SRI KRISHNA: 1. Listen further, Arjuna, to my supreme teaching, which gives you such joy. Desiring your welfare, O great-armed warrior, I will tell you more.

2. Neither gods nor sages know my origin, for I am the source from which the gods and sages come.

3. Whoever knows me as the Lord of all creation, without birth or beginning, knows the truth and frees himself from all evil.

When I was a boy, growing up in village India, I used to belong to the Boy Scouts. We were very much like Boy Scouts everywhere: we had the same khaki shorts and shirts, and a little patrol ribbon – ours was an elephant – and even a tenderfoot badge. The only difference was that the official uniform included a green turban.

Not far from our village there was a dense forest, and one of the things we used to do as Boy Scouts was tracking. We would divide into two groups and then one group would go hide in the forest, leaving all sorts of clues about where they had gone – tearing off one leaf and placing it next to another, breaking a twig in a particular way, things like that. Then the rest of us, after a decent wait, had to go through the forest very observantly and try to find and interpret all these little signs. We would roam around in our khaki shorts and our green turbans, peering closely at everything, and now and then someone would spot something out of the ordinary and exclaim, “Aha! That’s not nature; that’s some Boy Scout!” I wasn’t very good at this game, but fortunately there were others who were quite skillful and we always worked as a team. At last, after we had found several of these signs, one of these more skillful chaps would look up into a tree, squint his eyes, and say, “Hey, that’s not a monkey; that’s our Scout leader!”

This is what the Lord has done; he has strewn little signs of his presence throughout the universe, and the person who is very observant, who is very spiritual, will always see these signs and recognize where the Lord is to be found. Most of us see these signs but pass over them; we do not recognize them for what they are. But as our eyes begin to clear through the practice of meditation, when we see someone being extremely patient, someone who can listen quietly to criticism without retaliating or losing his temper, we will think, “Aha! That’s not my friend Richard; that is the Lord in Richard.”

Richard may leave broken twigs of patience, torn leaves of kindness, but the men and women who have realized God leave big signposts of His presence everywhere they go. There is a marvelous story about a man looking for the Buddha the way one follows the tracks of an animal in the jungle. He went around asking people everywhere, and whenever he found a person whose life had been transformed he would exclaim to himself, “Those are the tracks of a really big elephant!”

This chapter is rather like a divine tracking manual, in which Sri Krishna tells Arjuna a few of his favorite signs. Though the Lord is present everywhere, the expression of his presence varies throughout the infinite variety of his creation. Wherever perfection is approached, his glory is revealed a little more – among people, among trees, among stars, in all the qualities of life. As the Persian mystic Jami writes:

To display His eternal attributes

In their inexhaustible variety,

The Lord made the green fields of time and space

And the living garden of the cosmos,

So that each branch, leaf, and fruit reveal

His innumerable glories.

SRI KRISHNA: 4–5. The different qualities found in living creatures have their source in me: discrimination, wisdom, understanding, forgiveness, truth, self-control, and peace of mind; the dualities of pleasure and pain, birth and death, honor and dishonor; nonviolence, charity, equanimity, contentment, and perseverance in spiritual disciplines.

All the faculties of life have their origin in the Lord: not only pleasure but pain too, not only honor but dishonor too. It is not that the Lord is capricious or unloving; these are distinctions that we make ourselves. Once we make ourselves whole, we see everything as whole, which is what it means to see the Lord everywhere. But until then, as long as there is division in our minds, everything is split into two: good and bad, right and wrong, pleasant and unpleasant, friend and foe.

There is a story by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Purloined Letter” in which a certain cabinet minister steals a letter and then threatens to blackmail its owner. The Paris police almost take the man’s apartment apart looking for the letter – inside the vases, up the chimneys, behind the walls, everywhere they can think of – but none of them is able to find even a clue. Only the amateur detective Dupin is able to guess where it is: in the most obvious place possible, lying on the man’s desk in front of everyone’s eyes.

This is what the mind has done to us. The Lord is all around us, but we cannot see him as long as we have to depend on the mind, which has an unfortunate obsession with cutting everything up into two. It is pointless to blame the mind for this; it cannot help itself. Do you remember Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times? He plays a worker on an assembly line, whose sole job all day long is to take his wrench and tighten one particular bolt a quarter turn. After a day of this, doing the same thing over and over again, even on his way home he walks along tightening everything a quarter turn. This is how the mind is. It has its tool chest of saws for every possible purpose, and every time it runs into something – objects, ideas, perceptions, people – it pulls out a hacksaw or a pocket chain saw and saws that thing into two. That is all that is required; we cannot see the unity of life anywhere.

In practice, all that this collection of saws amounts to is likes and dislikes. As your meditation deepens and you begin to see the ways of your mind more clearly, you will notice that there is a constant chorus of likes and dislikes going on inside. Usually we are not aware of this chorus because it goes on beneath the surface of consciousness. But if we could listen in on a little of what literary critics call the “stream of consciousness” – really it is more a stream of unconsciousness – we would be embarrassed to see how petty this chorus can be. Just watch your mind when you respond to a person; what is it you are really responding to? “I don’t like his walk; it looks too pompous. I don’t like her voice; it grates on my nerves.” What about your walk? What about your voice? Once, when I was responsible for recording something for All India Radio, I played back one of the programs for a student to hear. She listened to it all with a rather pained expression, and afterwards she commented, “That’s a really unpleasant voice. I don’t like it.” The voice was her own; she hadn’t recognized it at all.

As long as the mind feels compelled to keep us posted on its opinions like this, consciousness has to be divided, which means that we are going to be tormented by vacillation and lapses in everything: in our loyalty, in our patience, in our security, in our capacity to see clearly and make wise decisions anywhere in daily living. All the qualities in this verse have a role to play in helping us see through this fog of separateness, called moha in Sanskrit. Moha literally means ‘delusion.’ Sammoha is ‘super-delusion,’ and the word used here is asammoha, ‘without any trace of delusion,’ which means complete awareness of the unity of life. I have translated asammoha as wisdom because in its practical application, it means that you will never be deluded by anything the world has to offer – money, pleasure, power, prestige, anything.

Sammoha is the distorting medium of self-will through which all of us perceive life. Self-willed people go around in this kind of ego-fog always; that is why they are constantly bumping into people and running down blind alleys. Everything is distorted: friends appear menacing, harmful activities promise fulfillment, and the road to happiness that looks so shimmering in the fog turns out to be the road to the dump. As your vision begins to clear through the practice of meditation, you really have to rub your eyes. It will scarcely seem like the same world, and yet nothing will have changed except your way of seeing.

One of the most practical ways I know for clearing our eyes of this fog of suspicion and self-will is kshama. Kshama is not only forgiveness, it is patience, forbearance, and understanding too, all wrapped into one. No matter how much we feel we have been wronged, no matter how much we feel others may not appreciate us, we should learn to be patient and to forgive – not only because it helps those around us, but because it helps us to free ourselves from the pall of suspicion and resentment. Gradually, as our eyes become clearer, this can save us a good deal of embarrassment. Because of the distorting mirror of self-will, most of us are liable to complain at some time or other: “Why is so-and-so always rude to me? I said hello to her this morning and she didn’t even answer.” It is only when we learn that she had received bad news that morning, or was up all night with her baby, that we realize we had not been wronged at all. It was only because we were so wrapped up in ourselves that we took her silence personally.

Bearing with people, especially those who really do cause us problems, is the essence of forgiveness. It is not particularly helpful to do this with a feeling of martyrdom, either; we need to bear with people cheerfully. But this does not mean making ourselves into a doormat. Letting people take undue advantage of us is not helpful for them any more than it is for us. Instead, we can learn to bear with them and at the same time improve the situation with their help.

When it is necessary to show our love by expressing disapproval, we should learn to disagree constructively. Sri Ramakrishna advises us to hiss gently when necessary, but not to bite. This is particularly applicable in relationships with children, who can be ingenious at needling us to see how far they can go. What they are trying to say is, “Hiss at us so we’ll know when to stop.” I saw the value of a well-timed hiss when I was out for a walk with our dog Muka, who tries to play with every creature he sees. He found a snake in the garden and offered to play with it. The snake was doing whatever snakes do early in the morning, and when Muka tried to get it to play there was a sharp hsss! and Muka came hopping out of the grass like a jackrabbit.

The secret of seeing through sammoha is in not dwelling on ourselves. The more we think about what we enjoy and don’t enjoy, what we want and don’t want, the more we are going to be caught in this net of separateness, cut off from others and from ourselves. So Sri Krishna says, Tushti: “Be content with what life sends you.” Don’t be a beggar, sitting with your little tin cup and begging of life, “Please give me a few cents of pleasure, or at least don’t give me any pain.” Don’t ask always what you can get from life, but danam: ask what you can give. Stand up to your full height and give freely to those around you – your time, your resources, your talents, your extra clothes or vegetables from your garden, whatever you have. It doesn’t matter whether the gift is simple or modest; what matters is that it be given freely, wholeheartedly, without any reservations, without even the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing. You are not wealthy simply because you have a lot, you are wealthy when you have given a lot away; and the more you give, the more you will have to give – not in money, but in the richness of your life.

It is not enough in life to do no harm; we should be able to contribute to life wherever we go. In the Hindu tradition we have a story about a man who was the perfect model of respectability, who always did what the letter of the law demanded of him. He never offended anybody or injured anybody; he always kept up with the Ramaswamis, and when he was called on to give a speech he always had a grand audience, because he used to tell them just what they wanted to hear. When the time came for this man to pay his final bill, he was taken before Chitragupta, a kind of cosmic auditor in the Hindu scriptures. Chitragupta looked up the man’s record and there it was, not a single entry on the debit page. Chitragupta was really impressed, because even in the case of the great mystics there are debit entries, sometimes rather a lot of them. “Wow!” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone like you.” Then he turned to the credit page and stared in astonishment, because that page was completely blank too. Chitragupta just stood there and scratched his head; he didn’t know what to do. The man had never let anybody down, never helped anybody; never offended anybody, never loved anybody – he couldn’t be sent to heaven, but on the other hand he couldn’t be sent anywhere else either.

Finally Chitragupta took the chap to Brahma, the god of creation in the Hindu Trinity. “You made this guy,” he said; “what shall I do with him?” Brahma looked at the statute books and couldn’t find anything to cover the case, so he said, “Send him over to Krishna.” And Sri Krishna said, “The buck stops here.” He examined the record very carefully and there, almost illegible, was an ancient credit entry: “Gave two cents to a beggar at the age of six.” “There,” Sri Krishna said; “return his two cents and send him back to try again.”

SRI KRISHNA: 6. The seven great sages and the four ancient ancestors were born from my mind and received my power. From them came all the creatures of this world.

The Hindu tradition has a gift for personalizing the forces of nature and of the mind, and to me these seven great sages and the four ancient ancestors of all living creatures represent the laws by which the universe and life evolved. As ruler of the cosmos, the Lord delegates his duties to specific powers. These are not just the laws of the physical world. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, there is no real distinction between the world outside us and the world of thoughts and feelings within, and the same unity that keeps the outer world running smoothly governs the world within us too.

Whenever we try to harm each other we are violating this law of unity. Today it should be clear to any sensitive man or woman that when we inflict suffering on others, we only destroy ourselves. Our world today is like a jet airliner without a pilot, in which most people are so busy trying to save their own seats that they can’t be bothered to think about the plane. We are prepared to fight all the other passengers and even to rip our seat out of the floor if that is what it takes to have it all to ourselves.

All of us can play an important part in the conquest of violence by throwing our full weight behind peaceful, effective programs for eliminating the situations from which violence arises. But most important, we need to do everything we can to remove every trace of hostility and resentment in ourselves. The violence that is flaring up all around us on our streets and on our campuses is not so much the result of social conditions as the inevitable expression of the hostility in our hearts. Hostility is one of the most infectious diseases I know of, and whenever we indulge in a violent act or even in hostile words or expressions, we are passing this disease on to those around us.

To take just one example, look at what can happen in even a little family quarrel. When we quarrel at home, it is not just a domestic problem; we are contributing to turmoil everywhere. Suppose Tom Jones gets up on the wrong side of the bed, sits down at the breakfast table, and dares Amelia to tell him where she ever learned to make coffee. Amelia, being upsettable, gets upset. Tom goes off to work in a black cloud, and just to make sure that his day will be irritating, he keeps on rehearsing what he’s going to tell Amelia when he gets home. And Amelia, who is doing the same thing, is still so upset two hours later that she makes an unkind remark to the clerk in the store, who takes it out on the next ten customers.

These are small things, but over the day, day after day, they all add up. In the language of Hindu psychology, all these little moments of irritation and resentment build up into a samskara, which means that they become a habitual response to everything around us. When a samskara like this becomes deeply ingrained, almost anything can trigger a hostile reaction, often without any rhyme or reason. You have only to pick up the morning paper to see how commonplace this kind of reaction has become. That is why it is so important for all of us to learn to respond to hostility with patience and good will, and never to say or do anything that adds to this chain reaction of anger.

This applies not only to our words and actions; it applies even to the look on our face. It is said that the English satirist Jonathan Swift enjoyed his pessimism so much that he used to wear mourning on his birthday and go around with a scowl. Probably he thought it was no one’s business but his own. But depression is everybody’s business. In my teaching days in India, when I would remind a student that he was looking a little gloomy, he would object, “But sir, it’s my face.” I would reply, “Yes, but it’s we who have to look at it.” Not even the look on our face is our own business; all these things affect the people around us.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. Whoever understands my power and the mystery of my manifestations comes without doubt to be united with me.

8. I am the source from which all creatures evolve. The wise remember this and worship me with loving devotion.

9. Their thoughts are all absorbed in me, and all their vitality flows to me. Seeing me in one another, talking about me always, they are happy and fulfilled.

In Sanskrit there is a vivid name for the Lord, Pranada, ‘he who gives us prana.’ Prana is energy, power, in the most basic sense of the word. All forms of energy in the universe are only different manifestations of prana, which is one and indivisible. It is by prana that the sun burns, the clouds rain, and the wind blows; it is by prana that cells reproduce, the eyes see, the mind thinks, and the heart loves. Physicists throw light on this when they say that behind all matter is a field of energy, a unified field of forces. The language is different, but the idea they are expressing is the same: it is all the same prana, whether we class its action as physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual.

The practical application of this is that it is the Lord, Pranada, who gives us this prana. As the Prashna Upanishad tells us, “Prana is born of the Self. As a person casts a shadow, the Self casts prana into the body at the time of birth.” Therefore, the mystics ask, where do we get the idea that anything can be ours? We hang on dearly to our car, our savings, our stereo tape deck, yet not even the life in our bodies is ours; everything belongs to the Lord. So a great mystic like Shankara will tell the Lord, “What is there to renounce in this world? There is nothing here that I can call my own; everything is already yours.”

Do you see the humor of this? It is as if I were to go up to my friend Jeff and say, “Jeff, I renounce your guitar once and for all.” He would say, “What do you mean? It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to me.” So where is the difficulty in renouncing it? Whatever we give up on the spiritual path, this is all it amounts to: we are simply letting the Lord know we understand that everything has always been his.

As we come to realize this on a deeper and deeper level – not intellectually, but in our hearts, so that it is reflected in our daily living – a great deal of the tension in our lives will begin to dissolve. When we want to have something that cannot be ours, we are putting ourselves on the horns of an impossible dilemma, and naturally there is tension below the surface level of our consciousness. This kind of constant tension wastes a good deal of prana. It is very much like leaving the lights of your car on all night: when you get up in the morning, you find your battery is dead. That is what is happening when we go through life always feeling a little under par, a little unequal to what the day may bring; prana is continuously draining out in the basement of our consciousness.

In deep meditation, however, we learn to get hold of the switches of our prana, which means getting control of our desires. Only then do we have the choice to turn the switch off and conserve the energy it would drain. Whenever we can do this, the results are immediate; the entire nervous system relaxes a little, and the very next day the battery will have more power. Eventually we get our hands on the master switch of the whole circuit, which is sex. It is a very satisfying state of affairs. If we choose to, we can close the switch and all our vital capacity will be at our disposal. But we can also choose to leave the switch off, which is like pulling the plugs of all the appliances in the house. There is no outflow of prana anywhere, which means that every part of the body is at rest.

Then, as this verse puts it, all our prana is flowing to the Lord, who is within. The immense security of this state cannot be described; it has to be experienced to be understood. You know from your own experience that there is no limit to the power of the Lord within you, so there is no limit to your love or your capacity for service. The Hindu scriptures describe this state as purnata – complete fullness, in which nothing can ever be lacking. There is no better example of the Lord’s sense of humor: in giving up what was never ours to begin with, we are filled with everything; all our deep desires are fulfilled.

SRI KRISHNA: 10. To those steadfast in love and service I give spiritual wisdom, so that they may come to me.

11. Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives.

With infinite tenderness, the Lord lets it dawn on us only gradually that we are not separate, that we belong entirely to him. If this realization were to come overnight, ordinary people like you and me would not be able to withstand it; it would be more than our nervous systems could bear. That is why the Lord is so gentle with us; he spreads the transformation from separateness to unity out over many years so that all these changes in the mind and body can take place gradually, often at such a deep level that we are not even aware they are taking place until we look back and remember how we were some years before.

I like to illustrate this gradual ascent to unity with the trip up to my home high on the Blue Mountain in South India. The scorching heat of the Indian summer begins early in March, and in the old days, when I was a professor in Central India, I used to count the days until summer vacation when I could leave the crowded cities and the hot, dusty air of the plains behind me. On the very same evening of the last working day I would be on the train for Madras, and we used to pull into Madras Central Station twenty-four hours later just in time to catch the Blue Mountain Express. It was a long, hot, tiring journey, and it was a very satisfying moment when I could open my eyes after the morning’s meditation and see the Blue Mountain beckoning on the horizon as we reached Coimbatore.

But even though there would be just fifty miles more to go, the journey would be far from over. At Coimbatore I had to leave the train and get onto a bus, and for a long, long time the bus would make its way slowly along the twenty-five mile road to Mettupalayam at the foot of the Blue Mountain. If you don’t know the road and close your eyes, it’s easy to imagine that you’re climbing. But all you have to do is open your eyes and look out the window at the cars and roadside merchants and bullock carts to see that you are still very much on the plains. It is a dull, dreary journey, with nothing to recommend it except that it has to be put behind you. The real climb is yet to begin.

Then, as the bus begins to climb, the scenery changes, and the road becomes beautiful. First you see areca nut palms, swaying gracefully in the wind, and then the dense forests of the foothills, full of wild animals like tigers and elephants. Then, as the bus climbs above three thousand feet, there are rich coffee plantations and terraced tea gardens, dotted with silver firs whose leaves sparkle in the sun. And there was a particular point where I used to feel the cool, invigorating air of the mountains. It was almost as if I could draw a line where that change would occur. The hot, dry, dusty air of the plains would suddenly leave us, and my whole body and mind would drink in the cool, bracing air of the hills.

It is very much like that on the path of meditation. For a long, long time you are on level ground. You are traveling forward, but it’s still on level ground; the air is still dry and dusty, and you get gas fumes occasionally. But all this time, though you may think that you are getting nowhere, you are building up momentum for the climb ahead. It is only after you have been very diligent about your meditation, after you have been very loyal in keeping your eyes always on the goal and very resolute in observing the disciplines of the spiritual life, that the scenery will begin to change. But change it surely will, and these changes will be reflected in every aspect of your daily living. It is a sure sign that you are entering the foothills and beginning to leave the plains behind. At work, you may find that you can get along with someone who always seemed to specialize in rubbing you the wrong way. When you go into a bookstore, instead of looking for books on literary criticism or getting glued to a sensational novel, you will begin to ask if there is a new edition of the Bhagavad Gita or an anthology of mystical poetry. And instead of going to restaurants where food lacking in nutritional value is served at outrageous prices, you will find yourself looking for vegetarian restaurants where the food is nutritious and the prices are within range.

At first your family may look askance at the way your life is changing, and your friends may raise their eyebrows at your flagging interest in old pursuits. If you don’t have a certain amount of detachment from your opinions, this criticism may be difficult to take. At home in Berkeley you may be calm and true to your convictions, but as you walk slowly up the driveway to your parents’ home, your security begins to waver. Then the door opens and the head of the household greets you with, “What’s this I hear about meditation?” All security vanishes. You become either apologetic or defensive, state your case too vehemently, and find yourself in a very difficult position. But as you begin to gain security, you will be able to answer gently but firmly, “Yes, I’m trying to live a spiritual life, and I think it will benefit all of you, too.” They may never have heard of the Bhagavad Gita; they may give an embarrassed cough and say, “That’s not the life for us”; but they will begin to respect your efforts. After a while, when they see that you can be secure in the face of opposition and ridicule, that you can be true to your convictions and still keep your sense of humor, their critical remarks will change. Your father will tell your mother, “I never thought he had this in him”; your mother may even begin to tell her friends, “We might be able to take a leaf from her book.”

During this first half of the ascent we have to travel under our own power. We have to make all the decisions ourselves; we have to strengthen our will and turn our backs on all sorts of temptations. It is only after this first part of the climb has been accomplished, after we have prepared ourselves, that we find the air becoming fresh and exhilarating. Then, slowly, during the second half of the ascent, we begin to realize that there is an inner power not our own which is drawing us forward. It is almost like reaching five thousand feet and then looking down from a narrow path to see how awesome the precipice is; one slip could plunge us to disaster. It makes us realize how miraculously we have been protected by the Lord all along the path. And though we can see the sheer, rocky peaks rising above us, we come to have a quiet faith that the same grace that has brought us this far will give us the support and inspiration we need for making the most difficult, most dangerous part of the climb which lies ahead.

Finally, at the very end of the spiritual ascent, we will reach a point beyond which we cannot go by our own effort. Though we must do everything we can to purify ourselves completely, the great mystics all testify, it is not possible for a human being to be finally united with the Lord by any amount of willing; it is up to the Lord to draw us to him if and when he chooses. This is a period of joyful agony, of watching and waiting as a bride waits for her bridegroom, for as Jesus says, the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief in the night. But finally, when we least expect it, the auspicious moment of union comes. Then, the Hindu mystics say, it is as if a lamp is lit in a temple which has been dark for many years: one minute the room is full of darkness; the next minute every corner is ablaze with light.

ARJUNA: 12–13. All the great sages and seers – Narada, Asita, Devala, and Vyasa, too – have called you the supreme Brahman, the highest abode, the supreme purifier, the self-luminous, eternal spirit, first among the gods, unborn and infinite. Now you have declared these things to me yourself.

Arjuna’s words here emphasize the unity of all religions. All the great spiritual teachers speak of the same Reality and inspire us to strive for the same supreme goal. All have come to tell us of the divine spark within us. But for some curious reason, it is very difficult for us to accept our divine nature. This has always puzzled me. We pay money for books about how destructive we are; we stand in queues to buy magazines that emphasize our capacity for making trouble; we go to encounter groups where we agitate each other over our weaknesses. Then, when Jesus comes to tell us that the kingdom of heaven is within us, we say, “There must be some mistake.” It is to convince us that our real Self is always pure and eternal that men and women of God keep arising among us and repeating the good news, that the source of all joy and security is right within.

ARJUNA: 14. Now, O Keshava, I believe that everything you have told me is divine truth. O Lord, neither gods nor demons know your real nature.

15. Indeed, you alone know yourself, O supreme spirit. You are the source of creation and the master of every creature, God of gods, the Lord of the universe.

Arjuna confides in Sri Krishna, “Every word that you say goes right to my heart. How can I ever think of knowing you completely?” This is one of the deepest questions asked in the scriptures. How can we talk about knowing God, write about God, speak about God, become an authority on God, if God is without name and form? The Hindu sages tell us that all we can hope to become is the dust of his lotus feet; Christian mystics will say all we can hope to do is touch the hem of God's garment.

The Lord is everywhere; there is nowhere that he is not. We can never know him through our physical senses, but for the man or woman of God, he is more real than any object of the senses can be. When St. Francis of Assisi says he sees Jesus, we should not think he is talking figuratively just because he saw what others did not. Similarly, when St. Teresa of Ávila says, “His Majesty told me so,” she is not referring to something she heard from King Philip; she did hear her King, but not with the outer ear. Sri Ramakrishna, who worshiped God as the Divine Mother, would sometimes break off in the middle of a sentence and tell his disciples, “Shh! Mother is coming; I can hear her anklets jingling.” This is not hearing in the way we hear the jingling of coins or the tinkling of glasses; the Divine Mother is so real to him that he hears her in the very depths of his consciousness.

In his trenchant way, Meister Eckhart says that people think they can see God the way they see a cow. Actually, Eckhart tells us, we see God with the same eye with which he sees us. It is an image which I enjoy very much. Imagine peeking through a keyhole and discovering you are looking right into the eye of the Lord! We cannot know God in the usual way of knowing, the way we know the phenomenal world. He is the Atman, the divine Self within us, and it is by identifying ourselves with this Self that we realize the Lord.

ARJUNA: 16. Tell me all your divine attributes, leaving nothing unsaid. Tell me of the glories with which you fill the cosmos.

17. O Krishna, you are the supreme master of yoga. Tell me how I should meditate to gain constant awareness of you. In what things and in what ways may I meditate on you?

Arjuna is asking how he can become aware of the Lord always, in everything he does and in everyone around him. In meditation when we are concentrating completely on a passage like the Prayer of St. Francis – “It is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned” – we are meditating on the Lord; forgiving and giving freely are among the ways in which the Lord manifests himself in human beings. But it is not enough to meditate on him like this for an hour or so a day. We must learn to meditate on him always, which means bringing these qualities to life in our thought and action and learning to see the divinity that is within those around us too. This is not something sentimental, something we can do by sending cards saying “The Lord lives in you.” We learn to see the Lord in those around us by trying to see the Lord in those around us. It is essentially a matter of practice, of constantly reminding ourselves over and over again throughout the day.

This is exactly what we are doing when we repeat the mantram, which is the name of the Lord. For those who have difficulty in remembering to repeat the mantram, I sometimes suggest putting a discreet little sign – “Repeat the Mantram” – wherever they are likely to see it frequently. Or, if they have a flair for the artistic and don’t want to raise unnecessary questions from friends and coworkers, they can always write their mantram out in some original and decorative way – say, in the shape of an elephant, because an elephant never forgets. The point is somehow to remember the mantram; how we remember it is a matter in which there is considerable room for imagination.

The mind has a tremendous natural capacity to dwell on things, and in repeating the mantram we are channeling this capacity to train the mind to dwell constantly on the Lord. It is the same capacity, only we are giving it a different focus. There is a little story in the Hasidic tradition of Judaism in which a man asks his zaddik or spiritual teacher, “Do you mean we should remember the Lord even in the give-and-take of business?” “Yes, of course,” the rabbi replies. “If we can remember business matters in the hour of prayer, shouldn’t we be able to remember God in the transactions of our business?”

Finally, when we become established in the Lord, we shall see his glory everywhere, wherever there is beauty or excellence in the world around us. If I may say so, due entirely to the grace of my spiritual teacher, my grandmother, this is how I see life today. When I see the first green shoots pushing up through the ground after a rain, or our dog Muka running on the beach, or a mother being very patient with her child, it is the Lord I see as the essence, the inner Ruler in us all. Once we learn to see the world like this, there will be no need for external reminders; we will not forget even for a moment that everything in the world is sustained by the power of the Lord.

ARJUNA: 18. O Krishna, you who intoxicate people with love for you, tell me in detail your attributes and your powers; I can never tire of hearing your immortal words.

When you live in a royal palace, Sri Ramakrishna says, even if you are not exactly in the royal family, a little of the royalty rubs off on you as well. In India, even if a man is only the tenth footman in a royal palace, everybody thinks of him as a glamorous figure – his address is the royal palace. Even here it is like that; there is glamor in being a member of the White House staff, even if all you do all day is pluck out dandelions on the President’s lawn. You still work at the White House, and sometimes you even get to go inside; you may have caught a glimpse of the President’s little girl and perhaps even have picked up her pen and returned it to her when she was on her way to school. It’s true that the Joint Chiefs of Staff won’t even look at you, but when you go home everyone will listen with bated breath about how you picked up Amy’s pen.

That is what is happening in this verse too. There is a little of the Lord’s infinite glory present in all of us, and the deeper we go in our meditation, the more this glory will shine forth in our daily living. That is why, when we really begin to be serious about the practice of meditation, we never become tired of hearing about the glory of God from someone who is speaking from personal experience. Like Arjuna, the more we hear, the more we want to hear, because every word inspires us to reveal more of this divinity that is within us all.

SRI KRISHNA: 19. All right, Arjuna, I will tell you of my divine powers. I will mention only the most glorious; there is no end to them.

In response to Arjuna’s eager request, Sri Krishna begins to describe the glory that lies within all of us. It is a reminder that there is no limit to the power we can draw on for selfless work through the practice of meditation. Compared to the state we can reach, the condition we are living in today is really a dream. In the verses that follow, the Lord will be giving us a glimpse of what the world looks like to the person who is awake.

SRI KRISHNA: 20. I am the true Self in the heart of every creature, Arjuna, and the beginning, middle, and end of their existence.

In no other language with which I am acquainted is there a term for our real nature so precise as this word Atman. All it means is ‘the Self’ – not the little self, the changing, self-centered personality with which most of us identify ourselves, but the higher Self, our real, changeless personality, which we discover in the very depths of our consciousness.

One of the most consoling implications of this is that no matter what mistakes we may have committed in the past, no matter what liabilities we are oppressed by in the present, our real Self can never be tarnished; the core of our personality is always pure, always loving, always wise. In both East and West, the mystics illustrate this by drawing a comparison with the sun. Even when it is completely hidden by the clouds, even when we close our eyes to it, the sun is always blazing away with the same radiance. Similarly, even if we have done our best for many years to cover up the splendor of the Atman, it is still there, as radiant as ever, in our heart of hearts. We don’t have to make ourselves loving or patient or forgiving; we have only to remove from our superficial personality everything hostile, everything impatient, everything resentful. When all these coverings are removed, the beauty of the Atman will shine forth unimpeded.

The Hindu scriptures describe this discovery in wonderfully simple stories. One of these is about a prince who is kidnapped by a band of robbers when he is very young. He forgets all about the lap of luxury, about palaces and culture, even about his mother and father; he just grows up as a bandit, learning to master the bow and arrow and ambush passersby and disappear into the woods without being seen. And for twenty years, this is the only life he knows.

Then one day the king’s spiritual teacher happens by. Many years have passed; the little child is a grown man now, rough and cocksure, looking for all the world like anything but a king’s son. But the spiritual teacher looks at him closely: beneath his violent manners, this young bandit has the king’s features, the queen’s eyes, even a hint of regal bearing. The teacher recognizes him as the king’s son, and with great love in his heart he goes up to him, embraces him, and calls him “your royal highness.”

The bandit is outraged. “What do you mean? I’m not your royal highness or anybody else’s; I’m a bandit, and everybody in this kingdom is afraid of me.”

But the teacher’s faith is unshaken. Instead of being repulsed by this young man’s bad manners, he puts his arm about him and begins to tell him stories about his childhood – how his father used to carry him on his shoulders, how his mother used to sing him to sleep with the mantram, how life used to be in the palace. And gradually the prince begins to remember. “Go on, go on!” The spiritual teacher continues his stories, and finally, in the depths of his consciousness, the young man’s memory clears. He draws himself up straight, his eyes are bright and steady; he has become a different man. “Now I recall,” he says slowly, as if awakening from a dream. “I’m not really a bandit at all. I’m not bad, I’m not violent; I simply forgot who I was.” He throws his arms about his teacher. “You’re my greatest friend,” he exclaims; “you helped me to remember who I am!” And truly a prince now, he goes home to his father, the king.

SRI KRISHNA: 21. Among the shining gods I am Vishnu; of luminaries I am the sun; among the storm gods I am Marici, and in the night sky I am the moon.

From the earliest times, men and women must have wondered about the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens, the forces governing the storms and the cycles of light and darkness. Even those of us who are not astronomically inclined must have had moments when we asked the sun, “What are you doing there?” or the stars, “Are you friendly with one another?” Now, in this century, astronomy has developed high-powered instruments for looking beyond the galaxy we live in to probe a universe much vaster and more wonderful than we had ever imagined – a universe in which there are billions of other galaxies, each with millions of solar systems, all held together in the embrace of a unifying force.

To me, this unifying force is the infinite love of the Lord, operating on the physical level. Just as all of us are one, so all things in the created universe are one in the Lord. That is why he is called Vishnu, ‘he who is everywhere.’ When the Lord puts his arms around creation so that it can work in harmony, this is love on a cosmic scale. Just as people live together as a family fostering each other’s welfare and happiness, so the cosmos is a family in which every member is related. If even a distant planet like Neptune or Pluto were removed from the solar system, life here on earth would be a little different for us all. There is no possibility of anything in the universe – a sun, a star, or you and me – existing separately. Each part derives its significance from the whole, which is what the mystics call the indivisible unity underlying all life.

When Sri Krishna says he is the sun, this can be interpreted with both scientific precision and spiritual wisdom. The sun is the source of heat and light, both of which are necessary for life on earth. We can ask ourselves, “How has it been possible for the sun to give out this heat and light continuously for more than six thousand million years”? The astronomer and the physicist account for this heat in terms of hydrogen being converted into helium. With a dramatic touch they compare the sun to a hydrogen bomb exploding continuously for millions of years, and they add that it takes twenty million years for this energy to reach the sun’s surface from its center, where the temperature is thirteen million degrees. But they cannot tell us why this process goes on or who is responsible for it. For this we have to draw upon the wisdom of spiritual insight.

I like to imagine Sri Krishna standing quietly in the center of the sun in an incomprehensible whirlwind of heat and light, playing on his magic flute. On a hot summer afternoon, when the temperature in our city goes up to ninety-five, my friends come home exhausted and consume gallons of iced lemonade. Now imagine the Lord, whom we are calling Sri Krishna, standing comfortably in the midst of thirteen million degrees and playing on his flute. If he were to play a little louder the temperature of the sun would go up, affecting life on earth; even a small rise in the earth’s temperature and we could not survive. And if the Lord should allow his hidden melody to become a little softer, the temperature of the sun would fall, again making life on earth impossible. The question that any scientist would ask is, “How is it that this thirteen million degrees at the center of the sun gives the perfect temperature for life on earth?” It cannot be dismissed as an accident. According to the Gita, the sun has an inner law – or, to be more personal, an inner ruler – which maintains a perfect balance of energy, pressure, and temperature. This balance is an expression of the divine unity of existence, which keeps all the local forces working together so that the unity of the solar system may be maintained.

SRI KRISHNA: 22. Among the scriptures I am the Sama Veda, and among the lesser gods I am Indra. Among the senses I am the mind, and in living beings I am consciousness.

The Vedas are the sacred scriptures of Hinduism. They are four in number – Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva – and together they form the source of India’s perennial philosophy, which extends in an unbroken tradition over more than five thousand years. Veda comes from the Sanskrit root vid, ‘to know,’ and the Vedas teach the only essential knowledge, which is to know who we are. Socrates gives us the same injunction: Gnōthi seauton, ‘Know thyself’; that is the beginning and end of wisdom. For this kind of knowledge we need to practice meditation, which gradually awakens a transcendental mode of knowing latent in all of us.

When I talk about a “transcendental mode of knowing,” people sometimes raise their eyebrows. It is beyond the range of their experience, so they have no way of judging it. In answer, I sometimes tell them about a cat we had staying with us when we returned to the United States from India. Woosh was a very sophisticated cat. Not only was she widely traveled, she had a special diet, an elaborately decorated scratching post, and all sorts of toys for recreation. But I am sure that if we could have asked her what she thought the highest faculty of knowing was, she would have answered, “Instinct.” In her next incarnation, if she were to become a human being, she would probably tell us it was reason; but as long as she is a cat, instinct is the highest mode of knowing open to her. Similarly, just as human beings develop reason, which is an evolutionary step beyond instinct, so the mystics develop a higher mode of knowing with which they see life whole.

The second line of this verse deals with the mind and consciousness. The mind – manas in Sanskrit – not only records the perceptions of the other senses, it can re-experience a perception even though nothing is immediately perceived by the senses. There is an important connection here with desire, for sense desires, especially obsessive desires, thrive on this faculty of recollection. Even if we are miles away from a pizza, when we remember one and want it we can easily recall just how it looks and tastes. If we are a little compulsive about eating, we may even dwell on all the pizza perceptions of our past experience. In doing this, of course, we are only deepening our pizza samskara, our pizza obsession, making it harder to resist eating two pizzas the next time we get a chance. The Gita would ask, where is the freedom in this? In terms of the damage we do our will, the difference between the pizza we dwell on and the pizza we eat is mainly a matter of calories – and even that difference disappears when, after dwelling on pizza for so long, we overeat the next time we get a chance. So the mind is by far the most important and powerful of the senses, and we can master the senses only through the mind.

Most of us have let the mind go unattended for such a long time that cultivating it requires full-time effort. I was admiring our vegetable garden this weekend and was pleased to see that the tomatoes and corn were doing very well. Then I noticed another crop which was really flourishing. I didn’t recognize that particular variety of greens, so I asked my friend Sarah about it. She explained, “Those are the weeds.” This is very much the usual state of the mind. If there were an exhibit of mind-weeds, most of us could enter some rather fascinating crops.

Anger is one of the worst of these weeds; it spreads over every inch of ground and keeps other plants from growing. But all negative states of mind – fear, hostility, jealousy, depression – make it difficult for useful plants like kindness and consideration to grow. It is not a question of our soil being infertile; it is that very few try to get rid of the weeds. There are even people who admire these weeds, who talk about weeds of anger and fear as though they were lilies and lotuses. Unfortunately, when we talk about our problems, write about them, think about them as we fall asleep, we are driving them deeper into consciousness. After a while the roots may go so deep that we cannot pull them out. So instead of dwelling on the negative aspects of the mind, let us turn our attention to the positive side and make the mind a beautiful garden. By practicing meditation regularly and repeating the mantram whenever a weed tries to send out a new shoot, we can trim back our negative tendencies and eventually weed them out of the mind forever.

In Hindu psychology, it is important to remember that the mind is not thought of as being conscious any more than a television set is, or the engine of a car. Just as the body is the external instrument we use, the mind is the internal instrument; it reflects consciousness, but it is not conscious itself. So Sri Krishna adds that he is not only the mind; he is consciousness itself in every living creature. If you go to a potter’s stall in an Indian bazaar, you will see all types of pots, tall and short, stout and slender. But the tall pot does not contain a different kind of air than the short pot; all of them are filled with the same air. Similarly, though each of us is quite different in appearance, underneath all these variations we are all one. Inside each of us is the same pure, undifferentiated consciousness, the Atman, the same in you as it is in me.

SRI KRISHNA: 23. I am Rudra and I am Shankara. Among the spirits of the natural world I am Kubera, god of wealth, and Pavaka, the purifying fire; among mountains I am Meru.

Shankara means ‘he who brings about our lasting welfare’; Rudra means ‘he who makes us grieve.’ Both are traditional names of the Lord of Love, and in the one short phrase with which this verse opens, Sri Krishna is giving us one of the deepest secrets of life: often the grace of the Lord comes to us in the form of sorrow.

One of the most distressing facts of life is that most of us do not learn without a certain measure of suffering. The question we must ask is whether we prefer to be stunted or to suffer some distress and grow up. Suffering in life comes as an enemy only when we do not know how to receive it as a friend. We can either benefit from suffering to improve our health and security, or we can become frustrated and embittered because we cannot change our ways of living under the impact of pain.

Several days ago I went with a friend to a restaurant just to see what people are eating. It was one of the better restaurants in the area, yet these educated, cultured people were eating the worst possible kind of food. It always amazes me on such occasions to realize how strong the human system is. It is a wonder that our bodies continue to function; it is only the mercy of the Lord that prevents us from causing ourselves more physical problems than we do. If you want to see how perfect the nervous system can be, look at a sleeping infant, as relaxed as a cat curled up in the sun. Yet thirty-five years or so later, many of us have managed to throw a big spanner into the machinery of the body. Tension, high blood pressure, chronic headaches, and peptic ulcers don’t arise overnight; these are problems we slowly develop by making ill-considered decisions day after day, year after year.

Suffering is like the red signboard on the freeway: “Go Back; You’re Going the Wrong Way.” The first time I saw this sign I thought the freeway designers had borrowed a slogan from the Gita; it has the practical touch of Sri Krishna. First the Lord puts up a little sign saying “Pain Ahead,” but we continue on our way. Then he puts up another, bigger sign, “Turmoil Coming,” but still we don’t pay attention. Finally he sets an enormous blockade. Most of us do not know how to respond, and instead of putting on the brakes we step on the gas. Then we wonder why we crash.

The mature person responds to Sri Krishna’s first signboard. As soon as there is even a little suffering, physical or mental, he starts looking around to see how to improve his ways of thinking and behaving. Often, of course, this presents a practical difficulty. When we have become addicted to wrong habits over a period of time, it is terribly difficult to change them. I have known people who want to give up smoking, drinking, or drugging, but who do not have the will to carry out their desire. Here it is that meditation comes into play. Almost all my friends who meditate regularly have been enabled to give up such addictions, for meditation gives us the will and wisdom to go against our previous conditioning.

This same capacity to change habits can be applied to the way we use our natural resources. The serious problem of pollution in our air, lakes, rivers, and oceans is just as much a source of suffering as physiological disorders, and it too is a warning: we have mercilessly exploited the environment and will have to change in order to survive. The ocean, for example, is not just something that stands between us and Paris or Tahiti; it is an underwater world where four-fifths of the creatures of earth live. In these vast depths there are gorges deeper than the Grand Canyon, peaks higher than Mount Everest, and great plains which stretch for hundreds of miles. All life depends ultimately on our oceans, yet the amount of oil, sewage, and industrial effluent that we are pouring into them threatens to turn this vast, teeming world into a wasteland. This is a flashing red warning signal telling us to reassess our way of living and simplify our needs so as to reduce the demands we make on the precious resources of the earth.

In spite of what the popular media may tell us, we should not pretend that there is no pain at the core of life. Whether in Africa or America, whether poor or prosperous, people are suffering everywhere; that is the nature of life. Even if we live in the midst of plenty, we do not say goodbye to pain. As our spiritual awareness deepens, we will find it impossible to go after our personal pleasure or profit when there is so much suffering to alleviate in the world around us. I often describe the mystics as hard-nosed. It is they who really know the facts of life; most of us live in a private fantasy land where we think that if we keep up an appearance of prosperity, everything is all right. We have only to open our eyes to see that behind this facade, there is sorrow all around us – not just on the grand scale of war and poverty, but in millions on millions of anonymous, private lives. The more we close our eyes to this suffering, the more we shall have to suffer ourselves, for the simple reason that this is what it takes to rouse us out of our complacency and make us go to the help of those around us.

So the Lord adds that he is Pavaka, the fire that purifies. A few years ago on a trip to Yosemite we stopped to visit an abandoned mining town, where we saw an exhibit about how gold is purified. It is a good analogy for what happens on the spiritual path, where the Lord comes with his fire, hammer, and anvil to burn away our selfishness and forge us into shape. The immature person takes one look and says, “Thank you very much, but I’d rather stay covered with this crusty ego.” But the person who can go far will ask the Lord, “Put me on the anvil and use your heaviest hammer; I want to be freed from this ego-crust once and for all.” When a person is able to say this, he or she has outgrown the need for suffering. The Lord may lift his hammer, but it does not fall. Instead he throws it aside and embraces that person in loving arms.

SRI KRISHNA: 24. Among spiritual teachers I am Brihaspati, and among military leaders I am Skanda. Among bodies of water I am the ocean.

Brihaspati is often mentioned in the Hindu scriptures as a tremendous spiritual teacher. It is not possible for the vast majority of us to approach the stature of such a teacher, but it is important to recognize that all of us, whether we like it or not, are in the role of teacher to those around us every waking hour of the day. This is especially clear in our relationships with children. Anyone who spends much time with children knows that they do not do what we ask them to do but what they see us doing. Education is based on a breathtakingly simple proposition: we teach by what we are. It is easy to buy a book on patience and security and give it to our children, but if we are impatient ourselves, no amount of reading will teach them to be ­otherwise. If we want our children to be patient, secure, and selfless, we have to give them an example of these qualities in our personal life.

This is a continuous struggle, so Sri Krishna adds that he is not only the ideal teacher, he is the ideal warrior too. Skanda is an invincible general in the scriptures who destroyed the forces of evil. It is a reminder to all of us that even the most aggressive temperament can be harnessed in this struggle to become commanders of ourselves.

Kalidasa, one of India’s greatest poets, has written a long epic poem relating the story of Skanda’s birth, youth, and victory over the demon Taraka, who symbolizes tyranny and evil. Taraka was so powerful that all the gods had been defeated by him in battle over and over again. They had even had to vacate their homes because heaven itself was not safe against his rage. Only a son born of the great god Shiva could have the power to destroy this demon, so the gods went to this eternal bachelor and begged him to bring forth a son. Kalidasa’s poem tells how Parvati, Himalaya’s daughter, after failing to attract Shiva by her unequalled beauty, finally wins his love by taking to the spiritual life. They are married, and Skanda is born to destroy Taraka and his demon armies. It is a beautiful story, because Skanda is born not of physical passion but of Shiva’s self-control. That is why he has the power to defeat Taraka and rescue the cosmos from its misery.

Next Sri Krishna says he is the ocean. When the Lord is represented as sleeping on the cosmic ocean, it is not just the sea outside; he is also reclining on the sea inside. In one sense this is consciousness, but even on the physical level it can be illustrated as well. The same type of salt solution that was in the sea eons ago, bathing and nourishing the first cells when life began, is in our body fluids today. The oceans cover seventy percent of the earth’s surface, and this same kind of fluid makes up almost seventy percent of the human body. It is not too far-fetched to say that we have a little of the sea flowing in all of us, giving sustenance to the millions of cells which compose our bodies.

The noted marine biologist and explorer Jacques Cousteau remarked that the ocean has become a universal sewer where all pollution ends up, so much so that a swimmer can contract an infection from just one swim in some of our more contaminated seas. Just as the sea outside is becoming polluted, the environment inside us suffers from pollution, too – the constant pollution of anger, fear, and greed, all of which we can clean up through the practice of meditation.

SRI KRISHNA: 25. Among the great seers I am Bhrigu, and among words, the syllable Om; I am the repetition of the holy name, and among mountains I am the Himalayas.

Bhrigu is associated with one of the most beautiful stories I know of about the infinite mercy of the Lord. According to this story, there was once a thriving ashram in ancient India where men and women worshiping the Lord in different forms – Shiva, Rama, Krishna, the Divine Mother – all lived and meditated together in harmony, each respecting the other’s chosen way. Then one day Narada happened to stop by. This Narada appears in many of our stories. He was a great devotee of Sri Krishna, and spent much of his time traveling around from one holy place to another, where he showed a certain gift for stirring up spiritual controversy. So at this ashram Narada asked mischievously, “Do you all worship the Lord in different forms?”

“Yes,” one of the members of the ashram said, “the Lord takes on different forms to meet the needs of his devotees. Knowing that, we find it easy to meditate together and respect each other’s spiritual ideal.”

“That’s very good,” Narada agreed. “But one of those ideals must be best, don’t you think? Which do you think it is?” Then, while the members of the ashram began to talk over this idea, Narada quietly slipped out and went on his way.

A month or so later, when Narada returned, the ashram was in a hubbub. Cliques had formed, and some people wouldn’t even talk to each other. Everyone was convinced that his or her approach to God was best. Some said that Shiva was the perfect embodiment of the Lord; others said Krishna; others said it was Rama or the Divine Mother. “This is silly,” Narada said. “Why don’t you go find out?”

“I’ll go,” volunteered Bhrigu, who loved the Lord with all his heart. “I’ll test Sri Krishna’s love myself; then you’ll see why I say that there is no limit to his forgiveness.” Bhrigu went up to Sri Krishna, who was sleeping with his head on the lap of his consort, Lakshmi, and while the rest of the ashram looked on in horror he kicked the Lord on the chest. Everyone was terrified; they expected Bhrigu to be burned up on the spot. But Sri Krishna simply opened his eyes and immediately saw into Bhrigu’s heart. “It takes great faith to subject me to a test like that,” he said tenderly, “but now everyone has seen that there is no limit to my forgiveness. This mark your foot has left on my chest will be my adornment, srivatsa; I will wear it always.” It is a beautiful illustration of why Sri Krishna is called Kshamasagara, the ocean of kshama – forgiveness, patience, and compassion all in one.

“Among words,” this verse continues, “I am Om, and the repetition of the holy name.” It is so easy to repeat the mantram or holy name that at first most of us cannot believe that it is charged with the power of the Lord. Only after we use it for a while do we begin to see that repeating the mantram is not just a mechanical exercise; it is a direct line to the Lord within – as I like to put it, “calling the Lord collect.” We don’t make any promises; all we do is repeat the mantram when we are agitated – angry, or afraid, or speeded up, or caught in worries or regrets – and the Lord opens a little door to the reserves of our deeper consciousness.

In college I used to be very interested in public speaking; it is an interest which still serves me well today. Whenever there was a talk being given I used to go to hear it, no matter what the subject, just to study the presentation and the delivery and all the little tricks of the trade. The principal of the school, whom I admired greatly, saw my enthusiasm and encouraged me in all this, and whenever there was an opportunity to speak or to debate I used to volunteer to go and represent our school. But no matter how often I spoke before an audience, the period of waiting to be called to the podium always turned my knees to rubber and my stomach upside down. It didn’t matter how many times I had faced an audience before; I was always afraid that when my name was called I would trip on the stairs or open my mouth and find that no words would come out.

When I confessed this to my granny, she had a very simple piece of advice: not to go over my notes, not to try to size up my audience, just to repeat the mantram. It was so simple that I didn’t put much faith in it, but because of my love for her I promised to give it a try. The next time I had to face an audience I sat quietly awaiting my turn and repeating Rama, Rama, Rama – and every now and then I would slip in, “I hope it works.” After a while it became “Rama, Rama, Rama . . . I think it works!” And now, on the basis of many years of experience, I can assure you with complete certitude, I know it works. At first it may just be a first-aid measure, but after many years, together with meditation, the mantram can enable us to transform our consciousness and rise to our full stature.

Most of us do not even suspect the height to which we can rise through the practice of meditation. On the walls of the Capitol in Sacramento is a line of poetry which I like very much: “Give me men to match my mountains.” It makes me proud to remember that in India, where we have the highest and most majestic mountains in the world, there has been an unbroken tradition of spiritual giants, men and women of such tremendous stature that they tower as high above you and me as the Himalayas above the plains below. That is why the last line of this verse sounds so sweet to me. To my partial eyes, I don’t think there is any symbol of spiritual awareness more beautiful than the Himalayas, the ‘home of perpetual snow,’ higher than which no human being can climb.

Here Sri Krishna is reminding us that there are Himalayan ranges inside us, too: the Himalayas of consciousness. When you begin meditating you enter the foothills, and as your meditation deepens, you climb higher and higher. Finally you reach the top of one of the lower peaks. But there is no time to sit down and congratulate yourself; another peak is already beckoning to you, saying, “Come and conquer me.” This is the challenge of meditation. Your legs are aching and your oxygen supply is exhausted. You have been waiting for the chance to sit down for a rest, but you just cannot be satisfied with anything less than the highest. So you start climbing again, hoping there will be a chance to build a little shack when you get to the top. But no sooner do you reach the summit than you see an even more magnificent mountain ahead of you. Then you realize that you have only been warming up; the real challenges are just beginning.

This is putting restlessness to work. Show me someone who is restless and I can help that person harness his or her restlessness in climbing the vast Himalayan ranges of consciousness, where the peaks never end. Even if, after years and years of climbing, you finally reach Mount Krishna, or Mount Christ, or Mount Buddha, you will see that there is no way to conquer these heights in the span of one human life; and even if it were possible to stand at the summit of these vast peaks, you would still be standing only at the foot of the highest of all mountains, Mount Brahman, lost completely beyond the universe.

SRI KRISHNA: 26. Among trees I am the ashvattha, and among the gandharvas I am Chitraratha. Among divine seers I am Narada, and among sages I am Kapila.

The ashvattha is the holy fig tree, important in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions. This tree, which lives for a very long time, is the basis for the image of the Tree of Eternity in the Upanishads – the cosmic tree with its root above, in God, and its branches here below on earth. You and I are its fruits; we are here on earth to satisfy the hunger of those around us.

This tree suffers if even the smallest leaves are injured. It is as if the leaves of a magnolia tree were to divide themselves into north and south and then wage war over the trunk; the whole lovely tree would soon die. This is the absurd situation we create between individuals, communities, races, and nations, when we forget that we are all part of one whole, the beautiful Tree of Life.

In the next epithet Sri Krishna tells Arjuna that he is Chitraratha, the leader of the gandharvas. The gandharvas are a little like angels in the Hindu scriptures. Just as in Judaism and Christianity you have cherubim and seraphim and other orders of the heavenly hosts, so in Hinduism we have gandharvas, devas, and other beings inhabiting the realms beyond earth. In particular, the gandharvas are cosmic musicians, and are responsible for what Shakespeare called the “music of the spheres.” The scriptures tell us there is music everywhere if we have ears to hear it. In the language of mysticism, every star is singing; throughout the universe there is a symphony. There is music even in the subtlest of cosmic radiation, to which scientists listen with delicate instruments; there is music even in the sap running through the trunk and branches of a tree. Thomas Huxley tells us that the wonderful noonday silence of a tropical forest is after all due only to the dullness of our own hearing, and could our ears catch the murmur of the tiny maelstroms as they whirl about in innumerable myriads of living cells which constitute each tree, we should be stunned as by the roar of a great city. This is not a mystic speaking; it is a great biologist, using the language of mysticism to describe a biological phenomenon. Everywhere the Lord is singing his divine melody, only we are unable to hear it with our small, sensuous ears.

In the Sanskrit scriptures, Narada is not just a celestial figure; he is an illumined sage of divine stature, a fervent devotee of Sri Krishna who often acts as intermediary between the heavenly realms and the world of human beings. Usually he is portrayed as floating in space playing on his vina and singing the praise of the Lord, and in many Hindu religious plays he is given a part even when he is not essential to the action, just because he is such a familiar symbol of devotion. Something of a spiritual correspondent, he is always carrying news from one ashram to another, motivating aspirants to greater effort by remarks like, “Yes, you’re doing well enough; you’re not falling asleep in meditation. But do you know that in the ashram I just visited, two people attained illumination last week?”

Narada had immense wisdom, but being a member of the monastic order he was under the impression that householders like you and me are not capable of much progress on the spiritual path. Sri Krishna has a soft spot in his heart for householders, and one day, it is said, he got the opportunity to correct Narada’s perspective. The two were walking together in heaven, and Narada was taking advantage of his love for the Lord to ask him all kinds of questions. “Lord,” he asked finally, “why do you like these householders so much? They’re not very regular in their practice. One minute they’re enthusiastic and resolve to be very spiritual, and the next minute they’ve forgotten all about it.”

Sri Krishna had a way of not answering Narada’s questions directly. This time he said, “Look, Narada, here’s a little oil lamp. Why don’t you carry it around this temple three times; then I’ll answer your question. But don’t let the flame go out.”

The Lord gave Narada the lamp, and Narada lit it and went outside. As soon as he was out of the door, the Lord called Marut, the wind, and said, “Now blow for all you’re worth!” Marut blew up a real typhoon, and then he called in his relatives to help him make it a hurricane. Narada was hard put. The north wind was blowing and the south wind was blowing, and there he was with this little oil lamp which he couldn’t let go out. But being a divine sage, he wasn’t completely without resources. He held the lamp close and huddled over it to shield it from the wind, and somehow or other he managed to get around the temple three times with the flame still flickering. When he finally got back to Sri Krishna he was a little disheveled but still undaunted. “Well, Lord,” he said breathlessly, “here is the lamp.”

Sri Krishna smiled. “Tell me, Narada,” he said. “You’re always singing my praises and repeating the mantram. While you were going around the temple just now, how many times did you remember to repeat my name?”

Narada hemmed and hawed. “With all this wind blowing, the north wind and the south wind . . . actually, Lord, I’m afraid I didn’t remember you even once.”

“You see, Narada,” Sri Krishna said, “these householders have so many problems – television, and the generation gap, and Madison Avenue to contend with; the wind is blowing against them all the time. If they are able to remember me only a little part of the day, I am very pleased.” It is a good story to remember whenever we find it difficult to remain calm and patient in all the storms of daily living.

Then, among sages, the Lord says he is Kapila, a spiritual teacher in ancient India whose stature was so tremendous that he was content to remain unknown. We know virtually nothing about his life. He was not interested in whether those who came after him would remember his vital statistics; he wanted only that we follow his teachings. If we could have interviewed Kapila he would have said, “Why do you want to know when I was born? How will knowing my height and weight help you realize the unity of life? None of this is relevant to going beyond suffering.” All Kapila’s greatness is inferred from the legacy he left behind him, which has influenced virtually every spiritual tradition in India since his time. Patanjali, who wrote the classic Indian text on meditation, follows Kapila’s sankhya philosophy and may have been one of his direct disciples, and the Bhagavad Gita, the Katha Upanishad, and the teachings of the Compassionate Buddha himself all show the strong stamp of the sankhya outlook. An old Sanskrit saying testifies to the immense effectiveness of these teachings: “There is no knowledge like sankhya, no power like yoga.” Sankhya, the philosophical aspect, gives us a systematic diagnosis of our human predicament; yoga – raja yoga or meditation – gives us the cure.

In this verse Kapila is called muni, ‘the silent one.’ What is meant here is not silence of the tongue but silence of the ego. For the sages who have forever silenced their self-will, this is a perfect name. After many years of meditation, when you have risen above body consciousness and your ego has been dissolved, you will have gone beyond the words of the inspirational passage. Then you will find yourself on the very seabed of consciousness, where everything is still. This stillness is the greatest source of joy, for the cacophony of self-will is the cause of all our suffering in life. The mind is completely still, so there can be no anger, no greed, and no fear.

SRI KRISHNA: 27. I was born from the nectar of immortality as the primordial horse and as Indra’s noble elephant. Among men, I am the king.

This verse refers to the story in the Hindu tradition about the churning of the cosmic ocean to bring forth life as we know it. The story is a little reminiscent of the passage in Genesis which describes how the spirit of God moved upon the waters of life. According to the Hindu scriptures, before creation there was only a vast ocean of undifferentiated consciousness. Then the gods of light, representing the forces of selflessness and goodness, and the demons of darkness, representing the forces of selfishness and violence, took the head and the tail of the serpent king, Vasuki, and began churning the cosmic ocean in order to obtain the nectar of immortality. Out of this churning, life as we know it began to evolve, and many creatures sprang forth.

In its practical application, the churning of the cosmic ocean is the churning of primordial, undifferentiated consciousness, and the creatures that come forth are the mighty forces released from the unconscious during meditation. The Lord brings out these forces within us so that we can work as his instruments, adding to human welfare and to world peace. Those who work for the welfare of the whole are leaders among men, which is the meaning of “king” in this verse. This is leadership based on love and service; it is leadership that is granted rather than taken for oneself. When we give up our private interests like this for the sake of serving others, two divine qualities are released which are essential to effective, selfless leadership. The elephant of Indra, king of the gods, is the perfect symbol of power; Indra’s white horse, called the king of horses, symbolizes the gracefulness that comes when immense power is combined with complete self-control.

During the churning of the cosmic ocean, before these precious gifts emerged, all the poison of selfishness and separateness came to the surface. This poison threatened all life, and no one, neither gods nor demons, knew how to get rid of it. Then Lord Shiva said, “Let me drink it myself, to save the world from its own selfishness.” He took the concentrated poison and drank it, but his queen, Parvati, was so anguished at the sight that she put her hands around his neck to keep the poison from going down his throat. So one of the most loving names for Shiva is Nilakantha, from nila, ‘blue,’ and kantha, ‘throat’: ‘he whose neck turned blue’ when he drank the poison of the world to save all creation. This is what true leadership means: even if there is sorrow and suffering, it is our privilege to take it on ourselves rather than let others become victims. When we choose to suffer for others rather than let our family, our country, or our world suffer, we become a little like Nilakantha.

Finally, after the poison, out of the cosmic ocean came the nectar of immortality called amrita. Mrita is cognate with the word mortal, and amrita is that which makes us immortal. This was the ambrosia the gods and demons were hoping to find by churning the sea with the serpent Vasuki. The nectar of immortality is what all of us are seeking, and we will find it eventually if we are vigilant in practicing meditation. In meditation we dive into the sea of the mind, where we learn how to transform all our poisonous, negative tendencies into selfless qualities. When at last we rid our hearts and minds of all fear, anger, and greed, the nectar of immortality will emerge. It is a symbolic way of saying that we rise above physical consciousness to realize that we are a permanent force for the welfare of all.

SRI KRISHNA: 28. Among weapons I am the thunderbolt. I am Kamadhuk, the cow which fulfills all desires; I am Kandarpa, the power of sex, and Vasuki, the king of snakes.

Here Sri Krishna uses vajra, the thunderbolt, as a symbol of the power of selflessness, which cannot be broken by any other power on earth. In the Vedas, Indra, leader of the gods, carries the thunderbolt as his weapon; it is with the thunderbolt that he slays the cosmic demon. The story of how this weapon was made is a marvelous one. The gods were terribly distressed at the strength of the forces of violence in the world, so they went to Indra and asked him to conquer this violence and separateness. His strange reply was, “I must first have an invincible weapon, which can be made only from the bones of a sage who is pure and perfect.”

The devas searched far and wide for such a sage. They told many spiritual aspirants of their plight. “Oh, yes,” the aspirants would say, “we would like to help you out. What can we do?” The unexpected answer was, “Give us your bones.” As it turned out, the aspirants preferred having their bones inside them instead, and so the search went on.

Finally the devas came to Dadhici, a simple, sweet figure who had come to identify himself so completely with all life that everyone’s suffering was his own. The devas confessed, “We are at the end of our tether. Violence is rising high on all sides, and we haven’t been able to get the weapon we need to stop it, for it can be fashioned only from the bones of a sage who is pure and perfect.”

“If you will accept it,” Dadhici reassured them, “my body is yours. You don’t have to look any further.” He sat down in meditation, united himself with the Lord, and shed his body so it could be used for the happiness of mankind.

This capacity to do anything to relieve the suffering of others is a sign of invincible power. We usually misuse the word power to mean the capacity to destroy another country, or race, or fellow creature. This is not power; this is a liability. Power rises from within us. The power that we have to forget ourselves, to subordinate ourselves to the welfare of the whole, is the only power that is real. As long as we have the desire and the resoluteness to contribute to life, we need not be diffident about our efforts to solve the problems that face us. The Lord tells us in this verse that he is Kamadhuk, the wish-fulfilling cow. This mythical cow satisfies desires that are for the general welfare, but if there is any personal taint in our wish, she will not grant it.

Because I come from India, people used to ask me if I consider cows sacred. I used to tell them, “Of course I do – and tigers, buffaloes, beavers, and Chihuahuas, too. All animals are sacred to me.” We are learning more and more about the nutritional advantages of vegetarianism, but I would say the more important point about not eating meat is that it makes for sound spiritual living, because it affirms the unity of life. In India, where we have a tradition of vegetarianism stretching back thousands of years, we have a loving, protective feeling for most of our animals. In my ancestral home, for example, my grandmother used to give our cows beautiful Sanskrit names. When visitors came to our home and my grandmother gave them the news, she would always include the latest about the cows, who were just like members of the family to her. “Shanti is not doing very well today,” she would say. “Shoba’s calf is eating better now.” My mother kept cows, too. One of them grew to a ripe old age and developed rheumatism, and my mother used to tell her friends with wry humor, “Both of us are rheumatic.” Once someone suggested she sell the cow. Her answer was perfect: “That’s like asking my son to sell me.” The cow had served us well, giving us milk, yogurt, and butter for many years. Out of simple gratitude my mother wanted her to live her last years in comfort.

Kandarpa and Vasuki are references to the power of sex. Vasuki is the serpent who was used in churning the cosmic ocean, but it is also a symbol of kundalini. And Kandarpa is one of the names for Kama, who is the Cupid of Sanskrit literature. These are ways of saying that the Lord is the power of sex, because sex holds the key to life. One of Kama’s many names is Pancashara, ‘he who has five arrows in his quiver,’ each tipped with the flowers of spring. On college campuses it is easy to see Kama busy at work. He pulls out his first arrow, which has ten flower-power, and quite a few students fall; one shot and they are down. But there are some who say, “I’ve got to work hard and get into medical school; I haven’t got time for archery.” For them, Kama pulls out a second arrow with twenty flower-power and down they go; medical school is forgotten. Then there is the postdoctoral research fellow, who thinks he is flowerproof. For him Kama pulls out the third arrow, and he falls victim to its thirty flower-power. So far, the man or woman who is self-controlled most of the time has managed to escape. But spiritual aspirants too can have moments when their vigilance nods, when Kama can claim them with the fourth or forty flower-power arrow. Finally comes the person who is almost invincible, who has gone some distance on the spiritual path. Kama waits patiently for a long time, until just the right moment comes. Then he quickly uses his fifth and last arrow, against which no one can be completely safe.

I would say, beware of the first arrow. The minute you see it coming, repeat your mantram and leave the scene. Here Jesus gives us simple, sound advice: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Given the constant drone of the mass media, most of us have become so susceptible to Kama’s arrows that we need to be particularly careful about not putting ourselves in situations where we are likely to be swept away. Our most effective protection against turmoil is to not base our relationships on sex. Whenever a man and a woman put each other’s welfare first, romance will never come to an end; they will fall more deeply in love every day.

SRI KRISHNA: 29. I am Ananta, the cosmic serpent, and Varuna, the god of water; I am Aryaman, the noble ancestor of mankind. Among the forces which control the universe, I am Yama, the god of death.

Ananta is the endless serpent on which the Lord, in the form of Vishnu, is said to sleep. This cosmic serpent, as we saw in the previous verse, is also a symbol for the evolutionary energy called kundalini. Just as we need gasoline to drive our car, so we need the power of sex to rouse kundalini up the spinal column to the highest center of consciousness in the head. If we want to evolve to the highest level possible, this is the power we must use. Fortunately, there is no limit to this energy once we have begun to put it to spiritual use; that is why it is called ananta, ‘without end.’

Aryaman, another figure from Hindu mythology, is the symbol of all that is noble in our ancestry. This is a reminder that we owe a great debt to those who have gone before us – our parents, our grandparents, our teachers, and everyone else who has helped make us what we are today. You can imagine your grandfather looking out of your eyes, because it is his tendencies that you have inherited. Sometimes I tease my young friends by saying that when we add twenty-five years to them, we get their mother or father. It works the other way, also: the next time you see a mother and daughter together, try subtracting twenty-five years from the mother and you will have the daughter. It is a very fine compliment to tell a daughter that she looks just like her mother, or a son that he is like his father. Whatever inadequacies our parents may have, they brought us into this world and therefore deserve our complete respect. Once, I remember, we took my grandmother to a big store in a nearby town. She looked around carefully, and when we were leaving we asked her, “Well, Granny, what do you think of this store?” “You can get everything you need here,” she replied, “except the love of your father and mother.”

Finally, the Lord makes a strong remark: “Among the forces which control the universe, I am Yama,” the King of Death. Yama is a rather frightening figure in the Sanskrit scriptures, but he can be a good teacher to those who want to receive his message. In the Katha Upanishad, the daring teenager Nachiketa goes straight to Yama to learn how to go beyond death. “You’re the King of Death,” he tells him; “who could have a better teacher than you?” When we face the implications of death squarely, it can give us all the motivation we need to take to meditation and learn to overcome our identification with the body once and for all.

Today, when life is so cheap and violence surrounds us, the theme of conquering death is particularly relevant. It is all too easy to resign ourselves to the constant threat to life and accept without question half-remedies which only feed the fires of violence. Take the problem of holdups, which are rapidly becoming commonplace. It is no answer to carry a gun; that only endangers our own life and the lives of innocent people around us. For a lasting solution we have to help our society change its values, and the best place to begin is for all of us to stop playing up money and material possessions. It is much more difficult to do this than to arm ourselves, but no other solution goes to the heart of the problem. When we are constantly being goaded to buy more, to own more, to measure everything in dollars, it is only a matter of time before we think we can’t be happy without a new sports car or Tiffany diamonds or a trip to Acapulco. Our cupidity is inflated in even the smallest matters. When I first came to this country, I was amazed to see how gas stations compete with each other. I thought they would be offering better gasoline or better service; instead they offer you a drinking glass or a can of nuts. My first response was, “Are we supposed to put these in our tank?” Even the strongest person can be affected by this incessant appeal to get, get, get, even if it is things we do not need or really want.

To help our society free itself from this deadly conditioning, we need to show that what makes life worth living is not money but personal relationships. We don’t do this by talking about it; we do it primarily by our own example. In their hearts, I think everybody knows that money and possessions can satisfy only for a short, short time. The problem is that most people do not have a clear, appealing alternative. But the person with a rich family life and deep, lasting relationships, who is always interested in other people and is not easily shaken by their ups and downs, is a reminder of the real meaning of life wherever he or she goes.

All of us can make of our lives this kind of shining example. Instead of spending our time making extra money, we can spend time with our family and friends, rediscovering the joy of being together. We can simplify our lives so we do not need that second sports car, and instead of taking to the road every weekend or sitting in front of the television, we can start some community project like a vegetable garden with our neighbors. Turning off the television to work with family and friends like this is not a sacrifice; the relationships it enriches will be a source of lasting satisfaction.

Another source of violence is the constant emphasis placed on sex. Now, for example, it is dangerous for college and university women to walk alone in the evening even on campus. You and I can counteract this source of violence in many different ways – by not buying magazines or books that play up sex, by writing to newspapers and television stations when their programs are objectionable, by not giving box-office support to movies which exploit sex. More than that, we need to show in our own lives that rich, lasting, fulfilling relationships between two people are possible when there is complete loyalty and mutual respect. Sex can have a beautiful place in such relationships, but if loyalty is absent, if sex is made the basis of the relationship and both parties are content to go their own ways, tragedy is going to follow for everyone concerned.

SRI KRISHNA: 30. Among animals I am the lion; among birds, the eagle. I am Prahlada, born among the demons, and of all that measures, I am time.

Some of the greatest characters in the Hindu scriptures are teenagers, and one of them is Prahlada, who had boundless devotion to the Lord. The example of Prahlada, Mahatma Gandhi tells us, was one of his earliest inspirations as a child. Born into a demonic society full of disharmony and violence, Prahlada steadfastly kept his eyes on the divine unity of life. In spite of his family’s objections, in the face of all sorts of obstacles and trials, he remained unswerving in his devotion to the Lord of Love. Throughout India he is deeply loved as a model of bhakti yoga, the path of love and devotion.

Then Sri Krishna quietly slips in one of the most powerful statements in this chapter: “I am time.” It has far-reaching implications, for our inability to see below the surface of life is closely tied to our preoccupation with time. Almost everything we do is under pressure of time. The constant emphasis is on hurry, hurry, hurry, and our greatest praise goes not to those who can do something better but to those who can do it faster. Just see the absurdity of this speed mania. Yesterday somebody was telling me about a camera that can develop film in ten seconds instead of sixty seconds. My comment was, “What am I to do with the fifty seconds I have saved?”

Instead of trying to do things faster and faster, it is more effective to work at a steady pace with complete concentration. The person who does things very fast usually does a shoddy job. At my university in India, I often saw students go into the examination hall, dash off their answers, and leave, saying, “We finished the whole thing in an hour’s time.” To be accurate, they ruined the whole thing in an hour’s time. An experienced observer can spot the good student easily: it is the person who studies the question first and tries to understand exactly what the examiner is asking. The student who is in a hurry, who begins writing immediately, often gives the examiner stone instead of bread.

When we work under the constant pressure of time, traveling as fast as we can and eating on the run, we are making our nervous system tenser and tenser. Eventually it simply goes out of control. When you see people being rude or thoughtless to those around them, it can help to remember that they may not really be unkind; their nervous systems may simply have been pushed beyond the limit. Instead of adding to their burden by giving tit for tat, we can help such people by being patient and courteous ourselves and by helping them to slow down.

Gradually, as we learn to slow down the mind through the practice of meditation, we begin to free ourselves from any compulsion of time. But we do not do this by throwing our watches away. Living in the midst of the world, I am always very particular about being on time, because being late affects not only us but everyone around us too. Being late makes for greater hurry and greater tension for everyone involved, and it tends to accumulate throughout the day. So even when I go out to a film or a play I like to arrive half an hour or so early, so that there is plenty of time to find a parking place, get the tickets, and find good seats without stepping on people’s toes. This is the way to become master of time and gradually slow down the furious pace of living.

SRI KRISHNA: 31. Among purifying forces I am the wind, and among warriors I am Rama. Among water creatures I am the crocodile, and among rivers I am the Ganges.

The wind is a powerful purifier; without the wind to keep impurities from accumulating, our atmosphere could not continue to sustain life. On more than one occasion now, the Bay Area has been so stifled with smog that children have been asked not to run or play for fear that they might breathe too much of this deleterious air. Then a strong wind blows in from the ocean, and on the following morning the sky is blue and the hills stand out clearly, glad to be clothed in the clean air again. In tropical countries like India, when there is no wind, the air can become so still it is suffocating, and many people sleep outdoors under the stars to catch any gentle breeze that blows.

In most ancient cultures the wind is deified as a divine power, endowed with tremendous capacity for both evil and good. My friend Bron has been telling me about the chinook, which is a hot wind you have only in America, east of the Rocky Mountains. What is surprising is that it makes its appearance in winter. One March day in Montana, it raised the temperature thirty-one degrees in just three minutes. In the dead frost of winter, the chinook can come down from the mountains like a corps of angels to rescue herds of cattle from death by freezing and starvation. Another interesting wind I’ve been reading about, the harmetan, has earned the title of “doctor.” It blows from the hot, dry Sahara to the humid coast of Africa. Following the professional services of Dr. Harmetan, ague disappears, the pangs of arthritis are relieved, and everyone is invigorated. But it is not only extraordinary winds like these that purify; even a gentle breeze does its part to keep our air circulating so that impurities don’t accumulate. The whole globe is enveloped in a mantle of giant wind systems, all kept in constant motion by the immense power of the sun. One scientist has calculated that the energy driving these systems is equal to that of seven million atomic bombs. All this is part of the continuous miracle which sustains life.

In this verse, Sri Krishna is reminding us that the same power for purification which is found in the wind is found in you and me. Any person whose life benefits others is a purifier. In contrast, those who spread anger and fear, who pursue their own interests at the expense of others, are like smog; they afflict people wherever they go. Look at their homes and you will see how the eyes of their families smart, how their hearts burn with the selfishness that hangs in the air. Unfortunately, each one of us today is polluted with the smog of self-will to some degree. But through the practice of meditation we can learn the science of purification. This is simply another way of describing the skill for transforming hatred into love, resentment into compassion, and fear into fearlessness that comes with sustained practice of meditation. The person who has this inner fortitude, whose spirit cannot be broken by any adverse circumstances, is a purifier.

Then the Lord says, “I am Rama.” Rama is the hero of the Indian epic the Ramayana. Like Sri Krishna, he is a divine incarnation of the spiritual power of Vishnu, the Preserver in the Hindu Trinity. Vishnu came down to earth many times to save humanity from danger, and he came as Sri Rama before his incarnation as Sri Krishna.

Rama is deeply loved in India because he represents the perfect son, the perfect husband, and the perfect king. His wife, Sita, is equally cherished as the perfect wife and mother. Rama and Sita were always deeply devoted to each other, and were loyal through all sorts of trials. In the Ramayana, the story of these trials takes on deep spiritual significance. There, as Sri Ramakrishna used to say, Rama represents the Lord, and Sita the human soul. Rama is so loyal to his father that to fulfill a rash promise his father made, he gives up his kingdom and goes into exile in the forest for fourteen years. Of her own accord, Sita goes with him, giving up all the comforts of the court in order to be with the one she loves. During their exile, Sita is abducted by a demon king called Ravana, the embodiment of the ego. At the end of many trials, Rama succeeds in slaying Ravana and is reunited with Sita. This mortal combat between Rama and Ravana, like the battle which is the backdrop for the Bhagavad Gita, is the struggle between the selfless and selfish urges within all of us, and the reunion of Sita and Rama represents the unitive experience which is the supreme goal of life.

This story of Rama and Sita is known all over India. In countless homes, especially in the villages, it is read and told over and over again, because it conveys spiritual values in a vivid way that even children can appreciate and absorb. Mahatma Gandhi was especially fond of the Ramayana, for his mantram was the name of Rama, who is the perfect embodiment of one who never swerves from truth. After many years of conscious effort, Gandhi made Rama an integral part of his consciousness. Then, when the assassin’s bullets struck him at point-blank range, he was able to greet his attacker with Rama on his lips and infinite compassion in his heart.

Among creatures that live in the water, Sri Krishna says he is the crocodile. We saw some crocodiles in the aquarium the other day, and what impressed me most about them was their almost impenetrable armor. This is the kind of armor we have to develop in order to withstand the onslaught of life. To meet every challenge as it comes, we cannot allow vacillations in fortune and fame to affect us. One well-known film star has confessed that he chose to go into films to gain as much attention as possible, thinking that he would find security. It was the one thing he did not find. Security is armor which we must learn to put on inside of us; we cannot get it anywhere outside. Every time we are patient in the face of agitation, every time we return forbearance for resentment, we strengthen this armor and deepen our security.

The final epithet has profound mystical significance, for the Ganges, the sacred river of India, is a symbol of the life-force contained in sex. In sex lies the secret of life itself. That is why I always repeat that sex can have a beautiful place in a relationship where there is complete love and loyalty. In meditation we gradually gain control over this deep drive, so that instead of being its victim, subject to every whim of desire, we become its master. Then sex becomes a source of tremendous creative power which draws people together in the unity that underlies us all.

SRI KRISHNA: 32. I am the beginning, middle, and end of creation. Of all the sciences I am the science of Self-knowledge, and I am reason in those who debate.

Patanjali, the great teacher of meditation in ancient India, tells us to take to the spiritual life so that we may realize who we are. To me, this is real education – not education for degrees but education for living, which is a perfect description of meditation. Meditation enables us to find, right in the context of our daily lives, the answer to that most important question, “Who am I?” We may know all about wines, or skiing, or even English literature, but until we learn who we really are, nothing else we learn or do can ever give us fulfillment, security, or peace of mind. The Lord is asking us here, “Before you try to learn everything else, why don’t you give half an hour every morning to learning about yourself?”

In this verse Sri Krishna does not try to impress us with terms like “transcendental wisdom” or “the clear light within”; he uses simple, chaste language: “I am reason.” Sometimes when I hear people discussing the possibility of intelligent life on other planets, I am inclined to ask, “Is there intelligent life on earth?” Far from expecting an age of mysticism, I hope only for an age of reason, which is noticeably absent in most of our activities today. For example, how can we live in harmony with our family and friends if we persist in returning anger for anger? How can we bring about lasting peace by adding to the probability of nuclear holocaust? To live in the midst of conflict with peace in our hearts, transforming those around us through patience and forgiveness, requires enormous internal strength, which is gradually developed through the practice of meditation.

SRI KRISHNA: 33. Among letters I am A; among grammatical compounds I am the dvandva. I am infinite time, and the sustainer whose face is seen everywhere.

In many alphabets, including Sanskrit, A is the first letter; when the Lord says that among letters he is A, it is a grammatical reminder that he is the origin of all life. As Jesus says, “I am the alpha and the omega”; we come from him and we return to him. We may be born into the world through our parents, but our real origin is divine.

Dvandva is another reference to grammar. Sanskrit authors were fond of making big words by running smaller words together, sometimes so many of them that they wander off onto the next page like a snake. The most democratic of these compounds are called dvandvas; usually all their smaller words have equal value. But there may be another reason why Sri Krishna singles out the dvandva here. Sanskrit scriptures are full of dvandvas or opposites to describe life on the physical level: sukhaduhkha, ‘pleasure and pain’; labhalabha, ‘profit and loss’; jayajaya, ‘victory and defeat.’ Duality is the very nature of the world of change, and if we are to live in freedom we have to learn to dispel this fog called dvandvamoha, the delusion of separateness which keeps us from seeing that life is one.

In the last verse but two, the Lord told us he was time the measurer; now he says that he is infinite time as well. This is the eternal present, which we sometimes glimpse in the deeper stages of meditation when all awareness of the world of change has been withdrawn. Then we begin to understand just how relative time is. The passage of time has no reality of its own; it is very much a part of the functioning of the mind.

All of us are familiar with this. When we are absorbed in something we like very much, hours can pass before we know it, but when we are doing something we dislike intensely, every little second seems to drag on endlessly. Patanjali would say that this has nothing to do with the world outside us; it is a matter of the mind being concentrated. When we are doing something we like, all our attention is on the present; when we have to do something we dislike, the mind is always wriggling out into the past, or the future, or its own little world of might-have-been.

In this connection, there is a good story about Dr. Albert Einstein – probably apocryphal, as a great many of these stories are – which tells how this delightful man of genius had to sit through a talk which seemed to have no direction and no end. Einstein was a very patient man, but after some time of this he began to shift uneasily from side to side and look down at his hands. Finally he leaned over and whispered to a friend sitting next to him, “I have discovered only relativity; this fellow has discovered eternity.”

The practical application here is that eternity is within the reach of every one of us. By gradually learning to still the mind through the practice of meditation, we can learn to live in the Eternal Now. Then we can enjoy not only what we like, but what we dislike as well. More than that, as we begin to live more and more in the present, we make the exhilarating discovery that past and future exist only in our minds. It is a tremendous realization, for it means that we are released from any burden of guilt about the past and any anxiety about the future. We think that past and future are real because we keep brooding over what we have done and what others have done to us, what we will do and what others will do to us. But it is not past and future that are real; it is our brooding on the past and the future that is real. If we could withdraw our attention from these will-o’-the-wisps, many of our problems would simply dissolve.

Many years ago I stayed at the home of an hospitable woman in the Bay Area who happened to believe in ghosts. Her home had a beautiful view which took in a cemetery nearby, and though she was very fond of me, nothing I could say could convince her that ghosts from that cemetery did not pay her visits at unlikely times. So one day I announced casually that I was going for a walk in the cemetery to meet one of these ghosts myself. When I returned she was wringing her hands. “Did you see any ghosts?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Three.”

“What did you do?”

“I told them you were too nice a woman to be living in fear all the time, and that they should go away and leave you alone.”

“And what did they say?”

“They said, ‘We can’t. As long as she believes in us, we have to stay.’ ”

She stared at me for a second and then laughed out loud. Because of her affection for me those simple words had gone in deeply, and after that she was never afraid of ghosts again.

Whenever we worry about something in the past or the future, what we are doing is setting up our own little haunted house and peopling it with our own special ghosts – Aunt Agatha, looking the way she did when she scolded us at the dinner table twenty-five years ago, or our little boy disguised as Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. To banish these ghosts, all we need to do is stop thinking about them. They will never bother us again, because they were never there at all.

As we learn to disentangle ourselves from past and future and bring our consciousness to rest in the present, we enter into eternity. The Compassionate Buddha gives us the key to understanding how this happens in his doctrine of momentariness, called kshanikavada, which tells us that there is no inherent connection between one moment and the next. Every moment is unique and discrete. When our concentration is complete, we rest like a king in the present, not concerned with what happened in the past, not anxious over what might happen in the future. Completely absorbed in the present, we are able to give our best concentration to everyone we deal with and everything we do.

The last epithet, Vishvatomukha, means ‘he whose face is everywhere.’ Nicholas of Cusa says that in every face there is the face of the Lord, hidden behind a veil. This divine face can be seen only when we enter into what Nicholas calls “mystic silence,” which is what samadhi may be said to be.

SRI KRISHNA: 34. I am death, which overcomes all, and the source of all beings still to be born. I am the feminine qualities: fame, beauty, perfect speech, memory, intelligence, loyalty, and forgiveness.

Over and over in these chapters the Lord is driving home to us that he is not only life and love, he is also death – mrityuh sarvaharah, by whom all of us one day are going to be struck down. No good spiritual teacher will fail to drive this into our consciousness, for once it penetrates our hearts we will give everything to the practice of the spiritual life; we will not let a day pass without doing our very best to surpass our efforts of the day before. The conquest of death is such an immense achievement that a lifetime is not too long for it, and when we let even a single day slip by, we are letting life itself slip through our fingers.

In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions we say that even a lifetime is not enough; all of us have been working towards this conquest for many lives. To me, the argument for reincarnation was summed up pithily by one of our children: “I don’t want to be dead always.” The Lord of Love, by whatever name we call him, is not likely to keep us dead forever. Each time around we have the opportunity to conquer death, and each time most of us decide that we have other things to do instead. The Lord waits patiently while we experiment for a number of years, but finally, if we have still not learned that the purpose of life is to go beyond death, he comes to take us back for “R and R,” rest and recuperation. Then, when the right circumstances develop for us to take up where we left off, he gives us a strong, new body and sends us forth to try again.

All this is very much like a loving father, but in many parts of India – particularly Bengal, where Sri Ramakrishna was born – we don’t talk about God as our Father but as our Mother. I think it is a particularly appropriate perspective for this verse, for the selfless love of a mother for her child is the perfect symbol for the love the Lord has for every one of us. Just as we have been born on earth to our earthly mother, all of us are children of the Divine Mother. In the Krishna tradition, one of the names of the Lord is Hiranyagarbha, the ‘womb of the cosmos.’ She is the Source from which the universe was born, and the Upanishads, echoed by some theories in contemporary astronomy, tell us that when her creation becomes so vast that it threatens to disperse itself forever, she gathers the galaxies and all their creatures into herself to be born again. In the beautiful words of Christian mysticism, we all come from God, abide in God, and return to God, who is the Divine Mother of us all.

Sri Ramakrishna used to say frequently that we should look on all women as the embodiment of the Divine Mother. What he meant is that the qualities which make for a perfect woman are the qualities which make for a deeply spiritual person. This is the sense of Sri Krishna’s reference to “feminine qualities” in this verse: it does not apply only to women; it applies equally to men. In the totally integrated person, man or woman, there is a part that is masculine and a part that is feminine. In the Hindu tradition this is represented by a glorious image called Ardhanarishvara – one half thoroughly masculine, the other utterly feminine, united in one person. It is unrealistic to deny that there are masculine qualities, just as it is unrealistic to deny that there are feminine qualities. There are both, and each is meant to be completed by the other. Gandhi was like that; there was never more of a soldier than Gandhiji when he was fighting for truth, and no one more tender when he was nursing the sick or comforting a little child. Here all that is best in man and all that is best in woman have come together. There is no contradiction in this, no discrimination, no competition; there is only completion. It is not only women who love such a man, and not only men who love such a woman; everyone loves the person who has realized the unity in which man and woman are one.

As a boy, growing up under the guidance of my mother and my grandmother, I absorbed this attitude naturally at an early age. The family tradition in which I grew up in the state of Kerala is like no other culture with which I am acquainted. It is a matrilineal tradition, highly civilized, in which women have had equal rights with men for centuries. One of the practical consequences of this is that while most boys and girls in India grow up almost in different worlds, I spent my first sixteen years under the roof of a large joint family in close daily contact with girls as well as boys, women as well as men. It still impresses me to remember how the ideals of that tradition were passed on to all of us by the quiet example of our women. Even when I was very young, I used to admire how girls no older than I was could put others first and win people over by their patient example with a grace that most of us boys never managed to achieve at any age, even when we tried. My grandmother was the perfect flower of that tradition, and it was from her that I learned how perfectly the qualities mentioned here apply to either sex.

Some of these qualities deserve special attention, because they have no precise English equivalents. Sri, ‘beauty,’ has nothing to do with superficial attractiveness; it refers to the inner radiance that shines in the eyes of those who are selfless. I have never seen anyone so beautiful with sri as my grandmother, even in the twilight of her life. My granny was not given to praising people easily, and she always took a deep interest in the women who married into our ancestral family because of its ancient matriarchal heritage. There were not many brides who could meet her expectations of what a woman should be, but when she saw one who did, she would say with quiet approval, “That girl has sri in her face.” No one could have asked for higher praise.

Dhriti, ‘loyalty,’ is a precious quality that we have almost lost sight of today. In relationships between two people, especially where sex is concerned, I think loyalty is considered old-fashioned, even unrealistic. Yet without loyalty, it simply is not possible to love.

When I first came to this country, everybody was talking about freedom. The idea was that if you came together freely, you were always free to walk out; this was supposed to be a complete safeguard against unhappy relationships. When my friends would talk this way I used to answer, “Oh, yes, you are free to walk out of such a relationship. There is no obligation; there are no bonds; there are not even any ties. But what happens if you go on doing this is that you never acquire the capacity to love.”

Loyalty is the quintessence of love. When two people tell each other, “As long as you do what I like, I’ll stay with you, but as soon as you start doing things I don’t like, I’m packing my bags” – to me that is not love; that’s indifference. Loving somebody means that even when they trouble you, you don’t let yourself be shaken; even when they are harsh to you, you don’t move away; even when they make a mistake that hurts you, you don’t go off and make the same kind of mistake to hurt them. All of us are so liable to human error that unless we have some capacity to bear with the errors of others, we will not be able to maintain a lasting relationship with anybody, which is the tragic situation that many people find themselves in today.

I am not idealizing intimate relationships when I talk like this. Despite what the media tell us, there is nothing easy about learning to love. It takes a lot of hard work, and if you want a relationship to get deeper and deeper with the passage of time, you will go on strengthening it all your life. Naturally there are going to be differences between you and your partner; that is the nature of life. Even identical twins have differences of opinion, and they come from the same combinations of genes and the very same background; why should two people from, say, New York City and Paris, Texas, expect life together to be smooth sailing? Even on the honeymoon there are going to be difficulties, and all too often one party is going to write home after the first week and say, “I never thought it would be like this!” You open Pandora’s box expecting a lot of doves and out come a couple of bats instead. Here it is the mystics who are the real romantics, because they are the most practical. They won’t get upset or despondent; they will say, “The doves are there; they’re simply lying low. Why don’t we get to work and clean out these bats?” This is the approach I learned from my grandmother, which I try to apply in everything: never to dwell on the negative, but always to respect the potential in other people and help them to realize that potential through your support.

To do this we need kshama – forgiveness, patience, the capacity to forbear. Kshama is so important that I look upon it as another aspect of yoga. In the last chapter we discussed raja yoga, the royal path of meditation; here we can introduce kshama yoga, the path of patience and forgiveness, which will come into its real beauty in the climax of this volume in chapter twelve. It is a path that is suited to people in all walks of life, from all religious backgrounds.

Poets like to write about love, popular singers like to glorify love, but nobody ever bothers to sing the praise of patience. Yet in order to love others you must have tremendous patience, to bear with them come what may. None of us are born with this capacity, but all of us can develop it through practice. In a situation where there is a lot of friction, where others differ from you and everything seems to be going wrong, don’t move away; move closer. It will be difficult, especially at the beginning. You may have to grit your teeth, you may have to bite your lip to keep from saying what is in your mind; and then of course you need to smile too, which doesn’t add up to an especially pretty picture. It is a demanding art to do this gracefully, but I can give you an image from which you can draw consolation.

On the Blue Mountain in South India we had a little garden with a number of peach, pear, apple, and cherimoya trees. These trees had never been pruned; they had been allowed to grow in any direction they liked, and the garden was so small that they were all crowded close together. Their branches were tangled, fresh growth was choked by the snarl of dead limbs, and it was impossible for them to bear good fruit. It took a lot of work to prune that garden, and when we were done the trees looked denuded. All the dead branches had been cut away and nothing new had begun to grow. It was only when spring came that I was convinced that the pruning hadn’t been a mistake, when I saw those trees all gracefully wearing their fresh leaves and decked with blossoms.

When we have free-roaming, unpruned self-will like this, when we’ve been letting our likes and dislikes run rampant for twenty or thirty years, the process of pruning can be quite painful. Not only that, we will not always be at our best. Sometimes we may be able to forbear gracefully, but there are going to be times when our smile looks like a grimace or we have to rush out the door repeating the mantram. This is the pruning period, when life can look pretty drab; the dead branches of our old habits will be lying all around us and the new leaves will not yet have begun to grow. But for all of us, if we keep at our pruning carefully, the spring is bound to come. There will still be gardening to do, but when we see our new ways blossoming and the good fruit we have begun to bear for others, this pruning of self-will will be a source of lasting satisfaction.

SRI KRISHNA: 35. I am the Sama Veda and the Gayatri. Among the months I am Margashirsha, and among seasons I am spring, the season of flowers.

The Sama Veda, one of the oldest of the Hindu scriptures, is so sonorous that it used to be sung. But no human recitation can compare with the beauty of such a passage in deep meditation, when concentration on the words is complete and each word reverberates through consciousness with unearthly beauty. The joy of this experience is so great that nothing the senses can offer is even worthy of comparison.

The Gayatri is a mantram from the Rig Veda, the earliest of the Hindu scriptures; it has been used throughout India for thousands of years. I interpret the word gayatri to mean ‘that which protects the reciter against all harm.’ The most enthusiastic Gayatri recitation I ever heard in India was not by any Indian, but by a Swiss friend with a good ear for music who used to recite it very much in a Wagnerian manner. But to reap the benefits of a mantram, you do not need to appreciate music or even be able to carry a tune. The Lord isn’t going to listen to your recitation and say, “No, no, Roberta, let me hear that A again.” All he is interested in is that we repeat the mantram whenever possible, with sincerity, concentration, and love.

Among months the Lord is Margashirsha, the first month of the Hindu year. It is as if Sri Krishna is asking us to make a New Year’s resolution to remember him in those around us throughout the year. Then he adds that among seasons he is the springtime, because all over the world spring is the season of birth, beauty, and joy. The birth that is meant here is the birth of the Lord in our hearts, which in the language of all the great religions is called our second birth, in which we wake up into eternal life.

SRI KRISHNA: 36. I am the gambling of the gambler and the radiance in all that shines. I am effort; I am victory; and I am the quality of sattva.

Some years ago I was in a bus depot and happened to hear the conversation of some people waiting for the bus to Reno. Everyone seemed to have their own foolproof system for blackjack, worked out through long research. Not only that, each person I listened to was absolutely convinced that their system could never fail. Even if the last time around they had lost their shirt and their T-shirt too, their faith was not affected. “Something was wrong with that dealer, or the angle of the table,” they would say. “Or maybe the stars were all wrong. But this time my turn is going to come, and I’m going to double the stakes.” As far as I could make out, they all had the same system: the more you lose, the more you double the stakes. Then, when you finally win, your losses are made up.

Now, according to the Gita, gamblers are not merely trying to win a game or break the bank; they are looking for the source of lasting satisfaction, which is the Lord. This is the compassionate view, which looks into the gambler’s heart. People don’t go to Las Vegas or Monte Carlo to make money or even to enjoy the thrill of winning; they go in search of the joy and security that can only be found within. It is very much like the man in one of my niece’s favorite riddles. She takes delight in posing riddles for me, which I am seldom able to answer, and this time she asked: “Why was a man looking under the streetlight for the quarter he lost at the other end of the block?” The answer is really to the point: “Because there was more light there.” This is very much our predicament. We are all looking for fulfillment in life, but most people are looking in places where they can never find what they are looking for, because the source of fulfillment is not outside us but within. We can render a real service to people like this by showing them that the thrill of winning can only be lasting when it comes from winning mastery of ourselves.

Next the Lord praises vyavasaya, ‘effort.’ Whenever you find the capacity to work enthusiastically for a selfless cause, the Lord is present, right in the effort itself. This does not include erratic effort, where we get up early and work nonstop until midnight, then go to sleep and do not wake up for two days. One of my schoolmates in high school actually did this; he went to sleep on Monday and woke up on Wednesday. We were all amazed. He couldn’t understand why we were doing geography that day instead of history, because he didn’t realize he had slept through an entire day. Such people do things on a heroic scale at the outset; then, when enthusiasm wanes and boredom sets in, they want something else to hold their fleeting interest. But there is a rare person who becomes more enterprising and resourceful with every difficulty that comes his or her way. Such people achieve success in any walk of life, and once they begin to harness their enthusiasm to achieve a selfless goal, they can really go far. So Sri Krishna adds here, Jayo ’smi: ‘I am victory.’ Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most inspiring examples of spiritual transformation I know of in this century, tells us out of his own experience: “Any man or woman can achieve what I have if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.” And then he adds magnificently, “Full effort is full victory.”

When you are really making your best effort on the spiritual path, there is a slow but tremendously potent rise of the spiritual energy called kundalini. To an experienced eye, the marks of this rise are unmistakable. There is such drive, such resoluteness, such an indomitable will to achieve the goal of life no matter what stands in the way, that the mystics of both East and West use the image of fire to describe their personal experience of this power. To those around them, it is almost like seeing a human missile; every ounce of fuel is channeled into this tremendous attempt to reach an almost unreachable goal.

But finally, after samadhi is achieved, everything is transformed. Those who have become established in this state are so tranquil, so deceptively serene, that we might make the mistake of assuming that all their power has been consumed. It has not: it has become almost limitless, but now it is completely under control. It is like getting a second engine: you may have a Model T body, but now you get a Ferrari engine; just a touch of the accelerator and in seconds you can be at top speed. And then, the Hindu scriptures say, kundalini is no longer fire; it is light. Going up, when all you can manage is to keep it under control, kundalini is fire; but when it comes down again, to bathe all the centers of consciousness and release their deepest resources, it comes down as light. This divine radiance is called tejas in Sanskrit, and Sri Krishna is telling us here that this same light is within everyone, and it is the same radiance in the sun, in the stars, as in us all. Kabir says:

The moon shines in my body,

But my blind eyes cannot see it;

The moon is within me,

And so is the sun.

SRI KRISHNA: 37. Among the Vrishnis I am Krishna, and among the Pandavas I am Arjuna. Among sages I am Vyasa, and among poets, Ushanas.

The references to Sri Krishna in this verse reveal a wealth of meanings. First and foremost, Sri Krishna is the eternal, immutable, infinite Reality whom we call God – the source of all joy, all security, all beauty, and all wisdom, present in the depths of our consciousness. But in another aspect, the historical aspect, Sri Krishna is a divine incarnation who was born on earth. He was a member of the Vrishni clan; he played as a child, grew to be a handsome young man, and went through all the stages of human life.

These two – the eternal Godhead and the divine incarnation – are different aspects of the same supreme Reality. Similarly, the Compassionate Buddha was born a prince of Kapilavastu and grew to be a young man with a lovely wife and child; we know of his struggle to find the answer to the meaning of life. The life of Jesus the Christ is familiar to all of us too; we know of his birth in Bethlehem and his death on the cross. There is no contradiction between the historical aspect of the Lord and the supreme Reality, which was never born and will never die. All these incarnations are simply different manifestations of the same Reality. In the next chapter, Sri Krishna, the perfect divine incarnation, will give us a glimpse of his immortal, omnipresent nature. Then, after revealing his cosmic form, the Lord will once again assume his role in the human drama as Arjuna’s guide and companion.

When my wife and I were in India we had to make a choice between going to the Taj Mahal and going to Vrindavana, the historical birthplace of Sri Krishna. We still have not seen the Taj Mahal. Instead we took the evening train to Vrindavana, and as it was a slow-moving train, we were able to watch leisurely all the timeless scenes of village India as we passed by. It was dusk, the “hour of cow dust,” when the cows come home from the pasture raising dust with their hooves, and the scene around us immediately brought to mind the stories of Sri Krishna as an irresistible young cowherd. Vrindavana is the perfect setting for these stories, with the river Yamuna winding round the village and Mount Govardhana standing as a nearby sentinel.

Some of the most delightful episodes in Sri Krishna’s life take place on this mountain. According to one legend, Indra wanted to test Sri Krishna to see if he was really a divine incarnation or just an imposter. So Indra, god of storms, told the rain, “Send down a deluge on Vrindavana, and we’ll see what this Krishna can do.” Torrential rains poured down, and the whole village was in danger of being swept away. When Sri Krishna’s friends begged him to protect them from the flood, he smiled, picked up Mount Govardhana just as we would pick up a push-button umbrella, and held it up above the village to protect everyone from the rain. So one of the names for the Lord is Giridhara Gopala, “he who holds the mountain as an umbrella to shelter all those who seek his refuge.” It is a simple way of saying that we do not need to be afraid of any challenge when we seek the Lord’s help.

In another story, Brahma, god of creation, stole the calves and cowherds of Vrindavana and hid them in a mountain cave. As the sun was setting, Sri Krishna went to look for his friends but could not find them. The families of these cowherds were eagerly waiting for their children to return home, and Sri Krishna couldn’t bear to think how much they would worry if their children were late. So through the great power of his Maya, he made himself appear as the missing cowherds, cows, and calves. Everyone apparently went home as usual, only this time there was unusually great joy in each home. The parents found their sons so perfect that they could not understand how they could ever have yelled at them, and their cows that night were such gentle creatures that no one wanted to part from them again. Nobody guessed that this was the perfection of the Lord appearing in the form of their sons and their cattle.

When Sri Krishna says, “Among Pandavas I am Arjuna,” Arjuna must be melting in ecstasy. He has given all his heart to Sri Krishna; he has eyes only for him; he has no thought other than of him. Because every corner of his consciousness is filled with love for the Lord, Sri Krishna says, “I am in him always, and he is united with me.”

Then the Lord says that of sages he is Vyasa. Vyasa was not only a great sage but a great poet as well – in fact, he is the author of the Mahabharata itself, the epic in which the Gita is the crowning jewel. So the Lord says that he is also Ushanas, the poet of poets. It is to remind us that if we have artistic talent, whether for poetry, painting, speaking, dancing, or music, we should use it in the service of the Lord to bring deeper awareness of the unity of life. Kalidasa, another of the giants of Indian literature, wrote in one of his early epics: “I am like a little pygmy trying to pluck a fruit from a tall tree; I have no gift for poetry. How I would love to be a poet so I could sing the praise of the Lord!” According to legend, his desire was so deep and so selfless that the Divine Mother, called Kali, appeared to him and wrote on his tongue the mantram Om. He took the name Kalidasa, ‘the servant of Kali,’ and became a genius in Sanskrit poetry and drama, using all his creative capacity to sing the praise of the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 38. I am the scepter which metes out punishment, and the art of statesmanship in those who lead. I am the silence of the unknown and the wisdom of the wise.

The Lord is not only the lawgiver; he is the law and that which enforces the law as well. Danda – ‘scepter’ or ‘stick’ – is a strong term in Sanskrit, implying punishment, penalty, or consequences. Since many people have some resistance to words like sin and atonement, I usually substitute terms like mistakes and consequences. This leaves no room for misunderstanding. For example, if we overeat, it is not a law passed by Congress that gives us dyspepsia. “He or she who overeats will suffer stomachache for three days, or three nights, or both” is not a law on the statute books; it is a law written within every cell of our body. This is the principle of mistakes and consequences, which we can ignore only at our peril.

Once our eyes begin to open, we shall see this principle working behind the scenes in all sorts of situations. Take vacations, for example. I have been looking at the advertisements for cruises in The New York Times. Much of the emphasis is not on seeing new lands or learning new languages, but on eating. One ad boasts, “We never give you the same menu twice during our world tour.” Another describes the ship’s twenty-two kitchens and one hundred eighty one cooks, and tries to entice the reader by saying, “We serve four gourmet meals daily, and you can come to the dining room anytime for a snack.” If we were to go on a tour like that we would probably need to be met by an ambulance, and our friends would not be able to recognize us at all. “That’s not my friend Jimmy,” they would say; “that’s some fat fellow.” For some, it would take a month in the hospital to repair the damage of this overeating and underexercising. Overeating has obvious consequences – overweight, gastrointestinal problems, probably high blood cholesterol, and an increased likelihood of heart attacks, to name just a few – which eventually force us to correct our unhealthy living habits. The beauty of the Gita’s approach is that it makes health our birthright, no less than security and joy. But in order to claim this birthright, we have to learn to make wise choices.

Then Sri Krishna says that in leaders he is statesmanship. This is statesmanship of an unusually high order, the mark of which is the capacity to return good will for ill will and nonviolent resistance for violence. Unfortunately, many of us have been conditioned to look upon violence as a way of solving problems. But one of the laws of life is that hatred can never cease through hatred. As the Buddha tells us, hatred ceases only through love. We cannot break this law; we can only break ourselves against it by not observing it in all our relationships. When, against the background of evolution, we come into the human context, the law of the jungle is superseded by the law of unity, which Jesus phrased perfectly: “Bless them that curse you, and do good to them that hate you.”

It is not difficult to understand what happens when we violate this law, which applies from the individual level to the international. No matter what the situation, violence will never cease when met with violence. World War I, for example, was supposedly fought to bring lasting peace. But the Treaty of Versailles which ended it, far from healing the wounds of conflict, broke the spirit of Germany and paved the way for World War II. In those days there were very few who could see the futility of seeking peace through war. Now most thoughtful people are beginning to agree that the world is one, that all life is one, and that a war anywhere on this planet threatens the welfare of us all.

SRI KRISHNA: 39. My seed can be found in every creature, Arjuna, for without me nothing can exist, neither animate nor inanimate.

Recently I have been reading a little of Spinoza, a mystic of the seventeenth century who was as unorthodox in the eyes of his Jewish community as Meister Eckhart was to the Christians of medieval Germany. Some of the things Spinoza says I like very much; they have the ring of personal experience, and they should appeal to any good scientist even if he or she professes not to believe in God. Spinoza calls God by a very surprising name: Substance. It is a very apt choice of words – sub-stance, “that on which everything in the universe stands.” It is very much the same language that Eckhart uses when he talks about the Divine Ground of existence. The Lord is substance, the only reality; everything else is shadow. Here, because Arjuna is not very philosophically inclined, Sri Krishna puts it more personally: “Without me,” he says, “nothing else could exist, because I am present everywhere.”

“As the idea of a circle is to all circles,” Spinoza says, “so is God to the universe.” If I want my friend Jeff, who is an architect, to build a complex of buildings where we can carry on our work, I don’t let him start with a few bricks and some old recycled boards and just let everything grow like Topsy; I ask him to put every detail into one coherent plan. It may take longer, but at least that way I know that we won’t end up with two false ceilings and a door opening onto the wall of the building next door. It is very much the same with the Lord. He has the blueprint for his creation worked out so that every detail follows from some previous detail, and when the time comes he just gives the word and the universe unfolds in all its endless diversity.

In some traditions this is the language that is used, where the Lord is the Architect, or the Designer, or the cosmic Watchmaker. In the Hindu tradition, however, we prefer to talk not about plans but about seeds. That is why Sri Krishna says here, “My seed can be found in every creature”: just as in the unseen genetics of one tiny seed there is the potential for countless full-grown trees, the whole of creation is implicit in the Lord of Love.

SRI KRISHNA: 40. But there is no end to my divine attributes, Arjuna; these I have mentioned are only a few.

41. Wherever you find strength, or beauty, or spiritual power, you may be sure that these have sprung from a spark of my essence.

With these verses Sri Krishna gives the message of this whole chapter: wherever we see selflessness or forgiveness, wherever we see someone choosing to suffer rather than bring suffering to others, we can be sure that the Lord is present there. To see God, we do not need to look for some physical or psychical manifestation. Patience and forgiveness are not just moral qualities, but forces for unity that are latent within us all.

Like physical forces, these spiritual forces are universal. It is not only human beings that respond to patience, to forgiveness; animals respond too. Among the legends that surround St. Francis, there is a wonderful story about a fierce wolf who had been troubling the town of Gubbio until finally he was captured by the townsfolk. In their fear, the people of Gubbio wanted to put an end to the wolf’s life. But St. Francis, aware of his unity with the wolf as only a child of God can be, went up to this fierce, frightened animal and scolded him just as he would an erring disciple. Francis was so full of love for all creation that not even a wild animal could see in him anything to fear, and the wolf lowered his head and listened humbly while the friar scolded him. After that he was a model of good behavior, and soon the entire town came to love him.

SRI KRISHNA: 42. But of what use is it to you to know all this, Arjuna? Just remember that I am, and that I support the entire cosmos with only a fragment of my being.

Out of his love for Arjuna, Sri Krishna has patiently listed some of the ways his presence is manifested throughout creation. Using the example of ancient sages and modern householders, of mythological creatures and even grammatical compounds, the Lord has told us that he is in every creature and in every activity. In whatever reveals perfection, beauty, and awareness of unity, he is present. But now, having played the part of the professor and satisfied Arjuna’s desire for knowledge, Sri Krishna warns him not to get lost in endless lists and categories. It is enough if we know that the Lord exists, and that his unifying force holds together the billions of galaxies throughout the cosmos with their countless forms of life. In the next chapter Arjuna will beg his friend to show him this infinite, universal form.