ARJUNA: 1. Out of compassion you have taught me the supreme mystery of life. Through your words my delusion is gone.

2. You have explained the origin and end of every creature, O lotus-eyed one, and told me of your own supreme, limitless existence.

3. You have told me about your infinite glory, O Lord. Now I long to see you as the supreme Ruler of all creation.

4. O Krishna, if you think my love is strong enough to absorb the glory of this vision, show me your immortal Self.

Swami Vivekananda, one of the foremost disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, used to say that religion is realization of God; nothing less can satisfy us. As a teenager, then called Narendra, he had struggled with all sorts of doubts. Like many young people today, he was tormented by questions about the meaning of life. He searched the worlds of literature and philosophy, but nowhere could he find an answer that satisfied him. Then he turned to highly regarded spiritual teachers, and to each he posed the same blunt question: “Have you seen God?” Always the reply was no.

Finally he heard of a saint who lived quietly at a little temple of the Divine Mother outside Calcutta. Narendra found his way there and went straight up to this little man to ask the same burning question he had asked all the others: “Have you seen God?”

Ramakrishna smiled. “Of course,” he said. “I see God more clearly than I see you now. You I see only with my physical eyes, but God I see with every cell of my being.”

This quiet authority, which can come only from experiential knowledge, is the unmistakable stamp of the vision of God. After becoming established in this vision, the God-conscious person may seem to be quite ordinary, but under this surface appearance he or she is no longer a separate, fragmented creature but part of the irresistible love force that we call God.

After years of enthusiastic effort, the Lord may reveal himself to us too in some small measure. Then we shall see into the very heart of life. This vision may last for only a moment or two, but it leaves behind an unforgettable awareness of the living presence of the Lord. Afterwards, no matter what their color or background or political persuasion, we see everyone as this divine force. It is because we do not have this immense frame of reference that little pleasures get amplified out of all proportion. Once we have tasted the joy of this experience, the ordinary pleasures of life become insipid in comparison. All our desires will be unified around one great desire to recapture this experience, and we will cry, like David, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O Lord.”

When this great longing comes to us, the Divine Fisherman has got his hook into us forever. Isn’t it Eckhart who says that the more we thrash about, the deeper the hook enters? We may try to run away, to do everything we can think of to get free; but finally, when we get a glimpse of who it is who has caught us, we realize what a blessing it is to be caught so firmly by the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 5. Behold, Arjuna, a million divine forms, with an infinite variety of color and shape.

6–7. Behold the gods of the natural world, O Bharata, and many more wonders never revealed before; behold the entire cosmos turning within my body. These are the things you desired to see.

Now Sri Krishna is beginning to reveal his universal, cosmic form, in one of the most magnificent portraits of the Lord I have seen anywhere in mystical literature.

In the Upanishads, the body is picturesquely called a little city, whose ruler is the Self. Recently I have been looking into quite a few books about the body, the immune system and the senses and all the mechanisms of health and disease, and the more I read, the more apt this image seems. If we could see life as a bacterium might, the body would be as busy as Bombay or New York City. It is a world of its own, so vast that learned societies of bacteria could study it and publish papers on its workings for generations and never suspect either the existence of the Ruler or of anything more vast outside.

In a breathtaking leap of spiritual insight, the Hindu scriptures go on to say that just as this body is only the city we live in during our life on earth, so the whole universe is no more than the body of the Lord. This is the cosmic vision that Arjuna is entering now. It is a beautiful image. When the Lord goes out into the world, he dresses as Sri Krishna, or the Buddha, or Jesus the Christ, and goes about looking just like one of us. But when he goes back home after a hard day’s work, he takes off these forms and wears all the galaxies of the universe as casual garlands about his neck. That is why Sri Krishna is always represented as dark blue in color; it is to remind us that his body is really the infinite vastness of space and time.

To get some idea of the scale of this vision, look at the sheer vastness of the universe. Even at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second, it takes four years for light to reach us from the nearest star. Our own galaxy is more than one hundred thousand light-years across, and yet it is only an infinitesimal part of the universe. How long does it take for light to traverse the universe – assuming that it is possible at all? We can get some dim idea if we remember that some of the stars we see at night may have ceased to exist thousands of years before the light from them reaches our eyes. In looking outward into the depths of space, astronomers remind us, we are also looking backwards into the depths of time, and the light we see from faint stars on a clear night may have set out on its journey before there were human beings on earth to see.

On this cosmic scale, the stars that seem to us to be eternal are not much more long-lived than fireflies on a summer evening. Like all created things, they too have a beginning and an end. Born out of great clouds of dust and gas, they pour out energy over a few billion years and die, often in the fierce throes of a chain of explosions from whose remains new stars will someday be born. This drama has been going on throughout the vast universe for billions of years, and will go on for billions of years more; and the Sanskrit scriptures, echoed by many modern astronomers, remind us that even this is but a single act in the Lord’s drama. Before and after the universe we live in, there stretch an infinitude of universes equally vast in space and time. As one Indian mystic wrote:

Let the Himalayas themselves become

The black pigment from which to make the ink,

And the ocean the bowl to contain it;

Let the whole universe serve as parchment,

And the celestial kalpa tree as pen;

Let this pen be held by Sarasvati,

Goddess of wisdom, and let her write on

Through all eternity: she will not reach,

O Lord of Love, the end of your glory,

Nor find a limit to your dazzling splendor.

SRI KRISHNA: 8. But these things cannot be seen with your physical eyes; therefore I give you spiritual vision to perceive my form as the Lord of creation.

Our eyes, like our other senses, are meant for registering changes in the world outside us. They are fine for letting us know when the traffic light turns red or when it is time to get up in the morning, but when it comes to going beyond change they are completely helpless. That is why in meditation we learn to withdraw all the senses gradually from the world of change. In deep meditation, when concentration on the inspirational passage is almost complete, we do not hear the cars on the road outside or the planes overhead; all our consciousness is withdrawn from the senses in a state of intense awareness within.

When we achieve this kind of concentration, we begin to discover that there is no real barrier between the world outside us and the world within the mind. As one British philosopher has put it, “outside” and “inside” are distinctions that we make mostly out of convenience; in both kinds of experience, outer and inner, what we are really perceiving is the contents and the impressions of our own mind. In other words, we see things not as they are but as we are. As long as our eye is multiple, as Jesus puts it, we see everyone around us as separate, and we cannot help trying to manipulate them when they do not behave the way we think they should. But when our consciousness becomes unified through the practice of meditation, we no longer see a world of separate fragments; we see all creation as one indivisible whole.

“Some people,” Sri Ramakrishna said, “think that God cannot be seen. Who sees whom? Is God outside you, that you can see him with your eyes? One sees only one’s Self.” The vision Arjuna is about to have, in which all of space and time is comprehended in the body of the Lord, is not something he will see outside himself; it is something he will experience in the very depths of his consciousness.

SANJAYA: 9. Having spoken these words, Hari, the master of yoga, revealed himself to Arjuna as the supreme Lord.

10. He appeared with an infinite number of faces, ornamented by heavenly jewels, displaying unending miracles and the countless weapons of his power.

11. Clothed in celestial garments and covered with garlands, sweet-smelling with heavenly fragrances, he showed himself as the infinite Lord, the source of all wonders, whose face is everywhere.

In this supreme vision the Lord reveals himself as having an infinite number of faces, and Arjuna sees the Lord in every face, in every creature. It can fill us with awe to realize that in our parents, our partner, our children, and our friends it is the Lord who is looking into our eyes, listening to us, responding to us. This is why we can learn to love the Lord while living in the midst of family and friends. Once the barrier of self-will falls in any of our close relationships, we will find the One – whether we call him the Christ, Sri Krishna, the Buddha, or Allah – in everyone around us.

Here the Lord appears to Arjuna as the source of miracles, not the least of which is the gift of life itself. Our every breath, our every heartbeat is a miracle; so are the wind blowing in the trees and the sun shining in the sky. We do not have to search the universe for miracles; they occur morning, noon, and night every day of our lives, only our eyes are not open to them. If we were in tune with this continuous miracle of life, we would put an immediate end to conflict – whether in our homes, between races, or among nations. We could not rest in peace until every creature was free from exploitation and violence and the threat of nuclear holocaust. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, “There can be no happiness for any of us until happiness has been had for all.”

SANJAYA: 12. If a thousand suns were to rise in the heavens at the same time, the blaze of their light would resemble a little the supreme splendor of the Lord.

You and I cannot look directly at the sun without damage to our eyes; its power is so immense that a minute fraction of the energy it radiates into space, diffused over ninety-three million miles and tempered by our atmosphere, is enough to sustain all life on this planet. Now we are asked to imagine a thousand of these suns rising at the same time in the depths of Arjuna’s consciousness; his whole being is flooded with light. The intellect lies helpless, unable to grasp the immensity of this splendor; even the imagination swoons. “When the soul looks upon this Divine Sun,” St. Teresa says, “the brightness dazzles it . . . . And very often it remains completely blind, absorbed, amazed, and dazzled by all the wonders it sees.”

Yet even this is still poetry, still understatement. The Lord is the source of all light; every sun, every luminous nebula in the cosmos is just a bead in his necklace. There are quasars, we are told, a million million times as bright as our own sun. The universe is filled with light; it pulsates with the power of the Lord.

The greatest wonder is that this tremendous radiance reflected throughout the cosmos shines within us too. As our spiritual awareness grows, as our separateness goes and our ego dissolves, we will experience a tremendous effulgence spreading throughout our consciousness, which no experience of the senses can ever help us comprehend. But Jesus gives the perfect description: “Thy whole body shall be full of light.”

SANJAYA: 13. There, within the body of the Lord, Arjuna saw all the manifold forms in the universe united as one.

Here we have a glimpse of the mystery of the universe, which fills both mystic and scientist with awe. I get spellbound when I read about some of the discoveries in astronomy and atomic physics and realize that all this is just an infinitesimal part of the glory of the Lord. Even professional astronomers admit that the mind reels before some of these discoveries; the intellect cannot grasp their implications. We cannot even look at our own sun, and here are quasars that are millions of times brighter than our sun. We are told there are neutron stars in the universe where matter is so dense that a tablespoon of it is conjectured to weigh forty trillion tons. When matter gets this dense, the force of gravity is so immense at the core that the star is liable to collapse internally from its own weight, and millions and millions of tons of matter just disappear into a “black hole” in space – a bottomless hole with zero volume. You and I ask, “What kind of a hole is that? Where did all that matter go?” And the astronomers can only shrug; they just don’t know.

Now, in wonder, Arjuna sees that this whole vast universe of incessant change is all one in the Lord. The Gita will express this oneness in the language of poetry, drawing on all sorts of images from Hindu mythology. But the discoveries of science throw light on Arjuna’s experience of unity too. Biologists tell us that every living thing, from a simple virus to a human being, has essentially the same DNA. It is a very personal tie that binds us to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; even the plankton in the ocean are our kith and kin. But the unity extends deeper still, for the elements of life are the very same elements that are found throughout the universe, created in the depths of stars and strewn through space in the explosions of stellar death.

In the language of modern physics, the fabric of space and time, matter and energy, is continuous throughout the universe, from the nucleus of an atom to the farthest galaxy. To a great physicist like Albert Einstein, all forms of matter and energy are interrelated, and every point in the universe – say, an electron in one of the atoms of my hand – is affected by the rest of the universe as a whole. If we could see life at the subatomic level, the material objects we cling to for security would dissolve into patterns of energy, and the universe would be nothing but a sea of light. It is a precise description, but it is the language of Sri Ramakrishna too. On this level, we are at the very threshold of matter. The atomic particles of our everyday world are not fixed or solid; they come and go in and out of existence in the smallest fraction of a second. It is as if the Lord is teasing us in this subatomic world by playing a game of hide-and-seek. He comes and goes so quickly that we can never be sure where he is; no sooner do we think we have caught him than he slips away.

The deeper we probe into the nature of the universe, whether it is the vastness of space or the infinitesimal world within the atom, the more we shall see the glory of the Lord revealed. When I look at pictures taken through an electron microscope or the telescope at Mount Palomar, I don’t see only beautiful, abstract patterns; I see illustrations for the Gita, showing the myriad forms of creation flowing from the Lord. Even the Andromeda galaxy and I have a common bond. In microcosm and macrocosm, the Lord holds all together in his embrace.

SANJAYA: 14. Filled with amazement, his hair standing on end with joy, Arjuna bowed before the Lord with folded palms and spoke these words.

ARJUNA: 15. O Lord, I see within your body all the gods and every kind of living creature. I see Brahma, the Creator, seated on a lotus; I see the ancient sages and the celestial serpents.

Once, it is said, the women of baby Krishna’s village came running to tell his foster mother, Yashoda, that her little boy had been eating sand. Baby Krishna denied everything, but his mother saw the look in his eyes and caught hold of his chin to try to see for herself. Krishna obligingly opened his little mouth wide. There, within that little rosebud of a mouth, Yashoda saw the vast starry sky with its innumerable worlds, and all the creatures that had ever lived and would ever be born. It must have lasted only for a moment, but Yashoda was overcome with fear and wonder, for this was the child she had been scolding and treating like her own.

This is the vision that Arjuna is entering now, which is beyond anything that words can express. Some of the greatest figures in the world’s spiritual traditions have been left speechless by the vision of God. Moses, it is said, returned silent from his encounter on Sinai, though his face was ablaze with the glory of the Lord. St. Paul lay paralyzed for three days and three nights after his vision of light on the road to Damascus. Pascal, a brilliant mathematician and writer, could only set down fragments: “Certitude, certitude; sentiment, joie, paix” – certitude, emotion, joy, peace. And St. Thomas Aquinas, the architect of Catholic theology, said simply after his experience, “All that I have written is no more than straw.” Even the theories of modern physics become poetic when they try to describe the unity of life, and though their images may be more sophisticated than the sages and celestial serpents of this verse, I wonder if they have any more capacity to inform our deeper understanding.

But even if this vision of unity cannot be conveyed through words or pictures, it can be communicated in more subtle ways. It is said that of all the ways of giving spiritual instruction, the highest and most effective is through the living, personal example of an illumined teacher. Such people express the awareness of unity in everything they do, and through a kind of spiritual osmosis, those who love their teacher deeply can absorb this awareness and slowly learn to put it into practice in their own lives. That is why it is said that spiritual awareness is not so much taught as caught. I learned this from my grandmother, who is one of the most accomplished spiritual teachers I have seen or even read about in the annals of mysticism. She scarcely ever spoke about these things, but she was so skillful in conveying her awareness that it was not until much later, when I finally turned to meditation, that I realized that she had been my spiritual teacher all along. Most people have to find a teacher. I was literally born into my teacher’s arms, and even now it fills me with wonder to see how every day I become a little more like her, trying in a small way to live out the awareness of unity which she, in her infinite love for me, implanted in my heart when I was growing up.

ARJUNA: 16. I see infinite mouths and arms, stomachs and eyes, and you are embodied in them all. I see you everywhere, without beginning, middle, or end. You are the Lord of all creation.

In Sanskrit, one of the names of the Lord is Vishnu, ‘he who is everywhere.’ Vishnu has a thousand names, which comprise all together one of the most sonorous of Sanskrit poems, and almost every name is to remind us of the all-embracing, all-pervading presence of the Lord.

It is said that when the suffering of Mother Earth became too great for her to bear, she came to Vishnu, the Lord of Love, and begged him to incarnate himself in a human body to lead humanity back to the unity of life. That is the story behind baby Krishna’s birth, and just as with Jesus and the Compassionate Buddha, there are a number of stories surrounding this event which every Hindu knows from childhood, which help convey in simple language what it means for the Lord to be born among us in human form.

According to the Hindu tradition in Kerala, a baby is not given a name until it is a year old. Then there is a big feast to which all the friends and relatives of the family come to celebrate his or her birth when the name is given. Now, when baby Krishna was born, very much as with the baby Jesus, there was a prophecy that caused the king of the realm to want to take his life. But his parents managed to spirit the baby away to foster parents in the country almost as soon as he was born, and so it is in their home that the naming day celebration takes place. As is traditional, his foster parents, Yashoda and Nanda, invite a great sage named Garga to give their new child his name. Neither Yashoda nor Nanda nor anyone else in the village knows little Krishna’s real nature, but Garga has only to see the baby to realize that he has been asked to give a name to the Lord Himself. He falls to his knees to worship the newborn child, and then he asks the foster mother and father, “What name can I give to a little boy who already has a thousand names?”

It is a beautiful way of reminding us that the Lord is in everyone, that all of our names are his names. It isn’t just a thousand names; that is the poetic way of saying it. He has billions of names, for he is within the heart of everyone on earth. The infinite numbers of arms and eyes in Arjuna’s vision are not the product of an artist’s imagination; in the depths of his consciousness, Arjuna is seeing the Lord of the universe simultaneously wearing the countless masks of all his creation. Ramdas, who is one of the most practical and inspiring mystics of this century, tells us:

Whenever we see any form, we must see not only the external form, but also the indwelling Reality. This is the true vision which liberates us from the sense of diversity and makes us realize the oneness of all existence. This is the message of the rishis. It is not merely in particular holy places and solitudes that we should have this vision, but even in the marketplace and the bazaar we should be able to maintain the consciousness of unity in diversity. We must feel the divine presence always about us.

ARJUNA: 17. You wear a crown and carry a mace and disk. Your radiance is blinding and immeasurable; it fills the universe with light like the fiery sun blazing in every direction.

Even Emily Post would appreciate the way the orthodox Hindu worships the sun; it is a very personal way of saying thank you to him who makes it possible for us to live, to work and play, to go to school, or even to make money. For us he is not just the sun; he is Divakara, “Mr. Daymaker.” We draw our light from him, we draw our heat from him, we get our food from him; all life depends on the continuous miracle of the sun.

Here again, the astrophysicists can help us understand the dimensions of this miracle. Every second of every day for fifteen billion years, they say, 657 million metric tons of solar hydrogen are converted into 652.5 million metric tons of helium through a process of nuclear fusion – the same basic transformation as in the hydrogen bomb. The heckler will say, “Wait a minute; what happened to that other four and a half million tons of hydrogen?” And Mr. Daymaker replies, “That is what gets converted to energy; otherwise my solar furnace can’t give you any heat or light. E=mc², you know; you can look it up in my file.” The accounting is perfect. Everything is taken care of; there is no wastage. In all these millions, even an ounce is taken into account. That’s how I understand those simple words, “He’s got the whole world in his hands.” He has his eye not only on these millions of tons of hydrogen; he has his eye even on the little micrograms. In Hinduism this is the aspect of the Lord that is called Chitragupta, the “cosmic accountant,” where the Lord himself does his own auditing. Sri Krishna is very thrifty; everything must balance. In accounting circles in India there used to be a joke about an auditor looking over some particularly complicated account books where the entry was often GOK – “God only knows.” It is like that. At the end of every day he tells the sun, “What about this, hmm? Four and a half million. Account for it.” And then, smiling to himself, he writes, “GOK.”

In other words, there is nothing superfluous in life. Everything is perfectly dovetailed into a delicate balance of matter and energy that extends throughout the universe, and which is just right for maintaining life here on earth. We look at the sun and take all this for granted; we forget the immensity of this miracle that makes life possible. It is not simply a matter of liberating an incomprehensible amount of energy every second; all this has to be tempered to our needs. The amount of energy released at the core of the sun is so vast that if it were released at the surface, there would be a wave of death that would spread throughout the solar system, destroying all life in its wake. Sir James Jeans, the British astronomer, writes that if we could take a bit of the sun no bigger than a pinhead and bring it here to earth, its heat could kill a person standing ninety-four miles away. To keep things from getting too hot for us, the Lord makes a very clever arrangement. The rays created at the core of the sun, astrophysicists tell us, are softened on their journey to the surface by atoms which play no part in the fusion process. They are the sidewalk superintendents who stand around and make comments; their job is to modulate the gamma rays until they leave the sun at just the right temperature to make life possible on earth.

When astronomers see all this, they too may feel a sense of awe at how delicately everything is balanced. But where the astronomer sees the laws of thermodynamics, the mystic sees the all-pervasive love of the Lord. The mystical poet William Blake declared: “I look through the eye, not with it. When the sun rises, I do not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea; O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, Holy, holy, holy.”

There is no contradiction at all between Blake’s vision and the scientist’s. When I say that even the miracle of the sun is an expression of the Lord’s love, it is not that I think there is someone waving his flute and saying, “Let these hydrogen nuclei fuse and become one!” The Lord is there in the nucleus of each atom, and the laws by which these transformations of matter and energy come about simply express the unity of his creation. If a star could talk, it wouldn’t write poetry about love; it would sing the praises of gravitation. Romantic young stars just a hundred thousand years old or so would be yearning to lose themselves in the immense attraction of a black hole. For them, the unity of life expresses itself in forces like these; for us, it expresses itself in love. The language is different, but the unity is the same.

ARJUNA: 18. You are the supreme, changeless Reality, the only thing to be known. You are the refuge of all creation, the immortal spirit, the eternal guardian and support of all.

19. You are without beginning, middle, or end; you touch everything with your infinite power. The sun and moon are your eyes, and your mouth is fire; your radiance warms the entire cosmos.

20. O Lord, your presence fills the heavens and the earth and reaches into every corner of the universe. I see the three worlds trembling before this vision of your wonderful and terrible form.

21. The gods enter your being, some calling out and greeting you in fear. Great saints sing your glory, praying, “May all be well!”

Arjuna tells us over and over again how he is overcome with wonder at this revelation of the infinite power of the Lord. Scientists sometimes are suspicious when they hear all this ascribed to the power of God, but this is simply because they do not understand what the word God means to those who have realized him. All of us in the modern world have been conditioned to look upon God as something outside us, something other than us; even in our wildest dreams it is not possible to suspect that he is our real Self. This is the core of the mystical experience, and nowhere has it been more beautifully expressed than in the Sufi tradition, where these great Muslim mystics will say that he whom the vast heavens cannot contain is contained within your heart and mine.

In other words, there is no conflict between the vision of a great scientist and the experience of a great mystic, as we can see in the work of a scientist like Einstein who has access to a higher mode of knowing than the intellect. One such figure in modern astronomy is Abbé Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest from Belgium, who hit upon a theory about the origin of the universe that shows not only brilliant intellect but the intuition of genius as well. Lemaître suggested that the cosmos was originally packed into an incomprehensibly dense primeval atom, a kind of “cosmic egg” in which there is neither time nor space – perhaps the way matter in a neutron star becomes so dense that it collapses into a black hole, pulling space and time in after it. It is very much the language of the ancient Hindu scriptures, which talk about Hiranyagarbha or Brahmanda, the ‘egg of Brahman,’ the germ out of which the cosmos grew. According to Lemaître, this cosmic egg exploded to become our universe, and it is still expanding from the force of this explosion.

Now, the question naturally arises, “What made this primeval egg explode?” The scientist, of course, looks for some cause other than the egg, some external force which struck a big blow at this egg and made it explode. But the mystic will say that the power of the Lord is right there in the egg itself – just as it is within everything, from the hydrogen nuclei in the core of the sun to the seed that will grow into a giant tree. When I look at an acorn, though I don’t know much about botany, I know that the power of the Lord is contained in that little seed. That power shows itself not in making a tree appear out of nowhere, but in the seed transforming itself and bursting open to send out a slender shoot that pushes its way upwards to grow into a sturdy tree. Everywhere in that tree there is the expression of the power of the Lord – in the growing branch, in the leaves making food with the energy of the sunlight, in the sap running through every growing part.

Gandhi once said that we may look upon God as dharma, the Eternal Law – very much as a scientist would – or as dharmakartri, the Lawmaker. Because of our intellectual orientation, many of us today have no trouble accepting it when a mystic like the Buddha talks about an unchanging Law that underlies all existence. It is when we talk about a Lawgiver that many people have reservations. Yet either way, it is the same Reality. Sri Ramakrishna goes straight to the heart of the matter by saying God is both personal and impersonal; the Law and the Lawgiver are two aspects of one supreme Godhead. All laws derive from the same unity of life. The laws of physics or chemistry all express various aspects of the unity underlying the world of change, and though the wording of physical laws will vary as our understanding grows, it is the same unity that is behind both physical and spiritual laws.

In other words, the universe is one. There cannot be a number of unrelated laws; the result would be chaos. If there were no underlying unity in life, there could be no order; we could never know what to expect. We could plant an acorn and poison oak might grow; why not? We could throw a tennis ball into the air and it might never come down. There are laws everywhere, in all the phenomena of existence. The mystic would say that all these laws come from the same source, express the same unity. The law of gravity comes from the same source as the principle of Archimedes; Boyle’s Law – it used to plague me as a student – comes from the same source as the law of relativity. How could it be otherwise? One of the most fervent hopes of Einstein was to find an overriding law of nature in which all the laws of matter and energy would be unified. This is very much the driving question in some of the ancient Hindu scriptures, too: “What is That by knowing which all other things may be known?” In samadhi we have direct knowledge of this unity, which is both the source of all laws and the Lawgiver as well.

ARJUNA: 22. The multitudes of demigods and demons are all overwhelmed by the sight of you.

23. O Lord, at the sight of your mighty arms, the multitude of your eyes and mouths, your arms and legs, your stomachs and your fearful teeth, I and the entire universe shake in terror.

24. O Vishnu, I can see your eyes shining; your mouths are open, you glitter in an array of colors, and your body touches the sky. I look at you and my heart trembles; I have lost all courage and all peace of mind.

25. When I see your mouths with their fearful teeth burning like the fires at the end of time, I forget where I am and I have no place to go. O Lord, you are the support of the universe; have mercy on me!

Arjuna has been overcome with awe at the splendor of the Lord; now he describes with horror the grim aspect of the Lord as the destroyer, the power which brings phenomenal existence to an end, whether it is a microbe, a person, or a star. If it is a microbe, the end may come after a few hours; if it is a star, it may not come for billions of years; but sooner or later, as the Buddha puts it, all that has been put together must one day be dissolved.

The Hindu scriptures make this point by drawing a comparison to the monsoon moth, whose life span is only about two and a half hours. After the torrential monsoon rains in South India, thousands of these moths fill the air. They come like the locusts in the biblical plague; you cannot even yawn without running the risk of getting one in your mouth. For just a short while they are everywhere; and then, suddenly, they are gone. Their lives are spent in just a fraction of a day. And the scriptures say, look at the concept these moths must have of time. They don’t want a calendar on their wall; they will say, “What’s the use? What is this ‘month’? We don’t believe there is a month; life is exhausted in two and a half hours. Give us a calendar for just two and a half hours; give us a watch for one hundred and fifty minutes to last us from birth to death.” Every little second would count terribly; every millionth part of a second would be precious to that moth. If we were to try to tell these creatures that a human being lives hundreds of thousands of times longer, they would not even be able to grasp the scope of it. And yet – it is a very grim reminder – our own lives are compared to the lives of these monsoon moths, who come and go in a matter of hours.

At the other end of the scale, there is our own sun – ‘Mr. Daymaker.’ He was born about six billion years ago, and – poor fellow – he will probably go the way of all suns after about ten billion years of age. Among the galaxies they would all say, “What a premature death; the fellow didn’t last long. Here yesterday and gone tomorrow.” It is like the day of Brahman and the night of Brahman, measured in billions of years. We cannot even grasp these things; for us the universe is eternal. But it is just a difference in scale. Just as fifty years from now not many of us are going to be playing baseball or mowing the front lawn, so after a few more billion years the sun will lose its rugged, youthful vitality. Already our Mr. Sun is middle-aged, and gradually, with the passage of time, he will become a solar Falstaff, big and lethargic. He may pretend to be the same boisterous fellow as before, but we would know otherwise. The fire at his core, his prana or life-breath, now about fifteen million degrees Kelvin, will slowly burn lower and lower, and as his temperature drops, life on earth will become impossible. Then he will shrink into what astronomers call a white dwarf, and finally, when his life span of ten billion years is over, he will no longer be a sun; he will be just a lifeless body no larger than the earth, another dead shell floating in space. One astronomer even says that the phenomenon of the black hole is very much like a giant star digging its own grave, falling in, and pulling the grave after it. It is a terrifying picture. According to the Gita, even the universe itself will come to an end. Estimates of its life span begin at forty billion years and go up from there, but eventually Sri Krishna will come as death and say, “Even for you, time is up.”

The wonder of this is that you and I can break out of this terrible cycle to which even the galaxies are subject; you and I can conquer death. This is the promise of all the great religions. We all accept death as inevitable, but there have been spiritual geniuses in every age who dared to challenge death and emerged victorious. Mohammed tells us the secret of this victory in four simple words: “Die before you die.” In the Hindu tradition we have a saying that just as a robber does not kill someone who carries no precious gems or gold, death cannot destroy those who no longer wear the jewels of their selfish desires. We go through life decked with such desires: “I must eat this food, wear that dress, travel to this country, own that kind of car.” It is these unfulfilled cravings that tie us to our physical and mental condition. Then, when the great robber Death sees us, he cries out, “Here is a rich person. So many desires for me to rob!” If we can learn through the practice of meditation to remove all our selfish desires, we will have cut through the obsessive identification with the body once and for all. After that, though our body will come to an end in the course of time, there will be no rupture in consciousness at the time of death. Instead there will be an unbroken awareness of our real Self, the Lord of Love, who cannot be affected even by the last great change called death.

ARJUNA: 26–27. I see all the sons of Dhritarashtra; I see Bhishma, Drona, and Karna; I see our warriors and all the kings who are here to fight. All are rushing into your awful jaws; I see some of them crushed by your teeth.

28–29. As rivers flow into the ocean, all the warriors of this world are passing into your fiery jaws; all creatures rush to their destruction like moths into a flame.

30. You lap the worlds into your burning mouths and swallow them. Filled with your terrible radiance, O Vishnu, the whole of creation bursts into flames.

This is the Lord in his most terrifying form, the personification of death. To those who follow the voice of self-will, who pursue their personal pleasure and profit at the expense of their family and friends, their community and their world, death often comes in the awful form of violence.

Because of years of conditioning, particularly by the mass media, most of us have become caught in a way of life that increases separateness fiercely. Now we find it difficult even to see the connection between our egocentric lives and the violence which threatens us today. But on every level, from international warfare to domestic quarrels, to ignore our unity is to invite social chaos and destruction. Even the ideological differences between two superpowers, for example, sustain the interest in armaments around the globe. We have become so accustomed to discussions of nuclear warfare and its threat to destroy the earth that we hardly raise an eyebrow when we read that there are enough nuclear weapons on alert around the world to kill each person on earth twelve times or more.

In 1960, in constant 1983 dollars, world military expenditures were 344 billion. By 1986 they were approaching 900 billion – 1.7 million dollars every minute. This much buying means a lot of selling, and the big arms sellers are still the United States and the Soviet Union, who hold roughly half of this highly profitable market. Some of the biggest customers, ironically, are the developing countries, who now account for one fifth of the world’s arms expenditures. Since 1963, almost half of this trade has come from the United States and its NATO allies; another third came from the Soviet Union. We seldom think how we cripple these emerging nations by encouraging them to buy weapons. But the money they spend on guns means less food, less housing, and poorer medical attention for people who lack these essentials of life.

When we pursue this trade in armaments, profitable though it may be, the Gita reminds us grimly that we are courting death. This courtship embraces more than the immediate buyer and seller. It includes the manufacturers and intermediaries and even those of us who fail to raise a voice of protest. The reminder is not pleasant, but the Gita has to shock us into seeing the tragic connection between the petty pursuits we follow with such narrow vision and the death and violence that torment our world today.

Fortunately, we have good reason to believe that even problems like the nuclear arms race can be solved if we set our minds to the task. On December 8, 1987, President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev signed the first nuclear arms reduction agreement in history – only a first step, yet a “truly momentous development,” as President Rajiv Gandhi of India acclaimed, for it “vividly demonstrated that given the necessary political will,” obstacles to peace can be overcome. But we should not expect governments to provide that will. We, the people, must insist on it ourselves.

Violence, of course, is not just an international problem. We Americans kill our own family and friends more frequently than do citizens of any other civilized nation. In the drawers, closets, and glove compartments of the United States are over sixty million handguns – part of an arsenal of private weapons that amounts to nearly two hundred million firearms. People use these guns because they are available. Nearly three out of four murders committed in this country are “crimes of passion”: that is, the killing of a family member or a friend in the blind heat of anger, often simply because a weapon was at hand. On the average, 69 persons were murdered by handguns every day in 1980; and in 1981, when President Reagan was shot, one handgun was sold every twelve seconds in the year. Yet we still can’t make up our minds to effect some simple measure to control this gun menace.

This kind of insensitivity to violence will plunge not only you and me into suffering, but our children and grandchildren as well. The Gita compares this to the life of a moth which rushes into a flame. Look at the monsoon moths I mentioned in the preceding verses: only two and a half hours to live, and even that is too long for them; they rush to their extinction in the very first fire they see. After the monsoon rains in Kerala, when the evening sky is so full of those moths that you cannot eat or sleep in peace, people light huge bonfires, and it is a terrifying sight to see thousands on thousands of these creatures throwing themselves into the flames to die. Now, in the depths of his consciousness, Arjuna sees all the warriors who are with him on the battlefield, uncles and cousins, friends and enemies, throwing themselves like moths into the jaws of death.

The more we build our civilization on selfishness and separateness, the Gita is telling us, the more we live like these monsoon moths. When we go on pursuing pleasure and prestige and power, we become blind and deaf to everything around us. Then we forget that the stream of life runs out quickly, as a rain-swollen river runs out to sea. This is why the great spiritual teachers of all religions tell us not to postpone the spiritual life for even one day; every day lost is one we cannot regain. We are moving closer to death with every moment that passes, and once this realization penetrates our hearts, we will begin doing everything we can to go beyond death here and now.

ARJUNA: 31. Tell me who you are, O Lord of terrible form. I bow before you; have mercy! I want to know who you are, you who existed before all creation. Your nature and workings confound me.

Arjuna is shaken to the depths of his being by this vision of the destructive power of the Lord. Just like you and me, he stammers, “I don’t understand; you are the Lord of Love, but all I see now is a terrifying vision of birth and death, suffering and destruction. Have mercy upon me.” He has glimpsed the central truth of existence – all life, from the simple virus to the vast galaxy, is marching from birth to death, to birth and death, again and again.

Death is not an event which takes place on a particular day in a particular place. It is a process that starts the day we are conceived in our mother’s womb, and every moment that passes brings us that much closer to the day this body will be taken away from us. Even within us the cells of the body are dying every second; it is only the limits of our vision that keep us from seeing that the body we identify with is in a constant state of change. That is why the Book of Common Prayer tells us in haunting words, “In the midst of life we are in death.” We can escape this process only when we cure ourselves of the fatal disease of ignorance which makes us identify with the body.

In other words, as Sri Ramakrishna puts it, life is a hospital; the Lord has sent us here so that we may cure ourselves of separateness and become whole. When we encounter violence and hostility, we have an opportunity to improve our condition by remaining steadfast and secure. Unfortunately, we all too often worsen things by retaliating; then we suffer a relapse and have to be readmitted to intensive care. But finally, once we have suffered enough, we realize that retaliation only spreads the highly communicable disease of self-will to everyone around us.

The Compassionate Buddha’s Four Noble Truths are a perfect diagnosis of our sickness by a supreme physician. After a careful examination the Buddha gives us the First Noble Truth, that we are seriously ill. Then he gives us the Second Noble Truth, that the cause of the disease is the fierce thirst of self-will. It is a worldwide epidemic, and no one has any immunity against it. At this point, thoroughly shaken, we ask, “What are my chances, doctor? Please give me a straight answer; I can take it.” And the Buddha, full of mercy, gives us the Third Noble Truth: “The prognosis is very bright, if you will follow this eight-course treatment.” The Fourth Noble Truth is the Buddha’s prescription for a complete cure, the Noble Eightfold Path: right knowledge, right purpose, right speech, right conduct, right occupation, right effort, right attention, and right meditation. It is a prescription we can follow right in our own home, by practicing meditation, turning our attention away from personal desires, and trying constantly to serve the welfare of everyone around us.

SRI KRISHNA: 32. I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world. Even without your participation, all the warriors gathered here will die.

These are words that have made the Gita known the world over. It was this verse that came to Robert Oppenheimer’s mind as he watched the first atomic bomb explode across the desert sky. The devastating word used here is kala, which has a double-edged meaning – ‘time’ and ‘death.’ Time is death; time is separateness. Its all-devouring jaws are following us always, closer than our shadow. As we grow older and our family and friends begin to pass away, we see how relentlessly time is pursuing all of us; every death should remind us of the imminence of our own. People with whom we played and laughed – they are no more. Great figures who have walked across the stage of life – they are no more. Dynasties and empires have returned to dust. It is only because of the mercy of the Lord that you and I survive each day. Those who are sensitive to this have tremendous motivation to take to the spiritual path and slay this monster of time and death.

Arjuna’s experience in this verse is not poetic fancy. It is a realistic vision of what time means, which in a smaller way can come to anyone. A friend of mine in India, a great devotee of Krishna, was once in the midst of a group of people who had gathered on a religious holiday to sing songs in praise of the Lord. At such times her intense devotion used to bring on a deeper state of consciousness. Something must have triggered such a change, because she suddenly looked around in horror; before her eyes, the people there turned into bare skeletons.

The vision lasted several moments. It terrified her so deeply that it haunted her for years. When she confided it to me, she called it the most dreadful thing she had ever experienced. I replied, “It’s probably the greatest thing you could have experienced. Instead of blocking it out, try to remember it always.” Her whole attitude was changed; instead of a curse, she began to understand it as a blessing.

This is the same service my grandmother rendered me. Even when I was a boy, just entering my teens, she knew how to open a little window in my consciousness and tell me, “Look carefully. If you can see far enough you’ll see Yama waiting for you, just as he is waiting for us all.” I have to admit that I did not appreciate this at the time. I could not understand why I, among all the children I knew, should be singled out to be made aware of this dreadful destiny. And Granny seldom tried to explain herself; she planted the seeds of this awareness without ever using words. Though all my cousins were shielded from such experiences, she loved me so passionately that she opened that window onto death for me again and again. More than anything else, she wanted me to understand that nothing is more important than remembering death – not to live in fear, but to make it our first priority to go beyond time and death here and now.

Even now I marvel at the artistry of her teaching. Whenever someone died in our large ancestral family, relatives and friends would gather around a central courtyard in my ancestral home where the grim ceremonies of a funeral are performed. Most of the other boys and girls would not be present on such occasions. But my grandmother insisted that I stand right in front and watch carefully what was taking place. The body was bathed and taken from the courtyard, and as it was carried away a heartbreaking chorus of hundreds of voices would break out in lamentation. Often it was old people crying, but when it was children my heart would almost stop beating at the sound. Then Granny would tell my uncle, “Now take him to the funeral pyre.” I didn’t know or guess that this was what great love means. All I knew was that I had to go and stand in the southern courtyard while the body was lowered onto the pyre, to watch the most harrowing scenes I have witnessed in my life.

This fate is waiting for everyone. “I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.” For most of us these are only words; for my friend they suddenly became a vivid, shattering experience, burned like Arjuna’s into her memory. Far from morbid, I think nothing could be more positive. It is no blessing to be able to forget death, to pretend it does not exist, while we go on playing with the froth and foam of life. It can be the greatest of blessings to remember that every moment is precious, and a lifetime not too long.

My mother is in her late eighties now, a ripe age by any standard. She came to live with us at Ramagiri the same summer we moved in, when work on the first chapter of this book had just begun. Now, in the eleventh chapter, I open the door to her bedroom every morning and stand for a few minutes to watch her sleeping. So much love floods my heart, and so much sorrow. In her younger days she was lissome and graceful, the most beautiful woman in our village. On the Blue Mountain, even in her sixties, she used to walk four, five, six miles a day. Now she can barely walk, scarcely get up or drink her tea. Often it is a great effort for her simply to open her eyes to see that I am there.

If you and I have the good fortune to move so close to ninety, this is the state our bodies are likely to be in too. It is love that makes me say this. It is love that makes me remind myself and those around me to keep this verse in mind every day; it will give a clear goal in every activity, bring complete dedication, strengthen you greatly in the hour of temptation. In my own sadhana, whenever I was tempted by some strong physical urge, the recollection of my granny’s teaching would suddenly well up in my consciousness. I would see death standing by my side, and that temptation would turn to ashes. Similarly, when you feel angry, jealous, hostile, or depressed, remember; this is waiting for us all. There is no time to quarrel, no time to feel resentful or estranged. There is no time to waste on the pursuit of selfish pleasures that are over almost before they begin. Time runs out so soon! In our twenties and thirties we have ample margin to play with the toys life has to offer. But we should find out soon how fleeting they are, no more permanent than writing on water; for the tides of time can ebb away before we know.

Not long ago my mother was reminding me of one of my great-­uncles, a contemporary of my granny. I stood in awe of him as a child because of his immense physical strength and courage. His mother was like that too, and when she shed her body at a very advanced age there was an elaborate funeral, lasting by Kerala tradition for fifteen days. On the fourteenth day the ashes were taken from the funeral pyre and carried to a river about six miles from my village to be immersed. We had a huge procession, including caparisoned elephants. And on the way back this great-uncle of mine, physically so strong, had a heart attack and passed away on the spot.

We couldn’t believe it. He had seemed indestructible to us. Here we had just finished fifteen days of mourning, and now there was another fifteen. It made me understand that even when we are healthy and strong and vigorous, in the prime of our lives, death can come at any moment. A venerable monastic friend of mine on the Blue Mountain used to say, “Don’t ever put things off until tomorrow. How do you know you will be here tomorrow?” It was not rhetoric for him. It was a simple awareness that we live from moment to moment by God’s grace, and that none of us knows when Yama will come to cut the thread of our lives.

“This life of separateness,” says the Compassionate Buddha, “may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.” It is good to bear in mind how evanescent life is so that we do not postpone the voyage across this sea of separate existence called samsara in Sanskrit, the ceaseless process of birth and death.

SRI KRISHNA: 33. Therefore arise, Arjuna; conquer your enemies and enjoy the glory of sovereignty. I have already slain all these warriors; you will only be my instrument.

34. Bhishma, Drona, Jayadratha, Karna, and many others are already slain. Kill those whom I have killed. Do not be afraid. Fight in the battle and you will conquer your enemies.

In the Mahabharata, the epic in which the Gita appears, Karna, Jayadratha, Bhishma, and Drona are famous heroes among the forces ranged against Arjuna. For you and me, these forces are the forces of darkness, destructive powers which we can observe in our own lives. These particular warriors are mentioned because they were supposed to be invincible; yet, as the Lord reassures Arjuna, even the most destructive forces of violence can be brought to an end, because they violate the unity of life.

None of us, therefore, can consider himself exempt from the responsibility of joining battle against these forces. I have always had a great deal of reverence for Mahatma Gandhi because of the way he chose to take upon himself this gravest of responsibilities. Gandhi taught us that evil has no existence of its own; it is when we connive at evil that it exists. When we all withdraw our support from the powers of destruction, we discover that they are an enemy which has already been slain. This is the principle of satyagraha, ‘clinging to truth,’ which is very inadequately translated as “nonviolent resistance.”

Gandhi’s discovery of satyagraha took place when he was still a young, ineffectual lawyer in South Africa, when he was thrown out of a train at night in the high mountain town of Maritzburg because of his brown skin. This must have happened to hundreds before him, but in Gandhi’s case it released a tremendous force within him; it whispered in his ear that he could draw upon his deepest resources, through the grace of the Lord, to bring this conflict between races to an end. Many years later, when he was asked what was the most creative experience of his life, Gandhi told the story of that night he spent shivering in the cold of the Maritzburg station, when he dedicated his life to eradicating the barriers which human selfishness has built up.

Gandhi was thrown into prison many times, but he was such a cheerful prisoner that he won the love and affection even of his jailers. While in prison in South Africa he made a pair of sandals especially for General Smuts, the man whose duty it was to oppose him in his struggle for justice. Later General Smuts returned the sandals as a gesture of friendship, saying, “I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man.” Incidents like these, which became commonplace in Gandhi’s life, showed us that there is no one who cannot respond to the person who is not trying to manipulate others for his own prestige, profit, or power. When we are with such a person all our defenses are lowered; we relax and begin to trust him, and gradually we too develop the conviction that goodness cannot fail to win and evil cannot fail to lose.

SANJAYA: 35. Having heard these words, Arjuna trembled in fear. With joined palms he bowed before Krishna and addressed him stammering.

ARJUNA: 36. O Krishna, it is right that the world delights and rejoices in your praise, that all the saints and sages bow down to you and all evil flees before you to the far corners of the universe.

37. How could they not worship you, O Lord? You are the eternal spirit, who existed before Brahma the Creator and who will never cease to be. Lord of the gods, you are the abode of the universe. Changeless, you are what is and what is not, and beyond the duality of existence and nonexistence.

38. You are the first among the gods, the timeless spirit, the resting place of all beings. You are the knower and the thing which is known. You are the home of all; with your infinite form you pervade the cosmos.

In his joy, Arjuna tells Sri Krishna that he sees the entire cosmos rejoicing in the sovereignty of the Lord. “You are the refuge of all creatures,” he says; “all beings in the universe can find their rest only in you. You are everything that has been and will ever be, and the beginning and end of all creation.” This is the experience attained by men and women of God in every age and every tradition who have dared to tread the razor-edged path that leads from death to immortality. Saints and sages like Sri Ramakrishna or Shankara, St. Teresa of Ávila or Jalalu’l-Din Rumi, the Ba’al Shem Tov or Jacob Boehme, all use very similar words to tell what they have experienced with every cell of their being. The Italian mystic Jacapone da Todi says:

The doors are flung open. United with the Lord, it possesses everything that is in him; it feels that which it never felt; it sees that which it never saw; it has that which it never thought could be; it tastes that which it never tasted. Being freed from itself, it now has attained perfection.

It is such a thrilling vision that even hearing about it makes us long for it. When we meet somebody who has actually been granted this awareness, our longing becomes intense; we light our torch from such a person, for he or she is burning with love for the Lord.

ARJUNA: 39. You are Vayu, god of wind, Yama, god of death, Agni, god of fire, and Varuna, god of water. You are the moon and the creator Prajapati, and the great grandfather of all creatures. I bow before you and salute you again and again.

Arjuna is prostrating himself at the feet of Sri Krishna, whom he now sees everywhere, in everyone. His voice is trembling in awe as he tells the Lord: “You are the whole cosmos, yet you are beyond it; you are in my grandparents and my parents; you are in every creature and in all the forces of nature.” Not only is the Lord in you and me, he is in the air, in the seas and rivers, in the life-giving power of heat and light and all the other forces of the universe. Existence is an unbroken ­continuum; only the scale of its parts is different. That is why we suffer so when we damage or exploit anything in nature. As John Muir, the great naturalist, observed, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”

Thomas Vaughan, the English mystic, tells us simply: “Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the nature of Light and the way of the children of it.” There is much the same image in Jewish mysticism, in which the life of the man or woman of God is said to be a ladder between heaven and earth. In all creatures, the God-conscious person sees the presence of the Lord.

Only when we become insensitive to this unity of life do we take the lives of other creatures wantonly. This is not only in matters like hunting and fishing; often we do not pay attention even to the needs of our pets. People take along a dog to entertain them during their summer vacation and then abandon it when they go back home, or think nothing of locking up a cat for life within an apartment in the city. Instead of denouncing such people, which will only alienate them, we can show persuasively how animals need to look to us as their protectors. My young friend Josh once went about this in a very winning manner. When he was in the third grade, his Boy Scout troop was planning a program for Thanksgiving. Josh championed the cause of the turkey. Then someone suggested that they represent the Pilgrim Fathers fishing. The other boys thought this was a harmless pastime, but Josh got up and bravely said, “Fish are God’s creatures, too.” It speaks very highly of his friends that they could appreciate his point of view, and the Pilgrim Fathers were finally represented as gathering nuts – which, after all, are an excellent source of protein.

ARJUNA: 40. You are behind me and in front of me; I bow to you on every side. Your power is immeasurable. You pervade everything; you are everything.

In Hindu society there is an age-old custom which prescribes the direction in which a person should lie when sleeping. One of the many names for the Lord is Dakshinamurti, ‘he who faces south,’ and in this tradition it is considered improper to lie with one’s feet towards the north, because that is the abode of the Lord.

Now, some centuries ago in the state of Tamil Nadu there was a great woman mystic named Andal, who once had to spend the night in the home of some orthodox devotees. When the woman of the house came to wake her up, she found her guest lying in the wrong direction. The woman was shocked and confused; she didn’t know whether to call this great saint’s attention to her mistake or not. But Andal, seeing her confusion, explained gently: “In what direction shall I point my feet that they not point towards the Lord? If I point them to the north, that is his home, but if I point them to the south, is he not there also? It is the same with east and west. I would sleep standing on my head rather than displease him, but he is above and beneath us also. Where shall I place my feet that they will not point towards the Lord?” It is the same language as in the Koran, in a verse which was a favorite of Mahatma Gandhi’s: “Unto Allah belong the East and the West; wherever you turn, there is Allah’s countenance.”

In the climax of meditation called samadhi, when the mind becomes still and the ego is silenced, we shall see the Lord everywhere around us, enthroned in the heart of every creature. In the Hindu tradition we have countless stories to help us understand this experience. One such story is about Hanuman, an extraordinary monkey who is mentioned in the Hindu scriptures to remind us that the Lord dwells not only in human beings but in monkeys too. Hanuman is completely devoted to Rama, an incarnation of the Lord. He has to undergo all sorts of trials which test and reveal his love for Rama. Once, sent on a dangerous mission by Rama, he is captured and taken before Ravana, the ten-headed demon who personifies the ego in all its multiplicity. Ravana’s courtiers gather to humiliate Hanuman, but the monkey’s devotion to Rama is so great that he remains undaunted. Personally, he tells the assembly, he doesn’t mind being relegated to a seat on the floor, but as Rama’s representative he deserves to sit in a chair. The only response he gets is laughter. But Hanuman prays to Rama to save his representative from this humiliation, and his faith is so complete that the Lord is able to make his tail longer and longer, until finally it coils up into a tail-throne on which Hanuman sits high above the courtiers.

Ravana is terribly impressed by Hanuman’s devotion to Rama. To test him further, the demon king takes a pearl necklace from his neck and offers it to Hanuman to try to buy his allegiance. But the monkey only bites one or two pearls and then throws the necklace out the window. The courtiers are outraged, but Hanuman’s indifference only makes Ravana more intrigued. He asks his prisoner, “Don’t you know that necklace was worth a king’s ransom?”

Hanuman replies, “For me everything is worthless if it doesn’t enshrine the Lord. I bit the pearls and saw that the Lord was not there.”

Ravana asks, “Then just where is the Lord?” And Hanuman, in answer, rips open his chest and reveals his heart where Rama is enshrined in all his splendor. It is a simple story, but it shows in a very vivid way the capacity of all of us to enter into the depths of our consciousness and see there the source of all joy and all security who is the Lord.

ARJUNA: 41–42. Sometimes, because we were friends, I rashly said, “Oh, Krishna!” “Say, friend!” These things I said casually, openly. Whatever I said lightly – whether we were playing or resting, alone or in company, sitting together or eating – if it was disrespectful, forgive me for it, O Krishna. I did not know the greatness of your nature, unchanging and imperishable.

Now comes a moment of great tenderness, when Arjuna begs Sri Krishna to forgive him for forgetting his friend’s divine nature. How perfectly Arjuna represents us, for the instances he mentions in daily living are the very ones in which we too forget that the Lord is within us all. As Jesus says, “Truly I say unto you, as you did it unto one of the least of these, you did it unto me.”

As the supreme source of love, the Lord would never have us beg, “Will you kindly consider my application for forgiveness and arrive at an early decision?” Real love knows no reservations or contracts. Most of us may not find it too difficult to ask the Lord for unreserved forgiveness, but we usually find it hard to forgive others when they have offended us. For me this is the perfect test of love: can I forget my own hurt feelings and ensure their welfare, no matter how he or she has treated me? If I can, my love for that person is secure. My friend, or partner, or son, or daughter will be so certain of my desire to do what is best for them that even if I do something wrong, they will not hold it against me; they will know that I am incapable of doing anything to harm them. This trust is the basis of perfect relationships anywhere, particularly between man and woman.

The marvel of forgiveness is this: when we can completely forgive someone the tantrum they threw this afternoon, loving them even a little more because we see they really need our support, we are at the same time beginning to forgive ourselves for every tantrum we have ever thrown at others. You can see how practical a step it is to take. All those other people may long since have forgotten what we did and said – maybe some of them didn’t really care much in the first place. But deep in our own minds, every single storm has left its mark. Every storm has burst a little hole in consciousness through which angry thoughts, angry words, and angry acts gradually seep into our daily life. In this sacred act of forgiveness we are mending thousands of these little holes. It relieves us of part of the tremendous burden that all of us carry within, healing our consciousness and taking the pressure of anxiety off our mind and our nervous system. And it makes us much less likely to get provoked the next time someone rubs us the wrong way. This is the miracle forgiveness works.

St. Francis of Assisi will say that when we have lost this capacity to forgive, we have lost the greatest source of joy in life. Once, in wintertime, it is said that Francis and his disciple Brother Leo were making an arduous journey on foot through the cold, snowy countryside of Italy. They had been walking along in silence for some time – probably repeating their mantram – when Brother Leo turned to St. Francis and asked him, “How can we find perfect joy?”

Francis stopped for a moment and then replied, “Brother Leo, even if all our friars were perfect in their holiness and could work all kinds of miracles for others, we still would not have perfect joy.”

He turned to walk on, and Brother Leo ran after him. “Then what is perfect joy?”

St. Francis stopped again. “Even if we knew all the languages of men and of angels, if we could speak with the birds of the air and the beasts of the field and know all the secrets of nature, we still would not have perfect joy.”

He started to go on again, but Brother Leo caught at his sleeve. “Then, Father Francis, what is perfect joy?”

“Even if we could cure all the ills on the face of the earth, we would still not have found perfect joy.”

Now all Brother Leo’s enthusiasm was aroused. “Then please, Father Francis,” he pleaded, “what is the secret of perfect joy?”

“Brother Leo,” St. Francis asked, “aren’t you cold and tired and hungry from our day’s walk through the snow? Well, suppose we now go to that monastery across the field and tell the gatekeeper how weary and cold we are, and he calls us tramps and thieves, and beats us with his stick, and throws us out into the winter night and slams the gate in our faces. Then, Brother Leo, if we can say with love in our hearts, ‘Bless you in the name of Jesus,’ then we shall have found perfect joy.”

Most of us, of course, do not have to forgive on such a grand scale, but all of us have little resentments which we can forgive every day. Often these resentments are buried so deep in consciousness that we are not aware of the extent to which they undermine our security, drain our vitality, and interfere with our personal relationships. Here it is not very effective to analyze the wrongs we have suffered and then forgive them one by one. If I may say so, often the “wrongs” are not wrongs at all; it is only that our self-will has been violated, not infrequently because we failed to understand what the other person did or said. Instead, it is much more effective not to dwell on the past at all. Whenever a little thought arises and wants to talk over something in the past, don’t talk to that thought, don’t argue with it; simply repeat the mantram. This is really what forgiveness means, because when we can withdraw our attention completely from the past, it is not possible to be resentful; it is not possible to be oppressed by either past wrongs or past mistakes. All our attention is in the present, which means that every moment is fresh, every relationship is fresh, and there is no possibility of staleness or boredom.

ARJUNA: 43. You are the father of the universe, of the animate and the inanimate; you are the object of all worship, greater than the great. There is none to equal you in the three worlds. Who can match your power?

44. O gracious Lord, I prostrate myself before you and salute you. As a father forgives his son, or a friend a friend, or a lover his beloved, so should you forgive me.

In the simple, sweet words of a child, Arjuna goes on asking the Lord to forgive his lapses: “You are my father; doesn’t a father forgive his child when he makes a mistake?” It is a beautiful example of the parent-child relationship which each of us can have with the Lord.

Sometimes – especially when the neighbors are saying “Report him to the police” or “Did you hear what your daughter did?” – parents become insecure and confused. They weigh the pros and cons of the situation and ask themselves, “Does this deserve forgiveness? Are there special grounds here for giving them a second chance?” Driving bargains like this does not result in forgiveness. No child should have to wonder what the chances are that we will forgive them. If there is love in our relationship, our son or daughter will be able to come and say, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I know you love me so much that you’ll keep me from getting into this trouble again.”

My granny had a unique gift for standing by people when they got themselves in trouble and at the same time teaching them not to get into that trouble again. One of my cousins was much more daring than the rest of us – and who doesn’t have a cousin like that? He was always finding situations to put us into where his daring would show itself. Now, all of us used to play soccer until late in the afternoon, and after the game we liked nothing better than to run to the river for a swim. But by the time we started for home it would already be dusk, and dusk is the time when all kinds of snakes love to come out and take their walks. The raised paths between the paddy fields used to be crawling with them. In the fading light it was very difficult to distinguish snake from grass from stick, and without knowing you could easily step on one of these creatures and be bitten before you had a chance to jump. Not only that, some of these snakes are poisonous. Yet this daring cousin of mine loved to lead us home at dusk along these paths, knowing full well we were frightened out of our little wits.

My grandmother had warned me many times of the extreme danger of doing this, and she had told me repeatedly to come home before dark. Her warnings, unfortunately, fell on deaf ears; I continued to follow after the others. But one evening after our swim, just as we got to a part of the path where snakes loved to make their home, whom should we come upon but my granny, standing there barefoot by the side of the path just waiting for me. There was no telling how long she had been standing there, and from her expression I understood that she was prepared to wait there for me every night if necessary. She didn’t need to say a word. I was cured. I never came home after dark that way again.

ARJUNA: 45. I rejoice in seeing you as you have never been seen before, yet I am filled with fear by this vision of you as the abode of the universe. Please let me see you again as the shining God of gods.

46. Though you are the embodiment of all creation, let me see you again not with a thousand arms but with four, carrying the mace and disk and wearing a crown.

The Bible tells us, “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The image of the Lord with thousands of arms, the embodiment of all creation, can fill us with awe when we realize that it means he is everywhere; there is no way we can escape from him. He is in our parents, our children, our husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend, even in our dog or cat. It means that whatever we do, wherever we go, we need to be very vigilant about not causing distress to any other creature, because the eyes of the Lord are always right there watching us.

Even when we are alone, we haven’t succeeded in escaping those watchful eyes, because the Lord is within us too. As the Upanishads put it, he is our real Self. Even when our little self is sleeping, the Seeing Eye is watching all our thoughts not because he is a busybody, but because he is everywhere and never sleeps. This is the aspect of the Lord which the Sanskrit scriptures call Sakshi, the Internal Witness. The traditional derivation of this word is from sa, ‘with’, and akshi, ‘eye.’ Sakshi is ‘he who is all eyes,’ sitting right inside us and everyone else, impartially taking note of everything we say and do and even what we think.

I remember how awestruck I was when I began to grasp the implications of this. As a schoolboy I was under the impression that God was floating about in space, issuing mandates and expecting us to carry them out. Most of us boys reassured ourselves that the Lord’s secret service agents were not too efficient, that he would never know about many of the things we did. When we were up to something that he would not have been too pleased about, we would say, “Why bother him with these details?”

Then, one day, a few of us boys got together and made a pact under a particular mango tree to rob a neighbor’s mango grove. It wasn’t a very malicious plan; we were young, we were all fond of mangoes, and it seemed to us that our neighbor had many more of them than he would ever be able to use. But since we knew he would probably not agree with this conclusion, we all took a solemn oath not to reveal our plans to anyone, and not to speak to anyone among us who let our secret out.

Somehow my granny managed to find out about all this before I even reached home. When she met me at the gate she asked, “Little Lamp, is there any particularly significant event in which you took part today?”

“Not to the best of my knowledge, Granny.”

“Did you happen to see anyone under the mango tree this afternoon?”

“Well, we did walk home that way.”

“What happened, Little Lamp?”

Silence.

“Who was with you?”

More silence.

Then she said, “It doesn’t matter if you conceal something from me, or your mother, or your aunt and uncle. But there is somebody inside you who is watching everything you do, and who hears everything that you say and think.”

Hearing this from her lips made it official. You may be able to hide from your neighbor or keep your dog from following you to the library, but how do you hide from someone who is watching everything you do from the inside? I felt I couldn’t do anything without the divine snooper finding out. After that, whenever I was with one of my friends who was prone to mischief, I could always hear her saying, “There’s somebody watching. There’s somebody listening.” If he would wink for just a split second, we could get away with something that he wouldn’t like to see. If he would doze off for a moment, we could make a remark without his knowledge. But he is there all the time, and we have no choice but to act in such a way as to win his quiet little nod of approval from within.

Once we begin to realize this, we become extremely alert about everything we say and do. But this does not mean we should always be listening to our own thoughts or thinking about what we are going to do next – quite the opposite. Instead of brooding on ourselves, which is what listening to our thoughts means, we become acutely aware of how the things we think and say and do may affect others. After all, the same Self that is watching us from within is watching in the other person too. If a chance remark of ours happens to hurt someone else, it is not enough to say, “I didn’t mean any harm.” We should be so fearful of hurting people that even if a clever remark is rushing off our tongue, we can stop it at the gate and take a look at it from the other person’s point of view. If it is beneficial – which is not usually the case with clever remarks – we can stamp its visa and let it out. But if there is any chance that the remark will be misunderstood, we should be able to swallow our cleverness and say something else instead. It is better to say something banal but harmless than to be clever at someone else’s expense. If worst comes to worst, we can always write the remark down and send it to the Reader’s Digest; they may publish it and send us five dollars.

In this connection, there is an Arabic proverb that has appealed to me for its practicality. The tongue, the Arabs say, should have three gatekeepers. When words arise, the first gatekeeper asks, “Is this true?” That stops a lot of traffic immediately. But if the words get past the first gatekeeper, there is a second who asks, “Is it kind?” And for those words that qualify here too, the last gatekeeper asks: “Is it necessary?”

Most of us, if these gatekeepers were awake, would find very little to say. Here I think it is necessary to make exceptions in the interests of good company and let the third gatekeeper look the other way now and then. After all, a certain amount of pleasant conversation, when we are sincerely interested in the other person and what he or she has to say, is part of the artistry of living. If we go through life mum as a clam, it doesn’t contribute much towards seeing the Lord in those around us. But where the first two gatekeepers are concerned, I think it is very important to keep them alert always – not indulging in gossip of any kind, not speaking ill of anyone, and especially not taking part in arguments or acrimonious discussions, which only agitate everyone involved. If we can learn to be watchful like this about what we say as well as what we do, we are well on the way towards identifying ourselves with our true Self within.

SRI KRISHNA: 47. Arjuna, through my grace you have been united with me and received this vision of my radiant, universal form, without beginning or end, which no one else has ever seen.

48. Not by knowledge, nor service, nor charity, nor rituals, nor even by severe asceticism has any other mortal seen what you have seen, O heroic Arjuna.

If we ask any mystic in any of the great religious traditions how the vision of God comes about, they will all give us the same reply: it is not because we are worthy of it, but because the Lord is so merciful. All that we can do is to make our best effort to purify our minds and hearts through the practice of meditation and its allied disciplines. Finally we will reach a point where we can go no further, where we have done everything we can to remove the last impediments of the ego which stand between us and the Lord. Then, with faith that wells up from the very depths of consciousness, we say to the Lord, “It doesn’t matter if I don’t have a glimpse of you. I want only to love you with all my heart; I expect nothing in return.” Rabia, a tremendous woman of God in the Sufi tradition, exclaims:

Lord, if I love you out of fear of hell,

Throw me into hell.

If I love you for the sake of heaven,

Close its gates to me.

But if I love you for the sake of loving you,

Do not deny yourself to me!

When we can say this to the Lord with complete love – whether we call him Sri Krishna or Allah, the Divine Mother or the Buddha or Jesus the Christ – it is only a matter of time before we will be united with him in the form we cherish most. Anyone who has reached this state is God-conscious.

In all the annals of mysticism, East and West, there is no finer inspiration than the unanimous testimony to this miracle of grace. The Imitation of Christ overflows with it:

O Lord, how entirely needful is thy grace for me, to begin any good work, to go on with it, and to accomplish it. For without that grace I can do nothing; but in thee I can do all things when thy grace doth strengthen me.

St. Teresa of Ávila puts it in wonderfully practical terms:

However much we may practice meditation, however much we violate our self-will, however many tears of devotion we shed, we cannot produce this blessing; it is given only to whom God wills to give it. We are His; may He lead us along whatever way He pleases.

And the Sufi mystic Jalalu’l-Din Rumi sums it up beautifully:

It is not we who shoot the arrow; we are only the bow. The archer is the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 49. Do not be troubled; do not fear my terrible form. Let your heart be satisfied and your fears dispelled in looking at me as I was before.

The Lord is not only love, he is also terror. In the Hindu tradition, this other face of the Lord is expressed by the law of karma, and we can see the fearful effects of its workings all around us today. In the twentieth century, we are reaping all that we have sown. The wars which this century has seen, which have cost so many millions of lives and brought so much sorrow and destruction, have not been inflicted upon us by anybody from outside. The destructive forces in life are not only outside us; they are within us too, in the very depths of our consciousness. All of us are involved in the fearful course our world is taking today. That is why I say so often that just to live is to be responsible – not only for what we do, but for what we fail to do.

To take just one example, there is a saying in my mother tongue that it takes two to get married and two to quarrel. It takes two to trade arms also. If the United States is exporting eight billion dollars worth of armaments, then other countries are importing eight billion dollars worth of arms from us – which means a lot of people who are involved in manufacturing, trading, transporting, stockpiling, and deploying American instruments of war. Every American shares responsibility for this deadly trade. I am not saying that other nations do not share this responsibility; they do. But I live in this country, not in France or the Soviet Union, and I believe it is the stronger party who must take the first step. As our awareness of the unity of life deepens, we see more and more how far-reaching are the consequences of all our actions. You or I may not have put a gun in an angry man’s hand, but if we are involved in the manufacture or sale of guns, if we fail to oppose these arms deals or to support gun control legislation, we are implicitly involved when any gun is used.

But there is a very positive aspect to the law of karma too. Just as it is we who have got ourselves into this situation, it is still within our reach to pull ourselves out again. Even though the debit side of our ledger may be red with entries, with scarcely a mark on the credit side at all, there is no need to be despondent. All that is necessary is to stop making entries on the debit side and throw ourselves heart and soul into adding entries to our credit. In this verse, Sri Krishna is reassuring Arjuna by telling him not to be oppressed by the destructive forces he has seen, but to devote his life to revealing the Lord of Love in his own life.

One of the most practical aspects of this is that it does not matter if the entries are large. Most of us do not have occasion to make large sacrifices, and if we wait for the opportunity to make a really big entry on the credit side, we may still be waiting when the cosmic auditor decides to close the books. What is important is to begin where we are and do the best we can. Even on the international level, we do not need to be in a position of fame or power in order to begin making a contribution to world peace. Often I think the world’s problems can be solved more effectively by many little people acting together than by presidents or parliaments or corporations.

To begin with, we can begin to make our opinions heard. There is no need to worry about how many people will listen. If our words are true, they have to have an effect; it is only a matter of time. Remember Lincoln’s words about government by the people and for the people? They still hold true today. Everyone from Capitol Hill to our local community center is interested in a calm, thoughtful, practical presentation. We can all write letters, and we can talk with our friends and neighbors and encourage them to write letters too. Those with speaking talent can address groups in their communities, and anyone with a flair for writing can put together an article for a magazine or take advantage of one of our biggest forums, the Letters to the Editor page of local and national newspapers. When friends get together for bridge or bowling they can give part of their time for letter-writing; it can be every bit as enjoyable.

Then, second, we can refuse to be a party to violence in any way, no matter how indirect. Many industries and occupations, for example, are involved in the making of arms; many others are involved in their development and sale. If even a small proportion of us withdraw our support from this machinery of violence, these problems could be brought under control.

SANJAYA: 50. Having spoken these words, the Lord once again assumed the gentle form of Krishna and consoled his devotee, who had been so afraid.

ARJUNA: 51. O Janardana, having seen your gentle human form my mind is again composed.

In a moment of infinite tenderness, the Lord reveals to Arjuna that He who contains all the galaxies is still none other than Sri Krishna, his beloved companion and guide. Arjuna breathes a sigh of relief, and in his joy he calls Sri Krishna by a very sweet name: Janardana, ‘he who intoxicates people.’ Most of us think that intoxication is something that comes through drugs or drinking, but these changes in consciousness are artificial. They are prompted by external circumstances, and when the circumstances change, we are left wide open to depression. The joy Arjuna experiences, the joy of being united with the Lord, is permanent.

After attaining this state of union the mystic lives in the continuous presence of God, seeing and serving him in all around. John Woolman, the American Quaker, describes in memorable words how this awareness came to him:

I saw a mass of matter of a dull, gloomy color between the North and the East, and was informed that this mass was human beings, in as great misery as they could be and live; and that I was mixed up with them and henceforth I must not consider myself as a distinct or separate being.

Woolman’s life reminds us that when, by the grace of the Lord, we attain this state of illumination, we cannot just tear up our identification cards, sit back, and put our feet up on our desks. The Lord saves his most difficult work for those who have become united with him. It is true that the person who has reached the summit of human consciousness wants nothing more of life than to remain on the spiritual Himalayas, and may be tempted to stay there for eternity. But there are rare men and women who attain these heights and look back upon the plains of the earth to see millions of us crawling through life like ants. They want to live on this Mount Everest of bliss, but every time they close their eyes to the misery below, something in them says, “How can I bask in this happiness when my brothers and sisters are trapped in suffering?” Fortunately for us, these mystics have learned how to make the arduous journey back into the world of change and multiplicity, so that they can show us how we too can put an end to sorrow.

It is said that even the Compassionate Buddha, on the night of his enlightenment, faced this temptation to withdraw from life and its misery. Mara, the tempter, had tried every trick in his book to prevent the Buddha from attaining illumination. Finally, having realized that he could not distract him with sensual temptations, Mara tried a clever psychological ploy. “Blessed One,” he said, “I admit that you have found the perfect joy of nirvana. Why not remain in this state of bliss, instead of going back to a world of selfishness and suffering? When you go back, who is going to understand you? Who is going to strive as you have striven?” It is a heartbreaking question, which comes to every mystic who attains the vision of God. But after a long pause the Compassionate Buddha replied with infinite resolution, “Perhaps there will be a few to listen to me, and believe in me, and follow what I say.”

This is all the man or woman of God expects. They do not hope for a meditation revolution sweeping from Alaska to the tip of Chile; when just one person attains Self-realization, the whole world benefits. As the Hindu mystics say, “When the lotus blooms, the bees come looking for it.” When the love of God blossoms in anyone’s heart, people will be drawn there, for everyone is looking for the permanent joy and security such a person offers.

The trip down from the spiritual summit is fraught with difficulties, for it involves learning how to be in the midst of the world without being of it. In order to reach people and touch their hearts, you must live among them and participate fully in life, yet remain aware every instant of the Lord within you and within all those around you. This is why spiritual living is so challenging. But when the going is rough, you have only to open your heart to be strengthened by the melody of Sri Krishna’s flute or the tender image of Jesus. Even though the world outside may be overcast by a pall of violence and suffering, the temple within remains lit in radiance always.

SRI KRISHNA: 52. It is extremely difficult to obtain the vision you have had; even the gods are always longing to see me in this aspect.

53. Neither knowledge, nor austerity, nor charity, nor sacrifice can bring the vision you have seen.

54. But through unfailing devotion, Arjuna, you can know me, and see me, and attain union with me.

As Jesus reminds us, it is only the pure in heart who see God. It is only the pure in heart who are capable of complete faith, which is what it takes to see the Lord everywhere around us always.

In the Hindu tradition we have beautiful stories showing the power of such faith, which is often dramatized as characteristic of a simple child. One of these stories is about a boy named Haridas, whose mother was a great devotee of Gopala, the youthful Krishna. Every day Haridas had to walk to school through a forest inhabited by all kinds of wild animals. The journey frightened him so much that he asked his mother what to do. “Don’t be afraid, Hari,” she replied. “You have a big brother, Gopala, who lives in the forest. All you have to do when you pass that way is call his name and he will come and escort you to school.”

Haridas had never heard about this older brother before, but he believed his mother’s words completely. The next time he entered the woods he called out, “Gopala! Gopala!” At first no one appeared, but the boy’s faith was so great that he just went on calling and calling. After a while, out from behind a tree stepped a handsome young man in a yellow silk dhoti, wearing a peacock feather jauntily in his rich black hair. “What’s all the shouting about?” he teased. The two became good friends, and from that day on Krishna appeared every time the boy called, and went with him as far as the edge of the forest. Haridas was never afraid in the woods again.

One day, however, the boy came walking home from school very slowly, with his head drooping. “There’s a feast tomorrow,” he told his mother, “and the teacher asked us all to bring something to eat. But we’re so poor that I don’t think I’ll have anything to take.”

But Hari’s mother was unperturbed. “Don’t worry,” she said; “just ask your brother tomorrow for some yogurt for you to take.”

The next day Hari arrived at school with a little bowl of yogurt, and when they all sat down to eat, Hari’s yogurt was passed around with all the other dishes. It was just a small bowl, and there should have been scarcely enough for three or four. But no matter how much was taken from it, the bowl was never empty.

Naturally, the teacher became quite interested in this phenomenon. “Hari,” he asked, “where did you get this bottomless bowl?”

“From my older brother, Gopala, who lives in the woods.”

“But you don’t have an older brother,” his teacher objected. “Come on, now, tell me the truth.”

But Hari, of course, only stuck to his story.

Finally the teacher decided to accompany the boy home that afternoon and meet this mysterious “older brother” Gopala, who handed out miraculous, unending bowls of food. But in his heart he still thought the boy was lying. They reached the woods and Hari called out, “Gopala! Gopala!” Sure enough, Krishna appeared around the bend of the path, looking quite natty in his silk dhoti and peacock feather. Hari waved and cried, “Hi, Gopal!” Then he turned to his teacher and said, “See, there is my older brother. Now will you please excuse me so I can run home to tell my mother about the feast?” And without waiting for a reply, he hurried off into the forest. But the schoolteacher was left standing there feeling rather ridiculous, because he could not see anyone at all.

It is a simple story, but it illustrates the power of complete faith. When we come to have this kind of unquestioning trust in the Lord within us, without any kind of selfish reservation for ourselves, there is no end to the inner resources that will flow into our lives.

Most of us, of course, do not begin the spiritual life with this kind of devotion. But love for the Lord is not something that descends miraculously from the skies; it can be fostered and deepened immensely through our own effort. At present, very little of our love is likely to be flowing to the Lord. Most of it is flowing to all sorts of other things down other channels towards money, or pleasure, or a new sports car or quadraphonic stereo set. In some cases, our vital capacity has been flowing down these channels for so long that they have been cut very deep. Then, when the time comes to dam them up and divert the love in them to flow towards the Lord, we feel we are standing there throwing pebbles into the Grand Canyon.

Here it is necessary not to become depressed by the immensity of the task, but just keep on throwing in the pebbles. They may not seem like much, but after a while they all add up. Take the problem of overeating. A handful of Brazil nuts may be a small thing, and no one would deny that once in a while they are not likely to do anyone any harm. But every time we pass up a snack, our will becomes a little stronger; we have thrown one more rock into the canyon. After a while, when we learn to do this freely, every rock we throw in will precipitate an avalanche, and soon – often before we even realize it – the Grand Canyon of that particular craving may be completely filled.

But there is another very practical suggestion I can make here. It is necessary to dam up the old channels down which our love is flowing, but if we do nothing but block the flow, there is always the danger that the dam may break or the water may overflow. So instead of giving all our attention to the rather negative work of throwing rocks, we can do our best throughout the day to dig a new channel straight to the Lord in those around us – by being patient, by being loyal, by always keeping our eyes on their welfare rather than our own. For a long, long time this new channel may seem terribly dry, but if we just keep digging, it will soon begin to drain off a little of the love that is now flowing down other channels. Finally it will become so deep that all our desires will be unified in a vast flood of love for the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 55. Whoever makes me the supreme goal of all his work and acts without selfish attachment, who devotes himself to me completely and is free from ill will for any creature, enters into me.

For a few great men and women of God, who are capable of total devotion to a divine incarnation, seeing God may mean an actual vision. In the Christian tradition, for example, St. Francis of Assisi was blessed with visions of Jesus the Christ, and in India Sri Ramakrishna saw the Lord as the Divine Mother. But while the idea of seeing visions and hearing angelic voices may capture our imagination, I would like to present a much more practical interpretation of what it means to see God. As Sri Krishna tells us in these magnificent verses, the man or woman who performs all actions as an offering to the Lord, without a trace of selfish attachment or ill will, is aware of the Lord always. In our own age, Mahatma Gandhi is a perfect example of what this kind of awareness means. With his characteristic candor, Gandhi once said that he had seen no lights, heard no voices, and witnessed no visions. But Gandhi was nonetheless a man of immense spiritual awareness. He was able to work tirelessly for the welfare of all those around him – not just of those who were for him, but of those who were opposed to him also – without any thought of his own comfort or prestige, disarming his opposition not through force but through the power of his love.

This is the vision of the Lord which we can cultivate everywhere, all the time. Whenever we are able to forget our own petty satisfactions in working for the welfare of the whole, whether it is for our family, our community, or our world, we are becoming a little more aware of the Lord. Whenever we are able to remember that what hurts us hurts others too, and are able to refrain from unkind words and deeds and even thoughts, we are becoming a little more aware of the Lord. Whenever we are able to respond patiently and positively to others even if they are hostile to us or rub us the wrong way, we are becoming a little more aware of the Lord. So when Sri Krishna tells us about devotion, he doesn’t mean a private relationship between us and the Lord; he means the whole of our relationships with every living creature.

When you are always aware of the unity of life, you see the Lord in every living creature. Then you welcome every opportunity to serve others, and you become incapable of doing anything at their expense. To put it more personally, you see everyone as dear to you; every child is your child, and every dog is your dog. I don’t think anyone has ever put it more beautifully than the Compassionate Buddha, when he tells us that we should love and protect every man, every woman, every child, every creature on earth, the way a mother loves and protects her only child.

In this final verse of chapter eleven, the Lord gives us his promise that if we devote ourselves to him completely – whether we call him Krishna or Christ, the Buddha or Allah or the Divine Mother – we will be united with him without fail, entering into his wholeness to become one with the indivisible unity he has revealed. As Jesus says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except ye abide in me.”

If we keep our eyes on this supreme goal all the time, our life will be full of meaning; every decision we make will be significant to the whole. Every morning we will renew our decision not to live for ourselves but to do what adds to the welfare of everyone, and once we have learned to make this decision we can live in any country or any society and give a good account of our lives. Of course, everyone does not make the same kind of contribution. Some are doctors or nurses, some are teachers, some are mothers or fathers. But whatever our place in life, each of us has a contribution to make that can be made by no one else. Each of us can learn to apply the changeless values of selfless living to his or her own life, and because the Lord dwells in every one of us, none of us need ever be diffident about our capacity to leave the world a little better than we found it.

There is a story from the folklore of India that illustrates this point effectively. On the first day of the sun’s creation, people expected to see it shining in the sky forever. No one knew that the sun had to dip into the water in the evening for a twelve-hour bath so that it could rise refreshed in the morning. So on the first evening of creation, everyone was terrified to see the sun about to set and the darkness beginning to spread across the world. They didn’t know what to do. Then one little person stood up and said, “I’ll light a candle.” Someone else added, “I will too.” Here, there, everywhere, millions of people started lighting candles, and soon the whole world was filled with light again.

This simple little story shows the importance of every person on earth, no matter how insignificant our lives may appear to be. Ordinary though we may be on the surface, within the heart of each of us lie tremendous capacities for love and service, and if we can keep our eyes always on the Lord of Love, there is no problem on earth too dire for ordinary people like you and me to solve.