SRI KRISHNA: 1. Let me tell you more about the wisdom that transcends all knowledge, through which the saints and sages have attained perfection.

2. Those who rely on this wisdom will be united with me. For them there is neither rebirth nor fear of death.

The distinction here is between what the Upanishads call para and apara: intellectual knowledge on the one hand, spiritual wisdom on the other. The purpose of intellectual knowledge is simply to know more, which can be useful. But the supreme purpose of spiritual wisdom is to take us beyond death.

The more we identify with the body, the more terrible death is. I can explain this in two ways. First, when we identify people in physical terms – when we love them, for example, because of certain physical characteristics they may have – we feel we are losing them when our physical awareness begins to dim at the time of death. The anguish of separation can be unbearable. Knowing that we are about to be deprived of those physical personifications, we may go to pieces.

Second, death wrenches your own body away. If you believe you are the body, this is fraught with fear. You cling to your body with all you have, at the very moments when it is failing and full of pain. Physically oriented people suffer dreadfully at death, not only on the conscious level but even after their awareness has been withdrawn into the unconscious in the final phase of dying, simply because of this agonizing inability to let go. Even when the body lies motionless, a sensitive eye can sometimes see this dreadful struggle, sure to be lost, still going on in consciousness.

I mention these aspects of death for one reason only: to inspire you to break through this wrong identification with the body and to build your relationships with other people more and more on the spiritual level. It may take years, but as relationships become more spiritual and less physical, especially between man and woman, you cannot help discovering the unity between you and those you love. After that, there is no parting. It is not possible to understand this on the physical plane, but two people who do not want to be separated under any circumstances can be so completely united that death cannot part them at all.

SRI KRISHNA: 3. My womb is prakriti; in that I place the seed. Thus all created things are born.

4. Everything born, Arjuna, comes from the womb of prakriti, and I am the seed-giving father.

Last night I watched a documentary on the Pacific salmon, done so beautifully that I found myself identifying with these valiant creatures as they made their way through the cycles of their lives. Spawned high in the mountains, they grow to about six inches in the bright, clear, secluded headwaters of a river. But then something prompts them to follow the current down to the sea, a wholly different environment. The water is dark and briny instead of clear. In place of seclusion, they find a realm that teems with other creatures which they have to learn to eat, ignore, or fear – a realm that must seem almost unlimited in its breadth and depth. Waves roil its surface, and below the surface great currents sweep the length of continents. As I watched, I remembered the Gita’s term for life as we know it: samsara-sagara, the sea of birth and death.

Here the salmon spends its days, adapting to its new environment completely. It even changes its appearance, much the way I used to see students do when they got away from home and came to the university at Berkeley. To all appearances it is a saltwater creature forever. But abruptly, for no apparent reason, a kind of alarm goes off inside. It is time, the alarm says, time to return, time to retrace its course.

The rest of the story is thrilling to see. Following that inaudible call, the salmon finds the mouth of a river – often the same river down which it came – and begins to fight its way against the current, back to the quiet waters where it was spawned. There seems nothing natural about this, certainly nothing easy. The little creature has to fight for every foot of the way. Somehow it almost seems to gain energy as it struggles along, so that by the time it reaches the fierce currents of the mountain heights it is leaping like a flame of prana. As I watched, there seemed to be nothing in it but pure energy, no desire except the overwhelming, overriding, exhilarating determination to reach its goal. “That is the battle,” I said to myself. The words of the Gita’s invocation came to my mind: this was rananadi, the river of battle, the river of life.

Then, finally, it was over. Somehow the little creature made it up the last waterfall, over the last rocky plunge of white water, into the quiet of a mountain lake. There it spent its remaining hours in the bright solitude of its birth, spawning the eggs of a new generation.

For some, I was pleased to learn, even this is not the end. Certain species spawn and then return to the sea, only to fight their way upstream again when the time comes, perhaps three or four times more. They come back again and again. Perhaps they remember the headwaters when they reach the sea again, and can assure the others that life has a source and the battle to return to it can be won.

In one hour, that show managed to capture the full lifespan of a Pacific salmon. If it could be spread out over five billion years or so, you would have the story of evolution from the Hindu and Buddhist perspective. Against the vast backdrop of reincarnation the individual creature, called jiva in Sanskrit, emanates from God, ascends the ladder of biological evolution, and finally enters the human context, where it begins the long struggle to return to its divine source.

SRI KRISHNA: 5. It is the three gunas born of prakriti – sattva, rajas, and tamas – that bind the immortal Self to the body.

From its divine source, according to the scriptures, life evolves through the differentiating power of three forces. This theory of the three gunas, as they are called, is one of the most important concepts in the Gita. The gunas are the very fabric of prakriti. All that exists in the realms of matter, energy, and the mind can be described in terms of these three principles, forces, or qualities, which unfortunately have no equivalent names in English. Roughly sattva stands for law, harmony, balance, rajas for energy, and tamas for inertia. In personal terms, sattva can be looked upon as the door into the kingdom of joy and security that is our source, our home. Rajas then is the force we can harness to take us there; unharnessed, however, it takes us everywhere else. And tamas is the obstacle that blocks our way.

Before the universe came into existence, the Hindu scriptures explain, there was undifferentiated consciousness, the indivisible unity called God. In mythology he is represented as Vishnu, ‘he who is everywhere,’ resting on the endless serpent Ananta in the midst of the cosmic sea. As long as consciousness remained unitary, any kind of separateness was impossible. But then, in the language of Genesis, “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The Lord began to meditate on himself. Consciousness began to divide, so to speak, at the behest of the Lord, in accordance with three principles: inertia, force, and law. From these three, matter and energy were born. These are the gunas, the stuff of the phenomenal universe. In Hindu mysticism, strictly speaking, there is no creation; there is emanation. As a spider weaves a web out of herself, the Upanishads say, the Lord weaves the web of the universe out of himself; and the threads are the three gunas.

In human beings, after millions and millions of years of evolution, sattva, rajas, and tamas are found in differing proportions. One person is full of energy; another is the victim of inertia. A third, much rarer, is calm, resourceful, and secure. In each a particular guna predominates, representing different stages of personal growth.

Yet at the same time, all three gunas are present in each of us. Their interplay is the dynamics of personality. The same person will have times when he is bursting with energy – particularly when he has to do something he likes – and times when inertia descends and paralyzes his will, usually when he is faced with something he does not like. The person is the same; he is simply experiencing the play of the gunas, though without his knowledge or control.

Sometimes this interplay is a function of time and energy. In the morning you may be full of life and vitality, able to get all kinds of things done “first things first.” But by afternoon, particularly after lunch, you may drag around accomplishing nothing. A detached observer might almost say these are two different individuals, so differently does the personality respond. And there is a third individual in us at rarer moments too. In everyone, simply by virtue of our being human, sattva is present also: kindness, security, equability, self-restraint. These qualities may be latent, but their mere possibility means that to some extent we have evolved. We have used the force called rajas to overcome the obstacle called tamas, and then brought the energy of rajas under selfless control.

The concept of the gunas provides the most penetrating analysis of personality differences that I have found anywhere. But it does much more: it also tells us how our character can be changed. Its descriptions are not passive. The Gita tells us what the forces of personality are, so that we can reshape ourselves after a higher ideal.

None of us, in other words, is cast in a rigid mold that limits our capacity to grow. We can change ourselves completely if we really want to. But we must have a strong enough desire to change the direction of our lives, to swim against the current of our conditioning. First we have to transform tamas into rajas – apathy into energetic, enthusiastic effort. This is the purpose of rajas: we have passions like anger, fear, and greed so that we can harness them all into the immense drive that is required to overcome the inertia of physical living. This is the power that will take us to the goal.

But that is far from enough. We then have to transform rajas into sattva, channel all that passionate energy into selfless action. And finally, if we want to cut ourselves free from all conditioning, we have to go beyond the gunas completely.

All three gunas evolve from the same source: prana. Just as potential energy can be transformed into kinetic energy and harnessed for power, tamas can be changed into rajas and rajas into sattva. Tamas is frozen power. It has been kept in the refrigerator so long that it has become a block of ice. It just sits there, hoping someone will come along and pour ginger ale over its head. But a block of ice can be melted, and tamas melted is rajas, a powerful, flowing river. It can move things, overcome obstacles, get from one place to another. But it can also flood and rage, causing great destruction. And sattva is steam, harnessed to drive engines and turbines. The simile is apt. The energy of sattva and rajas is present in tamas, only it is locked up, potential. The more tamas is heated, the more power is released.

As tamas melts, a tremendous stream of energy pours into our lives. This gives a precise test of how meditation is going: if you find yourself postponing urgent projects, it means your meditation can be improved. When you are meditating it is extremely important to be active, both physically and intellectually, in ways that benefit family and society. Hard, active work harnesses the energy released when tamas is transformed into rajas.

Selfless action, says Teresa of Ávila, “is the end and aim of prayer. Works are the best proof that the favors we receive have come from God.” Another simple, practical test: how well are we working – hard, with concentration, selflessly, for the welfare of all? Hard work by itself is not enough. That is rajas, whose signal danger lies in slowly inveigling us to do jobs just because we like them, even when they are neither necessary nor beneficial. I see a lot of rajas running amuck today, doing the most useless, futile, often harmful things on the face of the earth.

Yet restlessness is not at all a bad quality. Compared with stick-in-the-mudness, which is another name for tamas, it is a definite improvement. Restlessness to me is a clear signal: “Learn to meditate. You are ready to turn inwards.” People who feel restless usually misunderstand the signal and start running from state to state, country to country, job to job, deal to deal. This is just wasting the power that is rising. When you feel consumed by restlessness, you want to ship out on a tramp steamer, drive your van around the world, plunge into pleasure, turn the financial world upside down, perform all kinds of fantastic feats which appear adventurous to you but benefit nobody except your own ego. That is the time to take to meditation. When the energy of these activities is collected and harnessed in sattva, we are at the door to the kingdom of heaven within.

SRI KRISHNA: 6. Sattva – pure, luminous, and free from sorrow – binds us to happiness and wisdom.

Sattva, rajas, and tamas can be looked on as three stages in individual evolution. Those who are easily overcome by inertia, who procrastinate, who feel they have very little energy and cannot bring themselves to do anything worthwhile in life, whose actions say, “I don’t care; what does it matter?” – these are people in whom tamas is predominant. Those who have plenty of energy for compulsive activities, who are always “on the go” but with no particular direction, who have tempestuous passions but not the will to govern them, are people in whom rajas is predominant. And those who give their time and energy freely to help others, who are “slow to wrath” and quick to forgive, have attained sattva. They have released the energy latent in every human being and learned to harness it for the welfare of all.

Sattva and tamas may both appear quiet, even easygoing. But there is a world of difference between the two. Tamas is torpid; a really tamasic person can scarcely get up from his chair except to go to bed. The sattvic person is as full of energy as a Ferrari, but all his energy is conserved. He is not interested in being one of the ten most rajasic persons of the year; he knows when and how to spend his energy.

“So do I,” Tamas objects. “When I think something needs to be done, I do it. But usually,” he adds candidly, “it doesn’t need to be done. Wait and see; that’s my motto. Things usually work out by themselves if you leave them alone.”

Sattva does not get upset easily, and the result is a tremendous accumulation of energy. He has a normal prana income and a modest amount in his checking account, but behind all that is an immense amount in liquid, leveraged investments. In an emergency, he can move thousands into checking at a moment’s notice. Rajas, by comparison, keeps everything in checking. He has a big handful of credit cards which he uses freely; he enjoys living “close to the wire.” His assets are large, but so are his expenditures. As he moves into the second half of life, he may find he is spending more than he has, paying more and more frequent charges for overdrafts. And Tamas just loses money. When the normal bills of life arrive, he puts them on his desk. He does mean to get to them, but each day there is too much else to think about; they pile up; they get lost. It isn’t only outward activity that spends prana; dwelling on yourself is a terribly extravagant expenditure. Tamas goes about from day to day worrying about himself, brooding on his problems and desires, and while he does so, the bills pile up. “Fantasizing about vacation, 20 pranadollars. Self-pity, 75. Rehashing what to say to boss, 100. Total June resentments, 477.95.” No wonder he gets tired!

Our local utilities company has put up signs by the side of the road, reminding us how to save energy: “Don’t do this. Turn off that.” We can conserve prana immensely through an equally simple process: by turning off attention from ourselves and switching it to the needs of others. Just turning attention away from ourselves – say, by repeating the mantram when you start to dwell on some personal problem – saves a good deal of expense. But switching attention to others actually builds up savings. That is the source of Sattva’s fortune. St. Francis’s line, “It is in giving that we receive,” is literally true. If you give ten pranadollars to your partner, the Lord adds twenty to your account in savings. You can test it and see. You can also test the corollary: “It is in grabbing that we debilitate ourselves.” Not only do we not get; we lose what little we have.

We can also compare in terms of the will. Tamas simply doesn’t have any. It is a simple, accurate definition. He can’t attend to the job at hand because he doesn’t have the will. You can tell him over and over again the consequences of procrastination; he won’t hear. Tamas keeps his ears open, but his mind is closed with the wax of inertia.

Rajas, of course, has much more drive, more passion. But his will is still rather small – unless, of course, it is compulsively harnessed by a compelling desire. This combination of strong desire and weak will gets Rajas into a lot of trouble. The one thing I can say in favor of Tamas is that he is immune to temptation, for the simple reason that there is no energy to be tempted with. If you take the world’s finest chocolate cake and hold it in front of a pillar, the pillar will not feel tempted in the slightest. It is the same with Tamas. He loves to overeat, but he can’t be tempted to exert himself even for the sake of self-indulgence. Tamasic people can pass themselves off as statues. Set them in some situation and come back a couple of years later; they will still be standing in the same old place, surveying the scene with blank hauteur. Similarly, tamasic people cannot get angry. It is not that they are forgiving; their desires are so feeble that if you thwart them, they shrug it off. What does it matter? And they cannot get greedy – not because they are detached, but because they have no capacity to feel or desire. They cannot love; they can’t even have a passing fancy. Imagine how terrible it would be not even to have a passing fancy! If Tamas sees an ad for a three-week cruise to the Bahamas or a lavishly appointed new Mercedes, he can’t even say, “Wouldn’t I like to have that!” All he can respond with is, “Who cares?”

There is no sensitiveness in tamas, no awareness. Swami Vivekananda used to say that it is much better to be greedy than not to be capable of greed, better to feel angry than not to be able to feel angry, better to live a little than to sit there dead. This remark can help all of us in our moments of tamas. It is much better to move than to sit; even if you go in the wrong direction, at least you are going somewhere. When you’re moving, you can always change direction.

Unlike those who are tamasic, rajasic people get angry easily; they don’t have to take lessons. They find it natural to feel resentful, to crave things, to insist on their own way. It is no challenge for them to feel sustained hostility; they have a good memory, very well maintained. You may say, “What a negative state!” True, but at least rajas has possibilities. When you send a Christmas card to a resentful person, you can always write, “To a potentially ideal companion.” Power is present; therefore, so is the capacity to change.

Tamas, by comparison, is a damp squib. Swami Vivekananda compares tamas with a sodden log: you can light match after match and never get a fire. All you do is waste the matches. Rajas is like Georgia fatwood; just show him the matchbox and he blazes. His volatility may be dangerous, but at least Rajas is active; he has power.

Rajas likes to be active. In fact, he can’t be anything else. If he has to wait for a bus, he doesn’t know what to do, so he lights a cigarette or practices cracking his knuckles. He can’t simply sit and watch a movie; he has to keep his hands and mouth busy with a carton of popcorn and a soft drink. If the action is too slow, he gets up and walks out. When he’s driving he plays the radio to relieve his restlessness, beating time with his fingers on the steering wheel and switching from station to station. At a stop light he pulls out the newspaper or dictates a letter. And at night, of course, his mind keeps on racing. His work and problems nag him into tossing and turning, follow him into his sleep. If he tries to count sheep, they baa derisively or turn into bulls and bears.

Tamas, on the other hand, would rather walk than run. Jogging around the block is his idea of torture. If you warn him about fatty arteries, he’ll say, “I’ll take my chances.” The heart attack hasn’t come yet, so he can’t imagine it. Why exert any effort for something you can’t imagine? Tamas would rather sit than walk, and the sticker on his car admits, “I’d rather be lying down.” Unlike Rajas, he doesn’t have any trouble sleeping. Unconsciousness is his specialty. But his mind keeps churning all the same. He may not do anything physically, but Tamas never really rests. In the dark recesses of his mind – which means, in most of it – the Midnight Rocky Horror Show is going around the clock.

Only Sattva knows how to rest. He works hard when work is to be done, but his mind is free from turmoil. It doesn’t get worn down. And when the time comes to relax – to go to a movie with his family, to play tennis, to linger after dinner for good conversation with friends – he doesn’t stuff unfinished business into a corner of his mind so he can peek at it when somebody else is talking. He leaves his work at the office, physically and mentally too. Wherever he goes he is all there, one hundred percent. He falls asleep easily, and his sleep ­rejuvenates. During the day he may get as much done as two or three of the rest of us. His secret is detachment: he doesn’t get personally entangled in his work. He does his best, then doesn’t worry; he leaves the results to the Lord.

I like to illustrate this with the example of a good actor. A few years ago I went to see Sir Michael Redgrave and others read some of my favorite pieces from English literature. They took first a scene from Pickwick Papers – that curious episode where Mr. Tupman succumbs to romance – and for a while, just for that scene, Sir Michael and his supporting actress actually became Tupman and Miss Wardle. Then they did a scene from Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and everything changed. They spoke so differently, behaved so differently, that I thought they were different people altogether. For a poem of John Donne’s they changed roles again; then again for Shakespeare, again for Shaw. Yet through all those roles, it was the same Sir Michael Redgrave. We never forgot that; therein lay half the artistry. More important, Sir Michael never forgot it either.

Sattva is like that. He knows who he is, so he doesn’t confuse himself with the roles he plays. If he is a doctor, when he goes to his clinic in the morning he becomes a doctor – puts on a white coat and an expression of infallibility. This is part of his profession; it inspires confidence in his patients. But at the same time, he never forgets that this is Mr. Sattva playing the role of doctor. When he goes home, he leaves his infallibility at the clinic with his lab coat; it is not so welcome elsewhere. At home he has other roles: loving partner to his wife, loving father to his children.

Dr. Rajas forgets. He knows the textbooks backward and forward, but he is so caught up in himself that he gets emotionally entangled with his patients and their problems. When he goes home he is still the doctor, worrying about whether he will be able to do anything about Susie Smith’s depressions and save Sam Bass from alcoholism. He scarcely sees his children or his wife. Interestingly enough, when he goes back to the clinic, the same preoccupation is going to keep him from giving his full attention to the next day’s patients. He will still be carrying the burden of the past as if it were all his own. It doesn’t help Susie Smith, and it doesn’t help anybody else either.

This lack of detachment is the main source of professional burnout. Recently I read a thick book on this subject, full of charts and case histories. I don’t think it occurred to the author that a good professional need never burn out if he or she can learn to be detached.

It is the same for a teacher. Here I can speak from personal experience. The college professor is not really a professor; he is just a nice fellow, handy at home, normal, regular. But when he steps onto the campus, a pall of profundity descends on him. He goes into the library stacks and brings out the biggest books he can find. When he lectures, with his notes and diagrams and slides and prepared jokes, he speaks with an air of learned authority. But after he leaves campus, when he goes to look over the drugstore paperback collection, he is no longer the professor. He is Mr. Middle America, looking for something new in science fiction or the latest advice on inflationary investments.

Sattva plays each role with detachment. When she is a wife, she plays that role perfectly. With her children, she plays the perfect mother. At work she is the perfect doctor, teacher, accountant, programmer, clerk. After a lot of practice this becomes natural and spontaneous, as it must have been for Sir Michael Redgrave. You never forget you are really the Self, with many parts to play in life which require your best effort if those around you are to benefit.

Each guna has its characteristic problems. Tamas is full of fear. He doesn’t necessarily run from his own shadow; he may never think of himself as fearful. But fear comes in countless disguises. Tamas worries, though it seldom leads to action. He is anxious about the economy and the latest strain of flu. He wonders what people think of him, whether they like him, whether they will respond the way he expects. Often too he responds only to fear, which is not the most elevating kind of motivation.

Rajas, on the other hand, has two ways of responding: anger and greed. He cannot choose, but at least there is some variety. Rajas has possibilities; he can learn to change.

And Rajas has some will: not much, it is true, but at least he has something to work on. The problems arise because his desires are compulsive. In rajas, will and desire are like a little boy with his daddy. Desire strides along, and little Will can’t keep up. But Daddy Desire doesn’t wait; he’s too impatient. “Got to learn to keep up,” he says. “Step along!” Usually Will does not step along. He lags farther and farther behind, and wherever the will lags behind desire, there is trouble. You become a victim of your desires. You have no freedom of choice; you are driven. You may even become obsessed. When you can’t stop thinking about something, some thing or person you want, when you can’t switch your mind off it or drop that desire at will, the will is lagging so far behind that it is helpless.

When a desire is that strong, it can split your consciousness until the desire is satisfied. On the job, over dinner, at the movies, behind the wheel, in your sleep, whatever else you may be trying to think about, some part of your mind will be on that desire. You can’t concentrate, can’t do a good job at work, can’t keep your attention on those you love – all because the will is weak.

Fortunately, meditation can give the will walking lessons. I don’t know how you go about this here, but in India mothers often use a simple kind of three-wheel walker when a child is ready to learn. The child holds on to the handles; when the device rolls forward a little, he takes a few faltering steps to keep his balance. He totters over to his mother in this way and gets an orange. Then one day the walker mysteriously disappears. “Never mind,” his mother says. “Step over here and get your orange anyway.” The child tries, falters, takes a step or two, then a third. “You’re doing very well,” she encourages. “Try another step!” When he finally reaches the orange, he falls over his mother in relief. But he has walked. Soon he will be running around and playing soccer; she won’t be able to keep him home.

That is exactly how we teach the will too. We start with food – not eating between meals, turning down foods that are not good for the body, eating less sugar and fat and more fresh vegetables. This is not only good nutrition; you are teaching the will to walk.

You don’t train the senses just for the sake of training the senses. The point is to get at the will, which is difficult to reach in any other way. I see ads in the magazines promising, “Make it a pleasure to quit smoking! Take our ten-day Caribbean cruise. When you come back, you’ll think ‘Lucky Strike’ has something to do with bowling.” Promises like these are fairy tales by which we shouldn’t be fooled. Similarly, you don’t strengthen the will just to get what you want or have your way. The purpose of a strong will is to free you from the compulsions of rajas, so that your passions can be harnessed for the welfare of all.

By training the senses, Rajas develops a stronger and stronger will. Gradually he is turning into Sattva, who has a will like Mr. America. The sattvic will has to spend a lot on clothing; he has so much muscle that he would burst the seams of an ordinary sports jacket. But he doesn’t have much work to do. If a desire comes that Sattva doesn’t approve of, the will just flexes his biceps; desire gulps and disappears. The only desire that can challenge the sattvic will is sex. Then the will meets a foeman worthy of his steel, and the real battle of sadhana begins. It goes on for a long, long time.

There is no need to feel embarrassed or despondent about this. Sex is the strongest desire we have, the highest physical satisfaction life offers. That is precisely why it contains such a tremendous amount of power. Strong sexual desires means a lot of gas in your tank. You don’t want to throw the tank away; the choice we all face is simply, Shall I be victim of this desire or master? When sex is mastered, it leads to tremendous power and a magnetic personality. The power in that desire becomes kundalini, the energy we draw on to elevate our consciousness and go forward on the path of evolution. So much power is caught up in sexual desire that once it comes under control, it can lead even an ordinary person like you or me to great heights of spiritual wisdom and selfless action.

In sattva the will becomes so tremendous that even sex comes under its governance. Then, the Gita says, the heart becomes pure. As Jesus says, none but the pure in heart shall see God. It is to purify the heart of all selfish passions that we make the will immeasurably strong.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. Rajas is passion, breeding selfish desire and attachment. These bind the Self to compulsive action.

Rajas binds us, ties us up, throws us into prison. Why? Because everything in this state is tainted with selfish attachment – “I, me, mine.” This is Rajas’s fatal flaw. He does represent a higher state than tamas; he has at least some sensitiveness with all that passion and energy. But everything is selfishly directed. “Sure, I’m sensitive,” Rajas says. “I’m a very sensitive guy – sensitive to Number One. I’m really aware of what I want.” Rajas knows what he wants, and he is going to get it come what may. If he hurts somebody in the process, it doesn’t matter. If it means spoiling the landscape, “Well, we have to put up with it,” say Rajas. “That’s the price of progress.” If it fuels an arms race, “Well, that’s the risk we have to take.”

Take smog. The curious thing to me about the smog issue is that antismog devices and so on are just tinkering with the problem. The cause of smog is not in the materials or the furnace or the engine; it is within you and me. In biology the human being is characterized as Homo sapiens, “the thinking member of the family.” This is an unwarranted tribute. I think it was Bergson who said that a better name for the species would be Homo faber, “he who makes things.” “I have to make things,” Rajas says. “What else would I do with myself? I’m going to make products all over the place, as many as I can. Then I’m going to get everybody to want them, even if they don’t know what to do with them.” If something can be made, we have to make it – highways, cities, cars, games, toothbrushes, airplanes, bombs.

There is some satisfaction in making things; I do not deny it. But that very satisfaction is what binds us. While Rajas is making something, he gets caught in it. He climbs inside his product or project and seals himself in, and afterwards he is as deaf and blind as Tamas to the cries for help from the community outside.

Walk down Main Street, or through the malls of any shopping center. Look in the windows of the stores. How many of the things you see are necessary? How many are truly beneficial? If we rule out everything that is neither, things that were made because Homo faber fever has got us, the whole shopping center could probably be reduced to a single store.

As consumers, you and I have a close connection with this phenomenon. It is we who buy. When we go on acquiring new cars, new clothes, new appliances, when they are not really necessary, we are contributing to pollution. I am not pleading for poverty, merely for simplicity. The simple life is beautiful, artistic. A life that is cluttered with things we do not need, even if they are objects of art, is a life cluttered with attachments.

When my wife and I were living in Oakland, I remember looking out the window one morning to see a huge moving van pulling in down the block. “They’re coming all the way from New Jersey!” our neighbors told me. Sure enough, World Movers announced on the side of the van that they would take you anywhere. I watched with great interest to see what kind of furniture and objets d’art were worth the cost and care of being transported three thousand miles.

The doors opened, and out came a stream of stuff you could have picked up at Goodwill – armchairs, bedsteads, lamps, chaise longues, gilt-framed paintings of seascapes and sunsets, and boxes on boxes of old National Geographics, stamp and button collections, figurines, coat hangers, and recipe cards. They could have left it all in Camden, picked up what they needed in Oakland, and never known the difference. But human beings get attached, and once attached we are bound. We carry everything around with us, without noticing the burden of our attachments to things and to the past.

Please don’t rush out at this point, call Goodwill Industries, and say, “I’ve got a houseful. Come and take it all.” The point is not to get attached to things. Even if you have the world’s finest collection of Ming vases or Moghul miniatures, which are undeniably beautiful, please do not get attached to them. If you do, you cannot really even appreciate them.

We can get selfishly attached to people too. I always stress the word selfish here, because the words attachment and detachment are so easily misunderstood. Unselfish attachment is pure love. You have no thought of your own pleasure or gain; your only interest is the other person’s welfare. But selfish attachment prevents love. Unselfish attachment deepens a relationship; selfish attachment disrupts it. As with things, once you get selfishly attached you are no longer free. You cannot see the other person’s needs – in fact, you cannot see your own real needs either. To love completely, every taint of wanting to possess other people or to affix that stamp “Mine, Do Not Touch” has to go.

All of us have a certain desire to grab and to be grabbed; this is the human condition. So while we are young, the Lord gives us a margin for experimentation in order to learn that grabbing fulfills no one. At first everything seems perfect – that is one of the marks of selfish attachment. But then the sky begins to change. A little cloud “no larger than a man’s hand” appears – some slight difference in how the toast should be served, or whether it should be whole wheat toast or rye. The two of you agree to disagree. But the cloud spreads to the coffee. Rajas wants dark roast, full of caffeine, to get him off to an unnecessarily fast start on an enterprising day. Mrs. Rajas wants decaf; she is speeded up already. The cloud no bigger than a man’s hand is now the size of a man’s head.

Then Mr. Rajas comes home for lunch. Mrs. Rajas embraces him warmly. “I’ve been waiting fifteen minutes for you, dear.”

“Come on,” says Rajas. “It’s only five by my watch. Besides, do you remember how long I had to wait for you last month at the Dairy Queen?”

“Don’t bring up the past, dear. Try to live in the present. Besides, that wasn’t the Dairy Queen. You’re thinking of Foster’s Freeze.”

Little by little. This is what happens in selfish attachment; it turns against itself. After a while comes one of the most painful ironies of what we call love today: the very thing that attracted you to the other person now becomes irritating. Her nose, as perfect as Cleopatra’s, promised such delight; after a while, when the delight doesn’t come regularly, you feel chafed just to look at it. He had the voice of your dreams; when those dreams don’t materialize, the same voice starts to rasp at your nerves. This is what relationships are like in rajas, particularly today. But they do not have to deteriorate like this; and if they have deteriorated, they can be rebuilt by transforming rajas into sattva.

I was reading the other day about lichens, which shows how far afield my reading goes. I am always looking for ways to illustrate the changeless laws of life, and even lichens provide grist for my mill. My mind occasionally complains about this. “You’re a man of letters,” it tells me. “Why don’t you dip into a good play once in a while, instead of reading about borderline organisms?” But I read to get material, and these lichens provided a very interesting illustration. They can thrive in environments where no other plant can, and scientists have always wondered why and how. The answer, it seems, is that a lichen is actually two organisms, an alga and a fungus, each supporting the other. Their metabolisms are different, their views are different, their temperaments are different. But one provides food and the other provides water and support, so that together they become a unity which can face great environmental stress and thrive.

This is what man and woman can do. They are made to complete each other, not only in marriage but in every relationship. If they support each other they can forge an unbreakable unity that no outside stress can tear asunder. In this atmosphere romance flourishes.

Where there is competition, on the other hand, there is neither romance nor love. Not even synthetic romance can subsist in that soil. Where competition rages, only death can flourish. One of the great tragedies of our modern life is the constant attempt, sometimes in the very name of romance, to play man and woman against each other in every field of life. I see it daily in books, in films, on television, on campuses, in homes; I hear it in popular songs. All of us can bend our will to prevent this tragedy by emphasizing the unity between man and woman in everything we do.

SRI KRISHNA: 8. Tamas, born of ignorance, deludes all creatures through heedlessness, indolence, and sleep.

Up until now Sri Krishna has only given what in India we call trailers about tamas – what you call previews. “Next verse, coming to this theater, one of the most interesting characters in the cosmos! With all his cohorts – heedlessness, indolence, vacillation, disloyalty, and stupor.” A most motley crew. Everyone finds it entertaining to see a motley crew, so we may find Tamas dominating this volume the way Satan dominates Paradise Lost.

In this verse Sri Krishna lists some telltale signs of tamas. First is pramada, ‘lack of earnestness.’ This is a fatal weakness. People who are not earnest do not go very far. They get diverted; their attention is drawn away by a few playthings of life. To those who are earnest, Patanjali says, success has to come. They have, keep, and continually deepen the capacity to follow one supreme goal without ever giving up or wandering. Spiritual teachers in India often wait a few years before accepting a student completely, watching closely to be sure he or she is capable of sustained effort. To do otherwise would not be a wise use of a teacher’s time and energy, for this is the most precious gift any human being can give or receive.

Second is alasya, for which the nearest English equivalent I know is ‘indolence.’ Alasya means partly negative euphoria, partly positive inertia. You bask in your laziness. Even when you are simply walking along, you show you are not alert; your eyes are open, but nobody is home. Half your mind is thinking about what took place yesterday; the other half is on tomorrow. Naturally your body slows down. Your steps slow, your head droops; if you are sitting, you slump – which, incidentally, is hard not only on the will but on the spine, particularly for a meditator.

Last, Sri Krishna says, tamas ties us to nidra, ‘sleep.’ This is not legitimate sleep, “that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.” It is a torpor in which we try to take refuge. When a problem comes knocking on the door, you go looking for your blanket. This is one of the commonest responses to problems. Suddenly you can scarcely keep your eyes open. You may be watching a movie, in a meeting, at the dinner table; it does not matter. Something reminds you of a problem left unsolved, a task left undone. You feel drowsy, you yawn, your attention wanders, and the next thing you know you are asleep.

This happens often in the classroom, of course. Hasn’t someone defined a professor as a person who talks in other people’s sleep? One fellow in my freshman class in India used to sit right in the front row, and while I was pouring out the wealth of my love of life and literature, his eyes would glaze over and slowly roll upward until nothing showed but unnerving white orbs. Then his chin would hit his chest. I once took the liberty of asking him to tell me exactly what he saw at a time like that. His answers were worthy of a Gothic novel. “For a while you look like a ghost,” he said. “Then you become a kind of vapor. After that, you vanish into thin air.”

When you have burdensome emotional problems, it is not really sleep that comes at times like this. Clouds of the unconscious rise and overpower you. Even if you try to wake yourself up, you cannot. It can happen at work, or in the company of particular people, or behind the steering wheel; it can happen anywhere. At such times, even if you try your level best to break out of that bout of unconsciousness, you will not be able to. No amount of clenching your fists and sticking out your jaw is going to help. These are all physical attempts, and what is happening is not physical at all. That is where you need the mantram. You fight it out by clinging to the holy name, which St. Bernard called “the energizing Word.”

Tamas’s motto is “I Don’t Care.” He wears it on his coat of arms, beneath a rusty helmet and two turtles dormant. “I don’t care what happens to other people,” he says. “What does it matter? I don’t even care what happens to me.” Quite a lot of people today are victims of this what-does-it-matter attitude. The Gita would say these are people who are hardly alive. They might as well be made of stone. It is the nature of a stone to say, “I’m not going to move. Even if a fire comes, I’m just going to sit here. Let it burn all around me, even if it burns me up.” In the same way, insensitivity is characteristic of tamas. I see it everywhere today. How many seem unaware of the dangers that confront us all! War, violence, hunger here as well as abroad, the breakdown of the family, a poisonous environment – insensitivity to others on a massive, staggering scale. These are fires that threaten to consume us all. It does not require much imagination to see the flames on the horizon; every newspaper brings reports.

Psychologists and sociologists say there is no motivation to do anything about these problems. That is another characteristic of Tamas; he just cannot get motivation. About the only thing he responds to is fear. Similarly, to be stuck in a groove is part of tamas. Many people like the safety of a groove, where nothing can happen to them. They don’t have to do anything; they can just coast along, never seeing the world. Grooves, I would point out, do not usually touch. A man and woman may live in the same house, speak to each other at mealtimes morning and evening, raise children together, and never see each other. He is in his groove; she is in her own.

Change, therefore, is a particular fear of tamas. When we have to face a challenge or our life undergoes some alteration, many of us respond with tamas. Yet change is the texture of life. The Buddha reminds us that everything is change; nothing ever stays the same. We should be able to adapt effortlessly, yet still keep our center within ourselves. But Tamas, when change or challenge comes, simply says, “I can’t. I can’t change. I’m rigid; I can’t bend or yield. I can only break.”

The other day a friend’s little boy showed me a Japanese doll weighted in a fascinating way. Push it and it yields without resistance; yet the minute you take your hand away, the doll jumps up again. That is how we should be. When circumstances overpower us, we may have to yield gracefully. But as soon as the burden of circumstance is off our backs, we should spring up again with even greater resilience.

Tamas, by contrast, lies down and stays down. Often you don’t even have to push him; lying down is a state he finds natural and comfortable. “I give up” comes easily to his lips.

I used to see such people sometimes in my meditation classes. The first day they are full of enthusiasm. “I’m all set,” they tell me. “I’ve got a new pillow to sit on and a special meditation robe. I know this is right for me. Everything feels so right.” The next morning they sit down, close their eyes, and the monkey that is the mind goes berserk.

Isn’t it an English author who says that the first time he sat down for meditation, a curtain went up on the theater of his mind? Books he had read poured into his consciousness. He started planning a novel with complicated subplots; the characters pushed and shoved themselves into his mind in a riot, all trying to capture his interest at once. Suddenly he realized his half hour of meditation must have been over long ago. He opened his eyes and looked at his watch: five minutes had gone by.

That is the pandemonium that erupts when we try to train the mind, and it is too much for Tamas. He takes his meditation pillow to the flea market. “Sell this on consignment,” he tells the girl at the first booth, “and take anything you can get for it. I’ve had it; I’m giving up.”

Tamas literally means darkness. Tamas can’t see. He gropes in darkness throughout his life, stumbles around, bumps into things, falls down. He doesn’t see war brewing, doesn’t notice that he can’t breathe the air, isn’t aware when violence dominates his streets; his eyes are closed. The word “sleep” in this verse is especially interesting. Tamas may be able to walk about or get himself into a restaurant, but he is not really awake. He is walking in his sleep, which is a fascinating phenomenon. I remember reading about a whole family addicted to this nocturnal habit. They would get up in the middle of the night, go to the kitchen, and have a midnight snack together. Then the next morning everybody would say, “Who did all this?” It’s not so different from what you and I do. Compared to the awareness we are capable of, most of us go through life having midnight snacks in our sleep.

Some years ago, when we took our nieces to the ice show, I saw a robot skating on the ice. A girl dressed in gauze and glitter was skating around beside him with some kind of electronic monitor in her hand, calling out commands as if to a little friend. “Turn, Robbie!” Robbie did a clumsy pirouette. “Run!” Robbie ran. “Open your mouth!” Robbie cranked open his jaws. This is what happens in tamas. The ego sits inside with a transistorized walkie-talkie through which he issues orders, and we obey. This is not living, the Buddha says, it’s sleeping: being pushed and pulled about by selfish cravings which do no good to anybody, even us.

Sluggishness is one of the main characteristics of tamas. We find it difficult to think, to feel, to move, to get exercise, to get up from the TV to change the channel; naturally we find it difficult to resist evil and contribute something of value to the world. Tamasic people often put on weight easily. Their minds are heavy, so the body says, “Let me catch up!”

To strike a lighter note – which I always try to do with tamas, because its implications are so grim – I remember a piece of graffiti on a wall in Berkeley that makes a good epitaph for Tamas: “All I need is beer and weed.” I wanted to add, “To go to seed.” That is the song Tamas sings.

To release yourself from tamas, the first step is physical. You will be feeling listless, oppressed, weighted down by inertia; you won’t want to do anything at all. You may feel persecuted: “Why shouldn’t I be allowed to sit around if I feel like it?” You may feel you are not in the best condition physically, with aches and pains that nobody understands except yourself. But the worst thing you can do in tamas is rest. Rest is what you have been getting all along; what is required is the elimination of rest. Superficial physical symptoms may come by way of protest: a dull, throbbing headache, nerves on edge, no circulation in your legs, a head as heavy as your heart. Lying down and doing nothing only makes these conditions worse. Get up and go for a walk – and walk fast, repeating the mantram, even if you don’t feel equal to it. Try to walk a little faster than you can. After ten minutes or so you will find yourself breaking through that physical lethargy. Don’t stop then! Keep walking.

Or say you have a report to turn in – at your office, on your campus, wherever. And tamas strikes. You have managed to sharpen some pencils and bring them to the desk. You stack some supporting documents on the corner. But then all you can do is sit and stare. A fresh, blank pad of yellow paper stares up at you, waiting for the first words of inspiration. It has been waiting a long time. But the report is due tomorrow, and finally something has to be done.

You feel sure you haven’t mastered the subject. Perhaps you are one of those people who will not write anything until they know all the facts that have been written about that subject in the world. Here “perfectionist” just means “procrastinator.” There is nothing wrong with striving for perfection, but if you wait for perfection to come before you act, you are going to wait a long, long time.

Here I used to tell my students something I learned from personal experience: start writing with whatever knowledge you have. After all, you are not expected to make an original contribution. And do not worry about style. I know people who will not put a word onto paper, even if no one will see it except themselves, unless it is exactly the right word in exactly the right place. Sometimes you can sit for a couple of hours this way without writing a sentence. Style can wait; the important thing is to get started and keep moving. You can always polish and rewrite later.

That is the first step: physical activity. You just get the pencil moving; what you write doesn’t matter. Gradually tamas will begin to melt, as rajas begins to get its teeth into the job. An idea creeps in, then another. They seem to contradict each other, but you write them down. And then you see a possible connection. You test it; you test again. After a while you realize that an hour has gone by. When somebody comes by to remind you of your coffee break, you say, “I’ll take it later. Let me get this down first, while it’s fresh.”

By starting with physical measures – simply getting the pencil to move across the paper – you have begun to get tamas to melt, prana to flow. Now you can work directly on your concentration. Try to give your attention completely to what you are doing. Tamas scatters attention everywhere, anywhere but on the job at hand. When it strikes, your mind will wander all over the map. This lack of attention is what makes a job dull – which, of course, means that it holds your attention even less. The worst thing to do in such circumstances is to drop that job; this only adds to the problem. Whenever you find a job uninteresting, the answer is to give it more attention. If you find your mind wandering, concentrate more. Bring your mind back just as you do in meditation; that is where this skill is learned. At first it will seem painful, but after a while it becomes natural and rewarding.

Meditation enables us to direct attention at will. I carry a powerful little penlight in my shirt pocket; in the evening I can take it out, push the button, and train the light where I like. That is how the will should work: it should be “ever ready.” Most of us have a will that is never ready, for the simple reason that we leave it on in our pocket where it can’t do any good. When we take it out and try to flash it on something, nothing happens.

When the will has been trained, we can give full attention to the job at hand. This is genius. Those who have trained their will from top to bottom can give their complete attention to any problem. They don’t ask “Do I like this?” or “What’s in it for me?” If it helps to solve a problem like pollution or violence, they can absorb themselves in it so completely that they are no longer aware of their private personality. In this kind of work, tension and frustration disappear.

SRI KRISHNA: 9. Sattva binds us to happiness; rajas binds us to action. Tamas, distorting our understanding, binds us to delusion.

Most of our responses are compulsive. They are not really responses; they are reactions. If money comes near, most of us immediately feel attracted, even without our knowledge. Pleasure is an even more universal magnet. It draws everybody, rich and poor alike. We may say, “I can take it or let it alone.” But the magnet would have a different view.

When we start meditating, if pleasure starts to draw us and we feel ourselves slipping closer without meaning to, we find we can draw back. The magnet naturally feels annoyed. “This isn’t cricket,” Pleasure says. “You have to respond to me. That’s what life’s all about, isn’t it? Look around. Do you see anybody else running away? Everybody likes me; I’m everybody’s friend.” But someone like St. Francis would reply, “I’m not subject to the law of attraction and repulsion any longer. I go where I choose, not where you draw me.”

It takes a long, long time in meditation to discover that what we call free decisions, made calmly and objectively without any trace of outside influence, are actually reactions that could not have turned out any other way. They are not decisions; they are deep desires. We get these independent decisions from a slot, like stamps from a stamp machine; we have no say in them at all. That is why one word for Self-realization in Hinduism is moksha, liberation, from the root muc, ‘to release’: meditation frees us from compulsions.

The tamasic person, overcome with inertia, wakes up and thinks, “I don’t feel so good. I have decided to spend the day in bed.” Old Tamas splits his sides laughing. “I just push this guy back with one finger,” he says, “and he gives up. He might as well be tied to his bed with ropes.” If you tell that person he has no freedom, he won’t believe you. “What do you mean? Look, I can lift my arm. I can move my legs. I can roll over. Sure, I’m free.”

We ask, “Then why don’t you get up?”

“I could get up if I wanted to. I’ve decided to stay in bed.”

Another person comes to work and announces, “I’ve decided to go to Las Vegas this weekend!” It is Rajas’s turn to laugh. “This lady is so restless I can make her go anywhere,” he says. “If there were a casino on the North Pole where she thought she could break the bank, she would go there.” These are compulsive forces. They bind us to action because they bind us to a particular outlook, or shraddha in Sanskrit: the firm, fixed, unquestioned belief that something out there will make us happy. This belief is not peculiar to modern times. Pleasure hunters have been around since the dawn of history. Virtually everybody hunts pleasure, at least for a while, yet no one manages to find it for very long.

Most of us go on thinking that sensory satisfaction is out there somewhere; we have just been missing it. Only a few have enough self-knowledge to conclude, “It’s not here. I have to look inside.” That is the transition to sattva, the state of maturity, where we gain some capacity to make real decisions.

The word “maturity” is bandied about so miserably that we often forget what it means. The song today is “Go After What You Like.” In my ears this translates into “Be As Immature As You Can.” Maturity demands detachment. Immature people are acutely attached to themselves – their desires, their opinions, their way of doing things, their view of others. Mature people can stand back from their own likes and dislikes and go against them easily, without resentment, when it benefits other people.

“Sattva,” says Sri Krishna, “binds us to happiness.” This is a subtle point: we can be bound to happiness too. It means that when you reach the state of sattva, you will not be content with any worldly satisfaction. A few minutes of pleasure, an hour or two of most refined aesthetic satisfaction, will not be enough. You will demand a state of fulfillment that lasts always. This is the immense desire that impels us beyond sattva, beyond all the gunas, into full freedom and joy.

I was perhaps ten or eleven, I remember, when I was introduced to the beauty of English literature. I couldn’t believe there were such beautiful stories, such interesting people; here was a whole world I had never thought about. My high school library was just one big shelf behind the headmaster’s desk. He loved literature, so he was quite selective about lending these books to those who could really get absorbed in them. English novels can be big, you know – particularly those of Charles Dickens, whom I liked very much – and English was a very difficult language for us. So my reading went slowly. The novels went on and on, and I was captivated with every page. As I got toward the end, I used to feel a little sad that the story would soon be over. I would close the book and keep it aside for a while, just to try to make it last. My young niece Meera used to do the same thing when Christine gave her a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate: open it up, give it one lick, then hold it for a long time before licking it again. This is all right for children, but for you and me to lick at a bar of pleasure and then try to keep it around for another lick is not worthy of an adult.

When newcomers come to my talks on meditation, one of the simple ways I observe them is to see how easily they get dissatisfied with temporary satisfactions. Anybody quickly discontented with passing pleasure has good possibilities for spiritual awareness. Such a person has outgrown the toys of life. Many of the people I see around me today are like this. They may still be playing games with their clothes or hair style, but once they encounter the spiritual life as it should be presented – difficult, challenging, demanding a deep commitment to the goal – they can respond and go very far.

“Rajas,” Sri Krishna continues, “binds us to action.” When you are seething with rajas, you will be doing a hundred things and never concentrating on one of them. You will always be active, always restless.

Today on the way home I saw a big garbage truck with a sign at the back: “Frequent Stops.” This is a good reminder for rajasic people. The garbage truck stops everywhere. It opens up with a loud noise, picks up a lot of stuff, and dumps it in; then it goes a few more feet and does the same thing all over again. Those who get caught in pleasure and reckless activities are like this. They go in some store and spend a while there, then into another store to do the same – from tavern to tavern, game to game, country to country. Life is lost like this, often in the name of change. “I need a change,” we say. Change is the last thing we need; we have very little else. Our deep need is for something that abides.

Compulsive action is often responsible for tension and alienation. Those who are constantly trying to make more money, for example, will not have time to be aware of the needs at home. They will not be able to enjoy their family; they will not even be able to enjoy a vacation.

The slogan of rajas is “The end justifies the means.” Actually it is not even a slogan; it is an axiom. Rajas thinks only about ends. The one criterion he applies to the means to an end is, Will it work? This is not only immoral, it is futile. One of the most fundamental spiritual laws is that only right means can produce right ends. War cannot produce peace; only peace can produce peace. War produces only more war. Greed cannot produce satisfaction; it can only produce more greed. Competition cannot lead to anybody’s long-term welfare; it can only increase separateness.

Means and ends, Gandhi said, are one and the same. When you are using right means to bring understanding and unity to your home, you do not even have to ask, “Am I succeeding?” The question is not relevant. As Gandhi says, “Full effort is full victory.” Similarly, all that you and I have to do is give our very best to the solution of terrible problems like violence. We can use our time, energy, and resources to support causes like our own Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, which in the Buddha’s words are doing the highest work by driving out anger, fear, and greed. All we have to ask is, “Am I doing my best – every day, every way I can?”

“Tamas,” the verse concludes, “binds us to delusion.” Literally, it smothers wisdom, wraps it up in a dense blanket of ignorance and sits on top to make sure no awareness escapes. The lowest kind of human being is the one who is overcome by tamas, who cannot and will not act because he or she does not care.

When we have to do something we don’t like, Tamas overtakes us, ties us up, and throws us into the trunk of his car. We might as well be paralyzed. We can’t act; we can’t feel; we become utterly insensitive, utterly unaware of the suffering our attitude causes others. It is not that we want them to suffer; we are simply unaware of anything except ourselves. Many acts of infidelity or disloyalty are committed in bouts of tamas, when we don’t understand what loyalty means and cannot imagine that acts have consequences.

In this state, if we see someone being exploited – some person, group, race, or nation – we feel neither sympathy nor anger. We cannot act to relieve distress; suffering and injustice scarcely make an impression on our consciousness. We are in the trunk, and there is no one behind the wheel to feel or act. It is a tragic situation. Many people today seem unaware of the suffering in which so much of the world lives, simply because they are insensitive to anything other than themselves.

Some time ago I opened the morning paper and learned that the mayor of San Francisco had been shot to death right in his office by a former city councilman. The assassin felt he had been treated unfairly, so he went and got a gun. I expected the city to be so shocked, so concerned, that everybody would demand stricter handgun laws to try to keep this kind of crime from going on and on. Instead there was mourning for a day, a statement or two, and then the tragedy was forgotten again – as it was for President and Senator Kennedy, for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for over seven thousand others every year, men, women, and children, shot to death often by one of their own family or friends when anger raged out of control. The tragedy makes no impact. Life goes on as usual. That is tamas: business as usual. There is no capacity to understand that this is writing on the wall for all of us, demanding selfless, nonviolent action to set it right.

All of us, Sri Krishna says, are obliged to contribute to life. That is the sole purpose for our being here. Those who are so caught up in themselves that they do not care what happens to others, who cannot see consequences past their own nose, have pulled the covers of tamas over their heads and are trying to pretend to life that they are not there. Circumstances can treat such people very roughly. Yet even this kind of person can throw off the pall of tamas through the practice of meditation.

SRI KRISHNA: 10. Sattva predominates when rajas and tamas are transformed. Rajas prevails when sattva is weak and tamas overcome. Tamas prevails when rajas and sattva are dormant.

No one could want to live under the sway of rajas or tamas. But most human beings do. Why, in spite of good intentions, are we unable to remove the mental blocks that bar our way to selfless action? Why do we get caught so easily in self-centered activities, even some that are detrimental?

This is the human dilemma. Sometimes when we have a job to do, we feel paralyzed. We cannot bring ourselves to look at the job and if we do, we feel so inadequate that we say, “I can’t do it! Better get somebody else.” Yet when something we like comes, we can do it with energy and gusto. There may not even be any profit in it; it may actually bring us or others harm – the next day, some months later, or in the next generation. It does not matter. We get so absorbed that we never notice how time flies, and we neglect duties that have to be attended to even if they are unpleasant. Either way we fill our time but miss the point of life.

This simple verse gives a great secret: to live in sattva, get control over rajas and tamas. Keep rajas in rein and don’t even let tamas out of the barn. When any two gunas languish the other will flourish, for these are the whole fabric of life.

You can watch this interplay yourself. You may read the Gita on Monday and feel inspired. The words touch you deeply; you immediately want to change your life and pursue its supreme goal. The next morning you get up early, have a good meditation, a sattvic breakfast, work with concentration at your job, speak kindly, return courtesy for unkindness. If you start feeling lethargic, you go for a fast walk repeating the mantram or turn to some job you have been putting off. If you start speeding up, you repeat the mantram and slow down. If you find yourself caught in some third-priority item because you enjoy it, you have the will and discrimination to drop it and turn to item number one. In all these ways you are withdrawing attention from rajas and tamas, and sattva flourishes – till the middle of the week.

By then, despite your intentions, the will is beginning to flag. Inspiration has lost its edge. And the pace of the week has quickened at work. Deadlines loom, people make demands; the old habit of speed starts to draw you in again, perhaps without your realizing it. You try to fit more things in, and begin snapping at people if they get in your way. Perhaps by Thursday you are taking work home, thinking about it at dinner, cancelling that date with your partner so you can finish the week’s report by Friday. Sattva is neglected; rajas dominates the scene.

Saturday morning you crash. You can’t get out of bed; it feels so cozy, and you’re enjoying your dream. When you finally sit down for meditation, you fall asleep again. “Better relax this weekend,” you say. “I’ve had a hard week.” You treat yourself to a heavy breakfast and take your coffee cup out to the yard, where you can sit in the sun and plan a few improvements.

And Sunday morning you don’t know what is wrong. You’re not really in pain, but things just don’t feel right. Your throat feels a little raspy and you’re drained of energy. “Probably some virus,” you say. “I’d better not inflict myself on others today. I’ll meditate here in bed. Honey, will you call the church and tell them we can’t make it to the work party this afternoon?” There is an old paperback on exorcism lying around. You start to leaf through it. A page catches your eye. . . .

Maintaining sattva in the teeth of rajas requires a fight that goes on for a long, long time. But most important, don’t let yourself fall into tamas. When sattva is about to collapse, give it all your support. It will be excruciating, but you can develop your will only by exercising it; there is no other way.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. When sattva predominates, the light of wisdom shines through every gate of the body.

This is the Upanishadic image of the body as the kind of city people had in ancient and medieval times, with a wall all around and gateways for traffic in and out. The body’s gates, of course, are the senses. Sri Krishna is reminding us that there is a mayor inside, looking out through these gates. If the city is in order, the gatekeepers obey when the mayor says, “Let this fellow in; keep that one out.” That is sattva. But in the city of Rajas the gatekeepers do their own thing, and in the city of Tamas they are fast asleep. In either case there is trouble.

To take a simple example, I still remember the time a particularly explicit horror movie came to our little city of Petaluma. Grown men and women stood in line to pay through the nose just to get sick in the stomach. That was the attraction. In one theater in San Francisco, I read, a lady went into convulsions right in the aisle.

I saw couples in that line, waiting to get in. I could imagine the scene at the box office window. “Here’s my Juliet,” Romeo says. “I love her so much I want to give her convulsions.”

The eyes and ears are gateways to the mind. When we watch a movie like this, we are trucking everything we see and hear right inside, where the untrained mind can have a heyday with it.

The Self, the scriptures tell us, is light itself. We do not suspect this when we keep trucking in garbage, of course. Tamas is a blackout; rajas is a city riot. But in sattva, the city is peaceful. Your heart is full, rich, loving, and wise, so the splendor within shines forth freely.

SRI KRISHNA: 12. When rajas predominates, a person runs about pursuing selfish and greedy ends, driven by restlessness and desire.

What prevents the light of the Self from shining through? What keeps us from having tender, lasting relationships? It is rajas, Sri Krishna explains, and the first sign of rajas is greed.

Rajas is full of passion, but passion that is unharnessed. It cannot help erupting in anger, fear, and greed. Wherever he goes, Rajas is always thinking, “What can I get out of this?” If he sees a beautiful landscape, he subdivides it and puts up tract houses. If he sees a dense forest, he wants to raze it and sell the lumber. If he sees a school of trout shimmering in a stream, his first thought is to get his fishing gear. This way of thinking is depleting our world today. Gandhi said, “There is enough on earth for every man’s need, but not enough for every man’s greed.” In India, against the background of a poverty-stricken subcontinent, he went so far as to say that if you had one button more than necessary, you were a thief; that button was at somebody else’s expense. In our affluent society, of course, it is not necessary to go so far. Everyone should be able to live at a reasonable level of comfort. But it is still good to simplify our lives and not spend time and energy acquiring things that add to pollution or deplete the resources of the world.

Greediness is a fierce, tenacious glue. It can stick a human being to anything on earth, without his even being aware that he is stuck.

Take the automobile. I have to be careful here, because misunderstanding comes so easily. I am not at all against automobiles; they perform a very useful function. But when we get greedy about what automobiles can do for us, we get glued to them. We cannot do without them. We change our way of living for them, rearrange our cities for them, do everything we can to accommodate more and more of them at higher and higher speeds. Nothing is without problems, and cars are naturally no exception. But when we get glued, we can no longer ask, “Is this still worth the cost? Do we have to have more cars every year? Do we have to keep building faster roads just because cars can go faster?” The cost includes pollution and suffering. Automobiles kill almost fifty thousand people in this country every year, and the long-term toll of pollution on our air, water, and food is incalculable.

Sometimes I see a country’s progress toward civilization measured in terms of how many automobiles it has. Why not measure in terms of bananas? There is as much connection. We have become so attached to cars that we cannot imagine civilization without them. Automobiles are useful, but they have nothing to do with being civilized.

California, the papers say, is expecting to have its twenty millionth motor vehicle on the highways before long. We could observe that day as a day of mourning. When I drive to San Francisco I am always struck by how many cars cruise by with only one passenger; I would estimate at least seventy-five percent. By what standard do we “need” millions of cars to get the same number of people to work at the same hours in the same places?

On the positive side, I feel heartened to learn that car pools are slowly growing in popularity. People are increasingly willing to wait five or ten minutes for a neighbor in order to reduce pollution and congestion.

When rajas prevails, Sri Krishna says, pravrittir arambhah: we take up all kinds of activities. Rajas makes big plans, then drains all his prana in excitement. When he starts to act on those plans, he often runs out of steam. It is the nature of excitement that it cannot last. It has to die down, and when it does, the same project you began with such enthusiasm looks utterly boring. It is full of dull, drab details that you had not foreseen. And you give up. The project has not changed, but prana is gone. When we say something is interesting, it is not that the project is full of some substance called “interestingness” that sticks us to it until it oozes away. We are full of prana, the fuel of attention; that is what makes it interesting. Rajas takes the prana and runs. Then Tamas comes in and says, “The place is mine!”

People who are prone to excitement, the Gita says, will find it difficult to achieve anything worthwhile in life. They do not have the sustained capacity to carry through. Sri Krishna takes a long view here. Many people – this country has an abundance of them – have enough prana for decades of excited, enthusiastic activity. But activity, the Gita says, is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things or keeping busy. Even without reference to spiritual goals, a well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun. The life of a great artist or scientist is usually shaped by a single desire, carried through to the very end. Without this capacity to carry through, we scatter our lives. Like seeds broadcast on an uncultivated field, our activities do not bear fruit.

Restless activity is a hallmark of our age. It is not a wholly negative quality. I would say it is a signal bell, announcing readiness for the practice of meditation. When we feel restless, power is rising. We should never waste this power by running from place to place, flying from continent to continent, doing dangerous things just because they are dangerous or new things just because they are new.

With their immense energy and restlessness, young people sometimes get caught in daring activities – hang gliding, surfing, mountaineering, solo flying – simply because nothing else demands enough of them. They don’t find much challenge in making money or getting ahead in the world, and they don’t feel inclined to do what the rest of the world is doing. Sometimes they cause a lot of trouble to themselves and others, all because power is rising and they don’t know what to do with it. They are ready for meditation.

The Meditation Aptitude Test has two questions: One, have you got a lot of energy? Two, are you so restless that nothing satisfies you? If the answer to both is yes, you are admitted to the class. This is a fertile combination. With immense restlessness and immense energy you can go very far, because this is the gas with which a human being travels.

I believe I am one of the few spiritual teachers who will come out and say that there is nothing wrong with desire. Desire is power, and power is neither good nor bad. What is good or bad is the use to which we put it.

All of us believe that a strong desire leaves us only two alternatives: yield to it or be repressed. Give in to it and be happy; repress it and suffer a host of horrible consequences we associate vaguely with Sigmund Freud. The Gita says there is a third alternative. When a fierce desire surges up until your mind feels as if it is going to burst, your heart is racing, your glands are working overtime, everything in you is clamoring for that desire to be fulfilled, Sri Krishna asks quietly, “Have you got daring?” You say, “Talk to me later.” He says, “Anybody can give in to pleasure. Where’s the challenge in that? If you’re tough, defy it.” This is power rising. Don’t explode it all over the road; and don’t just sit there in the lot and race your engine till you are out of gas, which is repression. Get behind the wheel and use that energy to take you fast and far to a selfless goal. That is what I mean by transforming a desire.

People with strong desires can go very far on the path of meditation. When I meet people with a passion for making money I say, “Come learn to meditate.” All they have to do is get their hook out of money and get it into meditation. There is a technique for this. It is the same for sex or any other dominant passion; every desire can be harnessed to a spiritual goal.

SRI KRISHNA: 13. When tamas is dominant a person lives in darkness – slothful, confused, and easily infatuated.

Now Tamas gets his turn again, which he always finds gratifying. Rajas, of course, he considers a bore. “Krishna,” he says, “talk about me.”

“First,” Sri Krishna replies, “you’re aprakasha.” Prakasha is brightness: a glowing skin, luminous eyes, a vibrant voice, the whole body shining with pent-up selfless energy. Such a person is utterly alive, certain that he or she can face any emergency squarely. Aprakasha, which describes Tamas, is just the opposite. His eyes are dull, almost glazed; he can scarcely keep them open. No amount of Lustre Tone or vitamin E can make glazed eyes glow. When the lamp of love is lit inside, on the other hand, even your skin has to show it.

Even physically, tamas makes us ugly. If we have a good bone structure and don’t eat too much candy, we may be able to hide the worst physical effects of tamas while we are in our teens and twenties. After that, however, every body begins to wear, and I think every sensitive person is aware of the dullness that comes to the skin and eyes and mouth of someone who is aware of nothing but his own pleasure.

Second is apravritti, ‘utterly inactive.’ If you ask Tamas why he never contributes to anybody else’s welfare, he replies candidly, “Why should I? I don’t do anything even for my own welfare.” Tamas is a very impartial fellow: no work for anyone.

Interestingly enough, this is untenable. When Dr. Selye says that work is a biological necessity, that is another way of saying that no one can be one hundred percent tamasic. This is an encouraging comment. When his personal likes are roused, even the most tamasic person you can find will spend hours rearranging his record collection, playing cards, or clipping magazines. If he has something that appeals to his self-will, he may get so entangled that he forgets about dinner, which for Tamas is saying a good deal. All of us, in other words, have the capacity for working hard. All we need do is release that capacity and then harness it by gaining detachment from ourselves.

Third is pramada, ‘lacking in earnestness’ without zeal or gusto. Everybody, I think, appreciates a person who is full of enthusiasm, intense both in attitude and in action. People like that are good material for spiritual living. Tamas, again, is the opposite. If he takes up art, he doesn’t get past smearing large areas with color; he likes whatever goes onto the canvas. If he takes up gardening, he usually gets bogged down after the planting plan is finished, when the time comes to dig.

Fortunately, earnestness can be cultivated. Those who are not born earnest can become earnest. I admire a person who is earnest, but I have a special admiration for the lethargic person who has made himself earnest.

Last comes moha, ‘infatuation.’ Tamas gets easily infatuated, because he has very little discrimination. Any little thing can put its hook in him. He sees a teenager playing “Space Invaders” in a video parlor and immediately he gets fascinated; he will stay the rest of the afternoon putting in quarters and getting overcome by electronic extraterrestrials. When he sees his first electronic game watch, video recorder, food processor, or home computer, he has to have one.

Everybody knows how easy it is to get caught like this. The trend today is almost universal. A few years ago, I remember, San Francisco proudly hosted the First International Exhibition of Erotic Art. (I don’t believe there was a second.) Cultured, well-educated men and women flocked to it, to show they had cast off the fetters of our Victorian past. Another show that lingers in my memory was an exhibition of coffins. One was made in the shape of a Mercedes Benz; the entrance, so to say, was through the trunk. I have seen exhibitions of embroidered jeans, museum collections of corkscrews, beer cans, bread sculpture, candy wrappers, and buttons. These are not the work of unintelligent people; this is what happens to any human being when moha settles like a fog.

Moha is what advertisements exploit. Rajas is the ad agency and the client, but Tamas is the prime consumer. Label something “More” and he will buy it, even if it may kill him. Or don’t promise anything at all. Show him a lissome blonde beside a babbling brook in a verdant field and say, “Wide-open flavor!” He won’t even ask, “What’s the connection?” As Emerson says, he loves to be deceived. Rajas asks, “Don’t you want to be alive with pleasure?” Tamas says, “Sure. Do I have to do anything?” “Just buy this and put it in your mouth.” Sattva would object, “The least you could do is show him the other side. ‘Alive with pleasure’, dying with pain.”

Tamas gets caught in doing little things that benefit nobody. Then, as he dwells on them, these trivial activities begin to look big. He holds them closer than the nose on his face, so that they fill his field of vision. It sounds like a harmless case of myopia, but I think no state of mind is more tragic. When you get caught in doing your own pleasant little thing, even if it is not harmful in itself, a voice inside starts saying, “I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to anybody else, even to myself. What does it matter as long as I can keep on doing what I like?”

Sattva advises, “Move back a little.” As we gain detachment, life falls into perspective. Games and hobbies appear trivial then against a world backdrop, where the lives of millions of people can be improved, even if only a little, by how we live and what we do.

SRI KRISHNA: 14. Those dying in the state of sattva attain the pure worlds of the wise.

15. Those dying in rajas are reborn among people driven by work. But those who die in tamas are conceived in the wombs of the ignorant.

If the Lord lives in all of us, why are our lives so different? Why are many in such great misery and so few truly happy? Why do some succeed, find what they seek, yet die unfulfilled? Why do some attain fulfillment and others neither seek nor question?

Every sensitive human being asks these questions. I have never seen such a well-reasoned, sympathetic, or hopeful answer as in this chapter of the Gita, which lays the responsibility for our lives at our own doorstep, yet gives us full hope for changing ourselves completely.

Behind these two verses stands the immense backdrop of reincarnation. But the application of Sri Krishna’s words is easiest to understand if we think in terms of this life only. Every day – the Buddha would say every instant – we are shaping our lives by how we think, speak, and act. If we lead a selfless life, we become secure and spread security to others. If we lead selfish lives, caring only about ourselves, we make ourselves insecure, rigid, self-willed, and alienated. We cannot blame God for this, nor Providence, Nature, society, or the times. The first act of adult growth is to say, “I did this to myself. Nothing brought me to this unpleasant situation except my own foolish choices. Therefore I can also get myself out, by making my own wise choices.”

Scrooge, in A Christmas Carol, goes to bed an utterly selfish man. That night the ghost of old Marley, his former business partner, comes to visit him, rattling his chains. “Made every link myself,” says Marley, “with every loan, every deal, every greedy thought. You have made a chain like this too, Ebenezer.” Scrooge is terrified. The very next day he changes all his responses from selfish to selfless; he becomes a different man.

Why can’t we change ourselves overnight? We get up in the morning and decide to do everything right – to be kind, detached, patient, and sattvic. But then the momentum of the day picks us up, and before we know it we have blown up at our partner or snapped at the children. By the end of the day we are all too clearly the same old person. What happens?

Samskaras are forces. When we go to sleep, the Upanishads say, these forces do not simply disappear. The dreaming state, in fact, is a Free Play Day. Unhampered by time or space, our samskaras get to run around and do whatever they like, acting out our favorite fantasies and fears. In dreamless sleep, however, they go backstage and sleep it off. Then it is that we truly rest. In this state, the Upanishads say, a king is not a king nor a pauper poor; there is neither old nor young, male nor female, sensation, sickness, nor sorrow. If we could wake up in that state, we could make choices free from any past conditioning. But we are unconscious in that state. After a while the samskaras start to wake up again, dragging us back to the waking state to take up all our desires and fears and aspirations just where we left off the day before – the same person, yet a little different too.

Similarly, the Upanishads say, samskaras do not vanish when we die. I know of no explanation more sensible, more down-to-earth. Just as we enter dreamless sleep every night, yet pick up every morning where we left off, so we pick up at birth where we left off the previous life, to continue working out the same samskaras.

That is why Hindu and Buddhist mystics lay so much importance on the state of consciousness we are in at the moment of death. Against this background, your life and mine this time around are entirely the result of the innumerable good and bad choices we made in previous lives. There is no such thing as an accident, the Hindu and Buddhist sages say. As Jesus puts it, “Not a sparrow shall fall without thy Father.”

When I first came to this country, I was introduced to the “layaway plan.” I don’t believe I had even heard the phrase before. I was waiting in a big department store, looking at something expensive and useless which I could use as an example in my meditation classes, when the saleslady came up. “Wouldn’t you like to buy this?” she asked. “It’s marked down to sixty dollars.”

I laughed. “I have only six dollars,” I said, to be polite.

“That’s all right,” she said cheerfully. “That’s enough for the first payment. We’ll lay it away for you while you come and pay six dollars every month. Before the year is over, it’s yours!”

I was impressed. “May I take it with me?”

“Oh, no! This is layaway. We keep it here on the shelf until you’ve paid for it.”

I told the lady I would keep my six dollars too.

Karma is layaway on a cosmic scale. In every life we have done certain selfless things, helped a few people, served a few worthy causes; so we have a small packet of good karma, kept carefully in a pigeonhole with our name on it. When we die, according to the Tibetan mystics, we get a waiting period for rest and recuperation in which we are expected to look over our previous life to see what mistakes we have committed, so we can avoid committing them again – a little like our friend Scrooge. Then we claim our packets of karma, good and bad, and look for a suitable context – country, race, parents, environment – in which to try again.

When I explained this to a friend, she objected, “I don’t know if I agree with that. If I had had a choice, I wouldn’t have chosen to be born in Queens. Why wouldn’t everybody pick rich parents and be born with a silver spoon?”

“That is the rub,” I said. “You don’t get a choice that way. You have already made your choice, by all the things you said and thought and did in the life before.” After we die, all this information is fed into a cosmic computer which would be a hobbyist’s dream. It has unlimited memory, and it never crashes or loses any of its data. It takes in all the particulars, looks over the available openings, and matches your karma with the karma of parents, cousins, neighbors, city, nation, and epoch. You are born to a family with similar or complementary samskaras so that you can work out your own samskaras; and you are born into times that will allow those samskaras to come to fruition. Your samskaras will lead you to behave a certain way in school, to go out with particular kinds of friends, to choose the right kind of partner for getting the kind of children you need in order for you to grow. If you were difficult as a child, you have to have a difficult child the next time around; how else could you learn? If you have been a good husband, you may get a context in which you have a good husband, so you can learn to be a good wife.

When this is understood, reincarnation ceases to be a mysterious product of the Eastern imagination and becomes a cogent, compassionate explanation of our lives and times. It offers meaning, and it offers hope. It means that we have selected everything ourselves, not so much consciously as by our desires. The appeal is simple. Life is an educational process, a kind of school, with all the responsibility of making progress left to us. Whatever situation we are in is the perfect context for us to learn to face a problem in ourselves. When we learn to face a problem squarely, the Hindu mystics say, that particular situation will not recur. There is no need to learn the lesson again.

But here let me again sound a note of caution. In India we seldom talk about reincarnation because everybody believes in it. In the West, however, the topic seems exotic, so people sometimes get caught up in it. I still receive invitations to attend workshops on reincarnation or to give a talk on who I was in some previous life. I want to reply, “I am much more concerned with who I am in this life.” If the theory of reincarnation helps you to understand how to face difficult situations with patience and compassion, well and good. Beyond that, I would not advise getting intellectually caught up in it. All kinds of fruitless speculation can result.

Against this background, these esoteric-seeming verses make good common sense. Let me take up the second one first, because I like to end with the silver lining.

When a person dies in a mood of tamas, Sri Krishna says, he is born in a family full of tamas. I find this very reasonable. He has to learn to transform tamas; until he does so on his own, he cannot graduate to the next grade. So this hypothetical fellow is born into a family where everybody is inert. The father has no job, the mother overeats; every member of the family has the brakes on. They don’t have much will, can’t bring themselves to act, like to postpone everything. He will fit that family perfectly, because he is coming in with his brakes on too.

In India we have an official on the public roads called the brake inspector. He has only one job – to stop any car, any bus, any truck he chooses and say, “Let me see your brakes.” He is not interested in any other aspect of the car; he just wants to see if the brakes work.

Tamas’s brakes work fine; that is the problem. In those who do not have much will, who cannot bring themselves to act, who like to postpone everything, the brakes are permanently set. There is nothing wrong with the car. It is still in decent shape, and there is plenty of gas in the tank. The tamasic person cannot come into this life and complain, “I’ve got a lemon. Take it back and give me a better vehicle.” All that has happened is that the hand brake is on. I don’t have to tell you what kind of wear and tear results from this; that is what happens with tamas too. But there is no irremediable problem; we just have to release the brake and move our foot over onto the accelerator. Then the tamasic person can shoot forward like a Ferrari.

To continue this automobile language – which used to be as difficult for me as Sanskrit – one difficulty in tamas may be that the battery is dead. The car is in good condition, you have enough gas, but there is no power for getting the car started. I asked Christine what you do in such a situation. She said, “You call the auto club.” The person comes, jump-starts your car, and then drives off with a cheery smile. That is what a spiritual teacher can do. There are certain situations in which the will is paralyzed; we feel unable to move a muscle. Then the teacher can connect the cables, tell you to stay behind the wheel, and start you off his own battery with his support, love, and continuing inspiration.

I am assured that this kind of thing is a free service of the auto club, but as you say in this country, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The same is true in sadhana. If we get a start from our teacher, he expects us to make the best of it – to keep on driving, recharge the battery, and head straight for our destination. If we pull off to the side of the road again, switch off the engine, and put our feet up, the battery will go dead again, and the dispatcher may not consider the second call as urgent an emergency.

If we find ourselves in a family which is ignorant of the unity of life, lacking both energy and initiative, that is all the more reason why we should release the brakes in our own lives. When others in our family see this, they may be motivated to learn to do it too. In many families I have seen, after watching John or Josie meditate for a few years, somebody thoughtful will ask casually, “How do you do this Indian thing?”

Similarly, when a person full of rajas dies, he or she is born in a car that has no brakes. Tamas keeps his foot on the brake and leaves the hand brake on too; Rajas doesn’t have either. His transmission is automatic, and the only pedal on his floor is an accelerator.

When he was ten or so, my friend Josh had a kind of car he had made himself. It consisted of a platform with an uncomfortable seat, on which he had mounted four undersize wheels. Everything about that vehicle was primitive except those wheels. “Josh,” I said, “How do you steer?”

“Simple,” he said. “If you want to turn, you pull on this rope.” It was fastened to the front axle at both ends; he hauled on it as he would reins on an ox.

“And where are the brakes?”

“It doesn’t have any,” Josh said cheerfully.

“What do you do if you have to stop?”

“You drag your feet.”

Rajasic people are born into a car like Josh’s. They have to keep going from morning to night, often doing things that help nobody including themselves. They can get caught in anything. Whatever they take up becomes an obsession; a casual hobby becomes a full-time occupation. I saw this many times when I was a professor, though it is by no means confined to campuses. Somebody writes a paper and gets praised for his understanding of punctuation; after a while he is working on his dissertation, “The History of the Comma Down the Ages.” He does care about what happens in the rest of the world, at least to some extent. He feels regret when he reads that there is famine in the Sahel, or that one out of four in his generation will probably die of cancer from environmental causes. But these are vague issues to him, beyond anything he can do. The size of his universe is measured by just one question: “Comma or semicolon?”

The person who dies full of rajas, Krishna says, is born in a home where everybody is busy from morning till evening. Everybody in the family is making something, whether it is money or mischief; nobody has enough time to sit still and cultivate the garden inside, or observe himself or others. This kind of stillness can be healing. It makes us more sensitive, gives us an opportunity to see life whole. But the rajasic family has no time for reflection, and the rajasic child born into such a family rubs his hands together and says, “Perfect! This is the place for me.” It is: perfect for getting more rajasic, but also perfect for suffering the consequences of rajas and learning to transform it, which is a service to the whole family.

Finally we reach the silver lining of these verses: the man or woman who has cultivated selflessness and learned to live for others becomes full of sattva. When they die, Sri Krishna says, such people are born into a selfless family. The father forgets himself easily in the welfare of his wife and children; the mother is a shining example of strength and tenderness, who can hold her family together when all the storms of life are blowing. The child born into such a family grows up strong, secure, and selfless. That is the climate in which he is born; that is the air she breathes. There is no contradiction between this and modern psychology. Such people take easily to the practice of meditation, sometimes very early in life. When they are earnest, they find a guide who will love them, cherish them, and show them how to overcome the conditioning of all the gunas and set their course for the supreme goal of life.

This is how I would account for someone like Thérèse of Lisieux, who when she was still a child could say with utter honesty, “There is only one desire in all my heart, and that is to become a great saint.” She swept toward her goal so swiftly, with such single-minded purpose, that in the language of Hinduism we would have to say that she merely picked up in this life where she left off in the last. By the time of her death, barely twenty-four years later, she had attained such stature that Pope Pius X called her “the greatest saint of modern times.”

The “other Teresa,” Teresa of Ávila, tells us that she took twenty years to unify her desires. I would say that is one reason she became such an excellent teacher; she understood deeply the conflicts most of us face, and she knew from her own experience exactly how to deal with them. To me she is one of the most magnificent examples of womanhood in the world, as beautiful as she was spiritual. She had an unerring gift for selecting young girls of great spiritual promise, some even in their teens, to follow her way of life. According to the Hindu and Buddhist tradition, these are girls who have come into this life ready to take to spiritual disciplines. They responded to Teresa enormously. The Gita would say they must have been born into sixteenth-century Spain just to come into the orbit of this great saint, the perfect spiritual teacher for their needs.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. The fruit of sattva is a pure heart. The fruit of rajas is suffering. The fruit of tamas is ignorance and insensitivity.

Sattva breeds kind actions, and the fruit of kindness is a pure heart: no malice, no hatred, no ill feeling, no compulsive desire to cling to or manipulate anybody else. The sattvic person is kind to everybody, regardless of how he or she is treated in return. This kind of attitude purifies consciousness, because it is the same in all circumstances; there is no room in it for resentment, hostility, or fear. We can purify our hearts like this by moving closer when there are differences between us and others. Moving away from difficult people serves no purpose at all; it neither heals the breach nor helps either party.

Understanding, insight, wisdom, proceed from sattva and sattva alone. Rajas can pursue a subject as long as it likes; it may ferret out a great deal of detail, but it cannot penetrate the inner whole in which the details cohere. If you are full of rajas, you can study religion for twenty years and still not understand those simple statements of Jesus or the Buddha, which men and women of no scholarly standing have grasped with the heart for hundreds of years after they were spoken.

Sattva sees into the core of life, into its unity; its understanding leads to deeper understanding. Rajas, intent on finding more and more, only succeeds in becoming more and more confused by what it finds. Every mental state, Sri Krishna explains, bears fruit of the same kind.

Rajasas tu phalam duhkham: wherever actions are restless or greedy, motivated by one’s own self-interest, the immediate results may be pleasant, but the long-term result is suffering and sorrow. Sales people in the tobacco industry may make a good deal of money, enough to buy a lot of things for themselves and their families. They may never even question where the money comes from, never make the connection between the product they sell and the hundreds of thousands who die of lung cancer, heart attack, stroke, and emphysema every year in the United States alone. But whether they notice or not, the fruit of their work is sorrow: sorrow for others, sorrow eventually for themselves. ­Every state of mind has consequences, not only in behavior but in the mind itself. Just as the kindness of sattva is its own reward, the restless, burning desire of rajas is its own punishment. It is a painful truth, but most of us need this kind of suffering to teach us the consequences of living for ourselves alone. If we do not learn this lesson, as the preceding verse points out, we have to go back to the same classroom the next time around, to reap the fruit of our present state of mind.

Ajnanam tamasah phalam: those who are full of tamas, who are content to do as little as possible in a halfhearted sort of way, also reap the fruit of their own state of mind: they do not grow. Unable to settle their debt of karma, they manage only to add to it. Insensitive to anything outside themselves, they move from darkness into greater darkness.

Unhappiness, as someone has observed, is not the worst thing in life. The worst that can befall us is insensitivity. In our pleasure-oriented world, unhappiness is looked upon as something frightful. In my opinion it is much better to be unhappy and grow up than never to grow up at all. If we are sincere about leading the spiritual life, we should not be afraid to be unhappy if it enables us to become more sensitive to the needs of others. But the tamasic person, easily contented with what life has to offer, cannot take anything but pleasure. He or she is at the mercy of whatever life sends.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. From sattva comes understanding; from rajas, greed. But the outcome of tamas is confusion, infatuation, and ignorance.

Once again, let me start with tamas. Pramadamohau is a potent combination: Confusion and Infatuation, Inc. They have combined their fortunes, and Tamas owns most of the stock. In an utter lack of proportion, he gives his energy to little things, to foolish, trifling activities, for one compelling reason: he likes them. They give him pleasure, enhance his sense of self-importance, and generally swell his ego. Tamas may be no intellectual, but he reads a lot of books, billions of dollars worth every year. Yet even publishers admit that most of these works need never have seen the light of day. I am not thinking merely of mass-­market “escape literature” either. Many of these books are written by gifted writers, whose praises are sung in reviewers’ columns and the halls of great universities. But the authors are so caught in “doing their own thing” that they do not have the freedom to ask themselves what the effect of their books will be.

A few years ago, to take just one example, you could find a particular sex manual stacked in high piles in bookstore windows everywhere. It sold millions of copies; I believe it was even recommended reading for some college courses. The author is an honest professional with sound credentials. I feel sure he wrote his book with good intentions. But he is so entangled in his subject that he cannot see the results. He cannot see what that book will do to the millions of people who read it avidly and put its advice into practice, whose lives are so drab that they will jump at any avenue that promises some pleasure.

The theme of that book was simple: Put yourself first and everybody else last. Anybody who takes such advice seriously is going to become more lonely, more estranged, and more frustrated with every year. When we get caught in the sensory game, there is some satisfaction at the outset; no one would deny that. But gradually we get sucked in and entangled. Then we are in a compulsion. It is no longer a matter of choosing to go after a particular sensation; we are being driven to it.

This book calls itself something like a “gourmet guide to loving.” It sounds tantalizing. How easy, how pleasant, to love! I can understand anybody in these sensation-saturated times being attracted by these words and experimenting for themselves. But in a short, short time it is no longer experimentation; we have no choice. Anybody with some detachment can see how soon this kind of advice breaks up relationships. You find yourself going from one partner to another, then to another, for shorter and shorter periods of satisfaction. If I wrote the blurb for that book it would be, “A gourmet guide to disrupted relations.” Instead of joy, I would talk about “the sorrow of separateness.” That is what it leads to. One side of the coin is the promise of joy; the other is the fact of loneliness and despair. The Gita says simply, “Make your choice.” Choose which you prefer. But if you find yourself living in increasing dissatisfaction, don’t blame it on God or society or the times we live in. Sex has a beautiful place in a completely loyal, loving relationship between two people, but where there is neither loyalty nor faith nor honor nor tenderness, sex is a terrible, disruptive force.

Ignorance is the hallmark of Tamas, just as wisdom is the hallmark of Sattva. If Tamas’s eye falls on a book that says, “Do this; you’ll like it,” he immediately takes it up. He doesn’t even ask about the logic or the consequences.

Greed has subtler forms too. Going after “our own thing” is usually just being greedy: “I don’t care if this benefits anybody, even myself. I’m going to do it because I want to!” I have seen people standing in line all day because they wanted to hear the Rolling Stones in concert – in a theater in one of the most depressed areas of San Francisco. If a little of that day, that endurance, that desire, went into improving the neighborhood, what could not be done?

Every negative quality, Sri Ramakrishna says, can be turned into positive. “You say you’re greedy?” he asks. “Why not be really greedy? Instead of wanting things just for yourself, want them for everybody. Don’t settle for anything less.” We should not be content with getting the best just for ourselves. Why not go after the best for everybody? If we give it the same time and energy we give to our personal interests, we can make a real difference in people’s lives. So if you meet a greedy person, congratulate him. If he can turn his greed to human welfare, it will be a tremendous motivating force. The greed will still be there, but harnessed and mastered. The same is true of anger and fear; they are power that can be transformed. When Mahatma Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, was asked where Gandhi got all his power, Desai replied in effect, “He has forged all human passions – fear, anger, lust, greed – into one selfless, irresistible passion for the welfare of all.”

A theater in Berkeley recently offered an intriguing bill: Tarzan and Jane and Planet of the Apes. The marquee said, “Go ape!” I saw quite a few students standing in the queue, waiting to pay three dollars for this privilege. I don’t know exactly what it means to “go ape,” but I wanted to protest, “This is backwards! Go human; don’t go ape.” Being resentful, hostile, or vindictive is going backwards in evolution. Two tigers fighting is all right; that is their nature. It may be natural for animals to be red in tooth and claw, but you and I have forfeited that. If we wanted to be hostile, the Hindu mystics say, we should have told the Lord, “I still have a few violent hang-ups to work out. If you don’t mind, I prefer to stay in the jungle a couple of centuries more.”

SRI KRISHNA: 18. Those who live in sattva go upwards; those in rajas remain where they are. But those immersed in tamas sink downwards through their own inertia.

Near my village when I was growing up was a sadhu or holy man with an unusual way of teaching. In the morning Mad Narayana, as he was called, would go to the foot of a hill nearby and start rolling a huge rock up the slope. It was terribly hard work, especially in the heat of the Indian sun. People came to stand around and watch while he struggled.

Finally, toward the end of the day, he had the rock at the top. Then he motioned his audience to move away a safe distance, and with one hand he gave the rock a push. It rumbled down the slope, bouncing from spot to spot as it gathered speed, until it reached the bottom and crashed against a tree. All the while Mad Narayana watched and laughed. “It’s so hard to go uphill,” he explained. “But to go downhill you don’t have to do anything at all!”

It took a long time before I understood the profundity of this simple teaching. It is hard to go uphill in life. You have to struggle for every inch, and you can’t afford to stop and rest; if you do, the weight of your load will begin to slide you back again. But anybody can go downhill. It takes no effort. You don’t have to make any decisions, resist any impulses, deny yourself any desires. You just do whatever you like, and it is automatic: down you go.

This is the dynamics of will and desire. Tamas, the abyss of unconsciousness, is like the trunk of our car, where Will and Desire have been locked up trussed and chloroformed. Tamasic people have neither will nor desire, which is a deceptive state. They may look serene, tranquil, established in peace of mind. Worse, they may think of themselves in just such terms: relaxed, easygoing, easy to deal with, “just an ordinary man.” As Gandhi said, this is the tranquility of the graveyard, where nobody moves, nobody talks, nobody lives – in other words, just the opposite of sattva.

But gradually desire and will begin to help each other untie the ropes. They are still in the trunk, but once an arm gets free here and a leg there, a feeble desire begins to stir. You tell yourself, “I think I wouldn’t mind a little coffee.” It’s not much, but that is all you can muster; most of your capacity for desire is still tied up. With effort you manage to reach the stove, put the water on, and get some instant coffee powder into a paper cup. The result is nothing a connoisseur would recognize, but it is stimulating. As you drink it, desire wakes up a little more. Your mind has made a subtle connection: “Physical effort can lead to satisfaction.” The development of rajas has begun.

Now, Desire is a smart chap. Once he and Will are out of the trunk of the car, he wants to keep control. So he tells Will, “Now that I got us out, why don’t we go for a ride? You don’t have to do anything. Sit in the back seat; there is a blanket you can curl up in if you like, and safety belts to keep you from getting up. I’ll get behind the wheel.”

Will has just been rescued from utter immobility; he scarcely has enough power to move. “Good idea,” he tells himself. “Desire certainly is an obliging friend. Those are wise words of help.” “All right,” he says aloud. “You do the driving. I’ll sit back here, make myself comfortable, and offer a few suggestions from time to time” – to which, in the tradition of back seat driving, nobody is expected to pay attention.

Now Will and Desire enter a kind of Laurel and Hardy phase. Desire is Oliver Hardy; Will is Stan Laurel. Everything is “Stan, do this” and “Of course, Ollie; you’re so right.” For Desire is now behind the wheel, and the first thing he does is start making the rounds of those restaurants that offer drab food at exorbitant rates. “Where are we going?” Will wants to know. “I don’t have much money, Des, and I know who’s going to get the bill. I don’t like paying through the nose to put that kind of stuff into my mouth.” But Desire is getting stronger and stronger. The greed for food, for the stimulating titillation of the taste buds, has grown fiercer. “Hey, Will, keep quiet!” he says. “I know what’s good for you.” He looks so convincing – you remember Oliver Hardy, with those big, strong shoulders and that little hat? – that Will says meekly, “You must be right.”

At this stage Will is a harmless, accommodating fellow. But as the calories and cholesterol go on and on, he finally has to protest. “Des,” he complains, “I’m sick of all these restaurants!”

“You make me tired,” says Desire. He has grown loud and aggressive through self-indulgence. “I do all this driving for you, and what do you do? Nothing but sleep on the back seat and complain.” He shoves Will down and drives on.

When they stop for gas, there is a sale on cigarettes. “Try this,” says Desire. “It’ll make you feel cool. Alive with pleasure. You’ve come a long way, Baby. Don’t you owe it to yourself?” Poor Will believes all this; he still hasn’t grown.

Soon the trunk in which they used to be tied up is full of discount cigarettes and throwaway cans of wine. Desire is no fool. He knows that nothing strikes at the will like a compulsive habit. As long as he can keep Will incapacitated in the back seat, Desire can stay behind the wheel to do as he likes.

Unfortunately, Desire doesn’t really know what he likes. He is bursting with energy; he clamors for challenges, the bigger the better; but he has no idea of where he wants to go. He drives to Hollywood, then Disneyland, then Las Vegas; finally they manage to cross the Mexican border. By the time they come back, there is heroin in the hubcaps and hashish under the hood. Desire swells with pride. “Got past everybody!” he says. “What an achievement!” There is always satisfaction in a job well done, even if the energy is wasted in a wrong direction.

Actually, this is a state of tremendous potential. Rajasic people are full of energy; when they take to meditation, all that restless energy and the desire for challenges gradually come under control. After a while they clean out the trunk; those articles are not being used any longer. They ask themselves, “Why did I put this there, anyway? Why did I put all that stuff in the hubcaps and under the hood? Let it all go.” That is sattva; you are in control.

In sattva, Will and Desire are driving in a dual-control car, like the kind in which I took my driving lessons. Desire is still behind the wheel, but Will is the driving instructor, behind the other set of controls. As long as we are motivated by right desires – for the welfare of the whole family, the whole community, the whole of life – Will sits back and enjoys the ride. But the moment Desire starts to take a selfish turn, Will grabs the master control wheel, touches his foot to the brake, and says sharply, “That’s no way to drive!”

In the early days of this, of course, Desire will thump on the steering wheel and cry. “I’m going to call the Highway Patrol!” Will just says, “I am the Highway Patrol. You haven’t got anyone else to call. I’m the instructor, the police, everything.” After a while Desire realizes that Will is his friend and protector, who has kept him from disaster again and again.

You do not lose your desires in sattva; not at all. All your right desires become immense. But the will is always in control. Those in rajas are content just to drive around, always trying to see what is on the other side of the mountain. When night falls they are still driving aimlessly. The gas tank is almost empty, the tires are worn to the cords, yet they haven’t got anywhere. And tamas, of course, can’t even find his keys. He has an engine, but he can’t use it; all he can do is roll downhill. “But those in sattva go upward,” Sri Krishna says simply: upward toward the summit of consciousness, against the pull of gravity. You’re not in an old Morris Minor any more. You’re in a Ferrari, surging with power, taking the hairpin bends effortlessly.

SRI KRISHNA: 19. The wise see clearly that all action is a product of the gunas. Knowing that which is above the gunas, they enter into union with me.

20. Going beyond the three gunas which form the body, they leave behind the cycle of birth and death, decrepitude and sorrow, and attain to immortality.

Everything with which we are familiar – things, thoughts, actions, personality – is woven from the gunas. When Sri Krishna talks about going beyond all this, it almost sounds like going beyond the human condition altogether. I would say rather that it is going beyond human conditioning – the obsessive belief that we are the body and mind.

When we rise above this conditioning completely, we are no longer just a person. We become a permanent, beneficial force released into the stream of life forever. The Buddha is such a force; he can never die. As long as even one creature is bound, as he himself said, he cannot die. When we learn to live as the Buddha lived – “for the welfare of all, for the joy of all” – this force is released in our own lives. Then the Buddha, the Christ, comes to life in us.

When I came back from India to Berkeley in the early sixties, I found an amazing number of people who believed this force could be released by chemical means. Leading figures spoke persuasively about “chemical grace,” and millions of people who wanted access to some higher level of reality were exploring the whole smorgasbord of psychoactive drugs. This is the sort of thing that happens when you believe you are physical; it is just another side of the belief that you can solve a personal problem with a pill.

I have been watching with fascination a new doctrine: electronic grace. (It is very much the same.) We are fascinated by computer technology and laser magic, and we believe there is nothing more to personality than chemistry and physics; why not produce spiritual awareness, love, insight, imagination, through cerebral engineering?

Perhaps – who knows? – technology will find some way to analyze brain waves so accurately that we will be able to identify waves of patience and impatience, sympathy and resentment, and so on. Engineers may be able to invent electronic controls to carry in your pocket, so that when your partner is making you lose your temper you can set the indicator on Patience, sit back, and listen with a calm mind. They may even find a transformer for likes and dislikes, so that when you sit down for dinner and see something you detest, you can switch over your brain waves and enjoy it. I am not saying this sort of thing cannot be done. But at what expense? The human being would cease to be a human being. We would lose our sensitiveness, our originality, our tenderness, our creativity, all because we never developed the capacity to use our will. Without the will we have no freedom, and without freedom of choice we become machines. That is the theme of Huxley’s Brave New World, and I think it tells us why the increase of impersonality we see today has been accompanied by an increasing loss of sensitiveness.

I have seen claims, for example, that “illumination tanks” can bring about the integration of consciousness. You sit inside with light and sound and so on all cut off, and you stay there till you are illumined. This is picking up the stick by the wrong end. It is true that to enter a higher level of consciousness, you have to be able to leave the world of sensory awareness behind. The crucial difference is that in sensory deprivation, some external agent deprives the senses of their stimuli. In such cases, consciousness is not withdrawn from the senses. They are still full of prana, which means that the eye is still clamoring to see, the ear to hear, and so on. As a result, they may see and hear what is not there. In meditation, however, consciousness is withdrawn from all the senses by the will. All desires to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell are withdrawn into an immense desire to turn inward toward the Self. The power of these desires is harnessed by the will, which grows huge and strong like Jack’s beanstalk. When the will is that strong, the power of your desires is at your disposal.

When you can withdraw power from your senses at will, you go through life with such economy of personal energy that you scarcely feel stress at all. The Gita calls this “action in inaction.” There is no tension, no friction, no effort. You have gone beyond the gunas, beyond all human conditioning.

ARJUNA: 21. What are the characteristics of those who have gone beyond the gunas, O Lord? How do they act? How have they passed beyond the gunas’ hold?

When a man or woman is completely evolved, what happens? What does it mean to be completely integrated in character, conduct, and consciousness?

It is those who attain this state who show us what life really means. It is a mistake to think of Sri Ramakrishna, St. Teresa, St. Francis, or Mahatma Gandhi as consisting of body and mind. Their lives reveal the transformation from a separate personality into a universal beneficial force. These are not petty individual personalities from a particular period. St. Francis is much more alive today than most of the population of the world. We should not think of him in terms of a limited period of time – sixty or seventy years – or a circumscribed place. When a person is obsessively identified with a particular body and mental state, his influence is extremely limited; it cannot last long. But when we go beyond the gunas, we are no longer limited by time, place, and circumstance. We become a lasting beneficial force, as the immense power of the Self is released through us into the stream of life.

This force is called kundalini or evolutionary energy in Sanskrit, and it is present in every one of us. No one should say “I can’t make myself a beneficial force!” The force is already there. But we are spellbound by what Hindu mystics call Maya, the potent hypnotism of the senses and self-will. We cannot suspect even for an instant that in this fragile, limited frame of body, mind, and intellect a virtually limitless spiritual power is compressed a million times, waiting to be released.

In my early days in this country people used to ask me, “Isn’t meditation simply self-hypnosis?” It is just the opposite: meditation is self-dehypnosis. I saw an ad recently that said, “Learn to hypnotize your friends!” This is carrying coals to Newcastle. Continual, constant hypnosis is the human condition; we live in a hypnotized world. Sri Ramakrishna, I believe, compares it to a puppet show. If we could interview Punch of “Punch and Judy,” he would tell us, “Sure, we’re free! I can hit Judy; she can throw a pot at me. Isn’t that what free choice means?” But those of us outside the puppet theater can see a fellow with red hair standing in the back and pulling the strings.

In our case, Sri Ramakrishna says, we are Punch or Judy. The puppeteer is the ego, pulling strings from inside. A little tug and we flare up. Afterwards we say, “I chose to get angry.” I have actually heard people say this. Or perhaps the strings go slack and we fall into tamas. We say, “This is a personal choice I have made. I want to be lethargic. I like to feel dull.” The Buddha would smile gently at this kind of talk. “When someone is angry with you,” he would say, “if you can remain calm, compassionate, and respectful, then you can call yourself free.” You will have broken loose from the puppeteer’s strings. After that the ego can tug at them as long as he likes; it will not govern your ­responses.

SRI KRISHNA: 22. They are unmoved by the harmony of sattva, the activity of rajas, or the delusion of tamas. They feel no aversion when these forces are active, nor do they crave for them when these forces subside.

23. They remain detached, undisturbed by the actions of the gunas. Knowing that it is the gunas which act, they abide within themselves and do not vacillate.

In practical language, those who transcend the gunas go beyond likes and dislikes.

This may sound like a trivial, even undesirable achievement. “Do you want me not to like or dislike anything?” people sometimes ask. “I might as well not be living!” In fact, life as we usually live it does mean mostly liking this and disliking that, liking him, disliking her. But this is what makes us the puppets of our circumstances. When you are subject to likes and dislikes, you are standing on the street with an old tin can and begging of life, “Please treat me kindly. I can’t walk; I can scarcely stand. Look at my tin can and drop in a few crumbs of pleasure as you pass.” Most of us, I feel sure, would much prefer my granny’s attitude. “Little Lamp,” she used to tell me, “you just tell life, ‘I don’t care what you bring me; I’ll make the best of it. I’m prepared for anything.’ ”

It is pleasant when life gives us something we like. That is what the mind lives for. When things go our way, the mind gets all excited. It calls its friends, talks incessantly, and runs around trying to do twelve things at once. “If only things could be like this always!” it says. “Wouldn’t that be heaven?” But of course, things are not like that always. After a while, life perversely goes against us. Things happen that we do not like, often without warning. And the mind has run out of steam. For the time being, its vitality and vivacity have been spent. All it can do is lie down with a couple of aspirin and a cold washcloth over its eyes and wonder, “Why does this have to happen to me?”

Most of us, I think, believe this is all life has to offer: some precious periods of excitement and ebullience, when we are full of joie de vivre; some stretches of depression; and in between, our normal state – not bad, not good, a little irritable, but civil enough as long as nobody crosses us.

“It does not have to happen to you,” Sri Krishna explains. “You don’t ever have to feel depressed again. But you have to stop tying your moods to circumstances. Stop getting excited over what you like; then you won’t get depressed by what you don’t like.”

Virtually all of us get excited easily. Nobody can escape this pressure today. The mass media promise us excitement from everything on the face of the earth: movies, news programs, holidays, hair sprays, investments, toothpaste, towels. Is it any wonder that when these promises go unfulfilled, we live on the edge of frustration and depression? Millions of men and women in this country suffer from serious depression every year. In addition, since negative states inhibit the immune system, I would say depression is a hidden causal factor in billions of cases of colds, flu, migraine, dyspepsia, herpes, allergies, and asthma. And then there is the dull, minimal, just-able-to-cope state that the vast majority of us have come to regard as normal, which I would classify as subclinical depression. All in all, perhaps one quarter of the people in this country walk about in a chronic state of resentment or depression because life is not giving them what they think it promises – blaming the mango tree, my grandmother would say, because it can’t give coconuts.

If you don’t want to get depressed, Sri Krishna says, the first thing is not to get into situations where you know you get excited. This requires some self-knowledge, and a good deal of vigilance. If, in spite of doing your best to avoid such situations, you find yourself caught and your mind beginning to race out of control, start repeating the mantram.

The mantram is a stabilizer, the kind that enables ships to steer through rough seas and keep on an even keel. On my way to this country from India I traveled as far as Marseilles on an old P&O vessel that had no such device. When the monsoon burst on the way to Aden, one moment we would see only sky, the next moment only water. The ship pitched and rolled like that for two or three days, and virtually everybody got seasick, including most of the crew. It was a British vessel out of Australia, with some real empire builders on it. That is when I discovered that empire builders are human too. After a while they were asking for a brown bag and rushing to the rail with the rest. It brought home to me the unity of life.

The first day of this I managed to avoid asking for a paper bag. On the second morning, however, I woke up with my mind thinking, “Boss, this is it! I’ve gone as far as I can go.” My stomach felt terribly sick. Although I am not easily subject to nausea, my first thought was to get a bag like everybody else and spend the rest of the day at the rail looking down at the water.

Instead, without my even thinking about it, the mantram came to my rescue. I was determined to let nothing come in the way of my meditation. I went to a corner, sat down for meditation, and in a few minutes I had gone so deep that I had left my body behind. A couple of hours later I got up feeling terribly hungry. The ship was still pitching about. I walked into the breakfast room and sat down in solitary dignity, the monarch of all I surveyed. The purser couldn’t believe his eyes. He was a hard-boiled type, but he was so intrigued that he came over and asked, “What kind of tablets do you use?”

That is the power of the mind. When it is calm, the body stays calm; when it gets excited, the body too is thrown into turmoil. So whenever your mind starts surging up and down like that P&O liner, repeat the mantram. Then the mind becomes more like the majestic Queen Elizabeth, on which I crossed the Atlantic a week or two later. We slid through rough seas with quiet, steady grace. When I asked the captain why, he replied, “This ship has stabilizers. She’s not afraid of any storm.”

SRI Krishna: 24. Established within themselves, they are equal in pleasure and pain, praise and blame, kindness and unkindness. Clay or a rock are the same to them as gold.

Many years ago, a little fellow about four or five years old who was staying in our household came up and tried to sit on Christine’s lap. She said, “I’m sorry; I’m typing an article for the Little Lamp. Can you find somebody else for now?” He came to me, but I said, “I’m writing an article for the Little Lamp. Can you find somebody else?” He went to sit on Mary’s lap, but Mary was busy folding the current Little Lamp. Finally he said in exasperation, “Then I’m going to sit on my own lap!”

That was a profound remark. Svasthah, which I have translated as ‘established within themselves,’ means literally something like ‘self-­standing’ or ‘self-seated.’ The only lap on which you can sit comfortably is your own. If you try to sit on somebody else’s, you can feel secure only as long as that person remains seated; if he or she stands up, you get dumped onto the floor. If you learn to sit on your own lap, you rest there always. You are not dependent on anything external – the prime rate, the praise of your employer, the moods of your partner, the performance of your car.

Yesterday Christine and I went downtown to get a library card. She had a card in her name which she had lost, though I hinted that if it had been entrusted to me, I would have taken good care of it. When she said she had lost it, I was almost tempted to say, “What did I tell you?” But like a gentleman, I refrained.

We walked up together to the librarian, who explained that due to some technical difficulty a new card could not be issued to her just then. “But,” she said brightly, “your husband could take out one in his own name.”

I stood before her and gave the usual information: name, address, and so forth. Then she wanted a telephone number. “I don’t have a telephone,” I said.

“That’s all right,” she said. “Can you establish your identity?”

“I can,” I said confidently. “That is my profession.”

She waited, but I failed to produce anything tangible. Finally she asked, “Do you have a driver’s license?”

“No,” I said.

“Don’t you drive?”

“I do. I mean, I know how to drive. But I have too much respect for the public interest.”

She stared. “Do you have any credit cards?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “we did get a credit card in the mail some months ago. We had great difficulty destroying it. We couldn’t tear it, we couldn’t cut it, we couldn’t burn it. I think we may have buried it. You see,” I added, seeing her expression, “I like to pay cash for things. I don’t like being in debt.”

“That’s very admirable,” she said. “But I need something that tells me who you are. You must have some letter sent to you by somebody? Some card?”

That made a connection. “Yes,” I said, “I do have a card.” I owned the only membership card that the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation ever issued, and it was right in my wallet. “I happen to be the first member,” I explained with a touch of pride. I opened my wallet, and out fell Christine’s library card.

Sri Krishna is trying to tell us, “You already have your card. You don’t have to get another one. If you can get into your wallet, deep in that inside pocket you have forgotten, you will find the source of security and joy.”

SRI Krishna: 25. Alike in honor and dishonor, alike to friend and foe, they have given up every selfish pursuit. Such are those who have gone beyond the gunas.

These are astonishing statements, which deserve careful reading and reflection. Gunatita means literally someone who has gone beyond human limitations. He or she has transcended the barriers of separateness and self-will, which are the greatest scourge of this century. Only by rising above these states do we enter our true nature, which is to love, to forgive, to heal.

“Alike to friend and foe” has nothing to do with being indifferent. Sri Krishna is talking about good will, patience, forgiveness, understanding – not only to those we like or when it is convenient, but to everyone always. These are not moral maxims. When St. Francis says “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,” he is giving us a truth on which our very survival may depend.

For example, although most people buy handguns to make themselves feel safer, merely having a gun often heightens the sense of insecurity and suspicion. You start looking on everyone not as a friend but as a potential threat. Your guard is up everywhere. You are prepared to defend yourself against anyone, and you know that “the best defense is a good first strike.” Someone seems to be following you, he does something suspicious, and you shoot. If you get in a quarrel, your gun is handy. It has been estimated that 65 percent of all homicides are committed in a spasm of anger, jealousy, or fear, with handguns purchased for “self-defense.” Ironically, the same guns place the owners in greater danger too. It makes them aggressive, even cocksure, so that they are almost looking for trouble. Rather than deter assault and robbery, it seems to invite assailants to use a gun themselves. But guns are only the instrument. Suspicion and separateness pull the trigger.

The situation is the same between nations. Historians look back at the beginning of this century and see how clearly the seeds of World War II were sown in the fear, hatred, suspicion, resentment, and retaliation that accompanied World War I. Similarly, well before World War II was over, the Allied powers had begun among themselves a suicidal race for military supremacy that might well have ended in World War III. And in the last analysis, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to have been significantly motivated by a desire to “get even” for Pearl Harbor, as well as to impress on the Russians the kind of power we had and were willing to use. Violence breeds violence, resentment breeds retaliation, hostility perpetuates hostility – on a vaster and vaster scale, for higher and higher stakes. With nuclear weapons now in the hands of at least nine nations, each with its own alliances and desired spheres of influence, war between two countries might precipitate not only world war but worldwide disaster. Even scientists who worked on the first atomic bombs say today that they were not aware of what these weapons can do. They are not alluding merely to the deaths of twenty or a hundred million people in one or two nations. They are speaking of the effects of a nuclear exchange on the air, water, soil, vegetation, radiation levels, and species survival all over the globe. Now more than ever it should be clear that we live in “one world or none.” When two countries fight, even if they are not superpowers, the war involves much more than those two countries. The whole unity of life is violated.

SRI Krishna: 26. By serving me with steadfast love, a man or woman goes beyond the gunas. Such a one is fit to know Brahman.

Sri Krishna uses a strong word here, avyabhicara, for which “steadfast” is a pallid translation. The opposite is vyabhicarini – a prostitute, who tries to please many people. Those who give away their love and loyalty in many directions, the Gita says, can never reach life’s goal. This is not a penalty enacted by an outside power. When we scatter our love, consciousness is dispersed; how can we expect it to be whole?

For many years, sadhana means learning the skills by which we can unify desires. Gradually we subordinate everything else to the attainment of life’s supreme goal. Personal activities, attitudes, conditioning, prejudices, predilections, everything has to take second place. There is pain in this and a tremendous amount of self-denial from the flouting of self-will. The supreme quality here is endurance – the capacity to go on whatever the odds, to grow in determination as the challenges grow greater.

This requires tremendous discipline. Excellence in anything requires discipline; even to play marbles you have to practice, and here we are talking about the highest state of evolution. I was reading an interview with Nureyev, one of the greatest male ballet dancers in history. Ask him if he found it easy to scale the pinnacle of his art! All you and I see on the stage is spectacular, graceful, apparently effortless movement. Backstage, Nureyev says, it is a bloodbath. Margot Fonteyn uses equally strong language: if we only knew the torture a dancer imposes on herself to achieve that effortless grace, she says, we would feel we were watching a bullfight.

The Gita talks the same way. Sri Krishna reminds us, “This is a battle.” If you want to live at the summit of life, free from conditioning from the surface of consciousness clear to the basement, you have to fight for every inch of progress. It is not enough merely to transform rajas into sattva, which is a tremendous achievement in itself. Even in sattva thinking is conditioned, although your motives are pure. To be free you have to go beyond the gunas completely – beyond time, space, and circumstance, where the mind is completely stilled and the ego disappears.

To understand what this means, we need the personal testimony of men and women who have succeeded in this immense endeavor. Recently I have been reading the life of St. Teresa of Ávila, a remarkably modern woman of great spiritual genius who sanctified medieval Europe. She grew up with every possible advantage a girl in that age and place could have: she was cultured, talented, attractive, and high-­spirited, with a bright intellect and a strong will that in those days did not always work to her advantage. Yet she was so highly evolved that nothing fleeting could satisfy her. Even as a girl she could say passionately, “I want something that lasts forever!” This is the mark of mystical genius: not to be satisfied with something you can get today and lose tomorrow, but to demand a legacy that will be yours always.

This woman who was to become one of the world’s greatest mystics went through twenty years of doubt and struggle, torn between the pull of the world and the pull of God. When someone talks about attaining illumination overnight, I always want to reply, “Teresa took twenty years. Do you really think people like you and me should be able to do it in less?” Her words can inspire all of us, for everyone begins with doubts and conflicts and is likely to feel disheartened:

On the one hand I felt the call of God; on the other, I continued to follow the world. All the things of God gave me great pleasure, but I was held captive by those of the world. I might have been said to be trying to reconcile these two extremes, to bring contraries together: the spiritual life on the one hand and worldly satisfactions, pleasures, and pastimes on the other.

When you have doubts about your capacity for spiritual progress, which is only natural, it is good not to feel despondent, dispirited, or defeatist. That is the prerogative of tamas. Instead please remember St. Teresa and act as if you had no doubts at all. Keep on striving, keep on trying, and if you fall, pick yourself up. But never give up the struggle. This is all we are expected to do. Little people like us are likely to be haunted by doubts and conflicts for a long, long time.

Teresa was about forty-five when she became established in God. In Hindu mysticism this supreme state is called sahaja samadhi, ‘samadhi that never leaves you.’ Waking or sleeping, your awareness of the unity of life is not broken even for an instant. Then you have gone beyond the gunas once and for all.

SRI Krishna: 27. For I am the support of Brahman, the eternal, the unchanging, the deathless, the everlasting dharma, the source of all joy.

In this final verse, Sri Krishna is reminding us gently of the close connection between the gunas, time, and death. One of the pathetic characteristics of modern civilization is to try to cling to time as it rushes past, almost begging time to stop. We want to continue to be what we are now. We don’t want to be subjected to the ruthless physical changes that are an inescapable part of life. The deep-seated insecurity that results is what comes from a physical approach to life. As we grow older it leads to all kinds of problems, physical, emotional, and psychosomatic. None of our affluence or technology has been able to guard us against this nagging fear of inadequacy in the face of time’s advance, which haunts millions of lives today.

Nothing we do can prevent the body from growing older from the day that we were born. In the grim language of mysticism, our death began the moment we were conceived. When my mother dips her finger in ashes every morning to put a white mark on her forehead, it is to remind her and those around her that the nature of the body is to change, up to the last change we call death. Anybody who tries to stand on what is changing, who tries to cling to things that are slipping away, cannot help getting more desperate and insecure.

“When you live for the whole of life,” Sri Krishna says, “your state of consciousness will be mine” – that is, unfathomable love, which brings the unshakable security of knowing that every moment your life counts. In this state you are much more than a single, separate person. You become a permanent force that is released wherever you go, to ameliorate the terrible conditions which threaten the world today. Your life is an investment for every creature. No bear market can threaten this investment. It increases through good fortune and bad, and nobody has to buy shares to get the dividends; they are distributed to all. You are avyaya, inexhaustible: the more you give, the more you receive in patience, endurance, security, resilience, and love.