ARJUNA: 1. O Krishna, what is the state of those who disregard the scriptures but still worship with faith? Do they act from sattva, rajas, or tamas?

“Faith” here is a not very adequate translation of shraddha, which means much more. Literally, shraddha is ‘that which is placed in the heart’: all the beliefs we hold so deeply that we never think to question them. It is the set of beliefs, values, prejudices, and prepossessions that colors our perceptions, governs our thinking, dictates our responses, and shapes our lives, generally without our even being aware of its presence and power.

This may sound philosophical, but shraddha is not an intellectual abstraction. It is right at the bottom of our hearts. It is our very substance, Sri Krishna will say: it reflects all that we have made ourselves and points to what we will become.

And there is nothing passive about shraddha. It would not be quite correct to call it a force; it is a mental state. But shraddha is full of potency, for it prompts action, conditions behavior, and determines how we see and respond to the world around us.

When Norman Cousins talks about a “belief system” analogous to the body’s organ systems, that is one aspect of shraddha. He is referring to the power to heal or harm that is inherent in our ideas about ourselves. One person with a serious illness believes she has a contribution to make to the world and recovers; another believes her life is worthless, or that she has no hope, and she dies: that is the power of shraddha.

Similarly, I would say, when psychologists talk about “self-image,” they are often referring to one aspect of shraddha. One person believes he will succeed in life, and despite overwhelming obstacles he does. Another, who believes he can do nothing, may be more gifted and face fewer difficulties, yet make very little of his life.

Yet shraddha is not brute determination or self-confidence. It is a highly sensitive expression of our values: what we deem worth having, doing, attaining, being. The things we strive for show what we value; we back our shraddha with our time, our energy, our very lives.

In fact, shraddha literally determines our lives. In those tremendous verses from the Upanishads –

We are what our deep, driving desire is.

As our deep, driving desire is, so is our will.

As our will is, so is our deed.

As our deed is, so is our destiny –

that “deep, driving desire” is our shraddha. When St. John says, “We are what we love,” that word love could be translated by shraddha. The Buddha gives us the explanation in the first verses of the Dhammapada: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought. We are made up of our thoughts; our lives are shaped by our thoughts.” The Bible says simply, “As a man believeth in his heart, so is he.”

In applying this chapter to the world today, therefore, I would interpret Arjuna’s question very differently from the way it is usually understood. At the end of the last chapter, you remember, Sri Krishna enjoined Arjuna to follow the scriptures, since to do otherwise is to follow the downward course of rajas and tamas into sorrow. Now Arjuna wants to know about those who ignore spiritual laws but still “perform worship” out of some kind of faith. They do believe in something, he says, and they act according to their belief. What path are they on, upward or down? What kind of fruit can we expect from their actions?

The question, of course, is couched in the language of earlier times. If Arjuna were here today he might ask instead, “Our times are considered civilized and advanced. We have put our faith in science and technological growth, and we have achieved tremendous breakthroughs. Why is it that the problems we face are more menacing than anything faced in previous centuries?”

This is an excellent question. If scientific knowledge is the test of evolution, if technology is the standard by which to measure progress – if, in other words, we have put our shraddha in the right place – then it stands to reason that with all our scientific progress, we should be more at peace with ourselves and with others. We should have banished sickness from both body and mind and banished violence from the earth.

Technology has become the faith of our fathers, yet we are finding the fruit of it often bitter. And we feel bewildered, like Arjuna. We did so much with science and industry, went so far. Why is the world more fraught than ever with alienation, hunger, and insensitivity, with violence so virulent that one or two individuals can hold whole cities hostage, with side effects of industrial growth that blight the planet?

This is not to belittle science and technology. I have a very high regard for science, and would be the first to acknowledge the debt we all owe to technology in making our world safer and more comfortable. But we need to remember that in other ways, technology has also made the world vastly more dangerous and less comfortable, often in the pursuit of goals that do not, in retrospect, seem worth the price. The problem is that science and technology make good servants but very poor masters – and we have let the servants take over the house, in the shraddha that for every problem we face, every desire we want fulfilled, technology has the answer.

Let me take some illustrations from medicine, which has done so much to improve human welfare over the centuries. By and large, we are used to viewing medical history as a long series of triumphs against disease, particularly in the twentieth century. But there are disturbing signs that this trend has been reversed.

One example is the war on infectious diseases. When I was born, near the beginning of the twentieth century, most of the human race was still dying from diseases like smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza, and malaria, the same plagues that had haunted the world since ancient times. Smallpox was a daily threat while I was growing up. Fortunately, my village was particularly careful about sanitation, especially my grandmother; as a result, most of us in the village escaped when many around us died. Nevertheless, many of the boys in my school bore the scarred faces of those who contract the disease and survive.

Then vaccination came, one of Great Britain’s most valuable contributions as a colonial power. At first it met with resistance, just as in the West. Nobody wanted to go to a far-off clinic to get stuck by a needle and perhaps even contract smallpox because of it. But the British government hit upon the clever idea of making the vaccinator a persistent domestic visitor. He came to your door without any notice, looking just like everyone else, and began making conversation. Then, while he was admiring the bangles on a little girl’s wrist, he would pop the needle into her arm. It was over in a second, and it didn’t really hurt. But still the vaccinator was not a popular figure. If a mother couldn’t get her children to behave, all she had to do was say, “You know, the vaccinator is coming tomorrow.” I don’t suppose these dedicated efforts were ever popular, but as a result of them, smallpox began to disappear.

By the time I arrived in this country, in 1959, I was amazed at the nonchalance with which infectious diseases were regarded. With penicillin and the other miraculous antibiotics developed after World War II, the plagues I had grown up with were simply no longer taken seriously. They had been conquered in the West; soon they would be erased from the rest of the earth as well.

In 1959 the World Health Organization announced a daring plan to eliminate smallpox completely. Amazingly, the plan succeeded. After almost twenty years of heroic measures, the last person on the planet with smallpox was found, quarantined, and cured in 1977. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly formally announced that “the world and all its peoples have won freedom from smallpox.” Today the virus exists only in research laboratories in the United States and Russia, and there is pressure to destroy those cultures too.

For a while, it appeared that other infectious diseases would suffer the same fate. Tuberculosis, against which the nations of the world declared war in 1960, retreated dramatically in the developed countries for years. Malaria, carried by mosquitoes, seemed doomed by the pesticide DDT. By 1960, the Harvard School of Public Health had completely dropped malaria control from its curriculum. Not one case had been found in this country for years. Even in Sri Lanka, where cases had numbered one million in 1955, the incidence had dropped to a mere eighteen in 1963.

But by then, though very few realized it, the tide had turned. Through the natural mechanisms of evolution, the microbes were becoming resistant to the drugs being used against them. In the case of malaria, the new “supergerm” strains that resisted treatment were also being carried by mosquitoes that had developed resistance to DDT. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis quietly spread in the developed world until the New York Times announced grimly in 1992, “A Killer Returns.” Frighteningly, the new strains have the capacity to activate another new lethal microbe, causing HIV infection to blossom into AIDS. One by one, the infectious diseases that plagued our past for thousands of years are returning, proving much more adaptable than science can ever be. AIDS itself symbolizes yet another variation: new strains of virus, like Ebola, for which no treatment is known, to which we now find ourselves exposed because of the very technological progress that enables human beings to invade ancient ecosystems and carry microbes around the world in twenty-four hours.

In the meantime, of course, we still face the same degenerative diseases which became epidemic in the developed world because of “lifestyle factors”: things we do to ourselves, whether individually, nationally, or globally. Heart disease and cancer are still the biggest of these killers. Heart disease has begun to decline in this country, perhaps because of better diet and public education. Yet John Bailar, a statistician formerly with the National Cancer Institute, observed that “the cancer rate is holding steady and overall incidence is actually rising, even after adjusting for the effects of cigarette smoking” and longevity. “When you look at the whole picture,” Bailar said, “. . . the progress essentially disappears.”

Cancer, in fact, seems to be one of the diseases that can be traced in large part to industrial progress itself – to the contamination of our air, water, and food by substances like lead, asbestos, and a host of synthetic chemicals (from five hundred to a thousand new ones every year) to which all of us are exposed daily.

I think we have to be very careful, therefore, about boasting that we have made such incredible progress since the Middle Ages. Cancer was not a scourge in those days, you know. Heart disease was rare enough in the seventeenth century that Sir William Harvey noted it as a curiosity. Science has achieved great things, but it has also enabled us to magnify the consequences of our desires to such an extent that our ways of thinking are literally killing us, as prematurely and pervasively as a virulent disease.

Sri Krishna says later, “A person is what his shraddha is.” I would add that a nation is what its shraddha is, too. This whole planet is what its shraddha is. The Sanskrit word is yugadharma, the dharma of the times. Every age has its characteristic problems, and each epoch, each civilization, has its characteristic kinds of illness. Each, in a word, has its own karma – the often terrifying problems brought about by its beliefs and values and ways of thinking. In these last chapters of the Gita we see the full sweep of this magnificent insight, which lays the responsibility of our global situation at our own feet and then puts its solution in our hands.

SRI KRISHNA: 2. Every creature is born with faith of some kind, either sattvic, rajasic, or tamasic. Listen, and I will describe each to you.

We have spent some time looking at three stages in individual growth, corresponding to the gunas. Now I want to interpret the same stages on a much broader stage: global in breadth, thousands of years old in the evolution of human nature.

We can place individuals on this scale of development by the way in which they relate to their environment. Even more interesting, we can do the same with a society. This gives us a yardstick by which we can evaluate human progress and our contemporary civilization – its achievements, its values, its needs, and its potential for weal or woe.

The nearest Sanskrit equivalent for “environment” in this connection is prakriti, which adds a useful dimension because prakriti is not merely physical. In this volume I have been treating it as a continuum of matter, energy, and mind, rather like a lot of cosmic oatmeal. As jivas, individuals, you and I are part of that oatmeal, even though we may think of ourselves as unique and separate. I have read several excellent books on what we are doing to the environment today, as if the environment is something different from us. It is not: we are an inseparable part of that continuum. What alters the environment alters us; the way we think and act alters the environment. So “environment” in this sense means not only physical surroundings, but the worlds within all of us as well – the aggregate of our thoughts, our hopes, our desires, our fears.

In answer to environmental problems, ecologists often propose that we simplify our lives. But we have to distinguish simple from primitive. On the physical level the two may seem similar – for example, neither may put much value in technology. But in terms of shraddha, they are poles apart. Tamas is primitive; sattva means simplicity.

The kind of simple living the Gita would favor does not mean turning away from science, scrapping technology, and going back to the Stone Age. Some dedicated romantics get so disgusted with the trappings of modern materialism that they propose something very similar. In India after Independence, I remember, there was a faction that wanted to do away with all machines. At the other extreme were those who thought any machine was worthy of worship, never questioning the sense of replacing men with expensive machinery in a land where work was needed by millions and capital was costly and scarce. Between both extremes was Gandhi, often misunderstood, who gave a place to machines that were useful and beneficial to all, but asked simply that they not be used at the expense of India’s unemployed millions or of village self-sufficiency. That is the approach of sattva, where nothing is valued that does not add to the welfare of the whole.

I want to emphasize again that science and technology are neither good nor bad. I am never critical of science. But I am often critical of the uses to which science is put, and deeply apprehensive of making it the basis of our civilization’s shraddha. Science, and particularly technology, makes a good servant but a most obnoxious master. But science can be put in its place. We want to arrive at that delicate balance where science will not deprive us of our humanity but will serve us with humaneness: where it will help us solve our problems rather than add to them or create new ones. This is a difficult balance to achieve, because technological progress is heady stuff. We can get swept away with it and lose our personal relationships, our sense of the unity of life, without ever being aware that we are losing anything at all.

Let me give a tongue-in-cheek sketch of human development from tamas into sattva, from primitive to simple. This is not an attempt at social science. I am not trying to illustrate the development of human institutions, but the evolution of the basic mental state of our species as it gropes toward full expression of the unity of life.

In some Indian languages today, prakriti not only means ‘nature’ but also ‘primitive’. My grandmother used to tell us boys, “Don’t act prakratam”: that is, don’t behave like a caveman. Caveman living is the earliest, crudest stage of human evolution, tamas. There the human being lives by what he can find. If it starts to rain and he sees a cave nearby, he gets in, just as a leopard might. But if he doesn’t see one, he doesn’t run around looking; he just gets wet. The idea of an umbrella is impossible; the thought of a raincoat is still in the womb of the future. That is tamas. Even little children are past that stage today: they may play in the rain for the fun of it, but if they don’t want to get wet, they immediately put on their raincoats and boots. Yet there are throwbacks. When tamas lays hold of you – say, when you really feel depressed – rain may provoke no response at all. “Who cares if I get wet? What does it matter? Who cares about me at all?” My granny would say, “Don’t be a caveman!”

At this stage in the evolution of consciousness, the thought that you can do something about a situation simply doesn’t occur. A caveman can’t worry about getting in out of the rain; it’s hard enough just to get through the day. Food is the same. If you find an apple on the ground, you eat it. If you don’t find one, you probably don’t even wish for one. Tamas is inert; it takes everything for granted. It can’t even connect an apple seed with a full-grown apple tree; how could it? If you told a caveman to cultivate an apple orchard of his own, he would think you meant to dig up a few acres with the trees intact and move the whole lot next to his cave.

This is not really a period in history. It is a stage in the development of consciousness, for which most of us have a time machine. We can travel back to our caveman days. In my university, for example, when a paper was due, there were always certain students who would not have anything to turn in. They had temporarily become cavemen. When I asked, “May I see your paper?” they would show me a stack of clean, white sheets unmarred by human hand. “I’ve been sitting here every day,” they would tell me, “trying to receive some knowledge. But it doesn’t come.”

Another phenomenon is very common: you have something impor­tant to do, and you know you will feel reprehensible if you put it off. But you have to do something about that picture in the basement; it has been sitting there for months. Reason inquires, “Why not let it go on sitting?” But instead you spend a few hours picking out an acceptable frame, hanging it, rearranging the furniture to get everything right. I know people who will buy a crafts book and some special tools and make the frame themselves. This is taking a vacation from the here and now, climbing into a time machine and going back to the twentieth millennium B.C.

For a long while, in my professorial role, I thought it quite a poor show for students to indulge in this kind of procrastination. But gradually I began to see that effort is almost impossible when you are in tamas. Not being equal to any task is part of what tamas means. So I gradually learned to say, “Poor fellow! He’s got caught in Stone Age living.” It’s like looking at a far-off star; you see it there before you, but you have to remember that you are actually looking fifty thousand years into the past. My problem as a teacher was how to get such students back to the present again. Instead of remonstrating with them, I used to search for ways to help them transform tamas into rajas, not only in schoolwork but in anything.

One characteristic of Tamas is that he doesn’t feel tormented by problems, for the simple reason that he isn’t aware of them. From a later stage, we can look back and say that tamas is nothing but problems. The mind is undeveloped; it is all darkness. But for that very reason it can’t be aware of its benighted state. There comes a stage in evolution, therefore, when we have to develop the mind, even if it brings problems out in the open. We have to develop the art of thinking. Nobody comes into the world with a still mind. We have to be born with a troubled mind; only then can we learn to still it.

There is a close connection here with language. In Hinduism the faculty of eloquent speech is embodied as a goddess, Sarasvati; that is how precious we deem it to be to the human being. When words are used for a great purpose, they have immense power to stir, support, inspire, and elevate us. If this marvelous capacity had not been developed through the world’s great poets, writers, and speakers, civilization would be at a much lower level.

But in the Age of Tamas there are no words, only the kinds of sounds that animals make. The mind is raw. Nobody needs words, because nobody has anything to say. Why have a word for rain if you don’t care if it rains? Why have a word for apple if you don’t care if it’s a turnip, or if you don’t care if it’s even there at all? You could say “eats” for everything, but why bother? And for those surges of feeling when thought must find expression, there is always “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Imagine what a wonderful relationship you could have if every day, when you couldn’t contain yourself any longer, you came out with, “Me Tarzan! You Jane!”

Though it grieves me to say so, I sometimes think this is one area in which our whole culture is hurrying back to the Stone Age as fast as possible. I feel very grieved to see language losing its purity, literature losing its beauty, and communication being reduced almost to a mechanical level. If you want to express your opinion to your legislators today, you can send a note written for you by your lobbyists; after all, it will likely be answered by a computer anyway. If someone you love is in the hospital, why write? Send a get-well card; they have a dozen varieties at any supermarket, which couldn’t be more convenient. The message may not be quite right, but all that really matters is that you not send a “dear nephew” card to your grandmother. And when I go to a movie, I feel rewarded if the hero and heroine can find any words at all to express their love. Everything is “I’ve got this special kind of thing for you, baby” or “Isn’t this just real?” Soon, when Romeo wants to express his love for Juliet, he will be able to buy a videotape, send it to her, and say, “Watch this.” It will be made by professionals, with the words already given and “certain portions prerecorded,” as they say; how could Romeo do any better? When there is hardly any communication like this, we should not be surprised if relationships are very much on an animal level.

Speech mirrors thought, and when speech becomes tamasic, thought gradually sinks to the lowest available level. We can already see this happening with television, an utterly tamasic, utterly passive medium. Since about 1960, when television became virtually universal in American homes, millions of young people have grown up on five or six hours of television a day. In Being There, based on the novel by Jerzy Kozinsky, Peter Sellers gives a thoughtful portrayal of a man who has been fed a steady diet of television from infancy on. He talks solely in the clichés of soap operas and series dramas; in fact, the only ideas in his head have been supplied by television. Worst, and most startling, his feelings are sluggish. Like the language he lacks to express them, his emotional responses have been reduced to the most primitive kind. Usually he doesn’t feel much at all, though he tries to follow his lines. But when something provokes him, his responses are on the animal level: rage, fear, hostility, hunger, raw desire. He watches a tragedy on his street with the same inertness he gives to the evening news: he feels nothing about it, can’t say anything about it, and therefore is not likely to do anything about it. If he feels a pang of sensitivity at the time, it lasts as long as writing on water. We do not need to look far to recognize a state of mind in which millions of people live today.

From tamas we pass on to rajas, which I would say is the stage that civilization has reached today. In tamas, we are in a sense unaware of the environment in which we live. We don’t know how to cooperate with it, and we don’t know how to manipulate it to our advantage either. But in rajas we become aware of our environment and try to “master” it, which is not at all a negative development.

Rajas, for example, is the fellow who discovers fire. Tamas just sits there with the other rocks, but Rajas can’t keep idle; he’s too active. When he sees two stones, he has to strike them together. Suddenly he sees a flash, and the old gray matter starts working. “There must be something inside,” he says. “Let’s get it out and see what we can do with it.” Rajas Prometheus has discovered fire, which means great things are around the corner.

It is the same with eating an apple. Tamas just tosses the core away, but Rajas has to do something with it, so he buries it. After a while he notices a little plant coming up. He is always observant, and always curious about how he can use what he observes. He thinks to himself, “Those leaves look like the ones on the tree where I got that thing to eat. I threw it here, covered it up, and now see what has happened!” Unlike Tamas, he has the capacity to think, to connect, to follow through. He gets more apples, eats them, and buries the cores; after a while he has a few more trees. It is only a matter of time before two-story harvesters are rolling across California’s Imperial Valley by the light of the moon, churning up a thousand acres of tomatoes.

Here I would like to pay an overdue tribute to rajas, without which we would never have progressed out of prehistoric inertia. Rajas is a primary force behind the development of civilization. The problem is simply that we have become caught in it. Instead of harnessing its power we have let it run amuck, with the result that rajas, which has the power to solve all sorts of problems, has become the source of problems so terrible that they threaten to put civilization to an end. The crisis we face now is how to progress into the third stage, sattva, in which we learn that we and our environment are one and that the divinity within us is present also in every creature, every aspect of creation. Only when it enters this stage can we call a civilization mature.

When Rajas meets an obstacle, he has to figure out some way to overcome it. That is the secret of his progress. Tamas, by contrast, just gives up. Many, many little aspects of daily living that we take for granted are a kind of legacy to the human race bequeathed by rajas from the dawn of history.

Once in my childhood we went swimming with a boy who did not know how to swim. It didn’t occur to us to ask if he knew or not; he said he wanted to come, so we took him along. He wasn’t at all afraid of the water, either. We got to the river – seven of us, as I recall – and jumped in. Seven hit the water and went under, but only six came up. For probably a minute, we didn’t notice anything. Then suddenly we realized he was missing, and I think that was the greatest fright of my life. We all dived together, and there was our friend somewhere near the river bottom. He gazed at us in a lackluster way without any panic, as if to say, “Why are you fellows in such a lather?” We hauled him up and told him point-blank, “Don’t come with us again until you know how to swim!”

That is what happens to Tamas. Rajas fights; he doesn’t want to die. He is too agitated to sit quietly waiting for death to take him, so he starts striking out, flailing away at the water; and he comes up. Again the gray matter starts to work: “Hey, if I do this with my arms and kick like that, I can move through the water!” He goes back and tells everybody in the cave, and pretty soon people are swimming.

This is Rajas’s great contribution to the development of civilization: he doesn’t take anything lying down; he has to fight back. Today, unfortunately, the same quality is his contribution to civilization’s mortal problems also. We can harness all the fight of rajas to fight the war within, or we can go on fighting wars without, against nature and against each other: that is the crossroads at which we stand today. The first will take us into the Age of Sattva, the age of harmony, which is entirely within our reach. The second, needless to say, is leading us into disaster.

SRI KRISHNA: 3. Our faith conforms to our nature, Arjuna. Human nature is made of faith. Indeed, a person is his faith.

Even the littlest child has shraddha; I don’t think anyone can function in life without it. It is right shraddha when we function rightly, wrong shraddha when we function wrongly; but everyone has shraddha of some kind, and the whole message of this chapter is that even if your shraddha is of the lowest kind, you can always elevate it. If your shraddha is very selfish, you can change it to selfless. If it is violent, you can make it loving. This, to me, is the real glory of the human being: not intellectual achievements or prowess in science or any other external field, but the fact that there is no one on earth who cannot change the meanest shraddha into the noblest.

Until I took to meditation, I had no idea that this could be done. I had read that spiritual disciplines could transform the human personality, but this was knowledge ‘placed in the head’; it did not affect what was placed in my heart. Like most people with a university education, if I may be permitted a terrible Sanskrit pun, my shraddha was in shirodha, ‘that which is placed in the head’ – in other words, in intellectual knowledge, mostly related to literature. That was what I believed in, and it shaped my life: when I had time, I used to spend it reading or going to plays or lectures.

Gradually, however, this faith began to weaken, even before I took to meditation. When a great literary figure came to my campus to speak, I would be seated right in the first row to take in everything he or she said. But when we began asking questions afterward, the answers such people gave seemed ordinary, immature, or misleading. I knew that if I asked my illiterate grandmother the same questions, the answers would be mature and helpful. How could that be? It was terribly unsettling, because though I loved my granny passionately, it was still not she but these literary figures that I wanted to emulate. To take their busts down from their pedestals and put them away in the attic after sixteen or seventeen years of worship was a shattering prospect. My shraddha was changing, but the change did not come easily.

Yet as my discomfort grew more and more acute, I began to see that my grandmother embodied an entirely different shraddha than all the other people I had come across. In her understanding of life she towered above every other person I knew, above every literary or intellectual figure I had heard or seen or read. That is the purpose served by a spiritual teacher. She showed me that a human being does not have to be caught in this shallow shraddha that everything is physical; she taught me to question the very basis of life as it is generally lived.

A British biologist, Sir Peter Medawar, once advised a group of aspiring scientists, “You must feel in yourself an acute discomfort at incomprehension.” That is a fine phrase. Most human beings take everything for granted. But there is a particular kind of person – the scientist-to-be, the philosopher, the mystic – who begins to feel increasingly dissatisfied with what the world accepts as real and to desire a deeper explanation, a prior cause. The budding mystic takes nothing for granted. He or she feels puzzled by life and human nature. What are we supposed to do here on earth? Is there a goal? If there is, how are we to attain it? Ordinary people dismiss such questions after a while, but for the mystic they acquire a driving, demanding urgency.

It is the same with changing to a higher shraddha: it begins with an acute discomfort with the way things are around you. If you look upon yourself as physical and think of life as having no higher goal than the satisfaction of physical desires, you should feel uncomfortable. As Gandhi says, it is good not to feel well adjusted in a wrong situation. I think you can often see this in young people: the more sensitive they are, the more uncomfortable they become in today’s society. They see no correspondence between the values professed by those around them and the way those people actually live; because of this acute discrepancy, they sometimes do rash or harmful things.

“You are what your shraddha is.” One line gives the secret of personality. Let me give one or two illustrations. For one, if you believe in your heart that by offending and retaliating against people you can “get even,” that is what you are going to do. You can read all the books on psychology that you can find, go to any number of therapy sessions; if your shraddha is “get even,” you will act on it everywhere. The tragedy is that people who believe this only succeed in getting uneven, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. They avoid others, and others avoid them because they are so unpleasant. They have trouble working with others, enjoying life with others, sympathizing with others’ suffering. How can their personal growth be anything but uneven? The gap between them and those around them will go on widening daily.

This is individual shraddha. But we can speak of nations too as having a similar shraddha, one deep-rooted example of which is expressed by that ridiculous proverb, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” I think it is the Roman Empire that gave this preposterous shraddha to the world, and all nations believe it today. It shows what little relationship there can be between what is “placed in the heart” and common sense. If you prepare for war, war is what you are going to get. To my knowledge, never in recorded history has there been a major arms race that did not erupt into war. If you have a gun in your home, you are likely to use it on someone when you are upset; if you do not have a gun, even if you get furious, you will probably just erupt with some unkind words and shut yourself in your bedroom. It is very much the same on an international scale. I read scientists and statesmen voicing the same warning about these massive nuclear arsenals: sooner or later, they are going to be used. But now look at the consequences of that shraddha! It is horrible enough to have a Thirty Years War, when people lived out most of their lives knowing nothing but devastation, starvation, violence, and continuous social upheaval. That was the consequence of the biggest arms race of the time. Yet by 1914, technology had advanced to such a height that the suicidal arms race in Europe could wreak the same kind of destruction across the whole continent, and not in thirty years but in four. Such is progress that today, a single missile can destroy a city in minutes. In fact, at the end of the twentieth century, the threat of such a disaster may be higher than ever. Instead of two superpowers preparing for a nuclear exchange, we now have countries in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa – several of which are sworn enemies of others – in the “nuclear club.” And the stockpiles of the former U.S.S.R. have not only not disappeared; they are negligently guarded and coveted by other nations. The chaos following even a limited nuclear exchange between such countries would make life in France during the Thirty Years War seem like heaven. Yet stockpiling these weapons is called preparing for peace! Gandhi’s phrase was “the peace of the graveyard.”

If you want peace, the Gita would say, prepare for peace. It should take no great spiritual awareness to see that. Particularly today, we cannot afford to go on selling arms to other countries, pumping weapons into both sides of a conflict for the sake of short-term profit. All this is just preparing for war, which we cannot expect to remain contained within borders on the other side of the globe. Coming from India, I am appealing to countries in Asia and Africa and South America not to purchase these weapons, not even to accept them as a gift, because they are going to be used. That is the shraddha of weapons and its fruit.

Here is another modern shraddha of individuals and nations: that life is physical. It leads us to evaluate everything on the basis of appearance. Rajas is typically impressed by size and fascinated by speed. Bigger and faster are always better. If it’s good to be buried, it’s better to be buried under a pile of rocks and best to be interred in a pyramid. Rajas the First builds the first pyramid-tomb in the world. Rajas the Second builds the biggest. Rajas the Third builds his on higher ground, so it looks biggest, and he gets it done in less time. Soon afterwards the pyramid game is played out and has to be abandoned, which probably brings more praise from the rank and file than any previous development. But Rajas has not learned anything; he is simply moving on to greener, bigger, faster pastures. In our times he finds a way to build tankers so big that their seams give from their own weight, tasteless oranges as big as grapefruits, bombs that can incinerate thirty Hiroshimas at a tenth of the size it used to take to destroy only one.

Some people, if it takes twenty minutes to walk to town, have to find a way to get there in fifteen. If they cannot find a shortcut, they will design better shoes and find a faster way of walking. But walking is too much effort: one of the ironies of Rajas is that with all his energy, he is constantly obsessed with the idea of getting more and more out of less and less effort. So he thinks and thinks and comes up at last with the ten-speed bicycle, which I still think is one of his finest contributions to world civilization. And after a while comes the car. It’s not perfect at first, so how does he improve it? He makes it bigger, and he makes it faster. If you ask, “Why bigger? Why faster?” he won’t understand; he will look at you as if you are crazy. Today, coming from a bullock-cart village, I still have trouble believing that I travel to Berkeley or San Francisco at almost a mile a minute. It still seems incredible to me. Yet in this country it seems so slow that some people feel they have to do seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour. Within my lifetime, it was a miracle to cross the Atlantic by plane at all; now eight hours from New York to Paris seems so slow that you have to build planes that can travel a thousand miles an hour – just to do it, just because it can be done. You have nuclear missiles now that travel fifteen thousand miles per hour, so that a nuclear holocaust can be over in an hour’s time. It is a strange measure of progress.

The whole idea of unlimited progress rests on the prospect of unlimited resources. We are seeing that prospect dry up today, but many think it is only a matter of particular shortages: when we run out of oil we can use coal, and so on. But everything is limited, and we are gobbling the earth as if it were ours, all ours, to gobble. Nothing is ours. Nothing on earth belongs to us. We are tenants on earth, nothing more.

Imagine that I am going away for a few days and I ask my friend Bob to stay in my house while I am away. He is welcome to use everything, but when I come back I expect the furniture to be intact and to find something left in the refrigerator. That is exactly what Bob would do, being a good guest. But in this global house we are eating up everything, drinking up everything, and then planning to take the refrigerator to the flea market for sale.

To take just one example, it has taken three billion years for the world to accumulate its petroleum reserves and just one hundred years, in terms of what is economically feasible, to exhaust them. It is as if a man were to spend fifty years of his life amassing such an immense sum – say, ten million dollars – that he can will it to his son in the confidence that even if he makes a few bad investments at the outset, they won’t make much of a dent. He gets the money, takes it to an enterprising commodities broker, and one week later he has lost what it took a lifetime to accumulate. That, you would say, is a truly prodigal son. You have to have genius to lose money that fast; you really have to work at wasting it. Yet that is just what a handful of nations have managed to do with the world’s supply of economically available petroleum.

In fact, in terms of energy resources, it might be more appropriate to talk about the prodigal father. “There is always more in the future” translates very easily into “I can take whatever I want now.” That is our shraddha: me. “What do I care what happens in the future? What do I care what is left for my children and grandchildren? They’ll think of something. Let them ride bicycles; it’s good exercise. Why should I change my vacation plans, my lifestyle, just because of something that might happen thirty or forty years down the road?” That’s really the meaning of this attitude, and we are beginning to reap the karma of it. It is lack of love. If we cared about those who come after us, we would not waste anything. If we had a different shraddha, when petroleum was discovered we would have said, “All our successors are entitled to this – our children, their children, all succeeding generations.” We would have used it very thriftily, so that they could do the same. But we do not see so clearly when the children are out of sight, perhaps in other countries. And when they are still unborn, how many of us remember that to consume the present is to steal from the children of the future?

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, I think, in his spacious, luxurious palace, did not keep flowers on his desk. He kept a little flask of oil, “Allah’s bounty,” to remind him that all this comes from God. Petroleum does not belong to Aramco or Exxon or Royal Dutch Shell: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” It’s not just for those who have the capital or political power or simply armed might to take it; it is for the peoples of the earth, all of them, present and future too. Let them enjoy it also. We don’t want villagers in Burma to go hungry because our demand for oil pushes prices beyond what they can afford for fertilizers and machinery. We don’t want families in the Soviet Union – or, for that matter, here in the United States – to shiver through the winter because scarce supply and high demand make it profitable for a few to speculate on exotic prices. And we don’t want to tell our children, “Sorry, there’s no more. While it was cheap we had a great fling with it; everybody did what they liked. You can have what’s left: colder homes, restricted travel, oil spills, polluted air, radioactive wastes.”

All this comes from the underlying shraddha that life is essentially physical. From that it follows that the satisfactions of life are physical and external. To enjoy life we have to travel around, have a lot of things, do a lot of things, move, consume, get, hold, and hoard. Why? We cannot bear the thought of reducing, of wanting less, having less, going fewer places, looking inward for satisfaction instead of outward, even though all this is not only necessary now but beneficial. By simplifying our lives we would get more time and energy and interest for working with, loving, and serving other people. Our health would improve; depression, alienation, and boredom would shrink or disappear. If we could only see that, we wouldn’t use the phrase “energy crisis” any more; we would speak of an energy opportunity.

Instead we look for other ways to shore up our accelerating consumption. I want you to see the sheer power of this shraddha, how it is shaping lives and deaths, wars and bottlenecks and political entanglements, all over the globe. It is like a lemming; it must get to the sea to drown. Block its path in one place and it will go around or over or under; it will find some way to keep on going. Shraddha can be just as persistent, just as heedless, just as blind. “Well,” it says, “if oil’s not easy to get any more, there’s always coal. There’s always nuclear power.” These are the answers you still see in many books. Then they look at the pros and cons of coal, the way a lemming might look at a map and say, “Shall I take D Street to the river, or shall I go down by the quarry and jump in where the current is swifter?” It doesn’t think to ask if there isn’t something better to do than drown.

Shraddha is what we believe in; when it changes, the world can be turned upside down. When you go to the store for a couple of loaves of bread, for example, and give a piece of old, green paper in exchange, the grocer accepts that paper out of shraddha. He believes and trusts that the paper has a particular value; and because of that belief, he not only gives away a loaf of bread for it but gives away his time, his energy, his physical effort, and a lot of other things that are actually necessary or useful – vegetables, milk, cheese, paper towels – in order to accumulate similar pieces of paper, which in another kind of shraddha he then gives away to a bank. He has shraddha that the bank will be able to give the paper back when he wants it, though inquiry shows that even a conservative bank will owe many more pieces of paper than it has. And he has shraddha that everybody else will have the same shraddha in its value. That is a characteristic of shraddha: it goes deep, so deep that it is shared by virtually everyone.

We know what happens when faith in even one bank is withdrawn, let alone faith in the banking system. If people start questioning, the system can collapse. Similarly, we know what can happen to a country when faith in its currency erodes: its economy collapses, because no one knows the value of anything. The same is true of shraddha. When the whole world believes that God lives in every creature, people live and act accordingly; when that belief collapses, as we saw in the last chapter, the very basis of civilization is undermined.

It follows that shraddha can be changed – upward or down, to use the language of the last chapter – and that when it is, the result is a revolution in outlook. Up to a few years ago, to take a trivial example, everybody believed that the four-minute mile was an inherent human limitation. It was a kind of invisible glass wall: you could approach it, but you could never actually reach it or get to the other side. And while everybody believed this, it was true. People resigned themselves to watching the world record creep up by hundredths of a second, harder and harder to beat as the magic wall got closer.

And then somebody who didn’t believe in the wall ran faster. It was humanly possible! Belief in a four-minute wall collapsed, to such an extent that in today’s craze for running, mothers and students go out in their spare time and break records that used to be regarded as written in stone by the finger of God. Today nobody is willing to set a limit to how fast a human being can run. There has to be some limit, but no one can find a physiological basis for setting it, and in the meantime records are broken every year.

This is tremendously encouraging. On the one hand, as I shall go on showing, the shraddha of our times does have ruinous ramifications. But on the other hand, we can shed these ancient, imprisoning, disastrous superstitions as a snake sheds an old, constricting skin in order to grow. When we do so, we shall see such a revolution in human welfare and human happiness that we shall look back on today’s civilization as the Dark Ages, despite its microchips and CAT scanners and its hard-won capacity to destroy itself several times over. No one knows to what heights the human being can soar. No one can set limits to what we can accomplish with the immense power for love, wisdom, and imaginative action inherent in us all. Only from a few great pioneers of the spirit – St. Francis, St. Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi – can we get a glimpse of what it means to realize our human potential.

SRI KRISHNA: 4. Those who are sattvic worship the forms of God; those who are rajasic worship power and wealth. Those who are tamasic worship spirits and ghosts.

We see life as we are, as our shraddha is; and we worship the divine as we see it too. As shraddha grows, therefore, how and what we worship changes also.

Physicists will confirm that the world we perceive through our senses is an apparent world, and dependent on the peculiarities of the senses and their limitations. When I take our dogs for a walk on the beach, for example, we don’t really walk in the same world. We don’t hear the same things; we don’t see the same objects. I see occasional California poppies on the edge of the dunes, scattered among the purple lupine. Muka probably sees just one thing, a blob. Yet my beach is almost deserted, while Muka walks through a dense, rich jungle of separate smells. Neither of us is really walking on Stinson Beach; each walks in a world made by the mind.

It is the same with all the other senses. Here in Northern California, for example, wine tasting is an established profession. The wineries say, “You can blindfold our taster and give him a mouthful of one of our dozens of wines. Simply by holding it in his mouth, he will be able to tell you the wine and sometimes even the year.” To me, you know, they all taste the same. I experience one substance; this taster experiences a hundred.

It is a subtle point, but even within the limits of the same five senses, what we perceive depends on who we are – depends, that is, upon our shraddha. The more attention we give the senses, the more multiplicity we live in and the more separate we feel. But by learning to withdraw attention from the senses, we can discover a level of reality as wholly beyond the sense-world as Muka’s world of smell is beyond my own.

This world that we perceive with the senses, then, has only a partial reality. It’s not entirely unreal, just as the “solid” body you see with your eyes is not unreal. But the body an X-ray reveals is not at all solid, and that is an equally valid picture of reality. Similarly, when you rise above body-consciousness, the world you see is no longer the same. The world I saw as a student or in my early days as a professor was far, far different from the world I see today. It was not unreal, but I can see now that it had only a limited, partial reality. Then I saw the world; now I see into the world. I see the core of the divine Spirit that throbs at the very heart of life as the Atman in all creatures – God immanent, as philosophers say – and Brahman, God transcendent. This is how everybody sees at the time of samadhi, and when we become established in samadhi, in the continuing vision of God, this is how we will see always.

This state is beyond the gunas completely. But the man or woman in whom sattva is predominant has some awareness of this divinity underlying the perceptual world, and that is what the Gita means when it says “the sattvic person worships the forms of God.”

First, to illustrate with individuals, let me take people in my village as an example. I am not saying that everyone in my village was established in sattva; not at all. But by and large, the way of life they have followed for centuries is characterized by sattva, and that culture shapes the lives of everyone in it, even those who are rajasic or tamasic.

Take the attitude toward water. Hinduism personifies all the elements and forces in nature, and Varuna is God immanent in water. A good Hindu may not know how to explain this in contemporary terms, but he or she always feels that water is sacred, something to be treated with invariable respect. In Hindu law, these aspects of God have legal personalities. If someone desecrates a temple, the presiding deity can file suit. By the same token, in this country, Varuna could file suit against the enterprises that polluted Lake Erie or Love Canal; that is the practical application of this attitude.

I don’t say this is true all over India or that everyone shows the same sensitivity, but in Kerala, as far as I remember, the waters were always pure and clear. People would not foul them or pollute them, simply out of respect. I was pleased to read that an American who visited Kerala recently says this is still true today. The rivers are limpid, the lakes almost pristine in their purity; beaches like Kovalam, he says – I myself have never been there – are enchantingly beautiful and clean. That is what it means to worship the Lord in water: you don’t waste it, and you keep it clean.

By contrast, rajas and tamas desecrate water in countless ways. I remember twenty years or so ago when Christine first took me to Cliff House in San Francisco, which looks out over the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Golden Gate. The view is magnificent, and I stood there for a long while with my back to the city, looking down the breakers along Ocean Beach and up past Land’s End to the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Then, suddenly, the sound of the surf was broken by raucous, unearthly laughter. On the other side of the street was a so-called amusement park, from which a huge mechanical woman was broadcasting these chilling recorded sounds. I looked up at her and my heart sank. I recalled the words inscribed over the gate to hell in Dante’s Inferno: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.” That is rajas, desecrating nature in the hopes of a little more cash.

Since then, I am glad to say, this mechanical monster has gone the way of all flesh. Varuna’s vengeance. The whole of Playland was razed, and at the time even condominiums seemed a great improvement.

The sensitivity of sattva provides a way of looking at the world that has all but disappeared from contemporary culture. I read some years ago that ocean beaches in Long Island had to be closed because there was such a vast clutter of “floatable trash” – shredded styrofoam cups, plastic bottle caps, corks, balls, toys, cigar and cigarette tips, disposable diapers, and a variety of other decomposing items that drugstores tidily shelve under “personal hygiene.” Similarly, the beaches where I used to walk are often littered with plastic bags, beer cans, broken glass, garbage, and oil. All this is desecration. So, in my eyes, are loud music, smoking, and drinking at the beach – and fishing. I take my walks well before breakfast now, before the crowds arrive with rods and pails: I know they are not cruel, merely insensitive, but it pains me to see people killing time by killing creatures. When you become sensitive to life around you, you will not enjoy even a motorboat in a wilderness area because of the terror and distress the noise brings to thousands of fish and waterfowl.

All forms of nature, the Gita would say, should be respected for the divinity in them. This is sattva, which looks on nature as something to be conserved, cherished, and drawn on thriftily for our needs, something not to be conquered but won over. The asuric attitude, by contrast, is to worship what you can get. Nature is to be conquered: even though, as I think Schumacher points out, nature includes us; if we conquer nature, we defeat ourselves. Nature is to be plundered, even though when we plunder nature, we impoverish ourselves.

One corollary of the “there-is-more-of-everything” shraddha is “Waste what you want.” When President Eisenhower was asked how citizens could help get the country out of an economic depression, he replied, “Buy anything.” We get the same advice today. It is still a rare voice that suggests we have overgrown ourselves, or points out that we have based our industrial growth on unnecessary, wasteful production. What the economy needs, according to experts and advertisers alike, is for people to buy, buy, buy. Why should we, if we do not want what is offered, cannot benefit from it, or find it detrimental? Even in the case of goods that are useful and beneficial, the Gita would say, “If you don’t need it, don’t buy it. Leave it for someone else.” This is love in action.

Last week, just among my personal friends, I counted five victims of cancer. It made it terribly personal, then, when I read that between seventy and ninety percent of all cancers can be attributed to things we are doing to ourselves, many of them related to unnecessary industrial production. Researchers keep looking for a cancer virus, yet in the last hundred years – mostly in the last forty – we have created some fifty thousand new organic chemicals. Into a global ecological balance developed over billions of years, we have abruptly dumped new substances with the same chemical basis as living tissue, without any idea of what they might do individually or together within an ecosystem or inside an organism like a human being.

The theory of progress held that wealth could go on growing forever, consuming the seemingly infinite resources of Africa, Asia, and South America. It seems not to have entered anybody’s mind – except, of course, those of us in Africa, Asia, and South America – to leave those resources to be developed equably and at a reasonable pace. I suppose that as far as empire-builders were concerned, the rest of us were simply sitting on wealth that God had intended for those who knew how to take and use it. Nineteenth-century Europe proved itself well able to do both.

Land is one example I have not touched on. It was thought then that there was no end to it. You could do anything you wanted with it – build on it, cultivate it, graze it, mine it, raze it, erode it, bury waste in it, cover it with asphalt – there was always more. In places like our beautiful California, where resources are abundant, virtually nobody used to talk about limits. Waste didn’t matter; it cost more to be thrifty than to be profligate.

Today, of course, it is plain that we are losing cropland on all sides. To me this is a clear signal that the time has come to reduce extravagant waste in the way land is used, and particularly to cultivate cropland with great care and a long-range vision. But these “no-limit-wallahs,” as I would call them, give a very different answer. Wallah is a Hindi word that can be added to other words to make a job title: somebody whose life and livelihood revolve around making, selling, hawking, touting, promoting, or exploiting something. It also has undertones of chutzpah, which makes it a very useful word indeed. A used-car salesman, for example, is a transportation-wallah. Encyclopedia publishers are knowledge-wallahs. And these big corporations and think-tank technocrats are no-limit-wallahs; that is their world. “With technology,” they say, “you can always get more out of what you’ve got. Hype the soil with more chemicals; it’ll double the yield. Next year you’ll need to use more to get the same result, but by that time we’ll have something stronger. Use more pesticides too; they work the same way. Get more machines so that you can get more out of cheap, discardable migrant labor. Keep your eyes on the bottom line. Who says we should cut back? When you’re big, the only direction to go is up.”

The karma for all this is extremely interesting. As so often in matters of ecology, it is just recently coming to light. Overuse of chemical fertilizers, it seems, is very much like abusing drugs: you get Mother Earth hooked. It does mean high yields the first few years, although natural ways have been developed of getting even higher yields. But each hit of phosphate fertilizers, though a shot in the arm for the crops, actually depletes the soil. The next time you need a stronger shot to get the same results, which of course depletes the soil further. Pesticides have similar problems: over a period of time, they actually make crops more vulnerable to pests. You get a kind of superpest that, as one writer puts it, “practically eats DDT for breakfast.”

In the meantime, there is evidence that the pesticides are poisoning people, particularly those who work with them. The no-limit-wallahs – including many scientists, largely employed by other no-limit-wallahs – are still sanguine about this. We don’t have clear proof yet that more than a few of these substances are poisonous, they say; why get alarmed? This is probably a safe question; it would take a long time to prove them wrong. Central nervous system disorders cannot easily be blamed on any one cause, nor can problems that result from intracellular damage: birth defects, sterility, immune system failure, cancer. By the time epidemiologists can describe convincing patterns – which took decades in the case of cigarette smoke, asbestos, coal dust, and X-rays – these experts will not have to worry about their reputations. If “fame is a food that dead men eat,” so is blame. But karma is inescapable, and when one reads the accounts of sterility and birth defects among hired hands working on pesticide spraying operations in California’s Imperial Valley, the only reasonable response to these profit-wallahs is to say, “The burden of proof is on you.” If they can prove that these substances are safe to those who work with them, not to mention those who ingest them, then those substances can be used. But until then, there is no need to go on using people as guinea pigs simply because it produces a tidy figure on the bottom line.

SRI KRISHNA: 5–6. Some invent harsh penances. Driven by their passions and consumed by selfish desire, they torture their innocent bodies and me who dwells within. Blinded by arrogance and pride, they act and think like demons.

“Demons” here is the word asura again: these are the now-familiar characteristics of Tamas and Rajas, Inc. In fact, these verses seem to have fallen out of the last chapter, which we thought we had done with.

There are two views of the human being, Sri Krishna says. One is the physical, which is the lowest. This view is not inaccurate, especially in the early stages of human evolution. But there is another view, not only held by the mystics but fully realized by them: that the human being is essentially spirit.

The Gita would not say it is wrong to look upon a person as physical, but it points out that this is only the beginning of understanding. Everybody is separate physically; that is why identification with the body leads to loneliness, insecurity, and a growing inability to maintain relationships. Ultimately it leads to violence, because physical consciousness on a large scale makes a world of antagonistic individuals, cultural adversaries, economic competitors, and opposing nations. So the physical view of life is not wrong; but it leads to terrible consequences. The higher shraddha leads us to realize the highest in us; the lower shraddha leads us lower and lower. Though it is not pleasant, it is perhaps necessary in these terrible times to remember Gandhi’s observation that there is no limit to the human capacity for either degradation or exaltation.

If each guna has its characteristic “faith,” each has its own ways of worship too. Sattva’s is self-sacrifice – putting others first, serving the Lord in all. Rajas and Tamas, however, have a different style. In Arjuna’s day, the “bizarre penances” Sri Krishna mentions referred to harsh practices performed in the name of religion, where the body was tormented for the sake of fulfilling some personal desire. This phenomenon has not disappeared, and it is not only in India that it lingers. But I would not hesitate to enlarge the scope of these words to make their application more contemporary, and I will give a couple of examples.

For one, it is not merely metaphor to call smoking an act of worship. The person who smokes is trying to propitiate a craving with the ritual consumption of a cigarette. Those who smoke heavily will tell you that it is a ritual. Not only are there particular gestures, but most of the satisfaction is in the performance rather than the smoke. No one really enjoys smoke in the lungs; the relief comes from temporarily getting the craving off your back. “Lady Nicotine, grant me peace of mind just for one hour!” This is what I hear from smokers themselves. If they can’t actually light a cigarette, they can get some relief from simply holding one between their fingers or their lips. Such rituals, in the Gita’s language, torture the body – and, as this verse adds terribly, the Lord within the body as well.

In the language of this verse, which is rather grim, this is worshipping disease. Instead of lighting incense at an altar, devotees light up tobacco. Their very example is missionary activity, teaching patients and children not to pay attention to the warnings of the surgeon general. We get horrified when we read about a primitive religion sacrificing animals or people, but if I may say so, what is the difference between that religion and this? They say the Aztecs used to toss maidens into wells for the sake of getting a good harvest. Today, being more enlightened, we sacrifice young people of both sexes. According to the World Health Organization, the global tobacco industry spends two billion dollars a year on advertising and promotion, mostly to sell enough young people on the habit to make up for the adults who are quitting. Isn’t that sound marketing? Even if they still die prematurely, boys and girls will live longer than their elders; therefore they will potentially buy more cigarettes. Why concentrate your marketing efforts on men and women whose lives, and therefore purchasing power, may soon be cut short by your product? The karma for this kind of reasoning includes about a million deaths around the world each year that can be blamed on tobacco use. In the Gita’s language, that is worshiping the demons. Two billion dollars a year spent on ruining people’s health!

Adult smoking is still on the decline in the United States – a very promising trend for public health, but dismal news for domestic tobacco companies. Where are the losses to be made up? The women and children of this country are apparently not enough. To bolster the bottom line, cigarette manufacturers are pursuing a much more promising market: the Third World.

“It is in Asia,” says John Hughes in the Christian Science Monitor, “that most growth for American tobacco companies is taking place. American tobacco exports to Asia were up more than 75 percent last year [1987], boosting sales by a billion dollars.” The manufacturers argue that they are not trying to gain new smokers, but simply to get existing Third World smokers to switch to American brands. This should be simple, since everywhere in the media cigarettes are associated with Western progress, prosperity, status, and even sex appeal. But Asian men are already heavy smokers. “Aggressive marketing, the critics charge, may end up capturing a new Asian youth market, as well as women, who have traditionally not smoked.”

It is impossible to convey the sense of outrage this kind of manipulation provokes in the Third World. Look at the shraddha behind it. Health is poor enough in these countries. Life is already short; children are vulnerable from birth. And consumer protection is nonexistent. An earlier piece in the Monitor charged that “manufacturers are selling purported low-tar and filter cigarettes in poorer countries with four times as much tars as those sold under the same label in industrial countries.” “There is an important moral question,” Hughes concludes with understatement, “about browbeating Asian countries to accept American tobacco products which have been ruled harmful at home.”

Unfortunately, all of us share some responsibility in these activities. Our tax money pays federal trade representatives to open up these markets, and even within the United States, while the Surgeon General tries to reduce smoking, the Department of Agriculture annually spends millions of taxpayer dollars in bolstering up the tobacco ­industry.

Of course, ours is not the only government to be involved so deeply. Three of the world’s top four cigarette companies are actually public enterprises: the government monopolies of China, the Soviet Union, and Japan. (Rajas is no respecter of politics.) Two billion dollars a year is a lot of money – much of it, apparently, already in public trust. Why not spend it on agricultural assistance to the Third World instead? Corporations have plenty of room to make an honest profit without selling addiction to the poor on a global scale.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. The three kinds of faith express themselves in the habits of those who hold them: in the food they like, the work they do, the disciplines they practice, the gifts they give. Listen, and I will describe their different ways.

8. Sattvic people enjoy food that is mild, tasty, and nourishing, food that promotes health, strength, cheerfulness, and longevity.

9. Rajasic people like food that is salty or bitter, hot, sour, or spicy – food that promotes pain, discomfort, and disease.

10. Tamasic people like overcooked, stale, and impure food, food that has lost its taste and nutritional value.

In everything we do, we show our shraddha. That is why, after some experience, a good spiritual teacher has only to observe for a minute or two to get a good idea of a person’s mental state and character.

Likes and dislikes in food are one of the clearest indicators, because of the intimate connection between the sense of taste and the mind. Sattva likes food for what it offers naturally: its food value. What astonishes me is that there should be any other possibility. If food doesn’t have food value, what value can it have? In addition it should be fresh, tasty in itself (as opposed to, say, because it is deep-fried and salted), and eaten in moderation.

Sri Krishna’s criteria are really good. Sattvic food, he says, should increase our prana – our energy, our vitality, our strength, our health. That is an excellent definition of nutrition, and a good clue as to how to enjoy eating too. Our shraddha is that junk food adds to the pleasures of living; “health food,” though we may appreciate it, is not widely looked on as one of life’s joys. This shows how distorted our values have become. Junk food takes away from the pleasures of living. I have scarcely met anyone who could eat a ripe tomato just plucked from the vine without saying, “Now there’s a tomato! Why don’t they taste like that in the stores?” But when they want to indulge themselves, the same people do not go out and get a fresh tomato from their garden. They want fried, salted, months-old corn chips or some chemical candy with a name so ridiculous that we should be embarrassed to place it on the counter. All this is false shraddha. When our taste buds are re-educated so that wrong thinking about food is changed, we will enjoy simple, natural foods, delicately prepared, much more than we think we now enjoy junk food. Not only that, we will find it impossible to enjoy “food” that is laden with salt or sugar, harmful, harsh-tasting, or made from petrochemicals. We will not be willing to put into our mouths anything that has been sitting unchanged for months on a grocery shelf.

So the spiritual life does not mean eating foods that are drab and tasteless; quite the contrary. Of course we should take taste into consideration, take into account what is enjoyable. But we should also cultivate a taste for what adds to our prana, energy, health, and strength, and we should avoid eating something just because we have been conditioned to like it.

“Men and women of rajas,” Sri Krishna continues, “like foods that are salty or bitter.” The delicatessen is full of them. I do not want to step on any toes, but the reference includes a wide variety of almost universal favorites. Most of you, for example, take beer so much for granted that you may not realize how bitter it is. You may not remember how you had to cultivate a taste for it. In my early days as an English teacher, I once went with a friend into a British pub in India and ordered a big bottle of beer, which neither of us had ever tasted. English literature seemed to flow with beer and ale, and we naturally wondered what these heavenly beverages were like. The waiter really enjoyed the show. At first we couldn’t open the bottle, and when we did, we couldn’t manage to get anything into the glasses but foam. Finally I got a taste of the stuff, and I think that is when my hair started turning gray. Imagine six-packs of gall and wormwood brewed together!

In India, traditional cuisines include some of the most strongly-spiced dishes you will find anywhere. That is our conditioning: the hotter the food, the better. One great Indian physicist – C. V. Raman, who won the Nobel Prize – shocked us all when he pointed out as a scientist that the mouth is an open wound; we are applying hot chillies to an open wound and then saying while it burns, “How tasty!” This is so ingrained a taste that I have known very, very few Indians who could break away from it. Yet today, just because I have painstakingly re-educated my palate, my own tastes are utterly different. Today I enjoy, for example, asparagus just by itself, fresh from the garden, delicately prepared with the slightest touch of butter. Only sattva knows the real taste of food; rajas obliterates the taste with condiments and additives.

Rajas also enjoys foods that promote bad health. He actually goes after foods that burn and cause discomfort. We may say, “How perverse!” Perhaps, but not at all uncommon. The statistics, which can be borne out by our own observations, suggest that some forty percent eat to the point of discomfort regularly. We eat till we get heartburn, drop a couple of fizzy pills into a glass of water, and rest in front of the TV complaining, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!” But the next night we do it again, because we think we like the taste so much that we pretend the consequences are not inevitable. If nothing else we put on weight and weaken the will; often we are courting serious diseases down the road as well.

Recently I read an article entitled something like “How to Kill Your Husband,” the gist of which was that the salty, fatty “standard American diet” is a statistically effective way to do a man in without ever attracting attention. (It is also an effective way to do a woman in, though it may take longer.) How much of what we consume does not promote bad health? If we apply this criterion, considering the evidence that is accumulating against so many items in our national diet – food dyes, preservatives, artificial sweeteners and flavors, empty-calorie nonfoods, and over-the-counter drugs, to say nothing of sugar, salt, saturated fats, fad diets, and alcohol – I don’t think anyone would deny that Rajas is a very big buyer in the food world.

And finally we come to Tamas, who, says the Gita, takes a perverse pleasure in foods which are overcooked, stale, or impure. Sri Krishna really knows how to lay it on thick. “Impure” today would include nonfood “foods” and other adulterated items, of which contemporary stores are so full. And “stale” I would extend to canned foods and other items prized for their long shelf life. Those canned tomatoes were not exactly picked this morning. Sattva has a kitchen garden; she goes out before dinner and picks what she needs for the evening’s salad. Tamas, always ready for any situation with the lowest denominator of effort, pulls out a dusty can of tomato paste that he has kept handy since last Christmas. The supermarket had it for three months; the tomatoes were harvested and processed into long-lived pulp months before that. Sri Krishna says politely, “I wouldn’t call that food.” But Tamas says, “It’s okay with me!”

Tamas, of course, is not merely the consumer of such foods; he is also the producer. “Convenience foods” are not nearly so convenient for the cook as they are for the manufacturer; their main virtues – that they ripen at the same time for mass harvesting, have thick skins to protect in transit, are uniform in size, color, and shape, and so on – are conveniences for the grower that translate directly into cash.

I have been reading a very entertaining essay by Philip Wylie, whom I used to know primarily as the author of Generation of Vipers. I had no idea he ventured into food until I encountered this piece reprinted in Joan Gussow’s excellent collection, The Feeding Web. I was interested to see that it was first published in 1954, when the problem he describes was small by the standards of today. Since then food technology has advanced so far as to go beyond food entirely.

“What America eats,” Mr. Wylie says, is “handsomely packaged. It is usually clean and pure. It is excellently preserved. The only trouble with it is this: year by year, it grows less good to eat. It appeals increasingly to the eye, but who eats with his eyes?” This is the kind of question that Rajas and Tamas never ask. Sattvic food tastes good and looks good; tamasic food doesn’t bother about either.

One of Mr. Wylie’s illustrations that I appreciated was cheese. Real cheeses, he says, used to be made by many small, local factories, who sold directly to small, mostly local groceries. There were many variations in flavor, but these were enjoyed and even prized. Mr. Wylie doesn’t take up the issue of scale directly – this was still in the fifties – but small is clearly beautiful in cheese-making too.

These old-fashioned cheeses, however, “didn’t ship well enough.” We should always remember to ask, Well enough for whom? Those who eat cheese, or those who make money from selling it? The only reason they had to be shipped great distances and stored for long times was to supply giant chain stores, and the only reason for chain stores is profit. Yet as Mr. Wylie says, “Scientific tests disclosed that the great majority of the people will buy a less good-tasting cheese if that’s all they can get. Scientific marketing then took effect”– and scientific processing. Mr. Wylie blames all this on science, but science is neither bad nor good. I would lay the responsibility at the door of greed; science, or rather technology, is only the instrument. This is “science” at the beck and call of profit and “its motto is ‘Give the people the least quality they’ll stand for’ ” – which of course is our old friend tamas. If people will buy whatever is offered, then quality is clearly irrelevant. The underlying shraddha is that the goal of making cheese is making money, which many people, I am sorry to say, would consider too obvious to be questioned. And if quality is irrelevant, then it is only reasonable to concentrate on the things that make a difference: durability, unit cost, uniformity.

“It is not possible to make the very best cheese in vast quantities at a low average cost,” says Wylie. I would say it is not possible to make even decent cheese in vast quantities at a low average cost, especially if you want it to ship well and taste the same in Duluth in December as it does in Austin in August. “It is possible to turn out in quantity a bland, impersonal, practically imperishable substance, more or less resembling, say, cheese, at lower cost than cheese.” In other words, you can’t please everybody with one or two strong-tasting cheeses, but you can get almost everybody to accept one or two tasteless cheeses. They won’t like them, but they won’t be offended by them the way they would be by something with a pronounced flavor.

The identical product could be sold all over the country, and with energy costs not counted, it was so cheap and so much easier to obtain that it took over the market. Thus chain groceries took over the selling of cheese and many other foods, to the extent that independent family-style stores are rare today and real cheese can only be found in gourmet stores. This is the kind of activity that used to make Gandhi furious, and we who buy must carry some of the responsibility. By buying vegetable-gum substitutes, we are telling the marketing managers that we don’t want cheese; what we are really interested in is cost and convenience. Who can blame them if they continue to produce this stuff? I think we should all support our small, local storekeepers if they stock things that are useful, even when it means a little extra cost and inconvenience.

Then Mr. Wylie takes on vegetables. “Agronomists and the like,” he says, “have taken to breeding all sorts of vegetables and fruits – changing their original nature. This sounds wonderful and often is insane. For the scientists have not as a rule taken any interest whatsoever in the taste of the things they’ve tampered with! What they’ve done is to develop ‘improved’ strains of things for every purpose but eating. They work out, say, peas that will ripen all at once. The farmer can then harvest his peas and thresh them and be done with them. It is extremely profitable because it is efficient. What matter if such peas taste like boiled paper wads?”

In 1954 no one suspected that after twenty or thirty years of this kind of magical tinkering on a global scale, more would be involved than taste. Today farmers around the world have discovered to their cost that peas developed to ripen at once can be wiped out at once. Instead of a large, naturally diverse gene pool, with many different and well-evolved strains resistant to different diseases, we now have only a few hybrids for all the world’s crops, controlled by relatively few seed companies. Where formerly only part of a harvest might fail, today a nation’s crop can fail – perhaps a region that supplies a global market. Prices soar, small farmers and peasants can be ruined, and the poor can starve. As always, we are surprised at how far the consequences of an apparently beneficial breakthrough can go.

Wylie concludes with a very interesting point. “Of course,” he says, “all this scientific ‘food handling’ tends to save money. It certainly preserves food longer. It reduces work at home. But these facts, and especially the last, imply that the first purpose of living is to avoid work – at home, anyhow.” I would say “to avoid work” period. That is the underlying shraddha of many consumers today, and all of us can name the guna by now.

“Without thinking,” Wylie says, “we are making an important confession about ourselves as a nation. We are abandoning quality – even, to some extent, the quality of people. . . . If we apply to other attributes the criteria we apply these days to the appetite, . . . we would not want bright children any more; we’d merely want them to look bright – and get through school fast.” And so on. This tamasic shraddha corrodes our mental state; therefore it affects everything we do. That is the real issue, not taste. How many will understand when the Gita says that working together at home, eating together at home, doing the dishes together at home, are all opportunities for improving the quality of daily living? This is the purpose of work. It requires time, it requires effort, but its real meaning is to bring people together in love and respect.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. The sattvic perform sacrifices with their entire mind fixed on the purpose of the sacrifice. Without thought of reward, they follow the teachings of the scriptures.

12. The rajasic perform sacrifices for the sake of show and the good it will bring them.

13. The tamasic perform sacrifices ignoring both the letter and the spirit. They omit the proper prayers, the proper offerings, the proper food, and the proper faith.

This word yajna is commonly used for the sacrificial offerings of formal worship. But the root yaj means simply ‘worship,’ which, in accord with the needs of the times, I interpret in a broader way. To me yajna means self-sacrifice, especially in selfless service, where we offer our time, energy, skills, and enthusiasm to a cause bigger than ourselves. This is the contemporary equivalent of the sacrifices to the Lord that were made in Arjuna’s day, and it reveals the Gita’s perspective on selfless service. Such work is an offering, and how we work and who we offer our service to cannot help but reveal the kind of person we are. These three verses, in fact, could be taught in business administration departments or corporate seminars, for they throw light on the mental states behind our work and actions.

Modern civilization is not particularly concerned with mental states. It is concerned with physical states, physical action, things that can be measured, preferably in dollars and cents. But the differences between this outlook and the Gita’s are practical as much as spiritual. When you read in the paper, for example, that a firm has been successful, I don’t have to tell you what the writer means: there is a tidy figure at the bottom line. But this is just a small part of the picture. If the firm has been successful by selling cigarettes, the Gita, taking a much longer view, would say it is an utter failure. The mental state behind those sales has to reap disaster, because of all the suffering it has gone to such lengths to sow. In this sense, the man to whom I sometimes go for a shoeshine when I am in San Francisco is a much more valuable member of society than the man or woman who participates in the selling or manufacture of cigarettes, liquor, or weapons.

Take medicine as an example. The very essence of the profession is healing; so we would expect medicine to be clearly a sattvic activity. Yet even here the Gita would say it is necessary to examine the mental state. For one, there are a lot of people in every profession for whom it is not the service offered, but the name of the profession itself that provides the primary motivation. I don’t think anyone has ever become a garbage collector because of the name, even if it is changed to “sanitary engineer.” Yet the garbage collector performs an essential service. Tagore has a beautiful poem praising the work of the sweepers in India as yajna, service of all. In most Indian views of caste, the sweeper is considered lowest; in the West too, I notice, the post is not exactly regarded as lofty. Yet the Gita would rate a sweeper’s work very high – higher (here is the surprising side) than that of many professionals whose only interest in their profession is the profit or prestige it promises.

But it is not only motivation the Gita scrutinizes; the attitude with which a person works is equally essential. These are demanding criteria. If you prescribe a lot of drugs, taking the path of least resistance to deal with some symptoms whose cause you hope will go away, you are not practicing sattvic medicine. The name of the proper guna begins with a T. Two doctors from our University of California medical school charge that “irrational prescribing has led to tens of thousands of needless drug-caused deaths.”

According to books and journals I have read, a lot of these unnecessary prescriptions are written because patients “put pressure on doctors.” This makes no sense to me. If a patient puts pressure on you to do something harmful, or at best something wasteful, the answer is often to put more loving pressure on the patient. I know a number of doctors who do just that; they would not practice any other way. Their practice is sattvic. If the patient says, “I won’t come to you again unless you give me more Valium,” you do him a great disservice by writing the prescription. Not only that, you become known as a doctor who will yield to this kind of pressure. Once the word gets around, you find yourself compromising your ethics several times every day. Virtually everyone, doctors and patients alike, knows that tranquilizers are generally taken not to cure diseases but to mask problems. When doctors prescribe unnecessarily, they are participating in the problem rather than the cure.

What is even more frightful to me is a common attitude toward surgery. I certainly do not deny that surgery has a place in extreme circumstances. But even twenty years ago I used to maintain that most surgical operations are unnecessary, and I am glad to see this view shared today by more and more physicians and surgeons too. Surgery is severe trauma, an intentionally inflicted wound. To be warranted, it must be better than the alternative. Every good surgeon would agree to this, and yet we have to remember that we see what our shraddha shows us. As I believe Abraham Maslow puts it, if your only tool is a hammer, you approach every problem as if it were a nail. A surgeon is a surgeon because he approaches disease in a particular way, following his bent, his training, and his experience. Where he recommends surgery, because that is how he always approaches this particular problem, an internist might insist on drugs – and I, in turn, might well maintain that neither approach would be as effective as going directly to the mind.

The doctor who uses the fewest drugs possible and recommends the least amount of surgery, within the framework of helping the body to heal itself, is a sattvic doctor. There is a third, related factor: the mental state of the patient, which is vitally affected by those to whom he goes for help. Norman Cousins comments from his own experience: “I’ve learned never to underestimate the capacity of the human mind and body to regenerate, even when the prospects seem most wretched.” A sattvic nurse or physician has to have faith in this regenerative process, with which the body and mind are richly endowed. He or she will never write off a patient as hopeless. I have a long-held suspicion, based on personal observation, that it is even possible for nerves to regenerate themselves. I am not surprised at this, because what happens in the deeper stages of meditation has a far-reaching effect on releasing this regenerative capacity of the body and mind to heal themselves and recover their health and strength. But for this to take place, doctor and nurse have to support what is positive in the patient’s own shraddha and help to change what is negative, so that this healing capacity can be released.

Although this example is taken from medicine, the shraddha it illustrates can be brought into any beneficial occupation or profession. William James said that human beings like to live far within self-­imposed limits, which is very much what shraddha does. We all have an invisible four-minute-mile kind of barrier in consciousness, setting stringent limitations on what we think we can do and be. I do not say that we have no limitations; to be human is to live in a world of limitations. But I am saying that we do not know what our real limitations are, even on the physical level. We cannot know until we try to push them outward. That is what the mystic can do. Meditation, the mantram, and the allied disciplines slowly expand every limitation that our old, surface-level shraddha imposes on us. They don’t get us out of the cage, but they make it larger and larger. When you go deep in meditation, you begin to see that so-called irreversible disease processes can sometimes be reversed, “ingrained” biological drives can be transformed. Even the aging process can be pushed far, far back. We cannot live forever; but no one, I would say, knows how long life can be extended by a man or woman who has got hold of the source of prana and is leading a selfless life. In other words, there are tremendous possibilities inherent in the human being, in every human being, even on the physical level.

Mr. Cousins, I think, glimpses that the key to this is shraddha, for he continues: “It is possible that these limits will recede when we respect more fully the natural drive of the human mind and body toward perfectibility.” This natural drive is what the sattvic doctor and nurse try to harness, what the whole medical profession should try to harness. But it is not only a biological drive, and the same shraddha – an unshakable faith in every human being’s inalienable capacity to grow – is characteristic of the sattvic man and woman in all the helping professions. “No medication they could give their patients,” says Mr. Cousins again of physicians, “is as potent as the state of mind that patient brings to her or his own illness. In this sense, the most valuable service a physician can provide for a patient is helping him to maximize his own recuperative and healing potentialities.” Medicine is only one example; we could supply many more.

That is Sattva, who naturally thinks of work in terms of what he can give. Rajas, by contrast, thinks about what he can get. These strands are commonly mixed in each of us, and even a person with a good measure of sattva can have a dangerous element of rajas too. I have been reading a biography of Aldous Huxley, who had many factors favorable for a spiritual aspirant: a brilliant, searching intellect, a great cultural legacy, the Huxley family background, a keen interest in mysticism, a literary gift, and the opportunity of close association with a very good spiritual teacher, Swami Prabhavananda, whose own teacher was a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna. With books like The Perennial Philosophy and Ends and Means, Huxley did great service in presenting spiritual values to the West. But he also had a powerful rajasic element which led him to experiment with psychoactive drugs; and because he was so widely respected as an exponent of mysticism, his example encouraged a great many people to treat drugs as a route to instant enlightenment – a development whose fruits we are only beginning to see. When we have talents like this and the opportunity to influence people, we have to be particularly vigilant over everything we say and do. If we encourage others, even unintentionally, in ways that lead them or those around them into danger, part of their karma is ours.

Wherever rajas is present like this, the Gita says, action is tainted to that extent. But real trouble arises with work that is primarily rajasic, work undertaken solely for personal gain. We have had dozens of illustrations of this so far, and there are unfortunately many others to which attention should be called. The activities of what I have been calling Asuric Enterprises, such as dumping dangerous products on Third World markets – including nonfood “foods,” hazardous drugs, tobacco products, weapons, and nuclear technology – fall into this category. In such cases, the element of rajas is compounded with tamas. We are in it for the profit, which is rajas. But it is tamas that makes us so insensitive that we do not care about, may not even notice, the human costs of what we do.

SRI KRISHNA: 14. Offering service to the gods, to the good, to the wise, and to your spiritual teacher; purity, honesty, continence, and nonviolence – these are the disciplines of the body.

15. To offer soothing words, to speak truly, kindly, and helpfully, and to study the scriptures – these are the disciplines of speech.

16. Calmness, gentleness, silence, self-restraint, and purity – these are the disciplines of the mind.

Sri Krishna is about to speak of three kinds of spiritual aspirants, but first he singles out three levels of sadhana: action, speech, and thought. This is a useful distinction, but I want to stress that these three are separate only on the blackboard. In our lives, they have to be practiced together.

Even in the first verse, which concentrates on the physical level of sadhana, my emphasis is on the mind. Jesus and the Buddha too emphasized that the mental state behind our speech and actions is at least as important as what we say and do. Perhaps it is even more important, since sooner or later every mental state has to bear fruit in speech and action.

Puja in the first verse usually means ritual worship, but the underlying meaning is deep reverence. The Gita is telling us what kind of people deserve our love: that is, what kind can give us a model for living, a shraddha of human purpose higher than personal gain. I think this is one of the greatest handicaps young people face today: very, very few grow up with a living example of these timeless values. When we look at the papers or at magazines or books, when we watch TV or go to the movies, we see such an utter vacuum of ideals: no one whose life we can emulate, in whose footsteps we can follow. Entertainers, business leaders, politicians, and sports figures are often held up as models in the media. They attract attention in one small sphere of activity, so people want to be like them in everything. How seldom do we see anyone who has made his life itself a work of art! These are the men and women who truly deserve our love and emulation: those who know how to live with good will for all, how to work hard for the welfare of all, without being subject to selfish whims and caprices, resentments and personal vanities.

In my own life, though I had opportunity to meet many well-known figures, the one person who embodied all these principles of living for me was my granny. That is the vital role played by a spiritual teacher, who in a sense lives in a glass house. My grandmother did not sequester herself away; she chose to live right in the midst of people, participating in all their activities, sharing their joys and sorrows – the “tremendous trifles” of their lives, as Chesterton used to say – and in the midst of all that, to show them quietly how to live. There was an utterly natural artistry about this which I never saw fail her. As I became aware of it, I began to desire consciously to strive to become more and more like my teacher. That is why the Hindu tradition has emphasized for centuries that it is not enough for a spiritual teacher to preach spiritual values; he or she is expected to live them out, every moment of every day. Even if all the scriptures were lost, the tradition goes, we could reconstruct them from just one illumined man or woman’s daily life.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. When these three levels of self-discipline are practiced without attachment to the results, but in a spirit of great faith, the sages call this practice sattvic.

18. Disciplines practiced in order to gain respect, honor, or admiration from the world are rajasic. They are undependable and transitory in their effects.

19. Disciplines practiced to gain power over others, or in the confused belief that to torture oneself is spiritual, are tamasic.

Even among spiritual aspirants, Sri Krishna says, you will find three types, according to the dominant guna.

The lowest place on the ladder, of course, is reserved for Tamas, who may scarcely know why he is practicing spiritual disciplines at all. His understanding of them is mostly physical. Such misunderstandings can cause serious problems, particularly if an aspirant does not have a good, reliable, loving teacher to whom he or she gives undivided loyalty and respect. Those who are acutely aware of their physical existence, who live for the satisfactions of the senses, soon find that separateness becomes a compulsion, a kind of cult from which they cannot easily escape. Even so, by the draw of the spiritual teacher’s love and personal example, a good teacher can often manage to instill a higher shraddha – a self-image that is spiritual rather than physical.

The practical purpose of the theory of the three gunas is to show us how to change. Nobody is stuck in a negative state. Even to someone who suffers from acute emotional paralysis, sunk in lethargy and unequal to any challenge, the Gita offers boundless hope. It does not play Pollyanna. “Sure,” it agrees, “that is your present condition.” The analysis is as precise as a doctor’s diagnosis: “You are in the state of tamas; those are the signs and symptoms. You’re a block of ice.” Don’t we say of someone who is emotionally paralyzed, “He’s a very cold person”? Or of someone who can’t form relationships, who can’t find herself a place in life, “She’s got an icy personality”? But the Gita not only gives the diagnosis, it also presents the cure. Just as a glacier can melt into a mighty river, tamas can thaw, turn into rajas, and be harnessed into sattva – by any of us, if we are willing to put in the effort it requires.

I have to repeat this reminder frequently, because we are so conditioned to believe we are stuck with the problems and personality we have today. Most of us are not emotionally disabled. But almost everyone experiences a kind of sporadic paralysis where it seems impossible to make an act of will and do something we dislike, especially when it is for someone else’s benefit. We are, to coin a phrase, “tempoplegics,” temporarily disabled. There is a kind of heat therapy for this problem, and the Sanskrit name for it in these verses is tapas. The word means ‘heat’ and also a fiery self-denial. Training the senses and putting other people first, going against your likes and dislikes, are all comparatively palatable forms of tapas in my presentation, and they generate great power. In this sense, meditation is a kind of electric blanket. When you feel lethargic, wrap it around you and turn it on; the ice will begin to melt. If you don’t even care whether it melts or not, turn your meditation up higher. If your concentration is good, you have to have more energy; you may even feel the heat inside. That is transforming tamas into rajas.

These verses, with the previous three, give some very important instructions for entering the deeper stages of meditation. There is a significant difference between what I call the first half of sadhana and the second. In the first half, we have a wide margin for making mistakes. But in the second half, the margin becomes very narrow. What may seem a small mistake in the eyes of the world can then become quite large; and if we slip and fall, the suffering is that much greater because we are falling from a greater height.

In every tradition, mystics sound severe cautions to alert us to the danger of serious lapses in these latter stages of the journey. The point of these verses is to remind us to be vigilant about every aspect of our sadhana. Then, when the inevitable challenges come – challenges that will try us to the utmost – we will be able to keep our eyes on the goal and face them bravely without a slip or backward glance.

In the early years of meditation, most of our efforts are on the surface. We need to be regular, sincere, and enthusiastic, but whatever progress we achieve is still on the everyday level of consciousness, where the will does not operate much. This is true even of those who are intellectually trained or highly cultured. But after some years of immense effort, the rocky surface of the ego slowly begins to yield. At that time there are many symptoms in meditation – drowsiness, sleep, even blackouts – of which you may not be aware. But if you persist and break through the surface, you will be rewarded by a change in the level of consciousness on which you live. You will find you are a little more aware of the unity of life, a little less aware of the separateness in which you have been imprisoned. Without exaggeration this is a different world altogether. You have to learn all over again how to walk there, just as an infant learns to walk for the first time.

To facilitate this learning to walk, I usually give a number of practical suggestions. One, be sure you have enough selfless work to harness the energy released and channel it toward the welfare of all. A deeper level of consciousness brings more resources, more energy; if these are not utilized selflessly, they are going to cause trouble. The deeper your meditation, the harder you need to work. In fact, one of the simplest ways to assess your meditation is to look at your performance at work. How punctual are you? How concentrated? How harmoniously can you cooperate with your co-workers? Can you work with complete concentration, yet still drop your work at will when the time comes to drop it? The answers to questions like these tell a lot about interior progress.

Second, be sure to get adequate physical exercise. The deeper your interior life, the greater the need for vigorous physical activity. This is often forgotten. People sometimes fall into a kind of lethargy in the mistaken belief that this is what it means to work without tension, or even that it will benefit their sadhana. It is just the opposite. The body is our instrument of physical service, and it thrives on vigorous movement. If you are young or already in good condition, “vigorous” here means vigorous. Swimming, running, and fast-paced sports that require concentration are all excellent exercise. But unless you are in condition, please do not jump into such activities immediately. Work up to them gradually. If you are over thirty-five or have any particular physical problems, ask your doctor to start you on an exercise program.

Third, it is essential to be with other people. There is a widespread impression that to lead the spiritual life, you have to be a lone wolf. Again, the truth is just the opposite. Only when we have close relationships with other people can we reduce self-will in being more patient, forgiving, and kind, which is the very heart of sadhana.

Nutritious food, adequate sleep, and vigorous exercise are all important in sadhana. But even where such physical requirements are concerned, vitamin W – the will – is absolutely essential. Your body may be strong and resilient, you may be getting a perfect balance of amino acids and trace minerals, but if the will is not unified between the conscious and the unconscious, the latter stages of meditation can become too oppressive for the body to bear.

No example illustrates this more vividly than the transformation of sexual desire, which continues into the final phases of sadhana. The Sanskrit word for this transformation in these verses is brahmacarya, and although it is included here with the physical disciplines, it is essentially a matter of disciplining the mind. Brahmacarya is usually translated as ‘sex control’ or ‘continence,’ but its literal meaning is ‘conduct that enables us to move closer to the Lord.’ Sex is sacred, a sacred source of power. The reason mystics everywhere place such emphasis on control of sexual desire is that the journey of sadhana is so arduous, so demanding, that we need to draw on every trace of its power to reach the goal. If you want to rise to your full height, if you want to love to your full depth, then try gradually to master sex. Try to harness it, not to strangle or suffocate it, so that this immense power is released to flow towards all in love. Every time you put someone else first, you draw on a little of this power and transform it. Tenderness, patience, selfless service, hard work for others without thought of personal reward – all these harness the raw energy of sexual desire and help to transform it, little by little, into an abiding flow of joy.

I need to repeat this over and over, because it is so foreign to our conditioning: If you feel strong sexual drives, congratulations. If you feel haunted by sex day and night, you are a person rich in resources. It’s like striking oil in your backyard; you have a little Arabia to supply you with all the power you need. Just as with everybody else, it took me many years to understand this simple truth. I too was conditioned by the media, by poetry and drama and all the literature of romance. Only when I began to see how vast were the resources that the mastery of sex could release into my hands – to benefit everyone, to serve everyone, to lead a long, healthy, vigorous, creative life, always in security, always in joy, and never afraid of the challenges of life – only then did I begin to ask for my teacher’s grace: “Make me like you!” It didn’t happen naturally, and it certainly didn’t come easily; it required years of valiant combat, ceaseless vigilance. It is terribly hard, almost impossible: that is its challenge. But it can be done; and when sex is transformed, the Hindu scriptures say, it is like fire transformed to light: every moment, every relationship, is suffused with joy.

SRI KRISHNA: 20. Giving simply because it is right to give, without thought of return, at a proper time, in proper circumstances, and to a worthy person, is sattvic giving.

21. Giving with regrets or in the expectation of getting something in return is rajasic.

22. Giving at an inappropriate time, in inappropriate circumstances, and to an unworthy person, without affection or understanding of what it means to give, is tamasic.

St. Francis tells us, “It is in giving that we receive.” But the shraddha of our times is that it is in grabbing that we receive. Very few people today, I think, believe that giving for the sake of giving is even possible for a human being, let alone desirable. Dr. Hans Selye, a good man determined as a biologist to be “realistic,” finds nothing higher in human nature than “altruistic egoism”: give your best so that you may receive the best from others. This is perhaps the highest view we can take when we believe that human nature is wholly physical. But the shraddha of St. Francis reaches vastly higher, to show us our real human stature.

In these verses, therefore, I take the broadest view of giving. Dana here does not mean only gifts that are wrapped in decorative paper and tied with ribbons and bows. It can also refer to giving support, love, time, attention, or skill. And though I shall begin by describing individual giving, the scope embraces business, charity, public aid, and all the service professions.

Sattva provides the standard. Sattvic giving, simply put, helps the other person to grow – which, of course, is something that cannot be clearly seen without detachment. As Sri Krishna says here, you must understand the time, the place, and the person to whom you are giving. The application is startling, for it often leads to just the opposite of what we would ordinarily do. To someone who is compulsively attached to money, for example, money is the last thing we should give. It would only strengthen the samskara, deepen the compulsion. Similarly, to someone compulsively attracted to pleasure, opportunities to indulge that compulsion are not a sattvic gift; they would make that person more selfish.

This is easier to see with children than adults, perhaps because we can be more objective about child development than we can about adult development. When Christmas or birthdays come, a sattvic parent reflects on the effect a particular gift is likely to have on the child to whom it is given. If a child has a compulsive eating problem and we indulge that problem – giving special sweets, enrolling her in the Truffle-A-Day Club, making sure he gets acquainted with each of the hundred and thirty-seven flavors of ice cream at the store – then we are strengthening that compulsion, which to me is scarcely a sign of love.

In my own home, my grandmother was the only person who could discriminate so clearly that she never gave us children anything that would spoil us. I did not have many toys as a boy. I did not have many books, though I loved to read; I used the school library. I didn’t have a bicycle until I went to college. For a long time I thought my granny was really ungenerous, perhaps even unaware of my needs. Only as I grew up did I realize that she was continuously giving me everything I truly needed to grow to my highest stature. Ultimately, hers was what the Buddha calls “the gift of dharma,” which is the highest gift a human being can offer or receive. We get awed today when somebody gives a million dollars to endow a new performing arts center or a college library. But by the Buddha’s standards, no gift is so precious or so permanent as the gift of living in accordance with the supreme law of life.

The right gift for a child, of course, varies very much from person to person. But I can make one or two general observations. I am not much of an admirer of giving children machines for toys; it does not help their creativity. An elaborate electric train, for example, is an electric train and nothing more; it will go round and round without any help from a child’s imagination. The same is true for computers and computer games. There is plenty of time in life to learn to write your own program for balancing a checkbook, and not much is lost if you never get around to it, no matter what people say today. Childhood is the time for activities that foster imagination, not ingenuity; creativity, not cleverness: for broadening and deepening the faculties that enable us to identify readily with other people and other creatures, to sympathize and support and feel their joys and their suffering as our own. All these things are essential if a child is to grow up secure, loving, and loved. One of Gandhi’s basic principles of education was that a child’s hands should be taught as well as his head. I agree completely, but I would say “Head, hands, and heart.”

If any return is expected when a gift is made – praise, prestige, a business favor, increased sales, a sense of obligation – that giving is not sattvic. More than twenty years ago, when the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation was founded, Christine and I decided we would never accept a gift that had strings attached. Time and circumstances have more than justified our stand. Of course we needed money as our activities expanded; we still need and value financial assistance today. But we always make sure that the person offering to help us is not prompted by any personal motive; otherwise it would not help that person to give it or us to accept.

Rajasic gifts, on the other hand, are “business gifts.” You sit in closed session with the board and decide how much you can get by making a generous donation. Will it help your tax situation? Or, to use a good American expression, are there any kickbacks? (The word reminds me of a horse.) Are there favors that can be exchanged? Unfortunately there is no such thing as a free lunch anywhere in life, particularly for those who are interested only in personal pleasure or profit. Isn’t it Walpole who says that all such men have their price? The price is karma. They may be honored with a statue or get their names engraved on cornerstones, but as far as karma goes they will receive no reward. The Karma Telegraph boy comes in singing, “He has given a thousand pounds, a thousand pounds, a thousand pounds, and so he expects to be knighted”; but that is all: Chitragupta, the Cosmic Auditor, doesn’t so much as make an entry. To get good karma for giving, you must have no desire for personal benefit from it. Only then does it become nishkama karma, an act untainted by selfish desire.

More than that, Sri Krishna says, no one benefits from giving grudgingly. Suppose, for example, you are working in your garden, doing exactly what you like, and your neighbor comes over and says, “Can you help me get the spare bed down from the attic? Aunt Agatha’s going to be here in two hours and I don’t have anything ready.” You wanted to finish watering before the sun gets too hot, and part of your mind says snippishly, “You’ve been expecting Aunt Agatha for a week! Why didn’t you get the bed down earlier?” But you’ve been reading the Gita, so you say with half a will, “All right, if it won’t take long.” Sri Krishna says cheerfully, “Sorry, no credit for that either.”

My granny understood these things intimately, though she did not know how to put them into words. When I was, say, reading Ivanhoe, which was much more important to me than helping my granny, she would call me and say, “Would you go to the bazaar and get a couple of coconuts for me to take to the temple?”

“Granny,” I would say like any other boy “don’t you see I’m reading?”

“Yes,” she would say, “but this is more important.”

“All right,” I’d say, “I’ll go.” I would take the money and walk along slowly to the bazaar, and meet a couple of friends on the road and talk to them for a while, and stop to admire an elephant bathing in one of the village tanks, and all the time my granny would be waiting. When I finally got back, all she would say was, “That took you long enough.” I didn’t understand the satire. It was just a child’s inability to understand another’s needs, so that although I loved her, I didn’t realize that my granny’s needs were much more important than mine.

But later on, as I began to understand more, it dawned on me one day that I needn’t wait for her to ask me; I could go to her first. The moment I understood something, I always liked to put it into practice. “Granny,” I asked, “do you need anything for the temple today?”

“Aren’t the boys playing soccer today?”

“Yes,” I replied, “but I want to do your job first.”

She said simply, “You’ve grown.”

That was her way of teaching: letting me make my mistakes, showing me by her example how to avoid making the same mistake again, always keeping faith in my capacity to learn to read the unwritten lessons of her life.

Last Sri Krishna describes tamasic giving, and he covers all the bases: “things done at the wrong time, in the wrong place, in the wrong way, for the wrong person.” Any way you look at it, Tamas can’t win. To a nephew who has to have everything he sees, Uncle Tamas gives money; he doesn’t want the boy ever to feel deprived. What lack of love! He might as well write on the greeting card, “I want you to stay crippled, so life will be more difficult when you grow up.” His teenage children have a lot of irons in the fire, so he buys them each a car. “Why should I make them suffer?” he says. “I’ve got the money; let them enjoy themselves while they can.” My grandmother would reply, “You’re handicapping them. You’re not helping them to grow. They need to learn to work; they need to learn to give. All you’re helping them do is learn to take.”

Even with small children, her way of playing with them was to let them participate in the work she was doing, which they enjoyed immensely. Children like to do real things. I remember nights before a big feast when she sat up at night cutting vegetables. She used to ask the little girls to come sit around her, and then she’d start them shelling peas. When you do this with children, you know, half the peas go into the bowl and the other half into little mouths. “That’s all right,” she would say. “We’ll give you more peas.” She wasn’t trying to get the peas shelled faster; she was teaching them her own shraddha of work. And in the book of karma, it is not written that Martha gave fifty units while Matilda gave only ten. All it says is “Martha gave; Matilda gave.” What matters is shraddha – the mental state behind the giving.

We can look at medicine too – in fact, at almost every human activity – through these verses; their application is sweeping if you know how to read between the lines. Medical care is a kind of giving, and all these criteria of Sri Krishna’s provide interesting ways of evaluating what experts today are pleased to call “health care delivery.” Overprescribing powerful drugs or resorting to unnecessary surgery, as I said earlier, is tamasic. People talk a lot about Medicare; they should worry more about Tamocare.

Rajas, on the other hand, is found where the physician or surgeon is motivated primarily by money, prestige, or a need for power. When I was still new to this country, I remember sitting in one of those tiny hospital rooms wearing nothing but a nice paper suit, waiting for probably half an hour. (Later I was told that in the drop-in clinic, people sometimes wait half a day.) Since I knew how to meditate, after a while I closed my eyes and just went in. When the doctor finally came, he had to wait, which he was not accustomed to doing. He gave me a few minutes, cleared his throat a few times, then scraped the chair back and forth and tapped his thermometer. I scarcely heard; my senses were all closed down. Finally I opened my eyes, and we got to talk about this problem of keeping people waiting. He actually said, though not in so many words, that it reassures him if he can make a patient wait; it puts the patient in his proper place. That one remark told me something about his mental state, how much security he actually had.

“You know,” I said, “my way of reassuring myself is to turn up a little ahead of time whenever I can.” He understood, and he saw the love behind it too. Keeping people waiting, especially when it is done deliberately, is another form of unkindness.

In any profession, building yourself up at someone else’s expense is partly rajasic, partly tamasic: rajas contributes the insecurity, tamas the insensitivity. Many thousands of people, particularly those on lower incomes and the elderly, have to put up with this kind of treatment on a massive scale in getting health care today. I probably do not need to tell you that a child with a sore throat may mean hours of waiting in room after room, standing in line, waiting for forms to be found and filled out and filed again, waiting for the doctor, the nurse, the clerk, the pharmacist, one more faceless unit in the day’s outpatient statistics. That is asuric health care on a terrible scale, with far-reaching effects on the wellness of the nation.

I don’t by any means say that this is characteristic of doctors in general. But there are many who by their own confession go into the profession for the money it can bring or the prestige. That is Rajocare, and it need not be bad care either. If there is a lot of tamas mixed in also, you get the kind of doctor who keeps you coming back again and again while he palliates symptoms, or who orders unnecessary surgery just because it carries a big price tag or gives him a chance to show off his skill. But a purely rajasic doctor is not of this sort. He gives good care and attention, the best he can, to see that the patient really benefits, and he charges accordingly – he gets his time and money’s worth too. A highly trained specialist may be like this. As long as he or she is good and the charge is reasonable, we can appreciate this kind of care.

But sattvic care is the highest. The sattvic doctor is interested in getting at the root of a health problem, not merely in treating the symptoms. If her patient has high blood pressure, she won’t simply prescribe an antihypertensive. She will want to help him get his weight down, eat better, get more exercise; she may even encourage him to meditate, learn to manage stress, and change the wrong ways of thinking that contribute to chronic high blood pressure. This is the kind of care that I am interested in, and I hope someday to make a lasting contribution to it with the help of my medical friends.

Again, we can apply these verses to international assistance. Among tamasic gifts is the supply of armaments to other countries, often as a “token of friendship” or of “mutual alliance.” One of the motives in tamas is to injure, and whatever the intentions may be, the result of giving arms as “aid” is that the recipient nation is injured instead of helped. In the Middle East, particularly, we have had several recent examples of how pumping arms into an area increases tension, heightens insecurity, and provokes so-called preventive wars with highly destructive weapons that bring suffering not merely to soldiers but to whole civilian populations.

For anyone looking at this kind of activity with detachment, the consequences can seem to involve a karmic justice. In my own lifetime, I have seen weapons that have been sold into some far corner of the world for defense purposes eventually find their way into another corner of the world where, in an unforeseen shift of alliances, they are used against one of the donor’s allies or even against the donor itself.

Rajasic aid is a little better. It consists in selling goods or services in the donor’s self-interest. What is sold may or may not be beneficial to the recipient, at least in the short run – rice, wheat, steel. But the purpose of the exchange is to benefit the donor: to make a profit or consolidate power or change the balance of trade or bolster a sagging regime. This kind of aid is tainted even when the goods or services are not harmful, because they are given in condescension and with an intent to increase the dependency of the recipient. Often the underlying motive is less than generous, and the net result less than beneficial.

In such activities there can be a large element of tamas as well, especially when foreign aid becomes an instrument of pressure or coercion as it did in Cold War conditions. The U.S. has used “gifts” of surplus grain this way, doling them out to countries most pliant to its perceived interests. During the drought of 1965, for example, when India planned to develop its own fertilizer industry so as not to be so dependent on imports, the American government responded by putting food shipments to India on a month-to-month basis. The New York Times commented, “Call them ‘strings,’ call them ‘conditions,’ or whatever one likes, India has very little choice but to agree to many of these terms.”

In other cases, the United States has put pressure on a country to pay for its “gift” of wheat with a particular commodity – say, coffee – which forces agricultural production of that country to concentrate further on export crops at the expense of domestic foods. This too suits the interests of the donor, since it can sell such countries the food they do not grow for themselves. These are complicated issues, but rarely is the motivation what the Gita would call pure.

Sattvic aid, by contrast, furthers self-reliance. It may be skills or expertise or technical knowledge at an appropriate level of technology that helps the recipient nation to help itself. It carries no burdensome price tag; it depends on no burdensome supply of external resources like oil; it simply makes good use of what is locally available.

In this connection, I might point out that many Third World countries are as long on labor resources as they are short on capital and the elements of modern industrial technology. What sense does it make to build a big factory in Africa, financing a lot of expensive technology with years of debt, so that ten men can do the work of a hundred in turning out products for foreign exchange? Why not give the hundred men jobs, even if they actually do the work by hand, and produce things that are needed locally, made from local materials?

These are not criticisms of the United States. All great powers tend toward rajasic “giving.” I chose these illustrations simply because they lie within my own personal experience. I am not pointing a finger at the problems of any country. Every country has a dark side, and every country has a bright side too. We should be aware of the dark side, the Gita would say; otherwise we cannot see problems at all. But it is essential to keep our focus always on the bright side, for that is the side which is real. If we lose sight of what is positive, we have no way to change.

SRI KRISHNA: 23. ‘Om Tat Sat’: these three words represent Brahman, from which come priests and scriptures and sacrifice.

24. Those who follow the Vedas, therefore, always repeat the word ‘Om’ when offering sacrifices, performing spiritual disciplines, or giving gifts.

25. Those seeking liberation and not any personal benefit add the word ‘Tat’ when performing these acts of worship.

26. The word ‘Sat’ means ‘that which is’; it also indicates goodness. Therefore it is used to describe a worthy deed.

Om stands for the mantram. Tat, literally ‘That,’ stands for Brahman, the pure Godhead, which cannot be described in word or thought. And sat means literally ‘that which is real’ – real in the sense of what is abiding, changeless, everlasting. From sat comes satya, ‘truth,’ which was Mahatma Gandhi’s definition of God. Evil, Gandhi said, has no reality of its own; it is real only insofar as we support it. Goodness, by contrast, cannot be extinguished; it can only be hidden. “I do dimly perceive,” Gandhiji once said in memorable words,

that whilst everything around me is ever-changing, ever dying, there is underlying all that change a living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and recreates. That informing Power or Spirit is God. And since nothing else I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is. . . . I can see that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light.

This is not merely philosophy; there you see Gandhi’s real genius. War, for example, has no reality of its own. It is not a “necessary evil”; no evil is necessary. War takes place only so long as we support it. If more and more people refuse to support it, as thousands of women did some years or so ago in a full-page ad in the New York Times, we could see an end to war. When we truly do not want war on earth any more, we can establish everlasting peace; nobody makes war but we ourselves.

SRI KRISHNA: 27. To understand the meaning of self-sacrifice, self-discipline, and giving is ‘sat.’ To act in accordance with these three is ‘sat’ indeed.

28. To engage in sacrifice, self-discipline, and giving without good faith is ‘asat,’ without either worth or goodness. Nothing worthwhile can come from such action, either in this life or in the next.

Wherever wrong attitudes are present, Sri Krishna says, the result is asat – literally, ‘unreal.’ When we work halfheartedly, with reservations, with ill will or without concentration or respect, in the long run what we do will have no lasting benefit.

It is often assumed that beneficial ends justify any means. As you say in this country, “anything goes.” The Gita would say, “ ‘Anything goes’ means nothing will come of it.” Mahatma Gandhi declared with his life that wrong means can never bring about right ends – just as, in the long run, right means cannot help but bring about right ends.

In my language, there is no difference between ends and means. I look on my day’s work not only as the means to an end, but also as an end in itself. When you give your time and effort to selfless work without reservation, the work itself is the end.

The main reason we have not been able to establish peace in the world today, Gandhi would say, is that we have been using wrong means. The very theory of the balance of power – or, as it was called during the Cold War, the balance of terror – contradicts the unity of life. You try to frighten me more, I try to frighten you more, and we call it peace if neither side attacks! Economic sanctions, manipulating other countries’ food supply, selling arms, undermining the freedom of other people to lead their own lives – all these are wrong means, whatever end we intend to achieve by them. Therefore, Sri Krishna says, they are asat: their results are tainted, as transient as writing on water. The next time you go to the beach, try writing peace, peace, peace on the water; see how long it will last.

Yesterday at the beach I saw an elaborate castle made of sand, standing in proud dignity near the curl of the tide. When we returned after a long, brisk walk, the waves had washed everything away. That is what happens to even the best efforts to bring peace to the world when we do not use right means: understanding, sympathy, education, respect. This applies in all human situations, at all levels from individual to international. The words “self-sacrifice, self-discipline, and giving” in these verses refer to any kind of help or charity.

I want to tell you a story to illustrate how even good work undertaken with arrogance or lack of compassion can bring about more harm. The story is “Rain,” one of the great short stories of the twentieth century, written by W. Somerset Maugham. Although it is about individuals, you can read between the lines to apply it even to corporate benevolence and foreign aid. It was originally published in a collection called The Trembling of a Leaf, which took its title from a significant epigram by Sainte-Beuve: “There is only the trembling of a leaf between happiness and despair.”

The background of “Rain” makes an interesting story in itself. It seems that in December, 1916 – shortly before the story was first published – Somerset Maugham sailed on a Sydney-bound steamer called Sonoma. Scholars playing detective recently managed to find the passenger list of that voyage and were rewarded to discover not only the names of Mr. Maugham and his secretary but also of one “Miss Thompson”; Maugham hadn’t even bothered to change her name. Encouraged, they tracked down everyone they could find who had sailed on the Sonoma in 1916 and asked them what this Miss Thompson looked like. “Coarsely pretty,” the survivors recalled. “Flashy. A little plump. Full of animal vitality.”

Many of the young men on board naturally began following Miss Thompson around, just as in Maugham’s story. Her luggage included a phonograph which she played in her cabin throughout the night, while these men sat talking and singing and drinking with her. Maugham’s cabin was two doors away, and he became quite interested in this scene. As he says, everybody was “copy” to him; everyone was a potential story. Just as a mystic can see deep into the positive side of human nature, Maugham saw deep into the negative side, and he could be ruthless in describing it too.

The “Reverend Davidson” – Maugham did change his name – was on the ship as well. He was a medical missionary, and Maugham describes him in his journal: “A tall thin man. . . . He had hollow cheeks and high cheek bones, his fine, large, dark eyes were deep in their sockets, he had full sensual lips, a cadaverous air and a look of suppressed fire.” His wife, Maugham records, was from New England, which I suppose implies that she was inclined to judge people’s failings without remembering the compassionate theory of the three gunas. Maugham noted with relish that she loved to decry in detail the depraved marriage customs of the local natives. We can imagine her opinion of Miss Thompson.

Davidson was genuinely concerned, if not about Miss Thompson herself, at least about her moral situation. I remember Walter Huston in the movie role, pacing up and down and cracking his knuckles, terribly upset because this woman was leading so many young men astray. But instead of compassion, his attitude was one of condemnation. “If the tree is rotten,” he exclaims, “it shall be cut down and fed into the flames.” Motives like these are asat; therefore, the Gita would say, they cannot escape bringing harm to everybody involved.

As Maugham’s story picks up, the steamer is delayed at Pago-Pago for a fortnight because of quarantine. Sadie Thompson has a field day. There is uproarious merrymaking in her room day and night, which does not endear her to her missionary friends. Davidson does some sleuthing and learns that she is originally from San Francisco and has escaped a raid on the red-light district in Honolulu; now she is on her way to Sydney in search of a job as a barmaid. Clearly she could use a fresh start. But Davidson is not interested in finding some way to help her; he is only trying to have his way. He goes to the authorities and asks them to deport her.

What happens afterwards to the real Miss Thompson I do not know. But in Maugham’s story Davidson goes on like this, using any self-­righteous means he can think of to plunge her into an even lower shraddha of herself than she already has. For a long time he is not particularly successful. But he is determined to “save her soul,” to bring her around to his own view of her, and slowly he breaks her down. She begins to see herself as a fallen woman and learns to feel ashamed. He finds out that she is fleeing a three-year jail sentence in San Francisco, and he threatens her continually; he is determined to get her to go back and pay for her sins. Finally she becomes cringing and dependent. The phonograph is silenced. She begins dressing plainly, stops wearing makeup and perfume, lets Davidson read the Bible to her, and confides in him at length about her past sins. She believes she has met a man unlike the rest: someone of real moral stature, who is not after her physical attractions but is truly concerned for her soul.

To accomplish this “miracle,” however, Davidson is obliged to spend a good deal of time with her – talking to her, listening to her, reading to her, reasoning with her. And as she responds to him, though he does not realize it, he begins to respond to her too. The wheel of karma has begun to roll. He has had no sympathy or understanding for this woman or for the men so driven by compulsive desire; these are not emotions that he recognizes. But Sadie Thompson was “coarsely pretty.” She and Davidson spend long hours talking to each other, often well into the night, and slowly she begins to come up in his dreams. What he has been judging in others is happening to him, and not because of Sadie: the same samskara he condemns so vehemently in others is acting now in his own consciousness.

Finally comes a long, long spell of continuous, monotonous monsoon rains. Davidson is already obsessed with Sadie, though he cannot allow himself to realize it, and the ceaseless drill of the rain begins to pound in his head, his heart, his veins. On the night before she is to sail back to San Francisco, unable to control his pent-up desires, he enters her room and does not leave until two.

The following morning the rain has ceased, and Davidson is not to be found. Eventually his body is discovered washed up on the beach. He has committed suicide; the fierce samskara of judgment has turned on him. Sadie is her defiant self again, dressed and made up as before, and her phonograph is going full blast. “You men!” she says derisively to the doctor who represents Maugham. “You’re all the same, all of you!”

There is a ray of sunshine around this story. Maugham was in Hollywood soon after it was written, and late one night another writer called John Colton came to his hotel room and said, “I can’t sleep. Do you have anything good to read?” Maugham said, “I have the proofs of a short story I’ve written. You may read those if you like.” Colton might have wanted some more sensational Hollywood stuff, but he had to get to sleep somehow. Maugham’s story kept him up all night, and the next morning he went back and said, “I’ve got to make a play out of this!” That is how “Rain” came to be presented on Broadway in 1922. It sold out for some eighteen months, and every actress around wanted to play the part of Sadie. It shows that people’s hearts are still with the underdog, which is a very appealing facet of human nature.

You can see, reading between the lines, that Davidson’s shraddha applies to a much wider picture than the relationship between a repressed missionary and a lady “full of animal vitality.” Any attempt to help another person – or community, or nation – that is tainted by disdain, condescension, or a judgmental or “holier than thou” attitude is asat. I want to repeat that nations and charities can fall victim to this too. When “help” is defined by conformance to our own ideas of what is right – or, worse, by our own self-interest – the results are poisoned by our shraddha. Sooner or later, they have to turn against us.

By contrast, for the way of love, we have only to remember the example the Reverend Davidson professed to follow. Jesus was at supper in a Pharisee’s house when a woman “whose sins were many” – according to tradition, Mary Magdalene – stole in behind him and knelt for a long while weeping at his feet. A great Malayalam poet gives her thoughts in beautiful words: “You who walked on water, rescue me also from the ocean of my tears.” Everyone at the table is shocked that Jesus should allow such behavior from such a woman. But Jesus explains simply, “She loves much because so much has been forgiven.” And to Mary he repeats, “Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace.”

Asat is another way of defining ignorance. We can guess from this how many efforts to help other people, other races, and other countries are asat. They are based on the conviction that if we can have our way, things will improve for everyone – a kind of “my-way-only” shraddha which often shapes economic policy and most foreign policy, including foreign aid.

Emerson, I believe, pointed out that the ancestor of every negative action, every negative decision, is a negative thought. That is the power of asat: evil has reality only insofar as we support it with negative thinking. We do not have to be afraid of negative thoughts if we do not welcome them. They are in the air, and they may knock at anyone’s door; but if we do not embrace them, ask them in, and make them our own, they can have no power over us. Evil draws its support from the welcome mat we spread in front of our door. There is no need to go in for the strong language that orthodox religions occasionally use, of hellfire and brimstone and things like that: it is enough to say that we must be acutely vigilant about every thought we entertain.

In Berkeley, particularly in the sixties, University Avenue was often lined with hitchhikers. Many carried signs: “Vancouver,” “Mexico,” “L.A.” One said in simple desperation, “Anywhere!” Thoughts are hitchhikers too and we can pick them up or pass them by. Negative thoughts carry signs, but usually we see only one side, the side with all the promises. The back of the sign tells their true destination: duhkha, sickness of body, mind, and spirit. Suffering to ourselves and others originates in picking up these hitchhikers, which nobody is obliged to do. No matter what our conditioning, each of us has the freedom to drive past without even giving negative thoughts a glance. If we do not stop and let them in, they cannot go anywhere; they are not real.

Hindu and Buddhist mystics offer a dazzling theory to explain this. Just as we live in a physical atmosphere, they say, we are surrounded also by a mental atmosphere, called sukshmakasha in Sanskrit. The air we breathe is full of billions of atoms and ions of different substances, some beneficial, others poisonous, some natural, others man-made. Our mental atmosphere too can be polluted to a grievous extent. “You have standards about automobile emissions,” these mystics would say, “to protect the purity of the air. Don’t you think you should have equally stringent standards about polluting the mental atmosphere with negative thoughts?” We can actually teach the mind to breathe selectively, so that we can go safely through an atmosphere full of poisonous ideas and not be seriously affected by them. This is actually adding positive thoughts, which benefits everybody.

The other day our children were telling me about the importance of trees. If they were not always releasing oxygen, they explained, life on earth would perish. A person whose mind is free from negative thinking spreads life-giving oxygen in much the same way. On a smoggy day in California, the trees along the freeway look gray and drab in the haze; they do not seem to add anything valuable to the landscape. Yet if they were gone, our big cities would suffocate from their own activity. In the same way, although a selfless man or woman may seem to go through the day doing nothing extraordinary, such people are life-giving. Without them, nothing would revitalize the atmosphere in which we think. By being very vigilant, trying never to support or encourage negative thoughts, all of us can play a part in this vital service, which benefits everybody around us.

Akasha is usually translated as ‘space,’ but it is more than physical. I read that in a sense, physical space contains not only objects but a kind of record of events in the realms of energy. From outer space, physicists say, we can even pick up a faint echo of the “Big Bang” of creation. Similarly, like a vast library, akasha contains records of past thoughts and actions. They are there on the shelves, positive and negative alike, and we can check them out, take them home, and assimilate them or we can leave them where they are. The law of gravity has been present since the beginning of time; Newton, so to say, merely found the right wavelength to pick it up. Similarly, the mystics say, there is sympathy in the world; pick it up. There is antipathy in the world; don’t pick it up. There is love in the world; pick it up. There is hatred; don’t pick it up. Hatred destroys – individuals, families, nations, life itself. Love heals.

If we go on supporting negative thoughts, these verses remind us, what we do cannot be beneficial, even if we try to aim for a better world. But if we give ourselves wholeheartedly to selfless work without any desire for recognition or praise, power or remuneration, then our actions are sat. They cannot help bearing good fruit, not only in the world but in our own lives, by removing obstacles to our sadhana.