It comes down to this. The West has trained its people to perform veridical agreements -- this is true, this is false -- but all these Western people… - Antonio T. de Nicolás

It comes down to this. The West has trained its people to perform veridical agreements – this is true, this is false – but all these Western people lack the ability to make decisions in complex situations, where they have multiple choices and need the frontal lobes to view those situations.

Our educational system is biased in favor of veridical decisions, decisions geared to agreements between subject and object, logical platitudes, "finding the truth" … But there are no mechanisms in education to teach any one decision based on multiple ambiguous situations, self-centered decisions, "what is best from among the possible", in the concrete situation facing the subject.' To achieve this, he says, 'new technologies need to be embodied by a subject and also by the guide, guru, spiritual director', so that a person is equipped to make the best choice among the ones available in a practical sense. Thus, the battlefield in the Gita is the human body itself.

Hopefully, the West will realize that both Plato and Pythagoras are footnotes to the earlier cultures of India, such as the Katha Upanishad, Rig Veda etc. Indic texts had already marked the individual training and ethics of social life. Nothing short of excellence will do. The training for excellence is to practice the embodied technologies of decision-making, the right decisions, the wise decisions, when needed by the present dharma, context, one faces. This is the goal, the ethics of the whole program of the Avatar Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: to train Arjuna, that fallen and disturbed warrior, to make decisions, the best ones, as needed by his present dharma (his present situation), a battle field. And this is the program of human acting, from the Rig Veda down, that Indic texts propose: an ethics of decision-making as opposed to an ethics of compliance to rules coming from the outside. There is no outside god able to make these pronouncements in Indic texts; here all the gods are this side of creation, as the Rig Veda proclaims.

The Savior image [is] the go between God and the sinful race of humans. We know this image also as the scapegoat, and the Substitute King: someone chosen for the occasion to be the victim of the moment for the salvation of the rest of the community. He gains immortal divinity, saves other humans, brings his Father into the scene, his followers name a Church after him and these same followers establish a narrative, a theology, and ethics based on principles of behavior… The room left for individuals to improve their spiritual knowledge in this scheme of Savior/sinner, is not great, we are after all sinners, born in sin, and our individual salvation is only a gift, provided we follow the rules of ethics, and not the result of any superior knowledge of God or deviation from this scheme. Judaism, Islam and Christianity are the followers and founders of the model. God and the rules of ethics come from the outside and their mission in life is to bring all humans to surrender to this model, either through conversion or force. The individual, in this model, is an individual only in name, for after all, individual perfection consists in total surrender to the model, in letting the model become embodied in the subjects in such a way that the model, rather than the individuals, acts through each complying individual… Wherever there is violence the Savior model is at work.