ARJUNA: 1. O Krishna, destroyer of evil, please explain to me how one kind of renunciation differs from another.

SRI KRISHNA: 2. To refrain from selfish acts is one kind of renunciation; to renounce the fruit of action is another.

This morning our children came to me with a newfound treasure. From a distance, I thought the oldest had a live snake in his outstretched hands. Kerala is full of snakes, some of which are deadly, and everyone who grows up there quickly learns to jump first and pull out the field identification manual later. Even now, though I haven’t seen any poisonous creature for more than twenty years, my first response is to draw back. The children must have seen this, for they smiled. “Don’t worry, Uncle,” they said. “It’s not alive. It’s just a snake’s skin.” It lay there as fragile as medieval parchment, delicately burst at the seams.

I had been reading an interview with Albert Szent-Györgyi, one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for his discovery of vitamin C. “Snakes can grow,” he says, “only by bursting their skins. Molting has to be a painful process, and should it fail the snake would die. Mankind grows by bursting the outgrown skin of antiquated ideas, thinking, and institutions.” The Gita would agree, and from its point of view we, Homo sapiens, stand clearly at the crossroads today. Whatever purpose it may have served in the past, the constricting skin of self-interest – national and individual alike – has to be sloughed. Otherwise, as Szent-Györgyi implies, we shall certainly perish.

Often it is just when old ideas are ready to burst that we feel they will last forever. When I was born, the heights of progress were supposed to be contained in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the last great attempt to wrap up what the race had learned on every subject from physics (pre-atomic, of course) to the making of horse-drawn carriages. The authors seem never to have questioned that they sat at the zenith of civilization. Every article is written with implacable authority. Yet the whole is a compendium of outworn ideas, the constricting skins of modern industrial thought – about races, about empires, about the nature of the physical world, about progress and the nature of the human being. There is no hint of suspicion that this might be the end of an era. In the entry “War,” a British expert observes that with the new kinds of military technology, “losses in battle . . . are almost insignificant when compared with the fearful carnage wrought by sword and spear.” This just six years before the Battle of the Somme! “I cannot help seeing a parallel,” Hans Koning commented in the New Yorker, “for we in our time seem as little able to really think through the meaning of our nuclear ordnance as these men – with their eight pack animals and their Napoleonic cantonments – understood the meaning of their 16.25-inch projectiles.”

Old ideas, the Gita would say, are not sloughed by government decisions or in the boardrooms of corporations. They are given up by individuals, who go on to influence other individuals. Because the problems we face look so immense, it is easy to lose faith in this. I always try to remind people that though we are small, the power that can be released in us is anything but small. Despite appearances it is we, the ordinary people of the world – each of us individually – who have the power to change the circumstances of our lives. We do not often assert that power to choose; therefore we may not believe we truly have it. But it is a tragic misunderstanding to think that human destiny is made by anything other than individuals. We shape history together, all of us, by the total of our desires.

One poignant quote from Szent-Györgyi still lingers in my mind: “Here we stand now on our tragically shrunken globe with our ruined economy, with these terrific weapons in our hands and fear and distrust in our hearts.” The Gita opens on just such a scene. No one thrust those weapons into our hands; we have gone to great lengths to accumulate them, pawned our national economies and our intellectual resources for them, piled up more than we could ever use, given them away, sold them in ridiculous numbers for the profit of it: if we had tried systematically to make the globe as dangerous as possible, we could not have done a better job. As for the fear and mistrust in our hearts, where have they come from? Have we tried to dispel them throughout this century, or have we stirred them up? The law of karma may grind slowly, but it grinds exceeding small.

Yet this law is not some relentless, irreversible force of destiny. It represents the consequences of our choices – choices that are still being made today, will be made tomorrow, by people like you and me. No matter how massive our arsenals, how extensive the pollution of our environment, how violent our relationships, or how irreversible our direction may seem, we can change all these things by the choices we make from now on. And karma is not a punitive force. Its purpose in evolution is not to punish us for past mistakes but to teach us to make wise choices in the future, to teach us to live in harmony with the unity of all life. In this sense all our problems have a spiritual purpose: to enable us to evolve, by pushing and prodding and encouraging us toward the goal of life.

There are two levels to this: one individual, the other global. In this more comprehensive view, all the successes and failures of our humanity serve this same purpose of trying to guide and urge and chastise us into living in harmony.

War, pollution, and the growing poverty of perhaps two thirds of the globe are the collective karma of wrong ideas people have pursued in the past, in the belief that they would bring peace and prosperity to those who pursued them and eventually, ideally, to all. There is no point in berating ourselves for following these ideas, which are the basic values of industrial civilization: they made heady promises which it was only natural to pursue. Yet today we should be able to see that even on the material level, industrial civilization has not been able to make good those promises. This was a stage through which we had to pass; now it is time to learn from our limitations and move on. We are, as Szent-Györgyi says, at a turning point in the history of civilization, where we must slough our outmoded habits of thinking, break out of old institutions, or die.

In the last chapter, I spoke of three stages in the growth of civilization. Tamas, the first stage, is primitive in its simplicity; wants are few, because it takes almost all our prana just to stay alive. In this stage, the human being lives at the mercy of nature, dictated to by physical circumstances. We are now at the crest – perhaps even a little past the crest – of rajasic civilization, which thrives on complication. Rajasic progress, which begins by trying to satisfy human needs, ends in endlessly multiplying desires. The more problems it solves, the more problems its solutions create. In this stage, so intent on not living at the mercy of circumstance, we live increasingly at the mercy of our own nature. We produce in order to be producing, consume for the sake of consumption, desire to desire to desire.

This skin of rajasic thinking is what we have to slough if we are to progress safely into civilization’s third stage, that of sattva. Here, instead of multiplying human wants, we begin to reduce them voluntarily. Sattva is a return to simple living: not primitive simplicity, but the artistic simplicity of a life that includes only what gives most meaning and value. Sattvic civilization is not poor, not even in a material sense. It has a place for every material thing that enhances human life. But it has no place for things that are at the expense of life, or that sap vital resources – including time, most vital of all. It renounces so as to leave life freer for the things that matter most.

In espousing material values, the Gita would say, we were only striving for happiness. That happiness can be attained, even on a global scale, but not by satisfying material values. It can be attained only by satisfying the whole human being, who is essentially spiritual. I am not talking of a Neverland where sorrow does not enter; there is no such place. Nor am I speaking of Utopia. But it is possible, even without the world filling up with saints, for ordinary people like you and me to live in such a way that this very earth becomes heaven. This does not require that everybody take to the spiritual life; but it does require a higher view of the human being – in other words, a return to spiritual values in our relationships, our work, our education, even our politics and economics.

The Gita embraces both these goals: the one of global fulfillment, with profound material consequences; the other individual. This last chapter, which sums up the way for both, is the full flowering of the Gita’s message for our times. It gives the secret of effective action, the secret of full, victorious living – karma yoga, perfectly exemplified in the life of Mahatma Gandhi.

In Sanskrit, the chapter is titled “Freedom through Renunciation.” I have called it instead “Love in Action,” which I feel gives a much better idea of its meaning. Renunciation sounds terribly drab. Who would want it? But as Sri Krishna explains, it leads to freedom: that is, to full health, rich relationships, a heightened capacity to love; to a world of harmony, a world without want, a world without war. For renunciation means giving up selfish living and thinking. Therefore it means the release of love, which is not just a force in individual relations; it expresses itself in putting the welfare of the whole first in all affairs. Love means placing human values above material. It means not trying to build the happiness of a few on the exploitation of many. It means that food for people comes before food for profit. An entire society can be built with love as its foundation, with plenty of room for every legitimate human need and activity.

The material view of life, the Gita would say, is not evil. It is simply based on the lowest possible view of the human being. In the Christian tradition this is the state of the Fall, characterized by original sin. The Gita does not disagree about the sin, but instead it emphasizes original innocence, original love: not the Fall but our native state before the Fall, to which it is our purpose to return. The mirror of love, the mystics say, is always present in the depths of consciousness. It is present in everyone, in every society, whatever problems we face, whatever the karma of the times. All we have to do is to remove the dust that covers it.

SRI KRISHNA: 3. Among the wise, some say that all action should be renounced as evil. Others say that certain kinds of action – self-sacrifice, giving, and self-discipline – should be continued.

4. Listen, O Bharata, and I will explain three kinds of renunciation and the central truth underlying them.

There are people in the spiritual traditions of both East and West who hold that any kind of worldly activity taints us, getting us embroiled in self-centered activities and relationships. Trying to find ways to remove the threat of war, to help deal with the problems of poverty and hunger, to make our neighborhoods safe from violence again – all these agitate the mind and make it difficult to concentrate on spiritual disciplines. Why not forget about the state of the world, retire into the mountains somewhere, and lead a life of simple tranquility?

One of the most cogent arguments against this is that it doesn’t work. Anybody’s mind can calm down, at least on the surface level, when there is nobody around to contradict you. But left on its own, the mind goes on dwelling on itself; the ego becomes bloated. If somebody says something critical – asks, perhaps, what your way of life is contributing to the world – you blow up. Just beneath the surface of the mind, every samskara is still there. What progress has been made? The mind, with all its same old problems, is busier than ever.

Today, to avoid the problems of stress and tension, we are advised to “let go” and “take it easy.” Even experts sometimes say, “What does it matter? Go with the flow.” By now I don’t suppose I have to name the guna. Recently I was surprised to read the advice of a prominent physician on how to deal with stress: “Rule Number 1 is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule Number 2 is, it’s all small stuff.” To me, this is a most depressing view of life and of human capabilities. Such attitudes are often considered spiritual, but this is a gross misunderstanding. Not only the Gita but Jesus and the Compassionate Buddha too teach a message of active love and selfless service. There is no conflict between what Christian mystics call the active and the contemplative lives, between meditation and selfless action; they go together as naturally as breathing out and breathing in. “What a person takes in by contemplation,” Eckhart says, “he pours forth in love.”

The Buddha approaches this problem from another angle. He would ask, “What about the law of karma?” All of us have accounts which have to be balanced somehow. I can illustrate this from bank accounting practices in British India. In those days, the agent of the Imperial Bank of India – British, of course – used to live on the bank premises upstairs, and as a rule none of the clerks, who were Indian, were allowed to leave until the books were balanced. I remember my friends in the bank occasionally coming home at midnight. The bank agent could afford to take his time. He could go upstairs, have a leisurely dinner, and then saunter down again to see how his staff were doing. And as soon as debits and credits were balanced, the doors were unlocked and everybody was released to go home.

It is the same with karma. All of us are here on earth because we have made many mistakes in the past, often in ignorance of the unity of life. But ignorant or not, the entries of unfavorable karma are there in our ledger books; we are operating in the red. We have a tremendous debt to pay the rest of life, and until that debt is paid and our accounts balanced by entries of good karma, we cannot be released from the bondage of conditioned action and reaction. Even on a global scale, until we learn to live with the welfare of the whole in mind, we will be entangled in the terrible web of karma that I have been describing in previous chapters. We will go on making the same mistakes that lead to a poisoned environment, dangerous neighborhoods, broken homes, and a planet at war.

If “balancing the books of karma” sounds occult, I can assure you it is terribly practical. When two people have been at loggerheads, for example – disliking each other, thinking resentful thoughts about each other over and over and over – their enmity takes a toll on their health and vitality and peace of mind, especially when they have to work together or sit down at the same dinner table. Not only that, there is a subtler toll paid in strengthening negative samskaras like resentment, so that the ill effects will spread to other relationships as well. The law of karma says clearly, “Balance your books.” Your heart will be at peace; your health will be good; you will have more energy; your relationships will be sound; you will not be plagued by past incidents or be fearful of future ones. All these improve concentration and help to strengthen detachment, which in turn benefits meditation. Past a certain point, unless we have ample opportunity for selfless activity right in the midst of life, side by side with other people, it is not possible to make spiritual progress.

Before we take to meditation, most of us have no way of getting hold of a samskara and turning it around. It is only natural that our earlier entries are mostly in red – karmic debts we have to repay. The purpose of selfless action is to tot up entries in the black. This is not merely a matter of accumulating “good deed” entries for physical actions done and kind words said. When the motivation comes from the heart, we are not just doing one good action; we are changing our mental state, from which future words and actions will spring. In this way a change in consciousness can actually write off old debts, so that the karma to be repaid becomes minimal.

My granny used to illustrate this with a frightening example. If, she would say, you fought with someone – perhaps even in a previous life – and caused that person to lose an eye, the law of karma requires that somehow, someday, you too must lose an eye. That is the orthodox Hindu interpretation, and I should add that the penalty need not be exacted in a fight; it might be in an accident. But if you have changed your consciousness, my granny would add, and are sincerely trying to base your life on nonviolence in deed, word, and thought, you have already learned the lesson that karma had to teach. Then the law will still take its payment, but the debt will be immensely reduced: instead of losing your eye, she would say, you might only singe an eyelash.

Hindus personify the inner auditor who keeps the books of karma within each one of us as a kind of CPA – Chitragupta, our Cosmic Personal Accountant. When you feel insecure, that is Chitragupta looking at the liabilities side of the ledger and musing, “What a lot of entries!” When you feel secure, that is Chitragupta doing a favorable audit. All of us have both kinds of entries, assets and liabilities. But make more and more entries on the right side of the ledger, the Gita advises, and one day your life will be entirely in the black. Then you can throw your bottle of red ink away. You can no longer have negative entries, because the nexus with karma has been cut; you have paid your debts and are free and clear. Imagine if you could operate a business like that, where once you broke even, you could never slip into the red again! In terms of karma, this can happen even with ordinary people like you and me. You become naturally loving, naturally kind: even if you tried, you would not be able to do anything at the expense of any other creature.

SRI KRISHNA: 5. Self-sacrifice, giving, and self-discipline should not be renounced, for they purify one in wisdom.

“Self-sacrifice, giving, and self-discipline” are the three kinds of yajna or sacrifice presented in the last chapter. The Gita is offering a very interesting concept: meditation is essentially a process of purification. So are its related disciplines in my eight-point program, from repeating the mantram to putting others first. Everything we do – meals, work, relationships, recreation, even sleep – is viewed not from the mundane point of view but in reference to the supreme goal.

This is a very practical perspective. We know what strenuous disciplines a championship athlete has to undergo to win an Olympic gold medal. A great gymnast doesn’t keep her body supple and lithe for the sake of beauty, although I don’t suppose she minds being beautiful: she does it because a lithe, supple body is essential for a world-class gymnast. Similarly, Sri Krishna is lifting the disciplines of sadhana out of the realm of good and bad, right and wrong, into the dynamics of championship living. Putting others first, giving of ourselves generously, and hard, selfless work are not simply morally desirable. They are exercises that we must practice regularly if we want to win life’s highest prize. We may not think about it in these words, but all of us appreciate unselfishness, generosity, and self-discipline in others, and all of us have our moments of these virtues too. Sadhana simply means practicing them not just when it is convenient or when we are feeling good, but like a championship athlete: every day, systematically, eagerly, and with sustained enthusiasm.

Yet “purification” is not exactly a word that catches the aspirations of modern times. It has Victorian overtones, which is perhaps the worst fate that can befall a word today. My beatnik friends in the early sixties felt particularly sensitive to this. “People who tell you to have a pure mind,” one of them told me bluntly, “are usually hiding their ‘unclean’ thoughts under a rug. They have the same kind of desires I do; they just repress them. That’s not only dangerous, it’s dishonest.”

“The Gita is not talking about repression,” I said. “This is a matter of optics.” I still wasn’t accustomed to this phobia of Victorian thought, but I had learned the appeal of scientific images. “According to Patanjali,” I said, “the mind is like a clear crystal; it has simply got covered with dirt. If you want to see life clearly, you have to wash all the dirt off.”

“And what do you mean by ‘dirt’?” he asked. From the look on his face, as if he had just bitten into a sour apple, I could tell he still thought I was in Sunday school. The Gita’s answer took him by surprise.

“Thinking about yourself,” I said. “That is the worst kind of smog. A person who thinks only of himself is like one of those old cars that drives around filling the air with dark, oily fumes. He is really polluting the atmosphere.”

On a smoggy day in Los Angeles, I am told, you can wash your windows in the morning and find a thin film of grime on them by the end of the afternoon. That is how self-will builds up on the crystal of the mind. It takes a long time, of course, for the crystal to become so dirty that you can’t see through it. But we have been allowing self-will to accumulate since childhood – the Hindu and Buddhist mystics would say for many lifetimes. It is only natural that all of us have cleaning to do.

To me yajna does not mean ritualistic sacrifice, although that is how it is usually understood. It refers essentially to the sacrifice of self-will, which means putting other people first. When you work harmoniously at a job you do not like, that is yajna; you are sacrificing self-will. When you return patience for hostility, you are sacrificing self-will. When you refuse to act on a strong selfish desire or sense-craving, you are sacrificing self-will. Just as an Olympic athlete has exercises for reducing excess weight, these are exercises for trimming down our excessive burden of karma. If you want to make steady progress in sadhana, therefore, you cannot afford self-will. The less self-will you have, the less your karma-burden and the faster you will make progress; the more self-will you have, the heavier your karma and the slower you will make progress. That is the main reason for differences in how individuals’ consciousness evolves.

Yajna is not just a matter for individuals; it should have a preeminent place in international relations. For some reason, people often think that love is fine on a person-to-person basis but no foundation for a sensible policy of domestic or foreign affairs. As Gandhiji pointed out, historians pay little attention to good will, love, and nonviolent resolution of conflict; enmity and war are much more interesting. But this only shows that peace, harmony, and prosperity are the standard of normalcy; what we write about are the disruptions.

Yet history does tell of one particularly glorious experiment in government by love. Though there have been others, none is more dear to me personally or illustrates better how everyone benefits when yajna is practiced on a national scale.

Emperor Ashoka ascended his throne in 268 B.C., some fifty years after Alexander the Great turned back at the gates of India. Ashoka’s grandfather had driven out the garrison established by Alexander, and Ashoka inherited an empire that extended from central India up into Central Asia. However, empires never seem to be big enough, and nine years into his reign Ashoka launched a massive campaign to acquire the rest of the Indian subcontinent.

The land of Kalinga lay immediately to the south. Despite fierce resistance, it was finally subdued. Victorious, young Emperor Ashoka walked through the battlefield among the mutilated, dead, and dying of both sides. History must have seen countless similar scenes of slaughter since then: Carthage, Culloden, Gettysburg, Flanders, Stalingrad. Other victorious generals and rulers – we are told it of Alexander – must have been moved by the sight of the suffering their victories had cost. Yet they continued to wage war; Ashoka did not. At the height of his military power, he was so stricken by the human cost of war that he renounced violence entirely and devoted the rest of his reign to the welfare of his people. The southernmost corner of India, which would have been easy to subdue, remained; Ashoka retreated from its borders and gave it his protection. As H. G. Wells says in his Outline of History, we have no record of any other ruler renouncing war like this in the hour of victory.

What was the result of this change of heart? Surely this pacifist’s kingdom fell prey to wolves? It did not; it prospered. Ashoka became a follower of the Compassionate Buddha and lived his life bahujanasukhaya, bahujanahitaya: ‘for the happiness of all, for the welfare of all.’ He built roads throughout his kingdom, with way stations for travelers; he planted forests; he established universities and monasteries. He built hospitals not only for people but for animals, too. He made laws that are still exemplary for their humanity, and established a state policy of mutual respect for all religions. His foreign policy, even toward traditional enemies, was based on friendship; free trade and cultural exchange were encouraged with all countries.

The result was that Ashoka’s people prospered, trade and culture flourished, and friendly relations with surrounding nations were enjoyed for the thirty remaining years of Ashoka’s reign. In relating his horror after the conquest of Kalinga, Ashoka comments – the words are almost the Buddha’s own – that no one can truly be conquered except by love: and he adds, in a new kind of royal pride, that he has already made many such conquests, not only in his own land but in other lands as well. “Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history,” says H. G. Wells,

. . . the name of Ashoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan his name is still honoured. . . . More living men cherish his memory today than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne.

Why shouldn’t nations follow Ashoka’s principles today? It could still be done. For many years, throughout the Cold War, I appealed to the United States and the Soviet Union to renounce their enmity and assume such leadership together. It would have served the self-­interest of both countries much better than the “balance of terror” policies pursued for so many years. This kind of mutual respect seemed impossible, but friendly relations with Red China were considered impossible and even immoral not many years ago. All that vanished overnight. Our rigid fear of the Soviet Union could have been sloughed just as easily if we had glimpsed the potential of a different kind of statesmanship.

At that time, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. commanded the lion’s share of the world’s resources. In science, technology, medicine, they led the world. What might not have been accomplished if they had joined hands? Khrushchev once proposed to John F. Kennedy, “Let’s go to the moon together.” Why not replenish the earth together? Neither would have lost by it. The manipulations of the Cold War badly tarnished the reputations of both superpowers throughout the rest of the world. If they had joined hands against some of the environmental problems that face us all, they might have left a joint legacy that would make the whole globe rejoice.

I am not saying that problems and conflicts of interest would have vanished, of course. We have conflicts of interest even between states of the union. But how much more promising the future would have been! And how much more promising it would have been to have begun to solve some of these immense problems, working together with such a pool of resources, instead of adding the burden of a vast former empire in collapse.

This is not idealistic talk. It is much more realistic than the conventional Realpolitik. If it no longer applies to two global superpowers – and I suspect it will again, in time – it still makes good sense in every part of the world held hostage by the military rivalry between two countries. The example of India and Pakistan is particularly close for me, but there are other examples around the globe.

It may prove to be the smaller nations that show the world how to work together. They have the motivation: the biggest problem threatening their survival, too, is this kind of military rivalry between bigger neighbors. The great powers need more than the material and human resources of smaller countries; they also need their friendship and cooperation. With all my heart, I would appeal to developing nations to follow Gandhi’s way and not cooperate with the manipulations of other countries trying to gain influence against one another. They should not accept “gifts” of arms or act as pawns in balance-of-power games. They need not mortgage their future with loans and trade deficits to industrialize along Western lines. They can cooperate with each other to solve their problems whenever help from the big powers is offered with strings attached. Even if political differences divide them, they are much better off learning to help each other than trying to play one foreign power against another.

SRI KRISHNA: 6. Yet even these, Arjuna, should be performed without desire for selfish rewards. This is essential.

In orthodox circles, this powerful word yajna is often confined to a very restricted field of human activity connected with religious rituals. I do respect the place that these traditional rituals can have in the lives of those who respond to them deeply. But I belong to the most ancient of traditions in India, represented by the Upanishads, which say that by themselves, rituals are a very frail boat for crossing the sea of life and death. Here the dangers are so great and the challenges so overpowering that all of us ordinary human beings require the tremendous spiritual disciplines that have been handed down by the mystics of all the world’s great religions. It is these disciplines – also denoted by the word yajna – that alone can deepen our consciousness and make our will indomitable, our discrimination infallible, our loyalty all-consuming.

In practical terms, I would say that whatever we do for the welfare of all – not just for our own family, not just for a few restricted people, but for the welfare of all – without any hankering after prestige or profit, working in cheerful harmony with everybody else involved, that is yajna. When we can work like this, the miracle of yajna is that such work contains within itself the secret of success. However hard we work, however dedicated our contribution, it is not we who make selfless work succeed. The secret of its success is contained in its very concept. Wherever you find the earnest, loving, concentrated desire to bring people and resources together to improve the welfare of others, the Lord may be said to live in that desire.

This is not really as exotic as it might seem. In personal life, for example, we often say that we teach our children not so much by what we say or what we talk about but essentially by what we are. Similarly, when we work together in a loving manner for the benefit of others, cheerfully giving our very best at a job we are privileged to do in the service of the Lord without ever asking about our own personal reward or recognition, then our very example is going to influence others to help us attain our selfless goal.

Yajna is measured on a sliding scale. As our understanding deepens, we see how more and more of our thought and activities can become an offering. Any act prompted by selfish desire is tainted to the extent of that desire; but the same act without self-centered motivation can be an offering that purifies the mind.

In a small way, I can illustrate this from my own sadhana. As a young man, my interests were mostly literary. I wanted to be a good writer and an eloquent speaker. These are rather harmless desires, but I have to confess that they had nothing to do with benefiting other people; they were wholly personal aspirations.

I tried to launch my literary career in high school. My teachers had been telling me that I should take to writing, my friends used to enjoy my stories, and so one day I took it into my head to send a short story to the Illustrated Weekly of India, which was then publishing stories and essays by important English writers. It was a little like a high school student trying to get his first story published alongside the big names in the New Yorker, except that of course this was still British India, with the Illustrated Weekly under an English editor and almost exclusively the province of British writers. But I hadn’t considered any of this. My friends had said, “You should write that down,” and I had simply believed them.

I told my intentions to my high school English teacher, my uncle. “When you want to submit a story for publication,” he explained, “it has to be typewritten. Otherwise the editor won’t even look at it.” I didn’t even know that. I had never learned to type, of course; in fact, so far as I knew, nobody in our village had a typewriter. But in the next town there was a typing school where students did job work. I went there and told them I needed to have a story typed for the Illustrated Weekly.

“Where is your story?” the man asked.

“I haven’t written it yet,” I said. “But if you give me some paper, I’ll write it out for you here.”

He was genuinely impressed, which didn’t displease me. I wrote out my story in high confidence, all unfounded, and when I was finished he announced to his typing students, “Look at this! This boy comes in and wants us to type a story he hasn’t even written and then writes it on the spot, and it’s not bad either. Listen.” He read it aloud and everybody seemed pleased. I mailed it.

It came back promptly. I’ve never seen such promptness, though you know the British are noted for it. Enclosed was a little note set in type under the Illustrated Weekly’s crest: “The Editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India presents his compliments and regrets his inability to make use of your valued contribution.”

That was the beginning of my career. I must say my friends stood by me loyally. “What does it matter if the editor likes it or not?” they asked. “You can read us your stories any time.”

I kept on trying. My pile of rejection slips grew, and I began to appreciate how gracious that first one was. I came to think of them as dejection slips. One manuscript came back with no explanation except two words written in the margin: “No use.” That hurt me deeply. Many years later, when a student of mine came up after class and complained that her story had been rejected, I brandished my collection of these notes and said, “You’ve just begun!”

Then one day the miracle happened. One of the best papers in India – the Madras Hindu, which I still read – published a story I had sent them. I showed it to everybody I knew. “Read this!” They would get to the end and then exclaim, “Hey, that’s your name!” “Of course,” I would reply. “Otherwise, why would I show it to you?” And at the end of the month, a check came. I had never received a check before, so I showed it to my granny. She couldn’t read Malayalam, let alone English. “What does it say?” she asked.

“It says ‘Pay to the order,’ Granny.”

“Well, you go to the bank right away and order them to pay you.” But before I went, she took the check and showed it to everybody she could find. “That’s my boy, the writer.”

After that I slowly began to be published regularly. The editor of The Times of India accepted a piece and wrote back, “From now on, whatever you write, please send it to me first.” I became rather well known in certain circles, which was not at all displeasing.

Once, I remember, I was invited to the home of a distinguished government official whose daughter had been following my articles closely. I felt very flattered to hear her say how much she and her classmates enjoyed them. Then she asked a question that every established author likes to hear: “What is the secret of your writing?” I imagine I came up with all kinds of learned nonsense, but the truth was I didn’t have any idea what the secret of my writing was, or if it had any secret at all. My host came to my rescue. “It’s not what he writes about,” he said, “or even the way he writes it. It’s the way he looks at life.” “Hey,” I said, “that’s right!” That is how simple I could be. But there was truth in that man’s observation: in the way I was looking at people and events around me, I was already trying to convey the unity I could see dimly beneath the apparent diversity of the human scene.

I am trying to show you how human personal desires can be. After all, wanting to be a writer is a harmless desire, and being pleased if one succeeds is a very harmless, understandable kind of pleasure. My motives were quite innocent. I loved literature and the drama of the lives I saw around me, and I wanted to share what gave me joy. But none of this is yajna. I wasn’t writing to benefit anybody; I was simply writing for the love of writing.

It was the same with public speaking. There too I achieved some degree of notoriety, largely because I worked on my skills assiduously from college on. But I wasn’t trying to help anybody; I simply wanted to become a good speaker.

On one occasion, however, the local head of the Ramakrishna Order happened to ask me to deliver the keynote address for the celebration of Sri Ramakrishna’s birthday. I was floored. Here was a dedicated monk, highly placed in one of the most prestigious monastic orders in India, asking a householder to speak to a great gathering on the subject of their founder! I was uncomfortably aware of my position as I took my place on the stage. But once I began speaking, my deep love for Sri Ramakrishna welled up. I became completely absorbed, just as I do today, and forgot all about my notes. The rhetorical effects I used to rehearse so carefully came to me spontaneously. I felt afterwards a little like a magician who keeps reaching into his hat to see what will come forth next; my talk was as new to me as it was to my audience. They appreciated it, but I don’t think anyone appreciated it more than I did.

That occasion gave me a glimpse of unsuspected resources, which I could tap by reaching for a higher purpose. I began to see that I could use my literary training not merely for entertaining an audience, but for enriching other people’s lives. That was yajna, and it can happen with virtually any skill. In those days I used to have to prepare for every talk I gave. Now I simply sit down and begin to speak; every day of my life is my preparation.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. To renounce one’s responsibilities is ignorance. The wise call such renunciation tamasic.

8. To avoid action from fear of difficulty or physical discomfort is rajasic. There is no reward in such renunciation.

9. But to fulfill your responsibilities knowing that they are obligatory, while at the same time desiring nothing for yourself – this is sattvic renunciation.

10. Those endowed with sattva clearly understand the meaning of renunciation and do not waver. They are not intimidated by unpleasant work, nor do they seek a job because it is pleasant.

Sri Krishna is trying over and over to make it clear that renunciation is essentially a mental state. We cannot free ourselves of the tremendous backlog of human conditioning by packing up belongings and giving them to the Salvation Army. I have had people come to me and say, “Yesterday I was reading about St. Francis, and I decided to renounce my stamp collection and give it to the newspaper boy.” This may or may not be a good idea, depending on individual circumstances. But in any case, the renunciation is often only a sporadic impulse. Afterwards the person either suffers regrets or gets attached to something else. Attachment is a samskara, a living force in the mind. If you take away its stamp collection, it will grope around for something else to grab and hold: houseplants, art nouveau, classic cars, French wines, chess openings; the possibilities are endless. What makes the difference, Sri Krishna says, is the motivation behind the act of renunciation. And as usual, he comes up with three kinds of motivation.

Tamas is great at renouncing responsibilities. Halfway through college, or when he has a family to support, he decides that the time has come to give up worldly life with all its problems and devote his time to contemplation, gardening, writing poetry, or enjoying the simple life. “I’m not causing anybody any harm,” he says, and on the surface it may seem true. But the mental state says point-blank, “I don’t care. What matters is that I do what I like.”

This, of course, is not simply a matter of individuals. Bureaucratic bodies can be severely afflicted with tamas, as they come to reflect the lowest common measure of sensitiveness among those they comprise. Their very size creates torpor. We see this so frequently that I doubt if there is any need for examples. Governments and corporations defaulting on their responsibilities will tell you that onerous obligations such as public health were never properly theirs to begin with.

Rajas, by contrast, gives things up when he is forced to, usually by pain. If he renounces martinis, it is not because he has got hold of his desire and turned it around; it is because he has developed an ulcer and drinking martinis hurts. He gives up smoking because his cough has become too painful, because it is difficult even to breathe.

Let me be very clear: I applaud everyone who gives up smoking, whatever the motivation. It is the purpose of pain to prod us into making such changes, and though the experience is unpleasant, it is much better to learn from pain than not to learn at all. But here we have to look at the mental state and see how much it contributes to freedom. I know people who, though they have given up cigarettes, cannot watch someone light up after dinner without a stab of envy or deprivation. I appreciate their willpower; but at the same time, as they would be first to admit, they are not free from the compulsion of that desire in the mind. There is neither joy nor freedom in this kind of renunciation; the mind is still clamoring. Therefore, the Gita says, there is no spiritual reward in it either: that is, no reduction of unfavorable karma. All that can be said is that no more harm is being done on the physical level.

My granny did not at all appreciate this kind of motivation. She just didn’t like the idea of life pushing her into a corner and saying, “Now stick ’em up and give me all you’ve got!” She used to tell me, “Little Lamp, you be in control. If you see that something is bad for you, give it up freely, in the pride of your strength. Then you can tell life cheerfully, ‘Do what you like. I’m free.’ ” There is a gallant courage about this that appealed to me deeply, long before I was able to follow it in my own life.

The mental state behind rajasic renunciation is fascinating. Rajas simply can’t let go of something he wants, even when he is forced to. If he has to give up oranges, he grabs on to apples; when apples are taken away, he takes up bananas. On a larger scale, these quirks are fraught with danger. Rajas finds it painful to be dependent on oil, but instead of lowering energy consumption, he embraces nuclear power. He gets embroiled in a war to “protect” some imagined interest, finds his involvement catastrophic, and finally pulls out; then a few years later he gets into the same kind of war somewhere else. In all such cases, what has to be renounced is the underlying selfish attachment, the compulsive desire to have a particular thing whatever it costs. When that desire is removed, any problem can be solved.

The word the Gita uses for “pain” in these verses was a favorite of the Buddha’s: duhkha. It stands for anything from physical suffering to anxiety and alienation. The whole anguish of our age, virtually all its social and environmental problems, is duhkha, the prime symptom of epidemic selfish attachment. This is a deadly diagnosis, to which we cannot safely respond piecemeal. Banning a particular fluorocarbon or negotiating a treaty over one kind of weapon is an important step; but this is the way of Rajas, who wants to eat his cake and have it too. It does not get at the underlying cause.

One last point: on the spiritual path, you sometimes find people who say, “I have renounced work; I don’t want to get involved in making money. I don’t even want to touch money.” I touch money; on the whole, I find it rather useful in carrying on selfless work in the twentieth century. Mahatma Gandhi must have had millions of rupees pass through his hands, and he not only suffered them to pass, he solicited them from everybody. He was a tirelessly imaginative fundraiser. If a woman with gold bangles came to touch his garment and get his blessing, he would tell her, “Why don’t you give me those bangles to sell for the poor? You’ll look so beautiful without them. Your arms will feel much lighter, and so will your heart.” Many people gave, and the more they gave the more he asked. Enormous amounts of money were needed to fund the rural uplift work in India’s seven hundred thousand villages, and Gandhi reminded us that it was everyone’s privilege to give. We should thank the poor, he told us, for giving us the opportunity to undo some of our karma.

We are all sent into life for one task: to enrich the lives of others. Anybody who takes from life without giving to others in return, Sri Krishna says earlier, is a thief. Calcutta used to have a place called Thieves’ Bazaar, where if someone had stolen your wristwatch, you could usually buy it back the following morning from a middleman for only half the original cost. If you complain, the man will shrug. “It’s cheap! You’d have to pay twice that much to replace it new.” Those who live for their own profit and pleasure, Sri Krishna says, are holding their own Thieves’ Bazaar: stolen time, stolen energy, stolen education, stolen talent, stolen prana.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. As long as one has a body, one cannot renounce action altogether. True renunciation is giving up all desire for personal reward.

The other day I overheard one of our ashram children, who is about five, making a philosophical point to his mother. “I’ve had a bad day today, mommy,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m going to stay in bed with my bear and my blanket and not go out at all.”

“I don’t think so,” his mother said cheerfully. “Your stomach will make you go out. In the middle of the night it will start growling, and you’ll wake up and find yourself on your way to the kitchen.”

Even physically, she was saying, it is impossible to avoid action. To be human is to be active, not only physically but essentially in the mind. Even if you could keep yourself in bed twenty-four hours a day, your mind would run on nonstop. As Dr. Hans Selye says, work is a biological necessity. Once we enter the rajasic stage of human evolution, we have to be active; that is our nature. But though we cannot choose to be inactive, we can choose the kind of action and our motivation for it. Working only for ourselves tightens the ties of our conditioning, but learning to work without selfish attachment gradually elevates our consciousness and purifies it of selfish motives.

There is another dimension to these verses, which has broad implications: “action” here means karma in all senses of the word. Even if you confine yourself to bed, you are still accumulating karma. You may remember my earlier quotation from Lord Mountbatten: “If you’re doing nothing, you’re doing wrong.” Doing nothing creates karma too, because it reflects a choice; and to do nothing in a wrong situation can be bad karma indeed. We cannot go before the karma court, for example, and say, “I never worked on atomic weapons! I’m not responsible if a lot of generals and politicians built up those ridiculous arsenals.” The judge will ask, “What did you do to undo the situation through peaceful, persuasive means?” If we did everything we could, the judge will say, “No unfavorable karma.”

The same argument holds for all sorts of other activities. I remember reading in the Oakland papers a few years ago that ten people had been killed that week over cocaine deals in the Bay Area. Everybody who shows approval of drugs – even “beautiful people,” or those who write the articles and produce and sell the accoutrements that make drug use a fashionable fad – has a karmic role in tragedies like these.

Life needs the contribution of every one of us. Until there is no trace of selfish motives in our consciousness, we cannot avoid being involved in karma; merely to be alive is to be part of its net. So the Gita draws a very practical conclusion: since action is unavoidable as long as we are alive, why not make the best of it and work hard and selflessly, accumulating good karma by contributing to the welfare of others?

SRI KRISHNA: 12. Those who are attached to personal reward will reap the consequences of their actions: some pleasant, some unpleasant, some mixed. But those who renounce every desire for personal reward go beyond the reach of karma.

This “mixed karma” shows Sri Krishna’s dry sense of humor. Partly you like what you get from life, partly you don’t: sometimes you’re happy, sometimes you’re not; sometimes you can be loving, sometimes you cannot. This is a very popular kind of karma, always on sale. It makes a perfect formula for romance.

To me karma is not some mystic theory; it is a force that blows through the world like a wind. Nobody can escape it, just as nobody can live without air. Each of us therefore is expected to learn from karma the consequences of certain actions, just as we learn from gravity. We have to apply the concept to our lives and ask ourselves the crucial questions: How kind am I? How often do I indulge in unkind language? Do I tend to ride roughshod over other people, or manipulate them to suit my needs? These are not pleasant questions, but their purpose is not to make us feel guilty. They are intended to help us see what to look for and what to change in order to lift the burden of sorrow from our lives.

According to the Hindu and Buddhist mystics, of course, karma and reincarnation go hand in hand. This life then becomes not an isolated, chance event but a link in a continuous chain of life, broken only on the physical level by a succession of births and deaths. At some point, ready to learn from all this, we finally begin to suspect that it is we ourselves who forge this chain by our own karma, our thought and action. Then, as Swami Vivekananda says beautifully, we “turn from the temporal to the eternal.” This is what happened to me halfway in life, through my teacher’s grace.

Vivekananda gives one of the clearest formulations of the law of karma that I have ever come across:

Every thought that we think, every deed that we do, after a certain time becomes fine, goes into seed form, so to speak, and lives in the subtle body in a potential form, and after a time it emerges again and bears its results. These results condition the life of man. Thus the human being molds his own life. Man is not bound by any other laws excepting those which he makes for himself.

He concludes succinctly: “Once we set in motion a certain power, we have to take the full consequences. That is the law of karma.” This is a very far-reaching statement. I have tried to fill this book with examples, yet I have scarcely begun to illustrate the extent of the law of karma.

I like to present karma as part of cosmic education, a kind of teaching assistant whose job is to dispel our ignorance and issue our diploma into wisdom. Since karma is often unpleasant, a sensitive person can fall into the belief that this is a school of suffering. There is truth to this, but I always like to present the positive side also. In the Sanskrit scriptures this world in which we live – of birth and death, good and evil, right and wrong, unity and disunity – is called karmabhumi, the land of karma, the land of work. When you feel oppressed by the burden of the world and the tragedies enacted on it, please remind yourself that it is only here, where we find the choice between the best and the worst, that the human being can discover the unity of life. Strangely, it is in this utter darkness that we begin to grope for light; it is in the midst of utter violence that we begin to yearn for love.

For animals, evolution is a natural process; for human beings, it is a matter of choice. Animals do not have to make any effort, resolve their conflicts, or transform their passions in order to evolve. When our dog Muka gives me a pitying look, I sometimes imagine he is thinking, “Poor fellow! You have to work hard every day for what we dogs can do just by being dogs.” I would say, “Touché.” Being human is a dangerously free adventure. Chitragupta, our cosmic accountant, tells each of us cheerfully, “If you like, you can live in the dark.” And he adds, “Of course, if you prefer, you can walk toward the light. Night or light. You choose.” I like this kind of talk. Nobody ever forced me to meditate, you know. Nobody, not even my teacher, ever asked me to transform my passions. Just understanding the laws of life – that I can remake myself, change my samskaras, change my future completely – was enough to make me want to be king of my own life.

This choice is offered to every one of us. There is no privilege involved, no prerogative we can invoke. If we are giving our very best in sadhana, trying our hardest to transform our passions and curb our self-will, we have Sri Krishna’s promise that he will not allow the consequences of our mistakes to undo our progress. But if we are working half-­heartedly or disharmoniously or indulging our self-will, karma has to follow sooner or later.

The Mahabharata uses a homely image to describe this. When you do something unkind, it says, you are giving birth to a little calf of karma which immediately sets out to find its mother. “As a calf recognizes and seeks out its mother in the midst of a thousand cows,” the Mahabharata says “so the effects of past deeds do not fail to recognize and seek out the doer in his new life.” Here you are, looking different from the last time around, feeling different; you yourself have no memory of any previous existence; and just as you are walking down Telegraph Avenue, minding your own business, this calf comes nuzzling up to you out of nowhere. It has been wandering, looking, sniffing every passerby – “Nope, not him; nope, not her” – and then suddenly, “Hey, here’s the one I belong to!” It jumps on you like a friendly pup and starts licking your face. And you wonder, “Why does this happen to me? Why is life so unfair?”

Once you learn to treat others with respect, however, the calf comes of age. After a calf grows up, you know, its mother is just another member of the herd. Similarly, your deeds will come, sniff at you, and wander on: “You’re not my owner! I’m going to rejoin the herd.” The relationship with your past is ended.

In a sense, you see, you are not that calf’s owner any longer. Whatever was done in the past applies to the person that did it – selfish, insecure, vindictive, self-willed. Karma says, “This creep has asked for everything the law can give.” Many years later, after sincere sadhana, when you come before the bench for trial, the judge puts on his black cap to give the creep his due. But the defense protests, “Your Honor, there has been a mistake. This is not the same person as the accused; this is a different person from top to bottom. Every thought is loving; every act is kind.”

The prosecutor objects. “I demand the highest penalty under the law!”

“Overruled,” the judge says. “Mistaken identity. Case dismissed with costs.”

Let me repeat: nothing is gained by bemoaning the mistakes of the past. What is important is to change today. Then we can stand on Sri Krishna’s promise and say, “My past has fallen away. Now please do your part, and lift the burden of karma from my shoulders.”

SRI KRISHNA: 13. Listen, Arjuna, and I will explain the five elements necessary for the accomplishment of every action, as taught by the wisdom of sankhya.

The purpose of work is the attainment of wisdom. Modern civilization hasn’t caught up with this idea, which turns economics upside-down. It is meant literally; and it is not at all impractical, as it may sound. From the spiritual perspective, which I would say includes even material well-being, the purpose of work is not to make money, nor to feed oneself and one’s family, nor to achieve any kind of personal fulfillment, nor even to provide the goods and services that society needs. It is to remove the obstacles to living in harmony with the unity of life: in a word, to remove the obstacles to love.

All these verses become clearer if you remember that “work” is a translation of karma. For “work” you can fill in “action”; and of course you can fill in “karma” too, which makes for a very big picture. In practical terms, all work – everything we do – is for one supreme purpose: to undo the unfavorable karma that we have accumulated in the past. After all, it is in our relationships with others that we have accumulated this wrong karma. It follows that there is no way to undo this karma except in our relationships: by being patient, being kind, working in harmony, never failing in respect or trying to have your own way.

Yesterday a friend asked me a good question: “How can work help to slow down the mind?” On the one hand, the Gita has been telling us that the very purpose of work is to undo karma and still the mind. But on the other hand, as everyone with some self-knowledge knows, the usual effect of work is to get us speeded up and personally entangled in how the work turns out.

The key is simple to understand but difficult to practice: Sri Krishna is talking about selfless work. In this sense, the purpose of work is to learn to work hard without any ego-involvement at all. Stilling the mind is simply another way of expressing this, for nothing stirs up the mind except the ego.

“Stilling the mind” is a very abstract concept, and “renouncing the ego” is worse. It may be impossible to understand these things until a person has some way of practicing them. That is one function of work in sadhana: to bring abstract ideals down to earth. Many of the disciplines in my eight-point program are ways to still the mind through work. When you are working with one-pointed attention, for example, that in itself helps to slow the mind. When you do not gauge what you do by what you like or dislike, you are turning your back on the ego, which will make it easier to steady your mind.

When people tell me they would like a job that is more interesting or more intellectually challenging, they sometimes mean only that they want more personal recognition, perhaps even a little more power: not much, you know; just one step higher on the ladder, two or three more employees to supervise, a position a little closer to the boss’s ear. These are very human foibles, but indulging them is the opposite of work’s real purpose. Instead of weakening the ego, this strengthens it. The idea of “I am the doer” – “It is I who do this action, I who decide it, I who am responsible for its success or failure” – arises from the desire for personal attention. When that desire goes, personal conflicts disappear.

SRI KRISHNA: 14–15. The body, the means, the ego, the performance of the act, and the karma involved: these are the five factors in all actions, right or wrong, in thought, word, or deed.

16. Those who do not understand this think of themselves as separate agents. With their eyes clouded by ignorance, they fail to see the truth.

The word I have translated as ‘ego’ here is karta, literally ‘doer.’ Virtually all of us would say, “This is a reference to me. Of course I am the doer of my actions; who else could be?” Actually, Sri Krishna reminds us, all action is performed by prakriti; the Self, our real personality, has little to do with it. The ego which decides to act, the body which carries out that action, the means, and the activity itself are all elements of the same field – made, in a sense, of the same stuff. So too is daivam, the karma of that action. Daivam could be translated as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny,’ but this is misleading, for in the Gita’s presentation nothing is foreordained and nothing happens by chance. We choose our own destiny, because consequences are a part of every action. So is the volition behind it, in the way that a seed, its nutrients, the soil it is in, and the climate are all part of the environment that makes the seed grow into a tree. Hindu and Buddhist scriptures emphasize that karma is actually contained in the action itself, and only needs time and the proper conditions to become manifest.

None of this, Sri Krishna says, involves the Self, who belongs to a higher order of being. Until we realize the Self, however, we can’t go through life doing what we like and saying, “I’m not the doer; I’m not responsible.” To live is to be responsible. As long as we are present in the body, it is necessary to be responsible for our actions, for the plain reason that we are going to incur the karma whether we feel responsible or not.

Karanam refers to the means involved in the doing of any action. To a large extent, these determine the karma that results. For right results, right means are essential. Wrong means can never lead to a right end, any more than thistle seed can yield a harvest of apples. However good the desired end may be, however sincerely it is desired, wrong means bring wrong ends simply because they are prompted by self-will, which always provokes more self-will: opposition, ill will, anger, and the stubborn insistence on having one’s own way. Everything becomes tainted in this kind of atmosphere, even in the best of circumstances.

Every action has stages, phases of development. If you look only at the first phase or the third and do not look at the goal, you are likely to get caught in what you are doing. Then you get entangled, and burn out or lose hope. You may even get so personally involved that you begin resorting to any expeditious way of getting things done the way you see them, which in the long run can only weaken your effort and turn results against you.

I can give a personal illustration from the way the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation has grown. When I began teaching in this country, almost twenty-five years ago, I once took the advice of enthusiastic friends and rented a hall in Oakland for a public talk. “That’s the way these things are done in the United States,” I was told. “You’ve got to think big.” I was willing. We put up some posters, probably on telephone poles, and a hospitable friend offered to open a coffee bar at the hall and to provide a lot of cookies, which she felt sure would draw a crowd.

We turned up early, and I expected a large gathering. There were three: myself, Christine, and our friend, who was standing there at the coffee bar and drinking up the coffee herself. “Would you like some?” she asked. “There are a lot of cookies for you, too.”

The rest of the crowd arrived later: a young fellow and his brother, who I decided later must have been coaxed into coming. As soon as I started speaking, he fell asleep.

Imagine: you rent a hall, set up a coffee bar, draw an audience of four with your wife included, and one of the four falls asleep! You can see why Sri Krishna says that if you want to do important work, you can’t afford to have your ego involved: if you do, you are bound to get agitated and hurt and be tempted to do all kinds of things to keep it from happening again.

Instead of being bothered on that occasion, I watched my mind and was pleased to discover that it wasn’t agitated in the least. Events like this belong to the first phase of selfless work. If I had forgotten that first phases are followed by second phases, I might have given up and concluded that I would never be able to reach great numbers of Americans about the value of meditation. But those incidents were not the whole. I was seeing only the first act, perhaps only the first scene. To put it another way, this was simply the first in a long series of steps. I was learning to walk, so to speak, being tested, being trained. I told Christine, “We don’t have to worry about the number of people. We just have to give our best.” I gave the same enthusiastic talk to those four that I would have given to a packed hall, and within a few weeks Sri Krishna saw to it that I was speaking on meditation at the University of California campus to an audience of almost four hundred students. I didn’t let myself get elated: if I had, I would have been leaving myself open to depression when the next turn of ill fortune came.

Whatever you are doing, don’t think in terms of prestige or personal power or profit, all of which can be terribly insidious. As long as the work is beneficial, it doesn’t matter whether the part you play is large or small; what matters is that the work be done. Every role is important. At Nilgiri Press, where my books are published with the help of many dedicated friends, I always remind them that collating and stuffing envelopes are as important as editing or typesetting. If the collating is off, we get the kind of letter I once got: “Pages 33 through 64 were very inspiring, but did you need to put them in twice?”

All this has a direct bearing on the fifth element in action that Sri Krishna mentions: the karma involved. In no job, no activity, should we forget the law of karma, which often works in hidden and seemingly contrary ways.

I remember asking my granny about this when I was still young, long before I had any grasp of karma’s inner meaning. Like all Hindu children, I grew up with the stories of the Mahabharata. The Pandavas were universal “good guys” and the Kauravas universal “baddies.” What I could never understand was that the Kauravas lived in air-conditioned palaces, ate sumptuous cuisine, went about in special chariots with beautiful damsels, and generally (at least till the end) got their way in everything, whereas the Pandavas had a very thin time.

“Granny,” I asked, “the Pandavas were devoted to Krishna, but the Kauravas weren’t. The good guys should have had the best of times and the Kauravas the worst. Why did it happen otherwise?” She replied, “You’re looking at it from the point of view of worldly enjoyment, as if that were the point of living. I look at it from the point of view of spiritual growth.” The law of karma often puts us in difficult situations so we can take advantage of those situations to grow spiritually, just as the Pandavas did. We need such situations to work out unfavorable karma we have accumulated, and without such tests and trials, growth is not possible.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. The person who is free from ego has attained purity of heart. Though violence surrounds him, he is free from violence.

18. Knowledge, the thing to be known, and the knower: these three promote action. The means, the act itself, and the doer: these three are the totality of action.

All of us have committed mistakes, and all of us face significant obstacles in our sadhana and our personal growth. We find it easy to get angry, for example, and very difficult to be selfless. Here the Gita combines profundity with practicality. It does not say, “You’re perfect; you’re pure; it’s not really you that causes these problems.” It recognizes our present inadequacies, yet at the same time it offers a permanent solution: a set of disciplines by which we can learn to identify with our real Self, which is not touched by any of these inadequacies at all.

We carry an immense burden of karma on our shoulders, and it is this burden that prevents us from going deeper in meditation. That is perhaps the most frightening penalty of the law of karma, and it terrifies all sincere spiritual aspirants. Where there is a big load of karma, your mind has to be agitated; that is probably the single most important cause for lack of progress in meditation.

No matter how heavy this load of personal karma is, however, we can always cope with it. It may be too heavy to be easily dissolved, but it is never more than we can deal with. People sometimes ask me about karma, but their questions are not always very useful. The only really practical question to ask about karma is, “How can I remove its burden?” And the most practical answer is: Put those around you first every day, even when they are difficult, and don’t insist on having your own way. If I had to reduce going beyond karma to a single formula, I would quote the simple advice of a Christian mystic: “Be kind, be kind, be kind.” You don’t have to understand how karma works or make checklists of what specific karma needs to be undone. It is enough to be kind to everyone, every day, as much as you possibly can – in fact, I would say, a little more than you can. Working like this draws on every human faculty – body, senses, mind, intellect – to take us beyond the law of karma into a state of undivided love.

On the other hand, as long as we live under the sway of personal likes and dislikes, and especially of resentments and hostilities, our load of karma will grow heavier and heavier. An active ego cannot help producing karma because it is the very source of negative thinking, which eventually gets expressed in destructive speech and action. Over the years, this adds up to a terribly heavy burden.

We are seldom directly aware of this burden because we are physically oriented. All we know about is physical loads. If we see someone trudging down the street with a packing crate on his shoulder, we don’t ask why he is hunched over and seems to have such difficulty in walking; we are painfully aware of the weight he is carrying. Yet every day we see people bowed down under the weight of karma and we never suspect the reason. They too may trudge along, their eyes dull; it may challenge them just to get through the day. We shrug and say, “That’s how they are.” If our eyes could see below the physical level, we might see huge loads of karma riding on their shoulders.

Some time ago, while delivering an unusually heavy shipment of books to the post office, one of my friends drove too close to a soft shoulder and slipped into the water control ditch by the side of the road. We had to call a tow truck to pull him out. Without the weight of those books, he told me later, the shoulder of the road would probably not have crumbled. Everyone understands this explanation because physical burdens can be felt and seen; but if I say I see people fall into the ditch because they have so much karma in their trunk, it sounds occult. Yet I am not exaggerating. Everybody’s unconscious has a million harsh words, a thousand neglected opportunities to put others first. Even if each is small, the weight adds up, and it is all that weight that impedes our spiritual progress. Empty your trunk of self-will, the mystics say, and you will find that karma no longer oppresses you. Once the trunk is emptied, it is closed and locked; for without self-will, there is no karma. All your actions are prompted by love, and the good karma that selfless actions produce goes to benefit others.

Recently I read about a diligent bank clerk who managed to break the necessary codes so that as far as the bank computer was concerned, a particular account was inactive. The computer would go on sending out the proper statements, but whatever credits should have been posted to that account got credited to some special accounts set up by this clerk instead. Karma accounts work a little like this too, only instead of embezzlement, it is fulfillment. After your karma account is closed, credits for good karma keep coming; but they cannot go to your account because it has been erased. So your banker says, “To whom shall I credit this?” And you can choose. All the beneficial karma that you naturally accumulate after illumination can actually be directed to others’ accounts, lifting a good deal of their burden.

SRI KRISHNA: 19. Knowledge, action, and the reasons for action can be described according to the gunas. Listen, and I will explain their distinctions to you.

20. Sattvic knowledge recognizes the one indestructible Being in all beings, the divine unity underlying the multiplicity of creation.

21. Rajasic knowledge sees all things and creatures as separate and distinct.

22. Tamasic knowledge, without any sense of perspective, sees one small part and mistakes it for the whole.

We can take these verses as a commentary on science, the midwife of our modern civilization.

Tamasic science, the Gita says, sees only its own small corner of life and thinks that is the world. Once this might have been a matter for small concern, but today it is likely to be disastrous. Most weapons research is conducted in large labs where each person is working on one part of a weapons system – a guidance mechanism, say – without having to think about what the whole system will do. It is just a job, an elaborate technical problem. When he solves such a problem, as a good scientist he feels the same satisfaction that he might feel after a game of chess. In such isolation, what makes him stop to think about how the weapon might be used, what it might do, whom it might be used on? What prompts him to reflect that soon the innovation he has been working on will be part of every major nation’s arsenal, so that it threatens him, his family and friends, and he has to race toward something even more destructive? There are hundreds of thousands of such scientists today, in every country that can afford them, doing their best, in their ignorance of the whole, to increase the devastation that can be wrought by stockpiles of weapons capable of killing every person on earth many times over. I feel sure that the vast majority of these men and women of science are good people, educated and cultured, enjoyable to know. But they have no sensitivity beyond the surface of life, because their intellect mistakes the part for the whole.

In Sanskrit the word for science, vidya, implies a deep, intimate understanding of a subject’s inner nature. That is characteristic of sattvic science, represented by towering figures like Newton and Einstein. Our modern civilization has contributed a remarkable number of such figures, men and women for whom science meant a lifelong, all-absorbing search for truth. But the cornerstone of our times is not sattvic but rajasic science, whose purpose is not to learn from nature but to exploit it. Rajasic science has an amazing genius for making money out of natural laws. On its lab walls are two guiding mottoes: “If it can be discovered, it can be sold” and “If it can be made, make it!”

I don’t think anybody illustrates this kind of genius better than Thomas Edison. Sattvic science, by Edison’s time, had predicted the unity of electric and magnetic fields; the problem facing rajas was how to turn those abstract equations into patents. Edison solved the scientific, industrial, and commercial problems together, which means the goal in his mind was more than simply scientific. His new generator was designed not only to produce electric power, but to do so at a highly competitive price. When he patented his incandescent electric lamp, he also patented an electric meter for billing potential customers. That is the genius of rajas. In ten years the Edison “package” was producing power and making money in countries all around the world.

Edison’s success, incidentally, also launched a key institution of rajasic science: the research lab. Sattvic science is characteristically pursued by individuals, but individual research is too idiosyncratic and too slow. Rajas wants fast results, and he needs results that pay. So he puts a lot of people together and proceeds to do research the way pin factories in Adam Smith’s day made pins: one person fashioning the head, a second the shaft, a third putting them together, and so on. It is an effective approach; the Manhattan Project is probably its greatest monument. There some of the greatest physicists in history came together to turn airy theories about the nature of matter into a bomb of incomparable power. They did so in just a couple of years, pursuing two or three different approaches at once – men and women from all kinds of backgrounds, with all kinds of temperaments, working together in harmony and efficiency. The Manhattan Project made a deep impression on the asuric mind: it showed that profit and the power to destroy can be gleaned from even the most abstruse thinking in search of truth.

I have been enjoying a personal perspective on this period in a book called Disturbing the Universe, written by an English physicist named Freeman Dyson who came to Cornell University after the war to join Hans Bethe and the other great physicists who had followed him from Los Alamos. Reading Dyson, I began to form my own ideas of why the Manhattan Project had been so successful. The physics department at Cornell, he says, hummed with creative activity in those years – a constellation of brilliant scientists, working together day and night without thought of personal gain to achieve something really big. Even when the goal is destructive, I still respond to this kind of atmosphere where dedicated individuals forget their differences in working for a great cause. This is one of life’s greatest joys. Every one of us can work better in a selfless project if we remember the joy these scientists shared in their work:

It was youth, it was exuberance, it was informality, it was a shared ambition to do great things together in science without any personal jealousies or squabbles over credit. Many years later they received well-deserved Nobel prizes, but nobody at Cornell was grabbing for prizes.

This is the spirit of sattvic science, yet at Los Alamos it allowed itself to be harnessed by rajas for an unimaginably destructive end. There is a tragic element of blindness to consequences in this, a fatal lack of imagination. Still, the Manhattan Project demonstrates what a small band of dedicated, selfless people can achieve. The men and women who made the atomic bomb were a very gifted lot. But I want to call your attention to another gifted lot – a group that includes you and me. We too are connected with the Manhattan Project, only what they built up, we can demolish. And we can do it in much the same way: with the same resourcefulness, the same daring, the same dedication, and the same harmonious effort.

One man who particularly caught my attention in Dyson’s story was Richard Feynman, a brilliant, intuitive, unorthodox young physicist who solved problems with a creative leap of the imagination that these other great scientists sometimes found difficult to follow. Dyson recalls that when Feynman spoke to a gathering of distinguished physicists, struggling to put his vision into words, his theories were rejected out of hand – and this by perhaps the greatest assemblage of genius that science had seen for generations. Feynman pursued his ideas against this tide of learned opinion for some five years before they gained acceptance. All of us should remember this if we want to do original work, which cannot help running counter to the conventional wisdom. “What I saw of Dick,” Dyson says, “reminded me of what I heard Keynes say of Sir Isaac Newton six years earlier: ‘His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it.’ ” This capacity is necessary for achieving great things, and the Gita reminds us that it is available to everyone who reaches beyond his or her private, personal self for a higher purpose.

Here I want to put in an enthusiastic word for the ordinary people of the world. I consider myself a very ordinary person, and I presume that by and large my readers are ordinary also. That, to me, is our glory. But even ordinary people like you and me, when we harness our personal desires to achieve a selfless goal, can do extraordinary things. In that sense ordinary people do become extraordinary. You remember Gandhi’s assurance: “I have not the slightest doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.” Like Gandhiji, if we draw on meditation to ally our personal efforts with the forces of truth, love, and unity, we can help to reverse the disastrous trends we see around us, even if we ourselves are very small.

SRI KRISHNA: 23. Work performed to fulfill one’s obligations, without thought of personal reward or of whether the job is pleasant or unpleasant, is sattvic.

24. Work prompted by selfish desire or self-will, full of stress, is rajasic.

25. Work that is undertaken blindly, without any consideration of consequences, waste, injury to others, or one’s own capacities, is tamasic.

No translation can do justice to the precision of these terms, which are deadly in Sanskrit. “Work” here is still karma, any human action or activity. But I want to apply it specifically in the sense of employment, in order to get the Gita’s view of economics.

We can begin with asuric economics: Tamas and Rajas, Inc. Tamas, the Gita says, does everything blindly, wrapped in a thick fog of moha, the blindness of self-will. He can see just one thing, the only thing he is interested in: himself. Because of this blindness, he pays no attention to the cost of anything he does – neither in money, nor in resources, nor in harm to other people. Tamas is wasteful of everything, even lives. The word Sri Krishna uses is kshaya, which means not only waste but decay, corruption, consumption. The Sanskrit name for tuberculosis comes from this word; it carries the connotation of wasting away. Tamasic work drains prana, consumes vitality. A person whose personality has been invaded by tamas wastes time, wastes effort, wastes life itself. Tamasic economics does the same.

Tamasic work is work that harms people, work that inflicts injury or death on other creatures. This is the lowest kind of human occupation. Yet if you ask him about it, Tamas will shrug and reply, “It’s just a job.” One employee of a major weapons contractor explained in the paper recently, “It’s just like any other job, really. I don’t feel like what I’m doing has anything to do with death and destruction. We come to work, we do some paper work, and we go out for a beer afterward.” His plant builds missile-launching systems. No job is “just a job,” the Gita would say. Every job is karma: it carries costs. Each of us has the responsibility to assess the consequences of our work, for we will share in the karma of it whether we think about consequences or not.

Some years ago the New Yorker carried a profile of a man who, upon graduating from college in physics, proved to be a brilliant designer of nuclear weapons. What intrigued me was that he was a gentle, peace-­loving young man; he merely happened to have a genius for making bombs. As a young physicist in the heady early years of the Atomic Age, he found himself tantalized by the challenge of ballistics problems no one else could solve. He couldn’t let a second-rate bomb design lie around without improving on it, even when an “elegant solution” meant a smaller, simpler bomb that could kill more people. “The worst invention in physical history,” he admits, “was also the most interesting.” And he adds a very illuminating observation: “The theorist’s world is a world of the best people and the worst of possible results.” That is what moha does.

This is a talented, sensitive person, who I am glad to say has turned to more constructive activities. He gives us a clue to how rajas can be transformed. Given intellectual challenge and support, the same scientists can harness the same ingenuity, imagination, and dedication to achieve a beneficial goal. The rajasic researcher is not cruel. What satisfies him in defense work is not being destructive, but the things that make any kind of scientific work rewarding: intellectual challenge, professional respect, the satisfaction of solving problems skillfully, pride when a job is well done.

It is the same, I believe, with other defense-related work. Most people hold these jobs because they need work, and this is where jobs are. They would be happy doing something more beneficial, and all of us share the responsibility to shift toward an economy that makes more beneficial work available. Just as each of us has to ask about “right occupation,” everybody should ask about “right economics,” which is based on caring and sharing. How does our present economy use its resources, human as well as material? What are its costs – again, human as well as material? Finally, whom does it benefit? What things are included in its “bottom line”?

The arms industry makes a good place to begin. What are its real costs, and what does it contribute? Most people, I think, believe that big spending on war and weapons can buy a country into prosperity. In the United States, wasn’t it full-scale war production that pulled the economy out of the Great Depression and made this the richest country on earth? “Everyone knows war is good for business,” says Tamas. He is not strong in analytical thinking; he likes to fall back on formulas. “Defense spending is a shot in the arm for the whole economy.”

Sattva would agree with the analogy: a defense economy becomes addicted to high spending very much the way a person becomes addicted to drugs. Each new contract stimulates the economy a little less, and more money is required to get the same boost the next time. The arms industry, in fact, is a powerful engine of inflation. Nothing puts a ceiling on its costs. As in other industries where a few companies control the market – oil, the grain trade – prices tend to “float free” of real expenses. And however high the price tag, governments always seem to be willing to buy more weapons. A few industries do get an immediate “shot in the arm” from all this public spending, but everybody gets higher prices, higher taxes, and a cheaper dollar later on.

Inflation is deadly for those who live on fixed incomes. Hundreds of thousands of older people today cannot afford what you or I would call minimum food, heat, clothing, and rent, the costs of which continue to rise. But defense spending does more harm than merely fueling inflation. It usurps resources which should be benefiting people and their work: skills, training, talent, natural resources, even capital. In a sattvic economy, a sound economy, resources go to produce goods and services that people need and can use. An arms economy pours human and material resources into a black hole. Nobody benefits from what is produced, and in fact we benefit most if it is not used at all. Defense spending seems to have a stimulating effect, but over a period of time the economy wastes away from inside. It is producing nothing of use, and eating up a country’s potential in the process.

“Nonsense,” Tamas would object. “Defense spending isn’t barren; it creates jobs.” How many jobs, and what kind? Leslie Nulty, assistant to the president of the machinists and aerospace workers union, stated that “a dollar spent virtually anywhere else in our economy creates more jobs than a dollar devoted to military procurement.” One billion dollars spent on defense creates, directly and indirectly, some 28,000 new jobs. The same amount of money would create 32,000 jobs if spent in public transit and 71,000 if spent in education.

Defense spending may actually even cost jobs because of the cuts in social spending it requires. In California, a state agency has concluded that although the current increase in military spending will create some 670,000 new jobs, it will eliminate almost a million jobs that people are now holding.

Further, a good deal of new defense money goes to specialists, not to the local electricians, carpenters, building contractors, and unskilled laborers who swell unemployment rolls. “Economists,” I read in the San Francisco Examiner, “worry that the nation’s brightest engineers are designing supersonic fighters and electronic warfare systems instead of fuel-efficient cars and reliable color television sets that can compete with well-made imports.” An asuric economy pours more and more of its resources into a contracting sector, while much of its labor force idles and critical parts of its industrial capacity may grow obsolete. Finally it begins to ask why it is falling behind other nations, which are supplying more and more of its goods.

These are large issues. What is at stake is not merely a destructive industry, but the profit motive itself. An asuric economy would be built on waste and exploitation even if the question of arms spending could be set aside. The story of what Tamas and Rajas, Inc., do to a nation’s economy would make a fascinating book. All I can do in a few paragraphs is raise questions, but that is enough to suggest the Gita’s perspective.

A sattvic economy focuses on the welfare of all, which leaves room for everybody to make a reasonable profit in producing and selling goods and services that people need. In an asuric economy, however, an industry does not exist for the sake of producing something useful. It exists to make money, which may or may not involve producing something, useful or otherwise. Other costs or benefits are essentially irrelevant. Rajas makes his business decisions on the basis of “maximizing the bottom line,” no matter what the consequences elsewhere. He measures averages and aggregates. If corporate profits are up, then the economy is “recovering,” even if the higher profits have been gained by firing large numbers of people and a record number of businesses have failed. If GNP is rising, he concludes that the economy is getting stronger, although as Richard Barnet points out, many activities counted in the gross national product – “the automobile accident industry, the cancer economy, the costs of pollution, crime, and welfare – though they put money in a lot of pockets, [make] the economy poorer, not richer.”

Sattvic economics, to borrow Mr. Schumacher’s subtitle, is “economics as if people mattered.” It counts human costs as well as material ones, and its bottom line measures the whole rather than the benefit to a few. Asuric economics, by contrast, is essentially wasteful. Its very nature is to be careless of the whole. It doesn’t intend to waste resources; it doesn’t want to put the health of workers and consumers at risk or to despoil the environment. It only wants to go on making more money. But wealth has to come from somewhere, and in a limited world, unlimited profits cannot be had without someone paying the costs. This is crucial, because it means that we cannot pursue the welfare of the whole globe with the traditional motivations of greed and growth.

Rajas tends to consume resources at a prodigious rate – and not only natural resources; I am speaking also of human beings. In the early days of the industrial revolution, workers were used up as carelessly as any other plentiful commodity, for the same reason: they were cheap, and the profit motive required that they stay cheap. This was dictated by an Iron Law of Wages, which Rajas found it convenient to consider as inexorable as the law of gravity: when you can buy a man (or a woman, or a child) for a dollar a day, Market Forces will not allow you to pay a dollar ten. Today, of course, this looks more like an Iron Law of Greed. Yet many people still believe in it. It has helped to create a central paradox of industrial civilization: unheard-of prosperity side by side with intolerable poverty and despair.

This paradox has not disappeared with industrial growth; it has spread. In Dickens’s day, the industrial slums of a prosperous city might be as close as the other side of the tracks; today they are often on the other side of the world. In a world of global markets, poverty has become a global problem. Asuric Enterprises can buy labor wherever it pleases, and it has the economic power to dictate its terms to nations that can supply labor cheap. The same forces which made slums of cities now keep whole populations poor – not out of anyone’s cruelty, I repeat, but simply to ensure a decent bottom line. This may be good business for big business, and it makes the GNP soar; but I don’t think any country benefits by encouraging it. Poorer countries are kept poor, and even in wealthier countries we see poverty increasing as labor is purchased elsewhere or supplied by itinerant immigrants.

Let me give some illustrations, first from the Third World. Rajas’s formula for economic development is to encourage the profit motive. Wasn’t that what made the industrialized nations rich? He looks at a country like Brazil, a showcase for his theories, and observes with puzzlement, “This is the country of the Economic Miracle: massive foreign investment, a booming GNP, a wealthy elite and a middle class that, if small, is slowly growing. Why is inflation out of control, and why are the poor poorer than ever? Why do so many in the middle class feel economically threatened instead of more secure?”

The “economic miracle” that Brazil represents is financed by attracting large amounts of foreign capital, which is a little like inviting the fox in to build hen houses. International businesses have profited immensely from “developing” Brazil. Natural resources have been taken from the country instead of being used for local development, at the cost of waste, depletion, and destruction. Jobs are created by such activities, but local workers are still employed at local wage levels: if they were not so cheap, development would not be so attractive. Skilled labor is often brought in by outside contractors; so no skilled local work force is being trained. The money that does flow back into the country does not usually go where it can buy corn and beans; it goes to investors – wealthy individuals, large domestic businesses, banks, multinational corporations. Now, nothing keeps a domestic bank, business, or citizen from reinvesting profits at home. But generally it is more profitable to put the money somewhere else, where it does no domestic good – in a U.S. or Swiss bank, in Japanese stocks, in gold, or even in a foreign investment corporation that wants to “develop” some other country. The GNP may soar, but who benefits? The assets that should be developing local economies and businesses, building locally-owned factories, training domestic workers, raising food for self-sufficiency, are flowing out – benefiting a few, but actually making the nation poorer.

Wasting away under the cover of a rising GNP is not a disease of developing economies only. Even in this country, I have been noticing how deftly profit can be made to grow without productive activity. Here Rajas’s ingenuity really shines. “Why break your head,” he asks, “competing in a world where labor, materials, and capital are expensive and markets glutted? Instead of improving production or cutting costs, you can show growth by acquiring another company and merging the balance sheets.” This has actually been a popular corporate activity. Similarly, immense amounts of money which could be invested in beneficial work are invested elsewhere for the sake of short-term profits. Much of it goes into moneylending – the “money market,” buying and selling million-dollar IOUs. Who would want to tie up capital in retooling a factory for only a possible long-term profit when he can lend it out at ten or fifteen percent with scarcely any risk or effort? A lot of money can be made in this way, but the activity is sterile. The economy is continually draining its resources and going nowhere. One statesman has even observed that the U.S. is slipping into the status of a colonized country, supplying the world with raw materials and foodstuffs and importing most of its finished goods.

To his surprise, Rajas is beginning to discover that unlimited growth, instead of being a panacea, can be a kind of economic cancer. Asuric Enterprises’ activity, aiming continually at short-term profit instead of taking a long view of “care and share,” ends with consuming its own sources of vitality.

Any economics based on separateness, the Gita would say, cannot help failing in the long run. Rajas would have us believe that the free pursuit of profit, which obviously is of immediate benefit to a few, will eventually benefit everybody. This is an outworn idea; it cannot be sustained by a global view, which observes that around the world, in many countries both developed and developing, the gap between rich and poor is widening and the numbers increasing of those who live in poverty. We live on one small planet, where everything is interconnected; unlimited growth cannot be pursued for some without costs that will eventually be paid by all. A sattvic economics, a twenty-first century economics of caring and sharing, is not a luxury but a necessity.

SRI KRISHNA: 26. A sattvic worker is free from egotism and selfish attachments, full of enthusiasm and fortitude in success and failure alike.

27. A rajasic worker has strong personal desires and craves rewards for his actions. Covetous, impure, and destructive, he is easily swept away by fortune good or bad.

28. The tamasic worker is inattentive, vulgar, arrogant, deceitful, malicious, and lazy. He is easily depressed and prone to procrastination.

The word karta means literally ‘one who does,’ so these verses really refer to the character we show in all our actions, the mental states behind behavior. Nevertheless, the side of ourselves we show during work can be particularly revealing of our state of mind.

The other day I saw a devastating film about war, A Bridge Too Far. One scene still haunts me: the vision of thousands of paratroopers literally darkening the sky. That is what can happen in selfish attachment, when a person is invaded by rajasic and tamasic thoughts: the mind becomes blotted out with negative obsessions, and night descends on consciousness. Such people live in darkness, and the tragedy is that they have no idea of it; they think everything is light. Not seeing clearly, they are liable to do disastrous things. Where there is no danger, they are suspicious; where they should be wary, they rush in blindly. For this reason it is not wise to give responsible jobs to those who lack detachment: even if their intentions are good, their judgment cannot be trusted.

Sattva, by contrast, has a clear sense of priorities. This is not really a matter of efficiency. It reflects a mental state in which life has a unified purpose, making every day precious. The other day someone was telling me that a friend of hers did not have long to live. I had to remind her that none of us have long to live. Sattva remembers this always, reminding us to make the most of every day as an opportunity to give.

In fairness, I think all of us understand and respond to this ideal deep in our hearts. But most people have never had the experience of giving simply and purely, for no other reason than love. They have been conditioned to evaluate even an act of charity in terms of the admiration or status it brings; they have not had the opportunity of working with others for a great cause without expecting even a thank you. How could they know that this selfless giving of resources, time, or talents can release us from tension and competition?

I began to learn this lesson when I was a freshman in college. In those days I wanted to be a writer, so naturally I wanted to see more of life. That summer I persuaded my grandmother to let me spend my vacation traveling among some of the villages in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu.

Soon I came across a village very different from the one where I grew up. Our village was prosperous and literate, but this Tamil village was so poor that it didn’t have a school, and most of these villagers did not know how to read or write. They were simple, hard-working farmers; that was all.

But they had a strong desire to learn. They asked me to stay and be their teacher, not only of the children but of the adults too. What would I charge? They had never had a teacher in the village before, they explained, and they had no money with which to pay. But they could provide me with food, each family taking turns, and I could stay with one of the better-off households as if I were their own son. All this moved me deeply. I was only a freshman, after all; most of these villagers were old enough to be my parents. And I had only three months of vacation. How much can you teach in three months to people who had scarcely had a day’s schooling in their lives, who knew nothing but crops and soils?

“What do you want to learn?” I asked.

“We’d like to know arithmetic,” they said, “for buying and selling. We’d like to learn how to read, so we could read the stories in the scriptures. And we’d like to know how to write, so we could write letters to our relatives and friends.”

“That’s a lot,” I said.

They smiled. “We have all summer. Of course, we can’t come during the day; we have to work in the fields. But we can come at night.”

That kind of desire really impressed me. “Do you have a building where we could meet?”

“No,” someone said. “But we can make one.”

In my mind the three months began to shrink into two. “How long would it take?” I asked.

They grinned enthusiastically. “We can do it tonight.”

I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Sure,” they said. “It’s a full moon. We’ll start after dinner. You have your meal and then come and select the site; we’ll do the rest.”

That was my first glimpse of the real strength of India’s villagers, the millions of peasants who hold the country together. I selected a pleasant site on a gentle hill, from which you could see the river running close by. And after dinner, probably about eight o’clock in the evening, a man turned up from every hut in the village. These were men who had been up before dawn, worked hard in the hot fields with just a couple of hours rest when the sun was at its zenith. I was so profoundly impressed that I insisted on working alongside them, though I probably only slowed them down; they had to teach me everything. But by the time the sun came up the next morning, we had a one-room school – mud walls, thatched roof, sand from the riverbank for a floor, even a slate to write on and a piece of railing for a bell. As far as we were concerned, it was perfect.

I taught throughout that summer, and though attendance was a little irregular, by and large someone from every household was there faithfully every evening at eight when class began. None of us had a watch, so we used to end the lesson when we heard the whistle and clatter of the Blue Mountain Express chugging its way up the hills. Sometimes I would get so absorbed that when I heard a train and stopped, they would laugh and say, “The Blue Mountain Express went by an hour ago. That’s the Malabar Express; it must be eleven o’clock.” By the end of the summer we didn’t go home till we heard the Cochin Express go by at midnight.

By that time they could read, write, and reckon, which must have felt like the greatest achievement of their lives. Yet I felt I had learned much more. I never received a penny for my work, though in their simple affection my students used to bring me all kinds of things they had grown or made: mangoes, coconuts, bananas, grass mats, a pair of handmade sandals. But I received much more than I gave. From those simple villagers, who had just the bare minimum of material possessions, I learned to understand the words of St. Francis: “It is in giving that we receive.”

SRI KRISHNA: 29. Listen, Arjuna, as I describe the three types of understanding and will.

30. To know what to do and what to refrain from doing, what is right action and what is wrong, what brings security and what insecurity, what brings freedom and what bondage: these are the signs of a sattvic intellect.

31. The rajasic intellect confuses right and wrong actions, distorting dharma and adharma.

32. The tamasic intellect is shrouded in darkness, utterly reversing right and wrong wherever it turns.

The subject of these verses is buddhi, which is not just intelligence but discriminating intelligence – not merely seeing, but seeing into. It is not enough to see the physical side of life, Sri Krishna says; we have to see into its heart. It is not enough to see people as physical creatures; we have to see the Self in them. It is not enough to see the world; we have to see into its underlying unity. Otherwise nothing makes sense, nothing holds together, and we are left with no way of judging wise choices from foolish ones.

The tamasic intellect, the Gita says, is shrouded in darkness; it thinks wrong is right and right is wrong. This applies not only to the Big Issues of ethics. When you are unkind to someone, that is tamas; your intellect is telling you that wrong is right. On a national level, if you want to see sophisticated explanations of why right is wrong and wrong is right, you can read the state papers of almost any country – or, for that matter, the front page of almost any newspaper.

The rajasic intellect, by contrast, is mixed: sometimes clear, but muddied wherever self-interest comes into play. Throughout the work of our meditation center I have met many men and women who were outstanding in their professions. I was often surprised to discover later that in situations where they were emotionally entangled, the same experts could be foolish and even childish. That is rajasic understanding, and I think it is saddest in education and science, where the very basis of the profession should be sattvic knowledge, without any selfish motive.

When Tamas and Rajas incorporate themselves in science, the combination is disastrous: one can’t tell what is right and what is wrong, and the other doesn’t care. Genetic engineering is a good example. Some years ago scientists announced that they had finally learned how to put individual microorganisms to work – a truly numerous labor force! “A microorganism,” one spokesman for the new industry said, “is basically a little chemical factory.” It takes in substances and produces other substances without wages, downtime, or labor disputes, an industrialist’s dream. By changing the right gene in certain bacteria, for example, the bacteria will then actually produce the substance you desire, in great quantities and at low cost, simply by growing and reproducing. There is promise in this, but not, I would say, unless the mental state behind it changes. Any approach to life as basically something to exploit has to backfire, because that attitude infects every application. It is tamasic through and through.

“What we have been able to do,” this spokesman explains, “is speed up evolution, if you will. We can literally now get our hands on the genetic makeup of microorganisms and pick the characteristics we want.” Unfortunately, the very things that make this technology so powerful – the fact that microorganisms grow very rapidly and reproduce on their own – give it immense potential for getting out of control. But long-term problems pale next to short-term profits, which have been stupendous. These are developments that have thrilled Wall Street.

Predictably, however, others find them disturbing. As with nuclear power in the early days, one senses that the technology has taken a life of its own. It is natural, I think, to feel mistrustful when one learns that an agency of one’s own government – the National Institutes of Health – has patented the genes of indigenous human beings on the other side of the globe. Behind such actions lies a mental state that can only be viewed with alarm.

Professor Liebe Cavalieri of the Cornell medical school summed the situation up well in an opinion piece contributed to the Christian Science Monitor. “One might ask,” he commented drily, whether the same human beings whose ignorance of the whole has brought the world to its present state “could generate the fullness of vision needed to redesign a better system.” And he concluded, “Rearranging our genes is not likely to provide the solutions we so desperately need.”

The lure of profit in genetic engineering has even infected education. Of course, universities have been entangled in business through weapons, food, and pharmaceutical research since World War II, so that a student of the sciences now goes through college taking for granted that the nature of his or her profession is not merely to understand the physical world, but to help exploit it for some vested institution. With bioengineering, however, the “big money” got really big. Some university biologists have resolved the dilemma by dropping out of teaching and opening commercial labs of their own. Many who remain have been able to eat their cake and have it too, as prestigious universities find profitable ways to share their faculty and facilities with big business. I would not call such people scientists any longer; they are businesspeople, teaching a little on the side. I have no quarrel with anyone who does not want to teach; but as a former teacher, I feel qualified to plead that teaching and extreme self-interest do not mix. I am not saying that teachers should be underpaid. I am talking about getting caught, deeply caught, in personal gain. These are people who should embody the highest values in scientific research. They cannot afford to be indebted to profit-oriented corporations that need to manipulate the public for the sake of growth and market share.

The federal government contributes 46 percent of our “total R&D spending.” Industry contributes 51 percent. In practice, I would estimate, this means that almost all of the money spent on scientific research is tied to one of two major purposes: making new profits in consumer markets and increasing the effectiveness of weapons of war. Since that is where the money is, that is where fresh scientific talent is attracted. So we are talking about the bulk of our scientific resources, not only financial but intellectual as well.

You may remember Toynbee’s comment that if our civilization has made great strides in technology, it is because so many people have given their best to technology. Isn’t it time that we gave our best to peace, and to finding decent solutions to the problems of human health and welfare? If we fail in these areas, no historian is going to praise us for our skill in designing microchips.

SRI KRISHNA: 33. The sattvic will, developed through meditation, keeps prana, mind, and senses in vital harmony.

34. The rajasic will, conditioned by selfish desire, pursues wealth, pleasure, and fame.

35. The tamasic will shows itself in obstinate ignorance, sloth, fear, grief, depression, and conceit.

We have been looking at the human being in terms of the intellect; these three verses make the same kind of evaluation in terms of the will. This is a highly interesting approach, because normally it is only the intellect that gets attention. Even in my high school, boys who were unruffled by opprobrious names felt crushed if you said they had a small IQ. But if you tell someone his Will Quotient can be counted in one digit, how much do you think he will care?

In fact, the intellect is overrated. Even when coupled with a high IQ – perhaps especially when coupled with a high IQ – a weak will is a terrible handicap in every walk of life. When the will is flaccid, its weakness begins to affect decisions from the moment the alarm goes off in the morning. Five-thirty, time for meditation – well, why not make it six? Six arrives and the weak will observes, “A quarter after is just the same.” It is not only meditation that suffers; you are undermining your whole day.

The Sanskrit word for ‘will’ here is dhriti, from the same root as dharma: dhri, ‘to support.’ The will is what supports us, what holds all our faculties together in harmony, vitality, and strength. “Strength,” Gandhi said, “does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” In times of trial and turmoil, when fortune frowns and friends forsake you, if your will is strong you will never lose heart or feel abandoned. You can look at the life of Gandhi and see what this means: he faced the bitterest opposition, calumny, and betrayal over and over, up to the last moment of his life. So did Teresa of Ávila; so did St. Francis. Where will you find more vibrant, cheerful, hopeful, beneficial lives?

For these reasons, the Gita offers rather surprising advice: if you want to be secure and self-reliant, if you want to become loving, if you want friends who will stand by you, then do everything you can to strengthen your will; don’t do anything that undermines it. Even a midnight snack can undermine the will, though you conscientiously work off the calories the very next day. In the early days, of course, training the will requires effort and vigilance. It is not so simple or easy as it may seem. But the rewards will amaze you; and in the end, reassuringly enough, everything you had to work at becomes spontaneous and natural. Then you are free.

The sattvic will, Sri Krishna says, maintains an even flow of prana among all our human faculties: the various parts of the body, the senses, and the faculties of the mind. I could write a book on this one observation, for it gives the secret of perfect health on every level, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Prana is consumed by desires, so to conserve prana, we need to develop a strong will and a clear sense of discrimination. The mind has right desires, which may be satisfied, and wrong desires, which are to be defied. “Wrong desires” means those that are selfish: desires for things that benefit nobody, including ourselves. When a wrong desire is defied, there are rich dividends in prana. Recently the newspaper has been carrying compelling graphs which show how retirement accounts grow: you put in a thousand or so every year and by the time you retire, due to the magic of compound interest, those thousands have turned into half a million. In the same way, by not spending prana on wrong desires, our vitality account can compound a millionfold.

This is not an exaggeration. I have been reading about Gandhi’s daily schedule when he was in his sixties, and the only way I can describe him is to say that this is human capacity multiplied a million times. Here is one day, not uncommon, where he gets up at three in the morning to start answering correspondence; he confers with Indian leaders through the day, gives press interviews, has his prayer meeting and walk after dinner, and then goes at eight in the evening for another four-hour session with the English Viceroy of India. The fate of our country depended on the outcome of those talks; he should have been bowed under the burden. Instead, at midnight, he walks home discussing the meeting with colleagues, lies down to sleep at one, and gets his secretary up at three to start the next day! This kind of life went on for months at a time, and it is a thrilling confession when he tells us that he throve on it. A life without challenges, he said – a life when you are not being stretched to the utmost – simply is not worth living. It shows what capacities we all have, if we can only remove the crust of self-centered living that prevents them from coming into play.

SRI KRISHNA: 36. Now listen, Arjuna: there are also three kinds of happiness. By sustained effort, one comes to the end of sorrow.

37. The spiritual life seems like poison at first, but tastes like nectar in the end. This is the joy of sattva, born of a mind at peace with itself.

38. Pleasure from the senses seems like nectar at first, but it is bitter as poison in the end. This is the kind of happiness that comes to the rajasic.

39. Those who are tamasic draw their pleasures from sleep, indolence, and intoxication.

These are particularly potent verses, because they deal with the ever-­popular subject of pleasure. Before I go into a practical commentary, therefore, I think the subject calls for a sobering reminder: that all of us are born to die. This puts pleasure into rather clear perspective.

I am proud to tell you that to my teacher, the very thought that I would die someday was something her limitless love could not tolerate. She had to take me beyond the reach of death, to that state of Self-realization which she herself had attained; her love made this the major focus of her life. Similarly, we know that the Buddha was impelled into the search for immortality when he looked on his lovely wife and newborn son lying asleep and realized that their youth and beauty could not escape the ravages of time and death. His love was so immense that that moment of insight burst in his consciousness like a bomb; after that, nothing would satisfy him until he had secured the secret of immortality and could teach it to everyone who would hear. Of course, it is natural for a man to love his family, natural for a grandmother to love her grandson. But the love I am talking about is something much higher than normal: it shapes your entire life around the desire to rescue those you love from the suffering of self-centered living and the agony of death.

To realize your immortal Self, you have to remember your physical mortality always. Very few of us can do this, but it provides a perfect perspective for evaluating life around us. Every day we move closer to the great change called death, not only those of us who are older but those who are young as well. Even when I was a boy, my grandmother used to remind me that life flies fast for everybody, and I loved her so much that her words went deep into my heart and remained there to keep me sensitive to the transience of time. Even before I took to meditation, I remember looking out across my freshman class and seeing suddenly that all those bright, beautiful faces would someday fade away. And I would recall those lines of Housman:

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;

The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

These were not morbid reflections. They released such tenderness that even if a student offended me or let me down, I always remembered how short life is: too short not to love, too short not to care.

That is the practical side, you see. People who are selfish have simply forgotten their mortality. People who are unkind have forgotten how quickly the play will all be over. And people who measure life in terms of pleasure forget that every pleasant experience, even the most rarefied, lasts such a short while; nothing remains of it that we can hold or build our lives on. When you remember that life is fleeting, you will have no time to be unkind, no time to quarrel, no time for anything but to give. Even those who do not meditate, if they can remember this, will find that it gives them access to a deeper level of consciousness.

When you feel like indulging your senses unduly or giving free rein to your self-will, I would suggest you remind yourself that set against a longer perspective, these indulgences are going to amount to very, very little. Our short span of life is over so soon. There isn’t going to be anyone to be attached to, anyone to quarrel with, anyone to be jealous of, anyone to resent. Every older person is dimly aware of this, but by that time most of us are trapped in habits of mind that we find difficult to change. Now, while you have strength and vigor and determination, you can draw on this haunting recollection of mortality every day to strengthen your will, reduce your self-will, train your senses, and not let anything get in the way of your meditation.

These verses seem to call for poetry, so let me conclude with some lines from Robert Frost. I first became acquainted with them when I learned that Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister, used to keep them on his desk as a constant reminder. They are the conclusion of a poem called “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The forests of desire too are dark and deep, thick with unfulfilled desires. It is only human to feel tempted, to want to stray into them and take our time returning. But all of us have promises to keep, and miles to go, many miles, before we reach our home.

SRI KRISHNA: 40. No creature, whether born on earth or among the gods in heaven, is free from the conditioning of the three gunas.

41. The different responsibilities found in the social order, Arjuna, have their roots in this conditioning.

42. The responsibilities to which a brahmin is born, based on his nature, are self-control in body and mind, purity of heart, patience, humility, learning, wisdom, and faith.

43. The qualities of a kshatriya, based on his nature, are courage, strength, fortitude, dexterity, generosity, leadership, and the firm resolve never to retreat from battle.

44. The occupations suitable for a vaishya are agriculture, dairying, and trade. The proper work of a shudra is service.

These verses refer to the caste system, about which there is a good deal of misunderstanding. Over many centuries these ideas of caste became a terribly rigid and oppressive mold, particularly with respect to the millions of outcaste Indians whom Gandhi called Harijans, ‘children of God.’ It is one of the greatest chapters in Gandhi’s life when he begins to take on the ruthless exploitation of these people, who had been relegated to the lowest conceivable position in society.

At the same time, many people do not understand that although Gandhi was utterly opposed to the caste system as an instrument of exploitation, he was not opposed to the idea of caste itself. He wanted its rigidity dissolved, he wanted the very idea of “outcaste” Hindus to disappear from our hearts, but at the same time he wanted to preserve certain good qualities in this kind of social organization. This needs some explanation because it seems so contradictory. How can a man like Gandhi, so completely dedicated to the inalienable dignity in every human being, find anything to praise in a system that places individuals into different categories by birth?

First let me explain briefly what the caste system was like in ancient India, when it had certain virtues which can still be appreciated today. The original purpose of the four varnas, to use the Sanskrit word, was to facilitate living in the world. Varnas were something like roles, although much more comprehensive. The categories are: brahmins, priests and certain other professionals such as physicians and teachers (branches of knowledge were considered sacred in ancient India); kshatriyas, rather like the nobility of medieval Europe; vaishyas, the farmers, craftsmen, and merchants; and shudras, largely unskilled laborers.

These were not originally rigid categories, in which people were trapped by birth. Just as today a plumber’s son might open his own hardware shop and make a name for himself in the world of business, a shudra was once able to become a vaishya, a craftsman or merchant. Similarly, though it is regarded as rather unseemly – meditation and sacred learning are considered to be their proper province – we find brahmins in the Mahabharata who are highly skilled in the martial arts. Perhaps most important, caste was no bar to seeking and attaining Self-realization. I am speaking here of historical fact, not denying that there were prejudices to the contrary. The Buddha, himself born a kshatriya, drew great disciples from the so-called lower castes. So did Sri Ramakrishna, who was born into a very pure brahmin family just a little over a hundred years ago. The same holds true today. Mahatma Gandhi came from a vaishya or merchant community; the word gandhi means ‘grocer’. And my grandmother’s family, Eknath, are kshatriyas.

There are very practical reasons for traditions like these, which help to explain why the caste system has endured for probably three thousand years or more. First, we are talking here about culture – perhaps a hundred generations in which the families in a particular varna shaped their lives around the same habits, values, and standards, passed from parent to children. Because India embraces so many regions, languages, and traditions, you can find wide variations even within the same caste; brahmins in Kerala, for example, will have different habits from brahmins in Bengal. To take just one illustration, though my ancestral family are kshatriyas, we have been strict vegetarians for many generations. Every vegetarian, I think, can appreciate how difficult it is for a vegetarian to cook for a nonvegetarian, or even to share the same kitchen. Similarly, though they are not brahmins, men and women in my ancestral family are raised in an atmosphere that assumes the very highest spiritual ideals, which again is a characteristic of the ideal brahmin family. For these and many other similar reasons, our women generally married – as Granny and my mother did – men from a nearby brahmin community with lofty, pure values.

If you extend these illustrations to all the other values and habits of daily life, you will see how natural it is for an Indian man or woman to marry someone from a similar family background. The essential purpose of caste organization was to group people not so much by their occupation as by their values, their whole way of life. Again, however, I want to emphasize that I am talking about ideals, not trying to describe or defend how caste is followed in India today. I simply want to illustrate the truths behind these verses of the Gita, which might otherwise be lost in misunderstanding.

At its best, varna represents society as a collection of individuals with different aspirations, all evolving toward the one supreme goal of life, Self-realization. Life is evolving in this direction, it says in effect, yet not everyone desires the goal. People desire various things in life, according to their dominant gunas. Each, therefore, is born into the class where those accumulated personal desires can be fulfilled and the lessons of karma learned.

In other words, this ideal society is based on the assumption that life’s highest activity is not the pursuit of wealth or power but renunciation. Most people have other goals, and they lead their lives accordingly; yet everybody reveres renunciation as the highest of ideals, and everybody expects the brahmin to live up to this ideal too. So arose a kind of spiritual noblesse oblige. In ancient India, the kshatriya had a very demanding code of honor, somewhat like the codes of chivalry in the West. A warrior was expected never to take unfair advantage of an enemy, not even to save his own life; and I have mentioned that he was expected never to turn his back in battle, not against any odds. If he gave his word, he was bound to it; and so on. Yet he was permitted the very human failings of the passions, on which the brahmin was expected to have turned his back.

In my granny’s eyes, the same high standards apply to everyone who tries to lead the spiritual life, even ordinary people like you and me. This is a great responsibility. After we have been meditating for some time, though they may not say so, those who live and work with us develop certain expectations. If we burst out in anger, they feel surprised: even if everybody else gets angry daily, they expect something more of us. In a quiet way, our struggle to transform ourselves represents a very hopeful capacity in every human being; when we slip, they feel somehow that we have let them down. The more a person is capable of, my granny would say, the greater the responsibility to live up to those capacities.

The word brahmin means literally one who aspires to realize Brahman. The Buddha tells us what this means:

Him I call a brahmin

Who is never angry,

Never causes harm to others

Even when he is harmed by them.

Him I call a brahmin

Who clings not to pleasure. . . .

Who does not hurt others

With unkind acts, words, or thoughts.

Anyone who bases his or her life on these ideals, the Buddha is saying, is a brahmin, whatever the circumstances of his birth or the conditioning of her personality. Even a person who is selfish, or greedy, or full of anger or fear, can rise from tamas through rajas to sattva, and eventually pass beyond even the conditioning of sattva to attain Self-realization.

That is the power of meditation; do you see the sheer immensity of it? I am not speaking figuratively at all. We talk about the power of the sun, so immense that we can grasp it only when someone says that the sun converts billions of tons of hydrogen into helium every second and still has enough to go on burning for billions of years; then something sinks in, and still we have only a clue. It is the same with meditation. The Gita tells us that all our anger, all our fear, all our greed can be transformed into pure love, a force that will go on working even after we shed this physical body: we can’t grasp it, but we know the power of these negative forces, which make us act in ways we do not choose; we know the terrible power such forces can have over whole societies; and we have the example of Gandhi, a little man of our own times, who managed to transform these awesome forces into a love that has altered history. Just as hydrogen can be transformed into helium, self-will can be transformed into love. The most angry person on earth can become the most loving; the most fearful can become the most fearless; the weakest can become the strongest. All this is the power of meditation.

SRI KRISHNA: 45. By devotion to one’s own particular duty, everyone can attain perfection. Let me tell you how.

46. By performing work selflessly, a person worships the Creator who dwells in every creature. Such worship brings that person to fulfillment.

47. It is better to perform one’s own duties imperfectly than to master the duties of another. By fulfilling the obligations he is born with, a person never comes to grief.

48. No one should abandon duties because he sees defects in them. Every action, every activity, is surrounded by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke.

It is in our work and our relationships that we contribute to the rest of the world. It is not enough, therefore, to make progress in meditation; we also have to be sure that we share the fruits of meditation with those we work and live with, primarily through our personal example. This is the only way in which our personal karma can be undone. After all, Sri Krishna asks drily, if we don’t work out our own karma, who is going to do it for us? Nothing is more important.

Sri Krishna is trying to make it clear here that how we work is as important as what we do. Spiritual values are not so much taught as caught, from the lives of those who embody them. Your job may be nothing more glamorous than janitor in a hospital, but if you are practicing sadhana sincerely, you will be contributing to other people’s lives, even though you may not see it happening. These are spiritual laws. I have friends who have come back from a stay in the hospital and told me that the person who gave them most support and cheerful encouragement was an aide who was particularly thoughtful, or the night nurse who always had a smile and something cheerful to say.

Every one of us can enrich his sadhana, improve her contribution to the world, by giving the utmost concentration to the job at hand in a spirit of detachment. Both these are necessary: concentration and detachment. When they are present together, it is enough to go on giving our best in fulfilling the responsibilities with which we are entrusted. As sadhana deepens, new opportunities will open up to suit our growing needs and capacities.

“Duties” here is karma again, and the word gives some valuable clues. We don’t have to envy others because the jobs they do seem to be more prestigious or creative, or because other people seem to have more skill; we are where we are, doing what we are doing, because we have something to learn from that particular context. Our karma – what we have thought, done, and desired – brought us to that job and to those co-workers, because this is just the situation to work out the mistakes we made in dealing with others in the past. As that karma is worked out, we grow. Soon we may need a new context to work in, new people, new challenges, greater opportunities for service.

Last, Sri Krishna reminds us gently, is there any job that is one hundred percent perfect? Is there any position where you do only what you think you should, where your employer gives you meditation hours and mantram breaks and allows you to tell him how to conduct his business according to your interpretation of the eternal verities? Every job has its requirements that are not ours. Very few jobs are pure. No occupation is free from conflict; no task guarantees to protect us from stressful situations or from people with different views. And no job is free from drudgery; every line of work has a certain amount of routine. Sri Krishna says, Don’t ask if you like the work, if it is creative, if it always offers something new. Ask if you are part of work that benefits people. If it does, give it your best attention. In that spirit every beneficial job can become a spiritual offering.

SRI KRISHNA: 49. He who is free from selfish attachments, who has mastered his senses and passions, acts not, but is acted through by the Lord.

50. Listen to me now, Arjuna, how one who has become an instrument in the hands of the Lord attains Brahman, the supreme consummation of wisdom.

These verses begin Sri Krishna’s last great description of the man or woman who has attained Self-realization – one of the most memorable passages in the Gita, which I highly recommend for use in meditation.

What does it mean to become “an instrument in the hands of the Lord”? One explanation is that we become an instrument of our own Self, no longer moved by emotional and physical conditioning but motivated solely by love. To do this, we have to quiet the mind completely, for the mind is the place where conditioning lives – in fact, the mind is our conditioning. We live our lives within the narrow confines of the mind, never suspecting that there is anywhere else to live. But beyond the mind is a much vaster place, the Self, which mystics call the land of love, our soul’s true home.

To find our Self, then, we have to look somewhere other than our feelings and opinions. No idea could be more confusing today. If we are not what we feel and think, what can we be? This confusion is compounded by misunderstandings about the word love. We are told that our nature is love; but isn’t love a feeling, the most powerful of human emotions? The mystics say no: it is a state of being, an infinite force, the draw of unity. Our emotional states – liking, disliking, hoping, fearing, and so on – cover our native state of love. When the mind is completely still, we become love itself: we live in love; love is the spring of all our action.

No one can give an eyewitness account of the land beyond the mind, but all of us have a passionate nostalgia for it deep in our hearts. As we go deeper in meditation we begin to feel we are exiles here, tourists, wandering about and saying as tourists do, “Back home . . .” This world of change is not our native place. When we sense this and nostalgia begins to haunt us, all the thousand and one desires of the mind start to merge in the desire to return home. It is in this unification of desires that the mind is slowly dissolved.

The mind is a tumultuous place, a riot of thoughts; there are demonstrations on every side. It’s very much like Berkeley used to be in the sixties. Today people sometimes ask me in awe, “You mean you were there during the Free Speech Movement? You went to Vietnam Day, got tear gas in your eyes, watched the troop caravans roll down the streets to protect People’s Park from the people?” I reply, “Of course. For a while I lived right off Telegraph Avenue.” But that was nothing. If you really want to see where the action is, look inside the mind: restaurants, movies, street theater, record stores, booksellers, craftspeople, all kinds of sights, sounds, smells, and hits. Whatever you want, you can get it from a vendor on Mind Street.

We don’t know our own mind. In fairness, I have to admit that it is an extremely interesting place to learn to know. Nowhere on earth is more fascinating. But the better you get to know the mind, the more you will feel out of place there. Like so many dropouts from the sixties, you get tired of the Avenue. When every day is a demonstration, you know, after a while you get tired of demonstrations. You get tired of sampling the smorgasbord of sensations. “It’s not like the old days,” you tell your friends. “Maybe we should move to Mendocino.” And at last comes a great desire to leave this town forever. Like a traveler who grows weary of foreign lands, like an expatriate who has been away too long, you get detachment from the once-enticing sights and sounds and think more and more of going home.

The mind is not stilled forcibly. You part with it over a long, long period, with good will. But when in the end it falls away from the horizon, you shed no tears. This was the source of all your turmoil, the distorter of your vision, the disrupter of your relationships. It does not need your sympathy. We feel sorry for the mind only as long as we identify with it. Once we see we are not the mind, we mourn its passing no more than we would mourn an old TV set when it blows its last transistor.

Simply to hear about men and women who have done this is inspiring. Then we know that it can be done; we can see the results in the glory of their lives. Afterward, they tell us, there is no movement in the mind. Therefore there is no anger, no fear, no greed, no separateness. When you attain this state, all sorrow falls away.

In the deeper stages of meditation, there are moments when the mind puts up a little sign: “Back in Two Minutes.” Mr. Mind gets up, puts on his hat, and steps out for a turn around the block, taking his staff of problems with him. While they are gone, things are so blissful you can’t help saying, “This is heaven!” It is. In those two minutes all your problems are temporarily suspended. Not solved, of course; they will return when the mind starts up again. But for two minutes you have a flash of heaven here on earth, and an intense nostalgia wells up in your heart. “That’s where I belong!” you exclaim. “That’s where I come from! Here’s my passport; remember? That’s what it says.” And you wonder, “Why am I wandering around here?”

In this sense we are all searching from door to door to find our home. We knock at the house of Pleasure, but when she answers, her old man, Depression, is right there by her side. Knock at the next door and out comes Profit. “Is this home?” we ask. “Can’t say,” he replies. “But I can offer you a hot deal on some unsecured notes. Got a pen?” “We’re not looking for a deal,” we tell him. “We’re trying to find our way home.” He shuts the door, and we realize he has kept our pen. But it could be worse: if we go inside, pleasure or profit can slam the door and lock us in. That is perhaps the greatest tragedy in the latter part of life, when habits become rigid and we lose the will, the initiative, and the imagination to extricate ourselves from the wrong place. We pretend we have just what we wanted: we hang pictures on the wall, cultivate some African violets, buy a lacquered wooden sign from the five-and-ten that says, “No place like home!” But I don’t think the heart is fooled. When we feel frustrated, insecure, not at peace with ourselves or others, we are admitting to ourselves, “This isn’t home. I want to be fooled, but I’m really an alien here.”

When this realization comes, you may get even more restless. You might leave your old haunts and habits and go to New Orleans for a while, Paris, Molokai, Kathmandu. You’re looking for your own place, which is a sure sign that you are not where you belong. It’s as if you are always in somebody else’s house: the tables are all the wrong height, you reach for the soap and find your hand in the ashtray; everything is different, everything is off. Where you expect love you find hatred, where you expect appreciation you get deprecation, where you expect security you find nothing. The world is topsy-turvy, just the opposite of what it appears.

The Sanskrit word for this is Maya: the illusion of separateness, personified as the cosmic magician who has made the world the way it seems. “Presto!” She takes reality, turns it into a big jigsaw puzzle, and throws the pieces into the air. Then she challenges us. “Hey, Gale! Come on, John! Who can put these back together?” That is what we have come into life to do. We get hold of a few pieces and put them together our own way. “That’s reality,” we explain. It’s a modern work of art: two eyes inside an ear, say, on top of the neck of a giraffe. Maya laughs and laughs.

Maya’s magic works with two wands, tamas and rajas. With tamas she covers up the Self – our home, our native state. She wraps it in such a dense blanket of unconsciousness that we cannot see inside. Then with rajas she throws out all the bright, dazzling pieces of this world-­puzzle before our eyes. We cannot put this puzzle together by searching through the pieces of life outside us. We have to turn inward, have to put the pieces of ourselves together inside. When we have made ourselves whole, we see the world as whole; we see life as it really is. All the pieces of life fall into their proper places. Then, when we act, it is not as a separate fragment of life. We act in accordance with the cosmic forces that hold the world together – unity, truth, love – and all our actions are imbued with their power. We seem to act, but it would be more accurate to say that these cosmic forces act through us: or, as the Gita puts it, that we are “acted through by the Lord.” “From age to age,” Sri Krishna says earlier, “whenever violence threatens to engulf the world, I come to life in a human heart” – in Gandhi, St. Francis, St. Teresa, Mira – “to help show the world a way out of darkness into light.” In a small way this can happen to any one of us, if we empty ourselves of ourselves: we can become “an instrument in the hands of the Lord,” an instrument of his peace.

SRI KRISHNA: 51–52. Unerring in his discrimination, sovereign of his senses and passions, free from the clamor of likes and dislikes, he leads a simple, self-reliant life based on meditation, using his speech, body, and mind to serve the Lord of Love.

There are four obstacles to realizing the Self: obsessive identification with the body and senses, the mind, the intellect, and the ego. These verses describe what results when these obstacles are overcome.

We can think of these as layers covering the Self, which we have to learn to peel away as easily as a pullover. The sensory level is the outermost region of personality, nearest to the physical level. Next comes the mind, our emotions and feelings. After that comes the intellect, our judgments and opinions; and beyond that, nearest to the Self, comes the domain of the ego, the sense of ‘I.’ All our attachment to the satisfactions of these regions has to be left behind level by level in our inward search for the Self.

In leaving these attachments behind, nothing is lost. The senses do not atrophy; they become vital, vibrant, responsive, and obedient. The mind becomes calm and the intellect lucid and penetrating, because there is no longer any selfish attachment to agitate the mind and cloud judgment. Nothing is lost, and everything is gained. That is why John of the Cross says so cryptically, “If you would possess everything, desire to possess nothing.”

We begin to enjoy everything by loosening our attachment to the senses. This, of course, runs counter to the current of our times, which urges us all to cultivate sensory attachments as the key to happiness. Many years ago, if a waiter asked what you would like for dessert, he might offer three or four choices, one of which would be ice cream – not chocolate ice cream or vanilla, just ice cream. You got what they had. Today, thanks to modern technology and our pursuit of pleasure, a waiter can show you a board with one hundred thirty-seven flavors. You have to study the combinations for a quarter of an hour to make a serious selection: “Do I want chocolate? If I do, should it be mixed or straight? For straight chocolate there is Dutch, milk chocolate, bittersweet, and fudge; if I want it mixed, should I get rocky road, fudge swirl, mocha, or chocolate mint?” The next time I ask for Dutch chocolate ice cream, I am afraid the clerk will stare at me as if I had stepped out of a time machine. “You can’t just say ‘Dutch chocolate’! What kind of Dutch chocolate? Utrecht? Amsterdam? Rotterdam Rich?” When you are going constantly after sensations, your world fills up with sensations. That is what being a connoisseur often means.

The trouble with refining and extending the senses this way is that it moves us away from the center of our personality. At first the senses are only a few yards off; they know to whom they belong. Then they go as far as the corner: they can still keep us in view, but they are forgetting to look. They wander off after some promising sensation until finally, like little children, they are out of sight and far away. If you find them on the street corner and ask, “To whom do you belong?” they do not know; they have been cut off from their real personality. In other words, we are actually living in our senses, identifying with them completely. This is the beginning of alienation and confusion.

Meditation begins to recall the prana that has been caught in the senses. In this way we draw them closer and closer again, until they start to remember: “Oh, yeah, I belong to Steve!” They form working relationships with their boss again, stray less, come back when they are called. One sign of this is that the senses become clear and strong. Another sign is a feeling of deepening security, of an intimate, comfortable relationship with our own selves.

Learning to do this is a matter of reversing our conditioning. Tastes, for example, are not dictated by our genes; they are habits we acquire through practice. The first time the taste buds get something pleasant, there is only a mild response; not much prana is vested there. But the next time they perk up and say, “Hmm.” After that they keep a little extra prana ready for enjoying, and the next time the sensation comes along, they smack their lips and exclaim in satisfaction, “Ahh!” We can decondition ourselves in the same way. The first time we have to give up something we crave, the senses roar in protest. The second time, they mutter in resignation. And the third time they say “Ahh!” again: they have got the taste of freedom.

Meditation can be described as a kind of spiritual screwdriver, intended for loosening identification with the body. Before you can use a screwdriver, of course, you have to locate the screw, and most of us do not know where the screws to the body are. There are five: the senses, which we have grown used to tightening at every opportunity. Finally they get tightened down so hard that something breaks; then we wonder why we feel tense. In meditation you can slowly get your screwdriver onto each screw, fit it carefully into the slot, and begin to loosen up your mind. You cannot twist the senses out at once, as “instant mysticism” claims. You go on loosening gently for a long, long time, until finally the senses become so responsive that you can slip them in and out without effort.

All the five senses can be unscrewed like this through meditation. When there is no tightness in the senses, no clamor from them, tension is gone. Then the question of resisting a sensory temptation – to steal into the kitchen at midnight, for example, and eat up all the cookies – does not even arise. No resistance or effort is necessary. The cookies are in the kitchen, you are here in your bed; where is the conflict? This is our natural state. Far from it taking the joy out of life, joy is exactly what we gain.

Below the level of the senses is the mind. The senses draw their sustenance, their prana, from the mind: when it relaxes, the senses relax; when it gets tense, the senses are stimulated, and so are the vital organs. Everything takes its cue from the mind. To attain real physical health and a resilient nervous system, therefore, it is not enough to work on the body; you have to train the mind to be calm and kind. As the mind relaxes in meditation, conflicts are resolved, turmoil is quieted, and the senses grow clear and alert.

Detachment from your emotions is important even to survive in today’s world of stress, but it is essential for anyone who wants to try to do some good in the world. Only a detached person can jump into a crisis and help; an attached person just gets sucked in. Many years ago, when I was traveling on a train in India, a fight broke out between two people in my compartment. One of the onlookers was also from Kerala, and I have to tell you that people from Kerala have a reputation throughout India for being what you call feisty. This man watched the quarrel turn into a fight, and as he watched he became more and more excited. Finally he lost his self-control and jumped to his feet. “I don’t care who’s right or wrong,” he exclaimed to me in Malayalam. “I just want to join in!” That is exactly what happens with strong attachments.

Detachment from the mind brings the capacity to sit back and not act automatically on every emotion that comes along. I can illustrate this from a little incident last week, when I was returning from Berkeley late at night and had to wait at a railroad crossing while a long freight train rattled by. It was a familiar sight which I still enjoy: the crossing gates were down, red lights were flashing, and the bell kept ringing even after the caboose had passed to make sure that we didn’t drive onto the tracks before they were clear.

I could easily imagine a similar scene within the mind, perhaps hundreds of times each day. When you come to a samskara crossing, if you know you are not your mind, you have all these safeguards: gates, bells, lights, even a brakeman with a red warning lantern. But if you identify with your mind, you have nothing. People who get angry easily, or who frequently feel insecure or greedy over people or things, have no bell or gates at their mental crossings and no brake on their minds. When a samskara is steaming down, they hurtle forward at a hundred miles per hour, and the samskara scoops them up on the cowcatcher and drops them off at the other end of the line.

On the other hand, when you get some detachment from your mind, you can look on your emotions with a kind of creative aloofness and a sense of mastery. For a long time, of course, the trains will still come. But when a big one, Santa Fe Anger, roars into view, you will hear the bell and see the red lights flashing long before it reaches the crossing, giving you plenty of time to stop. Then you can sit back, turn off the engine to save fuel, loosen your seat belt, and watch the piggyback resentments and rusty hostilities pass one by one; there is no connection with you at all. Your engine is turned off, the hand brake is set, and you are safe – in the midst of tremendous anger, fear, or lust, which no longer have any power over you. Then you ask yourself in wonder, “Why did I always get caught in those accidents?” There is no need. After all, no law says that when you see a train, you have to lie down on the tracks.

SRI KRISHNA: 53. Free from self-will, aggressiveness, arrogance, and the lust to possess people or things, he is at peace with himself and others and enters into the unitive state.

Even in our most intimate relationships, each of us with some self-knowledge would have to admit that we live largely in private worlds. It is a devastating admission. Two people may say honestly that they love each other, that they can’t get on without each other, yet each lives in a private mental apartment with its own particular furniture – memories, expectations, hopes, fears, desires, prejudices – that no one else in the world has seen. Even that person knows very little of it. “Judge not,” says Jesus, “that ye be not judged.” We should never criticize another person; we haven’t entered the apartment where he or she lives. In the best of close relationships – between man and woman, parent and child, friend and friend – all we can usually do is stand on tiptoe and peek in through a window to see the furniture in the front room. Only with someone like Gandhiji do we encounter an open world, where anybody can walk in and see how he lives, how he thinks, what his motivation is. That is the world of love.

When you love one person, while there is a selfless element, it is good to remember that by the very fact of saying “one,” we are limiting our love physically. A good part of a one-to-one relationship is physical. Over and over, Sri Krishna has warned us of the danger of physical relationships: like all physical things, it is their nature to change. Desires are transients; they can never make permanent tenants. They will come in the morning and say, “We’re going to stay here all the time. We’ll sign a ten-year lease. When you go on vacation we’ll still be here to look after the house and water your African violets.” And we believe them. “Long lease,” we say. The following Sunday morning we go over to invite them for brunch: the bed hasn’t been slept in, the African violets are dry, the cats are mewing, and the desires have gone. Every sensory desire is like that: as long as we don’t have it, we want it; as soon as we get it, we don’t want it any more – at least, not for a while, not until the desire arises again in a slightly different form. The Buddha’s description is perfect: “Not having what you want is suffering; having what you do not want is suffering.”

Selfish desire stirs up the mind, and any movement in the mind, even what we call pleasant excitement, lessens joy, undermines security, and moves us a little further away from the Self. It is pleasant, granted. The Gita does not say that pleasure is painful. It merely adds that pleasure comes and goes: and that when it goes, it leaves deprivation, frustration, and depression. Pleasure and pain are not separate; they are Siamese twins. If you want the one, you get both.

My granny had her own ways of opening my eyes to this. “Sri Krishna doesn’t say not to go after pleasure,” she would begin.

“He doesn’t? Granny, he’s the right teacher for me!”

“He says, ‘If you want to go after pleasure, go ahead.’ ”

I couldn’t believe my ears. That is when I fell in love with the Bhagavad Gita, which really knew the way to a boy’s heart.

“But,” Granny continued, “he says if you go after pleasure, you shouldn’t cry if you meet pain along the way.”

Later – much later – I had opportunities to talk to people who had gone after pleasure systematically. Those with some self-knowledge confided to me candidly, “I had the money, I had the leisure, and I went after everything I enjoyed most. And mostly I got what I wanted. But I could never make it last, and the more I tried, the less I seemed to get. In fact, many of the same things that I sought for pleasure actually led me into sorrow.”

I needed a long, long period of experimentation to learn this – many years of making the same kind of mistakes that every human being makes. When finally I caught on, I went to my granny and said, “Guess what! You know what you were telling me all those years ago about pleasure? I found out you were right.” I felt I would burst with love when she put her hand on my head and replied simply, “You’re a bright boy.” Never a word about why it should have taken so long. Some people never learn; that’s what she was trying to say. So don’t get depressed or distraught if it takes you years to make this discovery, as it has taken almost every spiritual aspirant East and West. But don’t go placing yourself in situations where desires can stir you up; it will impede your spiritual growth. Stirring brings up all the sediments of the mind from past experiences, all sorts of emotionally charged memories both pleasant and unpleasant, and it will take a long time for them to settle down again.

There is joy, great joy, in going against strong personal attachments for the sake of a higher goal. There is immense satisfaction in knowing that you are making a contribution to the world in which you live. “This is the true joy in life,” says Shaw:

the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; . . . the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

That is rather strong language, but it puts the glory of renunciation into terms that can stir us all. Instead of “being a force of Nature” with a capital N, of course, the Gita talks of becoming an instrument in the hands of the Lord; but that is the only difference. Shaw is choosing his words very carefully. A selfless life is a force. Its contribution does not die; it continues in the stream of consciousness.

Translated into orthodox language, this is why our lives are said to belong not to ourselves but to the Lord. I was not a particularly devotional boy, but I found this a useful, personal reminder in my younger days, when I sometimes felt tempted to do something which, though not harmful, was not exactly for the benefit of all. When this motivation sinks deep, you will find it easy to go against self-will, just as a mother finds it easy to miss a movie or a few hours’ sleep for the sake of her child. It is when you spend your time dwelling on yourself, unprepared to sit back and look at the needs of a larger world, that motivation fails.

We can look at this from another perspective: that of prana. To enjoy life completely, prana has to be consolidated, harnessed, and conserved, because this is the very power of enjoyment.

Farmers in this country, I understand, often have their own gas tanks; they cannot afford to be dependent on an outside source. Similarly, every one of us has a personal tank of prana in reserve. There is no electric pump for this tank, only a manual pump with very stiff action, which we have to prime for a long time before we can bring prana reserves up where they can be used. But the tank is there. Just as a baby is protected in the mother’s womb, the Upanishads say, our prana reserves are protected against our own mistakes. We can squander our personal prana on sensory pleasures, but those deeper reserves cannot be drawn on until we take to meditation. That is why a human being can turn toward a higher goal, choose a higher path, at any time; the capacity is never lost.

However, like gasoline, prana is dangerously flammable. Just as gas stations post signs warning us not to smoke around the pumps, the sign on our reserve prana tank says “Danger! No Self-will.” Self-will is so incendiary that it can destroy not only us but our home and even our community, when prana intended for spiritual growth is ignited for selfish ends.

Prana can be understood as the capacity of the will to govern the senses and passions and to resolve conflicts, not only within personality but between oneself and others. This is a very creative faculty, and it is not coincidental that prana is closely connected with sex. In spiritual psychology, sex is not a physical desire. It is creative energy, the deep yearning for complete Self-integration; what we call sex is simply its potent, most physical expression. The more we think of ourselves as physical creatures, the more we feel compelled to satisfy this yearning in physical ways. But its roots go deep into the mind, and its highest purpose is to provide the power for realizing the Self.

I always try to make it clear that sex has a beautiful, natural place in a completely loyal and loving relationship, where it expresses the mutual desire of two people for lasting union. But even there, I would say, sex is not merely physical; it is a force. When you begin to master physical desires for the sake of moving closer to someone you love, you will find that your relationship gains immensely in tenderness, security, depth, and joy. Giving up something for a person you love, learning to change habits in yourself which brought that person sorrow, working shoulder to shoulder in a selfless cause: all these bring a lasting sense of joy to which no sensory pleasure, however acute, can be compared. This does not rule out any of life’s innocent enjoyments; it merely reminds us that we are here for something vastly higher.

Strong sexual desires, therefore, are a sign that prana is plentiful. This is the capital of vitality, and a man or woman with strong desires is a prana millionaire in the making. I used to say this often in Berkeley in the early days, and it was very popular. But I realized later that I was occasionally being misunderstood. There were people who heard that if they had strong sexual desires, they could go far on the spiritual path; so they thought it might be helpful to cultivate those desires – which, if I may say so, is scarcely necessary. Not only that, it is as dangerous as smoking next to a petrol tank. If a person with strong physical passions of any kind can learn to harness them, they will provide a lot of power for spiritual growth. But if they are not harnessed, there is no doubt that these passions will harness us. They will slip a bit into our mouth, fasten on a bridle, climb on our back, and ride us into situations where we can satisfy those desires, whatever the cost to others and to ourselves. So on the one hand, don’t ever think negatively about yourself if you have passions too strong to be easily harnessed: they are power rising, power that you will need for spiritual growth. But remember too that this power has to be transformed – through selfless work and patient, tender, selfless personal relations.

Now and then, I should add, someone comes to me and complains, “I don’t have strong sexual desires. Does that mean I don’t have enough prana to make it to the goal?” Self-will, I assure them, makes a more than adequate substitute. The Gita has something for everybody.

The technical name for these prana reserves is kundalini – evolutionary energy. You can imagine kundalini as a tremendous, tightly-coiled spring, a coil of vitality that has been twisted and compressed a million times in the course of evolution. To release the energy packed into this spring you have to start uncoiling it with your own hands, which is an almost impossible task. When someone tells me, “I’m not making any progress. Thoughts of sex haunt me continuously,” I reply, “The spring has been coiled for millennia, with all the power of evolution behind it. Now you’re trying to uncoil it with your bare hands, and you want it to happen overnight?”

Finally, after many years of sincere sadhana, the great day comes when you become aware that kundalini is uncoiling. This awareness usually comes in sleep – not really in the dreaming state, though mystics often describe the experience as a dream, but in what the Upanishads call dreamless sleep – the deepest state of ordinary consciousness, where the mind-process rests and only a veil of the unconscious mind separates us from the Self. In that state you can peek behind the conscious mind and see, even feel, the spring uncoiling just a little. This brings a strange sense of exhilaration, but at the same time, it means that even bigger challenges are coming. Immense amounts of power are being released into your life, and you have to be very vigilant to see that they are used in selfless work.

Imagine trying to get a powerful spring to uncoil. You have opened it up a little, but the tension is tremendous; it keeps straining to snap back to its original state. Not only do you have to go on trying to make it uncoil further, you have to hang on continuously just to keep it from coiling back up again. If you lose your vigilance, even for a moment, the spring may snap back and you will have to start all over. These are terribly difficult times. The fatigue and exhaustion this effort brings is much more than physical. It cannot be borne without a loving teacher, as I can testify from my own experience. The struggle continues even when you go to sleep, you see. How long can you hold on? There are limits to everybody’s personal will, everybody’s personal endurance. But when you have been doing your utmost for probably many years, just when you think that you cannot hold on any longer, your teacher may come and release the spring one turn with a deft touch. Then you know that as long as you go on trying, your personal will is allied with a much deeper will that cannot be broken.

When our ashram children were small I used to see them riding behind the wheel of the family car, seated on a parent’s lap and driving very slowly around the block. The mother or father seemed to steer effortlessly, where the child had to pull on the wheel as hard as he could to avoid running into a tree. A good spiritual teacher has the same light touch. When you are doing everything possible to get yourself off the shoulder of the road and into an attractive ditch, he can keep you going in the right direction with a touch on the wheel so deft that you may not even notice it.

We have a long drainage ditch that runs alongside our access road, hidden from view much of the year by the high grass. It looks like a very commonplace ditch, but it has witnessed great adventures. It has seen proud men fall and brave women panic, and watched sleek Cadillacs rescued without ceremony by a lowly tractor. Accidents like these can happen in sadhana too, and this is one of the most serious dangers in the latter stage of meditation. The mind is so powerful that anybody who loses vigilance can end up in a ditch, and it is not enough to be hauled out. The body cannot afford to lose the vitality it needs to face these crises; the nervous system cannot afford to lose resilience. Ultimately, all the disciplines we practice from the earliest days of meditation are meant for keeping us alert and in control in these critical stages, with both hands on the wheel.

I can give you a shining hope to look forward to. As you near the end of the journey, weeks and months will pass when you have been doing your best continuously to get kundalini to uncoil. You go to sleep exhausted, sure that nothing will ever happen, and while you are in dreamless sleep the Lord comes leisurely and gives the spring an expert touch. One turn of kundalini uncoils with a whiplash whirl so powerful that it jolts your whole body; every cell feels the impact. These are very difficult experiences for the body to pass through, for it is channeling forces much greater than a human being is ordinarily able to bear. But even while your body feels the stress of it, your consciousness is flooded with joy.

SRI KRISHNA: 54. United with the Lord, ever joyful, beyond the reach of self-will and sorrow, he serves me in every living creature and attains supreme devotion to me.

55. By loving me he shares in my glory and enters into my boundless being.

56. All his acts are performed in my service, and through my grace he wins eternal life.

This promise of eternal life is the essence of the mystics’ message everywhere. It is not rhetoric, but a literal statement of fact.

In the West the study of death is considered eschatological, the study of “last things.” In Hinduism, however, death is like a gate. Just north of the Golden Gate Bridge is a tunnel called the Rainbow Tunnel, through which Highway 101 passes on its way to and from San Francisco – four lanes in, four lanes out. The gate of life and death is like that: coming from one direction we are born; passing in the other we die.

Now, the other day on the way to San Francisco I looked up and saw a helicopter flying over; it didn’t have to pass through the tunnel at all. That is what you can do once you attain samadhi: you can go through that tunnel without any break in consciousness; and you can come back again, which is an experience beyond what words can convey. With a person who is dying, you can go down that road with him almost to the end and relieve much of the burden of the fear of death.

At the mouth of this tunnel, the threshold of individual awareness, you understand what death means: the conscious jiva, the separate personality, is withdrawn completely into the fathomless depths of the unconscious. Words are terribly elusive here, and what I mean by “the unconscious” is not quite what most psychologists mean. But I know of no better word in English. This is a deep stratum of undivided, universal consciousness underlying the individual personality, which none of us is ordinarily able to enter as a conscious individual. When you can reach this level in your meditation, you are withdrawing conscious awareness into the depths of the unconscious – waking up in the unconscious, if you like. This is parallel to what takes place in dying, but in meditation it is done intentionally, in full awareness. Then you know that death is not the end of the story: if it were, there would be no awareness in that state; you would not be able to return to tell the tale.

On this seabed of consciousness there is no passage of time, no past or future, because there is nobody to think about past or future. To experience time, you have to have a mind that can think of past and future, and at that level the mind-process is completely still. For the same reason, nothing “happens” in this state; things can happen only where there is time. I have to fall back on the language of traditional mysticism and say this is pure being. This is how mystics come up with those answers that drive logicians to tear out their hair. If you ask me, “Is there such a thing as time?” I would have to answer, “There is, and then again there isn’t.” The Buddha used to smile at such questions and say nothing, because any answer would be misleading.

You can see why it is not possible to enter such a state if the mind is divided. In the Hindu tradition they say that if even a single ray of desire slips away from the focus of your meditation, you cannot enter samadhi. When Gandhi says that this requires the patience of a man trying to empty the sea with a blade of grass, I can attest to it with my own experience. You can be right on the threshold, even see the door opening, but you will not be able to go in; that slight stray desire will hold you back. I had a good deal of patience even in those days, and I was prepared to go on trying as long as might be required. But my intellect, which was well trained to look at things objectively, surveyed the situation I was in and reported, “That’s it, boss. You’ve gone as far as you can go.” That brought me immense grief. I remembered the moment in Sri Ramakrishna’s sadhana when he takes up a sword, falls at the feet of the Divine Mother, and cries out in the desperation of love, “If you don’t reveal yourself to me, I’ll put an end to this body!” That is the stage I am referring to. It is as if you have finally managed to open the door an inch or two, so that you can catch a glimpse of what is on the other side, but no amount of effort can open it wider so you can slip through. There is an essential paradox: how can the ego throw itself out? It’s like trying to lift yourself by your own bootstraps.

This is where the teacher comes to your rescue. Except for my teacher, I can tell you candidly that the door to samadhi would never have opened for me: I had one foot inside, but I could not have gone further through my own personal effort.

Once you can go in and out of that door freely, however, you can travel with a dying person across the threshold of life and death, from the far side of which no separate individual can return in this same life. If the dying person has a deep bond of love for you, that love is a channel through which you can communicate your personal realization: that death is not the end of the story but only a door, a gate, a bridge, through which we pass to rest a while before we come back to pick up our evolution where we left off. To somebody who understands this, death loses its terrors. There may even be a certain eagerness to take on a new body and start afresh.

SRI KRISHNA: 57. Make every act an offering to me; regard me as your only protector. Make every thought an offering to me; meditate on me always.

Sri Krishna is coming to the end of his instruction to Arjuna. Now he is saying over and over again in different ways, “From now on, let there be no more reservations or qualifications in your mind. Let your pledge be ‘Everything I have.’ ”

This is no more than we should expect from love. I remember a popular singer’s perceptive remark: “I love to fall in love, but I know it will only last six months.” When personal relationships are based on physical attraction, I think six months is an optimistic estimate. But what Sri Krishna says, what the Buddha says, what Jesus says, is very different: “You can be in love always – when you can love me with all your heart, all your mind, all your spirit, and all your strength.”

People sometimes ask, “What does it mean to remember the Lord always?” That is a fair question, for this is not an intellectual recollection. One way to answer is to say what it means not to remember: anger, hostility, resentment, irritation, impatience, all these and a hundred other unpleasant states of mind. When you remember God in your heart, unkindness cannot arise, because God is love.

I wish you could see through my eyes the little quarrels I witness every day – in people’s homes, on the bus, in stores and restaurants. They look so ridiculous when you remember how little time we have here, even those of us who are young, and how much remains to do to attain the goal. To the mystic, a whole lifetime consists of evanescent days, a garland of nows that are gone too soon. There is no time to quarrel, no time to be selfish, no time to waste on any activity that does not take us closer to the goal.

This does not rule out any of the innocent joys of life. I always remind people to look at my own example. Though I am only a mini-mystic, through the grace of my teacher I now live in a state where I never forget Sri Krishna; even in my sleep I am aware of him always. Yet anyone should be able to see that I enjoy life to the fullest. I eat good food; I have many rich, lasting relationships; I enjoy long walks on the beach every day; I read widely; I go to movies and concerts and the theater regularly. I haven’t given up anything of enjoyment that I value. But I don’t live for the enjoyment of these things; that is the point. I enjoy life because I live for the joy of others, and everything I do is arranged around that one overriding priority.

I want you to know that reordering my priorities was as difficult for me as it is for everyone else. Nothing less is required than the singleminded dedication with which an artist pursues his art, and although I had this capacity even in high school, I gave my devotion to other goals. In those days I could not imagine living in a world without literature, music, sports and games, and all the other amenities I loved. Only after I turned to meditation did I begin to see that if I wanted to give all my love to Sri Krishna, I would have to withdraw the love that was caught in these harmless pleasures. It wasn’t that they were harmful in themselves, you see, only that they had caught and held my love.

It was the hardest struggle for me to detach myself from these pursuits. For a long time I did not think I would be able to do it, and my intellect kept asking, “Is this really necessary? After all, where’s the harm in these aesthetic delights?” I began to free myself from attachment to these innocent pleasures the day I realized that even if I became a great poet and won the Nobel Prize, I would still die unfulfilled. After that, everything in the arts became a distraction. Now nothing is a distraction; I can enjoy all these things in freedom. At the outset, renouncing them seemed like a loss; today I can see it has been an infinite gain.

This is not abandon. “Make every act an offering to me” means the abandonment of self-will, not of self-control. It is very important on the spiritual path not to let yourself be coaxed out of the driver’s seat, especially during meditation. You are tapping resources below the surface level of awareness, and the unconscious has powerful forces which can take the wheel without your knowledge.

It requires many years of strenuous training to learn to stay in the driver’s seat always. Much later, tremendous insights may come which will sweep you up out of yourself miles high in consciousness. I can give you a thrilling example from the life of St. Teresa of Ávila. She was absorbed in contemplation, she relates, when suddenly she felt as if a great eagle had swooped down on her and lifted her high in the air, so that she felt she had left her body behind. “Yet I was not afraid,” she says, “because of my love.” Teresa had many such experiences, yet this great genius possessed such control that when the Lord swept her up like this while she was frying an egg, her nuns tell us that her hand never lost its grip on the skillet! That is my granny’s way too, and it can save an aspirant from many pitfalls.

If the mind has been allowed to swing wildly when a dramatic experience comes, however, that very abandon can close the door. Instead of ecstasy, tantalizing moments come which mystics often describe in metaphor. “I heard the Lord’s footsteps,” they will say, “coming to the garden of my heart, and I grew so terribly excited that I heard him turn and tiptoe away.” This is why I say to stay in the driver’s seat; don’t let any emotion sweep you away. Excitement has to be followed by depression, and the depression that can follow a near visit from your divine Beloved, St. Teresa says, is perhaps the heaviest anguish the heart can bear. In Christian mysticism this is known as the Dark Night of the Soul, and it is sometimes considered to be a necessary part of spiritual growth. On the basis of my own experience, however, as well as the experience of others, I can say categorically that almost all such black depressions can be avoided, if we begin today to train the mind not to get excited. But the time to begin is now.

Every wave in the mind – every desire, every fear – has a force in it. Even a small desire has power, and anger, fear, and greed can be like hurricanes that sweep away every obstacle in their path. Even if we sincerely want to unify our desires, how can we deal with these typhoons of the mind? They keep blowing in every human being; no one can escape them. But they can be turned around. Meditation and the mantram can build a kind of miraculous wind tunnel in consciousness so that when anger blows in at a hundred miles an hour, it is turned around, to blow out as compassion – still at a hundred miles an hour, but wholly in the other direction. Greed going in at a gale comes out as a gale of love for all. There is no loss of force. I can’t imagine what such a wind tunnel might look like, but I know what it feels like when these storms of passion blow up inside and are whipped around in the other direction into hurricanes of positive power. If you want to see the extent to which it can go, look at the life of Gandhi.

The power of the mantram to turn a gale of anger around is dependent on the depth at which you can repeat the mantram. On the surface of consciousness, which is as deep as anybody can get at the beginning, there is very little power in the repetition. You will note that I did not say “very little power in the mantram”; the holy name is full of power. All that is wrong is that you haven’t driven the mantram in deeply enough, which can only be done through repetition – that is, hard work.

Sometimes I get letters saying, “The mantram hasn’t been working.” In my old days as an English professor I would have written in the margin, “Wrong word. You haven’t been working.” The mantram always works, but if you want it to do impossible things like turn around a hundred-mile-an-hour storm of anger, you have to get it down to the level of the mind where those storms arise, and that is done by repeating it over and over at every possible opportunity.

I have been using the mantram for many, many years with a diligence that still astonishes even me. I use every minute I get. Even on campus, in the midst of an extremely busy schedule, if I had a few minutes I used to sit in our crowded beehive of a faculty lounge, close my eyes, and repeat my mantram. “E.E. must have been burning the midnight oil again,” my colleagues said. “He’s catching forty winks.” I was catching forty mantrams.

At the beginning, I should add, I was not able to do this with deep devotion. Many Indians have a deep vein of devotion for their Chosen Ideal, the form of God they love and worship in the mantram – usually Rama, Krishna, Shiva, or the Divine Mother. This is a great asset, but I have to confess to you that I did not have it when I began, just as most of you will not have it: this kind of devotion is increasingly rare in the modern industrialized world, East as well as West. I repeated my mantram with such diligence essentially out of love for my granny, and as my meditation deepened, I found to my delighted surprise that I had begun to tap a deep, unsuspected, overwhelming love for Sri Krishna in and through my teacher, which the mantram called forth.

For a long, long time, repetition of the mantram is mechanical. But as meditation deepens, your repetition acquires more power, for with deepening meditation comes deepening devotion. I repeated my mantram with a kind of tenacity that most people cannot imagine, making use of every possible moment, lying awake sometimes for hours at night and keeping at it, all to attain the state called ajapajapam, where the mantram goes on continuously without any conscious effort. This is how Christian mystics explain St. Paul’s injunction, “Pray without ceasing,” and it is how I would explain this verse: “Make every thought an offering to me.” Today the mantram is with me always, at the deepest level of consciousness, and I would not hesitate to call its power limitless. Now and then, in dreamless sleep, I hear it reverberating through consciousness and my whole body vibrates with the power of it. It is as if I were holding on to a pneumatic drill, except that this is not noise but an unheard sound more thrilling than the sweetest music.

SRI KRISHNA: 58. Drawing upon your deepest resources, you shall overcome all difficulties through my grace. But if you will not heed me in your self-will, nothing will avail you.

Sometimes my granny used to say in front of my friends or acquaintances, “Little Lamp, you’re not going to be like anybody else.” It used to bother and embarrass me deeply. “Granny,” I complained, “you shouldn’t say things like that. Lots of boys I know do well in school.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

“Your love is making you blind,” I protested. “You don’t know me. I have lots of faults.”

“You don’t know yourself,” she corrected. “I know you have faults.”

I gulped. “You do?”

“Of course. I know faults you don’t know I know. I even know faults that you don’t know.” (I have to admit that took me aback.) “But, Little Lamp, you also don’t know what your real capabilities are. I know that too.”

I have said before that Granny wasn’t good with words, and I never could get her to explain any further. I didn’t understand, and I did not agree; I was a very ordinary boy. Only much later did I remember her words and realize that she was talking about immense capabilities which lie unsuspected in every one of us – the limitless inner resources of the Atman.

Some years ago, when the “Treasures of Tutankhamen” exhibit came to San Francisco from the museum at Cairo, I read a little about how these treasures were discovered. It has all the ingredients for a great short story. After six years of fruitless digging, the English archaeologist Howard Carter was routinely checking an unpromising plot of land in the Valley of the Kings when he uncovered stone stairs leading down to a secret tunnel. The passage showed the familiar signs of tomb-robbers breaking in and departing in haste. But at the far end, barely visible in the darkness, was a sealed door. Breathlessly Carter managed to make enough of a hole to admit a candle. As the flame flared up, its light glinted off gold and jewels: the little room was full of the treasures of a king. Beyond he would discover other rooms with even more dazzling riches, the greatest treasure trove in Egyptian archaeology.

When you finally reach a certain deep level in meditation, you feel much the way Carter must have felt when he first peered through that door, which had not been touched for three thousand years. As I said, I was not aware I had any tremendous latent capacities; no one is. But after many years of meditation, when I finally gained access to this treasury in consciousness, I couldn’t believe what I found. Until then, I had thought I had at most a little piggy bank, full of nickels and dimes of prana that I’d been able to pick up. On special occasions – usually when I wanted to answer some urgent personal call – I could turn the piggy upside down and shake out enough small change to satisfy my desires. All the while, my granny had been trying to tell me I was a millionaire. Living in a piggy world, what can we understand of the realms of Rockefellers and Mellons and Du Ponts? Who would suspect that he or she has a Fort Knox within, when most of us feel lucky just to be able to pay our bills? That’s why I say that everyone is ordinary until he or she begins to tap these resources; yet everyone is extraordinary when these resources are realized.

As long as we live on the surface level of life, our difficulties will be superficial also. If they seem big, it is because we have so little of our deeper resources at our command. But as we learn to function at a deeper level, the demands naturally become more challenging. I can assure you from my own long years of sadhana that these demands will never become more than you can handle or more oppressive than you can bear. To believe we are unequal to the challenges of spiritual growth is wrong shraddha, piggy-bank shraddha, the result of a lower image of ourselves. I want to correct that shraddha by pointing out that these challenges are natural and necessary as meditation deepens, and everyone has the resources to deal with them. In my own sadhana, when I found myself plunging into deeper consciousness at a speed I was not prepared for, I made a very heartening discovery: however difficult the problems I faced, I could always turn inwards, go deeper, and bring up a little more capacity for solving them. This discovery comes to everyone who perseveres, and once it comes, the wrong shraddha of defeatism and diffidence begins to be set right.

In other words, whether or not we feel personally worthy or personally capable of superhuman effort is not the issue in sadhana. The great mystics of East and West have given us their assurance, based on experience, that no one achieves Self-realization through personal effort; it is always a supreme gift of grace. All we can do is give our very best continually: follow every discipline to the best of our ability, pick ourselves up when we slip, and strive continuously to unify our desires. I tell my friends, “If you strive as I have striven, you will overcome all obstacles. That is Sri Krishna’s promise.”

Yet there is another side to this verse too, a second half, which I do not want to dwell on but which is vitally necessary to understand: this wholehearted personal effort is absolutely essential. It is not sufficient, but it is essential. Unless we throw all our personal weight on the side of sadhana, that weight is going to fall on the side of self-will: and as Sri Krishna says here, “If you will not heed me in your self-will, if you will not try your best, there is no way I can help you.” This is not a matter of the Lord withholding his love and support; these can never be withdrawn. It is simply a matter of spiritual dynamics.

I want to be very clear here, because to me these are very reassuring verses. All of us begin sadhana with doubts and reservations; if we did not have doubts and reservations, we would not be here as human beings. Some of these are relatively superficial and fall away as our meditation deepens. But others, whose roots go terribly deep in personality, may actually appear more acute when we reach a level of awareness where we see them more clearly. It is easy to get despondent at this point, to throw up our hands and say, “What can I do? The Gita says I need wholehearted devotion to go further, and I’m split in two.” This is only natural. After all, we are trying to do away with the ego; we can’t expect it to go quietly. It pulls in one direction; the Self pulls in another. Throw the weight of your personal choices and desires on the side of the Self, the Lord entreats; he will do the rest. “If we will do what we can,” says Augustine, “He can do as he wills.”

The unconscious is a vast undiscovered land, trackless, endless. On the face of it, bringing light to these limitless regions is impossible; the very word “unconscious” tells us that this part of the mind is not subject to conscious regulation. Yet the mystics say with humility but great daring, “Yes, it is impossible. Nevertheless, we have done it; therefore we know that it can be done.” Compared to this stupendous mastery, I don’t think any earthly achievement can be mentioned in the same breath.

SRI KRISHNA: 59. If you say, “I will not fight this battle,” your own nature will drive you into it.

60. If you will not fight the battle of life, your own karma will drive you into it.

Two forces pervade human life, the mystics say: the upward surge of evolution and the downward pull of our evolutionary past. Yet ultimately, everything in human experience, every side of human nature, has a supreme evolutionary purpose: of leading, pushing, cajoling, forcing us towards the goal of life.

This is a very reassuring point, so I would like to illustrate a little. It means that every problem we face, every trial we endure, offers the opportunity to take us closer to our goal. I mean this without exception; there is no hit and miss in life. When Gandhi, in his early twenties, buffeted by failure in India, snapped at the offer of a low-paying job in South Africa because it meant a change of scene, that proved to be a door opening onto the circumstances he needed to begin his sadhana and transform his character. But it might equally have been a door to further failure. The Lord did not give him a ticket to Self-realization, guaranteed passage. He gave him hardships, and Gandhi used those hardships to begin living for others rather than himself. How many Indians had been ill-treated in South Africa? Surely tens of thousands. Of them, this one man was touched so deeply by injustice that he learned its lesson: to fight it not on one’s own behalf, but on behalf of all.

Similarly, every apparent liability has a purpose, a role to play in spiritual growth. When I find someone who is rebellious, for example, I try to show that we have developed this capacity for a reason: to reach the goal of life, we have to rebel against our own selfishness and self-will. What you read in the lives of the great mystics is nothing other than the capacity for rebellion used wisely. Take St. Teresa of Ávila: if ever there was a born rebel in those days of the Inquisition, it was she. Her biographers tell us that she was a fiery girl with a will of her own, who dreamed as a child of stealing off to the Crusades. She drew on that fiery temperament when she turned to Jesus, rebelling with such instinctive genius against everything that kept her from union with him that she overcame her separateness and won him completely. She was such a revolutionary that having her self-will violated became a treat, because she knew it took her closer to her goal. When people criticized her, abused her, spread scandalous stories about her, even brought charges against her, she became sweeter as she got tougher, bringing up deeper resources, trying harder than ever to win her opponents’ hearts. These are the capacities of a great spiritual genius, and they came to her because she marshalled every trace of a fierce fighting spirit to remove the obstacles on her path.

Finally, every mistake we make has a purpose. Made because of karma, it offers an opportunity for some of that karma to be undone. This is the battle of life, and it is good to be aware that below the surface, it has already been joined. Restlessness, dissatisfaction with life on the superficial level, even a nagging conscience, are all signs that the upward and downward forces of evolution are struggling deep within. If the struggle is not pleasant, we should remember that merely to be aware of it means that we have reached a point where we are ready to take our evolution into our hands.

If we think of our negative samskaras as hurricanes in the mind, the human personality is a storm center – not one strong wind but hundreds. When I go to the beach for a walk, I sometimes encounter strong winds blowing off the Pacific. Going downwind can be refreshing; the wind at my back seems to help carry me along. But once I turn around and start to walk back, the same wind is not at all pleasant. It blows sand in my face and makes it difficult to walk, so that I sometimes have to lean into the wind to keep from being blown backwards.

We get this kind of wind from the mind too. It blows us in the direction of our conditioning: towards what is pleasant, away from what is unpleasant. If we turn around and try to retrace our steps, we find ourselves walking against the onrush of millions of conditioned thoughts, which blow grit into our eyes and make it difficult to see clearly. Our natural tendency is to keep our eyes on the ground in front of us and plod along, one foot after another, which is a good way to lose one’s sense of direction. In a strong wind, you can also get disheartened this way and feel you are getting nowhere. Even when the wind is full in your face, I would say, keep on going forward and don’t lower your eyes from the goal. Sri Krishna says, “Keep your eyes on me always”: with our desires focused on him, every difficulty and obstacle can be overcome.

There are those who say, “I don’t want to walk against the wind of my samskaras. I’m not going to let the wind blow sand in my face.” This too is a natural response. But the Gita’s reply is terrible in its implications. If you refuse to face into the wind, the Lord says, your samskaras themselves will eventually turn you around and push you forward. That is what sorrow and suffering do. There is a limit to what a person can suffer; and when you lose your peace of mind, when your nights become unbearable, when your relationships wither and your health deteriorates – then, Sri Krishna says, “your need for me will be so desperate, so driving, that the very weight of your suffering will force you to turn and walk against the wind.” But the longer we put this off, of course, the farther down the beach we will be, and the more sand and wind we will have to endure on the way back. Sri Krishna’s heartfelt appeal is very real to me: “Don’t wait until you can scarcely walk, until sandstorms are raging all around you; turn around and face your samskaras now.”

There are a rare few who have only to hear this appeal to turn. They are the stuff of which great mystics are made. But most of us need some prodding. In this perspective every event, every activity we engage in, has one supreme purpose: to make us dissatisfied with everything that is finite, so that eventually we turn inward to discover our real Self.

This need not come as a sudden decision to take to the spiritual life. I am not referring only to the kind of dramatic change of heart that we read about in the lives of great figures like St. Francis of Assisi, who goes along in life seeming like the rest of us until something opens his eyes, a veil falls, and immediately he turns to God. An ordinary person burdened by a self-centered, separate life might not say “I’m seeking God” but “I’m seeking a better way of life. I’ve got to have peace of mind, better relationships; I want to be able to sleep at night.” This is quite enough for a beginning. Your mind is driving you to distraction, you want to sleep well, and after you have tried the late show and hot toddies and sleeping pills and found that nothing works, you say, “All right, maybe I’ll try this meditation.” Ultimately, Sri Krishna says, all the drugs will fail; every external effort will fail. That is the nature of life: that is its purpose.

When I began speaking out against smoking in this country, in 1959, very few people considered tobacco a serious health hazard. Friends told me that I was giving too much attention to a trivial issue. I would never get people to stop smoking, they said, and in the meantime I was putting off many in my audience who had come to hear not about cigarettes but about spiritual values. Cigarettes were everywhere in those days: in every movie, on television, in all the ads. Public money was spent supplying planeloads of free cigarettes to “our boys” overseas, so systematically that the program looks now like a government plan for seeding cancer. In those years, the idea that cigarette smoking might be forbidden in public places sounded absurd, impossible.

But the hazards of smoking became more apparent. You could hear individuals express the desire to stop, though often they did not know how. Eventually, with some, the suffering becomes too great; then it is not “I want to stop smoking” but “I’ve got to stop – now!” That desire is wrenched up from a much deeper level than the craving to smoke, so it draws a lot of will. If it arises while a person can still change, an amazing amount of damage can be undone.

In the same way a whole society can change. One by one, in person after person, a habit is reversed by the goading of experience, until presently you can see that habit being reversed across a nation. This is happening today with smoking, and it can happen with any other kind of habit, even habitual ways of thinking. Not very long ago, in some of the most civilized nations on earth, there was an addiction to profit which took it for granted that children should work in factories fifty or sixty hours a week to keep the Industrial Revolution going. This was scarcely questioned by many good people; it was theologically defended in churches. Yet although the addiction to profit persists, it is no longer unmitigated. When the scale in which suffering is weighed sinks lower, the desire for change arises; the heavier the weight of suffering, the more that desire will rise. Everywhere it is the same: with smoking, with prejudice, with exploitation, with pollution, with war. When the price becomes more than we can pay, we say, “All right, doc. I’m ready to put myself in your hands.”

Halfway in sadhana, once meditation is well below the surface level, we reach a critical juncture. The ego realizes that it is embattled for its life, and then it really begins to fight back in all kinds of subtle, insidious ways. The ego is a very shrewd customer. He knows just where we are weakest – different people have different places – and that is where he strikes. Most of the time, he keeps a low profile. He sits with dark glasses in the back of a chauffeured car, parked discreetly across the street, and issues orders to his henchmen: our samskaras, senses, feelings, fears. If we are strongly attached to sensory pleasures, he comes up with excellent reasons why we ought to enjoy life a little more; after all, didn’t the Buddha himself say not to go to ascetic extremes? If we are restless, he might stir that samskara up with talk of travel or a new career. Or he may strike at the intellect: “Why go to extremes? You’re a good person; your likes and dislikes are reasonable enough. It’s all right to work on your liabilities, but why torment yourself in trying to become something you are not?” Or, more direct: “Who do you think you are, St. Francis? What makes you think you can do what only one person in a million has done?” There are many, many scripts like this, all supporting something which part of us wants desperately to believe: that we have no choice but to remain our petty, separate selves.

This development should not surprise us. We have been trying to blaze a trail into the dark forests of the unconscious: now that we are inside, we find that the same trail is a path for the wild creatures that roam there to get out. In other words, we have pushed our conscious world to the edge of the unconscious, which means that once-hidden samskaras are just beyond the frontier of our day. This is necessary, because otherwise we would not be able to take them on. Once they are in the open, however, if we do not take them on, they will take us over. It is not pleasant to face them, I agree; but it is even more unpleasant to be taken over by them. We have no choice but to fight.

At this stage, the wise man or woman becomes acutely vigilant. Sensory desires and self-will can be so powerful that even a dedicated aspirant can be swept away. If you do not resist a samskara at this stage, it may creep up on the will without your notice. Then suddenly you find that will and desire are running side by side, which means conflicts everywhere. You manage to keep your senses at bay for five days, say; then suddenly you find yourself making up for lost time. After a day or two of indulgence you manage to stop again, but the struggle is more painful than ever, and you need more effort to keep from falling back again. The same can happen with self-will: just when you think you can relax a little, a morning comes when your mind erupts because you cannot have your way. These are critical developments, for if you let compulsive desires or self-will grow stronger, they can break away from the will and pull out ahead, leaving the will to trail along feebly like a shadow.

In the beginning of the Gita, you remember, Arjuna asks Sri Krishna to drive his chariot between the two armies on the morning before battle is joined. He looks at the forces arrayed against him, face after familiar face, and tells Sri Krishna, “These are my relatives, my friends! How can I fight them? It would tear me in two.” This is how everyone feels for a while. We look at our ego, our selfish desires, our samskaras, and we feel, “This is who we are!” We can’t bring ourselves to fight these forces; it is like asking us to destroy our very selves. In plain language, we do not want to go through with it. We do not want to give up these desires, and our will to fight is sapped at the very root.

All this is because we have not yet seen anything of our higher Self; we are still identifying with our lower, physically oriented personality. We ask, like Arjuna, “Wouldn’t it be better not to fight at all?” Arjuna, you remember, throws down his bow, as if he is about to give up. His head is swimming; he doesn’t know what to do. That is how the Gita opens, and the whole of this magnificent scripture is an answer to his question. Now, in the final chapter, Sri Krishna will soon leave it to Arjuna to choose: to fight, or to run away.

As a boy, I remember being puzzled by an expression in English literature: “Hobson’s choice.” “Who is this Mr. Hobson,” I asked my teacher, “and what was his choice?” My teacher, who was my uncle, shrugged. “How should I know?” Later, so that I could tell my own students, I found out: Thomas Hobson, a carrier in Cambridge, was immortalized by Milton for no better reason than telling everybody who came to rent a carriage from him, “Take any horse you like, so long as it’s the one closest to the door.”

As far as being in this battle goes, Sri Krishna says, we have Hobson’s choice: that is, no choice at all. We cannot help being attacked by our samskaras; we have no way of avoiding the karma of our nature. Simply by being alive, we are standing in the middle of the fight. “But,” Sri Krishna always adds, “you do have a choice in which direction you face. You can face the fight squarely, or you can turn around and give up.”

It is good to remember here that Arjuna is a kshatriya, a warrior. The mark of a true kshatriya in ancient India was simple: his chest would be scarred from weapons, but on his back there would not be a single mark, because a kshatriya never turns from battle. That is the tradition from which Arjuna came; and I don’t mind telling you that though of course she never wielded a weapon, my granny was made of the very same stuff. So too was Gandhiji, once he had remade himself through these powerful spiritual disciplines. Through meditation and its allied disciplines, everyone can develop the capacity to fight this battle and never to yield or run away. All our aggressiveness, all our anger, all our pride, all our determination, have been given to us just for this purpose.

Sri Krishna says, “Your very nature will force you to change.” We are caught in our nature like a fish in a net, but this is a net we have made ourselves. For a long time, we don’t want to escape from it. As Sri Ramakrishna says, we want to snuggle up in it and feel secure. “I like it here,” we say. “I like being tangled. I like the fisherman coming and poking bait into me.” Even so, Sri Krishna says, nature itself – the upsurge of evolution – will eventually force you to work free. Aren’t there creatures which, if you place them in utter darkness, have to seek the slightest ray of light? That is how we human beings are. Our modern civilization may protest, “No, darkness is comfortable; we should learn to live with it”: in the end it is of no avail, because our need is for universal light.

SRI KRISHNA: 61. The Lord dwells in the hearts of all creatures and whirls them round upon the wheel of time.

62. Run to him for refuge with all your strength, and peace profound will be yours through his grace.

Generations ago my ancestors made provision for a potter and his family to live in our village not far from our ancestral home. He and his sons made most of our family’s pots, and most of those for the rest of the village too. We children used to go and watch him at his work. He went down to the river every morning to fetch a particular kind of clay, which he brought back to mix and knead until it was ready. Then, while all of us watched admiringly, he sat down in front of his potter’s wheel, took a lump of clay, and effortlessly began to shape it into what he wanted: a pot, a bowl, a drinking cup, a little oil lamp.

That wheel fascinated me. It wasn’t turned by a treadle, as I have seen here; it was worked by the potter’s son, who was expected to learn the craft at his father’s knee and carry on the family occupation. I used to marvel at the way the wet, shapeless clay came to life when the wheel began to spin; it seemed to grow and blossom like a flower under the deft touch of the father’s hands.

In a wonderful image, Sri Krishna says to stand back from evolution now and look at ourselves from a vantage point that can embrace five billion years: we shall see the jiva, the individual personality, shaped under the fingers of karma from life to life while it spins on the wheel of time. That spinning and shaping is Maya. Our life in the human context starts as a lump of clay, neither good nor bad, neither selfish nor selfless. And we are the potter. If we turn out a pot that is unsymmetrical, we can’t return it and demand our money back. Sri Krishna would ask, “From whom?”

On the other hand, there is plenty of clay. If one pot is unsymmetrical, we can put on more clay and try again; and if the first pot is not perfect, it can still be of use to other people. In other words, even our liabilities can be turned into assets when we start living for others rather than ourselves. In this way we undo our negative karma.

As karma is undone, an interesting thing happens to the mind: it begins to quiet down. That is the dynamics of the mind. Karma arises from our selfish desires; the more selfish desires we have and the more active they are, the more negative karma we produce by thinking and acting in response to those desires. As we undo our negative karma, by being kind and not acting on our samskaras, selfish desires subside and the potter’s wheel of the mind slows down. Finally there comes a state when we are detached from our desires and do not act on them. If a samskara starts to rise in the mind, the mantram switches it off, which means that we are no longer producing unfavorable karma. But there is still a lot of unfavorable karma from previous mistakes waiting to be worked out through good karma: this is the purpose of work and even of personal relationships.

Finally the pot we have been shaping is perfected. All that is negative in personality has been removed; we have reshaped ourselves in the highest image of the human being. But as Shankara says, even after we have finished our pot, taken it off the wheel, and left the potting shed, the wheel goes on spinning by itself for a while because of its own momentum. In other words, even in the last stages of sadhana the mind may still have a few negative feelings and personal desires, simply from the force of all our previous conditioning. But then we no longer identify with them, not in the slightest. They have no power to compel us to act on them.

In my early days in Berkeley, I remember being taken for a drive in a friend’s old car when the sky clouded over and drops of rain began to fall. My friend turned a switch and the windshield wiper in front of him went on – in front of him, but not in front of me. “That one’s broken,” he explained cheerfully. “The wiper arm came off.” All the way home the little stub of a housing went click-clicking back and forth, acting just like a real windshield wiper but accomplishing nothing at all. That is what a burned-out samskara is like. Some situation comes, some stimulus that used to require a response, and you just sit back and watch it. It switches back and forth, you comment “Very interesting,” and then you turn it off; there is no sense of deprivation.

Here I have to confess that I belong to a very realistic tradition which recognizes that all the conditioning we have received over thirty or forty or fifty years, even if you want to talk only of one lifetime, is not going to be completely erased from the human mind. Everyone is likely to face times when the wheel of the mind seems to start up again. There is no need to get apprehensive or despondent when this happens: all that is necessary is to be sure that we don’t pick up more clay, throw it on the wheel, and sit down to make compulsive images of it. That is where the danger lies. When the wheel is spinning, don’t buy clay, even if it is on sale. And if you have the clay, don’t make pots: that is, don’t brood over your desires, talk about them, feed them, or fantasize about their fulfillment. Then, when a strong desire comes, you will not associate yourself with it. It will dart across the clear sky of your mind like a bird and vanish, with no disturbance, no call to action, no connection whatever between it and you.

All this time concentration is deepening, and many far-reaching physiological changes are taking place in addition to what is happening in the mind. As concentration deepens, the mind slows down, and with it all other biological processes. When absorption is profound, the breathing rate may fall from sixteen per minute to three or four; finally it may be suspended for a minute or two. This is a tremendously exhilarating experience. The mind has temporarily closed up shop; the ego has gone on a two-minute vacation.

One way to describe this situation is to say that for those two minutes, there is nobody home. This is the negative side, which Catholic mystics call the Divine Desert, the Void. The positive side is that all the mind’s unruly customers have departed, leaving an utter stillness that cannot even be dreamed of until we experience it. It is healing and life-giving. Just two minutes, but once you get a taste, those two minutes count for more than anything else in the world. Afterwards, faced with even the most tantalizing sensory experience, you remember that stillness and say, “No. If I indulge now, it will stir up my mind and block my progress. I’ll do anything, forego anything, to taste those two minutes again.” You become acutely vigilant: training your senses, going against your self-will, willingly doing things you used to abhor, everything possible to quiet the mind.

Here the Gita gives us precious counsel in a verse that has comforted seekers for many centuries: “Run to Him for refuge with all your strength, and peace profound will be yours through his grace.” This is not running away; it is running home: sthanam shashvatam, to your real home. Take refuge in your Self, Sri Krishna says; dive deep to the shelter in the depths of consciousness where the Self abides; take refuge in the kingdom of heaven within. There is no time, space, or causality at these depths; it is no exaggeration to call them eternal. And there is no agitation; these are realms of “peace profound.” If a storm is blowing on the surface of consciousness, at this depth you can actually say, “Be still!” and it will be still.

In the final stages of sadhana, mornings come when your meditation is so deep that if a parrot were to come and sit on your head, you wouldn’t know it. Your body would be so still that the parrot would think it was sitting on a rock. Yet the mind may not stop that morning, nor the next, nor the next. You go on doing everything possible, waiting with a kind of quiet eagerness, an impatient patience, expecting every day to hear a knock inside so you can say, “Come in!” But nothing happens. You may hear a few steps coming toward the door, but they retreat; your absorption is not yet complete.

Yet inside a tremendous unification is taking place. All your other desires are dissolving in this one desire to open that door. Every desire has to be consumed; otherwise the wheel of the mind can start up again and begin generating more karma. Finally, after many days, weeks, even months of this delectable torture, your accounts are clear; your mind is utterly calm. One morning in meditation the door opens without any knock or warning, and the Lord swoops down like an eagle, as St. Teresa of Ávila says, to lift you out of yourself into the unitive state.

This tremendous experience is not something we can force. We cannot demand, “I’m ready now. Give me illumination or else!” All we can do is say humbly, “I have emptied my mind to the best of my ability. My self-will is reduced as far as I can go. I’m content to wait now; I can wait as long as you like.” This period of waiting can be a great test; but when the Lord finally reveals himself to us, we know that this revelation is a supreme gift of grace which can come in no other way.

There is a quiet but tremendous statement in the Katha Upanishad: “The Self reveals itself to whom it chooses.” No one who has experienced this can get over the wonder of it. There is no rhyme or reason about it that we can see. Through no human effort can the mind be stilled or the ego completely erased; when we have done everything we can right down to the unconscious level of the mind, our separate, personal will lies down and says, “There is nothing more I can do.” Then it is that the miracle takes place: to the great Catholic mystics, through a saint or through Jesus the Christ; in the Hindu tradition, through our spiritual teacher. That is why every morning and evening I begin my meditation with love and devotion to my grandmother, because I can find no other explanation than her grace of how a little fellow like me could have been enabled to attain this unitive state.

SRI KRISHNA: 63. I give you these precious words of wisdom; reflect on them and then choose what is best.

64. These are the last words I shall speak to you, dear one, for your spiritual fulfillment.

These precious words of the Gita are guhyad guhyataram: the best-­­hidden secret on earth. It is not that they are physically hidden; you can walk into the supermarket or a Greyhound bus depot and buy a copy of the Gita or The Imitation of Christ for less than the price of a sandwich. But their wisdom is hidden until we desire to find it, when we encounter someone who can open the inner meaning of their words from the depths of personal experience.

“Arjuna,” Sri Krishna says, “I have given you wisdom that you can’t get anywhere else. Now I want you to reflect on it. Think it over deeply. Test it everywhere, in every situation. Then yathecchasi, tatha kuru: do what you like.” These daring words are Sri Krishna at his greatest. He doesn’t say, “If you don’t do what I say, you’re going to be in hell for a trillion years.” He pays us the highest tribute: “You are rational, thoughtful people; you know now what is beneficial and what is harmful, what is health and what is illness, what is love and what is hatred. Now you can choose.” This is the glory of the Gita: no threats, no intimidation, complete respect.

There is an artistry in this way of teaching which appeals to me deeply. Hindu aesthetics places great emphasis on a principle called dhvani, ‘suggestion’: the artist just plays two or three notes, so to speak, and then expects us to fill in the melody. This is a high tribute to our imagination, and in fact dhvani expects a great deal of the audience. Even a very cultured Westerner can find its touches difficult to catch, for the ear has to be trained to catch all kinds of echoes.

My freshman students in English literature used to find this difficult – especially science students, who were required to take freshman English and wanted everything spelled out in black and white. It was painful for them to sit through a class listening to poetry, and one of them told me point-blank: “I don’t understand it, and I can’t use it either.” When I saw their point of view, I began to explain how to look for dhvani in a poem, how to catch and appreciate the echoes of an unstruck sound. Then they began to enjoy themselves. After a while, even students who had already passed their English requirement came to sit in on my class. It was a great delight to me to see their eyes light up as they caught something the first time; they were looking into a whole new world.

Kalidasa, a great poet and playwright whose stature rivalled Shakespeare’s, provided marvelous examples; he had dhvani in every line. I would recite a verse to my students – “His love had set like the sun” – and the freshman girls would look downcast. “Why are you sad?” I would ask. “When the sun sets, don’t you know it’s going to rise again?” Their eyes would open, and they would gasp with insight and expectation. Then I would explain dhvani: how with one deft image, a great poet can suggest volumes.

My teacher was that kind of artist; she had dhvani in everything she said and did. Each little thing was a quiet lesson, not spelled out, but left with boundless respect for my love and imagination to reach out and grasp. She might tell me an incident from the Mahabharata, something that Arjuna did, and not draw any moral or conclusion; but she knew that my love for her would take her words deep and turn them over and over in my mind, trying to see how I could apply that incident to my own life. She spoke seldom and never tried to explain, but that only enflamed my love to reach out farther. There is infinite respect in this way of teaching, infinite love, infinite trust, just the opposite of rigid rules and proscriptions. The teacher touches a few keys, then leaves it to us to make out the melody in our own lives.

SRI KRISHNA: 65. Be aware of me always, adore me, make every act an offering to me, and you shall come to me; this I promise.

66. Abandon all supports and look to me for protection. I shall purify you from the sins of the past; do not grieve.

“Abandon all supports.” This is terribly difficult advice, because it means not to hold on to anything on earth – any material thing, any person, any source of satisfaction. If we are trying to hold on to anything external, we cannot hold on wholly to the Self. But it is only human nature to prefer diversified investments. We want a balanced portfolio of props in life, just in case one or two fall through. I see advertisements today for investment packages that promise to protect you against anything the future might bring: flat inflation, runaway inflation, deflation, depression, “stagflation,” even chaos. “This may work with money,” Sri Krishna says, “but it won’t work with me. If you want to invest in me, mortgage everything you have – all your passions, all your emotions, all your desires.”

Arjuna is still the slightest bit dubious. “Krishna,” he asks his friend, “what if it doesn’t work?”

Krishna smiles sweetly and replies, “Then you lose.” No promises.

My granny used to talk this way too: in fact, it is the language of mystics everywhere. Gandhi, I think, was once asked a clever question: “Why can’t the Lord give us fulfillment first? Then it would be easy to renounce personal profit and pleasure.” Gandhi replied in effect, “That is not love; that’s a contract.” He was a lawyer, you know. The real lover of God says, “Take everything I have, everything I am; I don’t ask for any favor in return. It is enough just to love you.” That is the acme of love, and it is one of life’s great ironies that we can’t learn it from the annals of romance; we have to get it from the mystics, who have renounced everything the world offers. As John of the Cross says, they ask for nothing; so they get everything.

Only the very rarest of mystics can renounce everything at once. Most of the rest of us try for some time to keep a firm grip on the sense world, which is an age-old instinct. Pediatricians test a reflex called the Babinski: if you stroke the soles of an infant’s feet in a certain way, the toes curl downward as if to grasp. The response must have been developed millions of years ago, when we were carefree monkeys playing about on the branches of trees. Just as our feet have been conditioned to grasp at branches, the mind has been conditioned over an even longer period to grasp at the experience of the senses. Now we have to learn to let go and grasp at what seems like nothing, in what John of the Cross calls “the dark night of the senses.” You can see how impossible the challenge is.

In the language of Western psychology, we are trying to enter the unconscious, trying to trace our fundamental samskaras into the depths where these incredibly powerful forces arise. The mind has no bridges from one level of awareness to the next; there are not even any roads. How we can descend consciously into deeper levels is therefore beyond any physical feat, beyond what reason can understand.

On the surface, for example, a samskara like jealousy looks no bigger than our little finger. It is not too difficult to get your mind off it – by going to a movie, or eating a pizza, or diverting your attention with some other kind of activity. But as meditation deepens and you trace the samskara into lower levels, that little finger becomes a wrist, unexpectedly thicker and stronger. By strengthening your will, you can still manage to wrist-wrestle that samskara; you may even believe for a while that you have it under control. But in the unconscious, you see that your samskara continues on down to become a big, burly arm. At a deeper level, it is with you always. At night it may come out and pummel you in dreams. That is what an obsession is, and however attached we may be to it, no obsession is anything but torture. You long to free yourself from it, to draw that immense power into your control.

In the film version of The Old Man and the Sea, I believe, there is a long wrist-wrestling sequence where it takes Spencer Tracy many, many hours (and a certain amount of rum) to bring his opponent’s arm to the table. Similarly, it takes a great deal of time and effort to build up your will until it can bend down a negative samskara. You will find it so strong, so firmly fixed, that for a long while you can only hold on and go through the motions. You don’t know what to do. Every morning in meditation you go deep into consciousness and find your samskara seated at the frontier with its sleeves rolled up, saying, “Come on, I’m ready.” You grip its huge hand and find that your will has turned to custard.

This is a very elusive experience, but I can try to explain it intellectually: when you are in the unconscious, how can you make a conscious effort? The question is absurd, because you have lost your conscious will. Even if you sit down with a mighty resolution – “I’m going to make my muscles so strong that I can bend this fellow’s wrist right to the table” – when you get below the surface, there is no will to carry out your orders. You might as well be writing on water. It is most exasperating: you are seated at the table like Spencer Tracy, facing this muscular samskara while everybody stands around watching; you try to flex your arm, and your muscles melt.

Here I have to change the metaphor, because conscious effort can do nothing in such cases. There is nothing to do but let go and make a giant leap to a deeper level, which in traditional language is the entrance of grace. I can shed some light on this from my own personal experience. As a young man I had plenty of dedication and stamina, plenty of capacity for hard, sustained effort. I gave myself to my pursuits completely: I lived wholly in a world of literature, and I wanted nothing else from life. In other words, most of my prana was already unified, which meant that I entered the spiritual life with a well-developed singleness of purpose. Naturally, when I began to meditate, I was hopeful that this capacity for dedicated, determined, sustained effort would enable me to break through any obstacle. For a while it all went smoothly. Through sheer persistence I was able to go on deepening my concentration, because my concentration was already good. I was able to resist sleep and similar obstacles in meditation and to exercise reasonable restraint over my senses, because I was already used to subordinating activities to an overriding goal. But when I came to my first frontier in consciousness, I found myself utterly at a loss.

I read many books at that point to find out what others had done – that, as I said earlier, was my intellectual shraddha, to look for answers in books. But no answers came. I consulted many people, and it shows how catholic a good Hindu can be that I went to men and women of all religions who were trying sincerely to live out spiritual teachings in their daily lives. None of them could give me practical advice. Some said simply, “We haven’t reached that point, so we cannot guide you.”

I was so completely focused on my goal that when I began to suspect I might not be able to go further, the torture was excruciating. The fear haunted me. Often I would dream in Hindu imagery of leaping across a river and falling into the torrent, or of trying to leap a canyon and plummeting into an abyss. But finally, in very deep meditation, I received the kind of help that comes from a source beyond oneself. In the Hindu tradition, this help comes from your spiritual teacher, who can ally his will with yours at a deep level; and the will of a person established in Self-realization is a will that cannot be broken. This tremendous alliance, however, is a joint effort. The teacher cannot change levels for us; our part is to let go.

These are some of the great adventures in deepening meditation. We are halfway across the sea of birth and death, out of sight of land, and everything is dark and uncertain. We cannot see the other shore; yet we have left this shore for good: if anyone at this stage were to abandon spiritual disciplines, he or she would find life empty; the world of ordinary satisfactions would soon seem a desert. At this time, even a dedicated aspirant can feel lost. Not a single light beckons you; not a gull comes to herald that land lies ahead. You look back on the shore you have left, with its familiar landmarks, and you heave a great sigh of attachment and affection. “I’m leaving all those sandpipers! I’ll never be able to play with sand castles again.” That is the time to stop looking back and throw everything you have into reaching the other side. Whether you cross the sea or not, the time when you could be satisfied with sand castles is past.

As far as my experience goes, this is where love is indispensable: the kind of love that Mira has, that St. Teresa has, who gives everything – all her love, all her passion, all her loyalty – to the Lord, saying, “Even if I lose everything, I will love you and you alone; I shall pursue no other goal.” Nothing but that kind of passion is powerful enough to carry us forward when it seems that everything else must be left behind.

“When you can give yourself like this,” Sri Krishna promises, “I shall release you from all your karma, the burden of all your mistakes” – in orthodox language, from all sin. This is the ultimate mystery of grace, but it can be explained to some extent in terms of the dynamics of the mind. To give yourself completely, your mind has to become still; every selfish desire must be extinguished. Otherwise you will still be hanging on in some closet of the mind. When you let go of every selfish attachment, the mind-process stops; it has no more selfish desires. How can it produce more karma? Whatever we may have done in the past, its stigma on our consciousness has been erased; the residue of karma has been dissolved in our love for the Lord. After that our consciousness is pure. We have the example of great saints, East and West, who led very reckless lives before they took to the spiritual path. When someone asks them afterward, “Did you really do those things?” they smile and reply, “That was a dream; it happened long ago. I was that person once, but that person died: the body is the same, but in it is someone wholly different from before.” Like a story with which you identify until done, like a movie that absorbed you while it lasted, your past no longer applies to you; it has left no more stain than the light of the film left on the screen.

SRI KRISHNA: 67. Do not share this wisdom with anyone who lacks in devotion or self-control, lacks the desire to learn, or scoffs at me.

This friendly advice is just good teaching. To people who are receptive, who listen with an open heart and a willingness to test what they hear, the words of a scripture like the Gita are precious; they give the keys to the mastery of life and death. But there is very little point in talking about them to a person who does not wish to hear. No one benefits, not on either side.

The vision each of us has of the world, the mystics would explain, is dependent upon the level of consciousness on which we stand. In simpler language, we see life as we are. This is a revolutionary statement, because we are conditioned to believe that we see life as it is. This is the basis of our daily behavior, and it is appalling how much unkindness, misunderstanding, and intolerance are due to inadequate perception.

As I write this, our dog Muka is waiting outside the door. If I could go and tell him, “The sky is blue, and this rose is red,” he would cock his head and say abruptly, “I don’t think so.” He takes it for granted that the world is black and white; I take it for granted that the world has colors. Yet how many colors? A good artist, with the same sensory equipment, will see different colors where I only see blue. An extraterrestrial might see a much wider spectrum; his world might even be framed in extra dimensions. Whose world is real? In this sense Muka and I do not live in the same world, and for us to argue about what color the sky “really” is would be a waste of time.

Similarly, when I go to San Francisco, in a sense I am not in the same world as the joggers and sightseers who share the Marina with me. We live in the world our mind experiences, and all I can say is that I live today in a wholly different world from the one I lived in as a young man. I don’t see people as objects that please or threaten me; I see the Lord in many disguises, wearing warmup jackets and three-piece suits. I do not so much see faces as into faces, into states of mind. Most important, I see a world of meaning, shaped by forces we can learn to harness and understand: love, unity, and the forces of the mind, held together in the law of karma. I live in a world whose pieces form a pattern, where nothing happens by chance; I see choices everywhere. But if someone objects he sees nothing but blind forces, helpless conditioning, meaningless events, a world without options, how can I object? We will agree on surface details, such as how to get to Cliff House, but beyond that we live in different worlds.

In the same way, this verse reminds us, we should not judge harshly those who scoff at spiritual realities. We might as well condemn Muka for not believing in colors. But at the same time, very little is gained in trying to convey these truths to those who are, at best, merely curious. There is a kind of window in consciousness that must be opened in order to grasp interior realities, and unless that window is opened, even the most persuasive words pass in one ear and out the other without anything happening in between.

SRI KRISHNA: 68. He who teaches this supreme mystery of the Gita to all those who love me will come to me without doubt.

69. No one can render me more devoted service; no one on earth can be more dear to me.

All of us qualify for these verses to the extent that we are trying sincerely to translate the teachings of the Gita into our everyday lives. It is good to remember that everyone is a teacher, for good or ill, teaching others through actions and behavior. When we base our lives on spiritual values, we are teaching them much more effectively than if we were to bring a little blackboard to work every day and give noon lectures on humility.

With so many urgent physical problems – poverty, pollution, the threat of nuclear war – even good people sometimes wonder if teaching meditation isn’t a luxury. After all, physical problems are easily seen, while meditation works so quietly that it may seem to have no connection with everyday problems. “It may lower your blood pressure,” they say, “but how does it help the world?”

Meditation, I tell them, is a tool. Anyone can use it for releasing tremendous inner resources, and these resources cannot help flowing into loving service. The whole message of the Gita is to show how to release our full human potential into selfless, skillful action. The kind of action, of course, will vary from person to person, and its scope will widen as a person grows. The job of meditation is simply to release the resources. Nothing is more worth teaching, Sri Krishna says; for wherever these resources are released, in whatever field, they throw light on how pressing human problems can be solved. That is why the Buddha, like the Gita here, states emphatically that no one does the world greater service than those who show us how to drive out anger, fear, and greed from the human heart.

In a world that seems without options, such people offer boundless hope. Nowhere will you find anyone more hopeful than the mystics, nowhere such a glorification of the human being. Their emphasis is always on our essential goodness, our innate love, our inalienable divinity. Every human being, they remind us, can realize this innate love. And they do not merely remind us; if we are willing, they show us how, guiding us safely through the dangers along the way. There is no need for a spiritual teacher to add anything; the love is already present. I must have said this a million times, yet it is so simple that I suspect most people who hear me have not guessed how tremendous are its implications. It means that we don’t have to stuff good will into the mind; we only have to remove ill will. We don’t have to acquire a loving nature; we only have to remove what covers it. This brings the solution to every human problem within reach, for as William Law says, all problems arise from the lack of love.

SRI KRISHNA: 70. Those who meditate on these holy words worship me with wisdom and devotion.

71. Even those who listen to them with faith, free from doubts, will find a happier world.

In the traditional interpretation, this “happier world” is a plane of consciousness after death. Scholars are inclined to smile at such assertions, as at the idea that merely listening to the Gita a prescribed number of times can ensure a particular heaven. Yet there is a certain truth in these simple beliefs. Even without meditation, the words of a scripture do have power to purify consciousness to some extent when they are read or listened to systematically, with faith and an open heart. Then the perennial truths of life go in, and the more they fill our consciousness, the more naturally they will affect our action. We should not find this difficult to believe. All of us know the power of the media – movies, television, popular songs – to fill our minds and occupy our thoughts; and what our thoughts are, we become. This verse only states the positive side.

But I like to apply these words to life here and now. “Those who read these words with faith,” Sri Krishna promises, “will find a happier world.” This is not blind faith. Shraddhavan means ‘those who have shraddha’: those who believe the human being is more than a physical creature, that there is more to life than the physical, chemical level. This is enough to open a window of understanding. Such people may say honestly that they do not know what the human being is or what life is. They may tell you they are still searching. But if the heart is willing, that is enough. When they read these words sincerely, testing them against their own experience, they will find that the Gita and the other great scriptures open onto a world of infinite hope.

Sri Krishna does not promise that they will find a more pleasant world. They will see problems all the more clearly: a world threatened by war, poverty, and pollution, communities poisoned by hatred, families at odds, individuals imprisoned in self-will. But instead of a world without options, they will see choices opening everywhere. They will know that their lives count, that they can make a contribution; and they will have the tools – meditation and the allied disciplines – for releasing all the resources they need. Such people, Sri Krishna says, “will find a happier world.” I would say, “They will make a happier world.” In the midst of sorrow, they will find the great joy of being able to help.

The Hindu scriptures tell the story of a great king, Vipashcit, who, like Ashoka, devoted his reign to improving the welfare of his people, who came to love and revere him as a saint more than a king. When he died, it is said, Sri Krishna appeared before him to escort him into heaven. But King Vipashcit had an unusual request. “Lord,” he said, “before I enter eternal bliss, may I see the suffering of those in hell?”

Sri Krishna must have been a little surprised by this, but he agreed, promising an angel to accompany and protect him. So, like Dante, King Vipashcit passed with his immortal guide into another plane of consciousness. But what he saw puzzled him. Wherever he passed, he saw only happy faces. People ran to greet him and to receive his blessing, but the tears in their eyes were tears of joy. Now, a saintly king is still a king, accustomed to having his requests taken seriously, and there must have been a note of hurt in his voice as he turned to his escort and asked, “Why have you brought me here directly? I wanted to visit the other place first.”

“Your majesty,” his angel replied respectfully, “this is the other place.”

“I don’t understand. I expected hell to be full of suffering. Why is it that every face I see is shining with joy?”

“This world is full of suffering: behind you, beyond you, wherever you cannot see. It is being close to you that fills these people with joy.”

“Then,” said Vipashcit, “I need go no further. I have found my ­heaven.”

SRI KRISHNA: 72. Have you fully understood my message? Are you free from your doubts and delusions?

ARJUNA: 73. You have dispelled my doubts and delusions, and made me ready to fight this battle. My faith is firm now, and I will do your will.

Arjuna’s reply is the real end of the Gita, the conclusion of his dialogue with Sri Krishna. The instruction is over; the fight is about to begin. But Arjuna’s will is undivided now, which means that it is one with the divine will; victory is only a matter of time. His spirit is caught by those marvelous lines of William Blake:

Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

To those in the thick of this battle, the Gita gives two watchwords: fight and faith. Give your very best against your samskaras, never give up; then have faith for the rest. Remember Augustine’s assurance: “If we will do what we can, He can do as He wills.”

Arjuna says literally, Smritir labdha: “I have my memory back. I remember now who I am.” We can imagine him looking back over the long travail of evolution through which each of us has passed and shaking his head in wonder. “How could I have forgotten?” Our present state is a kind of prolonged amnesia: we have forgotten our divine nature, the unity from which we came. When a person has amnesia, don’t friends try to awaken his memory with reminders, once-familiar objects, the faces or voices of those who once were dear? All this happens as we begin to wake up from this spiritual amnesia and recall: we are not a separate, isolated creature but a prince, a princess, with a kingdom to return to and a mission to discharge when we return.

Arjuna is at his full stature now, every inch the warrior. You remember the insignia: no wounds on the back; no retreating. That is the mark of the lover too: no retaliating, no retreating. The forces are gathered, and Sri Krishna has thrown down a very personal challenge to us all: If you can forgive, if you can learn to return kindness for unkindness, love for hatred, you are on the side of light. But if you cannot forgive, if you prefer to meet violence with violence, then you are on the other side, whatever goal you may have in view. Therefore, the Gita says, the fate of the world is in your hands. By our choices, each of us helps to shape the destiny of us all.

For years, we will not have the remotest idea of what a ferocious enemy we have to deal with. Our aggressive instincts, our militancy and rebelliousness, the daredevil desires that make a person sail around the world alone or climb an unclimbed mountain, have all been given to us so that we can fight self-will to the end. Nothing is more difficult, no fight more fierce. But when the battle is won, the dark regions of the unconscious where anger, fear, and greed used to roam like wild animals will be fully conscious and flooded with light. Jacopone da Todi, with the understatement of a great lover and a brave warrior, tells us in words so simple that I like to quote the original Italian:

La guerra è terminata:

de la virtu battaglia,

de la mente travaglia

cosa nulla contende.

The war is over.

In the battle of virtue,

the struggle of spirit,

all is at peace.

Then, the Upanishads say, we pass here and now from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.

SANJAYA: 74. This is the dialogue I heard between Krishna, the son of Vasudeva, and Arjuna, the greathearted son of Pritha. The wonder of it makes my hair stand on end!

75. Through Vyasa’s grace, I have heard the supreme secret of spiritual union directly from the Lord himself.

76. Whenever I remember these wonderful, holy words between Krishna and Arjuna, I am filled with joy.

77. And when I remember the breathtaking form of Krishna, my joy overflows.

78. Wherever the divine Krishna and the mighty Arjuna are found, there will be prosperity, victory, happiness, and unshakable wisdom. Of this I am sure!

We have reached the end of what is to me the most marvelous document in the world, and I do not mind telling you that I could begin it all again. I must have read the Gita dozens of times, but each time it offers fresh insight, inspiration, and wisdom.

“Wherever we find Krishna and Arjuna” – that is, wherever there are men and women who turn to these timeless truths for guidance – the Gita assures us that the forces of light will be victorious. Life is not a blind area where blind forces are at work. Just as there are physical laws that govern the universe, there are equally operative spiritual laws which derive from the unity of life. When we violate this unity, negative consequences follow; we have seen many examples in this volume. In the same way, when we act in harmony with this unity, the very nature of the universe supports us. We may feel insignificant, but we have the invisible but inexorable support of cosmic forces behind us. Mahatma Gandhi’s life gives a perfect illustration, and we have his quiet but precise testimony that these are laws that can be verified as thoroughly as the law of gravity:

The claim that I have made is neither extraordinary nor exclusive. God will rule the lives of all those who will surrender themselves without reservation to Him. In the language of the Gita, God acts through those who have acquired complete detachment, that is, self-effacement. Here is no question of hallucination. I have stated a simple scientific truth to be tested by all those who have the will and patience to acquire the necessary qualifications, which are again incredibly simple to understand and easy enough to acquire where there is determination.

Gandhi is much, much more than the father of the Indian nation, much bigger even than the political history the world presents. His greatest significance is to show us the true potential of the individual human being, who, though physically limited, can become an instrument of divine forces that can change the world in some measure.

I have often said that to understand Gandhi, we have to understand the Gita. But the reverse is also true: to grasp the Gita, it is a great help to understand Gandhi. One of his most revolutionary contributions is that evil has no lasting reality. What is real is the underlying unity we call God, because it cannot be erased, cannot be altered, cannot be taken away. Here is the practical application: evil is real only insofar as we support it. If you stand in front of the sun, don’t you cast a shadow? There is darkness on the path; yet the sun still shines, and if you remove the obstruction to its light, the shadow disappears. Evil is a kind of shadow, the absence of light. It can disappear when what obstructs the light is removed. Each person who says or does or even connives at evil, therefore, bears a terrible responsibility: for the time being, he or she is helping to make that unreal evil real. As we withdraw our support – of unkindness, injustice, violence, exploitation, war – these evils will cease to exist.

From this perspective, every problem in the world has its final solution in withdrawing our personal support. Here Gandhi comes home to every one of us. We don’t have to look to presidents or prime ministers to solve these problems; we don’t have to look to leaders or experts in any sphere. We look to ourselves. If, in my own life, I can withdraw support from everything that violates the unity of life, I have reduced evil by one measure. This is much more than a negative contribution. It releases a tremendous positive force which finds expression in our work, our relationships, and our priorities. As that force spreads, it begins to change the lives of those around us.

This is where Gandhi really glorifies the individual. Truth, he maintained, does not need strength of numbers. Too many followers can actually be a hindrance; a crowd or a majority can be swept away. If only one person can turn from evil completely, in action, word, and even thought, he or she alone can change the world. Toward the end of his life, Gandhi was sometimes asked how he had managed to bring down the greatest empire the world had known. Gandhi replied in effect, “What makes you say I did it? I was only an instrument.” He was trying to tell us that God – truth, love, unity – is always present. By emptying himself of himself, he became a vehicle through which these forces could work. Wherever this happens, though it may take time, other hearts cannot help but respond. The Lord dwells in every one of us, and “deep calleth unto deep.”

When we look at the forces arrayed against us, it is only natural to ask how our small contribution can work against these impossible odds. Sri Krishna would object, “What makes you think that you are working alone?” Just as physical forces like gravitation are always operating, love, truth, and compassion operate everywhere, under all circumstances. Gravitation is not something added to the world; it is part of its very fabric. Similarly, love and unity are part of the fabric of life, part of its very nature. Just as we respond to these forces, others too will respond. We see only a tiny part of the stage: one corner in space, moment by moment in time. We can act, the Gita reminds us over and over, but we cannot dictate the fruits of our action. “Just do your best,” Sri Krishna says; “then leave the results to me.”

Even in our own sadhana, this brings immense reassurance. Spiritual disciplines are terribly difficult, and illumination almost impossible for an ordinary human being – I would say, even for a remarkable human being. The main reason why it can be achieved, even by little people like us, is that these cosmic forces are at work, helping everybody who undertakes this heroic task. Without these forces, there would be no future for the world.

In these dark times, therefore, I would like every one of you to remember this: we are not alone. This is not a world of chance, with “neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” We are surrounded by creative powers, as surrounded as we are by air and light and gravitation. It is only when we fail to ally ourselves with the forces of light that they are unable to support us. If we give our wholehearted support, love will triumph. This remembrance brings faith; it brings hope; it brings the certitude of victory.

So ends the Bhagavad Gita.

May the Lord of Love, enshrined in the hearts of all, inspire every one of us to live to make our world a land of peace and joy, love and wisdom.

Om shanti shanti shanti