SRI KRISHNA: 1. The body is called a field, Arjuna. Only those who know they are not this field can be said to know the field truly.

Many years ago I remember traveling north by train to Simla, once the summer seat of British government in India. We had not been long out of Delhi when suddenly I became aware of a chatter of conversation around me. The man beside me seemed particularly voluble. I asked him if something had happened. “Kurukshetra!” he replied. “The next stop is Kurukshetra!”

I could understand the excitement. Kurukshetra, “the field of the Kurus,” is the setting for the climactic battle of the Mahabharata, the vastest epic in any world literature, on which virtually every Hindu child in India is raised. Its characters, removed from us in time by perhaps three thousand years, are as familiar to us as our relatives. The temper of the story is utterly contemporary; I can imagine it unfolding in the nuclear age as easily as in the dawn of Indian history.

Everyone in our car got down from the train to wander for a few minutes on the now peaceful field. Thousands of years ago this was Armageddon. The air rang with the conch-horns and shouts of battle for eighteen days. Great phalanxes shaped like eagles and fish and the crescent moon surged back and forth in search of victory, until in the end almost every warrior in the land lay slain.

“Imagine!” my companion said to me in awe. “Bhishma and Drona commanded their armies here. Arjuna rode here, with Sri Krishna himself as his charioteer. Where you’re standing now – who knows? – Arjuna may have sat, his bow and arrows on the ground, while Krishna gave him the words of the Bhagavad Gita.”

I agreed. But already I had begun to understand that the battle in which the Gita is set is not merely an historical event. The real battlefield the Gita talks about is this body and personality, where there rages an unceasing battle between the forces of selflessness and selfishness, of light and darkness, love and hatred, unity and separateness, harmony and violence. The ringing words with which the Gita opens – “Tell me what took place at Kurukshetra, the field of the Kurus, the field of dharma” – apply to us; the dialogue of the Gita takes place on this field within us, in every one of us, in every age.

In other words, when Sri Krishna compares the body to a field in this verse, he is talking about more than the physical frame. “Body” refers to the whole separate person with which we identify ourselves: in Western terms, not only body but personality. To call this a battlefield is vivid language indeed. It means that from the physical level – for example, in our health – down to the depths of the unconscious, we live in the cross fire of two opposing forces, what is selfish in us and what is selfless.

This is the war within, but it has spread increasingly to outer war all around us. There are enough nuclear weapons in national arsenals to destroy not just a battlefield in ancient India but life on earth, and not in eighteen days but in eighteen minutes. As many as a dozen countries are riven with cruel civil wars; yet Belfast even in the midst of conflict was less dangerous to live in than Detroit in times of so-called peace. Similarly, many families are private battlefields, whose conflicts spill over into our relationships, our work, our politics, and even our entertainment. All this is the net effect of the turmoil in our minds, the decisions and desires of millions of little people like you and me who together shape the world. That is why the Gita maintains that no matter how violent the times outside us, the real war is always the war within – the only war in which victory can bring real peace.

But we can also think of body and mind as a different kind of field, much less martial.

In India we have a story about a man who was asked his occupation. The man replied, “Farmer.”

“You don’t look like a farmer,” he was told. “How much land do you have?”

“Five and a half feet.”

There was a loud laugh. “How much can you raise in five and a half feet of land?”

“This is very special soil,” the man replied. “This body is my field. My thoughts and actions are the seeds, and karma, good and bad, is the harvest.”

The Gita is using the same image. Body and personality, it says, are very much like a farmer’s field. In the soil of the mind we sow thoughts: desires, hopes, fears, resentments, and so on. There they take root and grow – into habits, attitudes, personality traits, patterns of responding to the world around us. And these finally bear fruit on the physical level, particularly in our health. That is the meaning of the much misunderstood word karma, which this whole volume will explore.

Sri Krishna begins by pointing out that we are not the field we till. Put that way, it sounds absurdly simple. Yet if someone asks us who we are, most of us point to our bodies. “This is me – five foot eight, one hundred thirty pounds, brown skin, not very luxuriant hair on the head.” Sri Krishna would object, “That’s not you. That’s your field, your little garden. You are the gardener.” To me this is a most comfortable way of looking on my body: a handkerchief kitchen garden, just the right size for my needs and abilities. I can appreciate other people’s gardens, but I like mine as it is; what would I do with someone else’s? So I take very good care of my body-garden: but I never believe that this is who I am.

I have a friend, Steve, with a talent for gardening. Every day after work in spring and summer he takes his children out to their large backyard to plant vegetables and flowers, and he lets them do a lot of the planning. The last time I visited, I saw none of the straight rows and tidy signs of a conventional grown up garden. Instead I found all kinds of twisted paths – Beet Boulevard, Carrot Corners, Artichoke Alley – making leafy, colorful designs through the yard. By August the garden was as lush and dense as the jungle in India near which I grew up. I was unable to locate anything there. But the children knew just where to find the reddest tomatoes and the sweetest snap peas, and just where to hide too. Their teepee of scarlet runner beans was so thick that all four could huddle inside without a grown-up ever seeing them.

Steve knows that garden too. With a taste he can tell if the soil lacks anything. He knows the nuances of sunlight, temperature, runoff, and mineral content from place to place, and how each plant affects the others around it. He and the children are able to bring me gifts of their finest produce all summer long.

But imagine what would happen if Steve believed he is his garden. I don’t think he would know that plot of land at all. He wouldn’t like being dug into and turned over with a spade; and as a result, the soil wouldn’t get cultivated. He would object strenuously to people planting vegetables in him that he did not like. If somebody criticized his soil, he would take it personally and feel people were insulting him. And suppose he didn’t enjoy children poking their fingers into him? All in all, that garden would do rather poorly. There would be no way for Steve to stand outside himself and see the garden objectively, no way to evaluate what it needed and what would do it harm.

Each of us goes through the day making a very similar mistake. We believe we are the body; we believe we are our mind. The consequences are disastrous. To the extent that we identify ourselves with the body, we are constrained to define happiness by what the body and senses find pleasant. It is a definition that excludes a good deal of life, especially as the body grows older. We might eat too much, or eat what is not healthful, simply for the sake of taste. We might smoke, drink, or take drugs because we find the sensations stimulating; we might fail to get enough exercise because inertia seems more pleasant than activity. Or we might spend all our time thinking about the body, trying to reform our complexion with queen bee preparations or to improve the definition of our biceps, as if who we are depended on how we look. All this can only make us more insecure. The body has to age and change and die. When we think that is all we are, the passage of time becomes a terrible burden.

In other words, unless you know that you are not this garden of body and mind, how can you cultivate it? You can have very little control. That is the essential message of this verse. But there is a deeper implication that should be spelled out too: that body and mind are not separate, but two aspects of the same field. The medical implications alone are far-reaching enough to shatter our conventional ideas of health and aging.

With all the progress of science over the last two centuries, modern civilization has reached a stage where almost all of us believe there is nothing more to life than the physical, biochemical level. Even thought is currently held to be reducible to electrophysiological events. This is the lowest possible view we can take of life, particularly of the human being. It is like thinking there is nothing to your garden except its harvests: no soil, no seeds, no nutrients, not even any roots. Plants simply adhere somehow to the surface of the earth, no one knows how, and we get good or bad harvests by chance. Our knowledge of the physical world amounts to the discovery that apple trees, to a statistically reliable degree, can be counted on to produce apples rather than pears or any other fruit; that is all.

Now, this is useful information, I agree. But a botanist would not be impressed. “If you think that’s useful,” she might say, “let me tell you about seeds and soil. Those little black things inside the apple are seeds. If you plant them in the right kind of soil and take care of them, you’ll get more apples – every time.” Imagine the significance of this kind of knowledge if you had never known about seeds! You would realize that you had never scratched the surface of gardening. It is the same with the garden of body and mind, which are as intimately connected as fruit and seed. When you see the way thoughts and desires grow into hard, physical conditions, and how surely a certain kind of thought leads to a certain kind of action, you will feel you have scarcely scratched the surface of life.

Our prehistoric ancestors, I imagine, might not know about anything but harvests. They like apples and know how to pick them, but they might not know there is any relationship between seeds and plants: after all, these look utterly different. And they might not know there is any relationship between the apple they eat and the soil, rain, sunlight, and so on by which it grew. They have all kinds of seeds lying around – apples, thistles, pigweed, pansies – but these are so tiny, so insignificant, that they don’t pay any attention to them. If the apple seeds lie on clay and the thistle seeds in well-drained humus, what does it matter?

The person who thinks there is no more to a human being than the physical body is in a very similar situation. What does it matter to his body, his health, what thoughts he thinks? He thinks what he likes, waters his thoughts with a lot of attention, and after many years – for thoughts do grow slowly – he begins to suffer a few physical ailments, which look no more like a thought than an oak tree looks like an acorn.

“All that we are,” the Buddha says, “is the result of what we have thought.” He means even physically, as I can try to illustrate. Suppose a person is habitually resentful: that is, he frequently responds to unfavorable circumstances by thinking resentful thoughts about the people involved. Many unfavorable consequences follow from this, but here I want to look only at those that affect bodily health. Those thoughts are seeds; if he keeps on sowing them, and particularly if he keeps on watering and feeding them with his attention by brooding over them, they have to begin to germinate. All this takes place in the soil of the mind, out of sight. But after a while, if favorable conditions persist, those seeds of resentment sprout. In the language of medicine, the physiological correlates of resentment – stomach tension, elevated blood pressure, and so on – become a habitual conditioned response, which any adverse circumstance can trigger.

This response can be unlearned, just as it was learned; the garden of resentment can still be weeded and new seeds planted. But if it is not weeded, after many years there will be a harvest of ill health. Physiologically, the body will be living in a state of almost continual readiness for defense – a grossly exaggerated response, granted, but that is the only way the body knows how to respond. Its resources for dealing with stress will be mobilized day and night, like the National Guard in a state of emergency, as we can tell from the signs and symptoms that may come: high blood pressure, chronic stomach tension, digestive problems, migraines, irritability, perhaps a low resistance to common ailments like colds and flu. All this takes a severe toll on the body’s resources for good health. For various reasons, including genetic factors, the final breakdown will differ from person to person. One might develop arthritis; another, a gastric disorder. But whatever the ailment, it is the fruit and harvest of a mental state, the seeds of resentful thinking.

Ironically, such people often respond even to these physical problems with resentment. Life, they say, has dealt them one more unfair blow. That is how entrenched the mental habit has become: resentment has taken over the whole field. And so, tragically, the harvest of ill health goes on reseeding the mind.

For a more cheerful picture, look at patience. Isn’t there a flower called impatiens, which they say anyone can grow anywhere? Anyone can grow patience too, though it’s not yet one of the twenty favorite houseplants of the mind. And it is a highly medicinal herb. Imagine the same people going through life with a garden full of patience instead of resentment. The same events that once provoked a stress response would be met with calmness, detachment, even a sympathetic respect. Those people are likely to live longer and feel better than if they lived in chronic resentment: good health is the body reaping the harvest of right thinking.

As long as we identify with the “field” – the physical, chemical organism that is the body – glands and hormones dictate our lives. Many people today believe in astrology, but almost everyone believes in hormonology. “I was born under the sign of Adrenaline,” they say. “He was born under the Gonads, with Thymus rising.” The lives of those who identify completely with the body are dictated by their chemistry; the Gita would not disagree. When life is reduced to biological functions, it says, what else can you expect? But those who break through this identification can undo this tyranny. They can rise above and eventually transform their chemistry; for the chemistry of our living follows rather than dictates the responses of our mind.

This breakthrough culminates a complete remaking of personality. Over and over again I hear talk about alternative lifestyles. Change your clothes, talk differently, grow a mustache or paint your eyelids mauve, and you have changed your life. This simply doesn’t follow. But there is a way to change your life, and that is to change your ways of thinking. When Michael down the street ceases to think of himself as his body, he is no longer Michael – at least, not the same Michael with whom you went to school. That was the old Michael, the pauper, as Meister Eckhart would say. This is the new man, a prince of peace.

This transformation is not all peaches and cream. There is a terrifying aspect to it. When mystics speak of the death of the old man, the pauper, the ego, this death is not at all symbolic. It is very real. The ego is done away with, or nearly so, and it does not appreciate the process either; it suffers. But even while it suffers we can experience the fierce joy of knowing that beneath the surface, a radiant new personality is being born.

SRI KRISHNA: 2. I am the Knower of the field in everyone, Arjuna. To know the field and its Knower is true knowledge.

If you think you are your field, there is no way to imagine a cultivator. Seeds, you say, come by chance; nobody plants them. Similarly, harvests are good or bad by chance. If you get a good crop – health, some happiness, a loving family, a few trustworthy friends – you say, “Well, fortune’s been good to me.” And if you get a few shrivelled ears of corn and a lot of weeds, that too has no connection with what you have done. You say what gardeners always say: “Fortune’s been bad to me. Unseasonal frosts. Not enough rain. Too much rain. Right amount of rain, but at the wrong time.” The Gita would correct this kind of talk gently but firmly: “You are responsible for what you grow and reap. Nobody else. If you let things go to seed, you can’t expect a rose garden.”

When you leave a field to itself, of course, it quickly reverts to weeds. Whatever grows best there takes over and crowds out everything else. The same thing happens to an untended personality: that is, to the ego. You can look on the ego as an abandoned lot of weedy samskaras. There are flowers there too, but they run a constant battle for survival against the thistles and dandelions and crabgrass.

Let’s slip into Alice’s Wonderland for a moment. We have been asking what it would be like if Steve believed he was his garden; now let me ask what would happen if the garden thought it was Steve.

Imagine that you have been visiting the children in their garden and have fallen asleep in the sun after a glass of Steve’s dandelion wine. When you wake up you find that the garden has become a jungle, with immense stalks and flowers that tower over your head and make soft rustling sounds like whispers as they move. And after a while you become aware that you have grown much, much smaller, and those whispers actually are speech. The plants in the garden have learned to exchange “information,” rather like neurons in the brain, and they have learned to function together like a biological unit. The cabbages and carrots come and go, but the Garden goes on forever. It is the Garden that is alive. It is the Garden that has intelligence, that can speak and reason and savor immortality – at least, to hear the Garden tell about it. “I’m the greatest,” it says modestly. “Tell me frankly, do you know of anything more wonderful?”

“Be serious,” you say. “You’re nothing but a lot of stems and seeds!”

Science fiction readers will be aware that this is a dangerous way to talk to an intelligent garden, especially if you happen to be in the middle of it. For this garden obviously has plenty of ego: in fact, as you will have guessed, it is the ego itself. “Better watch yourself,” it warns. “You’re on my turf now. If you argue with me, I may just swallow you up.”

“Who made you?” you demand.

“Nobody,” says the Garden. “I ‘just growed.’ I make myself.”

Yet there are the telltale paths, which now look to you as big as superhighways: Artichoke Alley, Beet Boulevard, Carrot Corners, Rutabaga Row. You get bolder. “Garden,” you ask, “can you grow what you like?”

The Garden hems and haws: it cannot. “I grow what’s right,” it says defensively. “I like whatever comes up.”

“And what happens when the big freeze comes?”

“I do die back,” the Garden admits. “But after a while, I grow and flourish again. My plants come and go, but I’m immortal.”

You shake your head. “Garden,” you say, “by yourself, you amount to nothing at all. You have a gardener that makes you what you are – chooses your seeds, plants and waters and feeds them, and makes all these paths. You can’t do anything yourself. You have taken all the qualities of your gardener and claimed them for yourself.”

That is just what the ego does, and very cleverly too. Nevertheless, it is only a field, an assemblage of parts, a process; it has no intelligence of its own. Only the Self can be said to know.

Interestingly, the word used for ‘field’ in these verses – kshetra – also means ‘temple’ in many modern Indian languages. Mystics often speak of the body as a temple, for the Lord dwells in each of us. The altar of this temple does not have to be built. Each of us has a sanctum sanctorum in the depths of consciousness, where the Self is present always. He is the Knower, our real Self, the same in all.

Overeating desecrates this temple. So does smoking, which is just the opposite of burning incense. Merely remembering that the body is the house of the Lord should help us to refrain from addictions, get regular exercise, eat good food in moderate quantities, and in general do everything we can to keep the body at its best.

Even here, however, we cannot forget the mind. It too is part of the temple, and if it is not kept calm and kind, no amount of physical care will keep the body free from disease. Insecurity, for example, lowers everybody’s resistance, no matter how sound the body may be. As I write this, the country is dwelling on another attack of some exotic flu. “It’s coming!” the papers announce. “Are you prepared?” And everyone asks, “Is it coming here? Am I prepared? Am I going to get it – have I got it already?” When you dwell on flu, the Gita would say, you become flu. Take care of yourself, live for others, and then do not worry. Your security and resistance will be high, and if the flu does bite, you will probably throw it off easily.

The body is a temple, agrees the German mystic Johannes Tauler: but before it can serve as one, he adds, we have to drive out the money changers and pigeon-sellers and other squatters who have taken it over for their own purposes. This is a dig at the ego, who has ensconced himself in our inner chambers. If the Lord is to be revealed in this temple, the impostor ego has to go.

Christmas is approaching now, so I took my mother to a department store where they were setting up a full-size Nativity scene in the display window. Hindus respond easily to the Divine Mother in every tradition, and the display appealed to my mother deeply. But one thing was still missing; the window dressers hadn’t finished their job. “Son,” she said, “I see the cradle. But where is the baby Jesus?”

All of us, Tauler would say, have the cradle ready and waiting in our hearts. But when we look inside we don’t see anything but the ego, so immense that his arms and legs are sticking out through the slats. Fortunately we don’t have to hunt for a Christ Child to put inside. All we have to do is slowly get the ego out; once we do that, we find the divine child is already there.

This is what St. Paul means when he says, “I was dead, and yet I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Paul, as you know, was no spiritual aspirant in the early days. He was a violent tentmaker named Saul, who I imagine used to beat his competitors with his tent poles. Whenever a customer came to him and said, “I can’t stand that Jesus of Nazareth,” Saul would exclaim, “I’ll give you a discount!” Yet all this time a force from the very depths of his consciousness must have been working up to the surface, to burst like a bomb while Saul was traveling to Damascus. Then the rough, violent, virulent ego of Saul was thrown out with the vigor formerly shown only to Jesus’s followers, leaving the tentmaker of Tarsus blind and paralyzed for three days and nights. When he opens his eyes again he is a new man, with all that destructive capacity changed to tenderness, love, and tireless energy for carrying the words of Jesus throughout the world. You and I need not be so dramatic, but when we are able to extinguish our self-will, there will be celebration everywhere: “Glory be to the newborn king!”

I mention St. Paul to show that this can come to anyone. The most seemingly unregenerate person in the world can change his thinking if he desires. When I was teaching English literature, I sometimes illustrated this lightheartedly with Macbeth, who as you know was not exactly a gentle man in a gentle world. Even Macbeth could have learned to meditate. It might not have made much of a play, but no one wants to live a tragedy. Fierce, violent, tormented Macbeth could have become secure. He could have told those witches, “Why are you trying so hard to stir up greedy ambition? Here’s a mantram, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus; why don’t you take that and sing it around the caldron all night instead?” Those witches are not outside, you know. There is real valor in turning your back on a whispering witch inside your mind – valor and freedom and joy.

The Gita is presenting here two levels of knowing. Knowledge of the field – the world of change, whether within or without – is called in Sanskrit apara, “lower knowledge.” This is not deprecation; when wisely guided, science and technology can contribute immensely to human welfare. Para, “higher knowledge,” is called higher simply because it enables us to make wise choices, based on a sure understanding of the unity of life.

When my friend Steve analyzes his soil and measures the density of his earthworm population, that is apara, invaluable for getting a good harvest. But as we have seen, it is important also for him to know who he is: that he is not his soil, seeds, and harvest. That is para, direct knowledge of the knower.

Unlike lower or intellectual knowledge, spiritual wisdom has a direct connection with the will. I can illustrate with the example of a young lady I met when I first came to this country as a Fulbright scholar. I was then at my first American campus, where this woman was a graduate student. She was intelligent, attractive, and quite strong-willed. With all this went a fiery temper, but fire can be an asset on the spiritual path if you can learn to harness it.

It hurt me deeply to see that she was a chain smoker. The medical evidence against smoking had not yet accumulated, but even so I had some idea of how harmful the habit was, not only to the lungs but to the will. I knew she trusted me, and I knew too that she had daring and will to draw on. So one day I asked point-blank, “May I take advantage of our friendship to ask you a personal question? If you don’t want to answer, I’ll never ask it again.”

She was intrigued. “Please do.”

“Why do you smoke like that? It hurts me to know what damage it must be causing.”

She got defensive for a moment and gave all kinds of intellectual answers. I listened to them all. Then I asked simply, “Don’t you know that there is much more satisfaction in defying a compulsive desire than there is in yielding to it?”

She just stared. Then she broke into a smile, and I saw that my words had gone in. So far as I know, she never smoked another cigarette. With that instant of insight had come an immediate connection with the will.

This connection is a sure sign of para, spiritual wisdom. By contrast, I have seen a highly qualified physician studying X-rays of a cancer-ridden lung with a lighted cigarette in his hand. That is apara: the man knows, but there is no connection between what he knows and what he does.

St. Francis used to say, “Your knowledge is only as deep as your action” – that is, no deeper than your will. Ironically, because of this, higher knowledge can actually be much more practical than lower knowledge when it comes to what matters most in daily living, as the contrast between that physician and my graduate friend illustrates.

Often someone objects to me that spiritual wisdom leads to passivity. They may even point to India’s present condition as an illustration, ignoring the fact that when India was much more firmly established in its spiritual heritage, it was one of the most prosperous and culturally advanced nations in the world. I would go to the extent of saying that India’s recovery from the devastating effects of foreign rule has more to do with rediscovering its spiritual roots than with adopting modern technology. That was the source of Gandhiji’s strength, and his greatest contribution to India was to awaken its hundreds of millions of common people to the power and dignity of these timeless spiritual values. Even in India, I think most people do not realize how much of this work was begun in the tremendous spiritual reawakening sparked by Sri Ramakrishna. To anyone with a sense of history who has looked over these events, there is no more convincing evidence of the power of spiritual values. They can transform a culture; today, with global interrelationships inescapable, they can change the basis of our civilization.

Spiritual wisdom cannot lead to passivity. It deepens our sensitivities and magnifies our capacity to battle with destructive forces without and within. We live in a world of unity, where all peoples on earth share a single condominium. One room may have tables and chairs, another may have mats and polished floors, but all the rooms are under one roof. If there is poverty in one room, everyone in the place will suffer, not merely in some vague moral way but economically. Similarly, if we set fire to one room, the whole building may burn down; this is what we do when we wage war. And if there is plague at the other end of the house, we can’t just sit back and think, “It’s only those people at the back; there’s nothing to get alarmed about.” Plague is infectious. It is only a matter of time before we too fall ill, and who is left then to play the doctor?

With modern technology, we – Homo sapiens – have reached a point in history when we have the capacity to embrace the whole globe in health, peace, and welfare. As never before, we have the choice of two paths: one leading to unprecedented, unwarranted sorrow, the other to unprecedented prosperity and happiness. Without spiritual wisdom, “lower knowledge” can destroy – I would go so far as to say that it will destroy, for it has no capacity to choose where to go. But with spiritual wisdom as well, we have the capacity to make a heaven on earth.

SRI KRISHNA: 3. Listen and I will explain the nature of the field and how change takes place within it. I will also describe the Knower of the field and his power.

Most of us, I imagine, think of ourselves as standing in the midst of the world looking out. We see trees, cars, animals, and people as separate objects; and we see ourselves as separate from all of them: the seer, the knower, looking out of the body at the world we know.

Yet a physicist would remind us that the things we see “out there” are not really separate from each other. We perceive them as separate because of the limitations of our senses. If our eyes were sensitive to a much finer spectrum, we might see the world as an atomic physicist describes it: a continuous field of matter and energy.

Once, I remember, it was considered a tremendous breakthrough when scientists agreed that matter consisted of molecules. The atom became the “building block” of the universe, and it was then believed to be a solid little entity of its own. Yet soon it was accepted that these supposedly solid atoms were actually made up of a few much subtler particles and were mostly empty space. Not only that, the “particles” were so elusive that they sometimes masqueraded as radiant energy instead of matter. Now scientists are probing so deeply into the nucleus of the atom that it too has become a shadow, with such a bewildering array of constituent particles that I have given up trying to keep count.

This adds up to a very intangible version of physical reality. Nothing in it resembles a solid object in our usual sense of the word; everything is elusive and nothing is at rest. “The external world of physics,” wrote Sir Arthur Eddington, “has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we remove the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.” If we perceive solidity and separateness only because our senses are so limited, where does this leave our idea that we are separate, physical creatures?

I have been reading about a proposal for a new supermicroscope that would enable us to see the atomic structure of almost any solid material. Imagine what it would be like if this were the range of our ordinary vision. The boundaries of objects would be no more substantial than shadows; we would see life on a kind of threshold between separateness and continuity. It would be a wondrous world. You could watch air and water moving in and out of molecules that made up leaves, roots, rocks, and skin. Perhaps you could even watch sunlight becoming food in the tiny factories of plants, and watch food broken down again to be assimilated into the body of a growing organism. When that body died, you would see its shadowy boundaries fade as chemical elements and energy flowed back into the world around it. From the point of view of life as a whole, it would be clear that that organism is part of an indivisible unity.

Let me go back to Steve’s garden. Behind all the vegetables is the fence that marks the boundary where Steve’s place stops and his neighbor’s dairy farm begins. He thinks of that fenced-off area as separate, and this makes sense on a practical level. I feel sure that the dairyman next door, for example, does not think his fences are arbitrary; he probably paid a surveyor to be sure they are not six inches too far south. But to an earthworm, those fences make no difference at all. The worm is sublimely indifferent. It sees nothing separate about Steve’s garden. The soil goes right on, and so does the worm. And it is not wrong. There is only one field. If Steve’s neighbor uses chemical fertilizers, to take just one example, they are going to leach into Steve’s garden and be fed to Steve’s two children. Our body is like that: separate in some important ways, yet continuous with the rest of the ecosystem in other, more basic ways.

In a larger sense, then, when Sri Krishna talks about the “field” he means more than simply the body. The whole of the environment is one field, in which we sow our actions and reap their consequences. It sounds simple, but the implications are vast. It means, in part, that the consequences of every action can extend the full reach of the field.

Let me illustrate on the physical level first. I have been reading about what I am afraid will become an all too familiar kind of tragedy: the fate of Times Beach, Missouri. Much more will undoubtedly have been added to the story by the time you read this, but today it is still unraveling; the outcome is uncertain. This much is known: many years ago a trucker sprayed the roads of Times Beach with oil to keep the dust down. Years later, by accident, it was discovered that the oil was contaminated with dioxin, one of the deadliest chemicals known. In laboratory animals, at the lowest levels tested, dioxin causes birth defects, nervous disorders, cancer and other diseases, and even death. Concentrations in some Times Beach streets measured one hundred times those levels, and floods have washed dioxin-contaminated mud all through the town. How many children have played in it? How deep has the poison penetrated? Has it entered the water supply, the food chain? How can the poison be tracked down and disposed of safely? All these are consequences of many little decisions a decade ago: by the hauler who had trucks spray this and many other sites with dioxin-laced oil, by officials who ignored early warnings of contamination, by scientists who advised that dioxin probably degrades faster than it actually does. And the consequences are still spreading: genetic damage, for example, can be passed on to later generations.

This is just one incident. I have read that the government estimates there are at least fourteen thousand hazardous waste dumps in the United States. You can see how vast this web of consequences can be, not only in space but in time too.

In another recent accident, much smaller, the consequences were actually tracked down. Feed contaminated with PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls – from a damaged transformer in a single plant spread to ten states. Incorporated in various food products, the poisons were found in seventeen states. Some of these products had gone to national suppliers that might have spread the contamination all over the country, even overseas. This kind of tragedy often results from a simple error made by a single person – perhaps only a trucker confusing poorly labeled containers. Yet look how far the consequences can reach! That is the unity of this field of karma: a seed sown in one corner can spread harvests of sorrow everywhere.

This unity is the source of a grim justice about karma which will be amply illustrated in the rest of this volume. The point of karma is to drive home to us that we cannot live for ourselves alone. We ourselves are going to reap what we sow, even if we only intend to sell the karma-crop to others. Again, I can illustrate from agriculture. A number of pesticides and herbicides that have been banned or severely regulated in the United States because of their toxicity have been sold in the rest of the world, generally to Third World countries, without any warning or regulation. But the hazards, it turns out, do not stay confined to those countries. Expensive pesticides are not generally used on crops grown for local consumption, where the market value is not high. They are characteristically saved for export crops – and so the poisonous residues often come full circle and return to consumers in the United States.

These are all essentially illustrations of the law of karma, which is so crucial a concept in this volume – and so misunderstood – that it needs a detailed explanation right at the outset. Literally, the Sanskrit karma means something that is done. Often it can be translated as ‘deed’ or ‘action.’ The law of karma states simply that every event is both a cause and an effect. Every act has consequences, which in turn have further consequences and so on; and every act, every karma, is also the consequence of some previous karma.

This will turn out to have the vastest possible implications. But let me begin with karma on the individual level, where it is simplest: the karma we sow and reap in our own little agricultural field of body and mind.

To most people who are familiar with the word, in India as well as in the West, karma refers to physical action. In this sense, the law of karma says that whatever you do will come back to you. If Joe hits John, and later Jack hits Joe, that is Joe’s karma coming back to him. It sounds mysterious, even occult, because we do not see all the connections. But the connections are there, and the law of karma is no more occult than the law of gravitation.

Let me illustrate. In the example I just gave, where Joe hits John, the law of karma states that that blow has to have consequences. It cannot end with John getting a black eye. It makes an impression on John’s consciousness – predictably, he gets angry – and it makes an impression, probably subtler, on Joe’s consciousness as well. Let us trace it first through John. He might take his anger out on Joe then and there, simply by hitting him back: that is what I call “cash karma,” where you do something and are repaid immediately. But for many reasons, John might not act on his anger until later, quite possibly in unrelated ways: he might explode at his wife, for example, or throw out the cat unceremoniously when it tangles with his legs.

Now, karma is rarely so simple; this is only for illustration. But what is clear is that John’s anger will have repercussions throughout his relationships. Those repercussions will have repercussions – say, John’s wife gets angry at Jack’s, and she takes it out on Jack, who works with Joe; and the next time Joe irritates Jack, Jack lets him have it. Poor Joe, rubbing his chin, can’t have the slightest idea that he is being repaid for hitting John. All he feels is anger at Jack: and so the chain of consequences continues, and Joe’s karmic comeuppance becomes the seed of a new harvest.

We do not realize how far our lives reach, how many people are affected by our behavior and example. Once you begin to see this, you get some idea of how complex the web of karma actually is. No one has the omniscience to see this picture fully. But I hope you can see that the idea of a network of such connections is plausible and natural – so plausible, in fact, that even though we cannot see the connections, we can be sure that everything that happens to us, good and bad, originated once in something we did to someone else.

The implications of this are terribly practical: we ourselves are responsible for what happens to us, whether or not we can understand how. Therefore – here is the wonderful part – we can change what happens to us by changing ourselves; we can take our destiny into our own hands.

As I said, all this is karma on the physical level, which is how most people think of it. The view is accurate, but it is not complete: in fact, the physical side of karma is only the tip of an iceberg. To get an inkling of how far karma reaches, you have to look at the mind.

Let me go back for a moment to Joe and John. I said that when Joe hits John, there are several effects: one on John’s face, one in John’s consciousness, and one in the consciousness of Joe himself. To put it simply, by acting on his anger, Joe has made it easier to act on his anger again. He may think he has relieved some pressure, but he has actually made himself a little more angry than before, a little less patient, a little more likely to respond to problems with violence.

Everything we do, in other words, produces karma in the mind. This is not at all theoretical; it has very tangible consequences. For one, look at how Joe is changed by his actions – not from without, from within. Over the years, if he keeps giving in to anger, he will become more belligerent. He may find himself swinging his fists more and more often; and by some quirk of human nature, he will find himself more and more frequently in situations that prompt his anger. Sooner or later he will get into a fight where he is more than repaid in kind; that is one way in which his karma with John can come back to him.

Even more intriguing to me is the karma of our health. Again, let me illustrate one or two kinds of connection.

For one, the Buddha says that we are not punished for our anger; we are punished by our anger. In other words, anger is its own karma. Joe may think he feels better for having hit John, but a detached physician would not say so. He would observe all that happens in Joe’s vital organs and nervous system while Joe is getting heated up – watch his blood pressure soar and his heart race, measure the adrenaline and other hormones dumped into the body, and so on – and conclude, “You’re putting yourself under severe physiological stress!” To my eyes, a bout of anger is one thousandth of a heart attack. You pay for it on the spot; and if you go on getting angry, you go on paying for it too.

Suppose Joe’s anger does become chronic. Even if Jack never gets back to hit him, Joe is hitting himself from inside. He comes to live in a world of constant stress, with his “fight or flight” mechanisms on duty around the clock. There is good evidence that this kind of stress can lead to heart disease, to psychosomatic ailments like migraine and ulcer, and even to cancer; these too are routes by which the karma of anger can be reaped.

Further, Joe’s aggressiveness and irritability make him harder to live with. His relationships deteriorate. Perhaps his friends start to avoid him; perhaps his co-workers respond to him with increasing irritation and anger, all of which provokes him even more. Life in these circumstances can be miserable. Joe may punish himself further by drinking heavily or smoking more. He may look for relief in high-risk activities like skydiving, rock climbing, or stock car racing. All these provide more ways in which karma can be reaped, and there are many more ways also, which I do not want to go into here.

One more fascinating point about karma: you can see that even if Joe does not actually strike anybody, the karma of anger is still generated in the mind and body. To the extent he gets angry, his blood pressure will still shoot up, his stomach get tense, his heart race, and so on. Of course, the consequences are much more serious if you hit someone than if you do not! But the point is that thoughts have consequences too. They shape the way we see life, which in turn affects our health, our behavior, our choice of work and friends – in short, everything we do.

I hope you can see how logical the law of karma is, and why I say that karma in the mind is the most potent kind of all. It is more subtle than physical karma, but it is also much more powerful and longer-lived. That is why I like so much this figure of speech that the body and mind are like a field. A thought is like a seed: very tiny, but it can grow into a huge, powerful, wide-spreading tree. I have seen places where a tiny seed in a crack in a pavement grew into a tree that tore up the sidewalk; its roots spread beneath a house and threatened the concrete foundation. It is terribly difficult to remove such a tree. Similarly, it is terribly difficult to undo the effects of a lifetime of negative thinking, which can extend into many other people’s lives.

I never like to talk about this without presenting the brighter side, which is very reassuring. You may have seen from all these examples how much in our karma depends on us: what we think, how we respond. The real source of karma is the mind, which means that all our unfavorable karma can be undone by changing the way we think. If someone gets angry with us and we respond with patience and compassion and the “soft reply that turneth away wrath,” that too is karma – good karma. Everybody benefits. The karma of the person who got angry is mitigated, even physiologically: his nervous system is calmed, so his anger subsides; he will not go on to spread it to other people and create still more bad karma. And our own mind and body benefit too. Even if we had to grit our teeth for a while to keep back angry words, afterwards we will feel good inside. All our vital organs can relax, put their feet up on the desk, and say, “Good job!” We know we have helped the other person, and we have the quiet thrill of self-mastery too. In St. Francis’s words, which appeal to me very deeply, we know we have been an instrument of peace.

SRI KRISHNA: 4. These truths have been sung by great sages in a variety of ways, and expounded in precise arguments concerning Brahman.

“As ye sow,” said Jesus, “so shall ye reap.” Perfect words. Everyone who heard them in those times, on the Mount in Galilee, must have grasped the connections immediately. Push a seed into the ground, take care of it, and it will grow – but not into any old thing; you get the crops you planted. When Jesus added, “Your actions are those seeds, and so are your thoughts,” the farmers in the crowd must have gasped with insight.

Most of us in twentieth-century America do not live close to the earth, and Jesus’ words are so familiar that we probably seldom stop to think of them. Yet the truth of those words still holds. We cannot breathe a sigh of relief and think, “He must have meant that in some particular context, for a particular audience in Biblical times on the shores of Galilee.” They are as valid today as they were in Palestine two thousand years ago, and they will be just as valid in the ages to come. Still, to make them fresh again, spiritual teachers interpret the truths of the scriptures anew for us from age to age, depending on our needs, our conditioning, our culture, and the times in which we live.

When the Buddha wanted to talk about mastering the mind, he used all sorts of images that would be familiar to his village audiences. One was a thatched hut. “If you live in a hut with a poorly thatched roof,” he asked, “doesn’t rain get in? You get wet, feel miserable, maybe catch pneumonia. It is the same with the mind: if you don’t patch all its leaks through the practice of meditation, passions seep in.” After a while, you may develop some serious psychosomatic ailments.

The Buddha’s thatched hut is a perfect image. But in today’s civilization, where psychologizing is the order of the day, the idea may benefit from more development. First, consider the body as a cottage, the dwelling in which you live. This is not really a metaphor; in a sense, that is all the body is. But it’s a living house: the kind of place you read about in science fiction, where the walls grow and toasters talk back and the television watches you. I’ll have more to say about this process-house later on, because it becomes particularly fascinating when you get inside, within the mind. But let me start with the building itself, the actual physical body.

The cottage I live in at our ashram is made of wood. My body-cottage, according to the Upanishads, is made of food: spinach from our garden, desem bread made by Laurel, soymilk made by Sandra, even some cheese from our cow, Shobha. It looks like a solid structure, but its tissues and cells are in a state of constant change and repair.

The other day, when I was visiting San Francisco with a teenage friend, we passed a store window displaying a remarkable cottage made out of chocolates and sugar candy, visited by Santa Claus and “eight tiny reindeer.” “Julia,” I asked, “what do you think of that?”

“I’d like to eat the whole thing,” she confided candidly.

“Wouldn’t you like to live in a house like that?”

“Oh, no!” she giggled. “It’d be icky. Besides, what would you do when it rains?”

If we eat enough chocolate, we will live in a house like that. We may not be what we eat, but our bodies are. The body is continuously remaking itself – brick by brick, so to speak. If I eat chocolate all day, whenever my body asks for a brick I am handing it a bonbon and saying, “Here, use this instead,” If I end up living in extra adipose tissue, I cannot blame the landlord; no one but me has done the construction. We cannot afford to choose building materials on the basis of whether or not they titillate the taste buds; the foods we eat should be those that make for a strong, healthy body.

But there is much more to the house than this. It has an interior too, with many levels: senses, mind, intellect, and so on. A thatched hut is not complex enough for our times, for it cannot illustrate the fascinating workings of the mind. In this post-Freudian age, we live in highly elaborate mansions like the Victorian homes I saw the other day in a fashionable section of San Francisco. Most of us spend a good deal of time taking care of our exteriors, which does make for an attractive appearance. But I know many people who have never been inside their own houses. They may not even know they have a door. They camp in the patio, and when life sends a storm they just get wet. This distresses me deeply. Every one of us has a home in which to take shelter, and interior shelter is vitally necessary for our health, our security, and our relationships. Yet every message we get today says, “There is nothing inside. You’re only the body. Getting wet and catching pneumonia is part of life.”

The whole reason I like this simile of Victorian houses is that it allows for the endless complexities of the mind. Some years ago, when I was visiting in San Jose, I remember encountering a house with a fascinating story behind it: the so-called Winchester Mystery House. Mrs. Winchester, it seems, was a woman of occult leanings who has been told by someone else of occult leanings that she would not die until the renovation of her house was completed. Mrs. Winchester put two and two together and decided she would go on renovating forever.

I have to admit that I never went into the house; the privilege currently costs four or five dollars. But I have it on good authority that the interior is bewildering. A lot of the construction went on with no rationale except to keep on going. There are rooms that Mrs. Winchester probably never saw, doors that open onto walls, staircases that lead nowhere – she was, the guidebooks say, very fond of stairs. And probably there are the sliding bookcase panels and trapdoors and hidden chambers which a good mystery mansion ought to provide. You could easily get lost in a house like that and never find your way out. In a sense that is what happened to Mrs. Winchester, who became more and more absorbed in the idea that she was her house; when it ended, she was bound to end too. I don’t know how it came about, but I suppose for some reason building had to cease: at any rate Mrs. Winchester did finally shed her body, though at a ripe old age.

That is how I would present the mind today. It has endless passageways and chambers, closets and vestibules, big bay windows that look out on scenes you never see from the street. It has several stories too – emotions, intellect, and so on – each of which literally recedes forever. You can never get to the back of any flat in the mind.

Just as there are people who never go inside, there are others who venture in and get caught in this fascinating labyrinth. They may lose all capacity to come out again and relate to other people. To function harmoniously in life, it is necessary to be able to come and go freely: that is, to turn outward in selfless action when necessary, and to turn inward regularly in meditation to restore our security, vitality, and will. And it is not enough merely to go inside. Many people who thirst for an interior life do manage to get into the vestibule; but once they get in, they do not know how to explore. They look around, see four walls and a velvet chair and the mailboxes where the senses drop their mail, and they conclude, “Well, this is all there is.” There is much, much more, but you have to know where to look, what to look for, and how to open the doors and climb the stairs. All that is what you learn in meditation if you have the guidance of a good, experienced, loving teacher.

I once gave a talk on the house of the mind in which the ego lived in a penthouse suite, presiding over a private fantasy world and looking somewhat like Orson Welles in Jane Eyre. But instead of his mad wife being hidden in a locked garret, the prisoner is the Self, the rightful heir. All in all, I thought it would make a good radio drama.

Here, however, I want to look further into the other extreme of the house, the basement. Actually, the house of the mind has several basements, each of which would give psychologists material for a lifetime. Freud barely glimpsed two or three of these levels, and his discoveries literally revolutionized the way people conceive of themselves today. It gives a clue to how much might be changed if we knew how to get into these areas consciously and transform whatever we find.

As I write this there is a good deal of public interest in dungeons, mostly in computer games. You enter an abandoned house, find a trap-door in the floor, and make your way down into the dark, there to find various treasures in endless chambers. The mind is somewhat like that. After some years of meditation you manage to get into the basement, just beneath the surface level of awareness. In this basement you make some important discoveries, the first of which is the light switch. It might sound trivial, but even to turn on the lights in this dark chamber is a tremendous achievement. Then you can look around and find some important clues to some of the problems that have been plaguing your daily behavior – sources of problems in personal relationships, for example, of which you might have been unaware.

Even on this level there is plenty to deal with. But the mystics say, “Look deeper! You’ve barely begun.” Many passageways lead away from this basement to other rooms and levels, most of which do not need to be explored. As I said, there is a dark fascination about the unconscious that can lure away an aspirant who does not constantly keep his eyes on the supreme goal. For no other reason I can think of except my granny’s grace, I passed straight through one level to the next without even looking to left or right. I was aware at crucial junctures that there were things to look at, but I had only one purpose in mind: how to reach the deepest level of the unconscious as quickly as possible, so that I could bring up to the surface treasures from which everyone around me could benefit.

The unconscious mind has many of these subterranean levels. Most remain unknown, though we may slip in unawares now and then – usually in dreams – and catch a glimpse of realms so unfamiliar that we shake our heads afterwards and wonder, “Now where did that come from?” As we go deeper, these levels are more and more alike from person to person. But of course we have no way of knowing this at first. We must not only learn to remain conscious in the unconscious, but to navigate these strange chambers as confidently as if we were in our own kitchen.

In many of these chambers we make some fascinating discoveries. If I remember accurately, I believe that archaeologists excavating some ancient cities once came across huge urns where seeds had been stored. Although they had been sealed away underground for thousands of years, once the seeds were exposed to the proper conditions they germinated and grew. Similarly, in the basements of consciousness we can find great urns of karma seeds, karmabija, stored away waiting for the proper time and conditions for sprouting. We have been accumulating these seed treasuries for a rather awesome time: the whole of evolution. At the upper levels, where they are readily ­accessible, are the seeds of individual karma – when John hit Joe, for example. But at deeper levels we find seeds from a common store: yugakarma, the collective karma of our times. Just our being in this same century together, the Hindu and Buddhist sages say, shows that we have some very basic karma in common – karma which our century provides the perfect climate for ripening. There is no hit-and-miss in karma. Our times, our country, our parents, our social situation all provide the conditions we need to grow, which we ourselves have selected from the seed catalogs of past thought and action.

At the deepest level of the unconscious, we find ourselves in a vast chamber which seems to have no walls anywhere. This is an extraordinary place, which literally seems to go on forever. The other basement levels have been individual, belonging to your house alone. But this chamber is universal. We could call it collective unconsciousness, for it belongs to everybody. But the Buddhist mystics have a more suggestive name: karmabijalaya, “storehouse consciousness.” Everybody’s basements open onto this one vast room, where the karma-seeds of universal samskaras are stored. Some are evolutionary heritages from our animal origins, like anger, greed, lust, and fear: millions on millions of seeds, stored there in huge containers. We get seed deliveries from this basement every day, and usually we carry the packages right out to the back yard for planting. We may think emotions like anger are provoked by someone or something in particular, but everybody gets these seeds.

When you can enter and move about consciously on these levels, you can draw daily on a limitless source of love, wisdom, strength, and inspiration. Words and actions from this depth have tremendous power to reach and help and inspire other people, for they come up from a level that is common to all.

There is much, much more to this subject than I can get into here. The unconscious alone would require volumes. But I hope I have said enough to show why I feel the mind warrants so much attention and illustration. The psychology of the Gita is profound, and a good deal of commentary based on personal experience is necessary to draw out its practical applications. That is why Sri Krishna says the scriptures keep drawing fresh commentaries. Yet at the same time, we should never forget that all great scriptures and mystics speak essentially the same language and deliver the same message. The experience of mysticism and the dynamics of sadhana are everywhere the same.

SRI KRISHNA: 5. The field, Arjuna, is made up of the following: five essences of perception and their corresponding five elements; five sense organs and the five organs of action; the three components of the mind, manas, buddhi, and ahamkara; and mahat, the undifferentiated stuff from which all these evolved.

I learned to drive in Berkeley about two decades ago: rather late by American standards, but then I learned to ride an elephant as a boy, which most Americans still haven’t mastered. I finished the course, too, though I have to admit that out of respect for life I rarely drive. My driving teacher was excellent. He must have taught Berkeley professors before, for he was very good at explaining.

For a long time I had trouble changing gears. He began by trying to tell me just what was happening inside. “This stick is connected to a gear called a spider gear,” he said, drawing deft, vague lines on the back of an envelope. “When the stick is here, so the gear’s not touching any other gear, you’re in neutral. But over here are four other gears –”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do I really need to know this in order to drive?”

“No,” he admitted. “You can learn what to do with your hands without ever knowing what’s going on beneath the surface. But some people learn more easily if they understand a little theory too.”

“Please proceed,” I said. “If what you say can be applied, I’ll try to follow.”

In verses like these, Sri Krishna too seems to be getting a little more technical than practical sense demands. We should bear with him, for these “twenty-four cosmic principles” are the components of a fascinating description of the universe with very practical applications. In Hindu philosophy this theory is called sankhya, which literally means counting or listing; yoga, or meditation, is its corresponding practice. Sankhya and yoga are traditionally taught together, for they support each other: understanding helps your meditation, and meditation provides the experience that makes the theory real. Particularly after some years of sadhana, these ancient theories can throw a good deal of light on yoga or meditation and difficulties thrown up by the mind.

I know of no English words to use for most of these twenty-four constituents. It is misleading even to use approximations because they bring in all kinds of associations from Western philosophy, which has a wholly different orientation. Behind all the categories and philosophy of sankhya lies a powerful, practical assumption: it is not trying to describe physical reality; it is trying to analyze the mind, for the sole purpose of unraveling our true identity. So sankhya does not begin with the so-called material universe as something different and separate from the mind that perceives it. It does not talk about sense objects outside us and senses within and then try to get the two together. It says, This is one world of experience. Sense objects and senses are not separate; they are two aspects of the same event. Mind, energy, and matter are a continuum, and the material universe is not described as it might be in itself, but as it presents itself to the human mind.

Let me illustrate. This morning I had a fresh mango for breakfast: a large, beautiful, fragrant one which had been allowed to ripen until just the right moment, when the skin was luminous with reds and oranges. You can see that I like mangos. I must have eaten thousands of them when I was growing up, and I probably know most varieties intimately by their colors, shapes, flavors, fragrance, and feel.

Sankhya would say that this mango I appreciated so much does not exist in the world outside – at least, not with the qualities I ascribed to it. The mango-in-itself, for example, is not red and orange; these are categories of an eye and nervous system that can deal only with a narrow range of radiant energy. Our dog Muka would not see a luscious red and orange mango. He would see some gray mass with no distinguishing features, much less interesting to him than a piece of buttered toast. But my mind takes in messages from five senses and fits them into a precise mango-form in consciousness, and that form – nothing outside – is what I experience. Not that there is no “real” mango! But what I experience, the objects of my sense perception and my “knowing,” are in consciousness, nowhere else. A brilliant neuroscientist I was reading recently says something similar in contemporary language. We never really encounter the world, he says: because of the mediation of our senses, all we can experience is our own nervous system.

When the Gita says the physical world is made up of five “material elements,” then, it is talking about the world as we perceive it through our senses. That is, the furniture of this world is not material; it is in the mind. In this sense, “physical objects” require a mental component also: five “essences” of perception, each corresponding to one of the five senses. From these five tanmatras derive, on the one hand, the five sense organs; on the other hand, the five material elements. You can see that the number five and the correspondences of sankhya are not arbitrary, but reflect the ways we have of sorting information supplied to the brain in electrochemical code.

Four of these elements have names similar to those from ancient philosophy in the West – earth, air, fire, and water. It is not impossible, in fact, that the Greeks got this terminology from Indian philosophy. But if we remember that we are talking about principles of perception rather than “earth-stuff,” “fire-stuff,” and so on, it should become clear that this is not an antiquated theory left behind by the progress of physical science. It is quite sophisticated and accommodates contemporary physical thought rather well, for it assumes that in the act of knowing, the knower cannot be separated from what is known. Tejas, for example, is not really ‘fire’ but something more like ‘brightness’ or ‘brilliance of light.’ It is a quality of perception, dominant in the mind-form we make and call a fire.

The fifth gross element is akasha, which is sometimes translated as ‘ether.’ This word too has misleading associations from the history of science, where it referred to an elusive physical medium. Since nobody likes to talk about ether after Einstein, I prefer not to translate but to keep akasha. Physicists today tell us that matter and energy cannot be thought of outside a field of space and time – a kind of frame of reference which has no substance, yet is “shaped” by the objects and forces in it. Akasha is like that; it is the frame of reference needed to describe the physical universe.

Senses and sense objects, then, are intimately related. There is a causal connection, for example, between the things we see and the physical organ of seeing, the eye and its related branches of the nervous system: both depend on the underlying form in the mind that conditions how we perceive light. The objects we see are shaped, so to say, by the way we see. So senses and sense objects “make sense” only together. Yoga psychology explains that is why there is such a strong pull between senses and the sense objects that complement them – and why indulging the senses only makes this conditioned pull stronger.

On the other hand, the Gita says earlier, this pull has nothing to do with us – the Self, the knower. It is an interaction between elements of the field, very much like a magnetic pull between two objects. We are not involved. Unless we confuse ourselves with the field, we can sit back and observe these interactions without jumping in and getting all entangled. When I look at my Prince Alfonso mango, it is natural for my senses to respond; that is their nature. But I should be able to stand aside and watch this interaction with some detachment, the way people sometimes stand and watch while movers unload a van. In that way I can enjoy what my senses report, but I always have the freedom to tell my hand, “No more. We’ve eaten enough for one meal; let’s save this one for tomorrow.”

Sankhya’s twenty-four elements are parts of a vast saga: the evolution of unitary consciousness into the countless forms of sensory experience. This is analogous to the evolution of the physical universe from the Big Bang. Working backward, most cosmologists agree that the universe must have expanded from an incredibly hot, supercondensed “primeval atom” consisting almost entirely of energy. At the zero instant just before creation, we would have to conjecture a state in which all the matter and energy in the universe were condensed into a single point, a kind of universe-seed before time and space were born. That is applying words where they cannot go. Yet I cannot help feeling amused when I read such accounts, when science is led beyond the reach of language. When mystics talk this way, scientists pull out their hair or shrug it off as poetry.

In this model, the equilibrium of this pure, undifferentiated point of energy must have been disturbed, for the early universe exploded with an incredible release of radiation. Within four minutes, it had expanded and cooled enough for neutron clusters to survive, but it would be more than half a million years before these nuclei could begin to form the simplest of the elements we know today. Then, John Gribbin writes, “the entire universe resembled the surface of the sun. It was hot, opaque, and filled with a yellow light. As matter and energy decoupled, it suddenly became transparent,” marking the ascendancy of matter over energy. Ever since, the cosmos has continued these trends, expanding and evolving toward increasing diversity in its forms.

The description of sankhya runs parallel to this, but it begins not with energy but with consciousness. Its purpose is to show how the diverse forms we perceive in the physical universe evolved out of unitary consciousness. Following that thread, we can retrace this evolution and discover the unity that is the divine ground of existence.

I have six-year-old friends whose current hero is Johnny Appleseed. When they eat an apple now, they save the seeds: someday, they threaten, they will run away from home and plant them too. I looked at one little seed through their eyes. Who would believe a tree could come from something so tiny? Where could it come from? Yet plant it, water it, and watch: from the air, water, soil, and sunlight it somehow makes tree-stuff to do different jobs in different places, so that this becomes part of a root and that of a leaf; and it grows and becomes huge. How? How does something vast, complex, and alive grow from something tiny and inert? How does it know how to repair itself? Why doesn’t it end up with some of its roots in the air? I know that biologists have good answers to these questions, but they remain good questions, no less wonderful if we understand enough to explain.

Here is an apple seed, tiny and inert yet full of potential, with an interior blueprint that can prompt it to sprout a root and a couple of leaves, diversify itself, and explode into a living tree. And here is a universe-seed without dimensions, yet with an implicit blueprint of laws by which energy evolves into stars, plankton, and human beings. Our cosmos too, sankhya says, is a tree: the Tree of Life, “with its branches below, on earth” – on the sensory level of experience – “and its taproot above,” in the undifferentiated consciousness called mahat. Like the conjectured seed-state of the cosmos, mahat is vast, for it contains in potential the entire universe. Yet it too is dimensionless and beyond time, for time and space, matter and energy, are still undifferentiated in this primal state.

And here too, it is said, equilibrium was disturbed and differentiation began. From mahat, step by step, the phenomenal world evolved in all its complex forms and forces, very much the way a huge tree emerges from a seed and bears fruit. First come ahamkara, the principle of separateness, and buddhi, the faculty that separates, distinguishes, analyzes, and differentiates. From these evolve mind, senses, and the ingredients of the perceptual world.

This derivation can get terribly complicated, and the complications have no practical value. But the rough outlines of this process of evolution can be verified if you like in deeper meditation. The stages of this evolution, as I said, are levels of consciousness – from unity to diversity, from subtle to gross. In an individual, we might call them levels of personality. There is a level on which we are physical creatures; this is the level at which we are most separate. But it is only the surface. Beneath the physical universe are deeper and deeper strata of consciousness, until we reach a realm so deep that nothing individual can be found. The whole thrust of sense-oriented living is to keep us on the visible surface of life, with the rest of our personality in the dark. In meditation, however, we learn to turn inwards and retrace the steps that led to our identifying ourselves as a separate, physical creature. We get deeper and deeper into the mind until finally, in the very depths, we find our source in pure, unitary awareness.

“After a certain state of development,” I read one biologist saying yesterday, “further progress in the life sciences requires breaking a system down to the molecular level.” That is not the bottom floor of life. Even the atomic level is not the bottom floor. There is a level, as the Upanishads say, that is “subtler than the subtlest”: consciousness itself. Only when you enter into the “dark waters” of pure, unitary consciousness, where there is neither name nor form, can you really understand how the mind and senses function, or even why the physical organism has evolved the way it has.

The end of evolution is to lead us back to the divinity that is our source. Meister Eckhart has a remarkable saying: “Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly Nature seeks and hunts and tries to ferret out the track in which God may be found.” The whole purpose of every experience, every human activity, every faculty, is to turn us inward and lead us back to our divine source. See the compassion of this view! Every person looking for something in the outside world, it says – pleasure, power, profit, prestige – is really looking for God. All the traits we develop, even those that seem negative, have a positive purpose: to enable us to fight this “war within” in the depths of the unconscious and discover who we are.

I don’t know if I have managed to convey the vastness of this: it means that sadhana is really the culmination of evolution. When you undertake this battle, the negative forces that you are striving to transform are part of everybody’s human heritage from our animal past, “red in tooth and claw.” That is why the mystics say that everyone who takes to the spiritual life does so on behalf of all humanity. And every victory won is a victory for all; for it shows what is possible, what is our highest nature. Gandhi said, “I believe that if one man gains spiritually the whole world gains with him, and if one man falls, the whole world falls to that extent.” And he added, “I do not help opponents without at the same time helping myself and my co-workers.”

SRI KRISHNA: 6. In this field arise desire and aversion, pleasure and pain, the body, intelligence, and will.

In the last verse, Sri Krishna gave the ingredients of the phenomenal world. Now he gives the recipe for blending these ingredients into a person. The body is part of this recipe, but you will notice that it is a relatively minor part. Most of what a person is belongs to the “world within”: what we loosely call the mind. Yet within or without, the point is that all these ingredients are part of the same phenomenal world: that is, part of a continuously changing process, with which we have only a passing relationship.

Let me begin to illustrate with my body. It seems solid and warm and brown, yet my medical friends tell me it is constantly changing. In some sense, these are the same hands that I have always had; yet the skin is different, the muscles are different, even the bone tissue has changed. While I am sitting here, my hand is busily engaged in an immense kind of interior urban renewal project of which I am not aware. At the same time my hand remains a hand, and it remains my hand. The tissues do not decide to turn it into a flipper or something else instead, although each cell has that capability.

My whole body is like that. It is not the body I had twenty years ago, yet it also is not a different body; it is very much mine. In other words, the body is not so much a thing as a process. The realization subtracts considerably from personal vanity. You can be proud, I suppose, of having an aquiline nose, but who can feel proud of an aquiline process?

To add further insult, this process is mostly space. There is very little solid matter to it; most of the body is space. I read somewhere that if you could get rid of all the excess space somehow, you could fit yourself into a peanut shell. This is fascinating, if not exactly flattering. It makes us see that the space is as important as the material substance, which is why akasha is considered one of the elements. But how much self-importance can we feel about a thing that is mostly air?

If we could really absorb this idea, it would probably be quite unsettling. Romance might be difficult to maintain. What would Romeo think of a Juliet that was mostly not there? Would he fall in love with a process – something he could tuck into a peanut? Maya cannot tolerate this kind of perception, so she draws a veil over it. One of the delightful contraries of human nature is that no matter how many times Romeo tells himself “just a peanut, just a peanut,” his heart will still race and his blood pressure rise when he holds Juliet’s hand; it will feel very solid indeed.

This is already dizzying, but we can take it further. Look at the mind. Every day you wake up the same person. Why? What makes you the same? You probably feel different: yesterday, perhaps, you felt on top of the world; this morning you have a chip on your shoulder. “Wait till after breakfast,” you say. “I’m not myself till I get something in my stomach.” And it is true that after a good meal, your personality may be different. All of us are like that: at different times and with different people, we are different too. At work we might be considered sweet; at home, a self-­centered grouch – two separate personalities. Our moods shift and flicker, even in those who are emotionally stable. Similarly, our desires change. When you were two, you might have wanted to be a garbage collector and drive a big, noisy truck around at five in the morning; probably now you have something else in mind. And opinions change. I know a number of people who used to be radically liberal, but who today are bastions of conservative thought. Change is the nature of the mind.

Philosophers have observed this flux of thoughts and sensations in themselves and asked, “Then where am I?” The parts do not add up to who we are. They don’t really add up to anything; they just flow by, “signifying nothing.” The mind too is a process, and its contents so transient that if we reflect on it, we feel relieved to think there is enough of us to fit into a peanut after all.

Just as to the physicist, the physical world dissolves into a sea of subatomic particles and energy, the mind dissolves into a river of impressions and thoughts. Yet through all this change, there is something that is the same person from day to day, moment to moment. The mind-process is repetitive. It could think anything, but in fact it keeps throwing out the same old thoughts over and over. Just as the tissues in my hand keep remaking the same hand, though never quite the same, so the mind keeps remaking the same old mind – at least, until we learn to change it in meditation. Nothing in the stuff of the mind is solid, fixed, tangible in any way. All that we have to cling to as “real” is the patterns of remaking – the dominant traits, obsessions, and “hang-ups” of our personality, called in Sanskrit samskaras.

All this adds up to a very shaky self-image for the ego. It loves to take center stage, yet when the spotlights come on, we can scarcely see anyone there. Here is a haphazard bundle of desires, predilections, resentments, insecurities, tied together with some random associations. What can hold this bundle together? When you take it up in your hands, it all falls apart. It is no wonder that when we identify with it, we feel insecure down to our toes. Anything can threaten this shadow house of cards. As a result, much of the string with which the ego tries to hold itself together is made out of defenses.

Just as the mind’s flow of thoughts makes sense only by reference to the ego, nothing holds the ego together except by reference to the Self. Only because there is an underlying Self can the ego usurp its place and put on all its qualities. This is a rather pathetic spectacle. The ego wants to be everything the Self is. It puts on the Self’s evening jacket and Brooks Brothers tie and expects – demands – to be intelligent and creative and loved and even immortal, just like the Self. But some small part is never fooled. It goes to admire itself in the mirror and finds no reflection, nothing solid, nothing to last from moment to moment. All this fills the ego with insecurity and fear, which can only be erased from our consciousness by the discovery of who we really are.

In calling this whole process a field, Sri Krishna has hit on terminology that is remarkably apt for our modern way of thinking. We speak now of matter and energy as being grosser and subtler aspects of a physical field of forces – an idea which, though now presented on prime time television and taught in high schools, was considered preposterous and occult within my memory. It is good to remember this, because it reminds us how readily our ideas of reality can be enlarged. That is exactly what the Gita is implying. This concept of a field of forces, it says, needs to embrace a still subtler realm than nuclear energy: the forces of the mind.

This is not rhetoric. We cannot see a physical force like electricity; we can only know its effects. It is the same with the forces of personality too. When you look at a magnet, for example, you see only a simple bar of iron. But if you put the bar into a lot of iron filings, they jump into position along the magnetic lines of force. Then you can actually see the lines; you can see the shape of the field.

In the same way, you can learn to see what I might call the shape of personality by knowing how to observe its effects. The most obvious portrait is the physical body itself. On the atomic level, I read one biologist saying, the body could be described as a complex bundle of energy. What we ordinarily call our body is the “solid” part of this bundle, the aspect that is perceptible to the senses. In the same way, the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures go one step further: the physical body, they say, is the solid part of personality, shaped over many years by our ways of thinking. This is not as occult as it might sound. These scriptures are trying to remind us how much of our physical health, for example, has been determined by the decisions of lifestyle and behavior we have made from childhood on: what we have been eating (and how often), how we work, how we respond to life’s give and take, how we spend our leisure time. All these make an immense impact on health status; and all, as this verse reminds us, are essentially a matter of our personal likes and dislikes, our will, and the deep, driving desires that motivate our lives. This does not deny the obvious importance of genetic factors. But in many cases, what our genetics contribute are propensities. A slow metabolism, for example, may mean we are liable to put on weight easily, but it does not condemn us to be overweight. It is our desires and behavior – the thousand and one little choices we make throughout each day – that actualize these tendencies and turn latent factors into real conditions.

But there is much more to the field of forces that is the mind, as we can see by its effects on others.

Once in a museum in San Francisco I saw a very powerful electromagnet. Two large poles as high as my waist were standing about a foot apart, bent towards each other at the top like two crooked fingers. When you passed your hand between them, you felt absolutely nothing. But it was a different story when the current was switched on. Then, when you tossed a handful of filings between the poles, the filings leaped into the lines of force and froze into a rigid bridge. You could push it and even rest your hand on it; though nothing seemed to be holding those tiny filings together, the bridge would remain intact. That is how real an invisible field can be; it literally molds and shapes the space around it.

A person can be like that too. Don’t we say, “She has a strong personality”? Like a magnet, personality creates a field of forces around itself wherever it goes, for better or for worse. That is why a person may attract certain types and repel certain others. Interestingly enough, we do not necessarily attract those whom we would like to attract, or repel those we want to avoid. On the contrary. If I may mix metaphors somewhat, we often attract those with whom we can sow and reap our karma. A person who is always resentful may actually draw to him people and situations that provoke resentment.

Given fertile circumstances, the field of forces thrown up by such a person can reach far beyond the realm of personal contact. In the Invocation to the Gita, Duryodhana, the ruler who masses the powers of darkness in the Mahabharata, is referred to vividly as a vicious whirlpool in the river of life. I don’t know if you have seen a whirlpool; when I was a boy we encountered them sometimes while swimming in the river, particularly during the monsoon rains. It was a terrifying sight to see those swift, dark, powerful swirls that could reach out across the river like an invisible arm beneath the surface of the water and draw a huge branch helplessly into its mouth. Duryodhana was just like that; his obsessive resentment and swollen ego drew the world around him into a vortex of destruction. I mention him not for any literary reason; to those who have read the life of Hitler and traced the resentments that came to dominate his life, the parallel is striking.

This image of a field of forces illustrates vividly the interconnectedness of our lives and the potential reach of our thought and actions. Just as you cannot separate an eddy from the rest of the river, the field of forces that is each of us cannot be considered limited to the physical body in which we live. The interplay of these eddies – the millions of little desires and actions of ordinary people like you and me – can create a whirlpool whose sweep reaches around the globe.

For illustration, I have been reflecting on some of the effects of one very common, innocent desire – the craving for high-beef living. I am not talking about meat-eating, either, but simply of the craving to eat a particular kind of meat out of all proportion to any physiological need or purpose – beef, beef, beef every day, often twice a day, so that it becomes not food but some kind of symbol. This has nothing to do with a normal diet, meat-based or not. It is an obsession, a desire fanned out of control; and whenever a desire gets fanned out of control in a society, there is a lot of money to be made. When these two, obsessive desire and greed, get together, you can expect a web of ill effects to spread.

As I understand it, the United States did not become a nation of what Russell Baker calls “beefaholics” until about World War II. But after the war, beef – particularly steak – came to stand for American affluence and a superior way of life. By the mid-fifties, the desire to share in this way of life had been fanned into a billion-dollar appetite. When I came to this country, the climate was saturated with beef ideals: Big Macs and Whoppers every day for lunch; steaks every evening, if possible, for dinner; barbecues in the patio when you wanted to entertain. I don’t think many people could imagine an American Way of Life without steak and hamburger.

Since then, following the flow of prosperity, the hamburger ­habit has spread around the globe: to Western Europe, to Japan, to the wealthy elite of Latin America.

Now see how far the ramifications can spread, along chains of cause and effect that no one would suspect. This desire for beef, for example, is one of the biggest causes of deforestation in Latin America, which in turn has effects that threaten the future of our whole planet.

Let me focus on Brazil, where about half of the Amazon basin – one million acres, an area roughly the size of California – was opened to foreigners in the nineteen-seventies, with generous financial incentives for those who invested in the country’s booming cattle business.

Because of the methods used for clearing land for grazing, however, cattle ranching is generally considered to be the most ecologically destructive of all tropical activities. “Ranchers” in the Amazon – often not individuals but corporations, including multinationals – carve their spreads out of virgin rain forest. Tractors shear vegetation off the thin layer of topsoil, and vast areas are cleared with herbicides like Agent Orange. The debris that remains, and the wildlife, are then burned. Three to five years later, soil fertility declines, grasses become less nutritious, poisonous weeds start poking up, and the range has to be abandoned; the cycle is repeated at a new forest site.

“So what?” investors argued. “There’s still plenty of forest untouched. We can’t afford to let millions of acres lie idle just because some bleeding hearts think wilderness is wonderful.” The government of Brazil agreed; it liked the flood of finance capital.

But other floods came too. By December 1980, an article in Science had reported that “the height of the annual flood crest of the Amazon has increased markedly in the last decade” because of “rapid ravages of deforestation. . . . Perhaps a fifth or a fourth of the Amazon forest has already been cut, and the rate of forest destruction is accelerating.” Higher floods meant a massive, irreversible loss of topsoil – and the loss of topsoil, together with the loss of transpired moisture from one-fifth less forest, pointed to a drop in rainfall that “might eventually convert much of now-forested Amazonia to near desert.”

Reports of the repercussions kept coming in, pointing to an ever larger picture. Destruction of the forests threatened food sources throughout South America – even, it turned out, on the other side of the globe. Already enough forest had been destroyed to alter global weather patterns, causing monsoons to dump their rain at sea instead of on the parched fields of India, Burma, and Southeast Asia. Who would think cattle ranching in Brazil could contribute to drought, famine, and flooding twelve thousand miles away?

Within a few years, scientists were convening to discuss what threatened to become an unprecedented ecological disaster. “Rain forests are being destroyed faster than any other natural commodity,” the Institute for Food and Development Policy observed in 1987. “If the present rate of destruction continues, in seventy-five years they will disappear entirely.” Brazil, which contains nearly one third of the world’s tropical forest, “has the dubious distinction of destroying more rain forest per year than any other country: over 3.6 million acres.”

At stake, biologists realized, is a truly global resource. Although rain forests make up less than one twelfth of the earth’s land surface, they are necessary for life as we know it. Besides their effects on food sources around the world, they have been called “the lungs of mother Earth” because they filter and cycle out pollutants like ozone and carbon dioxide, returning to the atmosphere vast quantities of oxygen and water. These processes, in turn, help temper the greenhouse effect: the overall warming of the globe, heightened by industrial pollution, which threatens to shift climate as drastically as the Ice Age. The Amazon forests, mysterious and misunderstood, have been helping all along to protect us from the effects of rampant industrialization.

Finally, rain forests are home to at least half of the earth’s species. No one really knows the long-term consequences of destroying a gene pool like that, but at the very least we know we would lose an unimaginably rich source of new food crops and medicines. Only a fraction of these species has been studied, yet that fraction – barely tapped – includes four thousand species of edible fruits and vegetables, ninety-nine percent of which are still undeveloped, and at least one fourth of the ingredients for prescription drugs now on the market. The October 3, 1988, issue of Science put this kind of destruction in its proper perspective:

With the forests vanished or largely disrupted, up to half the world’s species of animals, plants, and insects would disappear too. . . . According to David Raup, of the University of Chicago, a figure of 50% extinction would be closely comparable with the mass extinction of 65 million years ago, during which dinosaurs finally disappeared together with 60 to 80% of the rest of the world’s species.

At this scale, one tragic consequence often goes unnoticed. I learned about it years ago in a piece in the New Yorker about a remarkable man named Robin Hanbury-Tenison and a small organization called Survival International, which is trying to prevent the extinction of whole tribes of human beings. Hanbury-Tenison got his start, it seems, reading an article in the London Times Sunday Magazine entitled “Genocide”: not something about Nazi Germany, but about the Amazon Indians. Perhaps six million Indians lived in Brazil in 1500, when Cabral came. Today the count is just five percent of that figure, and declining to extinction. During this century, an average of at least one tribe per year has disappeared – cynically and systematically removed to make room for the expanding demands of cattle ranchers, prospectors, road builders, real estate developers, and others at the leading edge of advancing civilization. To me, it is an all too familiar example of the mental state to which any kind of exploitation of the earth has to lead.

I have been tracing the effects of one relatively innocent desire: let us say, the simple desire to eat something we have been taught is good for us and which shows that we have “arrived.” In anybody, this is not a strong desire; rather a small one. Yet it is widespread, it goes unquestioned, and therefore there is money to be made from it. Those who can make that money fan the desire, particularly with very effective advertising, playing on our natural aspirations: to nourish ourselves, to give our children the best we can afford, to enjoy the fruits of our hard-earned prosperity. Then with corporate growth come truly big ways to make money, and the capital to finance immense, global efforts. Whole countries, measuring economic progress by gross national product, get involved at this stage, turning over precious resources to feed the habits of the well-to-do rather than the needs of their own people. And so it spreads. By this time the “desire” may be just a habit, well under the advertiser’s control. We need to be careful of every ­desire, even those that are small. Even a little desire puts a handle on us, which anybody can reach out and grasp and use.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. Those with true knowledge are free from pride and the desire for ostentation. They are gentle, forgiving, upright, and pure, devoted to their spiritual teacher, filled with inner strength, and self-controlled.

This verse and the four which follow give a telling portrait of those who live in detachment, who have realized they are neither body nor mind.

There are portraits like this in every tradition. The words may differ, but the character portrayed is the same. I don’t think you will ever find the Buddha saying that arrogance is the mark of wisdom. Nowhere will you hear Jesus say, “Blessed are those who are proud.” The qualities mentioned in these five verses are signs of true spiritual wisdom. They shine forth wherever a man or woman attains Self-realization, independent of time, place, and culture.

But this is more than a catalog of inspiring virtues. We can think of it also as a seed catalog: each of the qualities mentioned is one we can cultivate to gain detachment. In other words, they are both fruit and seed. If we plant them and nurture them, they will thrive until they fill the field of the mind, yielding harvests that enrich us throughout our lives.

Such virtues are not unrelated. To my eyes this verse has a single theme beneath the surface, and that is forgiveness. The man or woman who knows how to forgive – not merely with the lips, but from the heart – can work in harmony everywhere without any fear. The secret is simple: a small ego. All the virtues of detachment come from that.

First comes humility, Sri Krishna says – literally, the absence of pride. For some reason I could never understand, pride is often taken as a sign of strength and humility as weakness. But anyone can see how pride weakens; for pride means rigidity. It is not different values or opinions that keep people from mending rifts in personal relationships; it is just plain pride. Neither party wants to take the first step. Those who are secure and strong can turn their backs on their pride and take not only the first step toward reconciliation but the second and third, and as many more as may be necessary.

There is a direct connection here with ahimsa, ‘nonviolence.’ Ahimsa means much more than refraining from harmful acts; it is essentially a mental state. You have made your mind free from anger – or, more practically, you have learned how to transform anger into kindness and compassion.

Ahimsa is our natural state, and it is very fertile soil. You don’t have to plant kindness in it; kind words and actions come forth naturally. But the field is choked by self-will – all the selfish, self-centered behavior that comes when we think of ourselves as separate creatures. As self-will is weeded out, security and fulfillment grow – not as a reward from some external power, but as the natural fruit of your mental state of kindness. On the other hand, by the same law, if you sow the dragon’s teeth of discord, you will reap a harvest of discord. Isn’t it Jason who faced the consequences of this kind of gardening? Where each tooth fell into the soil, an army sprang up to fight. This may be fanciful, but it is not an inaccurate way of describing the violence we read about in the papers almost every day.

Violent attitudes spread like a chain reaction. The other day I was standing with a friend watching our dog Muka watch a neighbor’s cat. The cat, in turn, was watching a flock of birds. For a moment the scene was tranquil. Then the cat, being a cat, suddenly leaped at the birds. Almost at the same moment Muka, being a dog, leaped after the cat. And my friend leaped after Muka. That is exactly what happens in human affairs too. If someone is rude at work, we take it out on our partner at home, and he or she spreads irritation to everyone the next day. It happens not only with individuals; you can see nations behaving to each other the same way.

Many years ago I remember a man on television demonstrating a chain reaction. He stood in a room filled with mouse traps, each of which would release two table tennis balls when sprung. At the blackboard he explained a little about uranium atoms being split by one neutron and releasing two. Then, without warning, he casually tossed a single table tennis ball into the traps. There was a snap, then a ­couple of other snaps, and in an instant, with a rattle like hail, the whole room was pelted with balls.

Without exaggeration, our globe is like that today. One person in a chronic state of anger spreads anger everywhere. When many people live in this state, continually on the edge of resentment, frustration, and hostility, the harvest is violence everywhere – in our hearts, our homes, our streets and cities, between estranged races, factions, and nations.

Detachment can break this chain reaction. A cat is conditioned to leap on birds; it has no choice. Muka, being a dog, is conditioned to chase cats. But you and I are human; we have the capacity to choose our response. We can snap the chain of stimulus and response behavior by meeting resentment with patience, hatred with kindness, and fear with trust, in a sustained, consistent endeavor to stanch the spread of violence that threatens us all.

Through meditation, as our minds become calmer and self-will fades, detachment comes and our vision clears. Only then can we see that most of the obstacles to forgiving others do not arise from ideological or philosophical differences. Put plainly, obstacles arise because we want to impose our way, our self-will, on others, and they want to impose their self-will on us. Seeing this clearly goes a long way toward releasing forgiveness; as Voltaire said, “To understand all is to forgive all.” But something more than clear seeing is required, and that is the will. It takes a good deal of inner strength to remain calm and compassionate in the face of fierce opposition, never losing your balance or resorting to harsh language. But when you can do this, a kind of miracle takes place which all of us can verify. The other person becomes calmer, his eyes clear a little too; soon communication is established once again.

There is a cult of anger in our modern civilization, often propagated in the name of better communication. But anger only disrupts communication. It widens any gap between people, destroys relationships, says without needing any words, “You don’t matter to me. You’re not worthy of my respect.” The only way to communicate is to be patient and sympathetic, even when it hurts. It will hurt; it will try your resources to the limit. That’s why the spiritual life is so difficult. But the more you give, the more it will enlarge your capacity to go on giving. “To those that have,” Jesus says, “more shall be given.” Then he adds, somewhat mischievously, “And to those that lack, even the little they have shall be taken away.” If a Philistine should complain, “Rabbi, that’s not fair!” Jesus would probably smile and ask, “What’s unfair? The choice is up to you.”

There is only one way to learn this, and that is in the normal give-and-take of personal relationships. People who are close to us may sometimes provoke us, just as we may provoke them; that is the natural state of emotional relations in every country in the world. When two people – particularly man and woman – have gone to different schools, grown up in different backgrounds, developed different ways of working, playing, eating, speaking, and thinking, we should be deeply impressed if they do not quarrel sometimes. All these differences provide opportunities for practicing patience, forgiveness, and respect, which are not going to be learned in any other way.

Forgiveness is important in every relationship, but it is essential in love. When two people love each other deeply, if one makes a mistake, the other doesn’t lose respect or say, “I’m going to do that too; then we’ll be even.” That is the time to stand by the person you love and offer support: not conniving at the mistake, but helping that person to overcome it and grow. This is a great art. It cannot be done in judgment or condescension, which means we have to get the ego very much out of the way. Most of us are not able to draw on a deeper will and a higher wisdom to do this; therefore our relations go wrong and we run away. There is no reason to bemoan this. I have made many mistakes in my ignorance, and so has everybody else I know. But from now onwards, by building our lives on meditation, we can learn to stand firm in situations where we used to crumble, stand loving and respectful when we used to get resentful, hostile, or vindictive.

We need not expect perfection. Robert Browning says in a magnificent simile that it is enough just to draw one small arc; the Lord will complete the circle. He will take into account the times in which we live – horrible times; just look at any paper to see: money and sex played up constantly, meaningless violence all over the globe. He will make allowances for our country, our culture, our physical and intellectual limitations, and then he will say, “Just do your best to forget yourself in the interests of those around you. Aim always for the ­welfare of the whole. If you can do that much, you will be a tremendous force for unity, harmony, and peace.”

The Lord of Love is infinite compassion, infinitely forgiving. We receive this compassion to the extent that we show compassion to those around us. There is nothing otherworldly about this. When I forgive someone, the inner world of the mind is so real to me that I can almost see my tensions dissolving, which is a tonic to my nervous system and to every vital organ in the body. In orthodox language, that is the Lord forgiving me. Just as anger can cause severe physical problems, forgiveness can heal – not only emotional ailments, but even physical ones that have their origins in emotional disturbances.

The other day as we tried to leave a parking garage near the Berkeley campus I noticed a lot of spikes protruding from the asphalt, leveled at the car like lances in some medieval fortress. The sign warned, “Do Not Enter. Severe Tire Damage May Result.” From the looks of those spikes, I would say that was putting it mildly; our tires would probably have come out looking like ravioli. There is a sign like this inside us too: “Don’t Be Selfish. Severe Damage May Result – Spiritual, Emotional, Physical.” When Jesus or Sri Krishna tells us not to retaliate or resort to unkind words, these are not copybook maxims intended only for Sunday pulpits. They are living laws. The more we indulge in unkind thinking, speaking, and behaving, the more damage we do ourselves. When you forgive, on the other hand – particularly when you forgive wrongs you have suffered in emotionally charged relationships – you are doing much more than repairing those relationships; you are discharging pent-up resentments and hostilities which are often responsible for severe physical problems. People used to ask me, “Does it help others if I pray for them?” I replied, “I don’t know how much it helps others, but it certainly will help you.”

This, Sri Krishna says, is right knowing: seeing the Lord in all, despite any differences that seem to separate us. The only way to know God is to try as hard as we can to become like him. To know Jesus, we have to try in all humility to be like Jesus, who forgave even from the cross. He gave us his life as a personal example of how to live – wisely, compassionately, for the benefit of all. Of all the ways to honor him, perhaps the most fitting is to give ourselves as gifts to him in return, so that in all our relationships we can show the spirit of utter forgiveness which made him say, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

SRI KRISHNA: 8. Detached from sense objects and self-will, they have learned the painful lesson of separate birth and suffering, old age, disease, and death.

Sri Krishna is continuing his portrait of the man or woman who lives in detachment.

This verse emphasizes what I call the mechanical side of personality, for our body and mind are instruments which we use in life. The discovery that we are not our machinery frees this machinery to function smoothly, which is a state of optimum physical and mental health. Even more wonderfully, we learn that it is only this machinery that suffers, decays, grows ill, and dies. We, the operator, are immortal.

It is not too difficult intellectually to see the body as an instrument: a sophisticated, powerful vehicle which we use to get around with, just as we use a car or train or plane. When I want to go to San Francisco, I travel in our Volvo; the trip takes about an hour. In just the same way, if I had more time I could go in this subcompact car I call my body. That is very much the way I look on my physical frame: it is not I; it is the vehicle with which I get through life in time and space.

But here the confusion arises. We can point to our car and say, “That is the vehicle in which I came here.” But we cannot point to the body and say, “This too is the vehicle in which I came here.” If we could say this truly, we would have no difficulty in returning this vehicle to the rental agency after a hundred years. But we have identified ourselves with this particular car. Through a monstrous error called simply avidya, ‘ignorance,’ in Sanskrit, we have come to believe that we are the body, subject to birth and therefore to death. In the Judeo-Christian tradition this is “the Fall” – the fall from the divine state in which we knew that we are not the body but a beneficial force, beyond division, beyond death. When we regain that state, we live again in paradise right here on earth.

I have a friend who is ardently devoted to Volkswagens. I point to my body and tell her, “You have a red VW bug; this is a brown one. It’s a rent-a-car: get it here, leave it there.” If I take good care of it – give it regular checkups, lubes, check the oil and tires – it should be good for a hundred years of service. And it is just the right size. Tibetan mystics say that between lives we line up in Bardo, the “in-between state,” and wait for a car that is just right for our needs and personality. So this little brown car is perfect for me. I don’t feel any jealousy over big luxury vehicles that take up so much parking space and drink a lot of gas. I have a car with minimum gasoline consumption and maximum maneuverability, and its engine is as powerful as a Ferrari’s.

This kind of attitude brings detachment in how we regard the body we have. People without this detachment are highly body-conscious: in their clothes, their food, their pleasures, in everything physical. They have no choice where the clamor of the senses is concerned; if the senses want something, all they know is how to yield. Detachment from the body means the capacity to tell your taste buds, “That’s not what my body needs! That’s what Madison Avenue is telling you to buy. It may look good, but it’s made for shelf life; it’s not going to help your life at all.” Only when we have the choice to say no if necessary to physical demands are we able to give the body the care it needs to make it healthy, resilient, and beautiful.

Athletes understand this. When a great gymnast has her eyes on an Olympic gold medal, she takes care of her body the way a race driver takes care of his car. Everyone understands the reason, too: after all, if you had a chance at an Olympic decoration, would you feel tempted by a pizza? What amazes me is that when it comes to a much longer lasting award – vibrant health and a long, full life – people object, “It’s not worth it. Beer and pizza are what make life worth living.” The Gita makes this distinction between the operator and the machine for one purpose: to show us that we do not have to obey the machine we operate; the machine should obey us.

To the extent we do take care of our car, most of us devote our time to the body – painting the chassis, fixing the windshield wipers, installing an eight-track sound system or a three-tone horn. These things are impor­tant; we certainly need a horn at times. But by spending our time and energy on the body, we have forgotten that there is an engine: the mind.

Many years ago, when I was still new to this country, a friend took me out to see his new car. “Look!” he said proudly. “I want to show you a mechanical miracle. They’ve finally developed a car that doesn’t need an engine.” He opened the hood with a flourish. Sure enough, I didn’t see anything except some old rags and a little roll of tools. Only later did he confess that with this particular car, the engine was in the back.

That is how most of us think of ourselves. The body doesn’t need an engine; it just goes. No wonder the engine is often in the worst condition possible! It has never been looked at; only by the mercy of the Lord does it function well enough to get us through the day without major mishaps. Therefore, the Gita tells us, work on your engine first: your ways of thinking, your emotional responses, your love, your will. If you have a powerful engine, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t have a horn. It doesn’t even matter much if you don’t have sides for your car: after all, jeeps don’t have sides and people are able to drive them. Work on the engine; that’s what you cannot do without. Work on your mind. After you have brought it up to specifications and tuned it to perfection, if you still have time, you can get a hula doll to hang in the rear window. Before that, Sri Krishna says drily, it’s a little premature.

One of the greatest misunderstandings of modern science is that if we study the brain, we will understand the mind. “Despite massive research,” a recent article reports, “neuroscientists say they still cannot answer the age-old question, ‘Is the material body really the seat of consciousness?’ Although there is a feeling of imminent breakthrough, such scientists have still to find the point in the brain where perception occurs – where nerve endings become music, or vision.” And that is perception, which is only the tip of consciousness. “As a matter of fact,” this writer adds, “the whole concept of consciousness has become even more uncertain.” This is unavoidable, because of the way the question is asked. When you base all your study of something on the assumption that it is something else, “more uncertain” is all it can become.

“Looking at the human brain as some sort of intricate computer,” says a specialist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “scientists confronted a system so vast and awe-inspiring that it makes all else simple to the point of triviality.” That is how wonderfully complex the brain is; yet at the same time, it is nothing more than a computer, which is to say a machine. We can put it on the workbench and study it all we like; even if we succeed in duplicating some of its functions, we will learn nothing about the operator of the computer, who is seated beneath the bench waiting for us to get around to him.

Many years ago I went to a computer exhibition in Oakland. There were computers all around, their beady eyes blinking, going beep, beep, beep. After a few minutes a man came up to me. Seeing that I came from another country, he asked, “Do you know what these are?”

Out of politeness I said, “Please tell me.”

“They are computers,” he said with evident satisfaction. “Do you know what they can do?”

I said, “Please tell me.”

“They can do everything you can do.”

I just laughed. “Oh, no. They don’t know how to meditate!”

The point may have been lost on him; I don’t think he knew what meditation is, so probably he didn’t feel any sense of loss. If he could have shown me a computer as sophisticated as the human brain, he would probably have felt very proud. But however complicated it may be, we can never make a computer that can do what every human being can, by virtue of being human: go beyond words, thought, and sensory experience into a higher realm of knowing, where awareness cannot be broken even by death. The reason is simple: the computer has no Atman. It is just machinery; nothing can make it more than that. The terror some people feel of the machine, of computers and the like becoming a kind of Frankenstein, is a terror not fully warranted; machines will never be able to “take over” anything in the sense of coming alive. But on the other hand, the sublime confidence that machines will someday solve all our problems, elevate our consciousness, and enable us all to fulfill life’s purpose is just as exaggerated and much more dangerous.

“This erring race of human beings,” Sri Aurobindo writes, “dream always of perfecting their environment by the machinery of government and society. But it is only by the perfection of the soul within that the outer environment can be perfected. ‘What thou art within, that outside thee thou shalt enjoy.’ No machinery can rescue you from the law of your own being.” And he concludes: “What then shall be our ideal? Unity for the human race by an inner oneness, . . . the pouring of the power of the spirit into the physical and mental instrument, so that we shall exceed our present state as much as this exceeds the animal state from which science tells us we have issued.” Aurobindo is not talking from book knowledge, though he was a great scholar. Statements like these are stamped with the vision that comes from personal experience.

As detachment deepens, health improves. It is amazing to see how easily we can change physical habits: eat better food, get more exercise, sleep better. But more important, we get peace of mind, without which no amount of food and exercise can guarantee good health.

In most of the books on health that I see, the mind is hardly emphasized. Current research into heart disease or cancer, for example, emphasizes only external factors such as dietary fats, smoking, or high blood pressure. Very few are even asking about internal factors, the influence of the mind; and when they do ask, given the physical orientation of our times, they scarcely know what to look for. I am certainly not minimizing the importance of external factors. But I think the damage that anger can do to the circulatory system, to take just one example, may be much greater than the harm ascribed to cholesterol. Hostility, depression, fear, and greed – not just for money but for power or pleasure – all threaten our health as surely as junk food or sedentary living. I once read about someone who devoured a bag of potato chips with every meal. I doubt his body appreciated it. But if you can be kind all day, even with three bags of chips you may be better off than someone with an exemplary diet who seethes with resentment inside.

Coffee’s adverse effects, for example, prompted me long ago to switch to a rare cup of decaf. But when people start telling me about the evils of caffeine, I sometimes try to restore a sense of proportion. “Mind you,” I say, “I’m not disagreeing. But what you really ought to worry about is anger. If you can give that up, you can take a cup of coffee in your stride.” The worst threats to health come from the Big Four: anger, fear, greed, and self-will. It is these we should focus on, for they sabotage our health, our security, and our capacity to love.

When you do not identify with your body, it is much less likely to be ravaged by disease. It doesn’t even feel easily the ravages of time. Gandhi was an outstanding example of this. So was the Compassionate Buddha, who was magnificently fit into his seventies. The chronicles and art of southern Asia, where Buddhism is oldest, depict him as tall, strong, and vibrantly alive – clad only in an ochre robe, owning nothing but a begging bowl, but every inch the king that he was born.

After all is said and done, the passage of time is going to affect all of us physically. But it is the obsessive identification with the body that really leaves it prey to the ravages of time. Will Rogers, I think, used to say that when he saw a pretty girl, he had to remind himself that in twenty years she was going to look five years older. That can be true of spiritual aspirants too. When you are meditating, though twenty years pass, the body may show the effects of only five.

I am not speaking here about events after samadhi, which may well seem remote. Even before this, you enter a stage where you are not conscious of the body during meditation. In the later stages of ­sadhana you may slip into this state involuntarily while you are asleep at night. If this happens, don’t jump out of bed; repeat your mantram for a few minutes and then get up slowly. The experience is exhilarating. After your first taste of it, you look on your body completely differently from the way you did before. You can develop a very affectionate relationship with it, as I have, but you no longer ascribe any personal significance to the body as the seat of satisfaction. And there is no more question of resisting temptations or cravings; the question no longer applies. Temptations and cravings belong in one world; you now live in another.

SRI KRISHNA: 9. Free from selfish attachment, they do not get compulsively wrapped up even in home and family. They are even-minded through good fortune and bad.

Now we come explicitly to personal relationships: the perfect context for learning detachment, and for reaping its benefits too.

Once I went up to a three-year-old friend and said politely, “Good morning, Laurie. How are you today?”

“You’d better keep away from me,” she said. “I haven’t had my nap.”

In fact, I was especially nice to her that day. I complimented her on her hair, her dress, even her appetite. No wise man wants to provoke a three-year-old, you know. But everything I said only got a nod.

With three-year-olds you can give a certain margin for this kind of behavior, especially if you are playing the role of uncle. But for grownups to act this way is quite another matter. I can’t imagine an adult saying, “I only got four hours of sleep last night, so don’t say anything I don’t like,” or “I’m hungry now, so I can’t possibly see anybody’s point of view except my own. Talk to me after I’ve eaten.” Yet that is how many of us behave, at least at times, though we seldom put it into words. Just the other day I read about certain political negotiations being conducted after a fine meal, on the grounds that wining and dining “makes for communication.”

When you know you are not your mind but the person who operates it, you get a good deal of detachment from your moods. If your mind is having trouble, the problem is mechanical; it can be solved. If someone contradicts you, even if you haven’t slept very well or have a little headache, you may experience some irritation, but that will not affect your attitude of love and respect for others. You can imagine the beneficial effect on your relationships!

Getting detached from emotional states is one aspect of learning that you are not your mind. Another aspect is learning that you are not your opinions either. This is detachment from another mental instrument: the so-called higher mind, buddhi in Sanskrit, which corresponds roughly to the intellect.

We live in such a pseudo-intellectual climate today that this kind of detachment is hard to achieve. Most of us identify ourselves completely with our opinions. Even on university campuses – perhaps especially on university campuses – I have met very few intellectuals who could look at their opinions with cool detachment and say when necessary, “Oh, no, this isn’t so good. Let me throw it away.” Usually, instead of “This isn’t good,” we say “This is mine. Therefore, how can I throw it away?” Look at the logic! When we actually discover that we are not the intellect – not merely believe, but actually experience it at a deep level of awareness – we can listen to opposing opinions with great interest and a quiet sense of security. If we find that someone else’s opinion is better than ours, even if we have held onto ours for twenty-five years, we can say cheerfully, “Where’s the waste basket? I’ll throw out my opinion and keep yours.”

In the latter stages of meditation we come to look on the mind as an instrument not unlike a vacuum cleaner: it makes a lot of noise, but it can do a good job. I saw one of our little boys using a vacuum cleaner the other day; he had managed somehow to attach the hose to the wrong end, and it was blowing dust and paper all over the place. That is how we usually use the mind, to blow our likes and dislikes over everyone who comes by. But properly used, the mind can suck up all this litter and remove it. That is meditation: using the mind to clean up the mind; or, more precisely, using the higher mind to clean up the lower mind.

From my personal experience, I can give a very effective technique for learning detachment from moods and opinions: work on reducing your likes and dislikes, not only in personal relationships but in everything. They may be very well rationalized, but virtually every pet like or dislike is the ego indulging in what it likes to consider creative self-expression.

The sankhya account of how the mind works can throw light on this kind of ego-art. In Sanskrit the stuff of consciousness is called chitta. We can think of it as amorphous mind-clay – unbroken, undifferentiated, without shape, contour, or size. By our thinking, we make this clay into anything we perceive, anything we dream, anything we imagine: trees, birds, dolls, people, even mental states like anger, sympathy, or regret. But through constant repetition of the same compulsive thoughts, we make our chitta into a Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. Everybody in our personal world is represented there in some detail, depending on how close they are to us: parents, partner, children, Aunt Josie, the office staff, even our dog. Interestingly enough, the Aunt Josie in chitta may have little to do with anybody outside. This is a figure we have made ourselves, the Aunt Josie that we see. When we quarrel with her, we go back into our museum and add a fang. “I make ’em the way I see ’em,” the mind explains. Sri Krishna would shake his head. “No, you see them the way you have made them.” Everything we perceive, everything we experience, is through these chitta-models of consciousness. They condition how we see life; therefore they govern how we respond.

When anger, fear, or greed molds this clay into rigid shapes, it is very difficult to break the mold. “I know my faults,” people sometimes say pathetically. “I know I’m not easy to live with. But I can’t change.” Everybody can change; that is the miracle of meditation. All the rigid pots and pans of chitta that we have been throwing at people in consciousness can be reduced to fresh, pliable clay again. Then chitta is plastic and responsive. We can make new things, beautiful things – forgiveness, patience, goodwill, fearlessness, anything we choose. The skill is the same. But formerly it was destructive forces that shaped consciousness; now creative forces make forms that are beneficial, not only for us but for others too.

Most mental turmoil, in fact, can be traced to trivial likes and dislikes that have been magnified by self-will: put bluntly, “I want this and I can’t have it” or “I don’t like this and I can’t get rid of it.” We don’t have to put up with this; that is the whole point of having what Sri Krishna calls an “even mind.” We can learn to hold our likes and dislikes lightly, and when we do, most of the difficulties in personal relationships evaporate.

Try this with jobs and responsibilities – the nagging little things you have to do but just don’t want to. It’s a rare spirit that can say, “I loathe this job – so let me at it!” For most of us, the voice of self-will has only to say, “Listen, count me out of this one. I can’t stand licking stamps, and besides, I don’t want to work next to Mabel.” We say obligingly, “All right, you’re excused.” Self-will grows fatter and bolder. Next time it doesn’t bother with formalities. It just says, “Mabel. Remember?” We say, “Excused.” And finally it grows arrogant and tells us point-blank, “Forget it!”

If we give in to self-will like this in every little like and dislike, we get rigid. When we find ourselves in a situation where we have to yield to the needs of others, self-will complains up and down the nervous system. “I can’t yield! I’m made of one bone; I can’t bend.” At the outset the protest may be only in the mind, but the mind has channels; as they get deeper, they dig into the body. Self-willed people are subject to all kinds of emotional and physical problems like allergy and ­migraine. When their self-will is thwarted and they cannot freely express their likes and dislikes, their breathing gets irregular, blood pressure climbs, the pulse races, the immune system is depressed. As Dr. Hans Selye observes, “Stress leads to distress” – first in the mind; then, if we don’t reverse it, in chronic physical ailments that make us miserable while they shorten our lives.

Fortunately, the distress of self-will can be completely avoided by reducing likes and dislikes. Whenever somebody benefits from it, go against your likes and dislikes, especially in relationships. If you dislike Mabel so intensely that you go in the other direction when you see her, make yourself look her in the eye; make yourself smile. After two or three tries, it won’t even be forced. You are stretching your compulsions, beginning to make them looser, more elastic. It is painful, it is difficult, but the benefits are tremendous. Your nervous system becomes sound and resilient, your vitality and resistance immense. If things don’t turn out as you expected, you won’t get depressed or irritable; if everything goes your way, you won’t lose your equilibrium. Your castle in the air may be blown to bits; if others benefit, you will not care; you may not even notice.

SRI KRISHNA: 10. Their devotion to me is undivided. Enjoying solitude and not following the crowd, they seek only me.

11. This is true knowledge, to seek the Self as the true end of wisdom always. To seek anything else is ignorance.

Like the preceding verses, these two describe both a means to detachment and its end.

Once we have realized experientially that the Lord dwells in us as our real Self, we see clearly that everything else in life is transitory. We are here on earth to serve; nothing can attract us again into any kind of selfish attachment. People sometimes ask me, “Don’t you ever feel tempted?” I reply, “By what?” When you know in every cell that you have the source of joy within you, where is the temptation in a chocolate truffle? It is not that I do not enjoy truffles, but compared with the joy of Self-realization, even the most sublime sensory satisfaction cannot be taken seriously.

Of course, this is the fruit of samadhi. The path of sadhana itself is full of temptations, and though they become fewer as we progress, they also grow immensely more compelling as our desires become unified. Right from the outset, therefore, it is important to do everything we can to make Self-realization our primary goal. The transformation of personality is so difficult that to accomplish it we cannot afford to dedicate ourselves to other objectives and try to practice sadhana on the side.

This does not mean we should have no other activities. In Sanskrit the earth is called karmabhumi, which has a double-edged meaning: karma is work, but karma is also karma. This earth is the world of work, and the world of work is the world of karma. Harmonious work with other people is a vital part of spiritual living. It is indispensable. If we do not live and work with other human beings who differ from us, how can we undo the karma of our previous difficulties and mistakes? If we don’t participate in life, particularly when it gets challenging, how are we going to learn to face challenges with courage, patience, courtesy, and unfailing respect? All this is part of what it means to see the Lord in all, which is the purpose of our being here on earth.

In the early days, however, this often means a change in some of our familiar activities. Several old acquaintances will gradually fade from our circle. Someone once asked Somerset Maugham, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot?” Maugham replied drily, “Sometimes.” To rebuild our lives, we have to change our associations and our ways of living. This is painful at first. But afterwards, when we return to our old friends, it will not be a case of the blind leading the blind; we will be a beacon in their lives.

In many parts of India, horse-drawn carriages are still a common sight. Usually the owner puts blinders on his horses, so they won’t be distracted by sights around them on the busy streets. Spiritual aspirants have blinders too. One is detachment, not identifying with the body, senses, and mind. The other is discrimination, constantly reminding yourself of the supreme goal in the midst of every activity. Without a goal, drawn here and there by the attachments of the senses, we become like horses without blinders on a busy street, willing to go in any direction, confused by what we see and hear.

In this connection we should remember to be on our guard against the influence of mass movements, which can sweep even the most sincere men and women off their feet. We need to be extremely vigilant too about the influence of the media, not only in the early days of sadhana but all along. I cannot emphasize this too strongly; it is one of the obstacles that spiritual aspirants in earlier times and less technological cultures did not have to face. Most of us have very little idea how easily the words and images of television, film, and popular music drop into the depths of the mind. On a seed catalog the other day I saw a confident guarantee: “Our seeds grow!” Let me assure you, media seeds grow too, as you will verify for yourselves in the later stages of meditation, when you get into the unconscious and look around. By that time every media-weed will have to be removed, which is a monumental task.

I can illustrate sadhana with different kinds of trains, based on my experience in India. Most of us begin meditation as passenger trains. We set out from Madras Central Station, say, bound for the Himalayas, over two thousand miles away. But a passenger train has to stop at every little station along the way. People have to get down or climb aboard, and every station has vendors with tasty wares to sample before the train moves on again. Similarly, there are aspirants who like to settle all their affairs before taking to meditation. Once they get started, they have to get down at every station and explore its possibilities before they move ahead again. When the sun goes down at the end of the day they are still in some rural station, hundreds of miles from their goal. Finally it has grown dark, and they have run out of time.

Like the passenger train, this kind of aspirant will reach his destination someday. But such an approach requires many lifetimes. Even if we are on the track and moving forward resolutely, all of us have a long way to go. The latter stages of the journey are a steep, arduous climb. Under such conditions, the human being simply does not have enough fuel in one lifetime to explore every byway that presents itself and still make it to the goal. If we had a thousand years to live, there might be no harm in this. We could play game after game in life, doing all the little things that appeal to us, and still have time left for realizing the goal of life. But a hundred years would not be too long, and most of us have but a fraction of that time before vitality and resolution begin to wane. We do not have time to dally with wayside distractions. “The affairs of the world will go on forever,” says the Tibetan mystic Milarepa. “Do not delay the practice of meditation.”

By contrast, there is the express. When I was teaching in India, the Grand Trunk Express used to leave Madras Central in the morning and go straight to Nagpur, at the heart of the Indian subcontinent, almost a thousand miles away. It did stop, but only at a few of the most important junctions. Even in those days the passenger bound for Simla, on the lower slopes of the Himalayas, could take express connections from Madras Central and reach his destination in two or three days. That is the second kind of spiritual aspirant, which all of us can become. Such a person may have made a lot of mistakes. His home town may still be talking about the trouble he caused. But when he takes to meditation and puts all his heart into practicing spiritual disciplines, he goes like an arrow to the goal.

SRI KRISHNA: 12. I will tell you of the wisdom that leads to immortality: the beginningless Brahman, which can be called neither being nor nonbeing.

The whole point of spiritual wisdom is to go beyond death. It is possible. It can be done, and it has been done, by cutting the nexus of identification with the body.

“When a person dies,” Nachiketa asks the King of Death in the Katha Upanishad, “there arises one question.” All of us must have asked this question at some time or other, when we have seen someone dying or been robbed of someone we loved: Where did he go? Where did she go? Nachiketa continues, “Some say he still exists somewhere. Others say, ‘Absurd. He’s just disappeared; there’s an end to it.’ Teach me the truth, O Lord of Death; I want to know for certain.”

I have friends, three fellows, who live in a geodesic dome, an apt symbol of the earth. They go out to work every day, and in the evening they come back to their dome. Imagine if one evening they came home and decided never to leave again. Someone brings them groceries and collects the garbage, but they never see who; they take it for granted. And after a while, their memory of the city grows dim. They forget their cars, for they never drive. They forget that there are roads leading to farther cities full of other people. Eventually they forget even the fields and pine trees beyond their windows, they become so preoccupied with the things inside: their books and records and old National Geographics, faded photographs and clippings from the newspaper, the patterns made by the stains from leaky plumbing, the drama of spiders on the ceiling. If you could ask them questions about San Francisco, they would shake their heads; the city would seem like something from a dream. “I don’t know,” they would answer. “I don’t remember.” After some years they would say in bemusement, “I doubt if it exists.” Finally they would conclude, “It does not exist. San Francisco is unreal. What is the evidence that there is an outside world at all?”

How have we forgotten where we came from, “trailing clouds of glory”? How have we forgotten we are all one, come from the same divine source, to whom we shall return? We have simply become preoccupied. Over a long, long period of dwelling on ourselves, thinking only about our own private pursuits and basking in our separateness, we don’t remember any of this; worse, we deny it. Those who subscribe to the biological school of thinking answer Nachiketa’s question with, “It’s over. When a person dies, that’s the end.” The King of Death says simply, “Not at all.” When my friends ask what is the evidence for an outside world, I might reply, “Just open the door! Go outside, look around for yourselves, and tell me what you see.” It is no answer for them to object, “I don’t want to open the door. Why should I? There’s nothing there.” If they do go out, they rediscover the world. If, through meditation, we step outside our egocentric personality, we ­rediscover who we are: part of the eternal, immortal Reality that we call God.

SRI KRISHNA: 13. It dwells in all, in every hand and foot and head, in every mouth and eye and ear in the universe.

14. Without senses itself, it shines through the functioning of the senses. Completely independent, it supports all things. Beyond the gunas, it enjoys their play.

15. It is both near and far, both within and without every creature; it moves and is unmoving. In its subtlety it is beyond comprehension.

Our two dogs sit outside my door every morning, waiting to see me and to have their breakfast snack. When I come out after my morning meditation, I don’t just see dogs; I see the Lord wearing two rather curious costumes. This is the best I can do to put the experience into words, but it is not metaphor; that is what I actually see. When I watch them playing with a stick, I see Sri Krishna playing – a small part of the eternal game that Sanskrit calls lila, the play of life. The whole of creation is this divine game, in which the Lord plays all the roles: our dogs chasing sticks, the children who throw them; our neighbors, each with their different goals; the lilac outside my window that explodes in bloom every spring. “Look around,” the mystics say. “The world is full of God.”

In this vision you can see life struggling upward in evolution, like a plant reaching toward light. The field of the created world is full of these sunflower-creatures, all growing toward God. Our dog Muka, when he sees me after meditation, actually tries to talk to me in ­human sounds; one of them almost sounds like Om. To me he is saying, “I want so much to be human!” He wants to be like us, and if we meditate, he wants to learn to do so too. That is the force that drives evolution, reaching up through Muka for the goal. With that kind of unified desire, I like to think, he will manage to be born into an ashram as a human being the next time around. The whole of life is moving like this toward the source from which it sprang.

It is impossible to have this vision except through the grace of the Lord. As Sri Ramakrishna puts it, the Divine Mother must say, “Let Brian have this vision.” She gives him a sidelong glance from those beautiful eyes and touches a desire deep, deep in his heart, deeper than all worldly desires. In the heart of every one of us this desire is lying latent, a seed of divinity waiting for its spring. After that, even if Brian tries to cling to selfish pursuits or to hold himself back in any way, her power will draw him forward – sometimes by deepening desire, sometimes by the heightened suffering that comes when you happen to forget your overriding goal. Every person who has attained the supreme vision will attest to the power of this grace, which will come to everyone who longs for it with an undivided heart and mind.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. It is indivisible, yet appears divided in separate creatures. It is to be known as the creator, the preserver, and the destroyer.

17. Dwelling in every heart, it is beyond darkness. It is called the light of lights, the object and goal of knowledge, and knowledge itself.

Again and again the Gita tells us that the Self is light, the very source of light. This is not merely metaphor, as can be experienced in the deeper stages of meditation. But until that experience, these words are very difficult to understand.

The Buddha might explain by saying that until we realize the Self, we are living in darkness, actually dreaming that we are the body. This is good scientific language. Even physiologically, there is much less difference than we like to think between the dream experience in sleep and the Maya-dream we experience while we are awake. The Buddha would go so far as to say that most of us pass through life like sleepwalkers – coming and going on cue, reading our lines, yet no more aware of our actions than someone in a dream.

“Preposterous!” we want to say. “Don’t I see? Don’t I hear? The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the neighbors are quarreling downstairs; I’m not aware of any of these things while I’m asleep.” But might not a sleeper say the same? After all, we see and hear not with our eyes and ears but with our mind. As long as we are asleep, the things we see and hear in dreams are real. Watch a dog dreaming: you can see its ears move and its nose twitch, and you know he is seeing and smelling – sensing a dream cat, made out of mind-stuff and memories, while his body slumbers. Our dog Muka runs on the beach in his sleep; you can see his paws trying to trot. Similarly, when you dream that something is attacking you, your heart races and adrenaline surges in your body just as if the attack were real.

“All right,” we say, “but look at the sequence of events in dreams. One minute you’re on a train in Canada at the age of five; the next minute you’re paddling around in the Dead Sea wearing a fez. There’s no logic in a dream world. You don’t have any control over what happens.”

But is our waking world so rational? One minute you’re talking amiably with a friend; the next minute, for no reason you can follow, she says something unimportant and you explode. You find yourself being kind to people in the office and short-tempered with those you love. All of us are familiar with this kind of bewildering behavior in ourselves, and to someone who is truly awake – say, the Compassionate Buddha – it looks no more logical than a dream. In both waking and dreaming, we experience with the same mind through the same conditioning. Our waking responses are not always more rational than our dream responses; they are simply better disguised by the conscious mind.

To be able to say we are awake, the Buddha would say, we must be able to turn our attention freely, at will, wherever we choose. It is as simple as that; yet nothing in the world is more difficult to do.

Imagine that you are seated in your room, trying to concentrate on the report you have to present in tomorrow’s meeting, when some word reminds you of college days. In a moment you have left your study. Your eyes do not see the pictures on the wall; your ears do not hear the noise on the street. You are back in Berkeley, wandering at midnight on Telegraph Avenue, recapturing dubious memories. This happens to all of us, much more often than we realize. Most of us can come back again with some effort, though usually only after the mind has finished exploring – in other words, when the mind gives us its permission. But some people actually lose the ability to come back. They keep wandering off to the same place in their mind so long that for practical purposes they actually live in the past. Their thoughts claim them; their memories oppress them. Such people are asleep, the Buddha would say. They are dreaming.

I have chosen an extreme example, but this is what a wandering mind means. When your mind is wandering from subject to subject, from memory to memory, from desire to desire, you say, “This is rational thinking. Continuous thought.” “You are asleep,” the Buddha would correct, “and you are having a series of dreams. The main difference with ordinary nighttime dreaming is that you can articulate some thoughts and make certain automatic responses.” These are not trivial differences, but they are differences of degree, not of kind. To say you are awake – the literal meaning of the word buddha – you have to be able to put the car of your mind in one lane and drive it straight to where you want to go, without weaving in and out of anybody else’s lane.

The consequences of this are enormous. If you are driving in only one lane, no anger can come to you. To get angry, your mind has to change lanes. To get greedy or jealous, your mind has to change lanes. This is a very compassionate view of human nature. If someone makes a mistake in a dream, who will hold it against him? It was a dream mistake, made with dream people: creations of the mind. Similarly, isn’t it rather unfair to condemn people who do not have control over their thinking process? Isn’t it rather unloving to condemn them? They have never learned to drive.

Quite a few people, though they admired and respected me, used to get terribly upset by the idea that we are living in our sleep once they saw the personal implications. “You sit laughing with the rest of us,” one good friend told me, “and then suddenly you say something like this. It goes into my heart like an arrow and comes out on the other side.”

Mostly this was in reference to sex, which is where many human beings naturally have their greatest vested interest in body-­consciousness. “This is the highest summit of reality for me,” this friend told me candidly. “If sexual experience isn’t real, what is?”

I could tell from the way he was looking at me that he was expecting one of those arrows. So I just asked a simple question. “Do you have sexual dreams?”

“Of course.”

“Do you experience pleasure in them?”

“Of course.”

“Do you remember the experience afterwards?”

I did not have to say anything more; the arrow had gone in. For a thoughtful person, this observation is enough to prompt reflection on the permanence and validity of sensory experience. Later I came across a quotation from Havelock Ellis, the psychologist who spent so much of his life studying human sexuality. “Dreams are real as long as they last,” he said. “Can we say more of life?”

Even when the body is sleeping, all of us experience dreams that are very similar to the experiences of waking life, complete with sensory content and even physiological reactions. This has profound significance. Even if physical consciousness is absent, mental activity continues and our identity remains intact, showing that body-­consciousness is not a necessary criterion of life.

The Gita is not saying that life on the physical level is unreal. It says simply that the waking state is not the highest level of reality. Just because you are making a bit of money and have had a couple of meals, you cannot say you are awake. All too often this is a kind of automatic activity on a relative level of reality, very much like dreams.

At this level, all sense experience has a kind of magnetic attraction. The moment the senses pull, we follow. In dreams, we know, we have very little say in what happens; we speak and act out of some kind of hidden compulsion. More often than not, we do the same during the day, with one important difference: in the waking state, if we can but exercise it, we do have a choice. Once we begin to exercise this choice by resisting the compulsive pull of the senses, we begin to wake up. I wish I could convey the joy that comes about then! You will be awake every moment, able to yield to a sensory desire when you approve of it and to say no to it effortlessly when you do not.

In the early days of meditation this is not at all effortless; often you will have to draw on the will to say no, and the mind will scarcely let you hear the end of it. But in the end this becomes as natural as walking or breathing. “My hand obeys me instantly,” St. Augustine complained. “Why doesn’t my mind?” Just as we train our hands to reach and hold through a million acts of self-control, usually when we are toddlers, we can train the mind to obey us gracefully and agreeably. This freedom defines the waking state. All that we lose by waking up is bondage.

SRI KRISHNA: 18. I have revealed to you the nature of the field and the meaning and object of true knowledge. Those who are devoted to me, realizing these, are united with me.

19. Know that prakriti and Purusha are both without beginning, and that from prakriti come the gunas and all that changes.

Three terms are introduced here that are basic in sankhya philosophy. Prakriti is the field in its largest sense: energy, matter, and mind. The physical universe can be derived from energy, though strictly speaking we never encounter this energy as such. Similarly, sankhya derives not only matter but the components of the mind from a kind of primordial energy-stuff, which is not knowable by the senses but is the substance of all the objects and events we experience. In my earlier account of the twenty-four “cosmic principles” of the field, prakriti is the first ­principle, the original undifferentiated stuff from which the perceptible universe evolved.

Purusha, which literally means ‘person,’ is the Knower of the field. Everything that can be an object of knowledge is prakriti; Purusha is the only knower. It is the Atman, the Self.

Guna, the third term, has a very important place in this volume. According to sankhya, the evolution of consciousness begins when prakriti differentiates itself into three basic states or qualities of energy. These are the gunas. Every state of matter and mind is a combination of these three: tamas, inertia, rajas, activity, and sattva, harmony or equilibrium. These are only rough translations, for the gunas have no equivalent in any other philosophy I know.

In high school we learned about three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. The gunas can be presented similarly. Tamas is frozen energy, the resistance of inertia. A block of ice has a good deal of energy in the chemical bonds that hold it together, but the energy is locked up, bound up, rigid. When the ice melts, some of that energy is released as the water flows; rajas, activity, predominates. We know what power a swollen river has; that is an expression of rajas. And sattva can be compared with steam when its power is harnessed.

Alternatively, in terms of the mind, we can think of the gunas as different levels of consciousness – say, from basement to upper story. Tamas, the lowest, is the vast unconscious. Most basements I have seen are piled with belongings: furniture, boxes, appliances, old books and magazines, and an incredible variety of odds and ends. The unconscious is like that: chaos, a dumping ground for eons of accumulated mental states. There is great power in the unconscious, but it is covered up and inaccessible to the will.

Rajas is the ground floor, the ordinary mind that races along desiring, worrying, resenting, scheming, competing, frustrating and getting frustrated. Rajas is power released, but uncontrolled and egocentric.

Sattva, finally, is the so-called higher mind – detached, unruffled, self-controlled. This is not a state of repressive regulation, but the natural harmony that comes with unity of purpose, character, and desire. Negative states of mind do still come up, but you do not have to act on them.

This forms the basis of the most compassionate account of human nature I have come across in any philosophy or psychology, East or West. It not only describes differences in character; it tells what the forces of personality are, so we can reshape ourselves after a higher ideal.

The rest of this volume will develop this theory, beginning with the next chapter; but I can give a preview here. In its natural state, consciousness is a continuous flow of awareness. But through the distorting action of the gunas, we have fallen from this native state into fragmented, divided, sometimes stagnant awareness. In this sense we can think of the gunas as spectacles, trifocals, through which we look at life. They are fragmented, so we see things as separate wherever we look: separate selves, antagonistic interests, conflicts within ourselves.

Evolution, according to the Gita, is a painfully slow return to our native state: pure, unbroken awareness. First we have to transform tamas into rajas – apathy and insensitiveness into energetic, enthusiastic activity. But the energy of rajas is self-centered and dispersed. It must be transformed into sattva, so that all this passionate energy is channeled into selfless action. There is great happiness in this state, which is marked by a calm mind, abundant vitality, and the concentration of genius. But even this is not the end. As long as we are wearing these spectacles of the mind, we cannot help seeing ourselves and the rest of life as fragments. The goal of evolution and of meditation is to take these spectacles off in samadhi: that is, to still the mind. Then we rest in pure, unitary consciousness, which is a state of permanent joy. Those who go beyond the gunas see no separateness anywhere; they see themselves reflected in everybody, and everybody reflected in themselves. This is seeing life as it is, indivisible and whole.

I think it is Ruysbroeck who says that we behold what we are, and we are what we behold. We see through the glasses of the mind. When you are divided, you cannot help seeing everybody as separate. When you are whole, you see the same divinity in your heart and the heart of every other creature.

SRI KRISHNA: 20. Prakriti is said to be the agent, instrument, and effect of every action, but it is Purusha that experiences pleasure and pain.

21. Purusha, resting in prakriti, enjoys the play of the gunas born of prakriti. But attachment to the gunas leads Purusha to be born for good or evil.

These are very difficult concepts to understand, because we identify so thoroughly with the field of matter and the mind. The Gita reminds us over and over that actions occur only within the field; thoughts take place only in the field; they interact and have consequences only in the field. Yet the field itself is inert. There is no consciousness in this field of matter and mind, which means that the mind does not really enjoy anything of itself; the intellect cannot really analyze; the senses cannot experience. Only the Self, pure consciousness, the same in all, can be said to see, enjoy, and understand.

All this is just philosophy until you begin to see the practical consequences, which are really shattering; they can turn our world upside down. To take one illustration, a good friend gave us a can of maple syrup this Christmas and our children have been making good use of it. I was watching them enjoy it with pancakes the other morning and reflecting on this nearly universal appeal of sugar. How many people, I wondered, would understand if I said that sugar is not pleasant; it is simply sweet? The words are clear, but the meaning is so deep to grasp. Pleasure is not pleasant. It is “apleasant”: neither pleasant nor unpleasant, simply a sensation.

You can see this in many everyday experiences, but even if you make the observation, it is terribly difficult to generalize it and draw practical conclusions. Many experiences in sports, for example, I would find terribly unpleasant; yet a participant may enjoy them. I can think of few things less pleasant than bouncing along on the back of a horse, yet if I were to say that in riding circles, people would scarcely know what I mean. The sensations are the same, but the interpretations are worlds apart. I say, “Horseback riding is unpleasant.” They say, “Oh, no, it is very pleasant!” Neither is right; it is apleasant.

It is the same with food. I know people who enjoy strong, bitter coffee. Millions find beer pleasant; millions would say the same about whiskey, which is even more bitter and burns all the way down. Indian gourmets like spices so hot that if you are not used to them, you feel that your mouth is on fire. And so on; we are all familiar with such differences. But we do not draw the conclusion: that the liking or disliking lies entirely in the mind.

Now take it one step further: an emotional experience is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is just an emotional experience, simply a mental state. You can watch it take place and then shake it off; the memory will remain without any emotional surcharge, which means that nothing can trigger that memory later and cause it to explode into words or action. This is what detachment means.

Incidentally, my friends – particularly parents – sometimes ask me how children get this kind of conditioning about food. Actually, a certain amount of this kind of experience seems to be necessary in life. That is why I don’t object to children having sweets within reason now and then, so long as they get plenty of good-tasting, nutritious food at meals and so long as taste is not presented as an end in itself. As far as I can remember, I enjoyed my food as a child primarily because it was prepared by people I loved deeply. Tastes are learned, and there is no motivation like love.

In this connection, I don’t think I have ever met anyone so free from the conditioning of the palate as my mother. Granny, you know, enjoyed good food. She never thought about it until it was time for her to eat, and while she was eating, it got her full attention. But to my mother, food really was apleasant. She was neither for it nor against it; eating was simply something one did, like washing dishes. This is a very rare capacity, which I am glad to say I did not inherit; I take after Granny. But my mother’s detachment played a part in my spiritual education too. She was an excellent cook. She used to prepare delicacies for me and then sit by my side in the Indian manner while I ate them, and I could never understand why she didn’t feel any desire for them at all. What she enjoyed was my enjoyment. This, I am pleased to say, is a capacity I did acquire. Today, after long years of practice in detachment, I don’t have any palate cravings, which means I can enjoy good food much more than any gourmet. Even when I take teenage friends out for ice cream or chocolate cake, I enjoy it more than they do; my enjoyment is multiplied by theirs, which I literally share.

SRI KRISHNA: 22. Within the body the supreme Purusha is called the witness, approver, supporter, enjoyer, the supreme Lord, the highest Self.

23. Whoever realizes the true nature of Purusha, prakriti, and the gunas, whatever path he or she may follow, is not born separate again.

When I was on my way to this country via Europe over twenty years ago, I remember with what great interest I stood at the railing of our P&O vessel as it rounded the Arabian peninsula and entered the Gulf of Aden. I had many Muslim friends in India, several of whom were scholars and poets steeped in Arabic and Persian literature. From them I had intimate exposure to Muslim culture. All this made it a very personal experience for me to see the barren deserts of Arabia rise ahead of us and to reflect on their legacy to India and the world.

Most of all I remember the long passage through the Red Sea. I had never thought of it as being so large; I had thought we might pass through in a day and night at most, yet it took three. The air was warm and humid, and the waters unruffled by any breeze. The passengers were so wrung out by the heat and humidity that the ship soon seemed deserted above decks. I thought of myself as the Ancient Mariner, “alone on a painted sea.” It was much too stuffy to sleep in our cramped, crowded cabin. When the purser wasn’t looking, I took my bedding out on deck and watched for hours with quiet fascination while the mountains slipped by beneath the stars.

One night, I remember, I suddenly caught sight of pillars of fire rising against the dark shapes of the Arabian peninsula – an alarming, awesome sight, as if the land were licking the sky with tongues of flame. Was that the way the Prophet describes hell? Had Armageddon come?

A sailor laughed. “No,” he said, “it’s just the refineries.”

When you know you are the Self, in a sense you pass through the turmoil of life with the same sense of detachment I remember from those nights on deck, watching deserts and refineries slip by without a sound. An unknown medieval German mystic wrote, “Nothing burns in hell except self-will.” There is the desert of alienation, the flames of suffering and sorrow; yet you know you are not the refineries; you are not on fire yourself. You watch in peace. Life is not an empty illusion then, but full of meaning. Even when you pass through sorrow, you know that there is an eternal backdrop to all tragedy, an end to sorrow, and you get unending joy in knowing how to help and relieve the suffering of those who suffer around you. In the midst of activity, your heart and mind remain at peace.

Part of this peace comes because the vast burden of the past slips from your shoulders entirely, the way the mountains of the Arabian shore slipped by and disappeared: they were real, yet no more real to me than shadows. When we believe we are the body, separate from everybody else, all of us make mistakes. We can cause a lot of trouble to ourselves and others just because of the way we see. But when we see clearly who we are, all these mistakes no longer burden us. They belong to someone else, someone in the past, and the past is gone. People sometimes asked Mahatma Gandhi why he did a particular thing or said a particular thing when he was, say, twenty-two. Gandhi would reply simply, “That is how I saw life then. I see more clearly now.”

Once you attain the Self, the scriptures say, you are not born again as a separate creature. This is not an easy statement to understand. In one school of Hindu and Buddhist thought, it is taken literally: you are not born again, full stop; you are out of the game. I am glad to say that I belong to the other school, in which I have good reason to believe. According to this view, though not born again as a separate personality entangled in the net of life, the man or woman who attains Self-realization may return to life again and again in order to help others and alleviate their sorrow.

Even having this perspective can help immensely in facing death, which is not an end but an open door. When I was a boy, I remember my granny once called me to the shed where one of our cows was dying. The cow raised her head a little to gaze at me, and I saw in her eyes the same fear, the same uncertainty, that I had seen in the eyes of relatives lying and waiting for death to come. They seemed to say, What is happening? What comes next – or is everything over at last? When you remove that uncertainty – not at a superficial level, but in the depths of the mind – the fear of death is gone. In every tradition the great mystics tell us quietly, “We are not afraid of death. We know.”

When you go to sleep, you know that you will wake up. If you did not know, you would be terrified. That is the Buddha’s approach. He would simply ask us, “Didn’t you go to sleep last night? When you woke up, was it the same you? While you were asleep, wasn’t there a period when you weren’t aware of yourself as a separate individual?” It is the same with death, if we could only see. The body dies, being made of matter, but the Self can pass through this great change as quietly as my P&O vessel passed through the Red Sea.

I have had the privilege of being with many people at their hour of death, sitting by their side, holding their hand and repeating my mantram, helping them to understand that death is not the end but a chance to rest before a fresh beginning. One man several years ago responded as sweetly as a little girl. The others who were with him had gone out, but I remained for a few more minutes. “Is there any personal question you’d like to ask me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he smiled. “Only one: after I shed this body, will I see you again?”

I just said, “That depends on you. If you deeply desire that we not be separated, sure, we will be together again.”

When you love your teacher deeply, the scriptures say, that love becomes a bond that death cannot sever. And in the bodhisattva tradition, those who attain Self-realization love all of creation so deeply that they return to this life again and again to alleviate sorrow and help the rest of us realize the goal of life. “As long as a single creature is suffering,” the Buddha said, “I shall not make the final crossing into nirvana.”

SRI KRISHNA: 24. Some realize the Self within them through the practice of meditation, some by the path of wisdom, and others by selfless service.

25. Others may not know these paths; but hearing and following the instructions of an illumined teacher, they too go beyond death.

In the Hindu tradition, there are four kinds of yoga or ways to God: jnana yoga, the path of wisdom, karma yoga, the path of selfless service, raja yoga, the path of meditation, and bhakti yoga, the way of love. If you look at the lives of those in India who have realized the Lord, you will generally find that they emphasize one of these aspects of sadhana over the others, according to their temperament and the needs of the times. But you will also see that none of these excludes the others, and that all have an important place in sadhana.

A luminous representative of jnana yoga in recent times is Sri Ramana Maharshi, one of the most outstanding spiritual figures of any age, who lived in relative obscurity in South India until the nineteen-­fifties. For karma yoga, the path of selfless service, you could not ask for a better example than Mahatma Gandhi. And for bhakti yoga, the way of love so well represented in the Christian tradition, I always draw on the life of Sri Ramakrishna, a perfect lover of God. But for those who consider these three yogas as watertight compartments, I like to point to a fourth shining example, my own spiritual teacher. Granny was not at all intellectual. If someone had tried to convince her that she could have her choice of wisdom, love, or selfless service, but not all three together, she would have found the idea absurd. Wisdom and service flow naturally from love, and all three are released through meditation and its allied disciplines. So where Gandhi says, for example, that the Gita is a manual for karma yoga, selfless action, I would add without contradiction that it is equally a manual for the way of love as embodied by my granny. As Sri Aurobindo says, all life is yoga. All the paths mentioned in the Gita are blended when we base our lives on meditation and work hard in loving, selfless activity during the day.

The word yoga itself contains the clue to this. Patanjali gives us the essence of it in a famous definition: “Yoga means stilling all waves of thought in the mind.” By this definition, any set of disciplines that stills the mind is yoga, and this excludes some activities that are called yoga and includes spiritual disciplines from other, non-Indian traditions. What the Gita calls yoga is central to mystical experience everywhere.

SRI KRISHNA: 26. Whatever exists, Arjuna, animate or inanimate, is born through the union of the field and its Knower.

Hinduism represents the Godhead and its creative power as Shiva and Shakti. Shiva, the eternal masculine principle, is always united with Shakti, the eternal feminine. Shakti literally means power, strength, energy; in this unique tradition, strength is represented as a woman. Shiva is the changeless, Shakti the dynamic. Thus Shakti is prakriti – the whole field of creation, both mind and matter, and the forces by which it is shaped. Every woman embodies Shakti, which means that in spiritual terms the woman can make a much more important contribution to the world than can the man. One selfless woman can enable everyone around her to grow. On the other hand, an insecure and self-willed woman can impede everyone else’s growth; so this is an awesome responsibility. Following my granny, I treat every woman with great love and respect because this is her potential; this tremendous power is what every woman represents.

For creation to take place, according to this tradition, Shiva and Shakti have to unite. From this union the world and all beings are born. Kalidasa, whom I would call one of the greatest poets and dramatists in the world, begins his epic Raghuvamsha with an invocation to Shiva and Shakti: “I meditate on the parents of the world, who are united like a word and its meaning.” You cannot separate a word from its meaning; it would no longer be a word. Similarly, the world makes no sense apart from God, who is Mother and Father in one.

SRI KRISHNA: 27. He alone sees truly who sees the Lord the same in every creature, who sees the Deathless in the hearts of all that die.

28. Seeing the same Lord everywhere, he does not harm himself or others. Thus he attains the supreme goal.

I remember a film in which there was a violent forest fire. Where it spread across the meadow, each blade of grass seemed to be made of flame; when the fire reached the woods, it leaped up to take the shape of trees. Each branch seemed to consist not of wood but of flame. While the trees stood, each tree of fire stood; when a tree fell, you saw a tree of fire lying on the ground, its branches glowing orange and gold.

Fire neither stands nor lies, of course; it takes the shape of the object it consumes. The Self does the same. The Katha Upanishad says,

As the same fire assumes different shapes

When it consumes objects differing in shape,

The one Self takes the shape of every creature

In whom it is present.

As the same air assumes different shapes

When it enters objects differing in shape,

The one Self takes the shape of every creature

In whom it is present.

This is not merely philosophy. I remember reading some comments by Jean Mayer, one of the world’s foremost nutritionists, written after he attended the World Food Conference of 1974 in Rome. I respect his observations greatly, not merely because he knows his field but because his concern gives him wide, sympathetic vision. While the representative from Bangladesh was speaking to the conference about the imminent threat of starvation in his country, Dr. Mayer remarked, very few people were present in the hall. Most of the delegates were at a cocktail party, drinking alcohol made from grain – that is, from food. By his calculations, the quantity of grain converted to alcoholic beverages might have fed twenty million people. And he asked, Who at this conference on world hunger even saw the connection?

People sometimes object, “What does it matter? The alcohol has been made; why shouldn’t we drink it?” The answer is that if we do not drink it, it will not be made. We have a choice, Dr. Mayer points out: there is a connection between a habit which benefits no one (except, of course, the industry) and the hunger of millions.

The intellect can see this, but it is the heart that enables the intellect to understand and empowers the will to act. A sensitive person, after grasping this connection, will not be able to lift a highball without seeing the eyes of a hungry child over the rim of the glass.

There is another common objection: “Even if I do give up drinking, so what? They’re not going to give the grain I save to the poor. They’ll make gasohol with it, or burn it to keep prices up, or fatten animals in feedlots with it.” In the short run, there is truth to these objections; withdrawing our personal support of a particular industry is only the beginning. But withdrawing support is essential. The Gita is talking about a whole view. We have choices everywhere; one by one, we need to open them.

This is not a matter of the intellect, though a clear intellect can help. It comes from a change in consciousness, in which we gradually learn to see the Lord in all and to act and live accordingly.

Dr. Mayer observed that at that time the nations of the world, including many developing nations facing starvation, were spending almost a billion dollars every day on armaments. (In the 1990s the figure has been running almost two and a half billion dollars a day.) If a fraction of that money could be rechanneled into the development of local resources for self-sufficiency, the world food problem could be completely solved.

Look only at the arms industry; you will see what incredible things can be achieved in a few decades when some of the best talent in science and engineering and finance concentrates on a single area. If the same energy and imagination were brought to bear on getting food to those who need it, not only in the poorer countries but in countries like the United States too, starvation could be eradicated from the globe within a generation. It is not that the problems are so large, but that people’s interests, self-interests, and attention are drawn to other things.

In an article contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year for 1975, Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi wrote:

No country can afford to take a narrow view of its own interests, since it has to live in a world that is closely interlinked. The richer regions cannot abdicate their concern. Prosperity for some cannot be enjoyed in the midst of poverty for most. It is not military confrontation alone that imperils world peace; disparity is an equal danger.

And she concludes: “The quest for an egalitarian society is not merely humanitarian. It is a practical necessity if the world order is to survive. . . . Unless the minds of people are remolded, infused with comprehension of and compassion for the suffering of the many, progress itself will be unreal.”

Again, this is not rhetoric. The United States is the wealthiest nation the world has seen; yet programs and support for children, for the poor, and for social problems are being cut while weapons spending and the public debt soar. Literally millions of children and old people now live in such poverty that they do not get enough to eat. I wish I were exaggerating, but the reality is even more tragic than I care to paint it. All this is because we do not put people first, but greed. Not only the poor but the middle class too are beginning to pay the price of a material kind of “progress” that ignores the welfare of individuals.

A few months after that World Food Conference, a perceptive piece by James Reston appeared in the New York Times. He too was pointing out that times are changing fast for people in the developing countries, who are no longer likely to sit quiet and watch in resignation while developed countries maintain a standard of living that is excessive and wasteful, which exploits the raw materials and cheap labor of the poor. We have entered an era of international terrorism, Reston says, when even a small group can lay hands on nuclear materials and hold a nation to ransom or precipitate a war. By the end of this century, if trends continue, enough fissionable material will be in transport at any given time to make twenty thousand nuclear bombs. “The truth,” as Fred C. Icklé said, “is that we are basically defenseless” – not only against this sensitive situation, but against an organized nuclear attack. All this massive expenditure on deterrents and detection systems has essentially come to nothing – except, of course, that it has left us more vulnerable to attack by enemies whom we should never have made our enemies in the first place. The law of compassion and unity cannot be violated without consequences.

There is only one basis on which we can live together, and that is to trust one another, considering the needs of the whole planet and subjecting ourselves cheerfully to small deprivations when necessary to serve those needs. This is not at all a negative note. Very little has been done along these lines. Very little has been done to make people understand that there is great joy in living like this, using all our personal resources in concerted, dedicated action to banish the threat of the suicide of the earth.

SRI KRISHNA: 29. They alone see truly who see that all actions are performed by prakriti, while the Self remains unmoved.

30. When they see the variety of creation rooted in that unity and growing out of it, they attain fulfillment in Brahman.

When I was a boy I remember being fascinated by the novels of Alexander Dumas the younger, particularly The Man in the Iron Mask. So far as I know, it has never been decided for certain who the real man in the iron mask was. History simply records a poor chap who was held as a state prisoner by Louis XIV for over forty years and finally died in the Bastille, his identity still a mystery. But Dumas’ theory made a great story: the mysterious stranger is King Louis’ twin brother, involved in a plot to impersonate and imprison the king himself.

This makes a good allegory too. Each of us, the Gita would say, goes through life in an iron mask, riveted on so securely that over the years – or, from the Hindu and Buddhist perspective, over many, many lives – we forget we have a face. We think the mask is who we are, and of course so does everybody else. But beneath this mask is the king, our real Self.

This mask is our separate personality, and what makes it interesting is that it is not material. To be more accurate, Hindu psychology might say we are wearing two masks, one inside the other and fitted to it perfectly. The outer mask is the physical body; the inner is called in Sanskrit sukshmasharira, the ‘subtle body’ – that is, the mind, intellect, and ego. Both are made of prakriti, created out of our obsessive identification with the body and mind. The wearer is Purusha, the Self.

Between these two masks there is a quiet correspondence, which has many ramifications for physical health. Put simply, the body can be said to mirror or materialize the more rigid conditions of personality. In many cases, disease processes in the body may be said to correspond to and develop out of compulsive ways of thinking.

This is not so occult as it might sound. For one thing, compulsive ways of thinking lead eventually to compulsive habits of behavior, which have consequences in the body. Chronically high blood pressure associated with some kinds of aggressive personality is a familiar example. But there is a deeper side too. The subtle body, as I said earlier, is a highly complex field of forces – anger, fear, desires, and so on – all consisting of prana. The same prana that is the vital energy for bodily organs and systems, including the brain, is the prana that makes up the mind. If thought-patterns grow rigid and compulsive, parts of the body cannot help being deprived of prana, of vital energy. Over the years this can lead to serious disabilities.

Of course, this is a highly simplified picture. Personality is complex, and each individual comprises many physical and mental factors that come together in the development of illness. Still, there is increasing evidence to indicate that especially the so-called degenerative diseases – cardiovascular disease, arthritis, even cancer – may have their origin in this kind of pattern. That is why I like the prescient advice Sir William Osler used to give other physicians: “Ask not what kind of disease a patient has, but what kind of patient has the disease.”

Hindu and Buddhist mystics would say that we have been at work fashioning this subtle-body mask for many lives. Every thought, every feeling, every act, every choice, shapes the mask further. I find this a very fair, sensible exposition. Whenever we dwell on a selfish thought – or, for that matter, whenever we act on an unselfish one – we are shaping tremendous forces in consciousness into molds of selfishness or unselfishness.

At first we make just a temporary kind of mask: grease paint, putty, a false mustache. You can clean yourself up in a few minutes if you choose. This is the natural state of the subtle body: elastic, pliable, spontaneous, with no rigid shape of its own. But the mind’s natural tendency, perversely, is not to stay in its natural state. It likes to think and think and think, to desire and desire and desire; and as it goes on thinking and desiring, it becomes more self-centered and more rigid. Finally we have a real iron mask, riveted on seemingly forever – so long that we believe it is part of us, our real personality. Fortunately, this mask can be taken off; that is the whole purpose of meditation and its allied disciplines. And when the mask is off, we see ourselves as we really are: pure, complete, inseparable from the rest of life.

SRI KRISHNA: 31. This supreme Self is without a beginning, undifferentiated, deathless. Though it dwells in the body, Arjuna, it neither acts nor is touched by action.

32. As akasha pervades the cosmos but remains unstained, the Self can never be tainted though it dwells in every creature.

33. As the sun lights up the world, the Self dwelling in the field is the source of all light in the field.

34. Those who, with the eye of wisdom, distinguish the field from its Knower and the way to freedom from the bondage of prakriti, attain the supreme goal.

Movies were rare while I was growing up in India. Our little village was not much exposed to the routes of world trade, and we had no theaters or auditoriums. But once in a while some enterprising individual would come by with a truck, a projector, a gas-powered generator, and an ancient print of a Hollywood film. We would set up the projector in a tent, and almost everybody in the village would assemble at nightfall to watch. It was all terribly new, and people in my village in those days were quite unsophisticated. Many had never even gone as far away as the neighboring town. So when we watched these films, most of us did not have a clear idea of what it was we were seeing. On the one hand, we knew it was not a live performance; nobody felt any reluctance about translating out loud or offering an unsolicited explanation of the action for the benefit of those who would listen. But the images had such power that we forgot ourselves. It all seemed so real! The screen would show a thief sneaking up on his sleeping victim, and while we watched we would hold our breath like children. Then suddenly one of my uncles would shout to the sleeper, “Wake up! He’s got a knife!”

It is interesting to look back on those days now, because we have become so accustomed to the illusions of film that we forget just how powerful they are. They hold us “spellbound in darkness,” as Pauline Kael says, in a kind of willing suspension of the world in which we really live. Life – the world of separate existence – does the same. In fact, movies make a good illustration of how the illusion of separateness works.

The other day Christine and I went again to see Gone With the Wind. For an instant at the start the screen was still a screen, filled with dazzling white light. Then suddenly it became a window, losing all dimension of its own, as we lost ourselves in the Deep South of another century. Without counting the extras, we must have watched dozens of characters come and go at various times. For a while the screen would be full of Clark Gable, then of Vivien Leigh; then both would disappear and the window would fill with horses and soldiers and the noise of battle. But when it was over, all the images vanished and the screen was again a screen: flat, white, and unaffected.

My uncle in the village might have wondered. The pictures seemed so real, but nothing had been painted on the screen. The film never touched it. The passion, the warfare, the terrible flames as Dixie burned – none of this had left a trace. And all those characters that looked so different were made by the same light. Imagine, the light that brought Clark Gable to life also shone through Vivien Leigh! Similarly, we look at each other at work or in the supermarket and wonder, “They look so different. They act so different. I would never wear a dress like that, answer my boss that way, buy that brand of macaroni. How can we be the same underneath?” But just as the projector’s light creates separate characters, the Gita says, the light of the Self shining through the field creates the illusion of separate individual selves.

We should not press this too far, for I do not want to give the impression that we are illusions. But our separateness is an illusion, and everything about us from body to personality depends for its reality on the Self shining through us. When a movie stops and the projector is turned off, even the most colorful character vanishes. There was nothing on the screen; it was the film that seemed to stain it with color and characters alike. Similarly, the Katha Upanishad asks, when the Self leaves the body, what remains? Nothing but inert matter. Life, light, intelligence, awareness, all come from the Self.

One theater in San Francisco, I notice, has been showing a highly popular disaster movie for the last several weeks. Now it is showing Richard Attenborough’s splendid film Gandhi. The first, I would say, gave us the lowest possible image of the human being: violent, self-­centered, motivated by fear and sexual desire. Gandhi shows us the highest possible image of the human being, an ordinary little man who transformed himself and uplifted us all by basing his life on love, truth, and nonviolence.

Of course, I was very pleased to see the theater make this change. I know the whole city benefited. Yet it made no difference to the screen which film was projected on it. You can show violence on it and it will not be harmed; you can show a fire and it will not be burned. Similarly, Sri Krishna reminds us, the Self remains untouched through all our thoughts and actions.

When we truly understand this, it can lift from our shoulders the whole weight of past mistakes. We are not our body; we are not our mind. The body is matter; of its very nature, it has made mistakes in the material world. The mind, of its very nature, has made mistakes. These are interactions in the field: the karma of the body, the karma of the mind. But we, the Self, are not stained or diminished by those mistakes. All human beings, no matter what we may have done, have this core of purity and perfection in the depths of personality. Therefore, whatever our drawbacks and past errors, every stain on our personality can be wiped clean, leaving no trace behind.