ARJUNA: 1. Of those who love you as the Lord of Love, ever present in all, and those who seek you as the nameless, formless Reality, which way is sure and swift, love or knowledge?

Arjuna has just been granted the vision of the Lord’s universal form. Now, overwhelmed by love for Sri Krishna, he is ready to do anything to be united with him forever.

This intense longing is the keynote of any genuine mystical experience, and we hear it echoed in the writings of the men and women of God in all ages and all traditions. In Hinduism it is beautifully expressed in a scene between Sri Krishna and the lovely village girl named Radha. Radha is passionately in love with Sri Krishna, and her intense passion represents the heart’s longing for union with the Lord.

The scene opens with Radha entering the glade where she and Sri Krishna had often wandered lost in love. Now he has gone, and tormented, she searches everywhere for him until finally all her other desires are consumed in the intensity of her love.

Then, from far off, she hears the haunting notes of Sri Krishna’s flute. Slowly the music comes closer. At last she sees him, and Radha is transported with joy. But only for a moment: just as quickly as he came, her Beloved disappears again, leaving her alone once more in the renewed anguish of desolation.

In the Western tradition, St. Teresa of Ávila uses almost the same image to explain her own experience:

We can compare this kind of union to a tryst, because it is over in the very shortest time. All giving and taking have now come to an end, and in a secret way the soul sees who this Spouse is that she is to take. By means of the senses and faculties she could not understand in a thousand years what she understands in this way in the briefest space of time. But in that one short visit her Spouse, being who he is, leaves her worthier than before to join hands with him in union; and the soul, for her part, becomes so fired with love that she will do anything not to thwart this divine betrothal.

It is to deepen our love, to unify our desires, that the Lord gives us this fleeting taste of the joy of union. Once we taste this joy, all we want is to be permanently aware of him in everyone, everywhere, every minute. And here Arjuna, fresh from his experience of unity, asks a very practical question: “How can I best attain this state, through knowledge or through love?” It is a question with far-reaching implications, because it involves a very basic issue: what are we, as human beings, and what can we become?

This is not just a philosophical issue; it affects every aspect of our lives. Our upbringing, our relationships, our attitudes towards the environment, our physical and emotional well-being are all conditioned by the assumption that the basis of human personality is physical. In scientific language, personality is a product of our genetic makeup, shaped in part by the environment we encounter as we grow up. Deep in our consciousness, whether we think about it or not, this is the picture to which all of us subscribe: our character has already been determined, and we have no choice but to accept ourselves the way we are.

This belief has tragic consequences; it limits our outlook everywhere to the lowest common factor of existence. As William James says, it is like having the whole human body at our disposal and going through life moving only our little finger. We don’t even suspect that there is a body; we think this one little finger is all we have.

Here I like to remember the example of Albert Einstein, whose theories revolutionized the physical sciences. When he was asked how he discovered relativity, Einstein replied simply, “By questioning an established axiom.” In the same way, this chapter of the Gita is going to question our concept of the human personality, and therefore the basis of our civilization.

The challenge is simple: we are not what our genes are; the body is. We are what we think. Conditioned behavior may be dictated by our genetic makeup, but when we get below the surface level of consciousness and get hold of the thinking process itself, we can go beyond conditioning and change our personality completely.

Up to now, in previous chapters, I have been trying to show that there is no conflict between scientific knowledge and spiritual wisdom. There can be no conflict, because any investigation of nature is an inquiry into the unity of life. There is no better example than Einstein’s theories of relativity, which – to use the words of C. P. Snow – “quietly amalgamated space, time, and matter” in the search for the underlying unity of nature. But no matter how far its investigations proceed, science can never go beyond the physical world of finite objects and passing events, which is just the surface of reality. As Spinoza puts it, “The finite rests upon the bosom of the Infinite.”

This applies not only to the world of space and time, matter and energy; it is equally true of the human personality. There too, with our physical orientation, we see only the surface and mistake it for reality. But unfortunately, very few of the important problems in life – those which threaten our health, our happiness, our relationships, our very survival – can ever be solved on the physical level. More than that, when we try to apply a physical solution we are all too likely to make such problems more acute, because we are usually dealing not with the cause but with the symptoms.

The other day, for example, I was reading about how physicians sometimes deal with compulsive overeating by making a surgical detour around some of the organs of digestion. The underlying assumption is that there is nothing else that can be done. From the mystic’s perspective, there is always something more that can be done – in this case, actually to go beneath the surface of consciousness and undo the compulsion to overeat. But even to understand that this is possible, we need a wholly different concept of human nature. To use Spinoza’s image, the biochemical level is only the surface of personality. Our real Self, the Atman, is at the very core of consciousness; and if we can get below the surface, we can change our personality at will.

This is in full accord with the principles of genetics; it is simply a larger picture. Recently I saw a physiology textbook that compared the genetic code to a movie film, unrolling through our lives with every interior event predetermined. The rationale is that brain neurons, like other cells, have their special properties coded by our genes. From this, many scientists conclude that the patterns of thought and personality are written into our genetic code. As long as we identify ourselves with the body and are subject to biological conditioning, this may be valid. But to repeat, we are not what our DNA is. Genetics may limit how tall we can be, but it can’t limit the stature to which we can grow spiritually. If we can change our way of thinking, many processes of the brain can be modified – not only the production of the behavior-related neurotransmitters and hormones, but perhaps even which portions of the DNA are expressed in certain cells. It is as if each DNA molecule had a secret key of its own: “You can change the expression of these genes through the practice of meditation.”

If our lives were on film, the genes would only be stagehands; the ego is the director. The mind and senses get the supporting roles, and thousands of distractions run about as extras to make up for the lack of plot. This is the first reel, and if we could see it clearly, most of us would walk out.

In meditation, however, we get hold of the camera and turn the directing over to the Atman. The supporting cast is the same, the makeup artist and set designer are the same, but we get a new script and a new star. Even biologically, it means that we have become a different person: the genetic material is the same, but the person is wholly transformed. In the language of mysticism both East and West, we have been born again. As Eckhart says, “The old man is dead and the new man is born; the pauper is dead and the prince is born.”

SRI KRISHNA: 2. For those who set their hearts on me and worship me with unfailing devotion and faith, the way of love leads sure and swift to me.

In India there is a story about a villager who wanted to learn to meditate. For several weeks, following his teacher’s instructions, he repeated the mantram Om and tried to fix his mind on the formless Absolute. But his mind did nothing but wander. Finally he went back to his teacher and complained, “Sir, I just can’t keep my mind on the Absolute. I don’t know what it’s like.”

The teacher got the hint and decided to take a more practical approach. “All right,” he said, “what is it that appeals to you most deeply?”

With some embarrassment the villager replied, “My cow.”

“Very well,” said the teacher, “go and meditate on your cow.” That is one of the skills of a good spiritual teacher; he always knows how to begin where you are.

A few days later the teacher decided to look in on his new student. To his surprise, the man hadn’t come out of his meditation room for three days. His teacher pounded on the door. “Open up!” he commanded. “What are you doing in there?”

There came a faint answer, a little like a bellow: “Meditating.”

“Come out at once,” the teacher repeated. “I have some instructions to give you about moderation.”

“Sir,” came the reply, “I can’t come out. My horns are too big to fit through the door.”

This is the basis of meditation: we become what we meditate on. Whatever we constantly dwell on shapes our desires, our decisions, and finally our destiny. And the mystics of both East and West draw the same conclusion: then we become what we love.

In this sense, every one of us has been meditating for a long time. The problem is that we have no control over what we meditate on. To take a negative example, look at what happens over a period of years to people whose love has been captured by money. At first they may show only a tendency to be greedy. But if they dwell on making money, that desire starts to condition their ways of thinking. Making a profit comes easily to such people, for the simple reason that they don’t really see anything else. As the Buddha would remind us, we don’t see with our eyes. We see with our mind, and here the mind is always thinking about money. If they see a redwood grove, they think, “That’s a dollar a board foot!” If they see the Grand Canyon, they want to dam it up and turn it into a resort. And the tragedy is this: after many years, they won’t be able to think of anything else. They will be so preoccupied with profit that they won’t be aware of the needs of family or friends or society. They may even be willing to work at jobs that are harmful to others, such as manufacturing cigarettes or armaments, just to make a few more dollars. In a sense, it is no longer realistic to expect them to be otherwise; they just can’t see any other way. This is the immense power of thoughts, which few of us even suspect.

But all this has a positive side too. Just as we stunt ourselves by dwelling on some private, personal satisfaction, we can grow to our full stature by giving our love to an ideal that embodies the perfection of human nature.

The annals of mysticism are full of examples of this, but I know of none more appealing, more human, than that of St. Francis of Assisi. He was born into a well-to-do merchant family, and though he must have been a sweet-tempered young man, his mind seems to have been full of no more than poetry and music and the romance of the Crusades. But when his heart turned to Jesus, his desire to become like Him was so passionate that it transformed and transfigured him completely. As G. K. Chesterton has said, if you find the Jesus of the Gospels unapproachable, if you find it hard to believe that the Sermon on the Mount can actually be practiced by a human being, you have only to look at Francis, the perfect image of his Master.

If this is difficult to understand, it is because most of us have no idea of what love really means. Look at how the word love is used today, not only in the mass media but by some of the most respected people in every profession. It shows how unreal our world has become; everything is a matter of biology. If someone says, “Two people are embracing each other; they are making love,” we consider that an intelligent statement. But if I were to see someone being patient in the face of provocation and say, “That person is making love,” people would think it was a quaint example of a professor from India mixing up his English idioms. How thoroughly we have turned life upside down! What is untrue is universally accepted, and what is true cannot even be understood.

When I first came to this country, I gave a talk on the spiritual life to a group of teenage girls. In those days practically no one had heard of meditation, so I centered my remarks around something in which girls of that age are always interested: personal relationships. The young president of the club listened very carefully, and when I had finished she said, “You have used the word love a lot, but not the way we are used to hearing it. Will you please tell us what love means to you?”

I like that kind of direct question very much, and I told her: “When I say I love a person, it means only one thing: that person’s happiness, that person’s welfare, means more to me than my own.”

She looked around at the others. “Well, girls,” she confessed, “I guess that means none of us has ever been in love.”

It was a thoughtful observation, for this is a concept of love that does not even occur to most of us today. To the mystics, love has very little to do with sentimental or physical attraction. I don’t think anyone has described it better than St. Paul:

Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth. . . .

Now, in the traditional interpretation, the message of this chapter of the Gita is to love the Lord. But I don’t think it is any exaggeration to say that the meaning is simply to love. The reason is simple: even to love another person completely, consciousness has to be united.

Look at the universality of mystical language East and West. In Hinduism, the relationship between God and creation is said to be advaita, ‘not two’. In Christianity, all mystics would concur with St. Paul’s eloquent exclamation: “Not I, not I, but Christ liveth in me.” In other words, lover and Beloved are one. And if we can cast our eyes to the summit of human nature, isn’t it the same even between individuals? “Here are my duties, here are yours. This is the boundary line. If you stay on your side, I’ll respect you; but if you cross over, you’re an invader.” Wherever people go their separate ways like this, there can be no love; there is scarcely a relationship. The very nature of love is not to have qualifications or reservations at all.

When I talk like this people sometimes object, “I’ve never spent a day like that, much less a lifetime! If that’s what love means, I don’t think I’m capable of it.” I have never accepted this statement from anybody. Every one of us can learn to love. Naturally, we all start with imperfections: self-will, self-centeredness, demands and opinions of our own. But there is no need to throw up our hands as so many are doing today and say, “Let us be separate and have a relationship;” it is not possible to do both. Instead, we start where we are – somewhat selfish, somewhat self-willed – but with a deep desire to relate lovingly to each other, to move closer and closer together. It requires a lot of stamina and many years of hard work, and there will be anguish in it as well as joy. But immediate consolation: we don’t have to wait until our love is perfect to reap the benefits of it. Even with a little progress, everyone benefits – not only those we live with, but ourselves as well.

This is what the Gita means by the way of love. It can be practiced in all relationships, but a loving relationship between man and woman provides a particularly good context. There the desire for union is already present. It needs only to be nurtured, so that every day you love each other a little more.

The Sufis have a vivid image to illustrate this, which I can elaborate from my own experience. In some parts of Muslim society, it is still not uncommon to see women wearing the veil. I first saw this at close quarters when I was teaching on a campus in Central India, where the women students would sometimes sit together behind a common veil on one side of the room. This veil aroused great curiosity: all the boys wanted to see who was behind it. You could hear the girls’ bangles jingling and now and then a soft ripple of laughter, and none of my best quotes from Shakespeare could compete with those delicate sounds.

At first the veil looked quite opaque. But as I looked with more concentration, I began to make out silhouettes behind it. Then I could see some of the features, and finally, as I learned what to look for, I was able to recognize the faces on the other side.

This is what happens in personal relationships on the way of love. At first there is just an opaque curtain between us and the one we love. The Lord is there, but we cannot see him – in fact, at the beginning we scarcely know what to look for. Gradually, however, our concentration deepens. Now we sense that there really is someone behind the curtain, and every once in a while we glimpse a silhouette. As vision becomes clearer, we seem to see the beautiful eyes of Sri Krishna or Jesus or the Divine Mother behind our partner’s eyes – and the more we see, the deeper is our desire to see more.

In the end, all our other desires merge in the immense longing to have no barrier between us and our real Beloved. Only one veil remains, and it is so thin that every morning we go to meditation knowing that this may be the day that we are united with the Lord at last. We may wait like this for years, but finally, without warning, the veil falls at last. Then, in the rapturous language of St. John of the Cross, we merge in the Beloved and are transformed: “Amado con amada, amada en el amado transformada.”

Most of us think of love as a one-to-one relationship, which is all it can be on the physical level. But there is no limit to our capacity to love. We can never be satisfied by loving just one person here, another there. Our need is to love completely, universally, without any reservations – in other words, to become love itself. It can take our breath away to glimpse the vastness of such love, which Dostoevsky describes beautifully in The Brothers Karamazov:

Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God. When you perceive this, your understanding of this mystery will grow from day to day until you come to love the whole world with a love that includes everything and excludes nothing.

This is what it means to realize the unity of life, and in these troubled times, when turmoil has invaded our society, our homes, and even our hearts, I don’t think there is any more precious attainment. That is why this chapter of the Gita is so acutely relevant today. As one Hasidic rabbi put it, the community of the living is the carriage of the Lord. Where there is so little love that the carriage is torn asunder, we must love more, and the less love there is around us, the more we need to love to make up the lack.

A man once came to Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem and said, “My son is estranged from God; what shall I do?” The Ba’al Shem replied simply, “Love him more.” This was my granny’s approach to every problem, and I know of no more effective or artistic or satisfying way to realize the unity of life in the world today. It is an approach to life in which everything blossoms, everything comes to fruition. As Sri Krishna will go on to explain, Arjuna’s question about love and knowledge is really unnecessary. Where there is love, everything follows. To love is to know, is to act; all other paths to the Lord are united in the way of love.

SRI KRISHNA: 3–4. As for those who seek the transcendental Reality, without name, without form, contemplating the Unmanifested, beyond the reach of thought and of feeling, with their senses subdued and mind serene and striving for the good of all beings – they too will verily come unto me.

This is the other concept of God: not a personal ideal that can be loved, but the formless, impersonal Ground of existence. It is an idea that many people subscribe to intellectually today, in the belief that faith in a personal God is either superstition or intellectual weakness. But jnana yoga, the ‘way of knowledge,’ has nothing to do with the intellect. The intellect can operate only in a world of duality, where there is subject and object, knower and known. Here we must soar beyond all divisions into a realm of absolute unity, where the separate personality merges completely in this formless, infinite Reality and all distinction between knower and known disappears. In this supreme state, called nirvikalpa samadhi in Sanskrit, there is no one present to take notes. Sri Ramakrishna used to tell about a doll made of salt who went to measure the depth of the ocean. As soon as she waded into the water, she dissolved – and then, Ramakrishna asks, who was left to tell of the ocean’s vastness?

In this realm all trace of distinction disappears, so it is not surprising that we find mystics of all epochs and all traditions struggling to describe their experience in nearly identical language. Meister Eckhart in thirteenth-century Germany and Shankara in eighth-century India often sound interchangeable; and Dionysius the Areopagite, probably a Christian monk writing at the end of the fifth century, uses terms reminiscent of this very verse:

Then, beyond all distinction between knower and known, . . . the aspirant becomes merged in the nameless, formless Reality, wholly absorbed in That which is beyond all things and in nothing else. . . . Having stilled his intellect and his mind, he is united by his highest faculty with That which is beyond all knowing.

To the intellect, which has to classify, the different traditional approaches to God – called, in Hinduism, jnana, bhakti, karma, and raja – are watertight compartments. But in fact, these are not separate paths. They are different aspects of the same spiritual experience, which flow together in life and practice.

To see this, all we have to do is look at those men and women who have followed the path of knowledge – not at their philosophy, but at their lives. Historians, for example, like to remember Shankara as a towering intellectual, the architect of an imposing philosophical structure that expounds his direct experience of the transcendent, impersonal Brahman, “One without a second.” But this same uncompromising nondualist was also an ardent lover of the personal God who poured out his devotion to Shiva and the Divine Mother in magnificent poetry, sometimes as a simple child of the Lord:

You are the Mother of the universe;

Why should I wonder at your love for me?

Even if his faults cannot be counted,

A mother never abandons her child.

Shankara died at the age of thirty-two, but in that short lifetime he traveled all over India, tirelessly revitalizing its spiritual heritage – founding monastic orders, establishing monasteries, teaching successors, and leaving behind a great body of writing to pass on the fruit of his spiritual experience. In such a life, love, selfless service, and spiritual wisdom all fuse; each path comes to perfection in the same soul.

In the language of Hinduism this underlying Reality, called Brahman, is said to be advaita, ‘not two.’ It cannot be described, because there is nothing from which It can be distinguished. It is “what is and what is not,” from which, as Shankara says, both “words and thought recoil.” Still, to inspire us, the first part of these verses tries to convey a little of the stark majesty of this infinite, eternal Reality. Aksharam: it is inexhaustible, imperishable, without either beginning or end. Anirdeshyam: we cannot point to it or define it, because it is neither outside nor inside; subject and object are one. Avyaktam: it is unmanifest; it cannot be seen. Who could be the seer? Yet, sarvatragam: it is everywhere; it is Existence itself. And finally, acalam: unshakable, beyond all change.

These are inspiring words, because as the Upanishads say, “Tat tvam asi:” this is our real nature. We were never born; we shall never die. But at the same time, it gives us some idea of the awesome challenges of jnana yoga, which I do not hesitate to say is beyond the capacity of all but a handful of people in any age. It is all very well to go about saying, “I am not my body, I am not my mind,” but for most of us, how much effect would this have on consciousness? We would still get angry, still harbor resentments, still be subject to doubt and vacillation. As long as it is only an intellectual effort, this sort of exercise has nothing to do with jnana. In fact, there is a danger to it. Far from shrinking the ego, it can actually swell it and make us more acutely aware of ourselves.

In the second half of these verses we get the qualifications we need to practice jnana yoga. They are really stiff. Samniyamy ‘endriyagramam: first, there has to be complete self-control. There should be no clamor from the senses at all, and if they do happen to ask for something that is not beneficial, we should be able to withdraw our desires without a hint of protest. Sarvatra samabuddhayah: no likes and dislikes, no personal entanglement in the world of sense objects. Friend and enemy should be equally respected. Sarvabhutahite ratah: our only joy should be in serving the welfare of others, without any thought of our own individual satisfaction. To me, it is all very much like the escape clauses you find in small print on the back of a contract: “If you can practice this yoga, you don’t need it; if you need it, you won’t be able to practice it.”

In this connection, Sri Ramakrishna tells a story about the gopis or cowherd girls who were Sri Krishna’s companions in Vrindavana. In these stories the gopis represent all of us, the aspiring human soul; and they are passionately in love with Sri Krishna, the Lord of Love.

One day, Ramakrishna says, a jnana yogi came to Vrindavana. Seeing that the gopis were completely devoted to an incarnation of God, the man began to teach them about Brahman, eternal and immutable. One by one, the girls fell asleep. When they woke up again they explained gently, “Holy one, we don’t understand any of this. All we know about is our Krishna, whom we can see and enjoy and love.”

Ask any young man whether he would rather have a date with Miss Principle of Femininity or with his girlfriend. Miss Femininity is perfect, but she is also formless – in fact, she doesn’t have any attributes at all. If I know anything about men, that chap will tell you candidly to keep your Miss Perfection for yourself; he would rather go out with the girl he loves. She may have freckles and an unpredictable temper, but she has a hand he can hold, eyes he can gaze into, and a smile that lightens his heart. And Sri Krishna says now gently, though we may pride ourselves on our intellect, it is the same with us. With our physical conditioning, how is it possible for people like us to aspire to disembodied consciousness? It is not enough that the Atman be eternal and immutable; it must also be packaged attractively in a human form. This is the miracle of divine incarnation, and when the Lord comes to life like this in a human being, it can capture our imagination and unify our dedication completely. St. Bernard gives the same explanation within the Catholic tradition: “The main reason for the invisible God incarnating himself physically in the midst of human beings was to lead them who can only love physically to the healthy love of his physical appearance, and then, little by little, to spiritual love.”

SRI KRISHNA: 5. Yet hazardous and slow is the path to the Unrevealed, difficult for physical creatures to tread.

A few centuries ago, a mystic from Kerala summarized the problem of jnana yoga perfectly: “Jnana is for those whose senses have come under control.”

That is the rub. For those who meet the qualifications – giants like Meister Eckhart, Shankara, or Anandamayi Ma – jnana yoga is a perfectly adequate way to Self-realization. These are people who are already free from the clamor of the senses, so they scarcely identify with their bodies at all. But if you believe in your heart that you are essentially physical, Sri Krishna says dryly, you are going to find this path very tough going.

Unfortunately, there are very few in the world today who do not fall into this category. Virtually all of us believe that we are the body, and if you doubt it, all you have to do is look around and ask a very simple question: how do we spend our time? When we want to celebrate, do we meditate or do we eat? When we get a vacation, what do we choose to do? What are the usual themes in the books and magazines we read, the songs we listen to, the movies and television shows we watch? We may protest, “This is the age of science. The path of knowledge has to be right for us.” But Sri Krishna would only smile. “Do your senses listen to you? If they do, you might be on the right track. But if they do not, you’d better consider the way of love instead.”

This is not a comment on the effectiveness of jnana yoga. It is a comment on the physical conditioning with which all of us have grown up. Ours is a physically-oriented world, so we should not be embarrassed to discover that we have learned to look on life with wholly physical eyes. But it is equally important to understand that we need not resign ourselves to this conditioning. We can change our thinking completely – and if we do not, we will find it very ­difficult to maintain any lasting relationship with those around us. The fiercer our physical conditioning is, the more separate we will feel, and the more we will be prey to all the problems of a divided mind: vacillation, depression, jealousy, and alienation. These problems can be solved, but not on the physical level where they arise. We need access to much deeper levels of consciousness.

Take, for example, a Don Juan who is all involved in a “meaningful relationship” with a young lady named Dulcinea. Juan is a very passionate fellow and intensely jealous. His mother will tell you that is his nature; he cannot change. Unfortunately, since Dulcinea is attractive, Juan’s life is an agony of suspicion. The minute she is out of his sight he can’t concentrate on anything, he can’t enjoy anything, he can’t stop worrying about what she is doing.

Now, according to one school of thought, if Don Juan can exchange his Dulcinea for a Juanita, as loyal as she is lovely, this uncertainty can be dispelled. “Change the environment, change the response” – isn’t it axiomatic? But unfortunately, as most of us know from our own experience, this simply doesn’t work. Juan has a jealous mind. He has to be jealous of somebody, and if Dulcinea is not around, he will be jealous of her maid. The problem is not with Dulcinea or Juanita or anything else in the outside world; the problem is the uncertainty in the mind of Don Juan. As long as he is living on the physical level, he cannot help being possessive. But it is possible for Juan to overcome his jealousy: not by reasoning with it, not by suppressing it, not by taking security hormones, but by learning to be master of his mind. When that is done, all insecurity goes – not only insecurity over Dulcinea, but insecurity over anything. Then he can take Dulcinea out to the Alhambra café, where her former boyfriend plays flamenco, and not be apprehensive at all. His face may look the same, his fingerprints may be the same, but Dulcinea will testify that he has become a different person.

Unless we can get beneath the physical level of consciousness, however, the conditioning of this level cannot be undone. Abraham Maslow, I think, says that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat every problem as if it were a nail. That is what we do when we try to deal with human problems from within a physical orientation. All we can look for is physical solutions, which cannot be effective because the problems are not physical in origin. Worse, such attempts can have dangerous consequences.

Recently, for example, I have been reading about the biochemical approach to personality. It is a fascinating area for research. Just as in our galaxy there are about one hundred billion stars, there is a galaxy within us too: the ten billion cells of the human brain. When Galileo is looking through his telescope at the stars, he is seeing them through those stars inside. And just as the Milky Way contains all kinds of little worlds, each seemingly self-contained but part of an integral whole, there are biochemical island-worlds within the galaxy of the brain – the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus, the thalamus, the amygdala – each with its histories of growth and commerce in which whole dynasties of proteins rise and fall.

This is not merely figurative language. I’m trying to show not only the fascination, but also the unity of these realms. Just as it is all one universe, for all those billions of apparently separate stars, it is all one head. It sounds elementary, but look at current research. Scientists have managed to probe into the molecules in the cells of the brain and are able to trace neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin which seem to trigger changes in mood. It is an amazing achievement. But when they suggest that by manipulating neurotransmitters we can help the brain to achieve its maximum potential, we have to raise our eyebrows. The brain is not conscious; it is an instrument of consciousness. When consciousness is changed, of course there will be correlated changes in brain biochemistry and in behavior. But by changing brain biochemistry, we can never change consciousness itself. All we can do is suppress particular symptoms, which is like trying to solve an electrical problem in a car by removing the little red light on the dash.

To take a particular example, neuroscientists tell us that there is an “appestat” in the hypothalamus that tells us when to eat or drink. When we feel hungry, we have to eat. Sometimes, in fact, even when we don’t feel hungry we have to eat. The appestat has gone off, the juices are flowing, and even if the refrigerator has been locked up we will find some way to get inside. In other words, we have very little choice.

Now, as long as we are completely identified with the body this is an accurate picture, and all of us know people who are victims of compulsive eating. But in meditation, we can learn to reset the appestat – not to turn our backs on it or stifle it, but to change our appetite at will. In fact, for those who are meditating, the problem of overeating is one of the easiest problems to solve. It means that even the hypothalamus can be put in its place.

Now take another very practical application: hyperactivity. Researchers have learned that certain drugs can have a quieting effect on children whose learning problems have been ascribed to their “hyperactive” behavior. These are children with uncontrollable energy – which, from the biochemical perspective, is a serious liability. To me, however, this kind of behavior is often the expression of tremendous vital capacity which is crying out to be harnessed. Often such children have the potential for great achievements, and quieting their behavior with drugs, while it may be necessary in extreme cases, is going to suppress their capacity for achievement as well as their capacity for running amuck. It is the same capacity: that is the key. The capacity to cause trouble is the capacity to solve the problem of causing trouble – just as the capacity to be selfish is the capacity to become loving. In sedation, what happens is that the medication blunts the cutting edge of consciousness. After some time of this, we don’t even have the blade of consciousness any more; we have only the handle. This is the danger of manipulation on the physical level. There may be a temporary relief of symptoms, but there is often a worsening of the problem.

The real issue with manipulating personality like this is the damage to human growth. In all these so-called solutions on the physical or chemical level, the will is forgotten or even undermined – and without the will there is no capacity for choice, no capacity for growth, no capacity for love. That is what physical conditioning leads to when it is taken to extremes. To overcome this conditioning we need to get to a deeper level of consciousness, where we can deepen our will and make the choices which enable us to grow.

SRI KRISHNA: 6–7. But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion – these will I swiftly rescue from the fragment’s cycle of birth and death to fullness of eternal life in me.

When my wife and I were living on the Blue Mountain, we had a visit from a young American who had been living in India as a spiritual aspirant for a number of years. He was dressed just like a traditional Indian sadhu, but when he spoke, his English still had its old Harvard accent.

We talked about the spiritual life for some time, and when evening came he offered to come with us to our little meditation center and give the inspirational talk. Our group consisted mostly of simple villagers, and I was afraid his words might be too sophisticated. But there was no cause for worry. He spoke their native Tamil without stumbling, and the story he told was one that anyone could understand.

“Look,” he said, stretching out his hands with open palms. “Sri Krishna is saying to every one of us, ‘Here, I have a very special gift for you – the gift of immortality. Won’t you reach out and take it?’

“ ‘Thank you,’ we say, ‘but can’t you see? Our hands are full of these sweet mangoes.’

“Sri Krishna smiles. ‘Let go of the mangoes,’ he explains patiently. ‘Then your hands will be free.’

“ ‘But Lord,’ we protest, ‘we like mangoes. Why don’t you give us your present first? Then we promise we’ll throw away the mangoes.’ ”

This is the essential conflict in every human heart. Part of us wants to reach out for the highest, part cannot let go of our little personal desires. Consciousness is split in two – between our higher and our lower natures, between the selfless and the selfish. And the Lord says simply, “Make yourselves whole.” Matparah: “Make me your only goal.” Don’t do anything just to please yourself; don’t do anything just to please Tom, Dick, and Harry. Everything should be for the sake of the Lord, the Self, in you and in those around you.

In this – and here the mystics of all traditions are unanimous – there is no room for doubts or reservations. The other day I read a remark that the Ten Commandments are rapidly becoming the Five Suggestions. This is the contemporary approach: we just don’t like to be told what to do. So why not have Moses say, “Here are Five Suggestions for your careful consideration, for those who have the time?” But Sri Krishna says, Sarvani karmani: “No exceptions. Give me everything: not only the big things, even the trifles.” Moses and Jesus use the same language: “Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart and all thy spirit and all thy strength.”

For the most part, this is not something we do on the surface level of awareness. We need to get into the very depths of our personality, where the fierce desires for personal satisfaction arise. Meditation enables us to enter these levels, but meditation by itself is not enough. Once we break through the surface of consciousness, we come to places where we can neither go forward nor withdraw. We see the doors to deeper awareness there in front of us, but we don’t know how to open them. At such times, no amount of exertion on our part is going to make it through those doors. It takes both hands, and one hand is still hanging on to something personal, something private, that we don’t want to leave behind. Until we let go, we are saying in effect, “Yes, Lord, I would like to go forward – just as long as I can stay here too.”

No one has described this more vividly than Augustine. At the time of which he is writing, in his Confessions, Augustine is thirty-one. The storm within him has been going on for over twelve years. Now it is almost resolved, but he does not realize it: on the surface of personality, the conflict has grown so fierce that he feels torn in two. “I was bound,” he exclaims –

not by another man’s chains, but by my own iron self-will. My capacity to desire was in enemy hands, and he had made a chain of it to hold me down. For a will that is bent awry becomes selfish desire, desire yielded to becomes habit, and habit not resisted becomes compulsion. With these links joined one to the other . . . a hard, hard servitude had me in its grip. The new will being born in me . . . was not yet strong enough to overcome the old will that had been strengthened by so much use. Thus two wills warred against each other within me – one old, one new; one physical, the other spiritual – and in their conflict they wasted my spirit.

Then, with penetrating insight, he gives us the clue to victory:

I was in both camps, but there was a little more of me on the side I approved than on the side I disapproved . . . for it had become more a matter of unwillingly experiencing [my desires] than of doing something that I actively wanted. . . .

It was I who willed and I who was unwilling: it was I. I did not wholly will; I was not wholly unwilling. Therefore I strove with myself and was distracted by myself. . . .

The analysis is perfect. It is not two selves in conflict; it is one self – sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. And to win, all we have to do is put more and more of ourselves in the other camp. Every time we withdraw our desires from some self-centered activity, a little more of us has defected from the side of darkness to join the side of light.

The dynamics are simple; but to do this, especially at the deeper levels of personality, is terribly, terribly hard. For a long time we cannot even see our choices clearly; we cannot bring our will to bear. In the latter stages of spiritual development, even the greatest mystics have cried out from the depths of their heart when they see how far off the goal is and how frail their strength, how limited their capacity. As Augustine says, it is like trying to wake up out of the seductive torpor of a dream – knowing it is time to wake up, longing to see, but unwilling to open our eyes. If we could watch our dreams, we would see that there is no freedom in the unconscious; our dream actions are all compulsive. And Augustine says, it is the same in waking life: our will is not our own.

By this time I was certain that it would be better to give myself to Your grace than to yield to my own desires. But though the former appealed to me and convinced me intellectually, the latter still ruled my wishes and bound me. I was still stuck for an answer to Him who said, Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and the Christ will give you light.

In these verses Sri Krishna is answering a practical, penetrating question: when we are immersed in this dream, how is it possible to wake up simply by willing it? We may see our choices clearly enough on the surface, but deep in the unconscious our will is fast asleep, and we want to go on dreaming. Here knowledge is not enough. “We require,” says St. John of the Cross, “a more ardent fire and a nobler love” – something that means more to us than the petty, passing satisfactions of the senses; something we desire so deeply that we are willing, in the end, to give up every self-centered attachment to obtain it. This is the supreme purpose of an incarnation of God: to draw us forward with such “burning fervor,” as St. John says, that when the time comes to leave some personal desire behind us, we let go so eagerly that we do not even look back.

The French mystic Blaise Pascal brings this out beautifully in a little note he wrote towards the end of his life, after an experience of the unitive state. His language bears the unmistakable stamp of personal experience. For about two hours, it seems, his individual personality has been consumed in the intense fire of union with the Lord. Then the fire subsides; the experience comes to an end. But the proof of its reality is that now he is prepared to pay any price for making that experience permanent.

He puts it very movingly: “Mon Dieu me quitterez vous?” My Lord, are you going to leave me? You come and fill my heart with joy and then you abandon me; what kind of cruelty is that? “Que je n’en sois pas séparé éternellement”: shall we then be separated forever? I know now what it is like to be united with you, and I cannot bear to be separate again. How can I possess this joy forever? . . . And then he answers himself with words that could have come right out of the Upanishads: “Renonciation totale et douce”; renunciation, complete and sweet. When we finally want to be united with the Lord more than anything else, there is no longer any bitterness in giving up our attachments. It is sweet – not because there is no pain in it, but because it takes us closer to the object of our love. The Sufi epigram is perfect: “When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has found.”

In the final stages of meditation we need such dedication, such total trust, to let go, that in my own small experience I have no doubt I would have found it impossible without the all-consuming love I developed for Sri Krishna. I was not born with this kind of love. I learned it, through the long, hard process of withdrawing all my personal desires from every selfish channel and redirecting them to flow towards Sri Krishna. In every tradition, we have the testimony of men and women who have learned to do this and crossed the chasm of separateness into the unitive state. And Augustine’s words can strengthen all of us when he exhorts himself, “Can you not do what these men and women have done? Or could they have done it by themselves, without the Lord their God? . . . Cast yourself upon him and do not be afraid; he will not draw away and let you fall.”

This is not blind faith. It is tested continually as spiritual experience deepens, and those who have made their faith unshakable – great saints like Sri Ramakrishna, Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila – tell us pointedly from their own experience that Jesus the Christ or the Divine Mother is much more real than we are. Physical reality is superficial: it is all a matter of physics and chemistry, a world of constant change. And the mystics say with one voice, “That alone is real which never changes.” The body will perish, the universe itself is transient; but the Self in each of us will never pass away.

With infinite tenderness, Sri Krishna is leading us in these verses to the theme of death and immortality. As long as we hold on to the passing pleasures of the physical world, we cannot avoid the suffering that overtakes the body in the course of time. In the first half of life, we have a certain margin for learning this – a certain amount of time to assess the value of physical satisfactions and weigh what they promise against what they actually give. But as we grow older, if we fail to assess wisely, life is not going to ask us if we are ready to give up our attachments. It is going to take them from us, and in that taking is most of the suffering of old age and death.

Here, I think, my granny was at her best. “Little Lamp,” she used to ask, “don’t you have a sense of self-respect? Why do you have to be forced to make choices that you can make voluntarily? Don’t let life back you into a corner and rob you. Give these things up now, when you are strong; that is the way to be free.” On the spiritual path we let go of all our selfish attachments little by little, according to our capacity – not under duress, but of our own free will – until finally we no longer need to hang on to anything else for support. To be forced to surrender is bitter. But to give up something for one we love, though at first it may seem a cup of sorrow, is found at last to be immortal wine.

“Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and the Christ will give you light.” This is the promise of all the great religions: when we unify our consciousness completely, we pass beyond the reach of change and death into eternity. East and West, the language is the same. “Wake up!” says the Compassionate Buddha. “It is time to wake up. You are strong and young in heart; why do you waver?” The alarm is ringing, and no one can sleep forever; it doesn’t behoove us to pull the blankets over our heads. And when we’re awake, all we can do for a while is rub our eyes. What once seemed day is now the night of ignorance. We have been living in our sleep, and now, as St. Teresa says, we live in “the light that knows no night,” in a day that never ends.

SRI KRISHNA: 8. Still your mind in me, still yourself in me, and without doubt you will be united with me, Lord of Love, dwelling in your heart.

In my classes in India, I had two brothers who were excellent soccer players. They knew each other so well that they seemed to communicate at another level of consciousness; they played as one man.

Once, after a particularly good game, I suggested, “Look, why don’t you use that same concentration in my class? That’s all you need to get an A.”

They just laughed. “To tell the truth,” one replied, “we don’t know how we do these things. We don’t even think about it. Our feet do everything; we just watch.”

Ask any champion athlete. With some self-knowledge, he or she will tell you the same thing: “When we’re playing, our mind doesn’t play a part.” If the mind does step in, the consequences can be disastrous. You worry about losing; you remember something your boyfriend said or a remark some newscaster made about your game. Concentration goes, and you begin to make mistakes. I think any good athlete will understand and agree when I say that if you reason while you’re playing, you’re lost. You can’t afford to stand there deciding what to do: “Shall I kick it or head it – or try to dribble? And if I decide to kick, where shall I kick it?” By the time you have made up your mind, you will be in the middle of the next play.

All of us understand this when it comes to physical skills, but when you talk about having a still mind in life, people think you mean becoming a zombie. It is quite the opposite. Just as an athlete comes to life on the playing field when he or she can play without thinking, we come to our full stature as human beings only when the mind becomes still. The reason is simple: the only source of mental agitation is the ego. A still mind means a still ego – and when the ego is still we can see clearly, we are free from compulsions, and there are no barriers to interfere with our personal relationships.

I have said this many times, but here let us look at the dynamics of self-will and love. The more self-will we have, the harder it is to love. So in order to love, we have to reduce self-will – and if we are not reducing self-will, no matter what else we are doing, we are not learning to love. If you look at the rest of the verses in this chapter, you will see that they all have one unifying theme: making the mind steady, especially in relationships, by rising above self-will.

The less self-willed we are, the more detached we become – not from others, but from ourselves. You can see the mechanics of it. Without detachment from yourself, you get easily caught up in your own reactions. Then it is easy to become jealous, or to lose interest in a person, or to become resentful when you don’t get your own way. On the other hand, the more detached you are from yourself, the easier it is to remember the needs of others, without which you cannot love.

Most of the time we can think of the mind as a see-saw, constantly going up when things are the way we like and down when they are not. And gradually, as self-will subsides and detachment rises, this see-saw motion becomes less and less erratic. When motion ceases completely, the mind is still. There is no self-will, no separateness, no sense of compulsion. We live in unity always, and the natural expression of unity is love – not just love for one person or another, but love for all people, all life. This is our native state. It is not necessary to acquire anything to become loving: when all self-will is removed from the personality, what is left is love.

This is an inspiring picture, but more than that, it can be practiced – by all of us, even those whose minds are far from calm. For one, “Still your mind in me.” In practice, the meaning is simple: if you want to rest your mind in the Lord, the Self, don’t try to rest it on the ego. In other words, don’t brood on yourself. This kind of brooding can come up in many ways. It may be self-righteous reflection on the past: “Why doesn’t so-and-so behave the way I want?” It may be a fear of what somebody will say, or a bewitching memory, or a fantasy of MGM Studios calling on the phone, or a thousand and one other things. The content of these thoughts varies endlessly, but the focus is always the same: I, I, I. Whenever you dwell on yourself like this, you are trying to rest your mind on the ego. And the answer is quite straightforward: the minute you catch yourself doing this, start repeating the mantram.

In the beginning, it will take some time to recognize these thoughts for what they are. As detachment increases, however, you discover that there are only a few basic themes, with innumerable variations. One of the most popular themes with everybody is “I Don’t Like It.” Whether the “it” is breakfast cereal or the way your friend laughs, the emphasis is always on the “I.” So as soon as you catch yourself thinking “I don’t like this” – or especially “I don’t like you” – don’t stop to ask whether the opinion is legitimate or not; just repeat the mantram. Gradually, as you become more vigilant, the mantram will come to your rescue more quickly and more often.

There was a good illustration of this the other day in our back yard. Our nonviolent ways must have given us a reputation in animal circles, because we have attracted a number of gophers who are completely unintimidated by our presence. If they put their heads up and see me standing nearby, they don’t hesitate; they come right up and go about eating whatever they like. But when they pop their heads out of the ground and see that our cat Charles is around, Charles has only to give one little smile and the gophers disappear.

That is how the mantram should be. In the early days, a self-centered thought will come up and nibble away at our attention until it is full. Then, after retiring for a nap, it comes back out of its hole again for more nibbling, all in its own sweet time. That is what agitation is: a thought burrowing in and out of consciousness as it likes, eating whatever it wants. But once we remember to bring the mantram on the scene, the thought will disappear. As we become more alert, the gap between the gopher popping up and Charles smiling – between the thought and the mantram – will narrow, until the response is immediate. That is a very promising state, because it means that soon all our negative thoughts will go looking for quieter turf.

Next, “Still yourself in me.” The word used here is buddhi: the intellect, discrimination. Not only the mind, but the intellect too has to rest completely in the Lord. Otherwise there is still the possibility of turmoil. This doesn’t mean that the intellect should be put to sleep forever. But to function well, it needs to rest securely under the direction of the Self. Its job is to make discriminating judgments: “What are the implications of this particular action? What will follow if I do this or do not do that?” To do this, it needs an overriding goal against which to compare and evaluate. Without a goal, on its own, it is liable to stay in its own little closet splitting hairs while the mind makes all the decisions, mostly on the basis of “I like this” and “I don’t like that.” So “still your intellect in me” means to look at life not from the narrow perspective of the ego, but from the perspective of the Atman. In practical terms, don’t judge things only by your own interests; look at the needs of the whole.

People sometimes ask me, “How can we know what the perspective of the Atman is? Let alone identify with it, we don’t even know where to look.” It’s a fair question: after all, most of us seldom look at life from any perspective other than our own. Here there are a number of questions you can ask. For one, whenever you are about to do something – or are already in the middle of doing something – that you like very much or that is getting your mind all excited, ask yourself, “Whom will this really benefit?” You may get some rather partial testimony from the ego: it’s all for the other person’s benefit in the long run, simply a coincidence that it’s what you really want too, and so on. But that is the purpose of the intellect, to be a good judge – listen very carefully, ask penetrating and embarrassing questions, and finally render a sternly worded judgment: “This doesn’t benefit anybody, not even yourself.”

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t care about your own personal benefit. But don’t go exclusively after your personal benefit. Keep the needs of the whole in view; then your own needs are included automatically. When you can do this always, continuously, you won’t even have to think about personal needs; they are taken for granted in the overall picture.

Second, take a long view of everything. The ego is short-sighted. It can’t see past the end of its nose, because it is all caught up in what it can get for itself right now. But the Atman is detached, which means that it can look far down the chain of cause and effect to see the long-term result of every action – not only the result on the doer, but on others too.

Once we get past our early twenties, for example, I think most of us will have burned our fingers enough to draw the conclusion that if we see a flame, we can be reasonably certain that it will burn. Especially where pleasure is concerned, it can be very helpful to ask simply: “What does this promise and what has it actually delivered, to the best of my knowledge?” You can make a ledger and draw your own balance: “One German chocolate cake. Promise: gourmet ecstasy. Delivered: fifteen minutes of sweetness, stomachache, surrealistic dreams, and two pounds of extra weight.” It can help, even with a powerful desire like sex. But it’s not enough simply to analyze on the surface. You have to look deep within yourself and take a long view to see the total picture: what it promised and what it actually gave, not simply the next day but two years, ten years later.

Third, remember the injunction of the previous verse: Matparah, “Make me your only goal.” Everything can be referred to that. “Will this deepen my meditation, improve my concentration, make my mind more even, make me less self-centered?” If it will, I will do it; if it won’t, I will not. “Will this divide my attention, isolate me from others, make me more speeded up, activate an old memory or desire?” If it will, I won’t do it, no matter how pleasant or how innocent it may seem. Keep the words of the Katha Upanishad always in mind: “What is pleasant is one thing; what is wise is another. The first leads to sorrow, though pleasant at the time. The latter, though at first unpleasant, leads to lasting joy.”

Then, more subtly, don’t allow yourself to be caught in anything. The moment you get caught in a particular activity, detachment goes. Worse, you are that much more cut off from the whole. One small part of life becomes blown up out of proportion, and all the rest shrinks into the background without your even realizing it. It is not possible to see this clearly without an overriding goal, but when you have such a goal, you can measure all your priorities against it.

Look, for example, at the question of physical fitness. Currently everyone seems to be running – not just jogging, but running for several miles every day. Not long ago there was a cross-city competition announced in San Francisco, a distance of some seven and a half miles, and almost fourteen thousand people showed up to take part. Now, I am all for physical fitness; who isn’t? It is important for everyone, and it is especially important for those who are meditating seriously. But after all is said and done, running can be only a part of the spiritual life. If this is forgotten, there is the danger of filling your life with running – at the expense of meditation.

Let me make myself clear: I am all for running. But I would apply the same criterion to it as to every other human endeavor: “How much does this help me to realize the goal of life?” That is the measure of its value and the index of its priority.

“Still yourself in me.” Next to the entrance to a bridge in San Francisco there used to be a sign with a short message from an Indian mystic of this century, Meher Baba: “Do your best. Don’t worry. Be happy.” I suppose many of the businessmen crossing that bridge at rush hour thought Meher Baba was playing Pollyanna. He was not; he was being supremely practical. Worry is usually no more than self-will in one of its more subtle disguises: everything is either “Am I up to this?” or “Is so-and-so going to manage to do this the way I want?” When you really are doing your best – in your meditation, in the other spiritual disciplines, at work, at home – there is no attention left over for worrying. Then you are beginning to rest yourself in the Lord, the Atman, at the very core of your being.

All this can be effectively practiced in personal relationships, which is the central theme of this chapter. Wherever there is agitation in a relationship – vacillation, estrangement, doubt, reservation – the capacity to love is divided; love is not yet complete. “How much did you do for me today? How much did you put into the emotional till? Six cents? I’m going to count. If it is six cents, I’ll give you six cents back. But if it’s five, I’m not going to give you more than five.” This is what we are accustomed to call love, even in some of the great romantic affairs of literature and history. But the mystics say, “That’s not love; that’s a commercial contract.” It divides two people, and it divides consciousness. If you want to love, all these reservations have to go.

When your mind is still always – twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, not only in waking life, but even in your dreams – then, says Sri Krishna, “You will live in me continuously, absorbed in me, beyond any shadow of a doubt.” It is a state that is almost impossible to describe in words, but there are certain signs. For one, your awareness of the Lord will be unbroken. In a sense you will be meditating wherever you go, even if you are at your office or caught in the downtown shopping. Brother Lawrence’s words are perfect:

The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.

To put it another way, the well of your love will be always full and always flowing. It will be natural for you to love; it will be impossible for you not to love. You won’t have to stop to think about how to respond to others. You will respond naturally, spontaneously, however is most appropriate for that person’s long-term welfare. And in your personal relationships there will be no conflict, no doubts, no reservations, no irritation. You will not need to prompt or force your love, and you will need no reason for loving or trusting or forgiving. As St. Bernard says, love is its own reason: “Love seeks no cause beyond itself and no fruit; it is its own fruit, its own enjoyment. I love because I love; I love in order that I may love.”

SRI KRISHNA: 9. If you cannot still your mind in me, learn to do so through the regular practice of meditation.

Here I imagine Arjuna, so much like us, complaining, “I’d like to still my mind, but it just keeps jumping around. Don’t you know some shortcut?”

Sri Krishna says, “Of course. I’ll give you a way that has worked for spiritual aspirants all over the world.”

Arjuna, expecting some great secret, leans forward eagerly. And Sri Krishna whispers in his ear: “Try – and keep on trying until you succeed.”

It sounds hard – it is hard – but there is no other way. Nothing about meditation is easy; nothing takes place overnight. Even a giant like the Buddha is said to have taken seven years to attain nirvana – and if someone of his stature requires seven years, I think it is only reasonable for people like you and me to be patient with ourselves and admit that even a lifetime would not be too long for this stupendous achievement.

Recently I read an advertisement for an “enlightenment workshop” that promised illumination in a weekend. Being taken in by claims like these is like thinking you can put on a pair of toe shoes and make a guest appearance with the Bolshoi Ballet without any practice or preparation. I saw some sequences from Bolshoi performances in a film the other day, with shots of great dancers like Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. When Nureyev took one of his famous leaps, he seemed to be suspended in midair. It looked so effortless that I could almost imagine myself out there on the stage, making wonderful leaps and breathtaking glissades. But the shots of the training that young dancers receive at the Bolshoi School brought me back to earth. What torture! Standing at the practice bar all day long, kicking your legs up while the ballet master stands there like a galley slave driver counting “One, two, three! One, two, three!” It wasn’t anybody’s idea of effortless grace; it was just hard work.

That training, I understand, goes on for ten years or more. Often it starts at a very tender age. And once you make your professional debut, the work only becomes more arduous. Nureyev doesn’t say, “I don’t feel like it today.” Whether he feels like it or not, he goes to the bar and practices – four, five, six hours every day. As I watched, I understood: this is the secret of excellence in anything. Spontaneity, effortless grace, comes only after years of practice. Dancers like Nureyev and Fonteyn are gifted, but the gift is not gracefulness; it is dedication.

Now, meditation is training the mind, which in many ways is like training the body. When you start jogging or doing sit-ups, at first you hear nothing from the muscles but complaints. It isn’t because they are being overused, but because they have never been used. Similarly, when you try to concentrate in meditation, there are going to be taut tendons in your mind. If you are impatient and start trying to be patient, your mind is going to ache all over; by the end of the day it will be begging you to stop. But I have never seen anybody who sincerely wanted better health say, “My tendons ache today, so I’m not going to run. I’m going to stay here in bed and give them a rest.” Everybody knows that you just keep on running; soon the muscles become stronger and stop complaining. That is how it is with meditation. You keep working at it every day with the same enthusiasm and determination I saw in the faces of those students at the Bolshoi. There is no easy way.

Now, I have to confess that I have developed a rather personal interpretation of these verses. If you look at the text of this verse and the two that follow, it is quite explicit: “If you cannot still your mind, learn to meditate; if you can’t meditate, serve me in those around you,” and so on. But when it comes to something as important as Self-realization, I am the kind of person who won’t leave any stone unturned. Even if it is only a little pebble, I have to turn it over. If I am going to devote so many years of my life to extinguishing the ego, I want to make sure it is extinguished once and for all. So even if Sri Krishna himself assures me that meditation, for example, is enough by itself, I will still say, “Excuse me, Lord. It may be enough for the Compassionate Buddha, but a little person like me can’t afford to take chances. I’m going to do everything I possibly can: meditate and put others first and learn to be detached from the results of action, all together.” It is a very practical attitude, which I must have absorbed from my grandmother’s example: there is always something more that you can do.

Let me illustrate from my own life how I began to apply this. When I started meditating, just like every beginning meditator, by the end of an arduous day I would have used up most of the power that had been released in my morning meditation. But for some time, it never occurred to me that I could meditate again in the evening. I had a very full work load, and often, even when the day was over, I would go back to campus again after dinner to attend faculty meetings or other college functions and try to make a contribution there. So naturally, when I did have a little time to myself in the evening, I liked to relax: read some of my favorite authors, listen to classical music or the All India news, attend a play or ­lecture.

Then I began to realize that there was more I could do about my meditation, and immediately my priorities underwent a change. To begin with, I told All India Radio it would have to miss me, and I began to meditate regularly every evening too. I didn’t understand it at first, but I was beginning to make my day whole, which meant that I was making my consciousness whole as well. Now instead of a sometimes slender thread connecting one morning’s meditation with the next, there was a thread connecting morning and evening – and then a new thread connecting evening with the following morning. I could see the benefit almost immediately – not only in my morning meditation, but in the quality of my life during the day. And to strengthen that new thread, instead of falling asleep in a Dickens novel or in classical Indian music, I started to read the great classics of world mysticism, beginning with the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. It wasn’t always easy, because I enjoyed literature and music very much. But soon I discovered that though my liking for these was still present, I got much more from the words of a great saint like Ramakrishna – simple, powerful, profound words, which went straight to my heart. It wasn’t long before I was looking forward to my reading and my meditation every evening. After that, even if a favorite play came to campus, unless there was a matinee I would just tell my friends, “I’m sorry, I have some other engagement.”

That gave me the key: put meditation first. Make it the first priority; everything else can be second. Nothing important will ever suffer by this. And once I realized that, I began putting it into practice everywhere. I even used to meditate at noon when I could – right in the faculty room, seated quietly in a chair with my eyes closed, so that people must have thought I had been up all night reading Shakespeare and now was catching forty winks. I wasn’t; I was practicing the refrain of the Bhagavad Gita: Matparah, “Make me your only goal.” In ways like this I discovered that everybody has time for meditation, and every day is full of odds and ends of time that can be used for spiritual growth.

The key word in this verse is abhyasa, ‘practice’: trying to keep the mind focused on a single point by bringing it back gently but firmly whenever it strays. I have translated abhyasa here as “the practice of meditation.” But after some experience, I began to see that abhyasa is essentially a matter of training attention. It throws light on every minute of daily living, because it means we don’t need to confine our practice to a half hour or so in the morning and evening. We can train our attention wherever we are, whatever we are doing. The dynamics are twofold: we unify consciousness by making the mind one-pointed, and by keeping it focused on what we choose, we keep it from dwelling on itself.

In practical terms, this means gaining control over the thinking process itself. When we can finally put our attention wherever we choose, we can think whatever we choose. The implications are tremendous: we can become whatever we choose. As Ruysbroeck put it, we can be as holy as we want to be – or as secure, or as loving.

Eventually – this is the ideal to be aimed at – the mind should not wander at all. Only then can it become still. When the mind wanders, consciousness is divided; attention is weaving all over the road. Everybody knows what it is like to share the highway with a bad driver. He is driving along in the lane next to you and suddenly, without warning, he wanders into your lane. Perhaps his eye has been caught by a sign, perhaps he has remembered an errand; his mind may even be in a different county. Then, with equal abruptness, he realizes what he has done and overreacts – first with the brake, then with the accelerator – and darts back into his own lane.

If we could only see it, everything in life suffers like this when attention wanders. A mind that darts from subject to subject is out of control, and the person who responds to it weaves through life oblivious to others, running into difficult situations and colliding with other people. But the mind that is steady stays in its own lane. It cannot be swept away by an impulsive desire or fear, and because it stays completely in the present, it cannot be haunted by an unpleasant memory or by anxiety about the future. Most of our problems in life are caused by the mind weaving out of the here-and-now into a Never-Never Land of what was, or might be, or might have been, and that is why I have come to the conclusion that there is no skill more worth learning than the art of directing attention as we choose.

In principle, the practice of this is simple: when the mind wanders, bring it back to what it should be doing. The problem arises when the distraction is not stray but compulsive: resentment, irritation, apprehension, craving. The power of such thoughts is that they are egocentric. There is nothing the ego likes to do more than to think about itself, and when a self-centered thought comes up, everything in our conditioning screams, “Hey, look at that! Pay attention to that!”

Here again, our greatest ally is the mantram. Whenever a selfish thought comes up, repeat the mantram. When the mantram takes hold, the connection between the thought and your attention is broken. A compulsive thought, whether it is anger or depression or a powerful sense-craving, does not really have any power of its own. Thoughts, in this sense, are very much the same; none of them has any more muscle than the others. All the power is in the attention we give – and when we can withdraw our attention, the thought or desire will be helpless to compel us into action.

Now, attention is very much like a searchlight, which is mounted in such a way that it can be trained on any subject freely. When we are caught up in ourselves – in other words, when attention becomes compulsive – this searchlight has become stuck. After many years of this, it is hard to believe that the light can turn: we think, in other words, that that compulsion has become a permanent part of our personality. But gradually, all of us can learn to work our attention loose. Once we do this, we can redirect our attention freely.

This can be practiced. For one, try to work cheerfully at jobs you dislike. It has nothing to do with the job; you are freeing your attention. Second, whatever you do, give it your best concentration – and, when necessary, learn to drop what you are doing and shift your attention immediately to something else. When you leave your office, for example, leave your work there too. Don’t bring it home in a briefcase or, just as bad, in your mind. And finally, the moment you take up something that does not require attention – doing the dishes, for example – start repeating the mantram. All this is the spiritual equivalent of those kicking exercises in the Bolshoi School. By practicing these things, anybody can learn to direct attention freely. And when you can do this, you will never again direct it at yourself: not only because it brings such suffering, but because the ego, by its very nature, is such a crashing bore.

I like to illustrate all this by comparing the mind to a theater. Thoughts are the actors, and getting into the unconscious, if you like, is like going backstage into the green room, where everybody is getting made up. Anger is there putting on his long fangs, fear is rattling his chains, jealousy is admiring herself in the mirror and smearing on green mascara. And attention is the audience.

Now, these actors are like actors everywhere: they thrive on a responsive audience. When jealousy comes out on stage and we sit forward on our seats, all eyes, she really puts on a show – if you want to see how much of a show, look at what happens in Othello. But on the other hand, what happens if nobody comes to see the performance? No actor likes to play to an empty house. If they’re real professionals they might give their best for a couple of nights, but after that they’re bound to get a little slack. Jealousy doesn’t bother with her makeup any more; who’s going to admire it? Anger throws away his fangs, fear puts away his chains; whom can they impress? And finally, the whole cast gives it up as a bad job and goes out for a midnight cup of hot chocolate.

In other words, when you can direct attention, problems will never be compulsive again. I wish I could convey what freedom this brings. No matter how severe the problem, how painful the experience, how powerful the craving, you will be able to go to your meditation room and get up again after an hour or so with all sense of oppression gone and your mind refreshed. That is the beginning of freedom in life. There may still be shackles on your hands, but now you know from your own experience that though it may take a long time and a lot of effort, every one of them can be removed through the practice of meditation and the allied disciplines.

SRI KRISHNA: 10. If you lack the will for such self-discipline, engage yourself in selfless service of all around you, for selfless service can lead you at last to me.

Here again, my application of this verse is personal but practical. Even in the early days, I have to confess, my capacity for concentrating in meditation was rather good. If I had taken this verse literally, I could easily have concluded that these words were not addressed to me. Instead, I tried to practice this verse too. It helped my meditation greatly, and that is why today I never talk only about meditation; I always say “meditation and the allied disciplines.” Meditation is essential, but for the vast majority of us today, meditation by itself is not enough. The task of training the mind is so difficult that we need the support of a comprehensive program of spiritual disciplines which work together to strengthen each other.

Again, let me illustrate this from my own experience. When I began meditating morning and night, I could have been excused if I had decided not to try to squeeze any more into my day. But as I said, I don’t like to leave any stone unturned. So when I saw an occasion when I could be of help to someone around me – by taking time to be with a student, for example, when he was in the hospital – I took a close look at my schedule and told myself, “Well, you don’t have to go to that movie on Saturday. You don’t have to attend this concert on Friday night.” I don’t say that there wasn’t a pang or two, especially when I had to miss an event I had been looking forward to. But the rewards more than made up for any momentary sense of loss. For one, my meditation deepened. Often I would notice the difference the very next morning. But more than that, there was a fierce joy in turning my back on myself to help people. I know that in a sense I was not doing it for them personally; I was doing it for the Lord in them.

Gradually, I began to understand that “serve me in all around you” didn’t mean merely reading to the sick or feeding the poor. It meant, in the simple words my grandmother used, putting other people first. Once my eyes were opened, I didn’t need special occasions to practice this. There were opportunities every day – on a busy day, many times every hour. And the dynamics of it is this: whenever you are mindful of somebody else’s needs, you forget yourself. Forget yourself completely, and you are united with the Lord.

The more I read in world mysticism, the more I appreciate the penetrating practicality of this approach. When all is said and done, I doubt very much if any of us in the modern world is able to extinguish the fierce fire of self-will without the benefit of personal relationships. In many traditions, the approach is what has been called the Via Negativa: you try to destroy the ego by a direct assault. It has worked for many great mystics, but for most of us, there is no motivation that we can grasp – and where there is motivation, the mechanisms are absent, for it is almost impossible to forget yourself when you are living in a world of one. But in a close relationship between man and woman, parent and child, or friend and friend, it is natural to want to put the other person first at least part of the time. I don’t say it is easy. But it is natural and fulfilling, because the desire for unity is already there. You have something in common with the other person, so you can identify with him and find joy in contributing to his welfare. This is the Via Affirmativa, the positive way, to emphasize not what is lost but what is gained.

There are some important things to remember when trying to put this into practice. To begin with, putting other people first does not mean saying yes to everything they say and do. I repeat this often, because it has a vital place in love. In fact, saying yes to everything can be the opposite of love, because it is not always in the other person’s real interests. To love, we have to learn the art of saying no tenderly but resolutely when those we love are about to do something that can only bring them sorrow.

Most of us fall short of this, even in our most intimate relationships. Often instead of saying no we remark casually, “When you have time, will you turn this suggestion over in your mind?” Or we write a little note: “This passage from Corinthians may be of interest to you.” This is called dropping a tactful hint, but unfortunately nobody notices these hints and nobody picks them up.

To me vague remarks like this show lack of love, because they are made out of fear of how the other person might respond. If someone we love is about to do something harmful to himself or others, we should have the security to say, “Even if you don’t speak to me for a month I’m going to stand in your way, lovingly but firmly, until you change your mind.” At the time it may be a source of irritation. But after that person has a chance to cool off, he will know he has a friend who really cares about his lasting welfare.

This doesn’t apply only to relationships between man and woman. It can be practiced everywhere: between friends, between parents and children, even between doctors and their patients. I learned this in my early days as a college teacher. Boys and girls used to come to our town fresh with the simplicity of Indian village ways, and sometimes, after a little exposure, they would get caught in activities that could only bring them sorrow in the long run. Some of my colleagues insisted that it was not my responsibility to intrude into my students’ lives. “You’re not their father,” they said. “You’re here to teach them Shakespeare and syntax.” For a while I accepted this as the voice of experience. But I had a deep love for those students, and in turn they came to love me and trust me. It hurt me to see them hurt, and quite naturally, without doubt or vacillation, when I saw that they were about to get into trouble I would take them out for a walk, talk to them, and help them to see more clearly the consequences of what they were about to do. It wasn’t always easy for them to accept this kind of loving criticism, but I don’t think any of my relationships suffered. On the contrary, my students and their families came to appreciate me for it. “He’s not just trying to please us,” they would say. “He really cares what happens.”

People sometimes ask me, “How can we tell how to put somebody else first?” I don’t think there is any special secret to this. The same answer is given in all the world’s great religions, but I especially like the phrasing of the Compassionate Buddha: “Remember – what hurts you, hurts others too. What irritates you, irritates others too.” To take just a few examples, people may differ in their preferences for salad dressing, but nobody likes a joke at his expense. No one likes to be talked about behind her back. No one likes to be ignored when he says hello, or to be talked down to, or to be interrupted in what she is saying or doing. Everybody is hurt by rudeness, irritated by an angry word, agitated by being rushed or pressured. One Western mystic sums it up in a simple phrase: “Be kind, be kind, be kind.” That is the sum and substance of putting others first.

What keeps us from doing this? In one word: samskaras. Put simply, a samskara is a compulsion, a rigid, automatic response to life which we think of as a permanent part of someone’s character. But the samskara itself is not rigid; it is a process. A samskara is nothing more than a thought repeated over and over a thousand times, leading to words repeated a thousand times, resulting in action repeated a thousand times. People with an anger samskara, for example, are prone to anger over anything. Their behavior has very little to do with external events; by conditioning, anger has simply become the way their mind responds to life. By thinking angry thoughts, saying unkind things, and finally indulging in hostile behavior, they have made themselves an angry person. A kind of neurological shortcut has been dug in their mind, down which consciousness flows automatically to the same conditioned response.

What we call personality is nothing more than a collection of samskaras. In other words, we are what our samskaras are. It is a revealing but hopeful analysis. On the one hand, it means that there is very little freedom in what we do or even when we think. But on the other hand, it means that personality is not really rigid; it too is a process. Though we think of ourselves as always the same, we are remaking ourselves every moment by what we think, just as every tissue in the body is in a constant state of repair and change.

Usually, because of our samskaras, we go on repairing the same old shaky structure. But actually, every thought is an opportunity for choice. Just as a samskara is built up through repeated thought and word and action, it can be unbuilt through repeated thought and word and action of the opposite kind.

Now see what this means in practice. If someone provokes you and you respond with anger, you are actually making your anger samskara stronger. Even if you avoid that person afterwards, you are making the samskara stronger. It will be that much more disruptive in all your relationships in the future, and that much more difficult to overcome. But look at the mystic’s attitude: when you feel angry towards someone, that is all the more reason to be kind. It’s not simply being kind to that particular person. You’re being even kinder to yourself, because you are undoing a compulsion, taking one more step towards being free.

There is a particularly vivid way to illustrate this. Until we are free from our compulsions, we are like hand puppets; the samskaras are the puppeteers. We may think we choose to get angry – I have actually had somebody tell me this. But more accurately, the anger samskara is doing everything: putting its fingers up into our arms and head – say, where the amygdala is – and making us throw crockery about, slam the door, and use words that are anything but kind. It is an apt illustration, because it is the nervous system itself that has been conditioned. But it can be deconditioned, and when it is, we are free.

The deconditioning process is straightforward enough: when a samskara comes up, don’t act on it. When it tries to tell you what to do, say no. Repeat the mantram, go out for a long, brisk walk if possible, and throw yourself into hard, concentrated work, preferably for the benefit of someone other than yourself. When you can shift your attention to your work or to the mantram, you have shifted it away from the samskara. Immediately the samskara is weakened a little, and the will to resist is strengthened.

Conversely – this can provide motivation – if you do act on the samskara it is strengthened, and you have struck a blow at your own will. To put it another way, you can’t choose not to fight. When you act on a samskara, you have joined the battle. The trouble is, you have joined the wrong side.

If you really want to land a blow at a samskara, go against it. Do just the opposite of what it says. It is a daring approach which appeals to me very much. If somebody has been unkind to you, go out of your way to be kind to him. It can require a lot of endurance simply to be patient with such a person, but I’m talking about more than endurance now; I’m talking about daring. Try it: there is an exhilaration in it, and a special delight in seeing the other person rub his eyes in disbelief. “I was just rude to that chap, and now he’s being thoughtful. Is he out of his mind?” Few people can go so far, but there is the same keynote in those marvelous words of Jesus: “If someone takes your coat, give him your cloak as well; if he makes you go a mile with him, go with him two.”

Samskaras go deep into consciousness, and the will and intellect usually operate only on the surface. We may say in all sincerity, “I’ll never get angry again!” But the samskara asks smugly, “Says who?” We don’t even see these forces lurking in the unconscious, and if we do get a glimpse of them, we don’t recognize them for what they are. It is only below the surface of consciousness in meditation that we begin to encounter samskaras without their makeup on. For a long time, vision is blurred in those depths. But when you get close to a samskara in meditation, there are certain external signs.

For one, there is a period of expectancy. You are about to get into trouble, about to repeat some conditioned pattern of behavior which you will later regret, and your subconscious is on the lookout for an opportunity. Second, concentration will be more difficult. Your attention will be scattered; it will be hard to keep your mind on a job, and you will find all sorts of excuses for putting off jobs that you don’t want to do. And in meditation, it will be especially difficult to keep your mind on the passage. Attention will wander, and if you are not vigilant you may follow a distraction for a long time or even fall asleep.

Like road signs, all these signs have an explicit meaning: “Go Slow. Drive Carefully. Samskaras At Work.” That is the time to be especially vigilant about all your spiritual disciplines. Be regular in meditation, use the mantram as much as possible, and work hard during the day, giving everything your one-pointed attention and enthusiasm. Be careful not to get speeded up or to allow your senses too much license. And especially, don’t get caught in brooding on yourself. When you do that, you are inviting the samskara to come in and stay as long as it likes.

Undoing a samskara is the most challenging battle a human being can face. If you have been impatient for many years, for example, learning patience can be excruciating. At the end of the day, if you’ve really been trying hard, every cell in your nervous system will be crying out for rest. Samskaras can erupt anywhere, everywhere, and they don’t pay attention to the rules of Queensberry. They’ll hit you from behind, below the belt, in your sleep; they’ll gang up on you; it’s all open street fighting. The fight can be terribly dispiriting, especially when you get below the surface level and see how powerful these forces really are. But there is a positive side too: this is the opportunity you have been waiting for. Every time you come face to face with a samskara, it is an opportunity to change yourself. The reversal in outlook is revolutionary. When you’re tired, when people are provoking you, when your patience has worn thin and your morale is turning blue at the edges, you can rub your hands together with anticipation: you’re in the ring at last, and the bell is about to go off. Previously you might have said, “I don’t want to go home now. The minute I walk through the door, I know I’m going to blow up.” Instead of going home, you’d be off to Sonoma Joe’s for a few rounds of bitter ale. But now you say, “Sure – one partner, two children; three people to irritate me. That’s just the odds: three chances to learn to be more patient. Even if I miss one, I’m sure to have another.”

The samskara may knock you around a few times, but as long as you keep on fighting like this, you’re training. Your muscles are getting stronger, and the samskara, though it may not look any weaker at first, is taking the beating of its life. You are beginning to change your personality, and though the bigger samskaras are going to be in the ring for a good, long time, every round of the fight is bringing you closer to your goal.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. If you are unable to do even this, surrender yourself to me in love, receiving success and failure with equal calmness as granted by me.

This verse, which sounds so simple, is probably one of the hardest verses in the Gita to put into practice. If it seems easy to follow, it is because the idea of surrender has been so often misinterpreted. Surrender has nothing to do with doing nothing – and as for “just letting things flow,” that is a state that is achieved only after years of almost superhuman effort. The Gita is essentially a call to action. But it is a call to selfless action, that is, action without any selfish attachment to the results. In other words, it is not action or effort that we must surrender; it is self-will – and this is something that is terribly difficult to do. You must do your best constantly, yet never allow yourself to become involved in whether things work out the way you want.

It takes many years of practice to learn this skill, but once you have it, as Gandhi says, you will never lose your nerve. All sense of inadequacy goes – in fact, the question of “Am I equal to this job?” cannot even arise. It is enough that the job needs to be done, and that you are doing your absolute best to do it. Then, no matter how stiff the challenges or how bleak the prospects, you can throw yourself into selfless action without conflict or diffidence or fatigue.

This is an elusive concept, and sometimes people ask me incredulously, “You mean you’re not interested in the results of what you do?” Of course I am interested. I doubt that there is anybody more interested in his work than I am, because I know how much people can benefit from what we are doing at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. But after many years of practice, I have learned to do my best and then not worry about whether things will work out my way.

Worrying about results not only makes us less effective, it is futile. By our very nature we see only a small part of the total picture, and we make our plans on an appropriately narrow and egocentric scale. The result is usually about D minus, barely passing – unless, of course, somebody else is trying to get things his way too, in which case everybody runs the risk of getting an F. But when we learn simply to do our best and leave the question of success or failure to the Lord, the result can really be spectacular. Where we had something barely passing in mind, the Lord turns up with results that rate an A.

One of the most moving episodes in the Ramayana illustrates this vividly. In just twenty-four hours, young Prince Rama’s life is turned upside down. He goes to sleep expecting on the following day to be crowned heir to his father’s kingdom; the whole city is celebrating. But he wakes up to find that his stepmother has turned against him, and instead of receiving his birthright, he is sent into exile in a forest for fourteen years. Rama’s brother Lakshmana wants to take matters into his own hands. But Rama pacifies him with a very simple question. “Lakshmana,” he asks, “haven’t you ever planned something down to the last detail – done everything you could to make sure nothing goes wrong – and then had the whole affair turn out completely differently? Doesn’t that show you that there is a power in the universe that encompasses us all, that it is not possible to ordain our lives the way we will?”

If we could but stand back from our lives and take a much longer view, even the smallest events would be seen to fit into a vast picture in which, as Jesus says, every hair of our heads is numbered. There is no contradiction between this idea and free will. The power Rama speaks of is the law of karma: we are shaping our lives continuously by what we think and say and do. To Lakshmana, Rama’s banishment seems nothing less than a disaster. But it is all part of a much larger drama. Many years earlier, by accident, Rama’s father killed the son of an old sage. When Rama is banished, King Dasharatha loses his son: and that same exile, which seems so cruel, is actually the door through which Rama enters into his own glorious destiny. Shakespeare’s words go deeper than he may have known: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”

If I may say so, the Lord is a very thorough teacher. When necessary, he will see to it that those who love him are tested from every quarter – as my granny would say, not any more severely than they can bear, but never any less severely either. For most of us, there is no other way to learn to remove the last vestige of selfish attachment from our work. When you are taking refuge under one corner and it caves in, you can always hide under another. If all four corners fall in, you can at least stand in the center. But when you are standing in the center, about to breathe a sigh of relief, and the roof falls in, you have nowhere left to look for help but inwards. And the amazing thing is that when you trust in this completely – and do your best – help always comes. It may not be in the way you expect it, it will not be at the time you expect it, but it will come; of that there is no doubt.

In a small way, this is the history of our own meditation center too. There were times in the early days when we faced nothing but obstacles – not only relevant obstacles, the kind one expects at the outset of spiritual work, but sometimes unnecessary, even silly difficulties too, which I think the Lord must have placed before us only out of a Puckish sense of humor. At such times, I kept on reminding myself that it was not my work. From the assurances in the Gita, I knew that all I had to do was empty myself of all self-will and put myself in the hands of the Lord – how he used my life after that was not for me to worry over. And today, after many years of practicing this, I do not get upset over anything where the work of our Center is concerned. I have no doubt now that work that is free from all self-seeking has to prosper in the long run – though it calls for resourcefulness, discrimination, and a lot of dedicated effort.

This is not blind faith; it is acquired after many years of trial. When I first took to meditation, though I had the example of my granny to guide me, I had no experience of these truths myself. As my meditation deepened, I had to face some difficult decisions about the conduct of my life. At such times, I usually made the best choice I knew how, even when it was not particularly pleasant – and, like most ordinary people, I sometimes made wrong decisions that carried painful consequences. But after a while I began to notice that even when the decision was not the wisest, if I had really done my best in deciding, the painful consequences would not be too painful. Either I would surmount the difficulty through some turn of events, or the difficulty would prove to be an opportunity. It was not at all clear at the time, but now I can look back and see that all these difficulties were training me to do my best and leave the rest to the Lord. When you do this, you can be sure that things will work out for the best of all concerned. “After all,” Sri Krishna asks simply, “don’t you trust me? I who am responsible for the rhythms of the galaxies, if you are really trying to serve me, don’t you think I can be trusted to give you all that you need for spiritual growth?”

SRI KRISHNA: 12. Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender in love, because there follows immediate peace.

This beautiful verse wraps up the four which precede it. On the intellectual level, it may seem obscure. But after some years of practicing these disciplines, the meaning becomes clear if we remember that here, words like “knowledge” and “surrender” are not watertight categories. After all, where there is knowledge of the unity of life, there is love. Where there is love, there is a direct apprehension of unity. And unless the mind is stilled through meditation, it is not accurate to talk about either transcendental knowledge or love. All these are categories of the intellect, which cannot help dividing. But in practice they flow together, which is why I have no hesitation about recommending the approach I have found effective in my own life: to practice all of them together.

“Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice.” This is not to deprecate mechanical practice: after all, at the beginning, the practice of any spiritual discipline is bound to be mechanical. If somebody comes to me and asks, “You want me to repeat the mantram mechanically?” I say simply, “Of course.” How else can we repeat it at the start? To be able to repeat the mantram with devotion, self-will has to be very small. But – and this is the very heart of this chapter of the Gita – devotion can grow. We begin repeating the mantram with as much enthusiasm as we can, whenever we can, and after a lot of practice, it slowly begins to penetrate to a deeper level of consciousness.

Similarly with meditation. At the beginning, though it should never be mechanical, meditation is only on the surface. It takes a lot of regular, enthusiastic work to break through the surface and open up a channel into our deeper consciousness.

Gradually, however, as we practice these disciplines, insight grows. We begin to see that living for ourselves has certain inescapable consequences for which we hadn’t bargained: alienation, loneliness, deteriorating relationships, a sense of desolation. The more we grab for our own happiness, the faster it recedes. And conversely, we discover that when we go after the happiness of others, relationships improve, depression disappears, and it is easier to face the challenges of life with resourcefulness and peace of mind. This is the advent of jnana. We are beginning to see beneath the surface of life, through the bewitching illusion of separateness called Maya, and everything benefits from it: meditation, relationships, security, love.

But understanding life is not enough. These insights need to be practiced. And for translating insight into daily living, we need meditation – not meditation on the surface now, but one-pointed concentration that drives spiritual ideals deep into consciousness and releases the power to act selflessly during the day.

As we practice this, the barrier of the ego is lowered and love grows. We ask less and less “What can I get?” and more and more “What can I give?” At last, after many years, if our practice of these disciplines has been sincere and systematic, we may reach a stage when we can truly say “I love.” All barriers are gone; every trace of self-seeking has been removed. We no longer want anything only for ourselves; we live in all. Then, and only then, the heart is flooded with utter peace – the “peace that passeth understanding.” The ego has been stilled forever, so there can be no more turmoil in the mind, no more vacillation, no more depression. It is not a temporary experience; every corner of the personality is bathed in peace that cannot be taken away. Jesus says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” And St. Catherine of Genoa explains out of the fullness of her own experience:

. . . when the soul is naughted and transformed, then of herself she neither works nor speaks nor wills, nor feels nor hears nor understands; neither has she of herself the feeling of outward or inward, where she may move. And in all things it is God who rules and guides her, without the mediation of any creature. And the state of this soul is then a feeling of such utter peace and tranquility that it seems to her that her heart, and her bodily being, and all both within and without, is immersed in an ocean of utmost peace. . . . And she is so full of peace that though she press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth from them than peace.

SRI KRISHNA: 13–14. That one I love who is incapable of ill will and returns love for hatred. Living beyond the reach of ‘I and mine,’ and of pleasure and pain, full of mercy, contented, self-controlled, firm in faith, with all his heart and all his mind given to me – with such a one I am in love.

Now we are entering one of the most beautiful, precise, and practical descriptions of the man or woman of God that I have seen. The purpose of such descriptions is not merely to inspire us, but to show us our real evolutionary potential: what kind of person you and I can actually become, in a marvelous transformation, through the practice of meditation and the allied disciplines.

In a sense, the words of an inspirational passage like this are not just words. They are more like depth charges, which are set to go off when they reach a certain level of consciousness. In meditation, by the concentration we give, we drive each word deep into consciousness so that it can release its potential. But when these words explode, instead of causing damage, they heal. Internal conflicts are resolved, doubts and reservations fall away, and we get the certitude that we are equal to challenges from which we used to run away.

This does not happen overnight, and like most people who are meditating sincerely, I used to wonder at times if this explosion was ever going to take place in my own consciousness. After all, I reasoned, the words of the Gita are thousands of years old; even the best of ammunition can fizzle after the passage of time. But I went on giving my best every day, and eventually I reached a stage in meditation where I could almost feel these words trembling deep in my consciousness, ready to go off. I didn’t know what was happening, but for a long time there was a strange air of expectancy. Then, one by one, each word released its potential, and I realized that the passage had become an integral part of my consciousness.

When translated literally, many of the words in these two verses sound negative: “without ill will for any creature, without any sense of I or mine.” But in this case, what is a negative construction in grammar has a wholly positive meaning in life. By not acting selfishly, speaking harshly, thinking negatively, we finally arrive at our native state, which is love itself.

In other words, this transformation does not take place by meditation alone. Meditation gives the power, but we then have to draw on this power to check every self-willed impulse during the day. Unless there are changes in our day-to-day behavior, even if they are modest and slow, we cannot talk about the transformation of personality.

You can see that this puts personal relationships in a wholly different light. From the spiritual perspective, if we are resentful towards a particular person, it is a much more serious problem than just one impaired relationship. That resentment is preventing us from attaining our native state. These verses do lead to deeper relationships, but their real purpose is much more: to enable us, through personal relationships, to realize the unity of life. If only in terms of our own spiritual progress, we need to learn to relate with kindness and consideration not only to a little clique of people whom we happen to like, but to everybody: at home, at work, in the store, on the bus, wherever we are.

It is easy to write this, or to read it and nod approval. But to practice it, day in and day out, is a constant battle. The other day an acquaintance was telling me he had been a soldier for twenty-five years. I wanted to reply, “Me, too.” The person who tries to live in accord with verses like these has been drafted into the toughest battle that life has to offer, and sent to the front lines without even a drop of rum.

Sometimes, riding my bicycle home from the university after a day of crossfire between department difficulties and student problems and all the university red tape, I used to think with a sigh of the spiritual aspirants in their caves on the Himalayas, watching the deer come to drink at a nearby brook and listening to the wind in the trees. I wouldn’t really have traded places with them, because it is only the rarest of individuals in any age who can extinguish self-will in the solitude of a cave. But there is nothing easy about realizing the Lord in the midst of society either. From first to last, it is a battle – and in a sense, every word in these verses is a battle strategy.

The very first phrase gives the key to all the others: Adveshta sarvabhutanam, ‘incapable of ill will towards any creature.’ Look at the daring of these two simple words! It is not enough not to express ill will; we must become incapable of it. Who even considers it possible today? Ill will is probably the most insidious enemy anyone could face. It doesn’t conquer us overnight, so that we wake up the next day with a different personality. It infiltrates consciousness with a few well-trained paratroopers: dislikes, resentments, petty, personal grudges. Paratroopers, as you know, wear camouflage, and the moment they land, they pretend they are part of the shrubbery. That is exactly what resentment does. It has all kinds of disguises, such as rationalization and righteous indignation. And like a good commando, it doesn’t stay hiding in the bushes; it immediately tries to occupy the strategic centers of the mind. Judgment is one of the first to fall, and once judgment has been occupied by resentment, we do not see things as they are. We feel threatened where there is no danger, and where there is danger we don’t see anything at all. After some time of this, the final occupation is easy. We welcome the enemy forces as liberators, and our loyal friends – equanimity, unselfishness, good will, trust – we treat with suspicion as traitors.

Even at this stage, I would say, it is possible to resist and win. But any strategist from Hannibal to Ho Chi Minh will say that if you intend to drive an enemy out, the least you can do is not first invite him in. In other words, don’t wait until the mind is teeming with invading resentments. As soon as you see a hostile thought, shoot it down with the mantram. It doesn’t matter if the thought seems justified or not; that is part of the camouflage. Don’t stop to ask questions; don’t wait for it to land and give you a password – shoot. At the beginning there may be a number of wild shots, but keep repeating the mantram until the thought drops out of sight. After a while, with a lot of practice, you will be able to pick off an invading resentment with just one shot.

At the heart of problems like this is our compulsive attachment to two narrow concepts: I and mine. This is the ego’s vocabulary. It goes around with a little mental stamp like those you pick up in a stationer’s, stamping everything and everybody it fancies: Mine, Mine, Mine. What it really means is Me, Me, Me.

Look at how people identify with their cars, or their clothes, or even their hair styles. I have a close friend, for example, who is devoted to her Volkswagen “bug.” If I compliment her on it, she is pleased; if I tell her what Ralph Nader says about VWs, she feels insulted. Where is the connection? She is not a bug.

Or take the way some people feel about their hair. If you make a remark about my hair – or lack of it – my hair might have ­reason to bristle, but why should I? I am not my hair; and if I start identifying with my hair, or with anything else external, my ego would swell to such a size that it couldn’t help bumping into other egos and taking offense.

This can be extended even to opinions, which is where many difficulties in personal relationships arise. Most of us identify ourselves with our opinions. Then, when we are contradicted, we take it personally and get upset. If we could look at ourselves with some detachment, we would see how absurd this is. There is scarcely any more connection between me and my opinions than there is between me and my car, and once we realize this at a deeper level of consciousness, most of the resentment in differences of opinion disappears.

This kind of detachment does not come easily, but it can be cultivated. Again, it may be helpful if I illustrate from my own life. In my earlier days – to change a few names – if Henry Ford, say, objected to my opinions on history and told me point-blank, “History is bunk,” I used to get upset. After a few times, I would begin to think of Henry Ford not as the man who made Detroit, but as the man with irritating views on history. In other words, I began to make a simple, common, but disastrous equation: “Henry Ford is the opinion that history is bunk.” Once the equation is drawn, it follows that if you dislike the idea, you have to dislike Henry Ford: and that is exactly what I used to do, except, of course, that I am using Mr. Ford here only as an illustration. After a while I would even block out his name; I would think, “Oh, you know, what’s-his-name: the man who thinks history is bunk.”

Now, I am not denying that there are people who are disagreeable about their opinions. There are such people in every walk of life, and it is only normal to avoid them. But the Gita is not talking about being normal; it is talking about living in freedom. And when I began to understand this, I said to myself, “Why not try sitting back from your opinions with a little detachment? After all, it doesn’t mean you have to give up your opinions. You don’t have to agree that history is bunk in order to like Henry Ford.” The real issue is not opinions at all; it is how to lower the barrier of self-will that keeps us from relating freely to everyone.

My desire to learn this was so great that if no one was around to contradict me, I used to seek out somebody whose ideas made my hair stand on end and say, “Hello, Henry, why don’t you explain to me your views on history?” And instead of arguing, I would sit and listen carefully and draw him out with the utmost courtesy. It had several surprising consequences. For one, I discovered I didn’t really mind the man after all. In fact, once I got my prejudices out of the way, I began to like him, simply as a human being. Second – which I hadn’t expected – I began to understand his point of view. I didn’t always agree with it, but I began to understand it: and that enabled me to listen with real interest, because it helped me to understand my own position better too. And third, even more unexpected, he began to listen with respect to me.

In other words, there is nothing wrong with disagreement. In fact, where relationships are concerned, it is a necessary part of love to disagree when the other person is about to do something he or she will later regret. What upsets us in such situations is simply lack of detachment: we don’t know how to disagree with complete respect.

Though I have been in this country for many years now, there are still many American expressions that I don’t understand. I remember trying to explain about meditation to a young fellow in Berkeley who kept shaking his head and saying, “Man, I just don’t hear you.” In all innocence, I started over again a little louder. Finally it dawned on me what he really meant: “I just don’t want to hear you. I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m going to plug my ears until you’re finished.”

This is what most of us do when there is disagreement. We carry around a pair of earplugs, and the minute somebody starts saying something we don’t like, we stuff them in our ears until he or she is through. Watch with some detachment the next time you find yourself quarreling with someone you love. It won’t look like a melodrama. A detached reviewer would write, “First-rate comedy! Two people trying to reach an understanding by not listening to each other.” One is saying, “What did you do the other day when I said such-and-such?” And the other replies, “What about you?” Can you imagine anything more comical? They are not trying to settle their differences; they are trying to make sure that they will never forget them.

If we could ask the mind on such occasions why it doesn’t listen, it would answer candidly, “Why should I? I already know I’m right.” We may not put it into words, but the other person gets the message: “You’re not worth listening to.” It is this lack of respect that offends people in an argument, much more than any difference of opinion.

But respect can be learned – again, by acting as if we had respect. And one of the most effective ways to do this is simply to listen with complete attention, even if we don’t care for what the other person is saying. Try it and see: the action is very much like that of a classical drama. For a while there is the “rising action,” just as I used to draw it for my students on the blackboard. The other person’s temper keeps going up, language becomes more and more vivid; everything is heading for a climax. But then comes the denouement. The other person begins to quiet down: his voice becomes gentler, his language kinder, all because you have not retaliated or lost your respect for him.

When detachment has deepened considerably, you can actually see the mental states behind a person’s behavior. It is an extraordinary leap in human perception. Just as a physician makes a diagnosis from X-rays of a patient’s lungs, you gain the capacity to read a kind of X-ray of a person’s mind and understand why he or she is behaving in a particular way. When this comes with detachment, you stop judging others. Then you can begin uprooting ill will not only from your words and behavior, but from your very thoughts.

Fortunately, this capacity does not ordinarily come without considerable detachment from oneself. The reason is simple: without detachment, there is too much of the ego in the way for vision to be clear. It is a precious safety clause, because sometimes even behind pleasant words, the mental state is anything but pleasant. But when you look at a person’s behavior with detachment, it’s almost like seeing the inner mechanisms of a clock. Most of us, when we have a problem with an alarm clock, don’t throw it out the window. We turn it around and try to find out what has gone wrong. Here it is much the same. You still see the face of the clock – the dial, the hands, the pendulum swinging back and forth, the little bird sticking out its beak at you and saying “Cuckoo!” But now, instead of taking all this personally and getting angry, you can look behind the face to the mechanisms inside and see what has gone wrong. It releases great compassion, for as Voltaire says, “To understand all is to forgive all.”

The words Sri Krishna uses here are among the most beautiful in the Sanskrit language. Karuna: there is a continous flow of love and sympathy, which comes when you see yourself in all and all in you. Kshami: ‘full of mercy,’ ready to forgive everybody no matter who they are or what they may have done. This is much more than simply shaking hands and saying, “I forgive you.” Real forgiveness flows automatically, and with it comes the desire and the capacity to move closer to those who offend you, and to help. Maitrah: this is real friendship, where you never withdraw your respect, never retaliate, but always see the best in people and help them to live up to the highest of which they are capable. Then, says Sri Krishna, “Yo madbhaktah sa me priyah.” This is loving the Lord; and when we try to live like this, we not only benefit those around us, we are helping to unite ourselves with the Lord once and for all.

SRI KRISHNA: 15. Not agitating the world or by it agitated, he stands above the sway of elation, competition, and fear, accepting life, good and bad, as it comes.

“Wherever you go,” my granny used to tell me, “you are going to encounter ups and downs – pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune, people who like you and people who don’t care for you at all.” The nature of life is up today and down tomorrow, and the Gita says simply, let it go up and down; you don’t have to go up and down with it.

Recently there has been a lot of popular interest in “biorhythms.” According to the current theory, each of us has built-in cycles of emotional ups and downs. For two weeks I can be cheerful, but then for the next two weeks I have to go into a slump. If I’m irritable in those two weeks, I’m sorry, but I have to be irritable; that’s just the way my cycles go.

The idea, of course, is that if you can plot all these cycles, you can pursue your goals when you’re at your best and stay at home in bed when you are not. Unfortunately, the demands of life pay very little attention to anybody’s cycles. If they did, I doubt that we would ever learn to grow up, which in the Gita means being at our best always – loving when life is for us, equally loving when life is against us. This is just the opposite of a colorless existence. It means going beyond the conditioned cycles of elation and depression to live in an abiding sense of joy.

Most of us do not think of elation as a problem. After all, doesn’t everybody like to be on cloud number nine? I agree: if we could stay on cloud number nine, life might be very pleasant. But as all of us know, the cloud eventually evaporates. Then we not only come abruptly back to earth, we usually burrow right into its depths and hide – that is, we go into a depression.

In other words, the problem with elation is depression. “What goes up must come down” is true of moods as well as of Newton’s apple. Elation and depression are inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon, the erratic swinging of the mind: up with what it likes, down with what it doesn’t like. Because of our conditioning, we like to make a distinction: when the mind swings up, we say that the swinging is pleasant; when the mind swings down, we say it’s unpleasant. But a good spiritual scientist like the Buddha would say, “No. Swinging is swinging.” In both elation and depression the mind is in agitated motion, and if we let it get agitated over what it likes, it will stay agitated when it encounters – as it must – something it does not like. The agitation is the same; the focus of attention has simply changed.

This is an important point, because depression today has become literally epidemic. By more than a few doctors’ appraisal it is the most serious mental health problem in this country, the condition most frequently encountered in a doctor’s office today. Perhaps as many as twenty million people a year suffer from depression acutely enough to require medical attention, and no one can guess at how many more cases have not been recognized and counted.

In an important sense, however, depression is not a medical problem. There are drug approaches that can be effective first aid, but they do not get at the mechanisms of depression; they only affect its symptoms. When Dr. Paul Dudley White, the distinguished American heart specialist, was asked what he considered the best treatment for heart disease, he answered simply, “Prevention.” That is the best treatment for depression too, and it is entirely possible. Until we understand the connection between excitement and depression, we are not likely to be able to keep depression from recurring. But once we understand the mechanisms of the mind, the picture becomes very reassuring: no matter how severely we may have been subject to depression in the past, we need never be depressed again.

There are a number of ways to illustrate how excitement and depression work. One way that throws light on the role of the senses here is to think of the senses as windows. In my old state of Kerala, houses are mostly one-story buildings with large wooden windows, which open out onto verandas when weather is pleasant and which close securely during heavy rains or the oppressive heat of the afternoon. Windows made from good wood can function well for centuries, but those made from cheap wood pose a constant problem: after a little exposure to tropical heat and monsoon storms, they warp. Then they open only with difficulty, and there is always the danger of forcing them open so wide that they get stuck and can’t be closed again. When that happens, you are at the mercy of all kinds of weather – until finally a good strong storm comes along and slams the windows stuck with a vengeance. After that, you can’t easily get them open again. One minute you’re wide open to the world, everything outside is blown right in; the next minute you’re sealed inside.

The senses behave in a very similar way. They are windows into the mind, meant to open smoothly when we are interacting with the outside world and to close securely when they are not in use. But in a person who gets easily excited, the windows of the senses are not just opened gently. They are thrown open as far as they can go, because of the intense desire to take in all the stimulation of the outside world.

We are not usually aware of this when it happens, because all our attention is turned outwards; there is no attention left for reflection and self-knowledge. But what happens is that the senses are thrown open with such force that they get stuck that way, leaving us completely at the mercy of the weather. We take in everything without discrimination; and just as we tried to take in what we thought was pleasant, we have to take in what is unpleasant too.

Then, eventually, there comes a storm. Something unpleasant comes along and slams the senses closed with a bang, locking us inside. That is depression.

What follows then is really tragic: we cannot help brooding on ourselves. In a mechanical sense, the senses continue to receive impressions – sights, sounds, and so on – but attention has turned completely inwards. If you look at a depressed person’s eyes, you will see a little sign: “Closed. Nobody Home.” There is somebody home, but he or she isn’t answering any calls. You can take him to a movie and he won’t respond; you can talk to her and she may not even hear: their attention is all caught inside, in brooding on themselves. There is even a characteristic expression, like the look on the face of somebody listening to the hi fi with a big set of earphones, slumped down in a chair all absorbed in a world of his own. But depression is listening to an “in-fi”: the ears are covered to the outside world, and the person is hearing nothing, listening to nothing, except his or her own thoughts. And the tragedy is that the program is never positive. Everything is in negative mode: “Nobody likes me, I don’t like anybody, I can’t stand myself.”

In personal relationships, the tragedy is at its worst. In a sense, while we are in a depression, we are not aware of any relationship with those around us – which means, among other things, that we are cut off from the major source of joy and meaning in life. To relate to people, attention has to flow outwards to them, so that we can identify with them and include them in our world. But if the windows of the senses are closed, there is no connection with others at all. We can be in the midst of a jolly crowd and still feel utterly alone.

There is an interesting comparison here with meditation. There too the senses are closed down, and the mind is trained upon itself. But in meditation, this is done freely. You choose a time and place for going inwards, and coax the eyes and ears and other senses to sit still while your higher mind takes a close look at your lower mind and concludes, with compassion, “What a clown!” All this is done in free choice, and after meditation you can turn your attention outwards again with the same freedom. But in depression, when the senses are slammed shut without your consent and the mind is turned in on itself compulsively, what happens is not a matter for joking. Everything is distorted, the way it is in a house of mirrors. Your partner looks as big as an elephant, you look like a little mouse; one side of you seems twisted and deformed. Smiles look like grimaces, and every gesture is threatening. If the bout of depression is prolonged, or if such bouts come frequently, you can even come to think that’s how you and those around you really are.

Here, as usual, the approach of the Gita is very practical. Don’t expect such people to be able to love, to be steadfast or patient or to work consistently at their jobs; show them how to get the windows open. Once that has been accomplished, you can teach them how to open and close their senses gently and with discrimination, so that they can guard themselves against depression coming again.

Essentially, the biochemical approach to depression is to force the windows open again, very much in the way in which they were slammed shut – that is, involuntarily. This approach can save lives, but it cannot do much to change the habit of oscillation in the mind. This is the real problem, and unless this habit is changed, depression is bound to recur. But to change the habit, we have to learn to open and close the windows of the senses for ourselves.

There are innumerable ways to do this, but here let me suggest just a few that are most effective in first aid. For one, don’t isolate yourself; be with people. When you are in a depression, all your conditioning is crying out for you to lock yourself in your room, put on your headphones, and brood over how depressed you are. This may be natural, but it is probably the worst thing you could do. To open the sense-windows you need to come out, be with people, and give them your full attention. It is especially good if you can throw yourself into hard, selfless work with other people. Activity, especially hard physical activity, helps to keep your mind off yourself. And don’t act depressed; act normal. Your mind may complain about the company – “a lot of crashing bores” – but you can still pretend to be interested. You don’t have to talk, but you can at least listen with interest – and smile, even if you have to pull the corners of your mouth up with your fingers. You know you’re really depressed, other people may know it too, but what does it matter? By acting normal you are becoming normal, freeing your attention from where it has been compulsively caught. The moment will come when you forget that you are acting. Then you are not acting any longer; the depression has lost its hold on you.

In all these approaches, the key is the same. A depressed person has lost the capacity to direct his attention. To get out of a depression, it is necessary to go against your conditioning and turn attention outwards again. When you can keep attention focused outwards, depression is gone; the windows are open again.

But there is another way to look on the mechanics of depression, and that is in terms of vital capacity: in Sanskrit, prana. This is an extremely useful approach, because it connects directly with the cause of depression: excitement.

For purposes of this discussion, prana is very much like gas in a car. It is the energy of life, not only on the physical level but on the emotional level as well. Now, in terms of energy, being excited consumes a lot of gas. It shows in many ways. There are people who, as soon as they get excited about something, begin to talk and talk. Excitement means that the mind is a bit out of control, and the lack of control overflows into their speech. Other people simply get speeded up, trying to fit more and more into their day, their sentences, even their thoughts. All this burns a lot of fuel, not only on the physical level but on the emotional level as well. If you could monitor your body when you’re excited, you would see all sorts of signs that energy is being burned excessively. The heart beats faster, muscles become tense, breathing is rapid and irregular. It is like punching holes in your gas tank: in all these ways, vitality is draining out. That is why excitable people often feel harassed and tired as the day wears on, always busy but accomplishing comparatively little.

Then, after prana drops to a certain level, the capacity for excitement drops too. We may still be in the same surroundings – on the same cruise, with the same people, visiting the same Caribbean island – but what seemed so exciting earlier now seems dull or irritating. This is depression. We have opened the petcock on our gas tank, and after a while we find that there is no more fuel with which to generate attention. In general, unless we can reverse the conditioning of depression, it takes as long for the tank to fill up again as it took to drain it through our excitement.

Actually, to me, this is a precious safety mechanism. The conditioning of excitement is so powerful that without some kind of cut-off, most of us would go on getting excited and drain a lifetime of prana before it occurred to us that we were throwing away our capacity to live. In this sense it is possible to think of depression as a friend, very much like indigestion. Without indigestion, many of us would overeat until it was difficult to reverse the damage. Similarly, depression is a friend that is sending us an urgent reminder, special delivery: “You haven’t been using your senses very well; you haven’t been taking care of your mind. No more prana until you give your mind and body a rest.” It isn’t pleasant, but depression gives a kind of recuperative period in which the senses close down so that our tank can fill up again.

One of the clearest illustrations of this is that in severe depression, sexual desire is often absent. There is a direct connection, because there is no more powerful stimulus to excitement than sex – not simply sex on the physical level but especially in the mind, where the desire arises. Dwelling on sex, anticipating it, longing for it, all takes up a lot of prana. Then the tank is depleted, and when sexual desire is absent for a while in depression, we are getting a little breathing spell in which to consolidate vitality again and to learn to protect ourselves against undue excitement in the future.

But let me be clear on this point: it is not sexual desire that is the problem. It is elation, the mind going out of control. Prana is drained by any kind of excitement, and today, everything is supposed to be exciting: vacations, restaurants, music, cars, even breakfast cereals and lipstick. There is a general attitude of seeking excitement that is in the air, and to me it bodes very ill for our civilization if we do not learn how to change. Where people are looking for excitement everywhere, epidemic depression has to follow: and as I said earlier, this is what we are beginning to see today.

Recently, for example, I saw a newspaper story about what was billed as one of the most exciting events of the season: a “Look Like Greta Garbo” party. Imagine – five hundred women paying a small fortune to come to a party all looking alike, not only in their costumes but in their wigs, their accents, even their gestures. There must have been weeks of feverish anticipation, planning, rehearsing, fantasizing, talking, dwelling on the pleasure that party would bring. With the Gita’s perspective, I had only to read that article to know that before long the offices of practitioners all over that city would be full of five hundred look-alike depressives.

Ultimately, it is not overindulging the senses that is the problem in depression; it is indulging our self-will. Whenever we dwell on ourselves – rehearsing pleasure, replaying the past, worrying about getting our way – we are indulging self-will. And the result, as far as vitality goes, is like letting your car sit in the garage all night with the engine idling: you go out in the morning and find that there is no more gas.

The critical message here is that all this can be prevented – by not wasting prana. Depression, put simply, is an energy crisis. With conservation there is no crisis. Your tank is always full, so there is always plenty of vitality with which to weather life’s ups and downs. In terms of the mind, there is no more erratic motion; the waves of agitation have been stilled. The exhilaration of this state is conveyed in precise, simple language by St. Teresa of Ávila in one of her rare little poems, stamped with her own experience:

Her heart is full of joy with love,

For in the Lord her mind is stilled.

Having renounced all selfish attachments,

She draws abiding strength from the One within.

She lives not for herself, but lives

To serve the Lord of Love in all,

And swims across the sea of life

Breasting its rough waves joyfully.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. He is pure, efficient, detached, ready to meet every demand I make on him as a humble instrument of my work.

I once knew a chap who was an expert at card games, who had a quiet way of making the most of every hand. “A good player,” he explained, “can’t afford to depend on chance. He’s got to be able to play whatever he’s dealt.” Then he would add, with understandable pride, “Let anybody you like set up the cards – some good, all bad, I don’t care. At the end of the evening, I’ll still come out on top.”

He was talking about cards, but I was thinking, “That’s the way to live in freedom too.” The word the Gita uses here is anapekshah, for which “detached” is a very pale translation. Literally, anapekshah means ‘without expectations.’ It sounds negative, even passive, but it is just the opposite. Anapekshah means always ready for the unexpected – in other words, ready for anything. It is a very daring attitude, because it means telling life, “I’m not concerned with what you send me. Good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, it doesn’t matter; I can make the best of whatever comes.”

The opposite of this is not preparedness; it is rigidity. Most of us are subject to this, and it comes to the surface when we have to deal with unexpected problems. From what I have seen of life, problems are a repertory theater. We may see all sorts of characters, but only a very few problems are playing all the roles. Self-will, of course, is one of the most versatile. Now, give us a problem that we recognize – dressed in a particular costume, cast in a particular role, appearing at a particular place and time – and we know how to deal with it. But the moment the same problem appears in a way we do not expect – say, wearing a false moustache and a fez – we go to pieces. The mind looks through its catalog and throws up its hands: “Boss, this isn’t supposed to happen! I don’t know what to do.”

In other words, to live without expectations is the secret of freedom, especially in personal relationships. There is a song from My Fair Lady in which Rex Harrison sings in exasperation:

Why can’t a woman be more like a man? . . .

Why can’t a woman be like me?

It did not surprise me to learn that this was a very popular song. In every emotional relationship, even if we don’t know how to put it into words, each of us has a rigid set of expectations which require the other person to act and think in a particular way. Interestingly enough, it is not that person’s way; it is our own. Then, when he or she acts differently, we get surprised and feel irritated or disappointed. If we could see behind the scenes, in the mind, this sort of encounter would make a rather good comedy. Here I am, relating not to you but to my idea of you, and I get irritated because you insist on acting your own way instead!

In the end, this is the basis of most difficulties in personal relationships. It is really no more than stimulus and response. If you behave the way I expect, the way I want, I’ll be kind. If you behave otherwise, I’ll act otherwise too: rude or irritated or disappointed or depressed, depending on my personality, but always something in reaction to you. It means, very simply, that none of us has much freedom; our behavior is dependent on what other people say and do.

When I first began to observe this in myself, I was astonished. Imagine going through life with handcuffs on and thinking that you’re free! Being a college professor, I had always assumed that my intellect did a rather good job. But when I saw that my behavior was nothing but stimulus and response, I looked my intellect in the face and it hung its head. “Look at you,” I said, “so well trained, so clever! How is it that you couldn’t see that my daily living isn’t being done by me but by Tom and Dick and Harry?” It was a shocking discovery, but on the other hand, it was a hopeful one. With that discovery came a deep desire for freedom to take my life away from that dubious trio and bring it into my own hands.

There is a simple but effective way to do this: give your best everywhere, without reference to anybody else. It frees you from all the vagaries of stimulus and response. On the one hand, by using verses like these in meditation, you set yourself very high standards of conduct – perhaps the highest that can be imagined. Then you try to apply these standards to everything you do and say and even think throughout the day, without being swayed by anybody else’s reaction. If things go your way, you can give your best; if they don’t go your way, you can still give your best. All the choices are yours.

In practice, this means that we become the same person always. Most of us think we are the same always, but if we could make objective observations at certain critical times of the day, we would have to conclude that the similarities are on the surface. A mother may say of her pediatrician, “Oh, Dr. Jekyll! He’s always so kind, never loses his temper with little Jamie.” But ask his wife or his medical assistant; they may tell you a very different story. “Come see the doctor at home; he’s a regular Mr. Hyde.” It’s like people being meticulous about how they look when they go out, but going about unshaven or with their hair up in curlers when they’re at home. To me, it’s a curious reversal of perspective. I don’t want to be at my best only with the mail carrier or the checkout clerk; I want to be at my best always, with everyone, beginning with those who are nearest and dearest.

Now, I will be the first to admit that this takes a lot of endurance. When you start giving another person your best, especially in an emotionally entangled relationship, he may not notice it for weeks. This kind of indifference can really sting. You want to go up to him, tap him on the shoulder, and say, “Hello, George, I’ve just been kind to you.” George would say, “Oh, thank you, I didn’t even know it” – not because he was trying to be rude, but because he was preoccupied with himself. To be patient and go on giving your best, you can’t have expectations about how other people are going to respond. You can’t afford to ask, “Does he like me? I’ve been putting him first for two whole weeks, and I don’t think he even cares.” What does it matter? If you go on putting him first, never mind that he benefits from it too; you’re growing.

Especially in a loving relationship, this question of “Does my partner love me in return?” should not be asked at all. Give the person you love your very best and don’t ask about the response. It frees you in your relationship, but more than that, it strengthens the other person. In one-to-one relationships, most of us tend to lean on each other. If one person wobbles, the other person wobbles too, and sometimes even falls. When you are always at your best, you become a real source of strength to those around you. No matter how much they may vacillate, they know they can always lean on you and trust you to stand firm.

If it takes patience to do this in even the best of relationships, it requires real courage in the face of hostile opposition. Here I can make some practical suggestions. For one, concentrate on your own personal conduct. Don’t allow your attention to wander to how rude the other person is; concentrate on not being rude yourself. It is terribly difficult, but it frees you to choose your response.

In a sense, this is like the attitude a good athlete has in competition. When the going gets rough, there are some players who get rattled and lose their capacity to concentrate on their own game. I have seen a well-known tennis champion lose to a chap who didn’t have half his skill, simply because he lost his concentration whenever his challenger got ahead. But there are other players who are at their best when they’re behind. They don’t start thinking about the other player and get all rattled. They dig in and concentrate even harder on their own game, and some of the most brilliant tennis I have seen comes when a fellow like Bjorn Borg fights his way out of a hole against heavy odds to win.

Another suggestion I can offer that used to help me greatly when I caught on to it is this: in an emotionally charged situation, when you find it difficult to concentrate on giving the other person your best, pretend you’re an actor on the stage. Play the role of someone who is detached – and give your best to your performance.

Let me give a personal example. In earlier years, as a professor, I often had to attend faculty meetings, where sparks can really fly. Naturally, when the issue was important to me, I used to express my opinion at those meetings – and as often as not, somebody who felt just as strongly about the opposite view would stand up and take to pieces everything I had said. Certain people did this with such regularity that the minute they stood up, my adrenal glands would start working overtime, simply because I was about to be contradicted.

Then I began to pretend that instead of being a professor, I was playing the part of a professor: using learned, professorial words, striking certain intellectual attitudes, but all as if it were a role in an off-­Broadway performance. If somebody contradicted me, my mind could just sit back and watch; it was all part of the play. I even came to enjoy practicing, and when my opinions came under fire, I would pretend to be Laurence Olivier: take my time to reply, bring the fire of righteous indignation into my eyes, and then state my position in forceful but courteous Victorian English.

Remarkably enough, my colleagues seemed to appreciate this too. Two or three even went so far as to say, “You know, you’ve really been making a contribution to these meetings.” After all, I felt the same responsibilities, held the same educational concerns; I was simply learning to hold my opinions without rancor in the face of opposition. And where I used to go home after a heated meeting feeling irritated, I now felt like a critic going home after a show. “Much Ado About Nothing again – same cast, modern dress. But not a bad performance from E. E.”

People sometimes object, “Isn’t this being hypocritical?” Not at all. If anything is hypocritical, it is being angry, behaving rudely, using words that are calculated to hurt another person. Any kind of negative behavior is untrue to our real Self, and when we try to play the role of someone who is kind, we are really learning to be ourselves. There is no need to be afraid of past performances. After all, some of Hollywood’s best known “good guys” aren’t always such good guys off the screen. Similarly, no matter what you have been like, you can always play a better part, which you will gradually assimilate.

When we quarrel, when we act resentful, that too is a play. It seems natural only because we have rehearsed it so many times. In acting with respect towards others, we are still taking part in the same play, but we have chosen a different role.

Naturally, it is difficult to remember this in the heat of the moment, let alone to do it. Even good actors sometimes forget their lines, drop out of character for a moment, and whisper, “What do I say next?” You can do the same – repeat the mantram and recall these beautiful verses, which meditation will drive deep into your heart: “Pure, efficient, detached, ready to meet every demand I make on him as a humble instrument of my work.” And then go back to the play. You may not feel the epitome of compassion, but I promise you, you can learn to play the part to perfection.

The marvel of this is that the more often you practice it, the more easily the lines and actions come. After a while they become an integral part of your consciousness. Some time ago in India there was a play about a great saint which must have been performed all over the country for a number of years. The actor who played the title role, by his own account, was not at all saintly when he took the job. But after so many years of speaking those inspired lines, taken mostly from the saint’s own words, and acting like a saint night after night, the man’s consciousness began to change. He began to want to be a saint. Finally, after the run of the play was over, he gave up acting and devoted himself entirely to the spiritual life.

Ultimately, to give up expectations is to lay aside all the absurd impositions of self-will. Then there is nothing that you require of life; all you want is to give. You have thrown away your defenses: they serve no purpose, for there is nothing that life can take from you. As the Upanishads put it, you are always full – “Take away from fullness and it is still full, give to fullness and it is still full.” And the rest of us, in the presence of such a person, lay down all our defenses too.

Some time ago I took my wife and some friends to see the film version of Camelot. One of the younger members of the party was just entering the age when the promises of romance seem eternal, so after the film I asked her what she thought of all those knights.

“Oh,” she said, “they must have had a very thrilling life. But imagine having to carry around those silly shields!”

Unfortunately, it’s not only in Camelot that people carry shields. Virtually all of us labor under defenses that are much more rigid and cumbersome: our expectations. Whenever we feel challenged, we shove these shields up in front of us – and then, when we have trouble relating to others, we complain about bad communication! Even when two people say they are in love with each other, though each may be trying to embrace with one arm, the other arm is still holding on to the same old shield, ready to bring it up again the moment he or she feels a little insecure.

How much vitality is wasted in life by carrying around these shields! They don’t even protect us; and as far as relationships go, they constitute most of our problems. And the Gita says simply, “Throw all your shields away.” Then you have both arms free to embrace with – in the end, to embrace all life. When you can really embrace with both your arms, the message is clear to anyone: “There is nothing I want from you; all I want is to give.” This is what all of us are looking for: not only to receive such love but to offer it, freely and consistently, so that our lives will be cherished by everyone around us.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. He is dear to me who runs not after the pleasant or away from the painful, grieves not over the past, lusts not today, but lets things come and go as they happen.

A friend of mine once asked her eight-year-old son what he wanted for Christmas. She was expecting him to say a bicycle or some Beatles records, or perhaps an electric guitar. His answer took her completely by surprise: “A pair of handcuffs.”

When we go through life running after what we like and away from what we dislike, this is just what we are asking for: handcuffs to inhibit every chance of relating to others in freedom. I have met people who were as proud of their handcuffs as that eight-year-old boy. “I’m a man of strong opinions,” they say. “I’m a woman who knows what she likes. I’m spontaneous; I’m free.” But someone like St. Francis just gives them a curious smile. “Free, is it? What are those things on your wrists?”

With rare exceptions like St. Francis, this is the conditioning that all of us share: to run after the pleasant and to avoid the unpleasant. It is the old story of stimulus and response. The other day I was reading that certain microorganisms, which ordinarily go about in random motion, become intentional when particular substances are introduced into their environment. If the substance is pleasant, they move towards it; if it is obnoxious, they move away. I said to myself, “How human!” But there is a crucial difference between us and the rest of creation. All of us, as human beings, have the capacity to decondition ourselves, to train the mind to make the choices that take us beyond conditioned behavior.

The villain here is not actually the mind; it is the ego. The ego has an obsession with taking everything personally. It can’t let anything go by without putting in its opinion: “I like this, I don’t like that.” We may not be aware of it; but if we could listen in on our thoughts, this is the incessant refrain behind all our experience.

When I was living in Oakland I used to go for long walks around the park, and on Sunday afternoons during the summer I would encounter a band concert. After a while, I began to take my walks at a different hour. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the music. What I objected to was that there wasn’t any choice about listening to it; wherever you went, you had to be accompanied by John Philip Sousa.

That is the way the ego is. He has a large repertoire of songs and dances, but they all have the same chorus: “I like this, I don’t like that.” Isn’t there a famous choir in which all the singers are boys? Here all the voices are our samskaras, our compulsions. They take every part from soprano to bass, and if they are sometimes squeaky or raucous, they make up for it in enthusiasm. They’re willing to practice seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, as long as we’re willing to listen. And the ego is the conductor, standing there with his baton and making sure that everybody comes in on cue.

It is absurd how flimsy likes and dislikes can be. Often, when we meet someone, all it takes to set us off is one little personal characteristic – his nose, her voice, the way he laughs, the way she shows her teeth. Immediately the chorus will set in. And the ego is a good conductor. He doesn’t have to saw the air; he just lifts his baton and cocks his eyebrows and everybody starts right up: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it, I don’t like it!”

It is pointless to blame the ego for this; it is his nature. If the ego had to declare his identity going through customs, he would say proudly, “I’m a conductor.” And if the officials asked, “Is there anybody accompanying you?” I am sure that he would trot out his whole band. “Come on up, boys!” And they would start up right there in the customs shed: “I like this, I don’t like that.” That is the ego’s show, and to paraphrase the Compassionate Buddha, if we hire the ego, we hire the show too.

To put it into practical language, underneath all our liking and disliking is one and the same samskara. A samskara, remember, is a habit of mind that operates independently of external circumstances. I sometimes compare it to a searchlight: once a searchlight is on, it has to shine, no matter where it is pointing. In this case, we may think we have all sorts of unrelated likes and dislikes – peppermint chip ice cream, hang gliding, names that begin with A – but underneath all of them is the same old samskara: “I like this, I don’t like that.”

To take an example, look at procrastination. “I don’t like” puts on a fancy costume and calls itself “I have postponed.” The disguise can be quite elaborate: “I have all this urgent work to do,” “My other responsibilities just don’t leave me time,” “I still haven’t cleaned out the garage.” There may be all sorts of complicating reasons, but underneath, it is often no more than “This isn’t pleasant, so I’m not about to do it.” That is why Jesus says so often, “Forthwith.” If something needs to be done, do it now, without even asking whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. Then you are undoing the samskara, getting rid of your handcuffs.

Now, for a bigger surprise, look at vacillation. Who would think that there is a connection between finding it difficult to make decisions and not being able to love? But as we begin to see the mental states behind behavior, it becomes clear that vacillation has very little to do with external circumstances. The mind has simply learned to wobble, and it will wobble back and forth over anything whenever its security is upset.

There is a good word for vacillation in Sanskrit: cancala. It almost sounds like the bangles on a dancer’s ankles, and in Sanskrit poetry, a girl with dancing eyes is called cancalakshi: ‘she whose pupils are always darting back and forth.’ In the days of classical Indian drama, this was considered a rare attribute. But I see eyes like this every time I go into a supermarket – trying to decide whether to get mint toothpaste or regular, weighing the pros and cons of two brands of soap, wondering whether herbal essence or musk best suits their personalities. People of both sexes are subject to this. They may think they are making independent decisions, but underneath, they are asking the same question over and over again: Do I like this? It can lead to taking half an hour to decide what kind of toothbrush to buy. “Do I like this? It says it’s soft, but there are only two rows of bristles. Or do I like this? It has three rows, but there’s no recommendation by the ADA.” We aren’t satisfied any more with liking one thing and sticking to it; we have to keep asking about it more and more often, so that our attention is dancing all over the store.

Now, here is the Gita’s revelation: this has very little to do with shopping. It is a habit of mind, and the person who has trouble making decisions in any part of life is going to have trouble making decisions everywhere. In the end, that person will vacillate even in personal relationships. The underlying question is still the same: Do I like this? “Do I like him or don’t I? He has a nice nose, and I think he likes me, but sometimes I don’t care for the way he walks.” When we think this way, every time the other person does something we don’t like we stagger a little in our stance. Then he staggers too – we’re uncertain, so he’s uncertain. It can come to such a state that neither person is able to stand firm; and when that happens in a relationship, life can really be miserable.

That is how far this samskara can go: in the end, “I don’t like” becomes “I can’t love.” This is why I put so much emphasis on going against likes and dislikes in little things like food. It has really very little to do with food; you’re working on the samskara. Enjoying something nourishing which you detest – say, broccoli – may not seem like much of a challenge. But when you learn to eat without rigid attachments, you are really undoing the conditioning of liking and disliking in everything, opening up the handcuffs that keep you from being free.

The problem here, the Gita says, is that our relationships are upside down. We try to build relationships on what is pleasing to us, on physical or emotional attraction. But if there is anything sure about physical attraction, it is that it has to change. We cannot build on it; its very nature is to come and go. To build on a firm foundation, we have to stop asking this question of “What do I like?” and ask only, “What can I give?”

Physical attraction, in other words, is a sensation – here one minute, gone the next. Love is a relationship. It is pleasant to be with someone who is physically attractive, but how long can you enjoy an aquiline nose? How long can you thrill to the timbre of a voice when it doesn’t say what you like? It’s very much like eating: no ­matter how much you are attracted to chocolate pie, there is a limit to how much you can enjoy. Beyond that limit, if somebody merely mentions chocolate, your stomach stages a revolt.

That is the most tragic truth about the satisfactions of the senses: they cannot last. It is their nature to come and go, and when the initial attraction begins to wane, the very things that seemed so pleasant now begin to irritate you. He had such a nice sense of humor when you first met; how is it that his jokes seem corny now? Her smile used to dazzle you; why does she now seem to be all teeth? The wave of passion has risen, now it has to fall: that is all. Pleasure cannot last, any more than the tide can rise without falling again. If you want to build a relationship, don’t build it on what changes. Build it on what endures, where the question “Do I like this?” doesn’t even arise. Then there is joy in everything, because there is joy in the relationship itself – in ups and downs, through the pleasant and the unpleasant, in sickness and in health.

In Sanskrit, physical attraction is called kama: selfish desire, in which I ask only what pleasure I will receive. It is a tremendous force, as we can see from the lives of those with strong passions who are hurled in and out of relationships even against their will. But kama can be transformed – not negated or repressed, but made a matter of free choice, by gradually changing the focus from me, me, me to you, you, you. Then we say in Sanskrit, kama becomes prema: pure love, where my attention is not on my own pleasure but on the happiness and welfare of those around me.

One of the difficulties in talking about this is that our English word “love” has become almost impossible to use. We talk about a mother’s love for her children and mean one thing; we talk about “making love” and mean another. We even talk about loving cheesecake, and we use the phrase “falling in love” as if it were something that could happen every day, like falling into a manhole. Is it so easy to fall in love? We have to learn to love, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort.

Listen to our popular songs; look at our magazines and newspapers. When they say “I love you,” that’s not what I hear; I hear “I love me.” If we could listen in on a marriage proposal with the ears of St. Francis, this is what we would hear. The man gets down on bended knee and says, “Sibyl dear, I love me; will you marry me?” Isn’t it an accurate translation? You’ll make me happy, so won’t you marry me? And Sibyl, who is nobody’s fool, says, “I love me too – and you’ll make me happy. So I will.”

To be honest, there is a little undertone of this in the relationships of almost all of us. There is no need to be ashamed of it: this is how we have been conditioned, to put ourselves first at least some of the time. But where I like to place emphasis is on the fact that all of us can change. Every relationship begins like this to some extent: some passionate I love you’s and some undertones of I love me. But if you want your relationship to blossom, you won’t dwell on each other’s weaknesses; you’ll set to work to correct them and really learn how to love.

I wish I could convey what unending artistry there is in this challenge – artistry and satisfaction and lasting joy. Every day we should be able to love more than the day before. Otherwise there is no growth, which means that things are getting pretty dull. Every day the same old story, “I love you with all my heart?” It may be enough for the romance magazines, but it’s not enough for a mystic.

Look at our travel ads – “Experience the Bahamas.” How gullible we can be! They show us a couple of swaying palms, some azure waters lapping at white sands, and then they ask innocently, “Wouldn’t you like to sit beneath these coconut palms and fall in love?” I come from Kerala, the “land of the coconut palm,” and you can take it from me: never try to pursue your dreams beneath a coconut tree. Coconuts have a way of falling on romantic heads, and even the smallest nut, if it drops from a height of fifty feet, can put an end to your romance before it starts. What do swaying palms and azure waters have to do with love? Love doesn’t need an exotic setting; it can flourish in the kitchen, in the garden, wherever two people are putting each other first.

If you want to know what love is, look at a woman who knows how to be patient when her husband is irritated. Instead of fanning his mood, she strengthens him by bearing with him until his mind quiets down. In my book, that woman is a great lover. Or look at a man who comes home after work instead of going to a bar, who plays with his children even though he’s tired, stays and talks with his wife while they do the dishes instead of flopping down in front of the TV. He is a great lover, even if you never see his name on the Hollywood marquees.

When you live with a person like this, the time will come when you find it impossible even to think a harsh thought about each other. You may not completely understand each other, you may not always see eye to eye, but each of you will know without doubt that the other’s loyalty will never waver. When this happens, you are no longer living in Berkeley or San Francisco. It is paradise, “Jerusalem’s green land,” right here on earth. There may be differences on the surface, but underneath the surface there is only pure, selfless love.

Two people like this are no longer two; they are one. When things are sunny, you may not notice how their relationship shines. But wait until the storms begin to blow outside, when everything is going wrong: you will see unfailing support between them, unfaltering loyalty, tenderness that never ends. “Call it not love that changes”: it is wise advice. This is the pinnacle of love, and nothing less can ever satisfy us.

SRI KRISHNA: 18–19. Who serves both friend and foe with equal love, not buoyed up by praise or cast down by blame, alike in heat and cold, pleasure and pain, free from selfish attachments and self-will, ever full, in harmony everywhere, firm in faith – such a one is dear to me.

I don’t think anyone illustrates these verses better than Gandhiji, for whom love and selfless action were one. “I don’t want to be at home only with my friends,” he said; “I want to be at home with my ­enemies too.” It wasn’t a manner of speaking; he lived it out through forty years of solid opposition.

The other day I saw some newsreel footage of Gandhi with a prominent political figure who opposed him so relentlessly that people said he had a problem for every solution Gandhi offered. These scenes were shot in 1944, when the two leaders met for a series of talks in which literally millions of lives were hanging in the balance. It took my breath away to see Gandhi treating his opponent with the affection one shows an intimate friend. At the beginning of each day’s discussions the man’s face would be a mask of hostility; at the end of the day both men would come out together smiling and joking. Then by the next morning the man would have frozen over again, and Gandhi would start all over with the same cheerful patience, trying to find some common ground.

That is how the mystic approaches conflict, and it pulls the rug out from under all the traditional theories. There is a lot being written these days about conflict resolution, which I am glad to see. But no matter what you read, they will always say in effect, “This is how you deal with your opponent.” Gandhi, St. Francis, St. Teresa, would all say, “No. The moment you start thinking about the other person as an opponent, you make it impossible to find a solution.” There are no opponents in a disagreement; there are simply two people facing a common problem. In other words, they are not in opposite camps. They are in the same camp: the real opponent is the problem.

To apply this, you have to set aside the question of who is to blame. We have a saying in my mother tongue: “It takes two to get married and two to quarrel.” No matter what the circumstances, neither person bears sole responsibility for a quarrel. It is an encouraging outlook, because if both are responsible, both together can find a solution – not merely a compromise, but a way actually to resolve the quarrel peacefully.

To do this, however, it is necessary to listen – and listen with respect. Don’t be afraid if the other person is angry. An angry person is blind. He is so absorbed in his own point of view that he cannot see what is happening around him, including what is happening to himself. We don’t get angry with those who are blind; we help them: after all, unless they have taught themselves to be extraordinarily sensitive with their other faculties, blind people can bump into things and hurt themselves and others. That is just how an angry person is; and when we have to face such people, we need to listen with patience and respect and help them not to rush off blindly into a lamp post. Whether the other person is polite or not, the objective is still the same: how can we find the common point of view?

Here the mystics ask a simple but subtle question: how can you end a quarrel if you do not even hear what the quarrel is about? How can you solve a problem with two sides if you never hear what the other side is? More than that, if you can’t listen to the other person with detachment, you will not have the detachment to understand your own position objectively either. It’s not just one side of the problem you can’t see; it’s both. So listen with respect: it may hurt you, it may irritate you, but it is a healing process.

Gradually, if you can bear with this, you will find that you are no longer thinking about “my point of view” and “your point of view.” Instead you say, “There is a point of view that is common to you and me, which we can discover together.” Once you can do this, the quarrel is over. You may not have arrived at a solution – usually, in fact, there is a lot of hard work left to do. But the quarrel itself is over, because now you know that there are two of you playing on the same side against the problem.

Not long ago I was watching the Brazilian athlete Pelé play his last game of soccer. He is retiring now at the peak of his career, one of the best soccer players the world has seen, and in this last game he was playing with the New York Cosmos against a team for which he had scored his most memorable goals: Santos of Brazil. For the first half of the game, Pelé played his best for the Cosmos. But the second half had a brilliant touch: he joined his opponents and played his best for them. This is what we should do in a disagreement: play half-time for the other side, half-time for our own. It is not a question of sacrificing principles; this is the only way to see the whole.

If we could only see the game more clearly – and the results were not so tragic – the spectacle of a quarrel would make us laugh. When we played soccer in my village, one of my cousins used to get so excited that he would shoot the ball into his own goal. We used to say, “Never mind the other side; watch out for Mandan.” But when two people quarrel, that’s just what they are doing – scoring against their own side. Whatever the disagreement, we are the Home Team, the Cosmos – all of us. Our problems, whether personal or national or environmental, are the Visitors. And the mystics say simply, “Support your team. There is the opponent, down at the other end of the field. Unite against the problem; don’t go scrapping among yourselves.”

Otherwise, if I may say so, there are no winners in this game. Once we divide against ourselves, whether at home or between races or nations, there can only be losers. On the other hand, there is no disagreement so serious that it cannot be set right if both sides can join hands and work hard for a common solution. It is not at all easy, and the results will not be immediate. But wherever there is hatred, complete love can be established; wherever there is conflict, complete unity can be established. The choice is up to us.

Jesus puts it perfectly: Love your enemies. You will never see any loftier words, but never any more practical either, for he is telling us how to rise to our highest stature. Look at the sun, he says; does it shine only on those it likes? It shines on all, it gives to all; and we should learn to love the way the sun shines, without favor or interruption. Bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you. In time they may learn to love you, but that is not the point. What we are called on to do is to be at our best always.

There is room for great artistry in this – especially when it is not on a grand scale, as it was for Gandhi, but in the everyday life of home and work. Here, I think, there is no better example than St. Thérèse of Lisieux:

In our community there is a Sister who has a talent for displeasing me in everything – her ways, her words, her character seem to me very disagreeable. However, she is a holy Sister whom the good Lord must find quite agreeable. So, not wanting to give in to the natural antipathy I was feeling, I told myself that charity must consist not in sentiments but in action. Then I applied myself to do for this Sister just what I would do for the person I love most. . . . I tried to render her every possible service, and when I was tempted to answer her in a disagreeable way, I contented myself with giving her my friendliest smile and tried to change the subject. . . . As she was absolutely ignorant of how I felt for her, . . . she told me one day with a contented air, almost in these very words: “Would you tell me, Sister Thérèse, what attracts you so much towards me? Each time you see me I see you smiling.” Ah! What attracts me is Jesus, hidden in the depths of her soul – Jesus who makes sweet that which is most bitter. . . . I answered that I was smiling because I was pleased to see her. (Of course, I didn’t add that it was from the spiritual point of view!)

In a small way, this is something that every sincere spiritual aspirant must go through in order to learn to love. In my own life, I too had to deal with people who disliked me – and I have to confess, I did not care for them either. But as meditation deepened, I began to understand: that was the challenge of it. As Jesus asks, “Where is the achievement in loving those who like you? Anybody can do that.” If you’re daring, it is a challenge that can appeal deeply. After all, if you really want to play championship tennis, you won’t want to play against people like me. You’ll say, “Put me across the net from Chris Evert or Jimmy Connors. Even if I lose, the game is going to be worthwhile.”

Once I got that perspective, I really joined battle with my likes and dislikes where relationships were concerned. If there was someone I had always avoided, who always avoided me, I gritted my teeth and began to try to win him over. The first few times, my knees were shaking as if somebody had given me a pair of boxing gloves and put me in the ring with Muhammad Ali. And sometimes, at the beginning, I was knocked down. But I wasn’t depressed: even if I hadn’t laid a glove on my samskara, I had made it through the first round. That itself was a triumph and a revelation. I wanted to cheer, to pat my mind on the back and say, “Never mind about winning or losing. At least we know that now we can make a fight of it; we don’t have to give up and be knocked out by the very first blow.” I felt as if all my chains had been broken, and if I had been the uninhibited kind, I would have got up and danced like Zorba the Greek. And after that, if a desire to retaliate or speak harshly came up, I would fight it with all I had.

It hurt. After all, I was a professor of the English language. I knew how to use words, I had a large vocabulary at my disposal, and sometimes all sorts of choice remarks would rush to my tongue and pile up behind my teeth, clamoring to get out. But no matter how much pain it caused, I wouldn’t speak until I could make my point in calm, courteous language that would not hurt the person who had hurt me.

Sometimes, after a lot of patient effort, I was successful in winning over such people. But sometimes, though I tried my level best, I was not. It was terribly disheartening. At times I was tempted to ask myself, “Wasn’t all that effort wasted? All that time you spent with that person, listening to him, walking with him, playing tennis with him, when you could have been reading the Gita?” But then I looked again. I hadn’t lost a thing – and I had made myself so secure that I could flourish in any relationship and never be let down.

Be ye therefore perfect, Jesus says, even as thy Father in heaven. That is the goal, nothing less. Why ask if it is possible? It doesn’t matter; we can always move towards perfection. In India – I imagine the same is true all over the world – children like to measure their height each year with a little mark on a wall. We can do the same: take a few minutes to take stock of our day and see how we can improve. Don’t psychologize or dwell on major failures. Two or three minutes morning or evening should be enough to take a bird’s-eye view of landmark events and look for ways in which you can do better on the next day. When you came to breakfast, were you a little abrupt? Did you get caught up in a silent dialogue with your oatmeal? Make a point of being especially attentive the following day. Was there somebody at work to whom – perhaps unintentionally – you gave a cold shoulder? Next day make it warm. That is all – little things. Life consists of these little things, and it is by putting other people first every day in a thousand little acts of kindness that we make ourselves perfect in love.

There are people, I am told, who examine their faces every evening for signs of advancing age. I would say, don’t look for crow’s-feet on the surface; turn the mirror inwards. Take a detached look, shake your finger at the mirror, and tell yourself, “Watch out! You think you did pretty well today – but tomorrow I’m going to be even more patient; I’m going to love even more.”

If you want to love with all your heart, this is the key: don’t ever ask how much you can get. Ask how much you can give. It is applicable everywhere. Last week I saw a very accomplished actor, Paul Scofield, in a film of one of Shakespeare’s finest plays: King Lear. The tragedy is relentless; and when you watch it from the perspective of the scriptures, it can tear your heart to hear old Lear, in the twilight of his life, trying to bolster himself with attestations of his daughters’ love: “Regan, how much do you love me? Goneril, how much do you love me?” For me, I had only to hear those lines to foresee that terrible moment when Lear cries out to the gathering storm,

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,

As full of grief as age. . . .

I am no longer an English professor; my whole life is devoted to teaching meditation. But if I could make a sally back into the world of letters, I could write a very different version of that play. I wouldn’t write a tragedy. Lear would learn to change his whole way of thinking: it would all be “Goneril, how much can I love you? Regan, how can I love you more?” And at the end of the play, instead of huddling on the moors all buffeted by the winter weather, he would stand erect and tell the sky, “Look upon a man as full of love as he is of age.” That is King Lear; the other was a pauper. It can be true of all of us: the power to rewrite is in our hands.

“If you want to know how good a person is,” the mystics say, “ask how much that person loves.” It is a perfect epigram, but I like to turn it around. If you want to test the depth of someone’s love, look at how kind he is, how patient she is – not when things are going smoothly, but in their hours of trial. A ship isn’t tested in a harbor; it’s tested on the high seas. There are great scientists, artists, philosophers, soldiers, who function well enough when life is with them but go to pieces when the storms begin to blow. And the mystics say, “Set aside the goal of life, set aside meditation; what good is a ship that’s only seaworthy in port?” Look at the daring of a great lover like Gandhiji or St. Teresa. When somebody opposes them, instead of running away, they move closer; when someone is angry with them, they try all the harder to be kind.

Love “has no errors,” says William Law, “for all errors are the want of love.” When we have problems in our relationships, it is not that love has failed; these are defects in our ability to love. In our contemporary climate of separateness, it has become almost impossible for a man and woman to remain together for more than a short period of time. But to throw up our hands and say that love won’t work, that lasting relationships are no longer possible, simply betrays our ignorance of what love means.

I read a lot these days about the decline in literacy. But when it comes to love, virtually all of us are illiterates. It is not a condemnation. When you were two, did you know how to read? And even when you began to learn, wasn’t it mostly things like “See Spot run”? There is no need to be embarrassed about it; that is how all of us began. To read a writer like Shakespeare with real understanding takes most of us twenty years – and even then we may not be able to follow the simple words of John of the Cross when he soars into realms where we have never been. It is the same with love. At the outset, it is wise to admit freely that this is an art that we do not know. But we can put ourselves to school; and if we are willing to put in at least the time it takes to understand Shakespeare, all of us can become perfect in love.

When two people love each other, there is one sure sign: they want to lose themselves in their unity. The words are simple; but the more you reflect on them and try to practice them, the more you will see how profound a concept this is, how difficult to practice. It is just the opposite of what we hear around us: “Maintain your individuality, maintain your own little separate personality, and then try to get along together as best you can.” In the Gita’s terms, this is the denial of love. Each person is drawing a little circle around himself or herself and saying, “I will function freely in my circle; you can function freely in yours.” The circles do not even overlap, which means that there is no real relationship between those people at all.

This is how we begin. Most of us, if we could see objectively, stand inside virtually separate circles, which we ourselves have drawn. That is what self-will does; and to move closer, we need to reduce self-will. It is difficult, distressing, even dangerous; that is its challenge. But gradually, as self-will decreases, the circles you and your partner have drawn around yourselves move closer together, until at last they touch.

After that, the work is equally strenuous. Now you try to make the circles overlap, so that each intersects a little arc. During eight hours together, you try to preserve at least one hour when there is no acrimony, no competition, no selfishness. For the other seven hours, your mind may have been complaining bitterly. It’s quite all right: there is now an arc in common. There are still vast areas that need to come together, but you can concentrate on that little area of unity and say, “Yes, it is possible. Even if it takes years, these circles can become one.”

If we could but see it, there are not many separate circles; there is only one. All have the same center and the same radius; nobody’s area is different from anybody else’s. You may have been born in Rhodesia and your partner in Rhode Island – two different environments, different languages, different cultures – but there is not the slightest difference between the Self in you and the Self in him or her. This is the realization that comes in samadhi. All circles merge, and afterwards you don’t see separate circles at all. Love is playing like a perpetual fountain in your heart: love not for only one person but for all people, all creatures, all forms of life.

The closer two people grow, the deeper is the longing to become closer still. But nothing short of absolute unity is going to fulfill the deep, driving need in the heart of every one of us to be one and indivisible. Even in the most passionate Romeo-and-Juliet relationship there will always be a void, a hunger that can be satisfied only for a short while. Pick up the paper almost any morning and you will find somebody complaining that this satisfaction has come to an end. “We’re together all week long; I need a vacation from him.” “She’s always there when I come home; I need one evening a week all to myself.” I read recently about two people trying to preserve their relationship by seeing each other only on weekends. I wanted to ask, “What relationship is there to preserve?” If the object is to keep life from becoming humdrum, why not just have a breathless encounter once a year when your paths cross in the air terminal at St. Paul?

When two people really love each other, they will want to be together always. It is one of the surest tests of love. It doesn’t mean becoming dependent on each other, or sitting together on a love seat writing sonnets. It means working together in a selfless cause, merging two lives into a single, beneficial force. When you have a relationship like that, even a hundred years together would not satisfy you. If you can be satisfied by anything that is limited, your love is not complete. When your two circles come together you will cry, with the daring of the mystic, “Let there be no separation.”

In the spiritual tradition of India, we have a story that illustrates this beautifully. There was a girl who was born of highly spiritual parents. She went to school, where she had many friends among the other girls; and gradually, as they reached the age for marriage, she began to come home with wonderful news. “Mummy,” she would say, “Nalini is going to get married! You know Nalini, the one who wears jasmine in her hair. She is going to get married, and her mother is getting her a beautiful new sari, and she’ll be exchanging garlands and wearing new jewelry . . .”

And her mother, who knew how to read the mixed look of joy and longing in her daughter’s eyes, would smile and say, “Be happy for her.”

This happened many times, year after year, until at last our little girl had grown well into her teens. Finally, on the day of her ­graduation, she came home crying as if her heart would break. “Mummy,” she said, “all the girls in my class are married now! I saw their faces shining at the wedding, and now I don’t see them any more. Their lives are joyful – and look at me; I don’t think I’m going to be married at all.”

The mother, who was a woman of great spiritual stature, did not try to answer immediately. She took her daughter into the meditation room, sat down with her, and taught her how to meditate. Then she explained, “These marriages you have seen were good; but in life, the sunshine is always mixed with shadow. There are days that are sweet, but there are also days that are bitter: and after this play of light and shadow, sweet and bitter, has gone on for many years, time itself is going to bring the relationship to an end.”

“Is there no marriage that is perfect?” the daughter asked. “Is there no relationship that lasts, that has no end?”

“There is,” her mother said. “It is possible to love for ever; but it is terribly, terribly hard.”

“That’s what I want,” the girl pleaded. “That is what I have been longing for all these years, and to love like that, I am prepared to give up everything else.”

“Then give all your love, your heart, your time, your life, to serve the Lord of Love. Offer him everything: ‘whatever you do, whatever you give, whatever you enjoy, even what you suffer’; do it only for him. Make your whole life a gift to him, and you will be united with him by a love that time can never bring to an end.” She looks at her daughter, so eager and so strong, and asks: “Are you able to do all this?”

And the girl, now gone far beyond her years, answers simply, “I am.” Like the other great teenagers of the Hindu scriptures – Nachiketa, Markandeya – she devotes herself completely to the overriding goal of going beyond change and death. And the story tells beautifully – almost in the same language that Catholic mystics use – that at last, in the supreme experience of samadhi, Sri Krishna comes to her in the depths of her consciousness and takes her as his eternal bride. “Amado con amada,” writes John of the Cross, “Amada en el amado transformada” – lover with the Beloved, united, transfigured, transformed.

SRI KRISHNA: 20. But even dearer are the devotees who seek me in faith and love as life’s goal. They go beyond death to eternal life.

In the Rig Veda, one of the most ancient of the Hindu scriptures, there is a prayer that must still find a response in every heart:

Lead me from the unreal to the real,

Lead me from darkness to light,

Lead me from death to immortality.

This is the central theme of mysticism in all religions: the quest for deathlessness, for everlasting life.

Until I took to the practice of meditation, it never occurred to me that immortality could be any more than a figure of speech – a rhetorical device that can strengthen and inspire us, but nothing that could be literally true. It was only by observing my granny’s attitude towards death that I began to understand that the quest for deathlessness was real – a living search that any person with drive and enthusiasm could undertake, not after death but in this very life. In both East and West there have been rare men and women who have been enabled through spiritual disciplines to transcend the conditioning of time, place, and the physical body. For people like this, there is no death. The body dies, of course; but there is no interruption of consciousness when the body falls away, because their identification with the body has already been severed.

In deep meditation, when consciousness is withdrawn from the body and senses, there actually come a few moments when you go beyond the body. The five buttons of the body-jacket – the senses – are undone, and for a short while you are able to slip your arms out, hang up your jacket in the meditation room, and rest in your real nature. That is a taste of immortality right on earth, and there is such joy in it, such a deep sense of peacefulness and rest, that afterwards you will be willing to give everything to extend those moments into the full twenty-four hours of the day.

Once that is done, the ties of identification with the body are severed once and for all. You know at the deepest level that you are not the body but the Self, and when death comes, it is simply a matter of hanging up this particular jacket for the last time. As al-Ghazzali asks, where is the cause for grief in this? Is consciousness ruptured when you take off your shirt at night?

There are no words to describe this state, but the mystics of all religions say quietly, “It’s like waking up.” Before the realization of God, we are living in our sleep – dreaming that we are separate fragments of life, small enough to be satisfied with wisps of experience that come and go. Aren’t the experiences of a dream real while we are dreaming? In a vivid dream, there is at best only a hazy memory of another state of consciousness to which we can wake up. Yet when we do wake up again, the dream falls away. And the mystics ask a very simple question: when you have been dreaming that you are Marco Polo, ranging all over the world into distant lands, and you wake up, are you a different person? Do you grieve that Marco Polo is gone? He isn’t gone: you were dreaming that you were he; now you wake up, the dream is forgotten, and you remember who you really are.

In the Katha Upanishad, there is a daring teenager named Nachiketa who goes straight to the King of Death for the secret of immortality. “I have heard,” he tells Death, “from the illumined sages that there is a kingdom where you never come, where one lives free from death in everlasting joy.” There is such a kingdom, but it is not outside us. In the early part of our lives, most of us are off on an external journey, looking for Shangri-la in the lands of the senses. But to those who are sensitive, there comes more and more insistently a sense of homesickness, of being wanderers on the earth; and finally there comes a point where we throw aside all the travel brochures of the sense-world and turn inwards to find our real home. Then the quest for deathlessness begins in earnest.

This is a demanding, arduous, challenging journey. As meditation deepens and we get beneath the surface level, we see a wholly different world within us: the world of the unconscious, as vast as the world outside us, without boundaries in time or space. Gerard Manley Hopkins gives a glimpse of these realms in a tortuous poem:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. . . .

To those who live on the surface of life, the dangers of this world seem “cheap,” insignificant. But once we glimpse the scope of the unconscious, it can take our breath away. Hopkins is not exercising poetic license; these mountains and cliffs and gorges are as real as those beneath the surface of the sea. To make a journey like this, it is not enough to have courage and determination. We should also have some idea of where we are going.

I saw an intriguing book title the other day: If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You’ll Probably End Up Somewhere Else. We are already somewhere else; our need now is to get back home. If you have a goal in life, it is like a polestar: you can guide your whole journey by it. You may have taken detours, but if you keep your eyes on the goal, you will always be able to know when you are off course and what to do to get back again. Without a goal there can only be wandering; with a goal you can never get lost. And Sri Krishna says here, Matparama: “Don’t settle for anything outside you; make me your only goal.”

A few weeks ago my little friend Rama received a picture puzzle of an elephant, and last night I came into the living room and found pieces strewn all over the floor. I grew up among elephants, so I thought I would be able to recognize an elephant from any conceivable angle. But no amount of looking at those pieces enabled me to distinguish head from tail. Then Rama showed me the picture on the box. After that, even though it might take a long time and a lot of trial and error, I knew I would be able to make those pieces into an elephant if I tried.

This is what we do in meditation. I would suggest memorizing this chapter of the Gita, “The Way of Love,” and using it regularly in meditation; there is no more inspiring portrait by which to arrange the pieces of our lives. As you travel deeper into consciousness, these verses will shape your daily living; even in your sleep you will want to realize them. “Free from selfish attachments and self-will, ever full, in harmony everywhere . . .” At the beginning they are only inspiring words, describing someone like Mahatma Gandhi or St. Teresa. But after many years of meditation and the allied disciplines, when this ideal has been completely integrated into your consciousness, it will be in a small way a portrait of yourself: not the little self with which you identified when you began this journey, but a person who has been transformed, reborn, remade in the image of this all-consuming ideal.

In the final stages of this journey, it is necessary to use all kinds of contradictions to describe what is happening within you. Everything is coming together, your desires are almost unified; and when you sit down for meditation, you drop like a plummet into the very depths of consciousness. In some strange way, you expect without expecting. You wait impatiently, yet you are prepared to wait a hundred years. Every day you give your very best in your meditation, your work, your personal relationships, so that nothing will delay this tremendous climax. And in the evening too you stay vigilant, keeping the mantram going ceaselessly; for as Jesus warns, “Ye know not what hour thy Lord may come”; he may come like a thief in the night. In these final stages there can be deep experiences in your sleep, experiences which are preparing the way for samadhi. You may hear the mantram reverberating through your consciousness, or the words of a passage you have been using in meditation. You may see one of the great spiritual figures you love deeply, or even have a vision of Jesus or Sri Krishna or the Compassionate Buddha. It is like the curtain trying to go up on a play you have been waiting for all your life. You can see the feet of the stagehands, you know that the sets are being moved into place, but that is all; and it so inflames your eagerness that you exclaim, like India’s great saint and poet Mira,

Oh, how I long to see my Lord!

At dawn I search for Him

Every day in my meditation;

I cannot sleep until my eyes behold Him.

Ages have I been separated from you, Beloved!

When will you come?

This is not the experience of a few days. It can go on for months, even years, and it is the most deliciously difficult time in sadhana. No mystic would ever be spared that agony. There is such joy in it that the Sufis ask, how much more joy must there be in the final union, when all separateness comes to an end? Then, says Abu Said in rapture, “I am lover, Beloved, and love in one; beauty and mirror and the eyes that see.” Jafar exclaims:

I have joined my heart to Thee: all that exists art Thou.

O Lord, beloved of my heart, Thou art the home of all;

Where indeed is the heart in which Thou dost not dwell?. . .

From earth below to the highest heaven, from heaven

to deepest earth,

I see Thee wherever I look: all that exists art Thou.

When we are united with the Lord, every created thing, from the farthest star to the atoms in our bodies, is our kith and kin. Remember William Blake looking at the sun and seeing a choir of angels singing holy, holy, holy? The whole of creation is singing; if we cannot hear it, it is simply because we are asleep.

When I was growing up at the feet of my grandmother, though I loved her passionately, I understood very little of her perspective. My attention was elsewhere, on Shakespeare and Dickens and the “Ode to a Nightingale”; I couldn’t hear what her life was proclaiming every instant – in the simple words of St. Angela, almost the same as those of the Gita, “the whole world is full of God.”

There is no barrier between us and this realization except self-will. That is all that keeps us thinking that we are separate from the whole. The more we love, the less our self-will – and the less subject we are to time and death. All of us have moments when we forget ourselves in helping others. In those moments of self-forgetfulness, we step out of ourselves: we really cease, if only for an instant, to be a separate person. Those are moments of immortality, right on earth. Stretch them out until they fill the day and you will no longer be living in yourself alone; you will live in everyone. And St. John of the Cross reminds us, “We live in what we love.” If you love the Lord in all, if you live in the Lord in all, what is there to die when the body dies?

On her deathbed, St. Thérèse of Lisieux was asked what she thought heaven would be like. Thérèse replied in her gentle way that she couldn’t imagine it would be so very different. “Oh, I know I’ll see God. But as for being in his presence, I couldn’t be more so there than I am here.”

Perfect words. When the little prison of the ego has been left behind, there is no longer any real difference between “there” and “here.” We no longer live in a separate body, a separate little personality. As Shankara says, the whole universe is our home.

Sri Sarada Devi, mourning for Sri Ramakrishna on the evening after he died, heard him ask in the depths of her consciousness: “Am I dead, that you are acting like a widow? I have only moved from one room to another.” And the Compassionate Buddha, in one of the most magnificent passages in mystical literature anywhere, chooses almost the same image:

In vain have I gone around these countless cycles of birth and death, looking for the builder of this house. How wearisome is the suffering of being born again and again! But now I have seen you, housebuilder; you shall not build this house of separateness again. The rafters are broken, the ridgepole has been destroyed: I have gone beyond all selfish craving; I have attained nirvana, in which all sorrows end.