasion. The mathematical proof of the principle did come until
about ten years later when Albert Einstein published his paper on
relativity. What had been known in the East for the last 5,000 years was then known to the West.

Works Cited:

http://www.bhagavad-gita.us/articles/662/1/Famous-Reflections-on-the-Bhagavad-
Gita/Page1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedanta

http://www.hinduwisdom.info/

(The list of famous reflections is endless and will be updated in time. Thanks to the contributing
websites! )