SRI KRISHNA: 1. Sages speak of the immutable ashvattha tree, the Tree of Life, with its taproot above and its branches below. On this tree grow the scriptures; seeing their source, one knows their essence.

This image of the Tree of Life is one of the most magnificent in the Gita. Most of this tree is not physical. The whole phenomenal universe – matter, energy, and mind – is only its canopy of leaves. This is all we can see. But each leaf grows from a twig, which grows from a branch, which in turn grows from a vast trunk. And supporting the trunk and all its leaves and twigs and branches, completely hidden, is the taproot, extending deep into pure being. Farthest from the root is the world of multiplicity and change: countless little leaves. But the taproot of this tree is the Lord, the eternal, changeless Self.

The application of this tremendous image is personal and practical. As long as we live on the surface of life, we believe we are separate, individual leaves. We lead private lives that bear no relation to the rest of the tree, even though when we are cut off from that tree we have no life. Look at the problems that face the world today because of this crude superstition that we are separate. We have violence in our streets and homes because individuals value no one’s welfare but their own. We have poverty and war around the globe because nations and corporations pursue private ends without regard to the cost to others. Most poignantly of all, we see men, women, and even children cutting themselves off from others around them so they can pursue what they want without hindrance. When we are driven by self-will like this, we cannot imagine we are forfeiting the whole of life for the little leaf we call our individual personality. So when you get up in the morning, while you are at work, before going to bed, or whenever you feel ruled by private passions, remind yourself of this magnificent simile, which asks us to claim the whole Tree of Life and not be content with being one passing leaf.

SRI KRISHNA: 2. Nourished by the gunas, the limbs of this tree spread above and below. Sense objects grow on the limbs as buds; the roots hanging down bind us to action in this world.

The Tree of Life, called ashvattha in the Hindu scriptures, is traditionally considered to be one of the giant fig trees found in southern Asia. A great deal has been written on the question of proper botanical classification: is this Ficus bengalensis, the banyan tree, or Ficus religiosa, the sacred pipal or bo tree, under which the Buddha attained illumination?

Shankara, who often drives Western scholars to exasperated footnotes, does not seem to care about this question. Instead he goes to the heart of the matter with a touch of imaginative etymology. Ashvattha, he says, can be derived from three little words: a ‘without,’ shva ‘tomorrow,’ and stha ‘standing.’ This is the tree of what will not be here tomorrow: in other words, of all created things. The universe today is not what it will be tomorrow; it changes even from instant to instant. Your body today is not what it was yesterday, and tomorrow it will not be what it is today. Every tissue is changing, even the bones. After some decades, the body will not be around at all.

Trees like the pipal and banyan are extremely long-lived. In an ancient temple compound, where you can see one still growing and spreading while the stones around it are cracked and worn with age, you feel that its roots must reach into the beginning of time. These species of Ficus also have another characteristic alluded to in this verse: what botanists call aerial roots. In some cases the seeds germinate not in the earth but high in some other tree (such as a palm) where they have been deposited by birds and monkeys. From there they send out long shoots that twine around the trunk of the mother tree until they reach the ground. Then they burrow in and become true roots.

The senses, Sri Krishna says, are like these aerial roots. When we yield to the clamor of the senses we are pushing consciousness out into sensory offshoots, making them longer and longer. Finally they reach the ground and burrow in, rooting us in the world of change. This is what the media promise us: the senses will supply everything we desire of life. “Indulge your senses,” they say. “Don’t be afraid to build your life on pleasure. If it feels good, do it!” By the time a person in this country reaches the age of twenty, he or she may have received this message a million times – from television and the movies, from magazines, newspapers, and books, and of course from the daily example of other people. With this kind of brainwashing, is it any wonder that our lives are as shaky as leaves?

The more we try to put our senses out to enjoy the world, the more we are sticking out our necks. I may be mixing metaphors, but this is an apt expression. People who are highly taste-oriented, for example, are extruding their palate farther and farther and farther. Obsessed with food, always thinking about what to eat and when and where and how often, they squeeze all their consciousness into their taste buds; they are feeling the world through the palate.

You will find such people very physically oriented – which means, among other things, that they get easily upset. Since they do not have much security within themselves, they try to correct their upsets by getting something from the pharmacy or the refrigerator and putting it into their mouths. Overeating is one of the most familiar illustrations of how consciousness can be concentrated on a particular sense organ, which really leaves it out on a limb. That is why Gandhi said the control of the palate is such a valuable aid to controlling the mind. If you can withdraw consciousness at will from the sense of taste, your mind will be much less upsettable.

The same can happen with any other sense. Children who grow up watching TV four, five, or six hours a day are squeezing much of their consciousness into their eyes. Those who listen for hours on end to quadraphonic sound are putting consciousness in their ears. In this way, consciousness is a little like toothpaste: it is easy to squeeze it out, but excruciatingly difficult to get it back into the tube again. When consciousness has been extruded into the senses, not much is available where it is needed – for concentration, security, sensitiveness, self-reliance, and imagination.

We should be able to withdraw consciousness from the senses at will, the Gita says, as easily as a tortoise withdraws its limbs into its shell. When we see a lot of goodies displayed in a bakery window and the palate is clamoring for us to move closer and glue our eyes to the glass, we should be able to say “Withdraw!” and recall consciousness back from the palate into the core of our being. The sense organs – taste buds, nerves, and so on – will be physically the same, but consciousness will not be present to activate them. Later, when we approve – say, when faced with a nutritious, tasty meal – we can send consciousness back out to the senses and enjoy our food.

All the senses can be trained this way. You are not forcing them inside or putting them in jail to punish them for their excesses. You are telling them, “When the sun is shining and it’s good to play, come on out; make hay. But when the weather gets cloudy, come in and take shelter.”

This means a tremendous consolidation of energy. Prana ebbs out through the senses; that is why people who overindulge their senses often feel tired and inadequate. Their resistance is low, the will is weak, and judgment gets clouded just when it is needed most. When you can regulate your senses, you can enjoy everything beneficial and still protect your mind and body against the ravages of undue indulgence.

I see advertisements for vacation cruises that proclaim, “Our ­dining room is always open!” After breakfast you’re not locked out until noon; you can come for a snack, come again for lunch, and still return for high tea before dinner. The variety of dishes is endless. And when you’re not dining, you can float in the pool with a cocktail: the drinks are free, so you can drink as much as you like. Then at night there are parties, movies, and gaming tables going until dawn; you never have to sleep. Now and then you get a day in a duty-free port, where you can pick up a few expensive items you don’t need. When the cruise is over, I imagine, they even have a fleet of ambulances waiting to take you to intensive care. This kind of indulgence leaves us vulnerable to every wind that blows.

When the senses come under control, prana is consolidated in the will. I like to repeat that what matters in life is not so much IQ as WQ, “will quotient.” There is no harm in having a high IQ, but it is not of much value in helping you deal with anger or fear. I have known gifted people with high IQs who were utterly unable to tackle their fears and conflicts. No amount of talking or reasoning could help; they had to deepen their will by digging through stratum after stratum of consciousness. When the will gets deep enough you can reach down into your unconscious, pick up a fear, and throw it out. After that, if you encounter a big fear again in your digging operation, you know you will be able to deal with it. Then that fear can no longer make you afraid.

It is the same with anger. Angry people are usually quite self-willed. They don’t have the strength to be patient or turn back harsh words because self-will eats away the will. If you want to transform anger and harness it, you have to strengthen the will.

When you have some detachment, the will becomes a kind of emotional barometer. You can use it to tell when storms are coming, probably more accurately than your local weatherman can predict rain. You go to your willometer in the morning, tap it a couple of times, and ask, “What’s the weather going to be like today?” If you did your best yesterday to control your senses and reduce self-will, your will has to be stronger. Then it doesn’t much matter what external events come your way; the day is going to be clear for you.

Trying to talk out anger and fear has become so commonplace today that I never mind repeating the Gita’s very practical advice. Instead of analyzing your fears and resentments – putting them under a microscope, scrutinizing them from different angles, classifying them, talking about them, reading books about them – work on strengthening your will. Brooding over these problems only makes them more obsessive. But as the will gets taller, emotional problems like fear, anger, and greed get smaller. When you have a strong will, if you feel lethargic, you can flex its muscles and watch your lethargy disappear. If you feel diffident, flexing the will brings self-confidence. A strong will can transform fear into fearlessness, anger into sympathy, resentment into compassion, hatred into love.

The intimate relationship between senses and sense objects is a recurring theme in the Gita. Just as aerial roots reach out for the ground to dig themselves in, the senses reach out to root themselves in objects of sensory experience. There is nothing wrong with this. It is the nature of senses to grasp, and there is nothing immoral about the force of their attraction, any more than there is about physical forces like magnetism or nuclear binding energy. Forces are not wrong; it is the use to which we put them that can be wrong.

In meditation, we learn to withdraw and consolidate prana from the senses back to its source. This takes years to learn. At first, though we are trying to give our attention completely to the passage on which we are meditating, we hear everything that goes on outside us. The reason is that consciousness is still in the ear, waiting to catch sounds. But as you learn to sink deep into yourself, you withdraw consciousness slowly from the ear. The organ still functions, but no hearing takes place. It is the same with the other senses too. St. Teresa of Ávila relates that she was so absorbed in prayer one evening that the candle she was holding burned down to her fingers without her being aware of the pain.

When we are pleasure-oriented, on the other hand – as our whole modern civilization is – consciousness is always looking for sense-stimulation. Some part of the mind is constantly watching for pleasant experiences on the surface level of life. Consciousness is out on the patio with binoculars, searching for sensations like a bird-watcher. The patio is the skin: most sensory stimulation is only skin deep. When we live in a world of skin-deep pleasures, they seem to be fabulously sweet, incredibly intense. Only when we leave the patio to retire deep into what Teresa calls the “interior castle” do we get a real standard of comparison. Once we discover the riches of this inner realm, we laugh at ourselves for sitting in the patio and gloating over some third-class mail from the senses.

SRI KRISHNA: 3–4. The true form of this tree – its essence, beginning, and end – is not perceived on this earth. Cut down this strong-rooted tree with the sharp axe of detachment; then find the path which does not come back again. Seek That, the First Cause, from which the universe came long ago.

Most of the Tree of Life, we should remember, lies in the world within. Sri Krishna is telling us to get beneath the surface and trace our way back to our source.

One school of thought speaks of this Tree as an illusion, because separateness is an illusion. But I would say each leaf is precious. Each individual creature deserves our respect, love, and protection. So instead of talking about cutting down trees, I would rather talk about digging to the root, deep in the soil of consciousness.

Meditation is the tool for digging. I don’t know if you have ever had to dig up an old, established tree; when the surface of the ground is knotted with thick, hardened roots, it can be painfully difficult to break through. Similarly, for many years in meditation we have to dig hard to break through the crusted strata of samskaras we have accumulated over the years – or, from the Hindu and Buddhist perspective, over many lives. To do this, we have to keep a sharp edge on our meditation. Like any tool, it must be kept in good condition. If it is not used for a week, even for a day, it will get rusty.

Sometimes the surface level of consciousness is soft loam, easy digging for the first twelve inches or so. You are still on the surface, but because the blade of your shovel is turning over soil you say, “This is easy! Isn’t meditation great?” Then you strike something hard and impenetrable. Your hands sting from the shock, and your arms ache. That is the first stratum of bedrock – a dense, rock-hard layer of tamas, sheer resistance.

One of the most common signs of hitting this layer is that you find yourself overcome by waves of sleep in meditation. It is very much like your shovel striking a rock. You are saying, in effect, “My shovel is getting blunted, and my arms are tired. Why not stop digging and have a snooze?” It is extremely important not to yield to this inclination, right from the first days of meditation. These are problems that continue for years. We have a lot of strata to dig through, and those who do not learn to deal with sleep in the early stages have a terribly difficult time later on.

When you have learned to dig effectively, you strike through this bedrock of resistance and change your level of consciousness. This has to be done under the skilled, personal guidance of your teacher. You can no longer afford to be self-willed or to be a victim of your senses. If you haven’t reduced your self-will and trained your senses and passions well, on a deeper level of awareness you will encounter serious difficulties in daily living. That is why I always tell those around me not to increase their period of meditation without meeting the basic requirements. They should be getting enough exercise, nourishing food, and adequate sleep, and they should be careful not to isolate themselves from the give-and-take of life, which is essential for reducing self-will.

The signs that you have changed a level of consciousness are utterly practical: better health, more energy, better control over your cravings, less self-will, and more of the joy that comes from drawing nearer to the unity of life. Unless these tests are satisfied, I say over and over again, please don’t go by anything you see or hear in meditation, any sensation you experience, any “vision” or dream. All these have very little relevance to daily living. Do you have more patience and security? Do you find it easier to get along with difficult people? Can you turn your back on your own likes and dislikes when necessary, to contribute to the welfare of those around you? If you can, you have changed your level of consciousness. If you cannot, the chances are that you are not yet ready to change.

Sri Ramakrishna, I believe, describes the role the gunas play in this. Sattva, rajas, and tamas all have to come on stage; otherwise life’s drama cannot be enacted. Tamas, he says, is the rock of resistance. This is a reassuring description: without a rock, how can you develop your digging arm? Rajas, of course, is hard, energetic, sustained digging. And sattva is the mastery that comes when you have overcome tamas deep in consciousness and are making steady progress.

SRI KRISHNA: 5. Not deluded by pride, free from selfish attachment and selfish desire, beyond the duality of pleasure and pain, ever aware of the Self, the wise go forward to that eternal goal.

Self-will is responsible for most of our spiritual problems, many of our emotional problems, and even some of our physical problems too. Broken relationships, disloyalties, and disruptions in spiritual progress can generally be traced to self-will. Everyone who wants to attain the supreme state, Sri Krishna says, must fight self-will until victory is won. It is a long, hard, uphill battle.

One very helpful strategy is to remember the needs of the whole always. Don’t ever go just by what appeals to you or what you find pleasing; that is the way to separateness. Go against your likes and dislikes whenever it is in the interests of all, and then continue to go against them resolutely until victory is won.

This can’t be done just from ten to twelve on Sundays. We have to go on fighting all the time, everywhere. Most of us have two personalities, the public and the private, which makes for tension, conflict, and vacillation. When you learn to fight self-will continuously, this deep division heals. Public and private personalities merge, until you are the same in all circumstances and all roles.

Selfish desires need a lot of attention. They are not very hardy; unless their needs are met precisely, they cannot last long. If we do not water and fertilize them regularly – thinking about them, dreaming about them, planning, wishing, fantasizing over them – they will wither and die. To get plants to thrive, I understand, it is considered helpful to talk to them in soothing, friendly tones. Selfish desires thrive on talk too; the more we talk about them, the stronger they get. So whenever you feel driven by a compulsive, selfish desire, throw yourself into work for others. It can starve the desire away, at least for the time being.

In the way we work, the way we eat, even the way we play, we can always do what is in the interests of the whole. For a long time, of course, this cuts across our likes and dislikes. But even then we reap benefits. The more likes and dislikes we have, the more physical and psychosomatic problems we are likely to develop; worst of all, the more turmoil we will feel inside. People with strong likes and dislikes go about with a little sign that says, “Upset me.” Everywhere they go, they meet a lot of other people wearing the same sign who are only too happy to oblige. Those who are free from likes and dislikes, on the other hand, are full of security. They function in freedom wherever they go. Once you reach this state, Sri Krishna says, you will live there always. You will never fall back into insecurity, turmoil, or disloyalty.

SRI KRISHNA: 6. Neither the sun nor the moon nor fire can add to that light. This is my supreme abode, and those who enter there do not return to separate, selfish existence.

The Self is the source of light. When you attain it, as Sri Ramakrishna says, you feel like a fish swimming in a sea of light. Everything separate disappears, everything that is dark with ignorance.

We are so used to this darkness that we mistake it for reality. We cannot recognize light because we believe the darkness is light. This makes for a very upside-down world. People who exploit separateness are called successful; those who make war are immortalized in bronze or marble. This is living in pitch darkness, Sri Krishna says, and calling the darkness day. Those who really see are those who forget themselves completely in living for the welfare of all.

St. Teresa of Ávila refers to the various levels of consciousness as different mansions in the interior castle of the soul. When you go from one floor to the next, there are sudden experiences of blinding light. This seems to be a characteristic phenomenon in the deeper stages of meditation. You are so completely absorbed in going through the words of the inspirational passage that your mind is completely one-pointed; not a single ray of your mental energy is flickering. As the Gita says, your mind is as steady as the flame of a lamp that is kept in a windless place. Then you are ready for the tremendous experience of dazzling, radiant light that St. Augustine describes so vividly:

I entered into the secret closet of my soul, led by Thee, . . . and beheld with the mysterious eye of my soul the Light that never changes, above the eye of my soul, above my intelligence. It was not the common light which all embodied creatures can see; nor was it the same kind but greater, as if the light of day were to grow brighter and brighter and flood all space. This light was none of that, but something other, altogether different. . . . He who knoweth truth knoweth that light: and who knoweth it, knoweth eternity. Love knoweth it.

Not only dazzling light but limitless love floods your heart, the infinite compassion that Buddhism calls mahakaruna, which embraces all life. The Franciscan mystic Jacapone da Todi says,

Love above all language,

Goodness unimagined,

Light without measure

Shines in my heart!

“Love above all language”: your heart is flooded with love; it bursts its barriers. The dam of separateness breaks, and a great sea of love surges up from inside – “goodness unimagined,” love for all creatures, all individuals, all countries, even those who may have offended or wronged you. And “light without measure”: even the sun blazing in the sky, the source of all physical radiance, borrows the effulgent light from your heart and mine. To understand this is to realize the immense glory of being human.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. An eternal part of me enters into the world at birth, assuming a body and mind made of prakriti.

8. When the divine Self enters and leaves a body, it takes along its samskaras as the wind carries a scent from place to place.

In the long drawn-out drama that is sadhana there are three actors. One is the Self, the changeless Atman, pure Being. This shining Self is within all, yet it cannot shine forth because of the mask of negative qualities and self-will that we call personality. This is the second actor, called jiva in Sanskrit – the separate, individual ego with which we identify ourselves. And third is Maya, the compulsive sense of separateness: as Evelyn Underhill puts it, the “web of illusion, here thick, here thin, [which] hems in, confuses, and allures” us in our evolution toward Self-realization.

Part of Maya’s power comes from the fierce clamor of the senses. This is an inheritance we have received from the animals, a natural part of our evolutionary heritage. Its power is especially poignant in personal relationships; for as everyone who has been through the experience knows, any relationship based on physical attraction has to end in heartbreak. It is not merely that the relationship comes to an end so soon; physical desire sets up such fierce expectations, and the disillusion that follows can last so long that some people never recover from it. All this is the work and delusion of Maya. Even today, when I see a movie depicting scenes of entanglement and sorrow, I breathe a fervent prayer from the bottom of my heart to Krishna, the same prayer that Sri Ramakrishna used to repeat over and over: “May I never fall under the spell of Maya again!”

In the terms of classical mysticism, only one of these three actors, the Self, can be called real. Yet to the extent that we identify ourselves with the jiva, our ever-changing personality, we live as well in the “unreal” world of change, bound to it by self-will and the fierce, compulsive play of the senses. The farther we progress spiritually, the more we become aware of the gulf that yawns between these two worlds: the one of sheer physical existence, the other of pure spiritual being. Yet eventually – this is the marvel of samadhi – a bridge is built between the two. Then, as Sri Aurobindo says, the divine invades the physical world; even in physical things we see the radiance of the Lord.

“In every creature,” Sri Krishna says, “a little part of me is present.” Those are very personal words that go right into my heart. Not only human beings but even the lowest creature has a spark of divinity within, infinitesimal but inalienable. It is this tiny part, he tells Arjuna, that travels through time in the process of reincarnation. The life-line of the jiva runs back five billion years or more; in five billion years, I could say, the amoeba has become me. This is perfectly compatible with biological evolution. But spiritual evolution does not consider this blind growth; it would not even call it arbitrary. We play a part in our own evolution; that is the vital difference. The other influencing factors – time, circumstance, and so on – are still present, but we hold the key in every life. “All that we are,” the Buddha says, “is the result of what we have thought.” And not merely the result: the word he uses is manomaya. This jiva is actually ‘made of the mind’ that we have used for many, many lives. There is no reference here to any external or supernatural power. My growth is entirely in my hands; your growth is entirely in yours. The continuous improvement we are able to make in the quality of our thinking is what decides our lives.

Not only that, this is what decides even the kind of body we have. According to the Gita, I have worked on my body for many lives. There is a quiet correspondence between the kind of body I have and the kind of mind I have. Just in the course of one life it is not difficult to see how the way we think shapes the way we eat, work, sleep, and exercise; how it determines the risks we take, the occupations we enter, the places we live in, the people we live with, and the way we respond to stress. All of these have an obvious bearing on our physical well-being. Now, says the Gita, extend the same influence over many lives: just as in this life we develop the health and physical condition that our thinking warrants, we enter the next life with the right kind of body to pick up where we left off.

There are many, many factors in this, as I shall attempt to illustrate. Personality is not at all a simple picture. So I would not recommend that anyone try to analyze why he or she has a particular kind of body or wonder how some physical liability can be traced to a past life. It is enough to understand that there is a connection, and that whatever our physical condition, we can rest assured it is the right one for working out our samskaras and going forward on the spiritual path.

In the same way that each jiva shapes the body by its thinking, each of us lives in a personal world very much of his or her own making. We experience the world as we are; we respond to it as we are; we are continuously reshaping it according to how we are. That is what the Christian mystics mean when they say, “My sin is stamped upon my universe.” But the Hindu mystic would say, “My goodness is stamped upon my universe.” Both statements are true: one simply takes the perspective of the jiva, while the other looks at the world through the shining Self.

The divine fragment called the Atman is the same in all people, all races, all creatures. This is not theory; that is how you actually see life after the Self is realized. The other day a kid was born prematurely to one of our angora goats, and a friend took a picture of me holding the tiny, fragile creature in my arms. When I saw the photograph I said, “That’s not just a guy and a goat.” I was not looking at myself; I saw the Atman, realized in me through billions of years of evolution and still latent in little Gautami, the goat, to be revealed in her after perhaps millions of years of evolution more. In that picture Gautami and I are gazing into each other’s eyes. She is marveling, “I’m going to look like you someday!” And I am smiling back: “Well, millions of years ago I looked like you.” That awareness fills my heart with joy and releases an immense desire to save the lives of all these creatures, knowing they are not merely my kith and kin but the same spark as you and I.

This divine fragment travels through time from stage to stage in evolution, revealing a little more of its divinity at every stage. Our dog Muka, for example, shows more of the spark than a tiger does; our cow Shobha shows more than a panther. Even in the human context this development continues. People who are terribly violent may look like human beings, but they still live largely in the animal world. Similarly, though someone who has extinguished self-will may look like the rest of us, he or she is no longer in the animal world at all. Such a person, Sri Krishna says, “lives in me” – in the state of Krishna-consciousness, Christ-consciousness, from which there is no fall.

As the jiva travels through time, it picks up a samskara in every stage of evolution. Our dog Muka is adding a samskara to his jiva-nature, and so are his canine friends Hebbles and Ganesha – three very different dogs. The black cat who lives in our greenhouse, whom the children call Luther Purrbank, is developing a samskara of his own: he still claws the hand that feeds, and I have very little doubt that he will continue to do so when he becomes a human being. Every creature adds a samskara of its own, a tiny seed of a samskara in every life. And, these verses explain in thrilling poetry, the jiva blows through time like a wind, starting five billion years ago as a little breeze and growing stronger and stronger, blowing through the phenomenal world to its end. When a spring breeze blows through a garden, it picks up fragrances from the roses and nasturtiums and sweet peas so that though the flowers remain, their essences are carried on. In much the same way, this jiva-wind picks up samskaras in every life. That is how the immaterial karmic legacy of each of us is carried on: not in the body, not physically or chemically, but by this wind of prana.

And from life to life the samskaras become heavier, more complicated. Good and bad, kind and unkind, selfish and selfless, mingle into a complex perfume that we call personality. Against the background of millions of lives, this makes for highly elaborate combinations. One person’s greed, another’s anger, may be a million years old. But no one is all greed or anger. Each of us has redeeming qualities too: a bit of love, a little forgiveness, a touch of sympathy to offset our jealousy. That is what makes the human personality such an elaborate, complicated affair.

This verse adds a subtle but very interesting touch: it is not only the samskaras of the mind that are carried along like this, but also those of the senses. The mind is called the “sixth sense” here because there is such a close relationship between it and the other five members of the sense family. Each sense can have its own samskaras, carried on from life to life, and these sense-samskaras have a telling effect on health.

Modern medicine, for all its triumphs, has one serious limitation: it looks for a cause of illness in something outside us. This approach is valid on the physical level, but it is incomplete; therefore it is inadequate. Of course external circumstances or agents can cause sickness. But there is also a mental factor, not only in so-called psychosomatic ailments but in every case of illness, because of the effect the mind and senses have on the immune system. So when the Buddha says, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” it includes our illnesses; it includes our general health.

The Gita, I would say, goes a step further than the world of medicine today. It takes in not only the physical body but also what spiritual psychology calls the mental or subtle body, which is closely linked to the physical organism by a very quiet correspondence. In this view, for an illness to develop, bacteria or bacilli are not enough; you must also have developed a susceptibility to that illness. How is it that of ten people who are exposed to the same bacillus, nine may succumb and one escape? Some say chance, others luck. Most physicians would offer the explanation that there are innumerable differences in individual physiology and genetic makeup, including resistance to disease, but this is still on the physical level and only begs the question. The explanation I would give in the light of verses like these is that the immune system is not just a physiological or biochemical network; there is a corresponding mental network also. Resistance is not merely physical, and among all the myriad factors it involves, I would give the mind primary importance.

There is scope for a whole volume on this subject, and someday I hope to write one; the ramifications for the healing professions are tremendous. Here let me just touch on a few aspects, to give some idea of the depth of application these verses offer.

First and foremost, I would say that if you want the highest resistance to illness of any kind, then a deep desire to live for others is a tremendous immunological force. The same is true for resistance to the ravages of time. From my own experience, as well as from the towering example of my grandmother, I can testify that the vast majority of problems associated with old age – problems with vitality, memory, attention, endurance, resilience – need never arise at all.

Every older person, even those who do not meditate, can draw inspiration from my small example. I have probably ten times the vitality I had when I was thirty, and perhaps a hundred times the capacity to contribute to life. I may not be able to run the way I did then, but my judgment is sounder, my understanding is deeper, and my endurance is greater; I can work long hours without tension or fatigue.

If you lead the kind of life many older people do, of course, the problems of senility are inevitable. Living for oneself, indulging the senses, having no overriding goal, all make tremendous demands on prana, and in the latter part of life we do not have prana to lose. But if you have an overwhelming desire to contribute to the welfare of others, if your heart is full of love for all, Sri Krishna promises that he will magnify all your faculties – your memory, your creativity, your energy, your resources, your capacity to draw people and win their love and respect and help them to change their lives. All this happens naturally when prana is conserved.

This desire to live for all can extend to the roots of your being. Psychologists talk about the importance of the will to live, but that generally means no more than the will to live for oneself. It can go no deeper than the ego, beneath which lie vast worlds of consciousness. Because we see only the surface of personality, we cannot understand how shallow the ego’s will to live often is. But the will to live for the whole of life, because it goes so deep, preserves and strengthens us down to the core of our being.

Second, and closely related, is what happens to the immune system when your heart is flooded with love. I am not thinking of love for one person here and another there, no matter how deep or genuine. I mean love universal, continuous, “love without an object.” It expresses itself in countless little choices you make throughout the day, all of which have a direct bearing on physical health.

I can give my own example again. When you haven’t been able to sleep for two or three nights, as everyone knows, the adverse effects can be terribly debilitating – not only physically, but mentally and intellectually as well. It is only natural at such times, especially for those who are older, to want to sleep on until the sun is high in the sky and then go and sit in the patio over a cup of tea. This is the body’s legitimate response, dictated by certain physical principles. But the body also responds to spiritual principles – because, among other things, they dictate the flow of prana, on which the body draws for energy. Depression, for example, inhibits the immune system because it drains prana. In the same way, I would say, the capacity to love others more than yourself floods the immune system with prana, strengthening it immeasurably.

I get very little sleep, often only three to four hours a night; I have not had more for many years. This is one of the developments that can take place after samadhi: once you wake up in the depths of the unconscious, you feel a very deep-seated reluctance to abandon, even for a few moments, the continuous awareness of God. I have actually had to teach myself to fall asleep again, and I feel rather pleased with myself when I manage to drift off in the mantram in the early hours of the morning. This kind of pattern produces a good deal of physiological stress, and once I do fall asleep, my body’s natural need is to go on sleeping late into the morning. Instead I get up early for meditation and then go to the beach for a long, fast walk. Ask yourself if this is the natural response to a sleepless night! Northern California beaches are cold and foggy in the morning; I do not go for pleasure. I go for exercise, so that my body will stay healthy and strong for many years more – not to enjoy life longer but to continue the work of our meditation center, which stands to benefit millions. That is the motivation. I come back from the beach with a ravenous appetite and have a really good breakfast to see me through another long day of work.

All this is to illustrate how even physical faculties can be invigorated and physical limits extended by the immense desire to live for others. This is not at all like driving oneself for personal gain, which takes a terrible toll on the body. Though I have maintained this pattern for years, day in and day out, I do not feel fatigued by it; I thrive on it. So I have no hesitation in saying that none of the problems associated with advancing age are necessary. Not only that, you can look forward to doing much better in the second half of your life than you did during the first.

Sickness, I said earlier, is caused by an external agent with the cooperation of an internal agent, the mind. The link is the immune system, through which resistance to disease is lowered or enhanced. To connect this with this verse I have to bring in the law of karma to some extent; for Sri Krishna says that from one life to another, it is not only the samskaras of the mind that are carried along but also the samskaras of the individual senses. This is a subtle distinction, but it means that samskaras which begin in the mind gradually become more physical, until they begin to invade the body through the senses. This is the first stage of disordered health.

A samskara of pleasure, for example, can become particularized through constant overindulgence in eating – and not only eating, but reading about food, talking about food, cooking, observing, thinking, tasting, imagining; in short, through dwelling constantly on the pleasures of the palate. Over years, over lifetimes, what began as a mental habit takes over the sense of taste and becomes a physiological compulsion with very real physical problems. I don’t like to sound occult, but when you know this is a person’s mental state you can actually anticipate the kind of problems he will have in the next life. You can list them for him, a, b, c.

The implication is acutely practical: because such problems are not caused only by something outside us, they cannot be cured only by something from outside us. I wonder how much drugs can cure an illness, however much they may help with symptoms. To solve even a physical problem you have to get inside the mind, which is the purpose of meditation and the mantram.

Take the most pronounced characteristic of our contemporary society, rage. You can take a person who is full of rage and almost predict the kind of physical and emotional problems he will have the next time around. There is nothing particularly occult about this. When a person comes into life with certain pronounced proclivities, he will find himself drawn into situations that provoke those proclivities. Without realizing it, an angry person will seek out circumstances that enrage him; he will get into situations that make him more hostile or resentful. These are the natural consequences of an anger samskara, and their purpose, if I may so call it, is to teach us to change our way of thinking.

If we do not learn, however, the samskara gradually invades the body. This can happen in many ways, depending on the individual. We have to remember that each of us comprises countless samskaras, which can reinforce or counter each other in patterns as complex as those of the ripples that dapple a lake. One angry person, for example, may develop peptic ulcer; another, some pulmonary disorder: anger changes the breathing rhythm, and chronic anger can lead to chronically disordered breathing. This process continues over many lives, but you can see it develop even in the span of a single lifetime. In any case, once the condition is established, that person comes into life with a tendency to serious breathing problems. As soon as he finds himself in contexts that provoke him – an angry home, an angry teacher, angry classmates, an angry partner – the physical problem erupts.

The positive side is this: Meditation, as I can testify from helping thousands of people, can help you use the same situations, formerly detrimental, to improve your health and state of mind. The same circumstances that once would have wrecked your health can actually be used to rescue it. That is why I say when someone is angry with you, put up with it cheerfully; return good will and do not withdraw your support. It will help that person, but it will help you even more, by helping to solve your physical and emotional problems too.

This is tough, I agree. But isn’t surgery tough? That is the way the Buddha talked; he always called a spade a spade. Surgery is a frightful procedure. It amazes me to see how willingly people in this country submit to it. Instead of getting myself into an untenable health problem and then paying through the nose to go through the trauma and indignities of surgery, I much prefer to take my health into my own hands.

You do not have to attain samadhi to do this, but you do have to change not only your lifestyle but your thoughtstyle. Then, as meditation deepens and you can repeat your mantram from a deeper level of awareness, prana is gradually withdrawn from sense-samskaras and consolidated as vitality, resilience, and resistance to stress and disease.

SRI KRISHNA: 9. Using the mind, ears, eyes, nose, and the senses of taste and touch, the Self enjoys sense objects.

In Sanskrit the stuff of the mind is called chitta, which you can think of as a peculiarly elastic modeling clay. Chitta is pure, shapeless consciousness, which takes the form of individual containers like you and me. It flows out through the senses, following desire; it goes where our attention goes. When you are listening to your favorite rock group in quadraphonic sound, chitta runs out of the mind and into the ear. Then it is difficult to get it back in again. This is prana that is flowing out, vital energy that is lost. That is why people who get conditioned to loud, agitating music usually find their security falling and their restlessness swelling past endurance.

The other day I went into a record store in Berkeley while Christine was shopping across the street. Loud rock music was playing as I went in, and everybody in the store – customers and staff alike – was doing a kind of St. Vitus’s dance in time to the beat. I just stood and watched; I couldn’t believe my eyes. Imagine doing this every day! When you subject yourself to this kind of music regularly for a couple of years, this is how you are going to be inside. Not only your limbs but your nervous system will jerk and bob about everywhere you go, even during your sleep. Your body may not be bobbing, but the movement has got into the mind. When the mind is dancing to St. Vitus’s tune, it is in a constant state of excitement or depression, a condition that has become endemic today.

As the mind travels further and further from the center like this, the lines of communication with the Self become overextended. We need fresh supplies of security, energy, judgment, willpower, but the supply lines are broken; we cannot get in touch with the center of our being. Depression or despair may set in; discrimination, sound judgment, is exhausted. We may set off in pursuit of anything that promises satisfaction, whatever the cost, though our vital capacity for enjoying anything has already been drained. Like a ship that has lost its anchor, we are at the mercy of any storm that comes.

In reaching out through the senses, we travel far away from the indivisible unity of life at the center of our being. To get back, we have to rise above everything that is separate in us: our physical urges, our emotional cravings for aggrandizement, our compulsive imposition of self-will on all around us. These are powerful forces that fling consciousness away from its center. If we are to turn and travel inward, each of these forces has to be harnessed.

To do this, it helps a good deal to look on everybody else as an extension of ourselves and on ourselves as an extension of everyone else. When we are physically oriented, we think we stop with the outermost layer of our skin. Inside that boundary is home territory. There I have to consider my comforts and conveniences, my pleasure and profit, because this is home. After all, if you don’t take care of your own home, who will? But beyond that, we don’t care what happens. “That’s not my problem,” we say. “It’s Bob’s. That’s his home, not mine.”

Those who live for physical satisfaction are driven by this sense of otherness, which cannot help leading to alienation. They become estranged from others because they are estranged from themselves. But if you can break through the surface stratum of consciousness, you will find the gap of separateness becoming narrower and narrower. You get a sense of nearness to people. Where formerly you saw a chasm between you and your partner, now you see only a little creek; with practice, you can jump right over.

How close can you move to your partner, your boyfriend or girlfriend, when some disagreement is pushing you apart? How easily can you yield your own opinions for the sake of the relationship? How gracefully can you go against your own self-will? When someone you love is going off in a wrong direction, can you correct that person with respect and sympathy, even if it means some temporary agitation? If you can do these things, you are making excellent progress. These are the arts of love, which have been completely forgotten in the modern world.

As long as you are self-willed, you will find a long distance between you and those around you, even your boyfriend or girlfriend. No matter how much you try to be together, you will not be able to lessen this distance until you raise the banner of revolt against your own ego. If you want to assess your meditation, take your tape measure out every New Year’s Day and measure the distance between you and your family. Our natural tendency is to think of ourselves as the center and others on the circumference. Instead, think of yourself as the circumference; the rest of life is the center. Every year we should be able to move closer to the center. The marks are more patience, deeper understanding, greater security when things do not go our way.

To draw closer to others, you have to rebel against yourself. Often you will have to hurt your own private feelings so that others can benefit. “Thy will be done,” Jesus says, not “my will be done.” Thy will is unity; my will is separateness. It is so terribly difficult to practice this that most people do not try; those who do try often do not persist. But if you have the inner toughness this fierce fight requires, you will find you need less and less tape to measure the gap between you and others. Finally you discover you are at the center, no longer separate from the whole. Then you can throw the tape away.

SRI KRISHNA: 10. The deluded do not see the Self when it leaves the body or when it dwells within it. They do not see the Self enjoying sense objects or acting through the gunas. But they who have the eye of wisdom see.

Until the mind is stilled it is not possible for any human being, however gifted, to see the unity underlying life. The mind is not equipped to see unity. It is meant to register change on the surface of life, and to that which does not change, which has no parts, it is simply blind.

In the Buddha’s presentation, the mind is not a thing or a state; it is a process. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf might have been interested to learn that the idea of a stream of consciousness was well worked out in Buddhist circles twenty-five hundred years ago. According to the theory of kshanikavada, each thought is born and dies every moment. There is no connection between one thought and the next and the next; each is separate from the others, like frames on a movie film. And just as in a movie, what makes things look connected is the speed at which these separate thought-frames move by.

Some time ago a filmmaker friend brought home a print of an old Humphrey Bogart movie. For almost two hours we watched a lot of fast, furious action. Afterwards, before it was rewound, I went to look at the film. Terry obligingly unrolled a few yards at the end and brought out his little magnifying glass. There was no action at all. We saw a lot of shots of someone standing with his hand up, then out; then some other chap is leaning precariously backward. But no blow takes place. You see this, then you see that, and you put two and two together and say, “Ah! He hit him. Hit him again, Bogie!”

This is what happens in the mind. A fast mind means a lot of thoughts crowding through, trying to get by at once. Each is separate, but they are all crowded so close that they are like a row of dominoes. You knock over the first thought – “She is looking at me with the corner of her mouth turned up” – and all the rest fall over in an instant, until the last thought topples off the edge of the table and you conclude that she is smirking because of that one stupid remark you made at Henry’s two weeks ago. “What a small mind she must have,” you say, “to go on acting amused because of something that happened two weeks ago! What about all those stupid things she said?”

This absurd process is the ego – ahamkara in Sanskrit, that which makes us feel separate. This is the film that is always going on in the theater of consciousness, even while we sleep. When we slow it down through meditation, the day comes when we can see for ourselves that every thought is separate. Where formerly thoughts were crowding and jostling each other like rush-hour commuters on the downtown subway, you begin to separate them. I remember a cartoon in an English magazine showing a team of American football players bent over in a huddle. A goat on the sidelines, taking this as a personal invitation, was lowering its head to charge. This is what you do in meditation; you start butting clinging thoughts apart. Finally you slow the thinking process to such an extent that each thought comes freely, without dragging any others along with it. Then your responses are free; conditioned thinking becomes a thing of the past.

When thoughts are crowded close together, it is very difficult to get free from the tyranny of thinking. We are helpless, particularly in the peculiar instance of circular thinking, in which the same old thought goes round and round: “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.” That is all anger is, the same compulsive thought over and over. Most of us do not know what to do with this. If it gets particularly oppressive – usually as we are tossing and turning in bed – we may exclaim to ourselves, “If only I could stop thinking!” But we do not know how.

This kind of obsession is like a scratched record. The needle has got stuck, and all the mind can do is repeat the same thought over and over. Yesterday a friend was playing a Beatles song that made no sense to me at all. John Lennon, I believe, was singing, “I am the egg man, I am the walrus . . .” “Very good,” I said to myself, “this is a song about the unity of life.” Then he went on, “I am the walrus, the walrus, the walrus, the walrus.”

“Julia,” I said, “why does he go on like this? Can’t he think of anything else?”

Julia just laughed. “The needle’s stuck,” she explained. “Doesn’t it sound funny?”

When the mind gets stuck, it makes very little sense to wail to yourself, “Why does it do this to me? Can’t it think of anything better?” Once you can elbow your thoughts apart, you can lift the needle when it is between two thoughts and place it a groove or two ahead, where the whole thinking process can pick up as if nothing had happened. This is a truly amazing accomplishment. Most of us know that when we get angry, resentful, afraid, or agitated, although we may have honorary degrees or be the union’s toughest negotiator, we cannot do this one little thing: put out a finger, lift the needle, and make the song move on. That is what meditation can do.

The more self-willed we are, the closer thoughts get to each other. Self-willed thoughts are a gregarious, pushy lot; they like to put their arms around their buddies, climb on each other’s shoulders, and generally make themselves at home. But as self-will subsides, thoughts become as orderly as if they were on parade. In a marching band, aren’t you supposed to keep a precise distance from the person in front? Your thoughts will become like that; they keep a certain distance. If someone offends you, it will not provoke a resentful response. You may feel a little displeased, but you can drop your displeasure immediately.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. Those who strive resolutely on the path of yoga see the Self within. The thoughtless, who strive intermittently, do not.

One of the reasons Sri Krishna gives for people being self-willed, separate, and selfish is laziness. It’s a simple but penetrating diagnosis. They are not prepared to make the effort of reducing self-will, even if they would like to be secure. They are not willing to work on their consciousness to try to remove what is negative. They follow the path of least resistance; wherever self-will flows, they follow. As a result they often end up becoming automata, without any life to their credit.

People like this remind me of the trucks I see sometimes taking a big mobile home along the freeway. They have red warning flags sticking out on both sides, front and back, and big signs that warn, “Wide Load.” Everybody on the road moves over as far as possible, because they know there is no arguing with this fellow; he will just get into your lane.

Self-willed people are very much like this. You may not have meant any offense, but their nerves are so raw that they will take offense. You may have meant only a slight joke; all you expected was a laugh. But they go home, dwell on it, and come back the next day with that remark inflated into a big problem.

This is what happens when you dwell on yourself: you take a limp little balloon of a problem, keep on blowing it up, and make it huge. It is helpful to remember that the personal problems we talk over with confidants, write up in our journals, brood over, and dream about are not as big as they seem. We have inflated them by thinking about them for hours, until they become huge. We may not be able to see the red flags or read those warning words, “Wide Load”; but others know, and avoid us when they see us coming.

Many, many people today who are intellectually gifted, materially prosperous, personally attractive, culturally advanced, have been hypnotized by separateness and inflated by their own importance. Whatever their gifts, Sri Krishna says, they cannot see unity. Therefore, their opinion or contribution cannot be of permanent benefit to ­humanity.

SRI KRISHNA: 12. The brightness of the sun, which lights up the world, the brightness of the moon and of fire – these are mine.

Yesterday Christine and I went to the Hyatt Regency hotel in San Francisco, which has achieved notoriety for its unusual architecture. I always appreciate a good view, and I wanted to visit the revolving penthouse restaurant from which you can look out over the whole city.

We entered the Regency’s portals and went straight to the top, the Equinox. I felt like a wide-eyed boy set down on another planet. A nice server came and showed us to a plush corner with huge windows and mirrors on all sides, where she promised we would be able to get a good view.

Then the usual restaurant topic of vegetarian food came up. This can lead to highly philosophical discussions about what comes with what and how it is prepared, whether fish and birds can count as vegetables, and other botanical and ontological topics. At the end of all this the server said, “I’ll bring you a special chef’s salad.” That suited me perfectly. “There’s no need to hurry on,” I assured Christine. “Why don’t we sit here until we’ve seen the whole city pass by?”

Out of the window we could see the ships coming and going in San Francisco Bay. While we worked our way through the salad, the Bay slipped out of sight and more and more of the city swung into view. “Look at that!” I said to Christine after a while. “You can see Coit Tower.”

Christine laughed. “That’s not really Coit Tower,” she said.

“Of course it is,” I said. Everybody in the Bay Area knows Coit Tower; it looks like a giant fire hose nozzle.

“You’re looking at its reflection,” said Christine.

She was right. I realized suddenly that I had been looking in the wrong direction, gazing into one of the full-height mirrors with which our booth was paneled. How much of what I had been watching had been real? I couldn’t tell what was window and what was mirror.

“There,” I said, pointing in another direction. “Isn’t that the Equitable Insurance building?” Another landmark; I recognized the parking lot.

Christine looked closely. “That’s not a window either,” she decided. “In fact, I think it’s not just a reflection; it’s a reflection of a reflection.”

I lost all confidence in my vision. Only when we escaped from the Equinox and got back to Union Square did I feel I knew where I was and what I was seeing.

Shankara compares the whole phenomenal world to a city seen in a mirror. This is not a poetic fancy. When we look at people as physical entities, talk to them and deal with them and try to possess or manipulate them as if they were physical entities, we are dealing with reflections of our own mind-making. Just like Coit Tower, they do seem real. Until Christine pointed out that I was looking in a mirror, I would have sworn that I was looking at the real Coit Tower. Even then, in order to understand that this was only a reflection, I needed to be able to compare it with something real. In the Equinox I could do that simply by looking in a different direction. But in life, if you want to see what is real, you have to get below the surface level of consciousness.

This illusion can lead to painful comments on relationships, particularly the romantic. “Making love,” for example, has no necessary connection with love. I would say this is “making physical relationships” – making reflections of reflections of love. Love means affirming the unity between two people; indulging in physical relationships for physical satisfaction is denying that unity. Anyone who has tried to build a relationship on sexual attraction knows how fleeting it is, how soon satiation and irritation come.

We have a story in India about a courtesan who was notoriously fond of money. One evening a rich man came to her salon and happened to see her standing before a mirror. The image was so voluptuously beautiful that he went and gallantly kissed the reflection. Immediately she said, “That will be one hundred rupees.”

This was a resourceful chap. He took out a hundred rupees, held it up, and gestured toward its reflection in the mirror. “You may collect that,” he said.

It is tragic, but in personal relationships we are often dealing with a reflection. Trying to possess somebody is trying to possess a reflection; it cannot be done. Imagine Romeo seeing Juliet’s reflection and carrying away the mirror! That is just what physically oriented people do when they try to possess, manipulate, and enjoy. Sooner or later this is accompanied by negative reflections of reflections: doubt, jealousy, insecurity, alienation, frustration, anger, depression. Love never asks “What can I get from this person?” It asks only, “What can I give?” That is the way to go beyond reflections to the real person.

After we finished our salad at the Equinox and paid the bill, we didn’t know how to get out. We wandered around the periphery looking for one of those glowing exit signs, but all we could see in that eerie half-darkness was windows, mirrors, and red plush. Finally we asked our server for help. “You just walk out,” she said. We had been looking for some special exit, but right in front of us was a gap through which we could pass from the Equinox back to the everyday reality of San Francisco.

“Don’t wait for signs,” Jesus says. Right where we are standing we can find the exit from the world of separateness and enter into the world of unity. All we have to do is turn our backs, to the best of our ability, on our private needs, demands, and self-indulgences.

Otherwise, the Gita says, the world we live in will become darker and darker. Living in separateness means being dominated by private urges, trying to have our own way and do only what we like, unable to see what cries out to be done for the welfare of the world around us. When this darkness becomes deep enough, we can’t see which direction to go; we will always be losing our way, never coming out at all. When we decide to say no to private, personal urges, we start to enter a world of light where the path is clear. We know where we are going, and we can travel safely and surely.

SRI KRISHNA: 13. With a drop of my energy I enter the earth and support all creatures. Through the moon, the vessel of life-giving fluid, I nourish all plants.

14. I enter each living creature and dwell within as the life-giving breath. I am the fire in the stomach which digests all food.

These verses again refer to prana, the primordial energy underlying all the forms of matter and energy with which we are familiar. The universe hums with prana, and its forces and processes can be described as the flow of prana. The Upanishads say that prana streams from the sun and flows into plants to be stored, to be released later in human beings and animals when the plants are eaten, to power the work of the body, senses, and mind. No biologist would find this inaccurate; it is a poetic description of what the life sciences would call “energy flows in an ecosystem.” I have seen textbooks refer to the oxidation of food as “the fire of digestion,” which echoes the Gita almost word for word.

We can also think of prana as flowing through time, powering the growth of the Tree of Life since the universe began. It is the energy of evolution, pushing its way through root, trunk, and branch to feed each individual leaf. And when a man or woman nears the end of the evolutionary journey and takes to meditation, this immense power bursts into new levels of activity.

I can illustrate this with an incident that occurred yesterday evening while we drove across the Richmond Bridge. Suddenly the roadway began vibrating wildly. I thought to myself, “Well, the earthquake has finally arrived.” Every few years, you know, papers and magazines in California start carrying fresh predictions that this is the year in which the San Andreas Fault is finally going to allow half the state to slide into the sea. But as it turned out, this was no quake. A huge ship was passing beneath the bridge, unseen in the gathering darkness and the fog. Its horn went off just as we reached the central pier, shaking the car with its blast.

That is how it feels when a long-standing samskara comes to the surface from the depths of the unconscious. You have to face it and do battle with it, which brings upheavals on every level of personality, physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. We have to be prepared to change with these impacts and develop new ways of living – more aware of the unity of life, less and less aware of the fragmented personality we once were.

This tremendous adjustment is accomplished through the energy these verses call ojas. The word has several implications. Partly ojas means the will, running all through the conscious mind to the very depths of the unconscious. Partly it means the prompt obedience of the senses, body, mind, and intellect to the slightest signal of the Atman. Few of us have ever experienced this. Our usual state of personality is a free-for-all, where senses, feelings, judgment, and so on behave like those electric bumper cars at county fairs, skittering about colliding with each other. When this erratic activity subsides, there is a great consolidation of vital energy that flows into your life like a steady stream.

Ojas is prana in the intense, superconcentrated form called kunda­lini. All of us have a vast reservoir of this vital energy, which is the power that impels the individual creature through higher and higher states of evolution. In those who are selfish, kundalini is hardly used. They do not need it; they are living just for themselves. To get along on the surface level of life, we need just one candlepower of kundalini. But we have much vaster capabilities, merely by virtue of being human. As we begin to economize our extravagant expenditure of sense-energy, kundalini gradually rises. Every time we defy a strong sensory urge, a little more of its power is available to us.

On the other hand, indulging a powerful desire like sex for the purpose of sensory satisfaction prevents kundalini from rising. There is a vitally close connection between kundalini and sex, and though we are not asked to become ascetics on the spiritual path, it is essential to get hold of this vast source of power and bring it under our control. I always have to repeat that this does not mean the faculty of sex is lost. It means simply that you have a choice in when and how it is expressed – which very few of us ordinary human beings can honestly say we have.

When sexual passions are fanned into flame, how difficult it is to understand that we are not our desires! Once we are caught in the fire, we have no freedom. The push is so fierce that we feel we have to succumb. At such times we are not using our desires; our desires are using us. All the Gita is saying is that we should not serve them; they should serve us. When sexual desire is mastered, it floods the body with the invigorating energy of kundalini and strengthens the will until it cannot be broken by any tragedy, calamity, or danger.

SRI KRISHNA: 15. Entering into every heart, I give the power to remember and understand; it is I again who take that power away. All the scriptures lead to me; I am their author and their wisdom.

Sri Krishna is continuing the same theme: that everywhere in the universe he is prana.

When Einstein discovered that matter and energy are interchangeable and began looking for a unified field theory, he may have had a concept like prana in mind. But prana not only underlies matter and energy on the physical level; it is also the power supplying the world within. If there is potential energy in a body at rest, imagine the energy in a strong desire or in compulsive anger! One fixed desire can launch a man or woman through thirty years or more of sustained, energetic action; it can overpower a continent, free a nation, transform a technology, eradicate a disease. All that power is prana. We have ample evidence of the immense energy in the nucleus of an atom, but when I say that there is as much energy in a thought, people think I am being poetic. As an acorn gathers prana and explodes into an oak tree, thoughts explode into action. If the thought is big enough it can work on for decades, draw in thousands of lives, change the course of history.

Dr. Hans Selye discovered that a laboratory rat can adapt to cold and other kinds of physiologic stress until it can not only survive but thrive under conditions where an unadjusted rat will perish. If the rat gets enough food to meet its body’s energy needs, it should be able to continue in this state indefinitely. Yet, curiously, there comes a point at which something “gives out.” After that, this well-fed rat will die if it is exposed to even moderate stress. Selye asks properly, What is lacking? Some other kind of energy, he concludes: some inner reservoir of vitality that stress has finally drained. He calls it “adaptation energy.” I would call it prana.

Dr. Barbara Brown, a physiologist in biofeedback research, made some related observations. She came to the conclusion that vital energy – she calls it “nervous energy” – is leaking out from us into the environment all the time. I differ with some of her conclusions, but I admire her originality of mind, and I found this an amazingly perceptive observation. This energy too I would call prana. Dr. Brown says she does not know how prana leaks out, of course; the loss is not physical, though it has physical effects. And she does not know how to stop it. But the Gita and the Upanishads would explain that whenever we desire something through the senses for their satisfaction, prana ebbs out. Not only the physical act of satisfying a desire, but the desire itself depletes our vital energy.

This leakage means loss of vitality, of will, of the capacity to adapt to and thrive under the normal stress of life. To prevent this, it is absolutely essential to be able to close and open the sluice gates of the senses at will. This means developing the inner equipment and the skill to release prana whenever you have a giant job to undertake for the welfare of all – as did, say, Mahatma Gandhi, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Ávila – and to withhold prana when some private, personal yearning is clamoring to be fulfilled. This magnificent capacity can strengthen the will immeasurably and make the body healthy, strong, beautiful, and vital.

Ultimately it is in the depths of meditation that prana is dammed until our reservoir of vitality is full. For prana is not lost only through the senses. It is drained whenever the mind is scattered and divided, pulled in all directions by different thoughts – which, for most of us, is most of the time.

Conflict, for example, is a prime drain on prana. Most conflicts arise because a selfless thought and a selfish thought want to occupy the same place in the mind. Often the selfish thought comes in first; when the right thought opens the door, there is Mr. Wrong with his feet up on the table. “This is my mind,” he says. “Nobody was at the door, and I got here first.” He doesn’t want to go, so naturally a tussle ensues.

Much of our prana is wasted not in making decisions but in the conflict we go through before we make decisions. We put ourselves on both sides, as Augustine says, and then we fight it out. Whichever side wins, we lose the prana. We enter a dark arena to fight with the wrong thought, and after a while we discover we are pummeling Mr. Right by mistake. “Excuse me!” says Right. “I thought you were on my side.” “Right you are,” we confess. “Where’s Wrong?” We go back to hitting the wrong thought for a while, and then somehow we switch sides again; and so it goes, back and forth, through the day and into the night. The next morning we are exhausted, and the problem is no closer to being resolved. “Arjuna,” Sri Krishna asks, “where is the need for all this? Why not just post someone at the door? If the right thought knocks, let it in. If the wrong thought knocks, tell it to leave.” When conflicts disappear, we get a tremendous accumulation of energy.

The next great consumer of prana is worry. Worry means that prana is leaking out through a thousand little wormholes. Most worms I have seen are small. Worries, similarly, may not be big thoughts, but a thousand of them means a lot of prana lost. When a person generally feels unequal to challenges or tries to avoid personal problems, the reason is often this constant leakage of vitality through worry.

Some people cannot help worrying. You give them a job like opening an umbrella and they immediately start thinking, “Suppose it doesn’t open? Suppose I get wet and catch a cold?” It is better to try to do a job, even if it turns out wrong, than to keep worrying about it and putting it off. “If I do this, there’s going to be this trouble; if I do that, there will be that trouble.” Do it and get into trouble if necessary; then you will at least know how to do it better the next time.

The cure here is “The early mantram gets the worry.” Worry only enervates; it serves no purpose. If you can learn to peck up worry-worms with the mantram, you will have so much energy that you will never feel unequal no matter how big the challenge. You will have energy and time to offer even after your regular duties are done: time to do more, to give more, to live more.

A third waster of prana, perhaps the biggest, is depression. Your doctor will tell you that most people today accept depression as a condition of life, largely because they think it is biologically unavoidable. We live; therefore we get depressed. Most of us have even lost the capacity to question this. We say, “Well, we just have to learn to live with it.”

Again, this is because no one is watching the door of the mind. When excitement arrives, blowing its trumpet and trying to knock the door down, we say, “Whoopee! Somebody’s brought me some joy; bring it right in!” We get so excited that we can’t sleep, we can’t stop talking; the mind is in overdrive twenty-four hours a day. In short, we fling the door of the mind open wide, all because we’re so anxious to be pleased. And while we’re entertaining Pleasure, her twin, Depression, slips in. You can’t keep her out, because you’re holding the door open to every thought you can get in. But you don’t notice Depression till a few days later, when you come home and find, instead of your dream date, a little note taped onto the door: “Thanks for a lovely time – someday we’ll have to do it again. Last night’s lasagna is in the fridge. I asked my sister to keep you company.” There is Depression, looking up at you with sunken eyes; she hasn’t even got enough prana for a smile.

Sri Krishna always gives Arjuna free choice. “You can go after pleasure if you like,” he says. “But if you do, you have to accept depression too.” Arjuna doesn’t say anything, but his eyes ask, “What’s the alternative?” So Sri Krishna adds, “Control your mind.” When Excitement knocks and wants to move in, just say, “Why don’t you try next door?” Then you can entertain angels. For when excitement and depression vanish, the state of mind that remains is joy. You have freed yourself from conflict, anxiety, anger, and fear; sorrow will come no more.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. In this world there are two orders of being, the perishable, separate creature and the changeless spirit.

I have been reading a thoughtful book, Mankind and Mother Earth, in which Arnold Toynbee refers to the human being as a “psychosomatic organism” – part psyche, spiritual; part soma, physical – who lives necessarily in two realms. “In the biosphere,” he says, we act “within a world that is material and finite.” That is precisely the language of this verse. Kshara means limited, exhaustible, perishable, finite. The term has become particularly poignant. Until recently, most of us believed that the biosphere was inexhaustible; we could do what we liked with its resources. Today we know that everything in our physical environment is limited: food, trees, minerals, soil, even water and air.

“On this plane of human activity,” Toynbee continues,

Man’s objective, ever since he became conscious, has been to make himself master of his nonhuman environment, and in our own day he has come within sight of success in this endeavor – possibly to his own undoing.

This is a simple point, but it is often ignored. No matter what technological miracles we achieve, Toynbee says, we can never separate ourselves from the rest of the biosphere. We are a part of this “nature” that we want to master.

But our “other home, the spiritual world, is also an integral part of total reality,” says Toynbee:

it differs from the biosphere in being both nonmaterial and infinite; and in his life in the spiritual world, Man finds that his mission is to seek, not for material mastery over his nonhuman environment, but for a spiritual mastery over himself.

Our nature is infinite. Therefore, the Upanishads say, nothing less than infinitude can ever satisfy us. If we forget that our real home is the world of the spirit, imperishable and changeless, we will go on trying to mine, refine, extract, harvest, and manufacture an infinite number and variety of things out of an acutely limited world.

The very air we breathe is exhaustible. Berkeley used to scorn Los Angeles for its smog, yet already clean air in the Bay Area is the exception rather than the rule. Last week children in San Francisco were asked not to run and play outside because the air was so thick with smog – smog caused by greed. If we loved our children as we profess to, we should remember that the air is limited, exhaustible, a perishable member of the family of life. Treat it gently, the Gita says; treat it with care. Don’t blow fumes into the air or dump poisons into the rivers and oceans just to make more money; and don’t fan overconsumption by buying more and more things you do not need. It is not only manufacturers who carry the responsibility for pollution. Insofar as we tell them, “Produce all you want! We’ll buy whatever you make,” the rest of us are responsible too.

In economics it is considered imprudent to live off your capital; in fact, in times of inflation it is imprudent even to live off your interest. We have been spending the stuff of the world wantonly, as if it were profligate interest on some eternal trust. Instead it is apparent that this is irreplaceable capital.

This is the first point made by the perceptive economist E. F. Schumacher in his brilliant little classic, Small Is Beautiful. I like the subtitle very much: Economics As If People Mattered. Schumacher, who has absorbed a great deal from Gandhi and the Buddha, questions all the assumptions of modern economics, and he does so in language that is simple, persuasive, practical, and profound. Other economists probably find this exasperating, but he is not writing for other economists. He is writing for people like you and me, who he feels can make a difference. “A businessman,” Schumacher says,

would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital. How, then, could we overlook this vital fact when it comes to that very big firm, the economy of Spaceship Earth and, in particular, the economies of its rich passengers? . . .

Look at the figures that are being put forward under the heading ‘World Fuel Requirements in the Year 2000.’ If we are now using something like 7000 million tons of coal equivalent, the need in twenty-eight years’ time will be three times as large – around 20,000 million tons! . . .

What is so special about the year 2000? What about the year 2028, when little children running about today will be planning for their retirement? Another trebling by then? All these questions and answers are seen to be absurd the moment we realize that we are dealing with capital and not with income: fossil fuels are not made by men; they cannot be recycled. Once they are gone, they are gone forever.

Then he comes to the essential conflict:

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.

Thus even a great economist is led to the theme of this chapter: our isolation from the Tree of Life. We do not think of ourselves as part of nature, Schumacher says, “but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. [Man] even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that if he won the battle he would find himself on the losing side.” That is what separateness does, and in this “outside force” we can recognize our old friend rajas. As Barry Commoner reminds us, technology has become such a terrible threat not because it has failed but because it has been so successful. It has succeeded so tremendously that since 1945 we have witnessed more technological progress, if that is the term I want, than in all the preceding years of human history; and the consequences of this progress threaten to close the pages of human history.

“Man,” Toynbee points out, “is the first species of living being in our biosphere that has acquired the power to wreck the biosphere and, in wrecking it, to liquidate himself . . . . [He] is an integral part of the biosphere, and if the biosphere were to be made uninhabitable, Man, as well as all other species, would become extinct.” It is good to remember that this is not rhetoric but a literal possibility, fraught with suffering drawn out over generations on a scale this tormented world has never seen before.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. But beyond these there is another, the supreme Self, the eternal Lord, who enters into the entire cosmos and supports it from within.

18. I am that supreme Self, praised by the scriptures as beyond the changing and the changeless.

19. Those who see in me that supreme Self see truly. They have found the source of all wisdom, Arjuna, and they worship me with all their heart.

“Supreme Self” here is Purushottama, after which the chapter is named – the highest ideal we can have.

Even without talking about spiritual values, it can be said that most of the meaninglessness in modern life comes from our having no ultimate purpose, no overriding goal. The strongest argument I can offer against personal pleasure and profit is that they cannot function as a goal. And without a comprehensive purpose, events cannot make sense to us; incidents cannot be related to a whole. We don’t have a framework for making wise choices. That is why every one of us has a crying need for the highest ideal, on which we can keep our eyes always. Whenever we wander, we can still find our way back. All of us, being human, are likely to make mistakes in life. But when we have a great purpose that transcends passing, personal satisfactions, a goal that rises high above the horizon like the polestar, we need not get lost and wander in the maze of our mistakes. By keeping our eyes on this shining ideal, we can retrace our steps, correct our error, and continue to pursue our journey until we reach the goal.

The pursuit of wealth is often placed before us as a goal. Most of us know people who launched some enterprise with the best of intentions and then slowly got possessed by the profit motive, losing all vision of life. There is nothing wrong with a fair profit on a beneficial product or service. But without a higher goal, there is no point of reference to warn you when the profit motive begins to lead you into activities and ways of living that can wreck your life or the lives of others.

Every country today has examples of how the compulsive desire for profit has driven people to make things that ruin human health. Many of the handguns used in violent crimes in this country are assembled here from parts made in Germany, so that manufacturers in both countries can realize their profits without actually violating the law. Drugs prohibited in the United States because they may cause cancer or birth defects are pushed shamelessly in Third World countries where regulations are lax or nonexistent. And there is probably no growth industry so bullish this century as that of munitions, where companies from a handful of countries – led, I am sorry to say, by the United States and a few other developed countries – thrive on the business of pumping lethal hardware into any nation that will buy, washing their hands of any consequences. The list could be multiplied dozens of times without effort, so commonplace has “business as usual” become today. Once you see this, you rule out the giants of business and finance as ideals to be followed.

Similarly, in almost every country, personalities from sports and entertainment are held up as ideals. People want to look like them, talk like them, live like them, though they may be far from happy. Sports, movies, and the like do have a place; all of us need some time for exercise and relaxation. But if you do not have any higher purpose, you can end up setting your goal in life on perfecting your tennis strokes or cutting down your time on the mile. We must have an ideal. If we do not have anything big enough, we clutch at whatever is available: football players, race drivers, rock singers, movie stars.

All the great religions give us a supreme goal that brings out what is best in us from the very depths of consciousness. Jesus or Sri Krishna or the Compassionate Buddha is placed before us as an ideal for one reason: so that insofar as is in our capacity, we may gradually become like these luminous figures in our lives and hearts.

Toward the end of his life, St. Francis of Assisi asked his companions to stay behind while he went up into the wild, secluded heights of La Verna for solitary prayer. After some thirty days and nights, just before sunrise, he entered a state of deep ecstasy – what the Hindu mystics would call samadhi, union with the Christ within. In that supreme state he prayed fervently for two favors: “The first, that I may, as far as it is possible, feel in my soul and in my body the suffering which thou, O gentle Jesus, sustained in thy bitter passion; and the second, that as far as it is possible I may receive in my heart the overflowing love that moved thee to suffer so much for us.” So complete was his identification with the Christ, the chronicles say, that he experienced both: the unutterable joy of complete love and the other side of that love, the cruelty of the wounds which Jesus suffered on the cross.

This complete identification is the meaning of samadhi. Those who attain it feel the joys and sorrows of others exactly as they would their own. They suffer and rejoice with all. The rest of us – less evolved, more self-centered, more separate – are scarcely aware of the full extent of suffering around us. The more separate we feel, the easier it is to forget about others’ troubles, ignore the tragedies that surround us all, and bury ourselves in the pursuit of personal satisfactions.

The more you grow in selflessness, the more deeply you will feel the sorrow that throbs at the heart of life. But this is not a paralyzing sentimentality. Wherever you see suffering, you will have to do something to relieve it. You will never throw up your hands at the magnitude of a problem and say, “There’s nothing I can do. The world is going to pieces; let it go.” Your deep identification with all of life will release the resources to go to the causes of sorrow and devote your life to alleviating it.

SRI KRISHNA: 20. I have shared this profound truth with you, Arjuna. Those who understand it will attain wisdom; they will have done that which has to be done.

This simple phrase was a favorite of the Buddha’s too: “That which was to be done has been done.” No grand poetry, no trumpets, no philosophy; just a quiet statement that life’s supreme purpose, the goal of millions of years of evolution, has been attained.

The implication is sobering: until we reach this state, nothing has been done. If you come and tell Sri Krishna that you have won the Irish Sweepstakes, climbed Annapurna without a sherpa, become the first woman to venture beyond Mars, he would say, “That isn’t what has to be done. You haven’t accomplished what you are here for.”

Once you have done what has to be done, you have no interest in making money; therefore you do not exploit others or pollute the environment. Greed has left you, and so have anger and fear. You are no longer interested in your personal pleasure, so you are not capable of selfish attachment. You see life clearly, and you will not do things simply because they please you. There is nothing more you can want from life, nothing more that life can offer you except the opportunity to give.