SRI KRISHNA: 1–3. Be fearless and pure; never waver in your determination or your dedication to the spiritual life. Give of yourself freely. Be self-controlled, sincere, truthful, loving, and full of the desire to serve. Realize the truth of the scriptures; learn to be detached from material things and to take joy in renunciation. Do not get angry or harm any living creature, but be compassionate and gentle; show good will to all. Put others first and yourself last. All these, Arjuna, will reveal your real nature, which is divine.

Some time ago I was reminded of this chapter when I picked up the morning paper and exclaimed to Christine, “This layout artist must have been reading the Gita!” There, facing each other on inside pages, were stories illustrating the two paths between which the Gita says each of us has to choose continually: an upward path that leads to abiding joy, a downward path that leads to increasing sorrow.

The left-hand page was an interview with a man offering advice on how to come out “on top” in the economic, social, and ecological disaster that he says is sure to come. Without reading more than the opening sentence, I knew which path he represented and where it had to lead. Because of its very premise – how to grab, not how to give – the advice he offers cannot lead anywhere but down.

He started with some grim forecasts: an economic collapse, acute food and energy shortages, rioting and pillage in the cities until production could be restored. Against the backdrop of ecological hazards and the likelihood of nuclear war, it did not make an attractive picture of the future – particularly, I thought, if you went on to follow his advice about how to face all these calamities. By the time I finished, I felt I was back in the Stone Age, defending myself with rocks against neighbors who wanted to steal my spark plugs and cans of tomato soup.

It was a great relief to look on to the next page and find it entirely devoted to the upward path, the way of love. The layout was dominated by photographs and eyewitness accounts of the arrival in Oslo of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, come to receive the Nobel Prize for peace. To me this was one of the most promising events of the year. As you know, the prize doesn’t often go to a real peacemaker, and here it was being presented to someone who had never addressed herself to war directly but had simply gone about trying to help the poor. There was a charming photo of her with the children of Oslo, presenting her with a gift that must have meant more to her than the one she had come to collect: a “Poor People’s Nobel Prize” of money collected from grassroots supporters. And there were stories about her childhood, her work, and her reception in Oslo, where she won my heart by asking the Nobel Committee to forgo the usual banquet in her honor and give the money to the poor instead.

Mother Teresa is one of those beacon figures who represent what the Gita calls here “the path that leads to the divine.” Her life provides a very personal illustration of how the qualities in these verses gradually purify personality, allowing the divinity within us to shine through.

Mother Teresa was not born in India but in Yugoslavia. She went to India at the age of eighteen as a missionary, and took her vows as Sister Agnes to become a teacher in a girls’ school in Calcutta. She must have been an excellent teacher; even now she confesses, “I love teaching most of all.” If she had continued in that profession, doing what she loved, the world would rightly have considered her a success.

Instead something happened to change her life completely. At the age of about thirty-five, I believe – well into her vocation – she was traveling northward to Darjeeling, seven thousand feet above sea level in the Himalayas. The route passes through some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, vistas of such beauty that the cities and problems of humanity seem as distant as a dream. But for Sister Agnes, a bomb burst in consciousness that must have been ticking away for more than a decade. “In that train,” she recalls simply, “I heard the call to give up all and follow Him into the slums to serve Him among the poorest of the poor.”

Calcutta in those days was “the second city of the British Empire,” an enclave of British power and a center of Indian culture. St. Mary’s School for Girls was a tranquil, well-kept, secluded place, with beautiful gardens and bright, responsive students from the aristocratic families of Bengal. Leaving her school, Mother Teresa has said, was harder even than leaving her home. St. Mary’s must have held for her the fulfillment of most human desires: beauty, companionship, comfort, security, the rewarding awareness of success in a selfless profession. She left it all without hesitation to join the homeless who lived in the streets and slums outside the school walls – with one rough, white cotton habit draped like a sari, a few rupees, and no plan but to follow her call. It was not an impulsive act; she was careful first to get some training in medical care. For the rest, however, she proceeded just as St. Francis had at a similar stage in his life: step by step, by helping the first person she encountered, then the next, then the next.

Today, like Francis, Mother Teresa has an order of spiritual descendents that ministers to the poor and dispossessed around the globe. Millions, I feel sure, revere her as a saint. Yet to me, what is most memorable in her story is that like the rest of us, she was not born a saint. Step by step, over decades, by making selfless choices that any man or woman can make, she ascended what the Gita calls the bright path that leads toward divinity. We do not start life with virtues perfected; no one does. We simply do our best to practice them, and as we practice they get stronger.

There were portrait photos on each of these two pages: one of the doomsday counselor, the other of Mother Teresa. The first showed a solid, honest man in his forties, confident, energetic, and self-reliant. You could see from the look in his eyes and the set of his jaw that he was sure of his ability to take care of himself and his family come what may. I guessed that he set high standards for himself, and expected others to measure up to them too. It was difficult to imagine him defending spark plugs against marauding neighbors. Yet if I were a gambler, I would bet any odds that at least in the physical sense, this man and his family would survive the future whatever it brought. He would pay the cost without even being aware of how high a price this kind of survival exacts.

How different to look at Mother Teresa’s face, shining from the opposite page! Small, frail-looking, but suffused with vitality, she wore her body as casually as she wore that white cotton sari; like Gandhi, she scarcely seemed aware of it. And in every photograph – with children in Oslo, with dignitaries, with the poor again in Calcutta – you could see how her smile and her deep, dancing eyes lit the faces of those around her. She would not survive whatever the future might bring; she would thrive. The more life tried to take, the more she would give. No one seeing her would ever question if she were happy. From their faces you could see where each path leads.

SRI KRISHNA: 4. Other qualities, Arjuna, make a person more and more inhuman: hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, anger, cruelty, ignorance of the unity of life.

I wish I could go on about Mother Teresa, but it is Sri Krishna’s unpleasant duty in this chapter to show Arjuna the dark alternative. It is a grim picture, but sooner or later every spiritual teacher finds it necessary to say clearly what will happen if the teachings of the scriptures are not followed. It puts life in proper perspective for us and gives us motivation.

In Sanskrit the two paths of this chapter are named after the states of consciousness to which they lead. Daivi, ‘divine,’ comes from the word deva, which literally means a god. The root sense implies something shining, effulgent, full of light. And asuri comes from asura, which means a demon. In Hindu mythology the devas are the forces of light; the asuras, their perpetual enemies, are the forces of darkness. These forces interplay throughout history, and from time to time, when the powers of darkness become so strong that they threaten to overwhelm the earth with suffering, the Lord is born as a savior to rally the powers of goodness and restore dharma, the unity of life. In the Mahabharata he has come as Sri Krishna, and we should picture him now speaking these words to Arjuna as they stand by their chariot between the vast armies of light and darkness, waiting for the outbreak of war on the Armageddon of their world.

This is history from a spiritual perspective, and it is not at all inaccurate. Yet at the same time, we should keep reminding ourselves that these are essentially forces within each of us. Self-will does wreak havoc on a global scale, but every disaster we face today – war, violence, starvation, cruelty, terrorism, ecological suicide – has not only been “born in the minds of men” but fostered there, nurtured, and unleashed in the world.

By folk etymology the devas are also called suras, as if asura meant ‘not sura’ the way ahimsa means ‘nonviolence’. Scholars may not agree with the derivation, but it makes a practical point: without what is sura, divine, what is left is demonic. If you want to make yourself into a demon, you don’t have to take a correspondence course or buy expensive paraphernalia. All you have to do is never do what a deva does. You won’t achieve success overnight, of course. To become a real king of demons, you have to allow your personality to deteriorate for a long period of time. It happens so slowly, so naturally, that you may not notice the change from day to day. But as old Mad Narayana used to show us, it’s as easy as rolling downhill. Before you know it, you’re at the bottom.

In the previous verse Sri Krishna listed many qualities that make personality more divine. Imagine that you had a roommate who never practiced any of these: not somebody evil, but simply a person who always took the course of least resistance. He would have no control over his thoughts, words, acts, or passions, but would be vacillating and self-centered twenty-four hours a day. He would never tell the truth, and he would have an awful capacity to hold a grudge. He would be anxious, arrogant, lazy, greedy, and bad-tempered. You would say, “Not exactly heaven!” That is what “demonic” means.

No one, I would venture to say, is born an out-and-out, incorrigible demon. Because the Atman is present in each of us, each has the innate capacity to make choices that benefit others instead of only ourselves. Personality is a process: we make ourselves more and more demonic, or more and more divine, with our own thoughts, words, and actions. Very simply, the qualities Sri Krishna lists here are moods and attitudes that worsen us. Almost everybody suffers from them at some time or other. But if we indulge them and go on indulging them, we deteriorate – physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Self-will is the proper name of this affliction, and it is worse than any of the killing and crippling diseases we know of today because it brings distress not only to us but to everybody around us. The main reason we cannot see it as a disease is that there is such a lapse in time between cause and effect. The course the Black Plague took was clear enough; a person might cough two or three times in the morning and be dead by the next day. But in the case of self-will, you cough and think it’s just pollen in the air. The adverse effects are too subtle to be recognized, too apparently unrelated, too far down the line of cause and effect.

Even physical ailments can be like this: a person exposed to radiation may not show signs of cancer for twenty or thirty years. Similarly, we may notice that our relationships are growing rocky, or that we can’t find a job we like, or that our allergies are worse or our blood pressure dangerously high, without ever suspecting that all these can be traced to inflated self-will. We watch our neighbors arm themselves in fear, read in the papers about the breakdown of the family, suffer through erratic cycles of inflation and recession, bleed the economy bankrupt amassing weapons we can never afford to use, and send our children into war without ever reflecting that all these happen because of self-will raging on a national, even global scale. It spreads like the most virulent disease. Unless it is fought, selfishness deepens in us, spreads, reinforces selfishness in others. We support it with the votes we cast (or do not cast), the purchases and investments we make, the silent consent we give to the operations of our governments and businesses and institutions.

Let’s look again at the doomsday advisor I mentioned. How could the path he had chosen lead anywhere but down? Once we accept the idea that what is most important is to look out for ourselves, the rest follows so naturally that we scarcely notice where it leads.

He began very reasonably. Since food shortages are almost certain, he advised, “stock up as much food as you can. If your cellar or attic will hold it, a twelve-month supply is not too much.” This made sense enough from his perspective. But I couldn’t help thinking how different my own response would be, drawing on the examples of my granny and Mahatma Gandhi. If I were told that food was going to be in short supply, my first thought would be, “What can I do without that I don’t need? Is there anything that I would actually benefit from giving up?” Most of us, according to nutritionists, would thrive if we ate less. Not only that, in terms of our national health, millions of dollars could be saved in medical bills. It amazed me to see this man talking about stockpiling cigarettes, beer, wine, or your favorite candy bars – let alone, if worst came to worst, actually sitting around and enjoying such things while hungry neighbors roamed in search of food.

My second thought would be, “How much food can I grow myself?” You can see my granny’s emphasis: always on self-reliance and turning obstacles into opportunities. Why go to the supermarket and spend your remaining currency on cans and packages of the same old stuff, just because it has a shelf life of twenty-four months? You can grow your own vegetables and even a number of fruits in many interesting places besides back yards and front lawns. Containers can go anywhere there is some sun: in patios, on doorsteps and rooftops, in windowsills and window boxes, suspended from eaves. Community vegetable gardens are blooming now in formerly vacant city lots. These are appealing, strengthening, sattvic solutions. Instead of subtracting from the food supply, they add to it. Instead of aggravating adversity, they actually improve the quality of life.

The next suggestion for survival follows from the first. Start hoarding other physical necessities: automobile parts, soap, razor blades, deodorant, paper towels, anything you do not want to do without. If you believe that life is not worth living without paper towels or that you can’t be happy without a car, this too is reasonable advice. Once you have achieved a lifestyle you like, perhaps anything is worse than changing it. On the other hand, we should look at the price. The consequences may be worse after all; and as far as answers to deprivation go, our lives might benefit from simplification.

Third, this expert advises, buy gold. Buy silver. No matter what happens to the economy, he reasons, you should always be able to get enough canned vegetables and spark plugs for a Krugerrand. A good part of your savings should be in bullion, perhaps even in a foreign bank; but you should also keep a bag or so of silver dollars and a number of small gold coins for emergency spending, preferably hidden somewhere that no one else in your family knows about. It is not that you should mistrust your partner, but the less everyone knows, the safer your treasure is – and, he adds, the better everybody else will sleep.

Of course, it would not be prudent to invest everything you own in precious metals. So this chap advises diversifying somewhat. For one, he says, you should “own real wealth”: that is, material goods. Even gold and silver are substitutes, he points out. “Wealth” is things, items that you can either use yourself or barter. The idea is simple: as much as possible, convert all your paper assets to material ones. So when you go out to purchase a year’s supply of paper towels, you can add to your shopping list an imaginative selection of products you think you and your neighbors are likely to value most in an emergency. His suggestions were revealing: lumber, tools, candy bars, soft drinks, toilet paper . . . “Why,” he demands, “should you be forced to abandon your chosen lifestyle just because your government can’t pay its bills?”

The other alternative took me completely by surprise. “A reasonable portion of your assets,” he said, “should be in things of lasting value – in the timeless treasures that have held their worth through decades, even centuries, of boom and bust, war and peace, depression and prosperity.” “Ah,” I thought to myself; “he is finally getting to spiritual values.” I read on in increasing disbelief: “For example, great masters. Antiques. Collector’s coins. Stamps. Comic books. Things that only go up in price because enough people always want them.”

Then came the inevitable last step. Doesn’t Jesus say, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also”? It is not enough to stock up on the material “necessities” of your chosen lifestyle and all the things required to support it. You should be prepared to defend it – yourself, your family, your food, your gold, your auto parts – against anyone who might come seeking help or shelter. Without any wrong intentions, without any desire for animosity, that is where the path has to lead. “I don’t want war,” Bismarck is said to have remarked. “I just want victory.” We say, “I just want to get what I want.”

Sri Krishna will show all this to Arjuna – all the consequences, from individual to global, of a life based on self-seeking. “If that is the kind of life you want to lead,” he will say, “no one can stop you. But don’t talk about love; this way leads to hatred. Don’t talk about peace; this way only leads to violence and war.” And Arjuna will shake his head and say simply, “I don’t want it.”

SRI KRISHNA: 5. The divine qualities lead to freedom; the demonic, to bondage. But do not grieve, Arjuna; you were born with divine attributes.

My doomsday expert liked to think of himself as a self-reliant, self-made man. Among personal values, one of his highest was freedom. How surprised he would be, I thought, if he could hear the Gita’s evaluation. Sri Krishna would not call such a person free at all. “You’re a slave to your desires,” he would explain. “You can’t change when circumstances demand it; all you can do is hang on tighter.” After all, what could be less free than feeling compelled to shoot another human being because you think he is after your canned goods and gold coins?

In fairness, Sri Krishna would add, very few of us can call ourselves free. Our responses are conditioned; we don’t really have that much say in what we do. By contrast, it is easy to see how Mother Teresa radiates freedom. Whatever life brings her, she is always free to give.

What is important here is the mental state, for that is what colors our actions. It is very likely, for example, that our financial friend will never shoot anyone. He says sincerely that he never wants to. Yet the fact that he is willing to recommend it tells us something about the mental state behind everything else he does and recommends. The mental state is the seed; the fruit, Sri Krishna says, is bondage – bondage to the consequences of our values.

In the mid-seventies, after acute famine had flared up in many parts of the world, a prominent California biologist showed us the global version of this protect-your-gold-and-spark-plugs mentality. The term he used, triage, originated in the trenches of World War I, when medical personnel had to sort the wounded into categories so that they could decide whom to help first. One category was those who did not require immediate attention. They could hold on until the medics had taken care of soldiers in the second category: those who would probably live if given immediate care, but who otherwise would die. And the last was those who would probably die anyway, though perhaps later, even if they received first aid. The medics had to decide, “These people are going to die, and nothing can be done about it. All we can do is not listen to their cries, turn our eyes away, and hope that they die quickly.”

Triage is still a part of military and emergency vocabulary; you see it in articles on “surviving” a nuclear war. But in the seventies it became fashionable in some circles to use the term in a new context: as a way of allocating food in times of famine. The argument was that there are certain countries facing famine which may be able to “pull out of it” and be of service to us later for political, economic, or military reasons. To those countries it makes sense to give food aid. But there are also countries that we decide are hopeless, not capable of solving their own problems; these we should allow to starve.

Perhaps because he is a biologist, this man takes a singularly biological view of the poor. Often, he says, they show so little self-restraint that they overreach the capacity of the land to sustain them. Then they run out of food. Countries with many such people, he says, are “basket cases” – another terrible term from war. For such countries we need an “adjusted ethics of survival dominated by unsqueamish self-interest” – a very interesting assemblage of words, for which I think you could find a good, blunt Anglo-Saxon translation. The term he coined is “lifeboat ethics.” The rich nations, he says, are like lifeboats. Prosperous peoples in the developed countries look around from these lifeboats and see people from poorer nations drowning, calling out for help. If we keep taking all these people in, he says, our boat will sink. Therefore it is best for us as well as for them if they drown as quickly as they can; otherwise everybody will die.

A good student of logic should have no trouble in reducing this argument to pieces, beginning with the central metaphor. But it is not really a logical argument. It expresses an attitude, a mental state of fear and possessiveness very much like that of our survivalist friend: “I’ve got what I want, I deserve it, and nobody’s going to take it away from me.” The only way to dissuade people from this point of view is to allay their fears on the one hand and to open their sensitivity on the other. For the first, some facts and observations can help.

In their excellent and hopeful book Food First, Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins quote from Road to Survival, in which one William Vogt wrote about a populous Asian country that it “quite literally cannot feed more people.” He predicted, “Millions are going to die. There can be no way out. These men and women, boys and girls, must starve as tragic sacrifices, on the twin altars of uncontrolled reproduction and uncontrolled abuse of the land and resources.” Most of us have heard similar words about many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They must be true, we feel. The graphs show population soaring, and we know food supply is limited by the amount of land.

Yet Mr. Vogt’s words, so obviously true, were written about China in 1948. I am not at all advocating that any nation follow the Chinese example, but it does show how misleading it can be to pronounce a country hopeless and then turn away to allow its people to die.

In Mr. Vogt’s day, when someone wanted to talk about basket case nations, nine times out of ten it was China and India that came up first. Today it is often Bangladesh, one of the areas of South Asia that was longest under colonial rule. Yet a report to Congress stated that Bangladesh is rich enough in agricultural resources “not only to be self-sufficient in food, but a food exporter, even with its rapidly increasing population size.” Lappé and Collins go so far as to say that no country they investigated is a basket case; every country has the capacity to feed itself.

Agricultural experts say this planet can produce enough food without any kind of agricultural miracle. Put simply, the problems are not physical or geographic but economic. Food raised by the poor in poor countries is predominantly raised for and sold to rich countries, which can pay much higher prices for it. But the profits go to landowners and middlemen. The poor stay poor, and they have to buy their food at prices bid up beyond their reach by the demand of the world’s well-to-do. This is a profitable arrangement for middlemen, but it guarantees poverty for the poor around the world. Those who can buy, eat; those who cannot buy, starve.

The main reason why there is starvation in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America is that these places have been reduced to poverty by centuries of exploitation. The material resources and labor of these continents produced a good deal of the prosperity that “developed” many of the developed nations, as any close student of history can testify. It is largely because of this kind of exploitation that one-sixth of the world lives in affluence while five-sixths are poor. If the United States has a lot of food at its end of the lifeboat, we should remember that much of it was raised by those we see appealing for help in the sea around us.

“Lifeboat ethics” has been called “deathboat ethics.” Perhaps more to the point, someone has remarked that instead of a lifeboat, this biologist is talking about a luxury liner. In any case, the whole earth is a kind of lifeboat: “Spaceship Earth.”

Here, I think, the metaphor becomes a little embarrassing to the developed nations. If, to simplify the picture, we say there are a hundred people on this lifeboat – representing all the peoples of the earth – then twenty seated at the stern have five-sixths of the provisions. To make the picture worse, a good deal of this has been taken from the eighty men, women, and children who remain. The “haves” complain that there are too many poor to feed; and by continuing to take what they want from the stores, they are ensuring that anyone “extra” is pushed out into the sea. The world’s poor haven’t jumped out of the boat. They have been conquered, colonized, and bled of their mineral wealth and their labor, and in many ways they are still being so treated today. The least we in the developed nations can do is help them back into the boat.

I am not saying that food aid will solve these problems, or that it is a solution for the developed nations to feed the rest of the world. In fact, I believe it is essential – and quite possible – for every nation to develop the capacity to feed itself. But I am saying that when people are starving, you share what you have; that is a simple matter of love.

Some months ago I saw a very moving performance of The Diary of Anne Frank, done by the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Towards the end, Anne and her family, her father’s friend’s family, and an utter stranger have been hiding together in a garret for well over a year, in constant fear of being discovered by the Nazis. Food has become ­terribly difficult to get, and the refugees in the garret are dependent on what can be smuggled in. After months of getting by like this, they discover that it is not rats that have been gnawing at their meagre stores; Mr. Frank’s friend has been stealing food for himself while the others sleep. No one is more shocked and repelled than Mrs. Frank. “You’ve been stealing from the children,” she cries, “while you could hear your own son crying in his sleep from hunger!” When the children are our own, or in our own house, most of us find it easy to identify with them. Would we ignore them if we could not see their faces or hear their cries?

By contrast, I read a story the other day from Mother Teresa that moved me deeply – partly because it comes from Calcutta, where the differences between Hindus and Muslims have been exploited to the point of terrible violence. “Some weeks back,” Mother Teresa says,

I heard there was a family who had not eaten for some days – a Hindu family – so I took some rice and I went to the family. Before I knew where I was, the mother of the family had divided the rice into two, and she took the other half to the next-door neighbors, who happened to be a Muslim family. Then I asked her: “How much will all of you have to share? There are ten of you with that bit of rice.” The mother replied: “They have not eaten either.”

I began by talking about freedom. Who shall we say is free, the woman who gives like this or the man who feels so terribly compelled to take? Behind all the sophisticated language of “lifeboat ethics” are the same primitive feelings that make for bondage: insecurity, possessiveness, fear.

You can see the same lack of freedom on an international scale in the web of dependencies that bind the rich and powerful nations to the small. The rich and powerful find it humiliating to discover this, and sometimes they resort to violence to “show who is boss.” But the fact remains. United States foreign policy, for example, is not made in freedom. It could be debated how much freedom the most powerful nation on earth actually has. Our policy decisions are usually reflexes, determined by what some other country does. Because of our dependence on certain minerals and the strategic balance of power, we have felt compelled to prop up illegitimate, repressive regimes, sometimes to the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives in war. Presidents and other leaders have repeatedly declared their willingness to go to war with some vastly weaker nation on the other side of the world to ensure that we keep getting “our” oil. And it is not only oil: many strategic minerals are supplied primarily by small, undemocratically governed nations whose leaders can dictate their terms to the industrialized giants. Our national response is the same as for doomsday: buy and hoard, and be prepared to go to war if necessary to keep the stockpiles from being used.

This is the kind of world that self-interest leads to – the only kind of world self-interest can lead to. The virus, Sri Krishna warns, is in all of us. Unless it is resisted, self-will can so invade the personality that an apparently good person – or nation – becomes an instrument of suffering for many others.

SRI KRISHNA: 6. Some people have divine tendencies, others demonic. I have described the divine at length, Arjuna; now listen while I describe the demonic.

Almost every day, a physician friend tells me, she sees a patient who smokes. “I have to tell them they’re bucking the odds,” she says. “The scientific consensus is that smoking kills more than a third of a million Americans every year. But people can’t identify with statistics. They just say, ‘I know that, doc. But I’ve tried to quit and I can’t.’ ”

“What do you say then?” I asked.

“It depends on the person. I never try to scare anybody. But if they have some imagination, and especially if they are still young, I try to bridge the gap in time that they can’t bridge. I want them to look thirty years down the road and give the future a fair chance.

“When I see them, they’re in their twenties or thirties. They’re still active, nothing but a little cough; they think they’ll feel like that forever. I try to help them feel what it’s like to wheeze with every breath. I describe the panic that comes when you just can’t get enough oxygen. I show them what happens inside their lungs and blood vessels. I try to turn the statistics into something real. Then I say, ‘At the roulette table, you at least get to see what you stand to win or lose. Don’t you want to see what you’re gambling against here? If you lose, you get emphysema, lung disease, or stroke. If you win, you get a pack of cigarettes a day. Now you choose.’ ”

When we persist in a wrong course of action, a good physician has to tell us the consequences. She knows the laws of physiology, and she has seen perhaps hundreds of cases like ours. She may not be able to predict with total accuracy – there are many imponderables – but she knows vividly the sequence of cause and effect in the human body. To us it is only a vague possibility. But to her it is so real that if she sees a disease in its early stages, she already sees its end.

In the same way Sri Krishna, noting the signs and symptoms of our times, has to describe what will be the outcome if we do not change our ways. It is not too late to turn back. But the mental states of fatal illness – greed, separateness, and anger – are present in our times, and unless they are eradicated, their consequences are inexorable. Here the theme of karma that runs through this volume finds its most explicit statement. We need not dwell on it, but at the same time we need to know what selfish thinking has to lead to if it goes unchecked, no matter how pleasant or harmless it may seem at first.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. The demonic do things they should avoid and avoid the things they should do. They have no sense of uprightness, purity, or truth.

8. “There is no God,” they say, “no truth, no spiritual law, no moral order. The basis of life is sex; what else can it be?”

9. Holding such distorted views, possessing scant discrimination, they become enemies of the world, causing suffering and destruction.

“There is no God, no truth, no moral order; the basis of life is sex.” The words sound so contemporary that it is hard to believe these are opinions expressed thousands of years ago. You could go to the newsstand of any supermarket and find the same argument repeated over and over. It says simply that there is no unity in life, no underlying order, nothing but the events that we can apprehend through the five senses: in short, nothing to life but the physical level.

Once someone is said to have complained to G. K. Chesterton, “The trouble today is that people don’t have anything to believe in.”

“Not quite,” Chesterton replied. “The trouble is that because they have nothing to believe in, they’ll believe in anything.”

That is a very penetrating remark. How many of the problems we face as a society are the result of people just believing in anything that comes along? This is one of the characteristics of Tamas. If someone on television or in the popular magazines tells him “Do this; you’ll like it,” he will go out and do it, so long as everybody else is doing it and it doesn’t require too much effort.

When you don’t have a reference point to refer to, Sri Krishna says here, you do what you should not do and you don’t do what you should. This is a classic definition of confusion. The capacity to know what should be done and what should not be done is called viveka, discrimination, and it is one of life’s most precious secrets. My granny used to be fond of a Sanskrit proverb, which unfortunately we gave her numerous opportunities to quote: Avivekam param apadam padam, “Lack of discrimination is the source of the greatest danger.” When discrimination goes, there is no reason not to do anything. If you look around, you will see intelligent, educated, cultured people throwing their energy and resources into enterprises that help nobody – enterprises, as this verse says, that even end in widespread harm.

Here we find ourselves in an age of unprecedented technological development, yet much of our mastery over nature has gone to find ways to hide or postpone the natural consequences of doing what we want. As a result, it becomes easier and easier to believe there are no consequences. You can do what you like and never pay for it.

This is not merely an individual weakness. We may deprecate people who go on buying and buying on credit cards without ever asking the price, but from the point of view of ecology, for example, modern industry and agriculture are continually mortgaging the future to pay for the profits of the present. “Buy now and pay later” has become “Buy now and refinance later,” so you never have to pay at all.

Yet there are consequences, even if the asuric mind manages to hide them from its view. You may buy whatever you like with your credit cards in March, but in April or May the bills start rolling in. You have to start paying something – at first perhaps just the finance charge, but sooner or later the principal. We can always try to circumvent physical consequences by more technology, but what we really ought to worry about, the Gita says, are the consequences for the mind.

I would like to write a story in which science had come up with pills that could eliminate the physical consequences of our behavior entirely, so that every day you could indulge yourself however you liked without any ill effects. You could eat as much as you liked and not gain an ounce. You could drink as much as you liked and never get sick or face another “morning after.” You could party all night and still be fresh the next day. And so on; each of us can supply our own favorite details. Doesn’t it sound wonderful?

The Gita would object, “It sounds horrible!” Even if nothing unto­ward took place on the physical level, what would happen to the will? Not many people value the will these days; it’s slightly out of fashion. But imagine going through life with a will like limp spaghetti: you couldn’t say no to anything. If a foot-high challenge came out from behind a bush, you would lie down and say, “I’ve got a headache. I can’t go on.” And you would be so insecure that if someone said anything critical, you might go to pieces or carry a grudge against that person for years. We don’t usually see the connection with the will in such situations, but that is what willpower means: a mind that does what you say.

Now we can trace the thread running through these verses. When you can’t say no to anything, as this verse says, you end up “doing things that you ought to avoid and avoiding things that you ought to do” – eventually, though it pains me to say it, “without any sense of uprightness, purity, or truth.”

Sex makes a good example here, not only because it is emphasized in the verses but because it is such a popular focus for our attention. “The basis of life is sex,” the asuric mind proclaims. “What else can it be?” Most people might not agree so openly, but how do we live? What do we value most, to judge from our magazines, our movies, our books, our songs, our advertisements, our choice of words, our idea of a “good time”?

I dislike being a wet blanket, but the long-term consequences of this trend are ghastly. Rajas looks at sex and finds it grand. Naturally he proceeds to do with it what he tries to do with everything: maximize it. “If a little is the greatest thing on earth,” he reasons, “more must be better.”

But the corollary of “More is better” is “Anything goes.” Once you accept the premise that life is physical, there is no basis for judgment. There is no one to explain that the real damage is done to the mind. Children who are continually exposed to sex in the media are particularly susceptible. By the time they reach adolescence, their minds and senses are going to be completely out of control; they will be at life’s mercy before their adult lives have truly begun. Their minds will be full of anger and frustration, and putting themselves first will have become a constant, conditioned habit. What will support them during the fierce buffeting of the teenage years? What will they have to build a lasting relationship on? Even setting aside the questions of love and loyalty, they won’t have the will to face any kind of challenge. Life treats such people mercilessly. No parents want this for their children; it is just the opposite of love.

I am not talking about right or wrong now; but simply in medical terms, look at where all this leads. What is at stake is prana, which is life itself. In younger years we are allotted enough prana to experiment with pleasure and discover what it can deliver; but we are expected to learn, not to go on performing the same old experiment over and over and over. For overindulgence drains prana, and prana is the very energy of life. Loss of sexual capacity in later years may be the body’s compassionate way of saying, “Let’s start to conserve! I’m running low on gas.”

It grieves me deeply to read that patients recovering from serious ailments – especially those who are older – are sometimes given hormones or other drugs to whip an exhausted body into action to satisfy the mind’s desires. That is just the opposite of therapy. The body needs rest so that all available prana can be marshalled in the processes of healing. Instead, the pleasure centers open the prana petcocks and drain the day’s tank almost dry. From the body’s point of view, it seems so unfair: the mind demands the pleasure, but the body pays all the bills.

The other day I saw some of our ashram children playing in the sandbox with their toys: a couple of dump trucks, some blocks and wooden animals, a few big spoons and cans for digging. “They can go on like that forever,” one of the mothers told me happily. “From one fantasy to another to another.” That is fine for toddlers – but even then, not forever. Imagine their parents playing there instead! Two computer experts, a professor, and a physician, pushing sand around with old tin cans and bursting into tears when one person’s road construction project destroys another’s farm. There is a time for toys, the mystics say, and a time to grow up. From this perspective, nothing is more tragic than to see men and women in the last stages of their lives doing everything they can to become like teenagers again.

In a sense even this is not an end; for though the body dies, the samskaras of desire carry over to our next life. I still remember vividly a friend in the twilight of his life recalling his teenage years and saying plaintively, “How I wish I could live through all those experiences again!” I don’t think I have ever felt a deeper stab of sorrow; for these last deep desires sum up our lives. That wish was like getting through second grade and then saying at the end, “That was fun! I’m going to go back and do it all again.”

“Life is not worth living without pleasure.” The logic is relentless: when your very capacity for sensory pleasure runs out, why go on living? What does life hold? Some years ago I remember reading that a distinguished philosopher and his wife swallowed overdoses of sleeping pills in order to avoid the prospect of a “useless old age.” The assumption is that life is physical; we are the body. Old age is “useless” only if you are living for yourself, in which case any age could be called useless. If you live for giving, you can go on making a vital contribution to the rest of life right up to your last day in this body. Even if you are confined to a wheelchair, you will be able to inspire, support, and strengthen many people who come in contact with you.

SRI KRISHNA: 10. Hypocritical, proud, and arrogant, living in delusion and clinging to deluded ideas, insatiable in their desires, they pursue unhesitatingly their own selfish ends.

The other day I saw a book on economics with an intriguing title: Greed Is Not Enough. This is true of most demonic activities also. Asuric Enterprises, as we might call it, is a joint venture of two partners. Rajas, “Mr. Greed,” is the senior, but Tamas is almost as important. His role is generally to be insensitive, but he also knows how to vacillate, postpone, prevaricate, refuse to change his mind, and simply do nothing when necessary, all of which provides Rajas with the support he needs to do his work. Rajas doesn’t understand this; he likes to think of himself as independent. But if he were capable of some self-knowledge, he would see that he is utterly dependent on Tamas for support.

Tamas clings to the status quo; he doesn’t like to “make waves.” But Rajas thrives on crisis. Where times are turbulent or technology is in flux, he knows there are markets to be cornered, power to consolidate, profits to be made. In fairness, this is not simply a matter of greed. Rajas just likes to keep busy. He can’t possibly sit still when opportunity is knocking, even if he is already juggling more opportunities than he can handle. His style is to keep moving, even if he isn’t sure where he is going, while Tamas sits in back and writes memos to cover his tracks.

Thoreau, I think, had a good remark to make on this subject. “It’s not enough if you are busy,” he said. “The question is, What are you busy about?” This is a terribly practical question. You may remember my quoting a Sanskrit proverb that was often on my granny’s lips: “Lack of discrimination is the source of the greatest danger.” I don’t think this is exaggeration at all. If you look around, you will see that most of the dangers that threaten us today are not the result of wickedness. I would say they are the result of intelligent, educated, well-intentioned men and women running as fast as they can after what they want, never caring to slow down, look around, and ask where they are going.

Rajas has a good reason for this: if you stop to look around, he would say, you may not like what you see. Worse, you may try to reason, by which time the opportunity – whatever it is – will have passed. If problems arise, Asuric Enterprises has two ways of dealing with them: Rajas likes to push them aside and keep on going; Tamas prefers to ignore them and hope they will go away.

I can give you one example that is highly relevant today: the way we pursued nuclear power. This is what you might call a national obsession: a very large number of individuals compulsively caught in the same idea. It illustrates very well the power of a particular mental state – part rajasic, part tamasic – to acquire a life of its own, regardless of facts or circumstances.

In the forties and fifties, crowning a century of breakthroughs, nuclear technology must have looked like the grandest of them all. It offered two heady promises: unlimited energy and perpetual peace. The very idea raised Rajas to poetic heights. “For the first time in history,” he liked to say, “man has released power that did not come from the sun!” Perhaps – Rajas tends to get easily inebriated by breakthroughs – perhaps soon we wouldn’t even need the sun. We knew how to grow vegetables in water with the help of lights; we were making “food” out of chemical constituents and planning space colonies with their own water and air. Now that we could turn matter into energy, what could we not do? “In a decade or so,” Rajas proclaimed proudly, “energy will be so cheap that you’ll have to give it away.”

The other promise was the Bomb. The irony was fascinating: here was the most terrible weapon ever discovered, and just because it was so terrible it could be the instrument of world peace! It was a military dream come true, the secret weapon that nobody else seemed likely to get. In our enemies’ hands it could hold the world hostage; in ours, it could enforce peace and democratic principles around the globe.

This was a package too good to pass up, and as this verse suggests, we bought it without hesitating – that is, without ever asking about the consequences. We knew virtually nothing about atomic energy except that its potential for energy release – constructive or destructive – was staggering beyond imagination. Many nuclear scientists say they felt like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, letting loose unknown, supernormal forces without any hope of turning back. Sheer common sense would object, “Let’s go slowly and be sure where we are going.” Yet from the first, Asuric Enterprises scarcely questioned anything. It was obsessed by a Big Idea.

In my high school physics class, I remember our teacher explaining about inertia. “It doesn’t just mean sitting and doing nothing,” our teacher said. “A body at rest tends to remain at rest and a body in motion tends to remain in motion, unless acted on by some outside force.” As an illustration he might have used the rock that Mad Narayana used to roll down the hill outside our village, which had tremendous inertia. You could deflect it only at great risk, and you could stop it only by absorbing all that energy, which usually meant a crash.

Ideas are similar. I like to say that thoughts are things – in fact, in some ways, they are more “thingy” than material things. A rolling idea can have tremendous inertia. It is hard to stop, hard to deflect; often it even goes unquestioned. That is the power of tamas.

“We’ve got a tiger by the tail,” Rajas liked to say about nuclear power. “We’ve got to go forward, whatever it costs.” Without going into details, I want to look at some of those costs. Two or three I find particularly moving, for the karma of this Big Idea has led to widespread sorrow.

Here we encounter one of the truly dark corners in the asuric mind. By the time the Bomb was developed, Tamas was already on the stage. Even in wartime, a certain measure of insensitivity is required to destroy a city of civilians, but I do not want to dwell on that; the decision-­makers must have felt they were saving thousands of American lives. What I find more astonishing, because the callousness is so calculated, is what happened after the war. Tamas is not very discriminating; his job is to be insensitive. He begins by being insensitive to enemy lives, but he quickly goes on to show the same insensitivity to those he is supposed to protect.

The first to experience this were U.S. soldiers, from whom I have been reading some moving personal accounts. Just forty-five days after Nagasaki was bombed, Marines and Seabees were sent in to clean up without any word about radiation hazards. “We didn’t want to worry anybody,” Rajas explained. “We had every reason to believe that after the fallout subsided, there was no danger from radioactivity.” (The scientists who visited these areas must not have been told this, for they wore protective suits.) For weeks these men were billeted near ground zero, around which the wind must have strewn radioactive dust and particles for miles. They drank the same water as the survivors, ate locally grown food, breathed the same dust-laden air. Today, thirty years later, they are dying of the same kinds of cancer.

“I don’t hold a grudge against my government for sending us in like that,” one man said in effect. “They had their reasons for not telling us, and anyway I was a soldier; it was my job to take risks for my country. What makes me so bitter is that now that we are sick or dying, our country won’t acknowledge any responsibility.” The official position is the same today as it was then: “There was no danger from radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the first five days.”

There is an important reason for this kind of prevarication, which is part of the mental state involved. In the official view, we had the Bomb and therefore had to use it; and that had certain implications too. Like it or not, we had to develop a nuclear arsenal. We had to prepare citizens to accept and deal with the possibility of nuclear attack. And we had to develop nuclear energy. Therefore, in asuric reasoning, it was “counterproductive” to question the Bomb and its consequences, whatever facts might come to light. To worry people or to admit how little we knew was dangerous. It might mean we could not proceed, and that would be playing into enemy hands – for although we were at peace, all this was pursued as a continuation of war.

The Bomb aside, there remains the complete lack of caution in how we pursued nuclear energy for utilities. It looked so wonderful then! “Makes itself,” Rajas liked to say. “Breeds its own fuel. What more can you ask? Power too cheap to meter.” Surely it is fair to ask by now, too cheap for whom? It is not cheap in human health; it is terrifyingly expensive. According to articles I saw some months ago in the Wall Street Journal, it is not even cheap in money. Fortunes have been poured into nuclear plants, though no doubt it could have cost much less if we hadn’t begun to require safe construction. But even from the earliest days, nuclear power was so fraught with unknowns and potential hazards that no one would invest in it unless the government agreed to underwrite it; no insurance company would touch it.

Much more significant are the human costs. Another example is the uranium miners. Uranium is expensive, but fortunately it was discovered in the United States – on the supposedly worthless lands that had been given (if I may use that word) to Native American tribes when the rest of their lands were engulfed by the spread of Western civilization. I don’t know if anyone was embarrassed to discover that something valuable had been given away. In any case, the Bureau of Indian Affairs – created ostensibly to protect Native American interests – persuaded them not only to lease their lands for uranium mining but to do the actual mining themselves. Nobody warned them about radioactivity; they might not have wanted to proceed with the deal.

A Public Health Service director has since called those mines “radiation chambers,” with “one hundred times the levels of ­radioactivity allowed today.” Millions of tons of exposed radioactive waste – “tailings” – have been piled near people’s homes. “Much of the land where our people have lived for thousands of years,” one Native American spokesman says, “is now poisoned by radioactivity – and will remain poisoned for many thousands of years.” This applies not only to the water and air, but even to many homes made from local building materials.

Finally, in spite of the incredible ingenuity that has gone into nuclear power development – and it has drawn some of the best scientific and engineering talent in several countries – we still don’t have the slightest idea of what to do with nuclear waste. To me that is like admitting that on a proposed trip from San Francisco to New York, we haven’t yet left the garage.

Some months ago we had a big holiday dinner at our ashram, which meant several people working in the kitchen at once to prepare a gracious quantity of food. Suppose you showed up to help and were told, “Sorry, we don’t have a garbage can. Why don’t you put the garbage in the back seat of your car and figure out what to do with it later?” You say, “At least you can give me a plastic bag!” “We haven’t got plastic bags,” Laurel says, “but maybe you can fit it into these grocery bags. If you line them with waxed paper, they won’t start to leak for three or four hours.” Pretty soon, of course, they will fall apart. But why talk about such things now? You’ve got to get dinner on the table. Lug the garbage out, stuff it in the car, and enjoy your feast. Maybe you’ll pass a dump on the way home. If not, well, half of it will decompose every twenty years . . . .

That is exactly what we have done about nuclear waste – except, of course, that we are talking not about messy potato peelings but about substances like plutonium, which is fatally toxic in microscopic amounts and has a half-life of twenty-five thousand years. We haven’t the slightest idea of what to do with the stuff, and it is one of the most poisonous substances known. Yet we are so greedy to proceed with our wonderful new discoveries that we just bury what we can’t deal with and hope we won’t be around when it starts to poison the rivers and soil where our children’s food is grown – or, worse, the oceans that sustain the world.

“Just do it,” says Rajas, “and then we’ll see. Technology will improve. If we can’t come up with anything better, we can always toss it into outer space. A few hundred garbage cans of radioactive waste hurtling around in a billion billion cubic miles of nothingness, what can they harm?” It is not only lack of love and logic, it is such a fatal paralysis of imagination. We had the same idea about the oceans and air just a few decades ago, and now we are surprised when a school is closed because of poisonous air, or when we read that lead from industrial emissions is accumulating in the trenches of the deep ocean floor.

“Well, what do you know?” Rajas muses. “Who could have predicted things like that?” Perhaps no one, but we could at least learn from such unexpected outcomes that we live in a complex world in which there is no such thing as “out of sight, out of mind.” There is already more radioactive waste than we can hide; it is leaking from its containers, poisoning livestock and people, and altering our genetic material, not to mention providing enough weapons-grade plutonium to put a nuclear weapon in the hands of every terrorist group and small-time dictator in the world; yet still we want our energy so badly that we keep on producing more of this stuff and talk about sending our garbage to Alpha Centauri. It makes one wonder. Cross the seas, fly in the air, burrow into the ground, the Buddha says; you will not be able to hide from the law of karma.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. Although burdened with fears that end only with death, they still maintain with complete assurance, “Gratification of lust is the highest that life can offer.”

In Hindu psychology, the forces of self-will are often grouped under three big categories: lust, anger, and fear, all of which are closely related. These three are the source of most personal problems, for they are working away almost incessantly in the deeper regions of the mind.

I have written predominantly about lust and anger for what I might call first-aid reasons: these are the forces that cause the most direct damage to others, and they are rampant today. But here I would like to give due attention to fear, which this verse connects subtly to the lust for selfish satisfaction.

“Lust” here, I should point out, is not just sexual desire. It can be any kind of fierce craving for personal satisfaction. There is lust for money, of course, and lust for any kind of pleasure; sex is merely the most acute. Lust for power is one of the most furious of lusts. So here I will be talking about no particular passion, but simply lust in general.

I sometimes see recruitment posters that say, “The Marines are looking for a few good men.” General Lust, by contrast, is not particular about who fills his army. Any obsessive, personal, self-centered desire can qualify. The recruitment application asks only one question: “Are you willing to let other people get in the way of your fulfillment?” If the answer is a resounding no, that desire is in.

General Lust is tough – at least, in his own eyes. He knows what he wants, and he gets what he goes after. He has tattoos on his arms, smokes cigarettes without filters, and wouldn’t dream of letting some namby-pamby speed limit law keep him from driving the way he likes. I saw a book of jokes on the best-seller list the other day: Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche. General Lust doesn’t even want to know how “quiche” is pronounced. He would be furious if he understood what Sri Krishna is hinting in this verse: that in every selfish desire is hidden a corresponding fear. That is part of the karma of lust; and as usual with karma, it is not some separate punishment. If lust is one side of a coin, fear and anger are imprinted on the other side, inseparable.

Fear is a whole world of its own within the mind. Most of us never see this world with our conscious eye, though it prompts much of our waking thought and action. I think it is Carl Jung who says that in the depths of the unconscious of every human being lies the fear of death and dissolution – the fear that we may cease to exist as a separate, personal creature. This is the root of all other fears. In a sense, every human being lives in a world of fear of which we are not aware. That is our protection. If we were to become consciously aware of all the great fears that lurk in the unconscious, life would become impossible. It is a merciful amnesia that we do not remember these fears. We may not even suspect that they lurk within us, far below the threshold of consciousness. To an experienced eye, however, the signs are clear. Wherever people overreact in anger, or get agitated easily, or are excessively rigid when they cannot have their way, there is a good chance that fear is pulling the strings from deep within. Almost every kind of insecurity or anxiety fits the Gita’s definition of fear.

In his Century of Verses on Renunciation, the great Indian poet Bhartrihari wrote a stanza of epigrams on fear. The first line sets the keynote: “In the pleasures of the senses lurks the fear of decay.” The poet is playing off two rhyming words: bhoga, which means sensual enjoyment, and roga, one of the sights that impelled the Buddha to seek Self-realization: disease, decrepitude, dissolution, decay.

We need a good deal of detachment to understand the depth of Bhartrihari’s statement. It can be taken at several levels, on each of which the consequences are subtler. The simplest is that of physical consequences, which the modern mind finds repellent and vaguely medieval: if you indulge in such and such a pleasure, you’ll be punished for it. Today we do not believe in being punished, and many of the efforts of modern science have been to find ways to avoid the physical consequences of sensual indulgence.

Perhaps the most obvious example is overeating. All thinking people, though they may not put it into words, are aware that if they go on eating more than they need, they are going to put on weight. Today even corporation executives are mindful of this, for obesity is more than an aesthetic flaw; it is a health hazard. Too much body fat aggravates heart trouble, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other ailments, and in addition it adds to the risk of smoking – all of which doctors and the popular media are making widely known.

Wherever there is any understanding of this, overeating carries a slight but nagging fear. Even while you are eating your second helping of french fries or chocolate cake and thinking, “This is really good!” there is a little voice inside, barely audible, saying, “It’s not so good. You’re asking for trouble.” We have learned to stifle this voice, even ignore it with a show of bravado. “Who cares? I’m not that fat, and I can still take it or leave it.” Even so, the Gita says, we have planted another tiny seed of fear beneath the surface of consciousness: the fear that we have added a little more weight not only to the body, but to the unknown burdens of the future.

This is even more clear with addictive habits like smoking, ­drinking, and drugging. I have never deprecated people who are caught in these habits, because I know how easy it is to get caught. Today a boy or girl can be an alcoholic even before getting into high school. Many children smoke by then, and probably most have at least sampled drugs. There must be very few today who think these activities do not have dangerous consequences. They just don’t care. Often they feel they have very little to live for, which is a tragic state. In any case they are young; they like to “live dangerously.” Consequences are far down the road, and words like cancer and emphysema convey only vague conditions. Yet as many smokers have confided in me, the fear is there. Even while they are inhaling, a little part of their consciousness is thinking about cancer.

This kind of fear has a useful function. It can act as a brake, keeping us from overindulging our senses or getting caught in addictive habits, both of which drain prana terribly. When you cannot see the connection between sensory pleasure and prana, the Lord says, how can you be expected to act on it? So to try to keep us from wasting our prana as fast as possible, life provides these fearful physical consequences, which anyone should be able to see.

In other words, if you are going to smoke, it is good not to be fearless about it. You can use that fear; you can capitalize on it, by drawing from it more will and more resolution. To be fearless about the risk of cancer, the Buddha would say, is not a sign of a strong character but the sign of a thick head. The Buddha was not one to mince words; some chapters of his Dhammapada are just as fierce as this chapter of the Gita.

Most of us, however, do not regard adverse physical consequences as a blessing. Here we are, trying to enjoy ourselves, and once we cross a certain line the pleasures start coming hand in hand with problems. The universal human response, the gift of rajas, is straightforward: find some way to get around the problems, so we can go on doing what we like. Homo sapiens has probably been doing this since the dawn of civilization, but it is only in the age of rajas, the age of science, that we developed the amazing technological capacity to suppress any physical consequence we choose.

Vast industries are built on this idea, which can be called the Free Lunch promise. “Every pleasure,” it maintains, “can be safely indulged indefinitely. Adverse consequences are incidental. Being physical, they can be physically prevented, just like the causes of a disease. All that is necessary is to find the chemical or mechanical means.” This was widely held and hailed when I arrived in this country, and it opened my eyes to technological progress. Why not eat too much when you can avoid stomachache and heartburn by dropping a couple of fizzing tablets into a glass of water? Why not have a few extra “meaningful relationships” when there’s the Pill? Why be afraid of burning yourself out in pursuit of pleasure when you can get a new face for the price of a new car? “For every fear we have a cure”: that is the motto of Asuric Labs.

Of course, Asuric has had its problems. The fizzing tablets don’t keep you from getting fat, and that new face may cost you your health. And there is good evidence now that the Pill, which is used by millions of women in the world today, is a causal factor in thromboembolic diseases and, in some, heart attacks. The Gita would ask, How do you expect to get rid of consequences? It has never been done; it can never be done. If you block one effect, another will occur; if you block them both, you will get a third. As the Buddha says, nowhere in the universe can you hide from karma, for the simple reason that action and consequences are one.

Nonetheless, the search goes on. There is money in it, and if someone invents a better diet pill or contraceptive, the world will happily beat a path to his front door. As long as we can even hope for such a breakthrough, fear is held at bay.

Trying to avoid consequences like this reminds me of a scene I once saw at the beach, when our children were trying to dam a little river that flows through the dunes into the sea. They managed to block the channel, but the water wouldn’t obey. It forced its way through the dam, and when those holes were plugged, it flowed over the top. When the children made the dam higher, the water burst around at the end.

That is how the law of karma works too. If the effects of an action are blocked in one direction, they have to find expression somewhere else. This is not a moral principle; it is simply cause and effect.

Rajas pursues consequence-blockers like a beaver racing against time. If an unwanted consequence bursts through here, he patches it; when another erupts over there, he patches that too. Like the Corps of Engineers, he believes perfection is just a patch away. If you suggest to him that it may not be possible to create a dam without adverse consequences, he would find the suggestion foolish, irresponsible, and vaguely immoral, as if you were pleading a case for evil.

Adverse consequences include physical illness, because body and mind are part of a whole. In every human being, there is a deep-seated sense of disquiet provoked when we ignore this fabric of responsibilities and think and act just for ourselves. We know, deep down, that we are not separate from the rest of life, but the primordial urges of the unconscious – the pleasure principle, the sex drive, the instinct for self-aggrandizement – pull us in a different direction. Freud is not wrong when he says we have stuffed these dark forces into the basement of consciousness and slammed the door tight. But repressed urges don’t lie around meekly. They hold mass meetings, pass resolutions, go on strike, hold demonstrations that have to be suppressed with the mental equivalent of tear gas. This round-the-clock control is a constant drain of prana. And since prana is the energy for every function of life, low prana means less vitality, more frequent depression, less ability to cope with stress, lower resistance to disease.

This model may have important implications for health. Emotional factors may well inhibit the immune system: negative mental states like depression, for example, seem associated with susceptibility to illness. I suggest that not only negative emotional states, but any chronic drain on prana – including excessive indulgence of the senses – weakens the immune system, leaving it more vulnerable to infection. If true, one promising corollary of this hypothesis is that activities which conserve prana – training the mind, training the senses – should enhance our capacity to heal ourselves and resist disease.

Up to this point we have been looking only at physical consequences. Yet this is only the surface. There are more subtle consequences which take place in the mind, and the fear of these goes deeper even than the fear of disease.

This level is much more elusive and difficult to talk about, but we have some clues in everyday experience. I think it is Art Hoppe who remarked that someday they will invent a pill to take away every consequence of our actions except guilt. “Guilt” is not a word that I like to use, because there is nothing positive about it. But when we do something selfish, the Gita would say, even if no harmful physical consequences follow that we can see, there will always be a quiet witness inside to observe and comment, “Shabby, shabby, shabby.” This is a good sign. The observer is the Self, who is sometimes referred to in yoga psychology as the Inner Witness of all action. The Self is never involved in our behavior, good or bad, or in its consequences, because the Self is not at all physical. But this dry comment of “shabby, shabby, shabby” is its way of reminding our “lower mind” – our emotions, feelings, and senses – that it has not been acting in harmony with the unity of life.

Most of us today never hear this verbalized, as people used to in simpler times. Instead we feel vaguely divided within ourselves – a little uncertain of ourselves, a little anxious, unself-confident, insecure. That is the beginning of fear. If I had to put it into words, I would say it is something like the fear that our behavior is moving us farther and farther from our real Self – in a word, the fear of alienation. The more we indulge a selfish desire, the deeper this fear becomes. In people who are compulsively self-indulgent, the results can be terribly debilitating. Such people can get caught in a vicious circle of behavior: they have a low self-image, expect very little of themselves; so they act the way they believe themselves to be – say, raid the refrigerator on a midnight binge – and plunge their self-esteem even lower.

Fear of being caught in these negative forces goes very deep in us, because without meditation most people feel they are being swept away by a power beyond their understanding or control. Meditation offers great hope to such people, for we can learn to transform these forces completely.

Subtlest of all is the deep, nagging fear that the pleasure in which we are indulging cannot last. Until we have made some progress in meditation, I think it is asking too much of even a good intellect to grasp this. The intellect will object, as my beatnik friends used to, “I don’t buy that.” And even when it does buy, the mind – our feelings – will balk. “You and your theories,” it will say. “To say I suffer from anxiety when I enjoy some private pleasure is absurd.” Yet deep down – “on the gut level,” as my medical friends say – every one of us knows this fear. The evidence is simple: if we were not afraid, we would not have to clutch at pleasure and try to make it last.

Ultimately, this is the fear of the final deprivation. Death in Sanskrit is called Antaka, ‘he who puts an end to everything.’ This fear is lurking in the depths of the consciousness of every human being – written there, as the Hindu and Buddhist mystics would say, over and over and over through countless lives. Death in the West has been called “the great unknown.” The Gita would not agree with this; you can’t really fear what you don’t know. Each of us does know in the depths of the unconscious what death is like, because each of us has experienced it many times. Even a tiny creature, when it dies, suffers the agony that a human being suffers. Because of this, yoga psychology maintains, every attempt to grasp at some outside support – pleasure, power, prestige, possessions – is prompted at the deepest level by the fear of death. On the downward path, this fear swells until it becomes obsessive. But it can be healed through meditation and the allied disciplines, and the relief from insecurity this brings is one of the great benefits of spiritual living.

SRI KRISHNA: 12. Bound on all sides by scheming and anxiety, driven by anger and greed, they amass by any means they can a hoard of money for the satisfaction of their cravings.

Some years ago I saw a very entertaining movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart plays the part of Fred C. Dodds, a man down on his luck in the Mexican port city of Tampico. He and a friend meet up with an old prospector, played by Walter Huston, who knows the gold country of Mexico like the back of his hand. Interestingly enough, though he has spent the greater part of his life prospecting, Walter Huston is rather detached about gold. Bogart feels detached too. “What’s gold going to do to change a guy?” he asks. “A guy’s a guy, whether money comes to him or not.” Walter Huston smiles back knowingly. “You don’t know gold,” he says.

The three go prospecting together, and after a long while they discover a rich vein. They are hard workers, and they dig and carry for all they’re worth. All three are equal partners. But slowly the consciousness of Bogart and his friends is changing, and presently, when a stranger is discovered following them, a very interesting discussion takes place: shall they kill him, or shall they not? Bogart, you know, is a “right guy,” and right guys don’t kill out of greed: if the man wants to dig too, there is plenty of gold to go around. But the question has been raised, and both men know now in their hearts that there are circumstances under which they would have gone ahead.

Gradually Bogart becomes more entangled. An idea takes hold of him: if the others were gone, the gold would all be his. He projects this idea onto his friend also – “he must be thinking the same thing” – and grows increasingly suspicious. Finally, convinced that the other man wants to kill him for his share, Bogart kills his partner, takes the gold, and runs away.

In the end nobody gets the gold. Poor Fred C. Dodds loses his life, and all the gold dust he and his partners had accumulated is caught up in a sandstorm and dispersed in every direction, hopelessly mixed with sand. Even Hollywood appreciates the law of karma.

“Money can’t do anything to a guy,” said Fred C. Dodds. “A guy’s a guy, whether money comes to him or not.” This same “right guy” becomes suspicious, starts to distrust his friends, and ends up murderous, without even realizing what has happened. In a smaller way, this can happen to almost anyone. You don’t have to look to movies or history for examples; just look in the daily paper, talk to people around you. You will see how many relationships have been disrupted by the love of money: how many marriages it has broken up, how many friendships embittered, how many families torn in two. Beyond that, on a vaster scale, I can only suggest some of the costs the profit motive exacts from many millions of workers and consumers around the world. We have no idea, I think, of how powerful and how destructive a force the lust for money can be; it can soak up our capacity for sensitivity so insidiously that we do not even see it happening.

Many people would reject categorically the idea that they love money. “I like what it can buy,” they might say. “I like to be able to buy whatever I want; who doesn’t? But ‘love’? Oh, no.” This is sincere enough as far as the surface level of awareness goes. But the test of what we love is what we think about, what consumes our attention through most of the day. By this test, it must be admitted, money is one of the top two objects of devotion in the modern world.

When we give our love to money – think about it, read about it, worry over it, measure people and activities by it, give it our attention, our time, our energy – we are helping to spread an epidemic of misery. “Money” here means not only currency but any kind of wealth in the economic sense: the obsession with accumulating material possessions is the same bacillus.

This is not just a moral issue. I am trying to focus on the consequences of greed, not merely on how it deprives other people but on the corrosive effect it has on those it infects. Little by little, the desire to have what we play up everywhere as “the good things of life” – cars, clothes, jewelry, expensive vacations, home entertainment equipment, the million and one ridiculous, costly, useless insignia of excess wealth – can consume so much of consciousness that a father doesn’t realize he has neglected to love his children, a wife her husband, a grown-up son his parents.

Let’s start with the children. I was shocked to hear a friend say the other day that many young couples think of children as an economic liability. All they do is cost money! One recent magazine article estimated it takes almost one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to raise a child in an average family through the first eighteen years of life. I would question those figures; but in any case, these young couples see that children are going to take a lot of money out of their paychecks for a couple of decades, and they conclude, “Why not spend it on ourselves instead?”

The tragedy is that this realization often comes only after a child is born. Then the child grows up unwanted, a constant burden and irritation to one parent or to both. Many of the million of America’s children who run away from home every year must be in this category. Often they say they would return if even a little love awaited them. The homes they leave are often literally empty, with the parents (or parent) away at work during the day and away for entertainment in the evening. Frequently they are escaping from serious abuse or criminal neglect. Frustration in such a family is high. A parent with an unwanted child and strong selfish desires is going to be frustrated often, as the child demands time, costs money, encumbers personal pursuits like recreation or a career, or simply gets in the way. I don’t want to go into the details of the kind of treatment that results; it can be terrible and even fatal. Child abuse cases number in the millions, increasing every year, and that is only what is reported; many, many incidents never come to light. I vividly remember one journalist asking a runaway boy why he was living in the streets. “Mister,” the boy said, “if you lived with my mother and father, you’d run away too.”

Parents today are “putting their own needs ahead of those of their children,” a university psychologist said recently. “My concern is that if they don’t feel cared about, then they can’t ever care about anybody else – or about themselves.” They grow up angry, rigid, and unresponsive to those around them – including, of course, their own parents and their own children, if they have any. That is where the law of karma comes in.

It has been many months since Christine and I went to San Francisco. I still think of it as “Baghdad by the Bay,” but much of the beauty is gone; it saddens me deeply to see how much this city of St. Francis has ceased to care about its people. Within a block or two of Union Square, I read, thousands of America’s grandparents are living alone in poverty and fear. Some have a room in a tawdry hotel, where friends who have worked with these people say they may not have adequate clothing for the cold, or furniture, or sheets and towels, or even food and heat. Soup lines feed some eight to ten thousand people, most of them elderly; for many, it is said, that is the only meal they will get that day. Literally thousands of others do not even have a room; they carry their worldly belongings in a shopping bag and sleep in parks and lobbies and theaters, in constant fear of robbery and attack. Can so many be without families to take them in and help take care of them, even if it means some hardship? The city seems full now of runaway young people and abandoned aged, many of them living in literal starvation and despair; and I am told the same is true in almost every big city in the United States today.

I am glad to say that San Francisco is trying to provide housing for its homeless. I deeply hope other cities will do the same. But these are first-aid solutions. In a country like ours, where national wealth is so high, no one should have to spend the last years of life in such terrible poverty. It is our privilege to help care for those whose income is inadequate, and on a larger scale, the karma for putting desires and careers ahead of the welfare of others is a dog-eat-dog society in which no one should want to live.

Similarly, millions of elderly Americans live in nursing facilities. They may be physically cared for, in the sense of having food to eat and a bed under a roof in which to sleep, but often they have been virtually abandoned by those they love. Their children may send cards on Mother’s Day and candy at Christmas, but by their actions they are sending a different message: “We’re too busy. We have our own lives to lead. You had your chance to make money and enjoy life; now we’re having ours.” Tragically, they are probably teaching that attitude to their own children; they may go on to become the abandoned aged of tomorrow.

The reverse can happen too. Many people are entering retirement age with the values of the “me generation”: they have money, their children are grown, and they are ready to put themselves first for the rest of their “golden years.” Their watchword, I’m told, is “I’ve paid my dues.” Whatever happens to the rest of society is no longer their concern. They are not interested in paying taxes for child-related programs, even schools; they don’t want to be bothered with all the troubles that children and teenagers cause; they choose a carefree lifestyle with the intention of avoiding as much of life’s difficulties and challenges as possible. An article in the Saturday Review, I think, pointed out the central irony: such people are behaving like children again. At a period in life when, with their experience and financial freedom, they could be doing great things to benefit the rest of life, they want to throw all this away and live only for fun. Most of them, I imagine, will tell you candidly that they are not living in fun; they are dying of boredom. As Dr. Selye says, work is a biological necessity. I would add, a spiritual necessity too. We need to work, need to give, need to love; otherwise, at any age, we wither and die.

Throughout these verses I am trying to emphasize that greed is a process, the slow corrosion of personality. It can take over our lives quietly, little by little, so that we never feel different from one day to the next; yet like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, we may be appalled toward the end of our lives to see what we have become. But the positive side, as I keep emphasizing, is that because it is a process we can arrest it, turn around, and go the other way. These verses, though grim, are not intended to condemn anyone. They are meant to help us see what tangled jungles of selfishness can grow when common, ordinary self-will is allowed to flourish, so that we remember to weed out self-will every day.

SRI KRISHNA: 13. “I got this today,” they say; “tomorrow I shall get that. This wealth is mine, and that will be mine too.”

On the highway between my home and Berkeley is a billboard advertising a particular variety of noxious weed. It makes no appeal to logic or taste or sensory satisfaction; it simply touts the brand name: “More.”

Whenever I pass I think to myself, “That ad sums up our epoch.” The civilization ushered in by the Industrial Revolution, in whose crises we are caught today, has been called the Age of Progress and the Age of Science; I would call it simply the Age of More. The word has two aspects here. The first is There is always more of everything; the second, The more you have, the happier you will be.

Several years ago I remember reading about a survey done over a wide base of salaries and occupations. One response caught my attention: almost everyone said they would be satisfied if they just had a hundred dollars a month more. The interesting thing was that it didn’t seem to matter how much a person was getting; everyone wanted just a little bit more.

That is the human condition. The very nature of the mind is to desire, to desire, to desire; if desires could be satisfied once and for all, the mind would be out of a job. “Today I got this; tomorrow I’m going to get that”: the words must have sounded contemporary even in the Stone Age, when the first caveman stepped out of his cave. But through most of history, the vast majority of human beings had narrow limits on what desires they could actually satisfy. The Industrial Revolution changed that, at least for some parts of the world, ushering in what the mystics might call the most potentially explosive epoch in history: an age when, to all appearances, any material desire can be satisfied. This is a terribly dangerous state of affairs; for as Schumacher points out, desires are infinite but material things are limited. There is only so much of everything to go around, and we have so cleverly magnified our means of getting and producing that it is now possible for human greed to despoil an entire planet and impoverish the lives of billions of people.

Recently I read an article celebrating the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, the world’s first industrial fair. The British Empire was at its zenith then, and the exhibit hall that journalists called the Crystal Palace was full of promise: the new engines and inventions of the Industrial Revolution; vast material wealth taken from places like India and China; the world’s first display of consumer products. Science was conquering nature, medicine was conquering disease, Europe was conquering Asia and Africa. To those who visited the exhibition, two things must have seemed clear: that there was plenty of the earth’s bounty for everyone, and that everything necessary for human happiness could be brought within reach through modern science, commerce, and industry.

There are still a good many people who believe this today, more than a century later. The difference is that it is no longer Great Britain which embodies the promise of prosperity. The ideal worshipped by most of the rest of the globe is the American Dream, which a European economic leader captured in four simple watchwords: “More, bigger, faster, richer.”

How vast this promise must have looked in London in 1851! Every door was labeled “More”: more lands to discover, more knowledge to acquire, more things to invent, more resources, more markets, more products. Wealth was everywhere, and you could not only pursue and get it but thereby be a benefactor of society. The history of those times is an epic story of Rajas Unbound, freed from every physical limitation – in a word, the story of greed. If you ask historians what made the miraculous progress of modern civilization possible, they will answer something like, “Coal. Iron. The concentration of capital. The rationalization of science.” There is truth in all these, but I would answer on another level: “Desire.” Behind all the seminal developments of the nineteenth century, you can trace the deep, driving desire for more, more, more. The Age of Progress made a science of greed. We have perfected that science, and now we are beginning to reap the karma.

Look at some examples, which I hope will provide a global perspective for these verses. Sri Krishna is trying to show what the result is when we allow the desire for profit to grow until it breaks out of every natural restraint, so that it is free to do what it likes. There are many sides to this, but here I want to look simply at greed on the largest scale.

It is an axiom of modern business that there is always more money to be made. The polite word for this is “growth.” Not only should your bank account always be growing, the rate at which it grows should always be growing too. No matter how much you made last year, this year you should be able to make more.

Where is this growth to come from? The answer is one of the great discoveries of the Age of Rajas: unlimited growth comes from unlimited consumption – more energy, more materials, more capital, more labor. The more you consume, the faster you can grow.

“Progress,” in this view, depends on resources being cheap and inexhaustible. Rajas’s natural movement is expansive: use up what is cheapest and closest; then, when local resources run out – or get too expensive, which is the same in effect – you look farther afield. Today, of course, we can envision a time when “farther afield” no longer exists, though Asuric Enterprises still talks blithely of mining other planets. We know too that even before a resource runs out, it may simply become too expensive. But at the dawn of the Age of Rajas no one guessed this. Somewhere in the world there was always more to take. Who could consume all of the mineral wealth, the agricultural potential, the cheap labor of the vast continents that lay waiting, perhaps two thirds of the globe?

Thus in need of materials and markets, Asuric Enterprises rushed into the business of empire-building, which is the inevitable end of greed.

Last week I saw a movie version of one of my favorite plays by Bernard Shaw: Caesar and Cleopatra, starring Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. The play was written around the turn of the century, when the British Empire seemed at the height of its power, and Shaw added a biting prologue about imperialism which the movie left out. The Egyptian god Ra comes out onto a dark stage, wearing his hawk’s head, and scornfully tells his English audience how empires grow, whether British or Roman:

Then the old Rome . . . robbed their own poor until they became great masters of that art, and knew by what laws it could be made to appear seemly and honest. And when they had squeezed their own poor dry, they robbed the poor of other lands, and added those lands to Rome until there came a new Rome, rich and huge. And I, Ra, laughed; for the minds of the Romans remained the same size, whilst their dominion spread over the earth.

As an Irishman, Shaw had reason to feel familiar with this process. The English, like the Romans, began at home. When I was in school in India, I remember reading about the terrible Irish potato famine as seen through English eyes. Our books had columns of figures that showed the Irish population shooting upwards, clearly out of control. They were too poor, we were taught, to raise anything except potatoes. But the land ran out – “too many people, too little land,” a classic case of Malthusian overpopulation. (We Indians were to consider ourselves warned.) In 1845 the potato blight attacked and destroyed the one food crop of the Irish poor. Within five years at least a million Irish men, women, and children died of starvation; the actual number may be more than a million and a half. Another million or so others escaped to North America in such terrible destitution that they died in the thousands on ship and shore.

What Shaw knew about this was something we were not taught in our English schools: that Ireland was as much a colony of England as India was. We never thought of this in India, you know. Ireland was part of the British Isles to us, and an Irishman was indistinguishable from an Englishman. So I was surprised to learn later that Ireland was colonized very much the way India was – in fact, the relationship was cemented through military force during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at roughly the same time that the British East India Company was establishing itself in India.

The parallels continue, beginning with control of land. In Ireland, after a terrible attempt at simply liquidating the population, the Irish were driven off and disenfranchised and their land given to landlords and settlers supplied by England. The English landlords – who, understandably, found it safer as well as more pleasant to live in England and were therefore not in close touch with affairs on their estates – grew not what would feed Ireland but what could produce the greatest profit in England; those profits (and the high rents) were the reason they were in Ireland at all. Just as a gardener might set aside a particular plot for raising tomatoes, Ireland became an agricultural backyard for industrial England.

Over the same period, except for the manufacture of linen in what is now Northern Ireland, Irish industries were undermined and destroyed, creating a huge population of unemployed, landless poor. The English did not need industrial competition. They preferred to take out cheap raw materials and sell back finished goods, which was a highly effective way of making money. This remarkably profitable relationship is the essence of colonialism everywhere. It is the ultimate refinement of the profit motive.

One problem in Ireland was that Irish peasants, who numbered in the millions, did not constitute much of a market. They could not afford to buy back food they grew for others; the price was determined by what could be paid in England. Millions, in fact, could literally not afford anything; they lived in a subsistence economy. With no occupation open to them in Ireland except sharecropping, they had theoretically four alternatives: they could provide cheap labor for industries in England, join the English army, emigrate in destitution, or starve. Most were willing to pay almost anything to rent a piece of some absent landlord’s land and till it for his profit. Demand kept rents exorbitant, and demand was forced higher by the fact that to keep surplus commodities from pushing prices down, a good deal of arable land – at least two and a half million acres, according to one English historian – was simply held idle. Nothing was grown on it; no herds were grazed.

The result was that Irish food, insofar as it came back to Ireland at all, fed those who were well-to-do. The poor ate potatoes, the best crop they could raise on a tiny plot of ground. The rest of the land, and all their labor, went to raise grain and other commodities to pay the rent.

In brief, there were not too many Irish for Irish land to support. There was plenty of land, and it supported English landlords bountifully. While perhaps two million Irish starved during the “Great Hunger,” ample quantities of meat and grain went on being shipped across the channel for sale in English markets. One contemporary English observer wrote that every ship sailing in with relief grain was sure to meet six ships sailing out with food for England.

As Shaw suggested, the English no sooner began to work this system out at home than they exported it – notably (and most profitably) to India, the “brightest jewel in the British Imperial crown.” What happened in Ireland happened in India too, and on a much vaster scale. I should add that the same exploitation took place all over what is now called the Third World, not only at the hands of England but of many other European powers. But India makes a very good example, and one I can write about from personal experience.

Westerners are often surprised when I remind them that ancient India was the United States of the world. It had tremendous wealth and thriving village industries, and in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and technology India was teacher to the rest of the world. Precisely because of that wealth the country was invaded again and again, some twenty times in its recorded history.

Last to come were the British. Counting from the 1750s, when the English East India Company began to establish a dominant military presence in Bengal, for almost two centuries India’s material resources and labor were systematically drained for British profits, first for enterprising individuals, later for the Crown. And those profits were enormous. “Possibly since the world began,” wrote the American historian Brooke Adams, “no investment has ever yielded the profit reaped from the Indian plunder.”

This is a very important connection, and one of the great ironies of modern progress: the material development of the West was paid for largely by its colonies in the South and East. In particular, the explosive growth of Britain’s industrialization – some fifty years ahead of her competitors – was directly financed by the wealth that poured in from India. One cartoon in an English magazine summed up the relationship very well: the Empire was portrayed as a huge cow with her udder in England, methodically eating up India.

The methods employed for this incredible venture were essentially the same as in Ireland, only more systematic, more sophisticated, and applied on a much vaster scale. Briefly, the English took control of the land and destroyed domestic industries, creating a landless, impoverished work force numbering eventually in hundreds of millions. The colonial government and its beneficiaries could pay minimally for materials and labor while charging impossibly high taxes and rents. On top of everything else, India paid the costs of being looted, up to the point of paying all the expenses of supplying Indian soldiers to die in British wars. This too became a standard feature of colonial rule everywhere.

“Well, so what?” says Rajas. “This is over and done with. Colonialism is dead, and no one mourns it. Why drag in the past?” Because it is not over and done with. I am bringing up the past to write about the present. The idea of systematically developing – or “underdeveloping” – poorer countries as a cheap source of resources and a huge market for finished goods is very much alive. So are the techniques of controlling land and its use, and the basic skill of draining capital. The ways in which global corporations control their land, labor, and sources of materials in the Third World are generally very similar to those developed by the English, French, Dutch, and other colonial powers in those same countries. Huge businesses have taken the place of colonial governments, but the relationships remain the same.

So the colonial inheritance is very much alive. Just last week I was reminded of the specter of bountiful harvests of wheat being shipped out of a starving Ireland when I saw an article describing the tragic famines in the Sahel area of Africa, on the edge of the Sahara. The Sahel is one of the places you see photographed most often when papers, magazines, and television want to show what they call “the face of famine.” For years the area experienced severe droughts in which hundreds of thousands of people died. Yet while food aid was being shipped in during the drought, record harvests of food from the same region were being shipped out: peanuts, cotton, vegetables, and beef, the cash commodities that have taken the best agricultural land since the days when the Sahel became a colony of France. The main difference between now and colonial times seems to be that instead of the French government, it is large corporations – mostly French – which profit. Those who starve may not find the distinction of much interest.

In this sense, colonialism is not so much a relationship between two countries as it is an attitude of exploitation. The essence of colonialism is the control of one country’s resources – not necessarily its other affairs – by and for some other power, rather than for its own people. It is no longer fashionable for one nation to colonize another, but there are more subtle and effective ways to make money than through outright physical possession. So today we have economic and military colonies: instead of the British Empire in India, for example, an Asuric Fruit Empire in Central America. To me the differences do not seem particularly great. Peasants in Haiti, Mexico, or Bangladesh may not care much who owns their crops. What matters is that they are not theirs, and that they have no control over what they raise, how much they can sell it for, or how they spend the little they can earn.

When Asuric Enterprises comes before the court of karma, it will have some answering to do. We can expect it to ask for rewards rather than punishment, for it claims nothing less than to have financed the progress of modern civilization. Without the free pursuit of profit, according to Rajas, we would still be living in mud huts and dependent on the land. There is truth to this claim, and I do not want to indict the profit motive as such. But the wanton pursuit of excessive profit, without regard to anyone’s real needs or to the consequences, has bought prosperity for less than a third of the world at the cost of keeping at least one half in poverty.

SRI KRISHNA: 14. “I have destroyed my enemies. I shall destroy others too! Am I not like God? I enjoy what I want. I am successful. I am powerful. I am happy.

15. “I am rich and wellborn. Who is equal to me? I will perform lavish sacrifices and give away lavish gifts, and rejoice in my own generosity.” This is how they go on, deluded by ignorance.

It is easy enough to picture a demented individual saying this kind of thing. Emperors have made a litany of it; in the days of Caligula and Nero, in fact, you actually could proclaim yourself God and get away with it, though often not for long. In our own times, these lines could be spoken by a captain of industry or a king of organized crime like Marlon Brando’s “Godfather.” But in all these cases the picture is so extreme that we may find it difficult to relate it to ourselves. “Well,” we say, “at least I’m no Nero. I may have my problems, but I’ll never be like that!”

Yet the shrill voice that mouths these verses does not belong exclusively to tyrants. It is the ego’s, and one of the most sobering experiences in meditation comes when we realize that this is what arrogance sounds like in any of us, even those who are likely to be forgotten by history. When we finally break into the greenroom of the unconscious, we find Mr. Ego there stripped of all the masks and makeup he wears for the outside world, parading before a mirror like some demented Peter Sellers character and uttering lines like these. Very few, of course, ever verbalize such thoughts. But the more inflated self-will becomes, the easier it is to hear these verses beneath the conventions of civilized behavior – not only in individuals but in the arrogance of a race, a nation, even a corporation.

“I have destroyed my enemies,” says the voice of Power. “I shall destroy others too, if they get in my way. Am I not like God? I do as I like.” This is the essence of gangsterism. Not all gangsters come from Chicago and hide from the law. Some have held positions of distinction; some have even been accorded titles, such as “the Great.” Entrepreneurs like Commodore Vanderbilt built empires by translating these verses into a ruthless but colorful way of business: take what you want and eliminate your opposition. Men like Leopold II and “Baker Pasha” did the same when carving out millions of square miles of Africa for Belgium and Great Britain. Their names are all honored now, as are those of other great empire-builders of history – Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Drake, Cortés, Clive – remembered not for what they took from life but by the “civilization” they spread in the wake of their conquests.

These are men of tremendous rajas, who felt themselves allied with destiny. In a world that measures success by competition, power, and physical might, they are considered immensely successful. The Gita would object. In the arrogance that comes with power they rolled across history like steamrollers, causing suffering to millions of innocent people who often did not even oppose them, but only happened to stand in the path of their desires.

The inheritors of the mantle of power today are often not single individuals but boards and committees. They may not literally believe themselves to be “like God,” as this verse puts it; but it does quite enough damage simply to believe unquestioningly that you have God on your side. In practice it means, “I have unlimited power, and it is right to do what I want.”

Alexander the Great, who actually did believe he was a god, was once unhorsed in man-to-man combat when he invaded India through the Khyber Pass. Alexander was rescued, but to punish the obscure Indian soldier who committed the sin, he destroyed the man’s whole town – mostly women, children, and the aged, since the men were away fighting Alexander. The bloated ego takes this sort of thing very personally. Its response is officially known as “righteous wrath,” and especially in war it can infect not just individuals but groups, communities, and nations. Dresden and other German cities were firebombed in World War II to “get even” for the arrogance of bombing England. Dresden was a city without military significance, and most of the population were civilians. The decision to reduce it to flame was made not by an enraged despot but by a presumably sober, sensible committee, carefully considering pros and cons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki – also cities of civilians, without military importance – were destroyed for the same kind of reason. The message to any future antagonists was as clear as the words of this verse: “We have destroyed our enemies. We can destroy you too!”

When I first came to this country, in 1959, I found many people for whom these verses might have expressed the American national sentiment. This is the natural euphoria of power and success, and if any nation ever had both, it is the United States after 1945. It had emerged triumphant from a terrible war, the protector of the “free world” from the forces of destruction. It was still protecting Western Europe and felt a moral and military obligation to enforce a Pax Americana over the rest of the world. It had the world’s most powerful weapon and by far the strongest economy. It had destroyed its enemies and was supporting its friends with foreign aid, which is precisely what these verses mean on an international level. By the time I arrived, advertisements were proclaiming, “America’s the greatest land on earth!”

But with so much prosperity and power came a measure of natural superiority. Most of the people I spoke with then were convinced that the United States had God on its side. “America” was synonymous with “freedom”; to oppose the United States was to stand aligned with the powers of darkness.

Just fifty years earlier, however, these verses would not have been the voice of America. Germany would gladly have spoken them, but more than to any other nation they belonged to Great Britain. Arnold Toynbee, the great English historian, recalls at the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 that the English “saw their sun standing at its zenith and assumed that it was there to stay.” That is the world into which I was born. The Empire was colored red on the maps in our schools (patriots had some cynical remarks to make about the reason for the choice of color) and it made an effective display; a red chain of power seemed to throttle the globe. England’s proud boast then was, “The sun never sets on the British Empire!” A cousin of mine used to add, “It’s afraid to.” England had everything then. She controlled the world’s trade, the world’s seas, the lion’s share of the world’s resources; she dominated world technology; her industrial capacity was unexcelled. Great Britain seemed poised on the edge of a great new epoch of world domination: a global peace, ensured by British military might, and a thriving global trade.

She also had something less tangible: an inherent moral superiority that destined her, at least in her own eyes, for world leadership. She tried to carry the mantle wisely. Everyone remembers Kipling’s phrase: “the White Man’s burden” of “new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child.” Often they had reason to feel sullen. This sort of extreme power easily becomes high-handed, ruling over matters of life and death like an instrument of divine judgment.

In brief, what the United States was after World War II, Britain was at the end of the nineteenth century. The parallel gives us a chance to look at the karma that comes from the arrogance of power, which I believe throws a good deal of light on contemporary superpowers whose military and industrial power has never been equalled.

Since I come from India, I would like to illustrate from the experience of my mother country what the arrogance of power does to both exploiter and exploited. I do not want to dwell on the abuses of military rule, which are always extreme. I would rather try to give some idea of the mental state that goes with the exploitation of any race or country by another. This attitude can infect even good people, and the indifference it breeds is the root of tremendous suffering, whether in British India or South Africa or the United States.

The vast majority of the British in India, when they came to our country to govern, were fair-minded people with some sense of fellow-feeling. But the world they stepped into was founded on inequality; it could not exist without callousness. Over and over we saw English men and women acclimatize themselves to injustice and exploitation that they never would have tolerated in their motherland. We watched them insulate themselves from the terrible poverty around them without ever asking if there might be some connection between their wealth and material progress and the poverty of the country whose resources they were there to take. Without such indifference, I think, exploitation cannot go on for long. But once we become insensitive to those around us, there seems to be no limit to what we can ignore.

These two verses of the Gita convey something very interesting about the arrogance of power: with one hand it glories in its capacity to destroy; with the other, in the lavishness of its own generosity. Like Rome in its days of empire, the British sincerely believed that despite a few excesses, they were doing good throughout the world by bringing the products and virtues of Western civilization to backward nations at the point of a gun. This was a common colonial attitude. Not only the British but the French, the Belgians, and the Dutch who carved up and converted most of Africa felt quite sure that they were bringing civilization while they carried away wealth, and that the first justified the second. It was a comforting combination of altruism, power, and profit.

I had a number of English friends in India in the days before independence, and even the most liberal of them often held this view. “You have to admit, old boy,” they would say, “that on the whole, England has done India rather a lot of good. We’ve unified the country, and we’re leaving you a first-class railroad system and all the administrative machinery of good government.” They were shocked when I pointed out that the railroads were built to deploy troops swiftly all over India, and volunteered that if efficient trains meant that any of our cities could be occupied by armed garrisons on forty-eight hours’ notice, most of us would have preferred to travel by bullock cart. And since by that time hundreds of thousands of Indians, not only men but women and children, had been imprisoned without charge or trial, beaten, and even killed for offering nonviolent resistance, we were also prepared to do without the machinery of British administration.

To be very clear, I want to repeat that no country is immune to the arrogance of power and the indifference it breeds. Most countries and races that have been in positions of superiority have succumbed to it, even the United States. If I have chosen to illustrate with Great Britain and India, it is because I can do so from personal experience and because I believe it throws light on the uses and abuses of power today. I am not inveighing against any country here. I am simply trying to illustrate the natural consequences of power: in the language of these verses, the unavoidable results of feeling “like God,” rich, powerful, able to do what one likes. The very attitude that you have the right to control other people has certain seeds of karma. Arrogance is part of that attitude; it has to bear fruit. Exploitation is part of that desire. So is jealousy. And so, curiously, is fear: the fear success breeds, that someone who is stronger will come along and take away what you have.

It is from these seeds of fear and jealousy that war finally springs, the last of the fruits of power. To me it is impossible to look over Britain’s “golden years” between 1850 and 1914 and fail to see the forces of international jealousy gathering. Great Britain had everything, and Germany wanted its share. By the end of the century, in their race for “defense,” the nations of Europe had massed standing armies vaster than any ever seen before in times of peace. The war that erupted impoverished and devastated its participants, excepting the United States. It devoured the money, men, and materials of the British Empire, colonies and “mother­land” together, and sowed the seeds of yet another war.

Modern history moves swiftly. The Roman Empire took centuries to collapse; from Queen Victoria’s coronation to the cataclysm of world war was less than a hundred years. The Reich that was to last a thousand years held up for barely twelve. The once-unchallenged superiority of the United States among the nations of the world is scarcely unchallenged today. Power cannot expand without a collapse. To someone who can take a long view of history, I think it must be clear that we are firmly in what Wendell Willkie called “one world or none,” where no country can unilaterally pursue its own way without risking disaster for the whole globe.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. Bound by their greed and entangled in a web of delusion, whirled about by a fragmented mind, they fall into a dark hell.

“Hell” in the Gita does not refer to some place after the Last Judgment. Hell is a state of mind. Tamas is hell, and the indifference and utter insensitivity of the tamasic mind makes hell of life around it. Wrapped in itself, interested in nothing else, tamas is not touched by suffering even on a massive scale; it is barely even aware of it. We can see the extent of this apathy and indifference if we take a long-range look at the globe today: its colossal poverty, the pervasive contamination of its water, food, and air, and most of all the monumental cruelty of its wars.

The Vietnam war, I must tell you, put this country in a very different light for Third World nations that had looked to it for leadership. Christine and I returned to the United States from India shortly before American military involvement in Vietnam began in earnest, and I remember that within a few years you could scarcely pick up a periodical or turn on the evening news without learning of more casualties and destruction. The tragic toll of human life ran into two or three millions in the ten years before U.S. withdrawal. Many of these – perhaps most – must have been innocent civilians, women and children whose lives were sacrificed for no reason whatsoever.

Vietnam gives clues of what war has come to mean at the end of the twentieth century. In both instances, staggering numbers of sophisticated weapons were used primarily not to defeat armies but to destroy cities and civilians. No one pretended that these women, children, and aged were the enemy against whom war was originally intended. They were “incidental casualties.” I doubt that they found the distinction of much comfort. They were killed essentially because the military mind, full of tamas, can approach a problem only in terms of killing. If killing doesn’t work, as in the trenches of World War I or the bombing of Vietnam, it tries more killing – and today, with the progress of science so rapid and so diligently pursued, there are vastly more effective ways of killing than the military mind has any imagination to deal with. So it goes on doing what it understands: after all, the weapons are there to be used.

I mention Vietnam only because these tragedies stand out in my mind. Any war would prompt the same commentary on the colossal insensitiveness of this kind of violence, the fatal lack of imagination of those who plan and order the death and suffering of thousands or even millions of people for no other reason than to assuage the national ego. Few individual egos can become so bloated or be more callous. The national ego is full of tamas, which means it is riddled with fears, obsessed by revenge, and utterly insensitive to suffering. Tamas is the morphine of the spirit. It knocks out sensitivity to friend and foe alike, with the result that the national ego doesn’t mind losing any number of lives as long as it ends up “winning.”

Leon Wolff, after a detailed discussion of the Battle of Flanders, summarized World War I in a paragraph:

It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing, and in so doing had killed 8,538,315 men and variously wounded 21,219,452. Of 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus the total deaths (not counting civilians) approach 10,000,000. . . .

“It had meant nothing, solved nothing, and proved nothing.” That epitaph could stand for any war.

For me, as probably for thousands of other Americans, watching the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam brought a period of agonizing reflection. It brought home to every thoughtful observer the utter futility of war and the untold misery it causes. Yet the world has been sick of war countless times before, and as St. Francis liked to say, our knowledge is only as deep as our action.

I have heard that it was the women in this country who finally asserted themselves and brought the war in Korea to an end. With Vietnam, as I like to repeat with great appreciation, more than anyone else it was the young people who opened the eyes of the nation to the horror and stupidity of war. This was not accomplished by national leaders. The war was begun by national leaders; it was the people who brought it to an end. This is how it must be. I generally appreciate the sentiment in this country that we should not look to politicians to solve our problems; all too often they are the cause of them. Ultimately our problems are our problems, and it is we little people who can solve them if we join hands and keep our eyes on the welfare of all.

Human tragedy, as the Gita makes clear, is not inflicted on us by God. It is inflicted entirely by ourselves: if not actively, then by the gross insensitivity which enables human beings to close their eyes to the suffering around them. This too gives a precious clue: the most effective way to undo this fearful suffering is not to attack those who have caused it, but to work to open their eyes and soften their hearts until they become sensitive again.

As I write this, there are signs that for the first time in a generation citizens around the world are rejecting in impressive numbers the acceptability of a nuclear war. This holds tremendous promise. After decades of an overpowering sense of helplessness, people are beginning to believe that they can, after all, make a difference in the course of history. If we believe this, it is possible to abolish war. Only if we believe ourselves powerless would I say that war becomes inevitable.

I remember J. P. Kripalani, the distinguished historian who must have been on close terms with Gandhi for more than thirty years, describing how he first heard Gandhi talk about freeing India through nonviolent resistance. Kripalani was a young man then and a good intellectual, and he was shocked. He went up to Gandhi after the talk and said, “Gandhiji, you may know all about the Gita, but you don’t know about history. Never before has a country been able to free itself without violence.” “You don’t know about history,” Gandhi corrected him. “To say that something has never happened before does not mean it cannot happen in the future.” This is why I think of our times not as the nuclear age but as the age of Gandhi.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. Self-important, obstinate, swept away by the pride of wealth, they ostentatiously perform sacrifices without any regard for their purpose.

18. Egotistical, violent, arrogant, lustful, and angry, envious of everyone, they abuse my presence within their own bodies and in the bodies of others.

19. Life after life I cast those who are malicious, hateful, cruel, and degraded into the wombs of those with similar natures.

20. Birth after birth they find themselves with demonic tendencies. Degraded in this way, Arjuna, they fail to reach me and fall lower still.

Someone has commented that in all the Hindu scriptures, there is no place where the fate of those with negative tendencies seems more hopeless than in these verses. We seem to have no way out. Nowhere does Sri Krishna sound more like a wrathful, vengeful Lawgiver.

There are secular and even scientific versions of this judgment too: schemes like astrology; theories that personality is written into our very genes. Sri Krishna would not hesitate to call both of these superstitions. I know people who believe that because their sun sign is such-and-so and their good planets are all in squares while bad ones are in triangles, they can never change. Some people even find this comfortable: it is arduous to change yourself, and very easy to go on being what you are. “Well, you know Leos,” they say. “It’s my nature to be dominating; what can I do?”

The Compassionate Buddha never used stronger language than when answering someone who spoke this way. “I abhor astrology,” he said. He abhorred anything that binds the human mind. For the same reason, without differing with anything fundamental in modern biology, I think he would abhor the crippling belief that our problems are written hopelessly into our genes. I have had people tell me, “There’s no point in my learning to meditate. What’s the use? I’ll always be like this. It’s the way I am.” One friend who was subject to very severe chronic depressions told me very earnestly, “You don’t understand. Meditation can’t do anything about this, because it’s not a problem with my mind. The doctor says there is a particular chemical imbalance in the neurotransmitters of my brain.” You can see why Sri Krishna, in an earlier verse, called this the path of greater and greater bondage. Nothing is more debilitating than a negative image of ourselves, and the voice that whispers “You’re no good, you’re no good” comes not from wisdom but from the ego-ventriloquist.

We should never succumb to this way of thinking. We should never conclude that our lives are hopeless, that we can never improve, that we are condemned by God or fate or chemistry or conditioning to repeat the same mistakes. We always have a choice. In fact, the verses which follow will affirm the glory of our human nature: not only that we can always choose a better path, but that someday we will. We can never alienate ourselves from our divine Self, and the whole force of evolution is pushing us towards this supreme goal.

Nevertheless, this reassuring picture is spread out over many lifetimes, and the way in which evolution urges us upward, if we do not learn quickly, is through suffering. I have seen a lot of literature recently about CAI, “computer assisted instruction.” Life is PAI: we often learn through pain, through the consequences of our own mistakes. According to the Hindu and Buddhist mystics, if we insist on living selfishly, we will not only reap the suffering of selfishness as we go on; we will also carry that mental state into our next life.

Of course, this will require a suitable context. If we are going to develop our selfishness, we need selfish parents and a suitably self-centered culture and epoch. We have to go to the computerized birth-planning service in Bardo and spell out our needs precisely. “Wanted: One or two parents consistently interested in putting themselves first. Proof of deterioration of character required.” A real devotee of sensory pleasure in ancient times, for example, might be born again in Nero’s Rome, with social standing and wealth enough to indulge himself however he liked. Sri Krishna would wince at the thought, but he would say, “How else is the fellow going to learn?” Similarly, as I think Trotsky once implied, someone really violent might try the twentieth century. You can fairly well have your pick of countries and decades. Any real situation, of course, would be vastly more complicated; thousands of samskaras have to be accommodated. But this is the principle: we are what we are and where we are because of what we have been.

When I was living in Oakland, I remember some apartment houses going up across the street from us. I was alarmed to see how flimsy they were. You could hear everything going on in the next room, and when someone went up or down the stairs, the whole building shook. A friend of mine who knew the owner went and asked him why it was being built so insubstantially. His reply was irrelevant but rather significant: “You can’t take it with you.”

This is a common point of view. If you could take it with you, you should build things to last forever. But if you can’t take it with you, what does it matter? Most of us, unfortunately, are working on things that we can’t take with us: we can’t take our houses, our cars, our swimming pools, our clothes, our work, anything. The Gita says simply, “Why not work on the things you are going to take: your own thoughts?” This is inescapable logic. Even if you don’t want to take them, your thoughts are going to come along anyway; so you might as well make them the best thoughts possible.

In one of the odd similes in Hinduism and Buddhism, the passage from this life to the next is compared to a kind of boulevard, lined with trees on either side: karmadaru, trees of karma. And thoughts are like birds – or, more Buddhistic, like bats. When you leave this life, all these bats jump off and alight in the trees at the far end of the road, waiting for you to pass. Then, just when you are about to re-enter embodied life, they drop from the trees into your open knapsack. You have a new body, live in a new context, but you have the same old thoughts. That is what provides the continuity of our load of karma. When you change your thinking from selfish to selfless, learn to return good will for ill will, your thought load is different – which means your karma load has been changed too. This shows the supreme importance of working on our thoughts, which is ultimately the point of all spiritual disciplines.

Only after many years of preparation in sadhana do we enter the unconscious, which is where the real work on our deeper thoughts takes place. This can be a terribly unsettling revelation. Our real nature is light, but in each of us there is plenty of darkness too: dark continents of selfishness which we share with every other human being as part of our evolutionary heritage from the animal realms. Both sides, the divine and the nondivine, are at war in each of us, and the very basis of sadhana is to get into the unconscious and then fight your way out. There is no other way.

As I said, it is dreadfully disheartening to see so much that is selfish within oneself. Somebody once asked St. Francis of Sales, “I’ve been practicing spiritual disciplines all these years, and I see more in me that is sinful than I did when I began. Do you think I might actually be a worse person than before?” Francis replied with a smile, “No, you have always been like that. You’re simply beginning to see what has always been present in the depths of your consciousness – in the consciousness of us all.” Generally I am very careful to avoid striking a negative note, but a great deal of the unconscious is unpleasant and inhuman. Entering there is like walking into a forest: it is the nature of a forest to be infested by wild animals, and the nature of the unconscious to breed anger, fear, and greed.

To give a very personal example, I have to confess that I was never a very unkind person. My grandmother used to say I had more patience than she did, which was saying a good deal. So I always looked on myself as a relatively decent human being – that is, until one day in meditation when I looked into this forest for the first time. I was appalled. It took some time for me to realize that this is what everyone sees; for this is the human condition. That is why no illumined man or woman will ever scorn another person or criticize others’ weaknesses or fail in compassion for any human error. In my eyes, it is the person who looks down on others who is on the lowest rung of the human ladder, not the person who occasionally slips and falls.

Fortunately, if you have been practicing all the disciplines sincerely and systematically, you cannot enter the unconscious until you have developed the capacity to grapple successfully with what you encounter there. This is a built-in safety mechanism in sadhana. So when you find yourself facing a samskara, the very fact that you are face to face is a sign that you are ready for it. This is not to say that you will find the fight easy; just the opposite. These samskaras are huge and tough; anger, fear, and greed have been in training through millions of years of animal evolution. You can’t expect to knock them out in the first round: in fact, you might as well prepare yourself to take a beating. You are likely to spend a lot of time on the ropes, especially in the early days; you may even find yourself looking up at a samskara from the floor. That is the experience of even some of the greatest mystics, East or West.

In traditional language, these “powers of darkness” in the depths of consciousness are often referred to collectively as the Devil. There is a good deal of practical psychology behind this. “If you keep saying ‘I’m a sinner, I’m a sinner,’ ” Sri Ramakrishna used to say, “you become a sinner.” It is terribly debilitating to identify yourself with evil; it can tear you in two or drain all your will to fight. Call all that “Satan,” the Christian mystics say, and identify with what is divine. Martin Luther, I understand, once threw his inkwell at the Devil to drive him away; he may have had a mess to clean up afterwards, but I’m sure the gesture had its effect. Nonetheless, in this age of psychology and science, people seem to understand more easily when instead of “Satan” and “soul,” I talk about the ego and the Self. This makes it clear that both are in our consciousness, but that our real personality is divine.

“Don’t be afraid,” Sri Krishna tells Arjuna; “you have the qualities that lead to Self-realization.” I want to make it very clear that all of us have these qualities in some measure, simply by virtue of our being human. Everyone can make the choices that improve personality; no one is compelled to remain at a lower level, whatever the mistakes and conditioning of the past. I sometimes read even experienced spiritual figures saying that in order to purify consciousness, you need to be born with a special kind of nervous system. I have to differ categorically: this is not necessary at all. I was born with the same kind of nervous system as everybody else – attracted by what is pleasant, repelled by what is unpleasant. Therefore I know from my own experience the truth of what every great mystic testifies, East and West alike: that you can remake yourself completely through the practice of meditation and the allied disciplines. That is the real glory of human nature; and that is why, though it may sound naive, I still tell Christine with a fresh sense of wonder, “There is nothing like meditation!”

SRI KRISHNA: 21. There are three gates to this self-destructive state: lust, anger, and greed. Renounce these.

22. Those who pass freely by these three gates of darkness, Arjuna, seek what is best and attain life’s supreme goal.

When I was a college student I used to enjoy going down to the railway station to watch the trains. Nagpur Central was a terribly busy place; lines from all over India came together there. The vast, high-vaulted waiting room was as noisy as your Grand Central used to be, and out on the platforms tracks seemed to stretch as far as you could see. A huge board above the ticket area posted the Arrivals and Departures, some of which had quite colorful names: the Grand Trunk Express, the Malabar Express, the Deccan Queen. I liked to think you could walk in, pick your destination from the board as if from a menu, and travel anywhere in India you wanted to go.

It occurred to me the other day that in its deeper levels, the mind is very much like a huge, busy train station. Thoughts are coming and going almost all the time, day and night. Many of these are narrow-gauge distractions: the state of the economy, what to have for dinner, what Sarah said that night at the Bijou. But there comes a stage in meditation when you go right in to the central waiting room, where the major express trains ply. They are listed on the Arrivals and Departures board, but the mind offers very few lines. Sri Krishna lists the major ones here: Lust, Greed, and Anger; express service available twenty-four hours a day. But the choice of destinations, he tells Arjuna, is even more limited. You can line up at any of these gates, give the collector your ticket, and climb aboard; but though the routes are different, you will always end up in the same place, and it is not heaven.

The other day I was reading about Disneyland, which apparently is one of the places in the United States that visitors from other countries always want to see. Even former premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union was fascinated by it. You can get a train there to take you into other “lands” – Jungleland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland – where for a small fee you can be attacked by wild plastic hippos or weird bugaboos in a darkened cave. I tell friends from India, “Why bother? If you learn to meditate you can travel to all those lands in your own unconscious mind, and you’ll have a much more thrilling time of it too.” I am being lighthearted, but I am not exaggerating. The creatures in the unconscious are more jungly than anything you will find in Jungleland. Plastic hippos may look real enough to scare you, but they cannot hurt. Rage, resentment, anger, hostility, on the other hand, will beat you up and rob you of your prana. If you stay on the ride, they will take you to the end of the line: a state of mind for which hell is the best name, though this is not a concept I even like to mention.

Looking around today, I have come to believe that the biggest of these three gates is anger. Our age has been called the age of anger; I would go further now and call it the age of rage. Newspapers could keep the same headline made up for most front-page stories: “Anger Erupts!” – in the home, on the street, at work, in the schools, between races, communities, nations, and even religions, most ridiculous and often most vicious of all. Books are written with little substance except anger. Magazines even praise it in the name of therapy. Films and television programs draw most of their action from angry characters, hostile language, and violent behavior. In a supermarket line, on the bus, walking along the city streets, I hear angry words at the slightest provocation.

After all I have said against lust and greed, it may seem surprising that I single out anger as the main gate to the land of sorrow. But there is a close relationship between lust and greed on the one hand and anger on the other – so close, in fact, that I would say you cannot play up lust or greed in any area of life without putting yourself on an express train to a chronically angry mind. “Angry” here, I should explain, is a comprehensive term. Angerland shelters all kinds of mental states which we may not recognize as belonging to the same family: fury, resentment, hostility, irritation, “righteous indignation,” or simply going about “with a chip on your shoulder,” spoiling for a fight.

Patanjali, the unexcelled teacher of meditation in ancient India, would explain this relationship in terms of the mind’s dynamics. He is always clear and to the point. Lust and greed are not very different in the way they work, he would say. “Lust” does not refer only to sex – we speak of lust for wealth or power or fame – and “greed” need not refer to money; we can be greedy to have an experience, a particular pleasure, or power, or prestige, as well as to have a huge bank balance. To Patanjali, the scientist, the force is the same: selfish desire. Only the object of that force is different. When it gets fierce and swollen, there is tremendous power in the force of selfish desire. We have to have what we want, and if we cannot get it, we become angry, frustrated, or resentful; the power of the desire is expressed as anger.

Now, if it is just a single, momentary desire that gets thwarted – say, you have set your heart on seeing a particular movie and it is cancelled – Patanjali would say that first a wave of desire rises in the mind, then a wave of anger or irritation when the desire is blocked, and that is all. Anger that flares and dies immediately is not pleasant to anyone, but usually it does no serious damage. But look at what happens when a strong selfish desire becomes chronic. Then it is not just a single wave; it runs through our lives like a river, beneath every other passing state of consciousness. It becomes a basic drive in our lives. We live for money; we live for sex: in the deeper levels of the mind we may be thinking about them always.

In such a case, Patanjali would say, we are setting ourselves up for chronic frustration. Life, to put it mildly, cannot always deliver what we want. Here the very nature of the mind is a bit perverse. It wants fiercely to be made happy by getting a particular thing, a particular experience. Until it gets that, it lives in expectation – that is, in a kind of Neverland sometime in the future. Bliss is “just around the corner,” but never here and now. And as the mind waits, there is a continuous, mounting, gnawing sense of irritation: life is failing to deliver. It is welching on its promises. We are being cheated. Everybody else is getting what they want; we can see that in the movies, on television, in the ads. Why can’t we have what we want all the time too?

We don’t usually verbalize this, of course. We know such expectations are unreasonable and absurd. But the unconscious is childish, and this is exactly the way it thinks. It wants its desires satisfied, preferably always, and it turns a deaf ear to philosophy. But perversely, when the mind does get what it wants, it feels pleased but also a little let down. A small voice inside always says, “Thanks, that was nice, but is that all?” Expectations have been swollen to impossible proportions, to which life cannot possibly be equal. So the desire gets fiercer – “Next time has to be better!” – and harder than ever to satisfy. The result is a chronic, mounting sense of frustration.

Of course, this is a simplified picture. Each personality is different, with many other intertwining samskaras in addition to these basic three. There may be positive forces at work in deeper consciousness which mitigate the expression of anger: a strain of patience, a measure of detachment. But in many people today, the essential pattern is the same. A kind of background of anger, fed by the feeling that our deep desires are not being fulfilled, is always bubbling away just beneath the surface of consciousness. It leaves a very low threshold of tolerance, so that often even a small, irrelevant irritation is enough to make us explode in anger.

Look around, Patanjali would say: doesn’t this tally with our experience and our observation? On the one hand, if we look with some detachment, we see money and sex and material possessions played up everywhere. People expect them to be more accessible than ever: you can have as much as you want; that is the promise not only of Madison Avenue but of contemporary psychology. Yet on the other hand, who would say today that people are happier? What we see is people who seem angrier than ever, more frustrated, disillusioned, discontented, ready to snap at anyone or lash out in meaningless violence.

Dante had a big sign over these three gates: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” I would say no. Even if we have passed through the gates to sorrow a million times, we always have a choice the next time. Sri Krishna’s advice is deceptively simple: “Pass each gate by, Arjuna. Don’t even open them to take a look inside; you might be drawn in.” Anger is a terribly fast train; lust is even faster. And greed for money or possessions can pick you up without your even knowing.

Avoiding these three requires not only will and patience but tremendous vigilance, especially in the climate of today. Everybody seems to be not only standing in line before the gates to sorrow but praising the states they lead to and trying to draw in their friends. Often here in the San Francisco Bay Area I see advertisements sponsored by the big casinos at nearby Lake Tahoe: “Come on, spend your weekend with us! We’ll give you a free meal at our hotel and five dollars worth of chips; we’ll even buy your gas!” They know they will get it back a hundredfold. Similarly, the gates of lust, anger, and greed have hawkers outside, offering us all kinds of promises and free tickets: heightened sense pleasures, therapeutic rage sessions, “trickle-down” theories of economics that tout the basic benevolence of greed. “Be warned, Arjuna,” Sri Krishna says; “they’re not going to fun-filled Tahoe. They’ll take you to you-know-where.”

The long-term consequences of saturating our society with these values are tragic beyond words. Particularly in the media, almost everything today seems to be tied to sex, violence, and the profit motive, as if schedulers and advertisers were convinced that these are the only things that will motivate us.

Yesterday afternoon I went to a friend’s house to watch the finals of the U.S. Open tennis championship, broadcast live. I was grieved to see how dominant money had become in what I used to consider a truly fine game. Everything was valued first in dollars and only secondarily in terms of skill. Jimmy Connors was playing beautifully, but the commentator didn’t have much to say about that; he kept repeating how much Connors was worth and how much was riding on the outcome of the match that day. Instead of saying “He has been playing brilliant tennis this season” it was “He has won thirty-five thousand dollars.” This kind of talk leaves a bad taste in my mouth; it teaches us to put a price tag on everything. That is the conditioning we are subjected to today: a man is what his bank balance is; a woman’s worth is her salary and possessions. The well-being of a community can be measured by the number of cars and TV antennas it has; a country’s welfare can be measured by its GNP. All this is as ridiculous as it is common.

The broadcasting was interrupted for a while because of some satellite problem, so I took the opportunity to watch some of the other programs to see what people are taking in when they watch television today. I was horrified to see the continuous damage these programs are doing, breaking up social relationships, disrupting homes, exploiting and degrading the image of women (I would say of men too), playing man and woman, parents and children, off against each other, validating the attraction of addictive habits, revealing and appealing to the very worst in human nature.

We have become so used to programs like this that we seldom think of the culture and values they present. If you find a program tawdry, distasteful, or ridiculous, you simply change the channel. Millions on millions, however, do not change the channel. As much as a third of their waking hours may be spent absorbing the kind of thing I saw.

First was a “giveaway” program: something for nothing, usually money or toaster ovens, for anybody willing to do ridiculous things before an audience for half an hour. Doesn’t everyone like to get something for nothing, even if it’s something that nobody needs? There was also a so-called news program, though the events seemed to me to be selected more for entertainment value than for social significance. And of course there were the soap operas, in which you can learn, as someone has remarked, that almost everybody is secretly doing all the things you thought people didn’t do because they shouldn’t; so why shouldn’t you?

But what disturbed me most was not one of the major studios’ programs. It was a sexual liberation talk show on the educational channel. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. Measuring life in terms of money was ridiculous enough, but here everybody was measuring by pleasure. Happiness and individual freedom were reduced to getting your share of sensation. How could anyone watch a program like that and not burst into laughter? The whole force of evolution is to lead us gradually to the realization that the body is not us, that life is not physical in its basis. In Hinduism this guiding force behind evolution is called shakti, creative power, and it is embodied and worshipped as the Divine Mother. Every woman is a source of this power. Every woman has immense spiritual potential, the capacity to regenerate society around a higher ideal. Because of that very power, it is a terrible tragedy for all of society if women start to line up as men have before the gates of lust, anger, and greed.

Over the years meditation enables us to enter the vast central waiting room of the mind, where thoughts are coming and going through these gates without our ordinarily knowing it. The difference is that now we are conscious in the unconscious, so we can actually begin to patrol these gates always. Even in our sleep we must learn to keep our vigilance at this deeper level, until we reach a state where these gates to negative consciousness do not open even in our dreams. Then, marvelously, they actually begin to rust shut. Flowering creepers grow over them as they do in India, when the encroaching jungle covers an abandoned temple. You cannot open those gates any longer; after a while, you cannot even find them. It may sound impossible, but in that state you cannot be angry or selfish even if you try; your consciousness will be full of love.

SRI KRISHNA: 23. Others disregard the teachings of the scriptures. Driven by selfish desire, they miss the goal of life, miss even happiness and prosperity.

24. Therefore let the scriptures be your guide in what to do and what not to do. Understand their teachings; then act in accordance with them.

The Gita, I like to repeat, is not a book of commandments but a book of choices. Once this is understood, the Gita’s presentation appeals greatly to the modern mind because it respects our freedom of choice completely.

My one quarrel with scholarly translations of the Gita is that because they are not concerned with putting teachings into practice, they often bury what is timeless and useful in the archaic language of rituals and a complex world view that Westerners do not share. Actually, Sri Krishna’s approach is surprisingly current and terribly practical. He describes the forces operating in the mind and how they shape our actions, first on an individual scale, then finally in their global effect on the rest of life. Then he leaves it to us to decide how we want to act.

When I was a boy, I belonged for a time to the Boy Scouts of India. People in this country are sometimes surprised when I remind them that scouting is a British contribution, not American, and scouting in India followed Mr. Baden-Powell as closely as a different country and climate and so forth would allow. Our motto was “Be prepared.” We used to ask our scoutmaster, “Be prepared for what?” He would just shrug and say, “How would I know?”

Still, he took his responsibilities seriously. When we were in the middle of some activity, he occasionally liked to surprise us by blowing his whistle and calling, “Fall in!” We would scurry into line and stand quizzically at attention. “Very good,” he would say. “I just wanted to see if you were prepared. Fall out!”

Once we went on a camping trip into the dense forest that lay just beyond my village. The forest was full of wild animals in those days, and despite Hollywood’s presentation, village children in India do not play in forests and jungles where they can be eaten. Therefore it was necessary to Become Prepared for the ways of the jungle.

Our scoutmaster briefed us carefully. “Beware of this and watch out for that,” he said. “Do this, but don’t do that. And follow my directions carefully.” He drew a rough map on the ground. “This is the route I want you fellows to follow.”

I had some cousins who disdained the safe and bland, wherever it might be. Danger was their cup of tea. “Sir,” they said, “it looks more interesting to cross the river and go along here. We’d like to take that route.”

“Better not,” he said.

“Why not? What will happen?”

“If you take that route,” he said seriously, “I will have to go back at the end of the day and report to your mothers that I have allowed their sons to be devoured by a tiger. That is highly embarrassing for a scoutmaster.”

They were delighted. I need hardly say that they did cross the river and did get into trouble; and though they were not eaten, they did have to be rescued. “That should be a lesson to you,” my scoutmaster said. I don’t believe it was; they just liked to live dangerously.

Sri Krishna here is being a good scoutmaster. “Here is one route,” he says, “and here is another. Every minute you’re at a crossroads. This route seems like more fun, but it’s full of wild animals. The path gets worse and worse as you go along – until you reach the end, which is unutterably horrible.”

Arjuna shudders. “I’m a man of action,” he admits. “I like danger, and I like challenges – but only if there’s a purpose to it. Krishna, tell me the alternative.”

And Sri Krishna smiles. “Just what I was about to do.” That is the concluding two chapters of the Gita, and no one will be happier than I to return to verses that follow the upward rather than the downward path.