SANJAYA: 1. These are the words that Sri Krishna spoke to Arjuna, whose eyes were burning with tears of self-pity and confusion.

Right from the beginning of the second chapter Sri Krishna reveals himself as the perfect spiritual teacher, striking a strong note intended to shock Arjuna out of his despondency. When Sri Krishna, silent until now, opens the dialogue, there are no soft words, no honeyed phrases. He pours withering contempt upon Arjuna, who has been weeping and protesting that he cannot fight against his senses, passions, and self-will. No spiritual teacher fails to resort to this method of shocking and strengthening us with strong words when occasion demands – and of course, when opportunity calls for it, supporting us with tender, compassionate, and loving words also.

Once I went to my spiritual teacher, my grandmother, complained to her that I was in great sorrow, and asked her why people should cause me suffering. You should not picture my granny as a sweet old lady seated in a rocking chair, knitting. There were times when she would take me to task and use language that would hurt and yet strengthen me. She could be very harsh, particularly to those who were close to her. This was the mark of her love. And on this occasion, she pricked my bubble with ease by pointing out that I was not suffering from sorrow, but from self-pity. When I grieve for others, that is sorrow, which is ennobling and strengthening. But when I grieve for myself, it is not really sorrow; it is the debilitating emotion called self-pity.

Immediately, like a true friend, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna to stop behaving like a water buffalo, which if it sees a pool of mud will go and roll in it over and over again until it is completely covered with mud. In order to live like a human being, to lead the spiritual life, Sri Krishna insists, Arjuna must stop wallowing in self-pity. To apply this to ourselves, we have only to look into our minds to see how much of our time we spend in dwelling upon what our father did to us, what our mother did to us, or what our partner said five years ago on a certain rainy morning. This is what goes on in the witches’ caldron seething in our consciousness.

Arjuna has beautiful eyes, but he has been sulking like a little child, and shedding so many tears of self-pity that he cannot see anything clearly. Our eyes, when full of self-pity, see even those who are dear to us as very cruel, as persecutors – not because they are like that, but because the tears of self-pity have clouded our vision. As the Buddha puts it: “ ‘He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,’ in those who harbor such thoughts hatred will not cease. ‘He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,’ in those who do not harbor such thoughts hatred will cease.” In the next verse Lord Krishna will tell Arjuna to silence this “she did this to me, he did this to me” refrain in his consciousness so that he can hear the Lord. Sri Krishna has to shock. He has to be severe to get Arjuna out of this morass. This is the way he shows his love.

SRI KRISHNA: 2. This despair and self-pity in a time of crisis is mean and unworthy of you, Arjuna. How have you fallen into a state so far from the path to liberation?

Sri Krishna looks with severity at Arjuna, who is overwhelmed by the horror and agony of self-naughting, and says, “Where does this depression, despair, and self-pity come from, Arjuna? Get rid of these things. They have no place where I live in your heart of hearts.”

The Lord uses the word anarya, which means ‘unworthy,’ to refer to Arjuna, whose conduct has not been fully worthy of himself as a human being. You and I, by coming into the human context, have evolved beyond the animal stage. What distinguishes us from the animal level is our capacity to forget our own petty, personal satisfactions in bringing about the happiness of all those around us.

On one occasion when I was in college, a group of college friends and I were discussing the usual topics that young men talk about when my spiritual teacher overheard a few key words, mostly about personal pleasure, profit, and prestige. She was just coming from the cow shed, which she cleaned with her own holy hands every morning. The cows provided us with milk, butter, and yogurt, and therefore she considered it a necessary part of hospitality to make the home of the cows clean, to give them proper food, and to guard them against sickness. So, just as she was coming out of the cattle shed, she heard us all talking in this vein. She never wasted time on many words. She caught hold of one of my cousins, who was the ringleader, and told him, “You get in the cow shed. That is where you belong. We will give you plenty of hay, cotton seeds, and rice water.” Because of her great love for us, she could shock us with these strong words without hurting us at all.

It is not enough if we walk on two legs, part our hair, and go about in a new suit. That does not make us a human being. The capacity to forget our own personal pleasures, and to bless those who curse us – these are what mark a human being.

Arjuna cowers now because there is lightning darting out of the eyes of the Lord when he says asvargya: “You have locked the door of the kingdom of heaven within by refusing to eliminate your ego, by failing to turn your back upon self-will and separateness.” The Lord shocks Arjuna out of his torpor by using these strong words, and when he has been pulled out of his despondency and despair, Sri Krishna continues in the third verse:

SRI KRISHNA: 3. It does not become you to yield to this weakness. Arise with a brave heart, and destroy the enemy.

Sri Krishna asks Arjuna to come out of this whirlpool in which he has been caught, saying, “It is unworthy of you. You are a blessed human being now and you cannot say that these challenges are too great to face.”

When the senses are driving us, we cannot make the excuse that we are unable to resist. We cannot say that just because there is food nearby we must eat. We cannot say that everybody smokes, therefore we must smoke; everybody drinks, therefore we must drink. However difficult circumstances may be, however formidable the challenges may be, we can be certain that because the Lord is within us we have the infinite resources of his love and wisdom to meet the challenge. When our dear ones are agitating us, we cannot complain that we cannot live with them, because the Lord will answer: “Why can’t you? I am in you. Draw upon me to return love for hatred, goodwill for ill will.”

Having thus made short work of Arjuna’s ego, Sri Krishna now tells him to get up, to rise to his full stature, to straighten his head until it reaches the stars with the whole sky as a crown. He says, “Arjuna, you have such valor in you because I live in you; all you need do is to draw upon me and you can destroy the enemy completely.” He ends the verse by addressing Arjuna as parantapa, ‘destroyer of the foe,’ which is the ego.

ARJUNA: 4. How can I ever bring myself to fight against Bhishma and Drona, who are worthy of reverence? How can I, Krishna?

5. Certainly it would be better to spend my life begging than to kill these great and worthy souls; if I killed them, every pleasure I found would be tainted.

Even though Sri Krishna has been taking Arjuna to task for bemoaning his helplessness and his inability to conquer his own sense cravings and selfish urges, Arjuna still feels that the senses are his friends. He turns to Sri Krishna and says, “What kind of counsel are you giving me? These senses are good, steady friends of mine. I should receive them with hospitality and give them everything they ask for. I am shocked that you should use such unspiritual language and ask me to defy the clamor of my senses.”

In our own daily life we can see how much conflict we have where the senses are concerned. When the eyes want to see something agitating, we feel we must show them all kinds of violent sights. When the ears want to hear raucous music that will agitate the mind and damage our hearing, we tell the Lord, “You don’t expect us to say no, do you?” Since we do not want to be cruel to our ears, we take them to all kinds of parties where the din is so great it lifts the roof. Then food – what the palate demands must be good for the body. Highly spiced, deep-fried, overrefined – this is the stuff the palate enjoys; so we conclude that it is very good for the body.

In the early part of our spiritual development this conflict is likely to come to all of us because we have given license to our senses most of the time. Similarly, we have never consciously tried to go against our self-will, and therefore even the discipline of putting our family and friends first is going to take a long time to master. We are likely to complain to the Lord that by asking us to put other people first all the time, he is making our path too difficult. “Why should I inflict violence on my self-will?” we moan. “This agitates my mind, making meditation difficult.”

ARJUNA: 6. I don’t even know which would be better, for us to conquer them or for them to conquer us. The sons of Dhritarashtra have confronted us; but why would we care to live if we kill them?

Arjuna now raises a question which many of us may be tempted to ask when we are having difficulties on the spiritual path. He says, “After all, even if I conquer the senses, how do I know that I will be able to control my mind? And even if I control my mind, how do I know that I will be able to eliminate the ego? This is all speculation. I am not convinced that all this is so carefully connected. It appears too logical. What does it matter if I conquer my senses or my senses conquer me? What is the use of rising to the summit of human consciousness and conquering the world if I am not there to enjoy it – if my senses are detached, my mind cannot get excited, and there are no more likes and dislikes?”

It seems to Arjuna that he is being asked to throw himself into an even more painful, agitating state. He is completely bewildered, and now breaks down and asks for spiritual guidance from Sri Krishna, the Lord of Love, who has been listening quietly and compassionately all the while.

ARJUNA: 7. My will is paralyzed, and I am utterly confused. Tell me which is the better path for me. Let me be your disciple. I have fallen at your feet; give me instruction.

Arjuna tells Sri Krishna, “I am your disciple. Now be my teacher and instruct me.” In the orthodox Hindu tradition, until we ask a spiritual teacher to be our guru, showing our readiness to receive guidance on the path of meditation, the teacher does not offer to do this for us. It is a great moment in the Gita when for the first time Arjuna declares himself the devoted disciple of Sri Krishna and asks him to be his beloved teacher. The word guru means ‘one who is heavy,’ so deeply established within himself or herself that no force on earth can affect the complete love the guru feels for everyone. If you curse him, he will bless you; if you harm her, she will serve you; and if you exploit him, he will become your benefactor. It is good for us to remember that the guru, the spiritual teacher, is in every one of us. All that another person can do is to make us aware of the teacher within ourselves. The outer teacher makes us aware of the teacher within, and to the extent we can be loyal to the outer teacher, we are being loyal to ourselves, to our Atman. We are told in the scriptures to select a teacher very carefully. We should not get carried away by personal appearance – because we like their hairstyle or saffron robe. We have to listen carefully, judge carefully, and then make our own decision. Once we make a decision and select an outer teacher who is suited to our spiritual needs, we must be completely loyal.

If I may refer to my own small example, I have committed the innumerable mistakes that most of us commit in our modern civilization, but in giving all my love to my grandmother, I was able to attain some spiritual awareness. When the disciples love the guru, it is this love that unifies their consciousness. At the time when we are ready for it, the spiritual teacher will step aside to show us that all the love we have been giving to our teacher has been directed to our own Atman. The guru, who has become complete in himself, does not need anyone’s love to make him secure; it is in order to unify the consciousness of the disciple that the relationship exists.

If you are prepared to undertake the long journey, the teacher will give you the map and all necessary instructions, but you have got to do the traveling yourself. That the teacher cannot provide. The purpose of visiting a spiritual teacher is to be reminded that there is a destination, there is a supreme goal in life, and we all have the innate capacity to undertake the journey. When people used to sit in the presence of Sri Ramana Maharshi and praise him, he would just smile as if to say, “There is no Sri Ramana Maharshi. I am just a little keyhole through which, when you fix your eye with complete concentration, you can see the beckoning, irresistible vision of the Lord.”

The Lord is most eager to meet us. He is much more eager than we are. He has been waiting and waiting for millennia, and we are standing him up. Every minute he is looking to see whether there is anybody coming home at last, and finally, after millions of years of evolution, when all our toys are broken, we decide reluctantly to turn back. When we go back like this after millions of years of separation, the Lord tells us out of his infinite love, “What good boys and girls to have come on your own.” In this verse Arjuna begins to turn to the Lord, by asking him to lead him forward on the path to Self-realization.

ARJUNA: 8. What can overcome a sorrow that saps all my vitality? Even power over men and gods or the wealth of an empire seems empty.

SANJAYA: 9. This is how Arjuna, the great warrior, spoke to Sri Krishna. With the words, “O Govinda, I will not fight,” he became silent.

Arjuna, taking his bow and arrows and putting them away, looks silently at the ground. His actions tell the Lord, “I am not going to fight because I do not have the strength, the will, or the wisdom to turn all my endeavor toward the conquest of myself.” It is impossible for any of us to take on the ego, which is really a formidable foe, without undergoing tremendous spiritual disciplines. When, in the early stage of their meditation, people complain to me about difficulties in controlling the palate, or giving up smoking or drinking, the Job’s consolation that I give them is that these are just preliminaries. The fight has not begun yet; you are just clearing the arena. The real fight begins only when the ego, huge and ferocious, comes onto the field.

Yesterday I was listening to a reading from the Bible about the combat between David and Goliath, which I took as a firsthand description of the spiritual life. Goliath comes and tells the armies of Israel to send their best man; if their man wins, then Goliath and his followers will serve the Israelites, but if Goliath wins, then the Israelites will become the servants of their enemy. The description of Goliath is impressive and terrifying. His armor is invulnerable. He stands on the field like a giant. When David comes up with his five little stones and his puny sling, Goliath gets furious and says, “What are you trying to do, catch a dog?” David takes a little pebble and hits Goliath with a fatal blow right on the center of his forehead. I interpret such stories spiritually. One of the Shiva mantrams is called pancakshara, the ‘five-lettered’ mantram, and for me the five pebbles that David was carrying were a five-lettered mantram with which he was able to defeat his own ego.

The ego’s size can be gauged by our anger, and the further we get into the depths of our consciousness, the more we shall see what anger surges in us when our self-will is violated. To defeat this colossal ego will take a long, long period of struggle with many reverses. But finally, the Gita and the scriptures of all religions assure us, through the grace of the Lord we will be able to eliminate our ego and extinguish our self-will, which is the only barrier between us and the Lord.

SANJAYA: 10. As they stood between the two armies Sri Krishna spoke with a smile to Arjuna, who had fallen into despair.

The Lord, Sri Krishna, does not get angry or agitated while listening to Arjuna’s many objections, but smiling with great affection for his disciple and friend, he now begins to teach.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. You speak sincerely, but your sorrow has no cause; the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.

It is a marvelous line where the Lord implies: “You speak very wise words, but your action is just the opposite of wise. You say you want joy, but the direction in which you are going is towards sorrow. You say you want fulfillment, but what you are going after every day is frustration.” Sri Krishna is now implying all this to Arjuna by pointing out that the way he uses words is one thing, but the way he lives is another.

Do we want joy, security, and fulfillment? This is the question you and I have to ask ourselves first, and then we must move towards these goals. We all say we want peace. There is no individual that says he does not want peace, no nation that says it does not want peace. But if we want peace, we must do the things that make for peace. If we do the things that make for war, only war will come. Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany, used to say, “I do not want war; I only want victory.” On the individual level, too, we are tempted to say, “I don’t want to fight with my parents, but I want to have my way. I don’t want to have any conflict with my partner, but I want to have my way.” In answer to statements like these, Sri Ramakrishna would say, in a childlike outburst, “If you want to go east, you mustn’t go west.” It is not enough if we talk about peace; we must work for it. Even today, after more than two thousand years of recorded history scarred by frequent wars, all the countries on the face of the earth say they long for peace but keep producing armaments, keep suspecting other countries. The Lord of Love therefore asks you and me through Arjuna, “If you want peace, why don’t you work for peace?”

In the second line the Lord, in strong words, gives us the secret of our nature. Arjuna has been talking about death, saying that he does not want to be killed, that he does not want to kill, but Sri Krishna reminds him that it is only the body which is born and which dies. You and I were never born, nor will we ever die, because our real Self is not limited by our physical body. We are spirit, eternal, infinite, and immutable. This is the great discovery we make in the climax of meditation, that we are not the body, senses, mind, or intellect, but supreme spirit.

When Sri Ramana Maharshi’s body was about to be resolved back into the five elements at the time of his death in 1950, all India wept for him, saying, “You are leaving us; you are going away.” His simple reply was, “Where can I go? I am everywhere. How can I leave you?” This is the supreme experience of unity that comes to us in samadhi. No adventure in the external world, however great, can ever be compared to the experience of Sri Ramana Maharshi seated on his little bamboo cot, going beyond time, place, and circumstance and seeing the cosmos as one, all creation as one in the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 12. There has never been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.

We are now getting into one of the central themes of the Gita. Looking at Arjuna compassionately, the Lord tells him, “You have always been; you will always be.” This is the realization we have to make in life – that we are immortal, that we have everlasting life. Jesus in the Christian scriptures often says, “I have come to bring you everlasting life.” It is into this experiential discovery that we shall move in the course of our meditation. As our meditation deepens, we shall find we are delivered from time into the Eternal Now.

One of the ways to test our progress on the spiritual path is to see how much we are able to free ourselves from the oppressive pressure of time. The clock is the most eloquent symbol of the tyranny of time. I sometimes speculate that before long we may be wearing watches with only one hand, showing a second divided into sixty subseconds. When we make an appointment we will say, “Come at two seconds and thirty­-nine subseconds after two thirty.” This is the direction in which we are moving as we become more and more conscious of time. I notice that if at a traffic signal the automobile in front delays ten seconds, immediately the other drivers begin using the horn. I always ask, “What is the harm if that person repeats the mantram for ten seconds and gives us all a chance to slow down?”

The constant craze for going faster, faster, faster throws us more and more into consciousness of time; and curiously enough, when we are oppressed by time, we make many mistakes. It is possible to do our work and attend to our duties without in any way being oppressed by time, and when we work free from the bondage of time we do not make mistakes, we do not get tense, and the quality of our living improves.

One of the easiest ways to free yourself from the tyranny of time is to get up early in the morning. When we used to go for our walks in Oakland in the morning, I would invariably see a few people – usually the same people – making a dash to catch the bus as if they were participating in the Olympics. Often they would be too late, and I always wanted to ask, “Why do you want to run to miss the bus? You might as well walk slowly and miss it.” This is the irony. You run and you still miss the bus, and in addition, the expression you direct at the bus driver is far from loving. You think that he has been doing it on purpose – just waiting until he saw you coming, then stepping on the gas.

This simple step of starting the day early in the morning gives you an opportunity to get up leisurely, take a short walk, and then have your meditation. In meditation, also, do not be aware of time. The moment you become aware of time in meditation, there is an unfavorable factor introduced. When we were having our large class of four or five hundred people on campus, the first night in meditation a few people kept looking at their watches, which I did not object to. But I did begin to protest when they started listening to see if the watches were still ticking. Once you start meditating, forget about time. There is no need to check the clock; you can learn to time the length of the meditation fairly well by the length of the passage you are using.

In order to regain our birthright of eternal life we have to rise gradually above the physical level. Any habit that ties us to the body through a sensory bond eventually has to be thrown away. Right at the outset of the spiritual life we must begin to rid ourselves of physical habits, such as smoking, drinking, and overeating, which will impede our progress. This is not at all a moral or ethical problem; it is a question of spiritual engineering. As long as we tie ourselves to the body by stimulating the senses, and especially by building relationships on the physical level, we cannot realize this legacy of everlasting life.

SRI KRISHNA: 13. As the same person inhabits the body through childhood, youth, and old age, so too at the time of death he attains another body. The man of wisdom is not deluded by these changes.

Just as the body, with which all of us identify ourselves, changes from childhood to youth to old age, similarly, Sri Krishna says against the background of reincarnation, we acquire a new body when we pass from one life into another after the last great change called death. There is no need to subscribe to the theory of reincarnation to lead the spiritual life, but it cannot be easily dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders as a feverish product of the tropical imagination. There is a wealth of evidence based upon scientific research available to those who want to understand this subject before pronouncing a verdict on it. Somerset Maugham, who came to India in the late thirties and had the glorious opportunity of meeting Sri Ramana Maharshi, from whom he drew the saint in his novel The Razor’s Edge, says that even for a nonbeliever it is very difficult to attack the philosophical structure on which reincarnation is based.

One of the common questions about the theory of reincarnation that people ask is, “How is it we do not remember anything of our previous lives?” Sri Krishna is now implying that just as it is very difficult to remember even our childhood in this life, it is impossible for most of us to remember our past lives. If the Lord were to ask us what we were doing on our birthday when we were one year old, we would say that we do not remember. If he said, “Then you didn’t exist,” we would object to his teasing and say, “Of course we existed. We received presents and great love from our parents on that day.”

Sri Krishna now hints to Arjuna, “Just take your thoughts back to your childhood and look at yourself as a child.” If we go back as far as we can to our childhood and picture ourselves as we were then, what our needs, ambitions, hopes, and desires were, we just cannot believe that it is the same person. Today what makes us happy is money, and to a child money means nothing, gold means nothing. One of my cousins, when she was going to the elementary school in our village, had a beautiful gold necklace made by our village goldsmith. One day when she was about eight she came home at noon for lunch, and her mother was alarmed to see that the necklace was not around her neck. “Have you lost your gold necklace, our family treasure?” she asked. And the little girl smiled and said, “No, mommy, I haven’t lost it. I traded it for a mango.” Somebody had offered her a mango, which was much more important, much more enjoyable, and she had just given the necklace away.

In these verses we are being led gradually to the question of death. I think it is Dr. Carl Jung who tells us that in the deep consciousness of most people there is a great fear of death, even among those who say they want to die. One of the most beneficial effects of meditation is that as our meditation deepens, we gradually lose our fear of death. This is the proof that we are rising above physical consciousness. If we talk about death to a great mystic like Sri Ramana Maharshi, who attained illumination at age seventeen, he will just chuckle quietly and say, “I died when I was seventeen.” When at the time of samadhi we lose our ‘I,’ our separate ego, that is death. This is the experience of St. Paul when he says, Not I, not I, but Christ liveth in me. Even intellectually we can ask ourselves the question: when our ‘I’ is wiped out, who is there to die? As we keep putting the happiness of others first all the time, our little ‘I’ is erased, and with the elimination of the little finite ‘I,’ the Immortal ‘I,’ which is the Lord of Love, is revealed in our consciousness.

SRI KRISHNA: 14. When the senses contact sense objects, Kaunteya, we experience cold or heat, pleasure or pain. These are fleeting; they come and go. Bear them patiently, Arjuna.

Sri Krishna is now telling Arjuna the nature of the stimulus and response relationship that our body, senses, and mind have with the finite world. When the material object that is the body comes in contact with other material objects, such as the dollar, then there is some kind of relationship established with which we have nothing to do at all. Sri Krishna, as I imagine him, now almost seems surprised and asks Arjuna, “Why should you get elated or depressed if one material object has its physical reaction with another material object?”

Depression has become one of the scourges of the modern world. Here the Gita can give immediate advice: when you are getting excited, when good things are happening to you, when fortune is smiling on you and you want to go on talking, telling everyone about how happy you are, that is the time not to get elated. On such occasions of elation – when your play is on Broadway, when your novel is on the best-seller list, when people are wanting your autograph – I am usually a bit of a wet blanket and say, “Now is the time not to jump up. Don’t pick up the telephone. Don’t call people. Just keep repeating the mantram.” When the mind is getting agitated, when the waves of elation are starting to rise, do not give them a chance.

Elation expresses itself in many ways in many people. We have some friends for whom the danger signal is the tendency to talk constantly; for others it is grandiose visions of the future. Apparently modest, apparently humble people can have such grand visions of the future that it is difficult to remind them how ordinary most of us are in the present. People with a talent for writing, drama, music, or painting, however mediocre, may get caught on such occasions in the visualization of scenes of great grandeur. They see audiences looking adoringly at them, fighting for their autograph, and in their elation they actually believe that these things can come true. The Gita suggests that when we conjure up elated visions of grandeur, we should guard ourselves against this kind of excitement. If we keep our equilibrium when good things happen, then when fortune frowns, as she surely will because that is her nature, we can sit back with fortitude and forbearance and remain secure.

When you are in a depression, do not withdraw into yourself. There are people with the best intentions who say, “We don’t want to come and force our depression on others.” This is another trick of the mind, which tells you, “Since you’re in a depression now, why not confine yourself to your little cell?” This is likely to make you more and more depressed. When despondency comes, I would suggest a smile. Even if it does not look quite like a real smile, it does such good for everyone, because even a smile comes from a deeper level of consciousness. If you can at least repeat the mantram and smile, the great process of relaxation begins.

Not allowing ourselves to get elated is neither callousness nor passivity; it leads us into a deeper level of awareness where we find we are completely secure and joyful. Anything that tends to make us elated is inevitably going to throw us into depression, and one of my grievances against psychedelic drugs is the very deceptive state of euphoria into which they lead us. In order to guard ourselves against elation and the following state of deprivation, we cannot allow our senses to be stimulated unduly.

In the language of the Gita, not only elation and depression, not only pleasure and pain, but everything in life is a duality; and in order to attain samadhi, one of the magnificent disciplines taught by Sri Krishna is evenness of mind. He will say, Samatvam yoga ucyate: “Yoga is evenness of mind.”

SRI KRISHNA: 15. The person who is unaffected by these, who is the same in pleasure and pain, is truly wise and fit for immortality. Assert your strength to realize this, Arjuna.

The Lord of Love begins to tell us how we can prepare ourselves for reclaiming our birthright of everlasting life. In the scriptures of all religions this promise of eternal life is given, but people usually understand it only as a very inspiring metaphor, not to be taken with scientific gravity. The mystics say that it is time that is an illusion; eternity is the reality.

How is it that you and I see people, very often our own dear ones, dying around us, and yet never ask ourselves the question: “Is this one day going to happen to me, too? Is there no way by which I can transcend death?” In my beautiful village in Kerala state, whenever a death took place, which is not infrequent in a poor country like India, my grandmother would always insist that I accompany her to the scene of sorrow, even when I was still an impressionable and sensitive child. As I sat by the side of dying people while my grandmother held their hand, it used to torture me. Even in my dreams, I long remembered the sight of all this agony I witnessed during the days when I was growing up at my granny’s feet.

Later on, when through her blessing I began to turn inwards, I realized why she had taken me to those scenes of great bereavement. It was to make me ask if there were any way to transcend death. Her grace enabled me to know that in the midst of life I am in death, and it made me want above everything else to go beyond death, to attain immortality in this very life. As my meditation deepened, I was able to harness even the fear of death, turning it into power to help me to overcome death.

As I began to recall the words of my spiritual teacher, it began to dawn upon me for the first time that we are not mortal. When Einstein was asked how he discovered the law of relativity, he said that it was by questioning an axiom accepted by all the world, and the scriptures say the stage will come in your meditation when you will begin to question whether death is inevitable. This is not an intellectual question at all, but an experience in which some lurking suspicion comes into your consciousness and whispers that you are not mortal. Once you hear that, there is great hope, and a great desire to turn your back upon all lesser desires so that you can use all your capacity to make the supreme discovery that you are eternal.

In every religion, the great founders will promise us everlasting life. In the Bhagavad Gita it is enunciated in very clear terms. The Gita says that as long as we identify ourselves obsessively with our body, we will keep falling into the jaws of death. In meditation we can very skillfully minimize this obsessive identification with the body. On many levels, in many ways, we can practice the spiritual disciplines which will gradually lift us above physical consciousness, giving us a continuing sense of freedom and a continuing sense of progress on the spiritual path.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. The impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between these two have attained the end of all knowledge.

The main difficulty with Arjuna, as with all of us, is that he looks upon himself as the body, as the biochemical mechanism with which all of us identify ourselves. Sri Krishna is trying to help Arjuna break through this wrong identification to remind him that he is not the perishable body, which is only the house in which he dwells. He is the imperishable Atman.

In this verse Lord Krishna distinguishes between what is real and what is unreal. With the far-reaching spiritual penetration of the Sanskrit scriptures, the Gita says that whatever perishes is not real. Whatever exists in reality, exists always. That which comes into being today and passes away a hundred years from now cannot truly be said to exist. In this sense the body, which is conditioned by time, is unreal.

Mahatma Gandhi, who studied Sanskrit while in jail, pointed out that the Sanskrit word sat has two meanings: the first is ‘truth,’ and the second is ‘that which is.’ When asked for a definition of God, Gandhi said, “Truth is God. God alone is and nothing else exists.” During the campaign to free India of British domination, he told the oppressed millions of India that evil has no existence in itself; we support evil, therefore it exists, but if we withdraw our support, it ceases to exist. In the example of his own life, Gandhi applied this truth on the practical level in his campaigns of nonviolent resistance against British exploitation.

Those who see the supreme Truth, the Lord, in their own consciousness, says Sri Krishna, know that that which is not real has no existence, and that which is real has no nonexistence. Arjuna just gets confused. He looks at his body, he looks at Sri Krishna’s body, he looks at Sri Krishna’s peacock feather, and he just cannot believe that all this is an optical illusion. This is why the Lord limits the vision of the unreality of the passing phenomenal world only to the great mystics, who have realized that beneath the apparent, impermanent world, the world of separate fragments, there lies the changeless Reality called God. But this vision does not apply to the vast majority of human beings. As long as we believe we are a separate fragment, as long as we identify ourselves with our body, we have to deal with the phenomenal world which is very real to us. I am real. Every one of us is real. Even after we realize the truth that all life is one, we can continue the activities of the workaday world, establishing personal relationships with loving artistry. We learn to show our love to each individual in the way that is most correct for that special relationship, though never forgetting the underlying unity of all.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. Realize That which pervades the universe and is indestructible; no power can affect this unchanging, imperishable Reality.

Sri Krishna is driving into Arjuna’s consciousness the great truth that he is neither the perishable body, nor the changing senses, nor the unsteady mind, nor the wavering intellect, but the Atman, as immutable and infinite as Brahman itself. The Lord of Love tells Arjuna the nature of that which pervades the cosmos. All that we see in life is pervaded by the immortal, immutable, infinite Reality we call God.

SRI KRISHNA: 18. The body is mortal, but he who dwells in the body is said to be immortal and immeasurable. Therefore, O Bharata, fight in this battle.

This body of ours will come to an end, but we, the Atman, are eternal. Here again there is the reminder that we have no end, and therefore never should confuse ourselves with the perishable body. The body is changing from moment to moment, and even in the few minutes you have been reading these words, the body has already moved closer to the great change called death. The mind is subject to even more rapid changes. We have only to look at our desires and moods to see how much the mind is subject to change. In Sanskrit the word for the phenomenal world is samsara, ‘that which is moving intensely’ – being born, dying, being born again, dying again.

Whenever we cling to anything that is continually changing, we will become more and more insecure with the passage of time. When we identify ourselves obsessively with the body, every morning begins to pose a threat as we get older and move into the latter half of life. Every morning we look in the mirror to see if there are new wrinkles on the face, bags under the eyes, or grey showing in our hair. Even if, with the advance of modern surgery, these bags and wrinkles can be removed, after ten or twenty years the same fate will come to us. Such is the paradox of life: when we cling to the body, it loses its beauty, but when we do not cling to it, and use the body as an instrument given to us to serve others, even on the physical level it glows with health and beauty, as we can see from the lives of many great mystics. When Sri Ramakrishna walked along the streets of Calcutta, legends say people were dazzled by his beauty. His spiritual radiance was so great that it would shine through the body. Ramakrishna did not like drawing the attention of people, so with his childlike simplicity he got an old blanket and covered his body when going out. When our consciousness becomes pure, even the body begins to reflect its light.

The body is the temple of the Lord and must be looked after with care. Even at the age of seventy-seven, my grandmother had a beautiful, healthy body because she was always aware that this temple had to be kept in good order, swept with the mantram broom, and purified through the daily practice of meditation and discriminating restraint of the senses. We show respect for the Lord within by keeping the body healthy, clean, and beautiful. Any attempt to misuse the body, or to indulge the senses at the expense of the body, is a violation of the divine presence. Where books, movies, television, and our eating habits are concerned, we must be vigilant to see we are not indulging the senses at the cost of the health of our body or mind. Even with those who are making progress on the spiritual path, the senses can play havoc if vigilance is relaxed. In order to transform our belief that we are the changing body to identification with the Atman, we begin by governing the senses very carefully for many years. This is not done in an ascetic spirit, or for the purpose of mortification, but to see that every day we give the body what is needed to sustain it as a spiritual instrument.

Just as we purify the physical body, called sthulasharira in Sanskrit, with vigilant care of the senses, healthy physical exercise, and repetition of the mantram, we purify the subtle body, sukshmasharira, by cultivating healthy thoughts. Thoughts are the food of the subtle body of samskaras, our mental and emotional conditioning. We are eating this food all the time, and every time a thought rises in the mind we have added either to the nutrition of the subtle body or to its malnutrition. The unhealthy effect on the mind of anger, resentment, and hostility is so great that it can cause far-reaching damage even on the physical level. To keep the subtle body pure and healthy we must first and foremost cultivate the virtue of forgiveness.

SRI KRISHNA: 19. One person believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both these are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain.

20. We were never born, we will never die; we have never undergone change, we can never undergo change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, we do not die when the body dies.

Sri Krishna continues to explain our real nature in this verse, which is a favorite of mystics in India. Na jayate, we were never born; na mriyate va, therefore we will never die; na ‘yam bhutva bhavita va na bhuyah, we have never undergone any change, and we will never undergo any change. Aja, never born; nitya, eternal; shashvata, immutable. And finally, in a flash of subtle humor, the Lord adds purana, ‘the ancient one’: compared to us the Himalayas are like a newborn baby. When the world was not, when the galaxies were not, we were already greybeards faltering with a staff.

The play of the Lord, in which he assumes a body and seems to pass through childhood, youth, and old age, is beautifully portrayed in Kerala in the Guruvayur Temple, dedicated to Lord Krishna. Sri Krishna is worshipped there in three different forms during the three periods of the day. In the morning if you go to the temple you will see a little baby Krishna in a cradle being fed, bathed, and sung to sleep. Most children like to go for the morning service. They see that the Lord is even younger than they, and they have such compassion for him, and feel so protective, that they do not want any harm to come to the little one. This protective feeling towards the Lord as a little boy is very good discipline for spiritual awareness. At noon Sri Krishna is a young man straight as a palm tree, outgoing and very vigorous. You see Lord Krishna as the embodiment of physical fitness at its best. You find the peacock feather, the garland of wildflowers, the yellow silk dhoti, and the bamboo flute. Young people like to visit the temple at noon, when it is easy for them to identify with the Lord. In the evening, when the sun is about to set and tropical India is at its artistic best, the old people like to go and see the Lord, who, hardly able to stand up with a staff, is ready to shed the body. The different images serve to remind you that these are all changes which affect only the body, and that you should learn to rise above the physical level so that you do not get caught in the cycle of change.

SRI KRISHNA: 21. Realizing That which is indestructible, eternal, unborn, and unchanging, how can we slay or cause another to slay?

22. As we abandon worn-out clothes and acquire new ones, so when the body is worn out a new one is acquired by the Self, who lives within.

In this homely verse, Sri Krishna says that just as when our clothes become old and tattered we throw them away to put on new ones, similarly, when this body has become unfit for serving others, it is time to throw it away. We should not cling to it. When Sri Ramana Maharshi’s body was about to fall away and thousands of his disciples begged him to continue on, he said, “No, this body is no longer able to serve you. As long as it can serve you, I will retain it, but when the time comes when it can no longer serve you, I am going to lay it aside.”

One of the facts about my granny’s life that I do not usually refer to is her attitude towards death. For her, death was not a painful topic because she believed so firmly that our real Self cannot die. In other words, even though we cannot but grieve when our dear ones pass away, the mystics tell us that underneath this grief we should always remember that death is only a change of rooms. They are speaking mostly against the background of transmigration, or reincarnation. We should all be aware, though, that the spiritual life does not depend on our acceptance of reincarnation, nor does meditation require that we subscribe to the theory of transmigration of souls. Whether we believe in one life or in a million lives, the supreme goal is valid; the basis of meditation remains valid for all. I would strongly discourage trying to speculate about previous or future lives; this life is headache enough. Let us confine our attention to this life and try as far as our capacity goes to learn to love the Lord here and now.

SRI KRISHNA: 23. The Self cannot be pierced by weapons or burned by fire; water cannot wet it, nor can the wind dry it.

24. The Self cannot be pierced or burned, made wet or dry; it is everlasting and infinite, standing on the motionless foundations of eternity.

25. The Self is unmanifested, beyond all thought and beyond all change; knowing this, you should not grieve.

Arjuna still does not grasp what Sri Krishna means by “our real Self, our Atman.” In this particular verse, the Lord is trying to awaken Arjuna, and all of us, to the truth of our existence. In referring to our real personality, which is divine, he uses three words beginning with a, which means ‘not’: avyakto ‘yam, acintyo ‘yam, avikaryo ‘yam. Avyakta means ‘that which is not expressed,’ ‘that which remains concealed.’ Our real personality is not revealed at all; it is very cunningly concealed. It is acintya, or unthinkable, because it is beyond the dualities of conceptual thinking. It is avikarya, beyond all change. Our real personality never grows because it is ever perfect. It is never enriched because it is always full. If we try to understand the applicability of these three terms to our own personality, we may begin to suspect that it lies beyond the fleeting body, beyond the turbulent senses, beyond the restless mind, beyond the clouded intellect.

Avyakta comes from the word vyakta, which means ‘completely expressed,’ ‘manifested.’ We all look upon ourselves as only our apparent personality, the body-mind complex, never realizing our real personality, which is the infinite, immortal, immutable Atman. If someone were to ask us what we consider our personality, we would be likely to say that our height is six foot three, our weight two hundred twenty pounds. To this a sage like Sri Ramana Maharshi would say, “I did not ask you the dimensions of your house; I want you to tell me what your real personality is.” If we tell him that we have two million in the bank, the illumined man will say, “You haven’t answered my question.” If we add that we have won the Nobel prize, he would still say, “Don’t beat about the bush.”

Meister Eckhart summarizes the truth of the Atman beautifully when he points out that the seed of God is latent in all of us. In Sanskrit it is called the Atman; Meister Eckhart prefers to use the homely expression “the seed of God.” He says that just as apple seeds grow into apple trees and pear seeds into pear trees, God seeds grow into God trees. The word avyakta implies that our only purpose in life is to reveal the divine personality that is concealed in all of us. The seed has to be helped to germinate, the weeds have to be removed regularly, and then the plant becomes a God tree.

The question then arises as to how we can reveal this hidden divinity in our everyday life. To see what noxious weeds keep the seed of our true divinity from growing, we have only to look at people who are insecure, who dwell upon themselves. Such people look at everything, everyone, through their own personal needs; these are the people who say they are very, very sensitive. In my early days in Berkeley, one of the expressions that I heard often when I visited Telegraph Avenue was “I’m so sensitive.” According to this interpretation, “insensitive” refers to anybody who treads on my corns, although when I tread on another’s corns, I don’t even know it. In the language of the mystic, being sensitive means being sensitive to the needs of others. You will find that the more you attend to the needs of others, in your own family for example, the less you will get hurt, agitated, or hostile over seemingly trivial things.

In a movie my wife and I saw recently, one that had been highly praised by critics, the daughter could not sleep one night just because her mother had repeated one question twice: “Have you forgotten my candy?” The daughter thought that her insomnia that night was a result of utter sensitiveness. Now, my mother often repeats herself half a dozen times – repetition runs in our family. And I don’t say she is casting aspersions on my integrity. I just say she knows I am an absentminded professor, and I am likely to forget things. As long as we are deeply convinced that our parents want only our happiness, that our partner or our children want only to add to our joy, things are not likely to upset us. My mother uses curt language at times, but under no circumstances would it occur to me to think that she is trying to vent some pent-up hostility or to take it out on me, say, because the milkman diluted the milk more than he is permitted to. Wherever there is not this deep faith in those around us, I think that no attempt at courtesy, no attempt to repeat the right words and phrases, will bring about clear communication. Whenever we get agitated or apprehensive in daily relationships, because of some remark, some act of omission or commission from those around us, the very best thing we can do is use the mantram.

All of us are trying to build our personality on the short span of time in which we thrash about in the sensory world. During the Anglo-Saxon period, a few Christian emissaries came to England to preach the gospel of Christ. One of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Edwin, took counsel with his advisors over the new faith. It must have been a bitter winter evening, with snow outside and torches lighting up the hall, for the answer Edwin received is as evocative as it is thoughtful. “My lord,” one man replied, “it has often seemed to me that we live like a swallow that suddenly darts through this hall at dinnertime and passes out again through a far window. It comes from the darkness and returns to darkness; for only a short while is it warm and safe from the winter weather. That is how I regard our life. I don’t know where I have come from; all I know is a little span of light, until I pass again into the darkness beyond. If this new faith can tell us truly what lies before and after, I think it most worthy of being followed.”

The Gita says that outside of this life we come from infinity and go again into infinity. This short spell in between, called vyakta, the finite, the mortal, the physical spell, has hypnotized us so that we say, “My personality lives only for one hundred years, from the time my body was born until the time it will die.” But in the first word of this verse, avyakta, we are reminded that our life is infinite. Jesus constantly reminds the people not only of ancient Judea but of the whole modern world that we can have everlasting life by rising above the physical level of consciousness. This is a great challenge that can set our imagination on fire if we can understand that it is possible to rise so high above physical consciousness and fragmentation that we can see not only what goes on in the lighted hall, but also what is outside in the infinite darkness beyond death.

The second word is acintya. Because our real Self, our divine personality, is beyond all the dualities of conceptual thinking, it can only be revealed when the turbulent factory of the mind has become completely still. For most of us, the mind factory keeps working twenty-four hours, day in and day out, without a holiday, and without any strikes either. There is only overtime. All of us must have experienced moments when we have begged, “If only I could stop thinking. If only I could close down, put up a little note, ‘Don’t enter here. It’s a misdemeanor.’ ” If we could, we would find ourselves beginning to reveal our true identity. One of the unfortunate trends of our modern civilization is described by that learned phrase, Cogito ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” The mystic says, “I have stopped thinking; therefore I am.” You can see the diametrical contrast. We are all under the impression that if we go beyond thinking, we are nowhere. If the mind is closed down, we fear we will be out of a job: “What will I do? How will I spend my time? What will I dream about in my sleep?” The answer is: why do you want to dream? Why do you want to go after personal profit and personal pleasure? It is in forgetting yourself, and in serving others, that you really come to life.

One of the constant reproaches that used to be flung at me in my early days of meditation was, “You have such a fascinating personality. Why do you want to throw it away? Look at your intellect, razor sharp; why do you want to blunt it? Look at your mind, so active, so productive; why do you want to still it?” It is not even possible for most of us to suspect that at present we have no personality. Most of us cannot reveal even one ray of the magnificence within us. This is why Sri Ramana Maharshi and other mystics will not take us seriously when we say we live. The mystics tell us that if we can only succeed in throwing away this mask which has become part of our face, the physical-psychical mask that we now call our personality, then all our magnificent capacity for loving, acting, and serving will come into our lives.

SRI KRISHNA: 26. O mighty Arjuna, even if you believe the Self to be subject to birth and death, you should not grieve.

27. Death is inevitable for the living; birth is inevitable for the dead. Since these are unavoidable, you should not grieve.

28. Every creature is unmanifested at first, and then attains a manifestation, O Bharata. When its end has come, it once again becomes unmanifested. What is there to lament in this?

In spite of all the Lord’s assurances about the immortality of the Self, there still lurks in Arjuna’s consciousness the thought: “I am the body; when the body dies, I die.” This is one of the occasions in the Gita when Sri Krishna teases Arjuna, telling him that even if he believes he is the body, even then he should not be afraid of death, because death is the natural consummation of the body’s span of life. The Lord is forcing Arjuna to break through his wrong identification with the body, which is only the house in which he dwells.

Through the practice of meditation, we will acquire the delightful incapacity to associate people very much with their physical appearance. If someone asks me, “How tall is Jeff?” I have to take time to try to picture him, then use a mental tape and try to remember his height. This is a healthy sign. Particularly when someone asks me how old a person is, it takes a certain amount of time for me to recall. When we do not associate people with their physical appearance, with their age, we are beginning to associate them with the Atman. The more we dwell upon the physical appearance and age of others, the more we are conscious of our own appearance and age. The mystics tell us we should be concerned less about these details of packaging and concerned more with the contents. When I look at people, I like to look at their eyes. These are the windows into the contents, which is the Lord. Gradually, as we become more and more conscious of the Atman, we will be looking straight at people through their eyes and deep into the Lord of Love who is within.

SRI KRISHNA: 29. The glory of the Self is beheld by a few, and a few speak of its glory; a few hear about this glory, but there are many who listen without understanding.

Sri Krishna passes on to a verse for which there is a close parallel in the parables of Jesus. Sri Krishna says that people in their response to the spiritual life seem to fall into various categories. Similarly, ­Jesus tells this parable: “Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow: And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the wayside, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.” (Mark 4:3-8)

It is a beautiful presentation. “And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the wayside, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up.” Unless there is a window open in our consciousness, some entry into the deeper state of consciousness, we will be unmoved by even the most eloquent presentation of the spiritual life. Somewhere in our consciousness there must be the suspicion that the passing toys of the world can never satisfy us. Even intelligent, educated, successful people, after listening to a talk on the spiritual life and meditation, may turn to their friends and ask, “What is he talking about?” In such people there is no window open; they are skimming, however successfully, on the surface of life. Very often they may ask, “Why do we need meditation?” Or, after I have waxed eloquent on what meditation can do in transforming all that is ugly into all that is beautiful in our consciousness, some good people have come up and said, “We don’t need meditation because we are beautiful. You folks need this transformation; evidently you have quite a lot to transform.” Still others of this tribe will say, “We are always happy. We get up happy; we go to bed happy; even in our dreams we are happy.” One of our friends on the Blue Mountain used to tell me to call such people “smiling cabbages.” When Jesus talks about the seeds falling by the wayside and the fowls devouring them, he is talking mostly about people in whom the words go in one ear and out the other.

In order to grow, you need sorrow; in order to become loving, you very often need distress, and turmoil is often required to release your deeper resources. Unless you have suffered yourself, it is not easy for you to understand those who are suffering acutely. Unless you have gone through some of the distressing vicissitudes of life, you cannot easily sympathize with others. Many people, even when they have gone through a good deal, suffer from a convenient amnesia with the passage of time. Older people have a tendency to forget some of the things they did when they were young. That is why they condemn the failings of the younger generation too readily. Their own past sufferings should enable them to understand, sympathize, and help.

“And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth.” This is the second category. In Sanskrit there is a word – arambhashura, ‘those who are heroes at the beginning’ – which applies to many of us. The first time we hear a good talk on meditation, we really catch fire. On one occasion a young fellow came up at the end of my talk and said, “This is what I’ve been looking for all my life.” I am still looking for him. Others, on the way home, get a deerskin, a Patanjali pillow, Mysore incense, and Ravi Shankar records, all in preparation for meditation. But after this upsurge of enthusiasm has exhausted itself in shopping, meditation is forgotten. It is not enough if we content ourselves with the preliminaries; we have to see that it is not a temporary infatuation, which passes away within a few days. Jesus must have met quite a number of this type in ancient Jerusalem, because he goes into greater detail: “But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.”

“And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.” This is the third type. When we were in Berkeley twelve years ago, we tried to have a vegetable garden at the back of our house. We had tomatoes, corn, and pumpkins. My agricultural advisor was a young British friend who knew even less about gardening than I did; his main advice to me was, “Give the weeds a chance.” I listened to him carefully, and between us we got one ear of corn, a few tomatoes, and pumpkins which I was told would not be edible at all. The weeds had really prospered; they choked out the corn, the tomatoes, and the pumpkins. In meditation, even though we meditate regularly in the morning, if we do not take care to pull out the weeds that are rampant in the garden of the mind, spiritual seeds are not likely to thrive. On Lee Street, where we reside, we have one of the best lawns, thanks to our friend Sumner. The dandelions which used to form the majority on the lawn are now disappearing. The dandelions are rather attractive, and they also have a place in the scheme of existence, but on our street they are not looked upon with favor. In the early days, our neighbors must have found it a little disquieting when these dandelions came up so quickly. We would come and pull up the weeds, and as soon as we walked away the dandelions would say, “Have they gone? Let’s come up.” We didn’t know about their habits, so we had just been pulling off the flowers and throwing them away. Later Sumner explained that their roots go deep, and unless something drastic is done at the root, it is not possible to prevent the dandelions from coming up.

“And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and some an hundred.” There is sometimes a suspicion that the spiritual life is rather selfish. In the early days, when we try to make meditation the basis of our life and retire from some of our former activities and former cronies, it is not unlikely that we will be branded as unsociable. On such occasions we can strengthen ourselves by remembering that the practice of meditation is not going to benefit us alone. We may not be able to reach thousands, as does a great mystic like Sri Ramakrishna; but each of us, as our spiritual awareness deepens, can help a few members of our family and a few friends to find their center of gravity within.

SRI KRISHNA: 30. The Self of all beings, living within the body, is eternal and cannot be harmed. Therefore, you should not grieve.

In my village, where death was not uncommon, most people on their death bed would send for my grandmother just to have her sit by their side. They would hold her hand or look into her eyes, which said, “There is no death.” For her, the dissolution of the body was not death at all. At the time of samadhi, this is the realization the lovers of God attain. When they become united with the Lord in their hearts, they go beyond identification with the body. The physical nexus is cut once and for all, and afterwards, though they look after the body very carefully, they know that it is just an instrument to be used to convey the truth of immortality to all those ready to receive it.

The body is not me; it is only the jacket which I wear. When this jacket is torn and tattered, the time has come for me to throw it away and put on a new jacket. Sri Krishna asks, “What is there to grieve about? What is so tragic about putting on a new jacket? Do you want to keep an old jacket that lets in cold air, makes you uncomfortable, and can no longer be used to serve others?”

When you are able to go deep into meditation and rise above physical consciousness, it will seem as though you can just take off the body as you would take off a jacket and leave it on the hanger until you finish meditating. If sometime in meditation you go very deep into your consciousness, after going home you may even find that you have left your jacket at the ashram. Mystics in India have been victims of this divine phenomenon at the most inopportune times. Once, while walking on the streets of Calcutta, Sri Ramakrishna heard a song about the Divine Mother, or saw someone seated in meditation with eyes closed, and had such a sudden transformation of consciousness that he dropped his dhoti. The dhoti is wrapped very gently around the hips. It is not meant for sudden attacks of higher states of consciousness; it is meant for the secular way of life. I can imagine Ramakrishna’s embarrassed disciples gathering around him and asking, “Blessed One, where is your dhoti?” and he, in sublime simplicity, answering, “You ask me where is my dhoti? I ask you where is my body!”

Body consciousness is the obstacle to divine awareness, and every day we must ask ourselves what is likely to decrease our identification with the body. Whatever increases physical consciousness cannot be an aid to the spiritual life. Overeating, for example, intensifies body consciousness. Every time we are tempted to eat something because of an advertisement or an old samskara, we should ask ourselves if the body needs it or if it will merely stimulate the palate. Once we start retraining our sense of taste, which is in the mind, we can enjoy green salad and fruits as the greatest of delicacies. Skipping a meal, especially when we have eaten a little more than is necessary at the previous meal, is another way of lessening body consciousness. Other aids for lessening physical consciousness are giving up harmful habits such as smoking, drinking, the use of drugs, and overindulgence of any kind. The Gita does not ask you to do this for puritanical reasons; it says that if you want to rise above physical consciousness, these are the things you have to throw away. Once this obsessive physical identification has been broken through, you feel so good, so high, all the time that you cannot imagine using any artificial aid to be a few inches high when you are now almost the height of the cosmos.

SRI KRISHNA: 31. Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate. For a warrior there is nothing higher than a war against evil.

32. O Arjuna, the warrior who is confronted with such a war should be pleased, for it has come of itself as an open gate to heaven.

33. But if you do not participate in this battle against evil, you will be violating your dharma and your honor, and you will incur sin.

34. The story of your dishonor will be repeated by people endlessly; and for a man of honor, dishonor is worse than death.

35. These brave charioteers will think you have withdrawn from battle out of fear; those who formerly esteemed you will treat you with disrespect.

36. Your enemies will ridicule your strength and say things that should not be said. What could be more painful than this?

37. Death means the attainment of heaven; conquest means the enjoyment of the earth. Therefore rise up, Kaunteya, with the resolution to fight.

Now Sri Krishna begins giving specific instruction to Arjuna, a very practical man who is a little impatient with all the philosophical touches the Lord has been adding. He looks ready for the supreme teaching, and Lord Krishna, who knows when the time is right, plunges into the great verse:

SRI KRISHNA: 38. Having made yourself alike in pain and pleasure, profit and loss, victory and defeat, engage in this great war and you will be freed from sin.

Tato yuddhaya yujyasva. Yuddhaya means ‘for battle,’ for the great war. We are all born to fight the ego, to do battle against the three phalanxes of the ego’s formidable army: fear, which is the infantry; anger, which is the cavalry; and lust, most powerful of all, which is the elephantry. The language of the Gita is really appropriate when it describes this as a long, drawn-out war. If we talk in terms of one life, then all our life this war will rage; if we talk in terms of a million lives, against the background of evolution, this war has been going on all the time. The war is between what is selfish in me and what is selfless in me: what is impure in me pitted against what is pure in me, and what is imperfect against what is perfect.

Sukhaduhkhe same kritva. Here is the way to embark upon this war against all that is death in yourself so that you may have immortal life. Sukha is pleasure; duhkha is pain. Make yourself alike in pleasure and pain. Here is one of the central themes of the Bhagavad Gita. Even if you fight with all your might, the ego will always win, you will always die again, the cycle of birth and death will go on and on, unless you succeed in being alike in pain and pleasure. When I used to hear this from my grandmother, I would always make the same practical objection: “I don’t know how to do this. I like pleasure, and I don’t like pain.” In answer, her smile seemed to say, “How original of you!” This is everybody’s problem; it is the human condition to be pleased by pleasure, and to be displeased by pain. This is why Sri Krishna says, Sukhaduhkhe same kritva: transform your mental state into perfect equanimity if you do not want to die. When you get the firm resolve not to die, when there is no price you are not prepared to pay in order to transcend death, then you have the unfailing motivation for carrying out this great discipline of being alike in pleasure and pain.

When pleasant things happen to us, the mind immediately gets agitated, and we say, “I am pleased; I am happy.” We wrongly identify ourselves with this passing wave of mental agitation called pleasure, and because we identify with the wave of pleasure, we cannot help identifying with the passing wave of pain also. When something is a little more pleasant, the mind gets a little more agitated and becomes excited. If we repeatedly get caught up in the same experiences of pleasure and excitement, they become samskaras; the mind becomes more turbulent, and we get caught more and more in the cycle of birth and death.

Suppose someone praises us, “Look at your hair: gleaming like molten gold. Look at your eyes: Mediterranean blue. Look at your lips: ruby from the mines of Golconda.” When somebody praises our appearance, almost all of us respond in the same way; immediately our mind becomes agitated. The point Sri Krishna makes is not that we have to tell people, “Don’t praise me; I am trying to make my mind calm.” What Sri Krishna says is to be grateful if someone declares that you are irresistible, but do not depend for your security on that; do not allow your mind to be affected. The way to remain calm when good things are happening to you, when people are praising you, is to repeat the mantram. As soon as someone looks appreciatively at your appearance, start repeating Rama, Rama, Rama. I know it is dampening, but as long as you are vulnerable to praise, you will be vulnerable to condemnation also.

Most of us do not realize how much we depend upon other people’s approval for our security. The time may come on the spiritual path, as it came many times in the life of Gandhi, when people withdraw their appreciation and their support because we are not going the way they want us to go. When we are established within ourselves, criticism, even condemnation, will not shake our security, will not make us hostile. We can function beautifully alone, against the whole world if necessary. If criticism is destructive, we can ignore it; when it is constructive, we can benefit from it.

More than once the people of India refused to follow Gandhi, particularly in the early days. “You are an ascetic,” they said. “You are a dreamer; you are impractical. We cannot follow you.” Gandhi would always answer, in effect, “I am not asking you to follow me. If you want me, my terms are complete nonviolence. If you are not prepared for that, look for another leader.” Many times he said this, and many times the people of India said, “All right, we are going to look for another leader.” But after some days they would return to him. This is what faith in oneself means: if necessary, I will go alone. What do I want when I know the Lord is within me? Whose criticism am I afraid to face?

The Lord continues to emphasize the duality of life in the word labhalabhau, ‘profit and loss.’ Today you may get fifty percent on your investment; tomorrow you may lose fifty percent. Be alike in gain and loss, not only in terms of money, but in terms of time, energy, and effort. Personal profit agitates the mind and gets you selfishly involved. “How much is it going to bring me? If it brings me fifty percent it is a philanthropic enterprise. If it brings me loss it is not good business.” Even though you may have a high code of personal conduct, the mental agitation continues when you are attached to profit. In whatever you are doing, says Sri Krishna, keep your equanimity. He uses one more word, jayajayau, ‘victory and defeat.’ Make your mind alike in victory and defeat, in gain and in loss, in pain and in pleasure; then you will go beyond death to the supreme state.

SRI KRISHNA: 39. You have heard the intellectual explanation of sankhya, O Partha. Now listen to the principles of yoga; by practicing these you can break through the bonds of karma.

Arjuna is an intelligent man who has been taught by the best teachers in ancient India, and Sri Krishna therefore tries to satisfy his intellectual needs to some extent. This kind of intellectual background to the spiritual life is called sankhya, which literally means ‘counting’ or ‘listing.’ First the spiritual teacher lists carefully the benefits of meditation and spiritual disciplines; but listening to these theories is not enough. The disciple must begin their practice. The theory is called sankhya; the actual practice is yoga. The word yoga often has been misunderstood, especially in the West, as the practice of certain physical exercises. These exercises are not yoga; they are asanas. Neither is music or dancing yoga. There may be musicians in India who say their music is yoga, but it is not. There may be dancers who claim their dancing is yoga, but I am afraid it is not. Yoga is the practice of meditation and the allied spiritual disciplines. When the senses are stilled, when the mind is stilled, when the intellect is stilled, when the ego is stilled, then the state of perfect yoga is reached.

Arjuna, having accepted Sri Krishna as his teacher and listened carefully to his initial instruction, is now ready to hear in detail about the actual practice of spiritual disciplines.

In this verse the Lord promises Arjuna that if he practices these disciplines – bases his life on meditation, repeats the holy name, restrains his senses intelligently, and puts the welfare of all those around him first – then he shall go beyond the law of karma. The law of karma is not a concept limited to only the Hindu and Buddhist traditions; no one has stated this law in clearer terms than Jesus the Christ: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” If we contribute to the suffering of those around us, we cannot escape the law which will bring this suffering back to us. Similarly, if we begin to keep the welfare of others in view, and contribute to it every day, we are contributing to our own joy as well.

In the ultimate analysis, our resentments and hostilities are not against others. They are against our own alienation from our native state, which is cosmic consciousness, Krishna-consciousness, or Christ-consciousness. All the time we are being nudged by some latent force within us. Somebody is trying to remind us what our native state is, and all the time we are under this pressure from within. Our senses are turned outwards, and we are adepts at personal profit and pleasure, so we do not like to hear these little reminders; but the needling goes on. When we get tense, it is easiest to vent our frustration by making cracks at our children, our wife, or our husband – it is just a matter of geographic proximity. When we attack other people, when we become a source of trouble to others, it is not because we want to add to their trouble; we have just become an object of trouble to ourselves. Our nerves are tense; we cannot sleep properly; we cannot sit down and meditate. Our partner is close by, our parents are close by, our neighbor is next door, so why not go and get them agitated? We succeed in agitating seven people, and each of them is now prepared to agitate seven more. Agitation, particularly the form that follows the precept “Express your anger; explode your anger on society,” is infectious, and this chain of retribution will eventually bring our agitation back to us. When we are agitated, when we are ready to burst our anger upon others, the immediate solution is to go for a long walk repeating the mantram.

SRI KRISHNA: 40. On this path effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure. Even a little effort toward spiritual awareness will yield protection from the greatest fear.

For me this is one of the most memorable verses in the Gita, and it will take a lifetime on the spiritual path to appreciate its applicability to every aspect of human life. When we meditate on the Lord within for even a short time every day, this effort is not wasted. Even if we meditate only thirty minutes every morning, and try to practice the allied spiritual disciplines to a small extent during the day, this can go a long way in guarding us against many fears, known and unknown, which lurk in our consciousness. Most of us have fears of losing what we believe gives us security. Those who go after money are doing so under the impression that this is the way to become secure. They are the victim, the toy, of the stock exchange. There are others who are afraid of losing their youth. Beauty has nothing to do with age. We can be beautiful in childhood, in youth, and in old age to the extent we are unselfish. To be secure, we must find the source of security within ourselves. The advice given by Sri Krishna in the Gita is simple and profound: if times are bad today, try to contribute the best you can to the welfare of those around you. If times are good today, also try to contribute the best you can to the welfare of those around you. You can serve others no matter if times are good or bad. This is the choice we make in order to find security within ourselves.

SRI KRISHNA: 41. Those who follow this path, Arjuna, who resolve deep within themselves to seek me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.

Sri Krishna says to look at the lives of worldly people, whose minds are many-pointed, jumping like a grasshopper from one blade of grass to another. Every day they keep making decisions, most of them wrong. This is the natural pattern of worldly life when we go after personal pleasure, profit, prestige, and power. In comparison, in the spiritual life only one major decision is necessary. If, after turning to meditation, we look back upon our past, upon the innumerable wrong decisions we have made in seeking fulfillment in the world without, going down one blind alley after another, and contrast this with our present development, where everything is being subordinated to reaching the supreme goal, we see that now our consciousness is slowly being unified.

We are all granted a reasonable margin in life to make our experimentation with personal pleasure, but one day we must begin to suspect that it is not going to fulfill our deepest need, which is for Self-realization. When we begin to have this suspicion, when it is already at work deep inside, we may still resist it for a while. We are all ego-centered, and it is only natural that when our old props are being taken away we fear that we are going to lose out. None of us need have any qualms if now and then a little voice whispers, “See what you are missing.” Even after taking to meditation we are likely to have a few reservations. We may have a secret hope that in one of the rooms in our consciousness some old cravings can find an occasional welcome – we can leave the key under a stone, and they can just slip in; we do not have to invite them, but if they come we need not be inhospitable. In other words, we are all human.

In order to find the freedom of being able to function everywhere, under both hostile and favorable circumstances, to be able to reach the goal of Self-realization, we have to make the decision to find the Lord, and to subordinate everything else to union with him. If we can make this decision to base our life on meditation, to repeat the mantram as often as we can, to restrain the senses vigilantly, and to put the welfare of those around us first, the Gita says we need have no doubts about the outcome. We need not be anxious about the results; this is the Lord’s responsibility. Self-realization comes through the grace of the Lord, who is ever present within.

SRI KRISHNA: 42–43. There are ignorant people who speak flowery words and take delight in the letter of the law, saying that there is nothing else, O Partha: whose hearts are filled with selfish desires, whose idea of heaven is their own enjoyment, and who engage in myriad activities for the attainment of pleasure and power. The fruit of their actions is continual rebirth.

44. Those whose minds are swept away by the pursuit of pleasure and power are incapable of following the supreme goal and will not attain samadhi.

One of the beauties of the Bhagavad Gita is that it does not say “You should do this” or “You should not do that.” Sri Krishna simply says that if you want joy, security, wisdom, then this is the path. If you want sorrow, insecurity, and despair, then that is the path. He gives both the maps in graphic detail, and tells you that it is for you to decide where you want to go.

In these strong verses Sri Krishna describes those who will not see samadhi. Those who say there is nothing other than this world, who say there is no God, no other life than eating, drinking, making merry, and dying – such people will not attain samadhi. When people say they are atheists, I usually feel a little amused, because even to say that one is an atheist requires a definite experience. In order to say that there is no one in our deeper consciousness, we have to go there, knock on the door, and find that no one is at home. Of those who tell me they are atheists, I ask, “Don’t you believe in yourself?” Their answer is, “Of course.” “Then,” I say, “you believe in God.” When the Gita uses the terms “God” or “Lord,” Ishvara or Bhagavan, it is not referring to someone “out there.” It is referring to someone who is inside us all the time, who is nearer to us than our body, dearer to us than our life.

When our heart is full of selfish desires and sense cravings, we cannot see the underlying principle of existence which is divine. This is the significance of the word kamatmanah, ‘one whose soul is clouded over by selfish desires.’ Ramakrishna was fond of saying that Rama, the principle of abiding joy, and Kama, selfish desire, cannot live together. This is difficult for most of us to understand because we usually feel that even if Rama has to be brought in, Kama can be given a little closet, or some little corner with a drapery so that he isn’t visible. Every mystic worth the name says it must be Rama or Kama; we cannot have both together. Here, too, we have to be prepared for a long period of development before Kama finally packs up his belongings and leaves without any forwarding address. Let us not get agitated if, after a long time on the spiritual path, we still feel some of our old cravings. As our spiritual awareness deepens, we will come not to identify ourselves with those desires. Then a big desire may come and crawl like a rat across the stage of our consciousness, but we will just calmly sit and watch. It is when we identify with the desire that there is trouble. For a long period, I would suggest that when old desires and urges come, when the old samskaras come into play, the very best way to deal with them is to go for a long, brisk walk repeating the mantram.

SRI KRISHNA: 45. The scriptures describe the three gunas. But you should be free from the action of the gunas, established in eternal truth, self-controlled, without any sense of duality or the desire to acquire and keep.

It is difficult to translate the word guna; the English word “quality” is only a rough equivalent. According to the cosmological theory presented in the Gita, everything in the universe is a combination of the three gunas – sattva, rajas, and tamas – in varying proportions. We human beings, also, are considered to be varying combinations of sattva, ‘law’; rajas, ‘energy’; and tamas, ‘inertia.’ Evolution is from tamas to rajas to sattva. This far-reaching concept not only accounts for the way in which human beings conduct themselves in daily life, but also gives guidelines as to how we can proceed on the path of evolution by transforming tamas into rajas and rajas into sattva.

Let us first take our good old companion tamas, inertia. Tamas shows itself in not wanting to move, not wanting to act – in other words, in wanting to be a stone just lying on the road. It is all right for a stone to be inert; that is its dharma. But it is not all right for you and me to be inert, to try to avoid problems, to say, “What does it matter?” When I hear the phrase “well adjusted,” I do not always take it as a favorable comment. Mahatma Gandhi has said that to be well adjusted in a wrong situation is very bad; in a wrong situation we should keep on acting to set it right. When Gandhi, at the peak of his political activity, was asked in a British court what his profession was, he said, “Resister.” If he was put in a wrong situation, he just could not keep quiet; he had to resist, nonviolently but very effectively, until the situation was set right.

In order to transform tamas into rajas there is a series of simple steps we can all take in our daily life. Postponement is one of the valuable allies of tamas. One of the ways to tackle inertia and expedite its transformation into rajas is never to delay anything. “Immediately” is one of the favorite words of the mystics, who live completely in the present. Jesus often used the word “forthwith.”

Concentration is perhaps the most effective way of transforming tamas into rajas. Those who have a tangible element of tamas can work only for a little while. Even if they are enthusiastic, they will begin work with gusto, but at the end of thirty minutes their morale collapses. They often complain they are bored. The answer to boredom is to give a little more attention to what we are doing; any job, the moment we attend to it completely, becomes interesting. If a job bores us, we should not yield to tamas, but should give more attention to our work and try to increase our span of concentration. This not only helps us get over tamas, but helps our meditation as well.

The transformation of rajas into sattva is not extraordinary either, for all of us have an element of sattva in us. We all have this capacity for some degree of forgiveness and friendship in our relationships. It is already there; we just have to extend it slowly to include a wider and wider circle. There is no human being who does not have an element of tamas, and there is none who does not have an element of sattva. As tamas becomes transformed into rajas, particularly as our meditation deepens, there is more and more energy available to us; there is more capacity for productivity, for action, and for service. We must harness this newly released energy in order to transform it into sattva. One reason why I emphasize that we should have plenty of physical exercise, and should work at our job or studies with concentration, is that this enables us to harness all this energy. If we meditate regularly but do not take regular exercise, do not work at a suitable job, and do not give at least some of our time to selfless service without thought of return, there is a possibility that this energy may become too much for us.

Though there is a vital need for hard work, we should take care in our fast-paced modern world to see that we do not get caught in work. This is one of the real dangers against which we should be on guard. There are people who become victims of work, who carry their work from their office or campus into their living room, then into the dining room while they eat, and then into the bedroom to dream about in their sleep. We should do our work with concentration and yet be able to drop it with complete detachment at a minute’s notice. This frees us from tension and enables us to give our very best.

The characteristics of the man or woman established in sattva are calmness, compassion, and complete fearlessness. When the mind is agitated, judgment is likely to be clouded; therefore the Gita says we should never undertake any action when angry or afraid. Such action is not likely to be correct or effective. Any time our mind is agitated, the repetition of the mantram is a great help in calming our agitation, and when the mind is calm, judgment is clear.

Another characteristic of sattva is the capacity to forgive. Most of us perhaps are not even dimly aware of how, under the surface level of consciousness, old resentments keep burning, old hostilities keep flaming up. A sudden agitation, or a sudden depression, is often caused by old resentments which we still harbor in the depths of our consciousness. We cannot learn to forgive by reading books about forgiveness. I once saw a big book entitled The Dynamics of Forgiveness, and I could not help wondering what the author would have done to me if I had written a strong review against it. He probably would have come to the Center and given me a piece of his mind. Writing books about forgiveness, reading about forgiveness, and talking about forgiveness do not enable us to forgive. When we rely upon our own capacities, I do not think it is easy for us to forgive, but when we repeat the mantram, the holy name, we are calling upon the Lord to help us transform all our resentments into love.

Finally Sri Krishna concludes that it is not enough if we transform tamas into rajas and rajas into sattva; we must go beyond sattva also. Going beyond the three gunas means going beyond time, space, and causality – going beyond death into eternity, immortality, and infinity, here and now.

SRI KRISHNA: 46. Just as a reservoir is of little use to people when the country is flooded all around, so the scriptures are of little use to the illumined man or woman, who sees the Lord everywhere.

When the whole countryside is flooded, as it is during the monsoon in my native state of Kerala, where is the need for a little reservoir to get water from? In the villages of India, during the heavy monsoon period, all the tanks, pools, rivers, and wells are filled up with water. But as the summer sets in, wells begin to dry up; tanks and pools dry up, and people in the village have to walk long distances to the river to have their baths and fetch water. In the dry season not even a bucketful of water is wasted.

As long as the living waters of spiritual awareness are not flowing all the time within, you have to get little pots of water from outside. This evening you bring a little pot here to meditation class, and take it home full. By tomorrow the pot is empty, and you have to come again in the evening to see that it is filled up once more. Now all this is necessary, but when the living fountain from within bursts forth, when the love of the Lord who is ever present within wells up, why would you want pots? Why would a person want pools who is in the midst of the limitless sea of love? At that time, you do not need to meditate; you do not need the scriptures. You do not need to repeat the mantram, because it will go on in your consciousness ceaselessly. This is the great ideal to be attained; but for the present we must be regular about our meditation, repeat the mantram regularly, restrain our senses discriminatingly, and be careful to put the welfare of others first.

SRI KRISHNA: 47. You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of rewards, nor should you long for inaction.

“You have only the right to act; you have no right to the fruit thereof.” This line is often quoted by people who do not want to act, who get overpowered by circumstances and say, “What is the use? Everything is going to the dogs.” But Sri Krishna is really trying to tell us here, “If you throw yourself heart and soul into a selfless undertaking, using the right means, the purest means that are available to you, I’ll be responsible for the outcome.” We all have to use our judgment, weighing the pros and cons before we select a selfless goal, assessing our capacity thoughtfully, and then selecting the right means. According to the great mystics, wrong means can never bring about a right end and right means can never fail to bring about a right end. This is why Gandhi has said, “Full effort is full victory.”

Gandhi followed the path of karma yoga or selfless service, which requires the capacity to be perfectly detached from results and undaunted by reverses. When he returned to India from South Africa in 1915, the country had been in political bondage for nearly two hundred years, and nobody believed him when he said that through the grace of the Lord he could lead us to freedom without firing a shot, without using any means of violence. Everywhere he went, he identified himself with the people. He woke them from their long stupor, and within a little more than three decades, a very short period for a nation, the country became politically independent because of the tremendous capacity of nonviolence to win respect and cooperation even in Britain.

Gandhi was subject to the severest criticism, not only in foreign countries but in India as well. Composite photographs and scandalous stories were published in the papers. It is a painful experience when those who have supported us turn against us. Very few can remain calm and considerate when the crowd is crying for their downfall. This happened many times to Gandhi, and I do not remember even one occasion when he lost confidence in himself or in the final goal. At the same time he was very firm, saying, in effect, “If you are not prepared to be nonviolent, I do not want to have anything to do with you.” He was prepared to wage the fight alone, because he knew that the Lord would use him as a humble instrument if he used right means for attaining a right goal.

The second line warns us not to interpret Sri Krishna’s words as a counsel for inaction. There is sometimes a dangerous tendency in the contemplative life to withdraw, to retire into our ivory tower, to ignore the tremendous need for all of us to contribute selflessly to solve the problems of the world. Every one of us has a debt to pay in life, and those who drop out of society, who turn their backs on the problems of the world, are incapable of leading the spiritual life. The Gita is a forceful call to action – but to action in which the right goal is pursued by the right means.

SRI KRISHNA: 48. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself – without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. For yoga is perfect evenness of mind.

Here Sri Krishna defines yoga in a single word, samatvam: ‘to be equal,’ to be completely serene. This is yoga. Those who are established in yoga, who are illumined, are equally loving to the person who supports them and to the person who attacks them, equally concerned about the welfare of all around them, regardless of other people’s attitudes and actions. Besides my granny, the one person I have seen in life who never allowed himself to be shaken by the attacks of unfavorable circumstances was Mahatma Gandhi, who is a source of inspiration as to how you and I can free ourselves from dependence upon public applause and appreciation. Following Gandhi’s example we can develop such calmness and such confidence in the Atman that during reversals of fortune, which will inevitably come to all of us, we can maintain our equanimity and tranquility. We do not need any external support because we are complete in ourselves. We need not be downcast when people withdraw their support, or even attack us, because we can draw upon the Lord within to face any challenge.

Sri Krishna tells Arjuna, Yogasthah kuru karmani: “First become established within yourself, be united with me; then begin a career of selfless service.” Do not be intimidated by heavy odds, by changing winds of fortune, or by the vacillations of people. Sangam tyaktva: do not worry about the results, thinking, will this come about? How long will it take? Will the results be delayed? Do not be anxious about all this because you have nothing to do with results. This is the secret of Gandhi, who embodies the ideal of karma yoga for the twentieth century. From the Gita he learned to throw himself into an undertaking for a selfless goal, to use right means, and never to be anxious about the results.

Sri Krishna says siddhyasiddhyoh: be alike in victory and defeat. What does it matter if you have won temporarily, or have been defeated temporarily? When victory comes, do not get elated; do not let the ego get inflated; do not go about saying, “I have won; I have defeated my opposition.” Instead, remain calm, remain considerate, and remember that the Lord has given you victory. When defeat comes, do not moan, but grit your teeth and increase your effort, using right means to attain a selfless goal. This is yoga; this is the spiritual life: being alike in pain and pleasure, victory and defeat, praise and censure.

The Gita is a call for enthusiastic, selfless action. Sri Krishna impresses upon us that by practicing meditation daily, by repeating the mantram daily, we too can learn to establish ourselves within Him and then throw ourselves into tireless service for our family, community, country, and world.

SRI KRISHNA: 49. Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment and you will amass the wealth of spiritual awareness. The man who is motivated only by desire for the fruits of his action, and anxious about the results, is miserable indeed.

“Miserable” is the word used here to describe people who are caught in results. Such people do not have any peace of mind; they are consumed with the anxiety, “Am I going to fail? Am I going to succeed?” They begin to use unscrupulous means once they become afraid of not achieving the results they desire. Sri Krishna tells us through Arjuna: “Whatever you do, therefore, do not get caught in the result. That is for me to give; as long as you use right means and strive for a selfless goal, you can be sure that I shall give you the right results.”

Even after we have selected a selfless goal and the right means, and have thrown ourselves into the endeavor, we have to free ourselves from anxiety about the results, which is the most difficult part of the discipline for all of us. If I may take an example from our own work, when I started looking for an ashram over ten years ago, I could not help being somewhat entangled in the results. Now, through long, strenuous years of detaching myself, and through the hard discipline of reminding myself that the results are not in my hands, that the world does not belong to me, that not even a leaf of the tree in the back yard belongs to me, I have been relieved of all anxiety and agitation. Today I take a great deal of interest in finding a suitable ashram – read the papers, underline the property that is likely to be of interest to us, go to these places and ask, “What is the temperature like? Do many motorcycles come this way?” I do everything possible to further our work, but I do not get at all apprehensive. I do not get at all anxious about the results because I know these are in the hands of the Lord, and it is for him, who knows our needs and our difficulties, to give us the right place at the right time. This is detachment: throwing oneself completely into selfless work, and yet knowing the results are always in the hands of the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 50. When consciousness is unified, all vain anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether actions proceed well or ill. Therefore, devote yourself to the disciplines of yoga, for yoga is skill in action.

“Yoga is skill in action.” When we become detached from results and work hard without thought of profit or prestige, deeper resources come to us. We see our way clearly; we do not waver when difficulties come. Selfish motives hide our goal, for when we are attached to results, when we are worried about the outcome, we do not see the goal; we see only the opposition and the obstacles before us. Most of the time we just do not know what to do when caught in a wrong situation in which we should not rest content. Feeling unequal to the difficult circumstances, we become resigned. But no matter how complicated and explosive the situation may be, there is always something we can do. Many small people working together can take on even the biggest problem of our age – violence. Sri Krishna repeats over and over again, “Do not get caught in the results. I am in you; therefore keep on striving, and at the right time I shall give you victory.”

SRI KRISHNA: 51. The wise, who have unified their consciousness and abandoned the attachment to the fruits of action which binds a man to continual rebirth, attain a state beyond all evil.

Sri Krishna continues to tell us the secrets of karma yoga, the path of selfless action. Whatever the situation, we can act if we do not get caught in results; karma yoga can be practiced against the heaviest odds if we do not allow the ego to get us caught in attachment to results. Prior to Gandhi, even people who had seen and grieved over the political bondage of India could not bring themselves to act because they thought the situation was impossible. They could not act because even before taking the first step they were already caught in results. We too, when faced with problems, have a tendency to think, “There is nothing we can do about it.” The secret of karma yoga is never to accept a wrong situation, a situation in which you are exploited, discriminated against, or manipulated, because it is bad not only for you but for the exploiter as well. In the early days, before India’s independence, I myself used to see how young British men coming to India, fair-minded and interested in doing a good job for the benefit of the people, would gradually lose their fairness and come to believe they were superior, sent to civilize the people of Asia. This is a deterioration in character that no exploiter can escape. We all know, even in our own personal life, that with selfish people if we yield an inch, they will ask for a yard. In such cases, therefore, it is necessary quietly to say no. This is the great art of nonviolent resistance, where you love and respect everyone, but you will not allow anyone to exploit you, because it is bad for that person just as it is bad for you. Wherever we find a wrong situation – in our personal life, in our country’s life, or in our world’s conflicts – we all have a duty to work to correct it.

In karma yoga every reverse will send you deeper into your own resources. This is one of the marvelous changes in perspective that comes over you in deepening spiritual awareness. When an obstacle is coming you say, “Come on. Let it be a big reverse, because then it will drive me deeper.” You lose your fear of defeat. You learn to use defeat and disappointment to deepen your resources. Lord Krishna says, therefore, “Do not be afraid if out of my love for you I send you a few defeats. On the surface level you have no weapons, but when I send you defeat after defeat, then you will be able to draw upon your deeper awareness where my resources will be open to you.”

SRI KRISHNA: 52. When your mind has overcome the confusion of duality, you will attain the state of holy indifference to things you hear and things you have heard.

53. When you are unmoved by the confusion of ideas, and your mind is completely united in love for the Lord of Love, you will attain the state of perfect yoga.

The Sanskrit word used here for “confusion” is moha, the duality of the sensory experience, beyond which lies the unitive state of samadhi. When we cease to pursue sensory pleasure in the hope of finding lasting joy, which the senses will never be able to give, we come to have what the Catholic mystics call “holy indifference.” This is not a negative state, but a very positive one in which we learn to make the mind undisturbed and equal under all circumstances. When the mind is calm it is ready for samadhi.

ARJUNA: 54. Tell me of those who live always in wisdom, ever aware of the Self, O Krishna; how do they talk, how sit, how move about?

This question of Arjuna’s introduces the glorious eighteen stanzas which, as Gandhi points out, hold the key to the interpretation of the entire Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi, a devoted student of the Gita, was especially drawn to these last eighteen verses of the second chapter. I have seen him meditating on them with such intense concentration that as I watched, I could see the great stanzas coming to life in a human being. When Gandhi said that the Gita describes the war going on within, scholars in many countries, including India, would not take him seriously. In reply, Gandhi only asked them to look at these verses and see what reference there is to the conquest of international enemies, the conquest of enemies outside. In every verse of this passage we have clear proof that the battle referred to is within, between the forces of selfishness and the forces of selflessness, between the ferocious pull of the senses and the serene tranquility of spiritual wisdom. I strongly recommend these verses to be memorized for use in meditation because they gradually can bring about the transformation of our consciousness. The secret of meditation is that we become what we meditate on, and when every day we use these verses with the utmost concentration we are capable of, gradually we will become what they describe as the God-conscious person. If I might refer to my own small spiritual endeavor, before taking to meditation I was subject, as most normal people are, to all kinds of cravings and foibles that naturally led me to make many mistakes. But due to the spiritual awareness emanating from these verses, I have been able to surmount these obstacles. It is because of this small personal experience that I recommend all of you use these verses in your meditation.

What Sri Krishna is really trying to do in the first part of the Gita is to rouse Arjuna’s interest, to prepare him for receiving instruction, and to make him ask this practical question. Without this preparation it is difficult to communicate spiritual wisdom. When I give my introductory talk on meditation, sooner or later there will be someone in the audience to say, “How do you do it?” In the early days I had to restrain myself from saying “Hurray!” because this is what I had been waiting for. Arjuna now begins to ask the same kind of question, which Sri Krishna has been waiting impatiently to hear.

Here Arjuna calls the Lord by a very charming name: Keshava, ‘he who has beautiful, infinite hair.’ In the Upanishads there is a marvelous simile that describes the entire cosmos as hair growing out of the Lord’s head. In order to understand the beauty of this name Keshava, you really have to go to India, and to Kerala more than any other state, where women have the longest, richest, blackest hair. Early morning when they go to the temple pool to have their bath, it is a gorgeous sight to see their hair cascading down their backs, sometimes reaching even to the knees. Long black hair has always been considered a great mark of beauty, and when Arjuna uses this loving term, Sri Krishna must be blushing under his deep blue complexion.

Arjuna asks, Sthitaprajnasya: “Tell me about the person who is firmly established in himself.” Ka bhasha: “What kind of person is he?” Samadhisthasya: “Tell me a few words about his samadhi; how does he live in union with you?”

Sri Krishna wants Arjuna to be more explicit, and probably the look in the Lord’s eyes makes Arjuna feel he is expected to be more precise. Arjuna gets the point and says, Sthitadhih kim prabhasheta kim asita vrajeta kim: “How does such a person talk? How does he sit? How does he walk, move about, and conduct himself in the everyday vicissitudes of life?” It is a marvelous question, in which Arjuna by implication is telling the Lord not to recommend the study of the scriptures, not to give him papers published on the subject, not to impart some spiritual gossip, but to give clear signs as to how he can recognize the illumined man or woman who lives in complete union with the Lord.

sRI KRISHNA: 55. They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed every selfish desire and sense craving tormenting the heart.

They are established within themselves in whose hearts every selfish desire has been completely eliminated. The word the Lord uses here is kama, which I translate as ‘selfish desire.’ Though the dictionary gives other meanings as well, the significance of the word is selfishness, especially as it expresses itself in cravings on the sensory level. The Lord is very particular about his words in this verse: kaman sarvan, ‘all selfish desire.’ Not a trace of any selfish desire, which agitates all human minds, may remain. Sri Krishna looks compassionately at Arjuna, whose eyes reveal his thought: “Does it mean all?” This is why I say that Arjuna represents you and me perfectly; we, too, feel that Sri Krishna must mean just the majority of desires, that a few must be allowed.

There is no human being, unless he or she belongs to the category of Jesus, the Buddha, Sri Ramakrishna, or Sri Ramana Maharshi, who does not have some taint of selfishness in their consciousness. Sri Ramana Maharshi will say that selfishness is I-ness. He also says that the I-thought is the mind. When in the Christian tradition St. Paul says, “Not I, not I, but Christ liveth in me,” he is also showing us that if we could tirelessly endeavor to expunge the I-concept from our consciousness, purification would be complete. In Sanskrit the word used for separateness and selfishness is ahamkara: aham means ‘I’; kara means ‘maker.’ This ‘I-maker’ shows itself in many, many ways in daily conduct and behavior, particularly in our intimate personal relationships.

Anything we can do to subordinate our profit, our pleasure, and our prestige to the welfare of all those around us naturally results in the reduction of I-consciousness. When we keep imposing our self-will on, for example, our partner – very often unwittingly and under the impression that we are defending our rights – to that extent we actually are adding to our separateness, building up a higher wall between our partner and ourself. In the early days of almost all married relationships there is this tendency to stand on our rights, and to get so agitated when our rights are violated that we naturally build a higher and higher wall under the impression that we are demolishing it. Right from the early days of marriage, or of any relationship, we must try to forget about rights and remember duties if the relationship is to last.

One of my favorite poets when I was professor of English was Milton, who has given the world a spiritual masterpiece in Paradise Lost. There is a moving sonnet by Milton on his blindness which concludes with the lines:

God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.

I interpret this “standing and waiting” as inexhaustible patience, as bearing with people, particularly in close personal relationships. When everything around us is swirling, when we feel our feet are slipping, we get terrified. We fear that we are going to be swept away, and even with our very good intentions, we are not sure whether unkind words may not come out of our mouth, whether unkind actions may not come from our body. It is when everything is uncertain like this, when the whirlpool is going round and round, that we must be able to draw upon enormous patience to stay firm and steadfast. This is the significance of the word sthitaprajna, ‘established in wisdom.’ On every occasion where there is resentment, resistance, and hostility around us, let us not use it as an opportunity for making ourselves more uncertain, more unstable, and more insecure by taking it out on other people and retaliating. Let us instead forgive and help them to overcome their problems, which means we will also be helping to eliminate our separateness.

The capacity to yield is not defeatism; it is not weakness. It is immense strength whereby you are able to get over your demands, your claims, the shrill voice of your ego, to contribute even to those who oppose you, ridicule you, attack you. Without forgiveness, I do not think anyone can enjoy life. In order to enjoy life completely, it is not a bank balance or material possessions that is required, but an immense capacity to forgive those who injure you and are hostile to you. St. Francis of Assisi puts it perfectly when he says that those who have not learned to forgive have lost the greatest source of joy in life.

We can recognize those who are united with the Lord of Love, ever present in us all, because they have been enabled by the grace of the Lord to come out of the forest of selfish desires in which most of us seem to be wandering, unable to find our way. Life on the egoistic level, on the physical level, is called samsara, which is from the root sri, ‘to move.’ Samsara is that which is moving all the time, the ceaseless flux of life in which we cannot stand anywhere. Everywhere is movement; everywhere is change and flux. This is the cycle of birth and death, whether we believe in reincarnation or only in evolution.

In one of the great scriptural stories of Hinduism, the ferocity of the senses is brought out with terrible humor. A man who is very body-conscious, as we all are, was being pursued by a tiger. The man, panic-stricken, ran as fast as he could until he reached the brink of a precipice. There, just when he thought the tiger was about to pounce upon him, he saw a mango tree below him and leaped down onto it, finding shelter on one of the middle branches. The tiger was standing on top of the precipice looking down with its tongue hanging out. The man breathed a sigh of great relief and started to climb down the trunk of the tree. He looked down and there was another tiger looking up at him. This is samsara. In this most precarious position – death above, death below – the man sees a mango. “Ha!” he says. “Just what I’ve been looking for.” At that moment tigers, life, death, samsara, all disappear, just for the few moments’ satisfaction of a sense craving. It is a terrible story because this is what sense craving can do to us. At the particular moment when there is a fierce sensory craving, even though we are being submerged under it, it is good to remember that the nature of the mind, the nature of desire, is to change. If we can hold out and resist the temptation, we are free.

SRI KRISHNA: 56. Not agitated by grief or hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger.

This second verse in the inspiring picture Sri Krishna is painting of the illumined man or woman is of extreme importance in daily life, because according to the Gita the very texture of this life is one of duality – pain and pleasure, success and defeat, birth and death. Like most of you, in my earlier days, I also held on to the hope that I would be able to isolate pleasure, take it home, keep it on my table, and throw out pain. This has been the hope of every ambitious person, but up to this day no one has succeeded. If you go after pleasure, honesty demands, you cannot complain when you come across pain. If you do not want pain, do not go after pleasure either.

When we hear this from the Gita, we immediately get frustrated because we believe, on the evidence of the intellect and senses, that we have a choice of either pain or pleasure. There is no choice. But when we do not go after pleasure, we do not have to be on intimate terms with pain; we go beyond the duality of pain and pleasure, into a state of tranquility, serenity, security, and abiding joy. Beyond pleasure and pain there is this realm of abiding joy that is called, to use Gandhiji’s phrase, Ramarajya, the Kingdom of Rama. We just do not want to go there. We want to live in the border kingdom where we are haunted by pain and pleasure.

Sri Krishna does not use mystical terms here; he does not go in for exaggerated language. He asks, “Don’t you want to be sthitadhi?” This means: aren’t you tired of being a plaything of the forces of life, of being pushed by pleasure here and pulled around by pain there? Aren’t you tired of being dependent upon other people’s praise, afraid of other people’s censure, trying to manipulate people and to return unkindness for kindness?

We all need joy, and we can all receive joy in only one way, by adding to the joy of others. This is the simple teaching of the Gita: do not complain against the Lord, and do not complain against fate; if you are miserable, it is because you have added to the misery of others. If you are very happy, it is because you have added to the happiness of others. Sri Krishna says that no matter what may have taken place in your past, here is the choice you have today; why don’t you make it? Often our way of translating this into action is to write in our diary, “Today I began a life of putting other people first,” and to have a sticker on the back of our car saying “Put Others First” and a button saying “I Put Myself Last.” This is all very easy, but it does not add to security; it does not add to anybody’s joy except that of the manufacturer of the sticker and button.

We have been dwelling upon ourselves so long, caught for so long in our own needs, urges, impulses, and conditioning, that we should be patient with ourselves while undergoing the discipline of gradually subordinating our personal profit and pleasure to the needs of those around us. This is the first and last of the spiritual disciplines, and it is not a matter of high IQ. It is a matter of high WQ, Will Quotient.

In order to strengthen the will, start early morning when you want a third piece of toast. Just push it away, and you have increased your will. From breakfast onwards this goes on, and every time you can say no to the craving of the palate you have added to the will just a little. Now just imagine: breakfast, lunch, high tea, dinner, and midnight snack; five attempts at strengthening the will every day – in one month, one hundred fifty opportunities. When you do not yield to the craving of the palate, after a long period of discipline the great day will come when you will realize that these cravings were a thorn in your flesh.

An even more effective way of increasing your will is to put the comfort and convenience of other people first in situations where you are used to putting yourself first. In many little matters every day it is very painful to make these concessions. It is not too difficult to be a hero on a great stage, but to be a hero when nobody is looking except your cat is extremely difficult. When there is an immense upsurge of self-will saying, “This is how I want it to be. Not you, not you, but me!” that is the time to give, particularly to your parents, to your husband or wife, to your children, and to your friends. That is the time to yield, and yield, and yield. You will find, beautifully enough, that when you start practicing this others start doing the same. This is the advantage of a spiritual family where everybody is putting the welfare of everybody else first – everybody is first.

I do not indulge in too much sympathy when I see someone is growing up, even though he or she groans a little. Whenever I see somebody growing up and standing on his or her own feet, it is a day of jubilation for me. Tears, sighs, and groans are a part of the process of growth; so Sri Krishna says that when suffering comes, we should remember that we can use it to increase our spiritual awareness. It is said that pain is the only teacher you and I will accept, and without this stern teacher, none of us would grow up to our full stature. When we are suffering, we may be tempted to say, “If the Lord wants me to lead the spiritual life, I would expect him to be more cordial and more hospitable, instead of hitting me and making me cry. This is no way to treat a devotee.” The Lord is extremely fond of us, but he has no sense of false pity. He wants us to grow out of our selfishness and separateness to be united with him, and he knows suffering is often the only language you and I understand.

SRI KRISHNA: 57. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are not elated by good fortune or depressed by bad. Such are the seers.

Sarvatra ‘nabhisneha: his wisdom is unshaken, he is deeply rooted in himself, who has no trace of selfish attachment on any level. In all the mystical teachings, we are told it is our identification with the ego, our obsessive attachment to our self-will, which is responsible for the friction, frustration, and futility in our lives. The most unfortunate part of this tragedy is that as long as we are caught in the ego trap we will always maintain we are free. With a certain degree of progress in meditation, we come to realize with great alarm how even in the most endearing of human relationships there is the tendency to impose our self-will unwittingly and unconsciously on those around us.

There is a Sanskrit saying that gives the key as to how we can remove the taint of egoism in our relations with our children. According to this Hindu saying, until the child is five we should treat the little one as a god or goddess. This does not mean that we give up our power of authority, but that we give the children all the attention and affection we can, hugging them, carrying them, and keeping them physically close to us. Such affection is essential for maintaining unity on the physical level, and children respond to it easily. These five years of intense physical intimacy and intense emotional love reassure them more than any other experience – more than any words can – and in later life they will be able to draw upon this security they received in early childhood.

Three or four days ago, while we were seated in a restaurant, we saw a couple come in with a little baby, probably a few months old. Both of them were expressing their love for the little one and smoking the whole time. It is not enough if we talk about loving our children; we have to show our love in our personal life in every way, and this can be very, very difficult. If we want to be a loving parent, we cannot afford to smoke, because it is a bad example we are setting before the child. If we want to be a loving parent, we cannot afford to drink; we cannot afford to be selfish. It is an extremely serious responsibility to be a good father or mother. Those parents who can put their children’s welfare first all the time, and can teach by their personal example of vigilantly restraining the senses and adding to the welfare of others, may rest assured that their children will follow their example when they grow up.

It is good to remember the words of Jesus: “Unless you become like a little child again, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” As Wordsworth puts it: “Heaven lies about us in our infancy”; and when we fail to set an example before our children, we are violating their divinity.

One day when Sri Krishna was a little boy, his mother was churning curds into butter in an earthen pot, using a wooden pestle which she moved round and round by means of a rope. Little Krishna was up to mischief as usual, and when his mother tried to get him to behave like an obedient child, he was defiant. She took the rope she was using and said, “If you don’t stop your mischief, I’m going to tie your arms.” Little Gopala opened his rosebud of a mouth and put out his arms. The mother came up and tried to tie his hands, but the rope would not reach. She got another rope, but it also was not long enough. Soon everybody on the street had become interested. They all brought ropes and tied them together until the rope was very, very long, yet it would not reach around the wrists of the boy because of the infinity of the Lord present in him. With his slender hands he held the whole cosmos. Consciousness of this divinity of children can enable all parents to lead lives of reasonable sense restraint and utter selflessness in order to inspire their little ones to realize the divinity ever present within them.

After five, until the age of sixteen, the Sanskrit injunction tells us to treat our child as a servant. It sounds harsh, but the more I see of life, the more I appreciate the utility of this training in obedience. In modern psychology, it is said that growing young people get puzzled when their parents cannot take a positive stand. Even though teenagers may slam the door in anger, I think they cannot help appreciating parents who can draw a line very intelligently and tenderly, showing them they must learn to discriminate in life. It is during the years five to sixteen that children are going to rebel, and it is during these years that they must learn to obey their parents so they can learn to obey the Atman later on. In their daily life the parents have to approximate themselves to the image of the Atman. This is why parenthood is an extremely valuable aid to meditation.

From sixteen on, the saying concludes, your children are your equal. Afterwards do not try to push them about; do not throw your weight about, but try to explain. Appeal to their sense of reason; try to make them understand your position, and make a great effort to understand theirs. It is because parents and growing young people find themselves unable to be detached from their opinions that there is conflict, and obsessive identification with opinions can be the worst kind of attachment. The parents are not their opinions, nor are the children theirs.

If we are prepared to listen with respect to opinions that are different from ours, it is not impossible that once in a way we will find the other party is right. If we can go to our parents with the attitude that we will not contradict them because they may be right, we will find our feeling of hesitation and apprehension is lost. They will appreciate this; our father may even say to our mother, “You know, the boy may be right.” In most personal friction this simple discovery of “you may be right, I may be wrong” can go a long, long way to facilitate communication and bring about better understanding. One of the unmistakable signs of spiritual awareness is the cheerful capacity to say, “I was wrong”; and it will save us a lot of trouble in life if we can make that very daring statement, “I don’t know.”

SRI KRISHNA: 58. Even as a tortoise draws in its limbs, the wise can draw in their senses at will.

Sri Krishna uses the simile of the humble tortoise. In Kerala, it is very common for children to get excited when they see a tortoise. They gather around it and playfully hit it with their bamboo sticks. So as soon as a tortoise sees children coming, he issues an order immediately to all his limbs, his head, and his tail, “Return. Get inside.” When the children come, the tortoise just waits patiently inside his bamboo-proof shell until they are tired of playing. I was reminded of this simile years ago when we went to the zoo. The lions and tigers, the panthers and leopards were all in cages, but a huge tortoise was wandering around unattended. On his back was written, “Don’t report me to the management – I am free.” If you have developed the capacity to withdraw your senses immediately when there is danger, then you are completely free. You can go anywhere and live in the midst of any agitation. When the situation is serious you just say, “Withdraw,” and the gates are closed. As Sri Krishna says in this verse, Tasya prajna pratishtita: “That person is unshaken and firmly established in me, the Lord of Love, who can withdraw the senses at will from sensory objects.”

Most of us are unaware of how mercilessly our senses are being exploited by today’s mass media. It requires some progress in meditation to become aware of how much we have become tyrannized by the siren song of the mass media: “Stimulate your senses, and you will find joy.” Aldous Huxley went to the extent of calling the anonymous advertisement copywriter the apostle of our modern civilization.

On the sexual level, for instance, we have been subjected to relentless conditioning. Somebody has only to bring a matchbox and we are on fire. There is no point in saying that we are a wicked generation; this is how we are conditioned – by the movies we see, by the magazines we read, by the television we watch, by the conversation we indulge in. In advertisements, sex is the motif that is played over and over again. None of us need be guilt-laden, therefore, if we find that preoccupation with sex has become extreme. The Gita says that there is only one way to dehypnotize ourselves, and that is to get some measure of control over the senses. Until this has been accomplished, it is not advisable to attend sensate movies, where old memories, slowly fading, are refreshed. This does not mean we have to give up movies altogether. What I do, when I find one of these scenes coming on where people start taking off their clothes, is to close my eyes and have a little nap. There is no point in thinking of these movies as wicked. “Silly” is a better word for the childish illusion that by taking off our clothes we can reveal our beauty, which is only revealed when we rise above physical consciousness.

It is necessary also to be very discriminating in the books and magazines we read. When I go to the store and look at magazine covers, I envy my grandmother her illiteracy. Most of the magazines that people read by the million cause more agitation, insecurity, and despair than we can imagine. I would suggest that we choose only those books that add to our self-knowledge, our self-respect, and our sense control.

If we want to be able to withdraw our senses at will, we should train them in such a way that they listen immediately to the slightest command we give them. What often obstructs this is our diffidence and agitation. We should have confidence in our capacity to train the senses. In disciplining the senses, do not get angry with them, but be courteous and say “Please” and “I beg your pardon.” This is the kind of artistry I always recommend on the spiritual path. Do not do things by force, but with patience.

In training the eyes, we can begin by not staring at things in which we are likely to be caught. For most of us, the shop window may exercise a certain pull, particularly for those who have been used to buying things in order to maintain their security. The spell of attraction is broken when we realize that by buying things and giving presents we are not likely to become secure, and relationships are not likely to be repaired. The ear, also, can be trained not to listen to what is harmful, especially to gossip. The time will come when we can actually close our ears and not hear what is going on. I suggest that when there is unkind talk, unsavory gossip, we can always get up and walk out, or, even better, we can say something in praise of the person who is being attacked.

In order to understand the full import of this verse, we have to see where attachment to sense objects has brought our civilization. I am an admirer of science, and I know that the modern world needs the wise help of technology to solve many of its material problems, but the misuse of science and technology has brought us to a very serious pass. Today’s paper carried a brilliant article by one of the foremost authorities in the country on the pollution of the environment. The writer traces the environmental crisis directly to our excessive attachment to objects, showing that we have produced for the sake of production, multiplied things for the sake of multiplying things, without any reference to their wise use or their necessity in our daily life. This is a serious pronouncement, and all of us should pay it more than lip service.

We are all aware of the terrible impact of the automobile on our environment. There are a number of simple ways we can help relieve this problem. The first is by walking more. Some years ago, when my wife and I were first walking around Lake Merritt, the only company we had was the seagulls and a black dog. Now we just keep bumping into people; old, middle-aged, and even little ones have started walking. A second suggestion, which is also beginning to be practiced, is to form car pools. There may be practical problems with this. We may have to wait three minutes for one person, five for another, but we can look upon these little inconveniences as part of our sadhana, as an opportunity for repeating the mantram while we wait. Third, we can all avoid travel that is unnecessary. We do not need to travel around the world when the source of all joy and all beauty is right within us.

We can be discriminating, too, in the way we furnish our homes. In Kerala, even in well-to-do homes, there is very little furniture, just a few pieces of teak or ebony. Teak is not expensive there; it grows in abundance, as does redwood here in California. The rooms are beautiful, austere, with just a few touches here and there. Once we begin to exercise our judgment in these matters, we shall see many other avenues in which we can simplify our life yet maintain all its comfort, joy, and beauty.

In a world where natural resources are limited, we should not waste a single particle of anything. When we were on the Blue Mountain, my wife and I met often with a British Quaker friend, Mary Barr, who had been close to Gandhi. She had so deeply imbibed this lesson from Gandhi that if I left two or three grains of rice on my plate, she would say, “Don’t waste,” and I would obediently pick up every last grain and put it in my mouth. Similarly, with regard to clothing, it is possible to be very attractively dressed with a select wardrobe, and it is possible to be very unattractively dressed with a vast wardrobe. There are many people, I am told, who have sentimental attachments to clothing with a story – this dress they wore in Acapulco in 1959, or that jacket in which they hitchhiked to New York. Give these to someone who needs clothing. Get rid of these attachments. These are the ways in which we can help relieve the state of emergency which overproduction and overconsumption have brought us to. Ultimately, you and I are responsible. If we do not buy, they cannot make; if we do not buy, they cannot sell.

By meditating and leading the spiritual life we are showing how we can make the ecological emergency disappear. Sri Krishna says: “I am the source of all the joy, all the love, all the wisdom, and all the beauty within you. You do not need these external attachments. Just have enough to keep your family in comfort, and whatever else you have, give to those who need.”

SRI KRISHNA: 59. Though aspirants abstain from sense pleasures, they will still crave for them. These cravings all disappear when they see the Lord of Love.

If we remember Patanjali’s definition of dharana, the first stage in meditation, it may give us some idea of the behavior of the senses in the early years of our sadhana. Patanjali with his unfailing spiritual accuracy says that dharana is the effort to confine the mind in a limited area. Imagine the mind to be a dog. If I take a dog to the store and chain him outside while I go in, telling him, “I’ll be out in two minutes – just a few groceries and I am done,” the dog will expect me to come back soon. When he does not see me coming out, he will start going round and round, howling and putting his paws on the glass, trying to see me. After a while, when I still have not come out, the dog will finally become tired of looking. After a lot of restlessness, after walking about and whining, he will turn around three times and then lie down. The mind is very much like that. It has got to run about and howl a little, then stand up and see who is inside and what is coming out. But after a while it will turn around three times and lie down.

The senses, too, are very restless. They are so turbulent, and have been indulged so long, that even when you are beginning to restrain them, by eating only when hungry and only what is nourishing, they still may rebel. Though you may be having only a meager breakfast, a spare lunch, and a pauper’s dinner, you are still thinking about what makes a sumptuous meal, and mentally you are eating a long list of items. In your external consumption of food there may be extreme restraint, but for a long, long time the old sense cravings and selfish desires are going to be there in the mind. Sri Krishna is very compassionate. When you are restraining the senses, he admires you for that, and he does not hold it against you if once in a while you are tempted to say, “If only I hadn’t taken to meditation!”

What is required for a long time is our conscious effort, our sustained discipline, in restraining the senses. Gradually these noxious weeds of sense cravings will begin to wither away if we do not yield to them. Even though the desires may arise in the mind, if we subject the senses to an external discipline, the desires will gradually cease to agitate our minds through the practice of meditation.

Listening to people who are subject to compulsive habits of eating is sometimes a little like science fiction. They say they are just walking along, thinking about what passage to memorize for meditation, and all of a sudden an unseen hand pulls them inside. Before they know where they are, the door has closed on them and they are in the restaurant. For such compulsive cases, what I would say is even if you are being pulled in the doorway, try a judo twist. In this way you can actually manage to come out and start running. When you are nearing a bakery, if you are not quite sure whether you are bakery-proof, make a dash for it. It helps your physical system, you get vigorous exercise, and you conquer temptation, too. So in the case of bakeries, candy shops, and restaurants, for all those who do not mind a certain amount of curiosity on the part of passersby – run.

In samadhi, when we see the Lord, the source of all joy, then we do not need any other source of pleasure. When we see the source of all beauty, then we do not need any other source of beauty. When we see the source of all love, we do not need any other source of love. In samadhi, Sri Krishna says, we become complete; all the vacancies are filled, and there is no more craving.

When we consistently practice this exhilarating discipline of discriminating sense restraint, the time will come when we shall see for ourselves that the connection between our senses and the sense objects is cut. It is a glorious day that we can mark on our calendar as Deliverance Day, and celebrate every year because it brings such relief. Then we can go everywhere in freedom; there is no compulsive liking or disliking. We are free to choose.

SRI KRISHNA: 60. For even of one who treads the path, the stormy senses can sweep off the mind.

Even though we are trying our best to lead the spiritual life, the senses are so fiercely turbulent that if we yield to them for a little while, and a little while more, we will be swept away. Vipashcitah indriyani pramathini: even if we are very wise, the senses can become so powerful that they just pick us up and throw us from the path. This is a warning given to all of us, particularly on the level of sex.

We do not have to belong to the monastic order to lead the spiritual life, and sex has a beautiful place in a completely loving, loyal relationship, though even there with discrimination. But for people who indulge in sex in the wrong context, even though at the outset there may be some satisfaction, ultimately the relationship will be disrupted. If we ask any two people who have built their relationship on the physical level, they will say that in just a few months they could not bear each other. The tragedy is that after a short time they are again in the same relationship with someone else. If you ask them the same question again, they will say their new relationship also could not last even a few months. The senses are getting stronger and stronger, resistance is getting weaker and weaker, and one day such people will find that even if they want to, they will not be able to lead the spiritual life because of the turbulence of the mind. Sex is sacred; it has beauty and tenderness in a completely loving, loyal relationship, where it brings two people closer and closer to become one. But on no account is it going to help us physically, psychologically, or spiritually to indulge this impulse as the mass media are trying to make us do.

We shall find that we give our best to each other when we put each other first; and when we do not put each other first, particularly in the married relationship, sex breeds jealousy. Shakespeare does not exaggerate when he talks about the “green-eyed monster” of jealousy, which is characteristic of sex on the physical level. Even when we do not suspect a trace of jealousy in ourselves, it may be clouding our eyes. I remember one of our friends who told me he could not take his girlfriend out on Telegraph Avenue because there were so many fellows there who wanted to deprive him of her. I got permission to accompany them one day, and as far as my rather bright eyes could see, nobody was looking at them. People were all engrossed in themselves or in their dinner. In his case, he was trying to build the relationship on the physical level, and as he could not avoid admitting that, I told him that jealousy is the nature of such a relationship.

Jealousy comes in only when we try to possess something for ourselves. It is good to admire beauty, but it is neither beautiful nor good if we want to take it home, put it on the mantle, and say, “You just stay there.” When we see something beautiful, we begin to want it for ourselves. It may be a beautiful house, it may be a beautiful flower, it may be a beautiful dancer – we just want it. The Gita says that by wanting it, we have lost it. It is a very difficult secret to understand that when we do not want to possess another selfishly, he or she will always love us. It is when we do not want to possess, when we do not make demand after demand, that the relationship will last. Sri Krishna is giving us the secret of all relationships, not only between husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, but between friend and friend, parents and children. Instead of trying to exact and demand, just give, and give more, and give still more. This is the way to keep love and respect; and it is something we have to learn the hard, hard way.

Unless we exercise vigilant control over the senses, we cannot put other people first. For example, if we let the palate run away with us, we will want to eat only what we like and may try to force others to eat what we like. If we do not restrain the senses, we may try to impose our self-will on those around us in all the little matters of daily living. I am sure that all of you will find, as I have, how delightful it can be to forget your own taste in eating what your wife, girlfriend, or mother wants you to eat. When you are not appreciating the taste very much, when it reminds you of gall and wormwood, try to smile, and you will see what real freedom means. Inside, the taste glands are conducting a funeral, but you just free yourself and smile. It begins with a half-­paralyzed expression, but through repetition of the mantram the smile slowly pervades the whole face, until at last the eyes light up. We can train our senses with artistry by doing what will add to the joy of our parents, partner, children, and friends.

SRI KRISHNA: 61. But they live in wisdom who subdue them, and keep their minds ever absorbed in me.

That person is of unshakable wisdom and security who has subdued the senses and become completely absorbed in the Lord of Love, call him Krishna or Christ. The subjugation of the senses is enormously difficult when we keep telling ourselves, “I must subdue my senses; I must deny my body.” On this impersonal path – the path of neti neti, ‘not this, not this,’ as the Upanishads put it – you are told you are not the body, you are not the senses, you are not the mind, you are not the intellect, you are not the ego. There are great mystics who have traveled this way to Self-realization, but it is hard to imagine ordinary people like ourselves climbing the Himalayas up such precipitous slopes.

One of the practical beauties of the Gita is that it is not negative in its presentation. The Gita approach, which I try to follow, is expressed here in the words yukta asita matparah: the Lord is in me, and I ask him, “Reveal yourself to me; unite me to yourself; make me the dust of your lotus feet.” This is the positive approach, and I have seldom found it useful to keep on the negative path. Let us follow the positive way of asking the Lord to reveal himself to us in the depths of our consciousness, and of loving him in our parents, partner, children, and friends. This discipline of adding to the joy of those around us itself weakens the tyranny of the senses.

SRI KRISHNA: 62–63. When you keep thinking about sense objects, attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession which, when thwarted, burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgment; you can no longer learn from past mistakes. Lost is the power to choose between the wise and the unwise, and your life is utter waste.

In his autobiography, Gandhi narrates in moving language how these two verses, which he read for the first time in London, haunted him day in and day out and began to protect him from the dangers of life on the sensory level. Many times when I, too, have been tempted to follow the call of the senses, these words have rescued me from rushing headlong into torrential waters. I would suggest these two verses be used in meditation, particularly by people who want to subdue their senses, not to negate them but to use them as faithful servants in the service of others. The purpose of these verses is not negative; their purpose is to bring under our command the resources of love, wisdom, and selfless action which lie dormant within us all.

Dhyayato vishayan pumsah means ‘dwelling on sense objects.’ To apply this to the modern context, we are dwelling on sense objects when we read books, for example, that are erotically charged, which means most of the books that come hot off the press today. Whenever I go into a bookstore now, I fail to find a section where Eros has not homesteaded. There is a tendency for all of us to be drawn into this kind of reading. Partly it is our conditioning, and partly it is our deep belief that we are the body, which leads us to think that by giving in to the senses we can win love, we can give love, we can become beautiful and fulfilled. It is good to select books in which there is not undue and distasteful description of what stimulates sexual desire. As a former student of both Sanskrit and English literature, I can say the most beautiful love scenes can be conveyed without a single sensate word. Last month we had the pleasure of seeing a movie by Satyajit Ray, the distinguished producer and director from Bengal, whose movies are well attended in this country. It was a powerful love story narrated from beginning to end without a kiss, without the two people ever throwing themselves into each other’s arms, all the more powerful because it was so beautifully done with great restraint. It should not be too difficult for us to understand that power can be conveyed better by restraint than by taking the lid off. This is one of the great secrets of the classical tradition, where the enormous power that is contained within is suggested rather than explicitly described.

Books are a stage through which we pass, but we should slowly outgrow the need to draw upon other people’s imagination and information, and especially upon the mass media, for our entertainment. Magazines particularly must be read with discrimination. When I am in the supermarket and take a look at the covers of the magazines on the shelves, every week there seems to be some new scandal, couched in such inconsiderate, unkind language that I often wonder why people even like to look at these articles. By not reading most magazines, we are not losing out on our education, though there are one or two we can select carefully and pass on to our friends.

My wife looks upon me as a well-informed critic of the movies, but I do not mind confessing that now and then I make a faux pas. Sometimes, after looking at the reviews, I come to the conclusion that I have found a peaceful movie. I think the scenes are going to be rather restrained, but before we know where we are, pandemonium has burst loose on the screen, and people are taking off their clothes on all sides. As far as the movies are concerned, I have now almost become resigned; and for those of you who want to share my secret, whenever this kind of disrobing begins I close my eyes and take a nap. The dangers of such movies are more serious than we sometimes think. We are still beginners on the spiritual path. We are still trying to bring the senses under control. The desires are all there, just hidden in a corner, waiting for their opportunity. When we see a voluptuous scene on the screen, we may not even notice it very carefully, or be conscious when we come home that it is this scene we see in our dream, meaning that it has gone into our deeper consciousness. The advertisers and movie makers know much better than we do how these stray, seductive, highly suggestive images get into our consciousness. Movies can be harmful if we do not have some kind of resistance, and one of the easiest ways to immunize oneself against the seductive powers of the movies is to learn to laugh, not with them, but at them.

Sangas teshu ‘pajayate. If we keep on reading about something, and seeing it, and hearing about it, even in the most self-controlled among us the seed will gradually germinate; and sangat samjayate kamah: we will come to desire to have the experience ourselves. This is all underneath the surface level of consciousness, so we are often not even aware of what is going on until we suddenly find ourselves in a situation where we can gratify the desire.

Here the Gita does not talk about morality or ethics; it says what Patanjali also says: when we have a desire for a certain thing or experience, and fulfill that desire, the happiness we feel is due to having no craving for a little while. It is not because this craving has been satisfied, but because for just a little while there is a state of no craving. The Gita is in no way deprecating love and tenderness between two people; it is merely trying to tell us that sensory desire makes us wrongly believe the object of desire can bring us satisfaction. It is our desire which gives quality to a relationship or a thing. In our own experience, where we have built a relationship on the sensory level, we must have asked the question: “Why is it that six months ago I thought I could go through ten incarnations with this person, and now I cannot go through ten weeks?” There is nothing wrong with us, nor is anything wrong with the other person. Our desire has exhausted itself. It is the nature of sensory desire to come to an end very, very soon.

In most of us our desires are not under our control; but if, as the Upanishads say, we can get hold of our desires, we will get hold of our destiny. We can then direct our desires at will. The Katha Upanishad (1:3) uses a particularly vivid image:

Know the Self as lord of the chariot,

The body as the chariot itself,

The discriminating intellect as

The charioteer, and the mind the reins.

The senses, say the wise, are the horses;

Selfish desires are the roads they travel.

When the Self is confused with the body,

Mind, and senses, they point out, it seems

To enjoy pleasure and suffer sorrow.

When a person lacks discrimination

And his mind is undisciplined, his senses

Run hither and thither like wild horses.

But they obey the rein like trained horses

When a person has discrimination

And the mind is one-pointed. Those who lack

Discrimination, with little control

Over their thoughts and far from pure,

Reach not the pure state of immortality

But wander from death to death; while those

Who have discrimination, with a still mind

And a pure heart, reach journey’s end,

Never again to fall into the jaws of death.

With a discriminating intellect

As charioteer, a well-trained mind as reins,

They attain the supreme goal of life,

To be united with the Lord of Love.

The more we indulge the senses, the less we get out of them, and the less we get out of them, the more we indulge them. Finally, we begin to get angry. This is the anger that bursts out between two people in a physical relationship, when they begin to quarrel and drag up the past. The physical desire has been exhausted, and now they just go on doing things which will bring the relationship to an end. When both parties become resentful, the most tragic stage in personal relationships is reached. Formerly, every little thing the other person did was so lovely that you could have gone on watching these innumerable acts of grace forever. Now the same thing begins to irk you. These were the things with which you used to be in love, about which you wrote minor poetry; why is it that now they only irritate you? When resentment begins to arise, even things not meant to be hostile are interpreted with hostility. The whole atmosphere of the home, of the relationship, becomes vitiated because the desire on the physical level has been exhausted.

When this kind of constant resentment and anger becomes established in our consciousness – it may be for any apparent reason outside – we begin to see what is not there. Krodhad bhavati sammohah: from anger arises delusion. We accuse people of things they have not dreamt of; we attack people for what they are not doing, and sammohat smritivibhramah: we lose the capacity to learn from previous mistakes. All of us commit mistakes, and none of us need feel guilty about past errors if we have learned from them. The tragedy of this kind of anger is that the power of discrimination goes completely. Sri Krishna uses terms here which he very rarely uses, smritibhramshad buddhinasho buddhinashat pranashyati: when a human being has lost all capacity to learn from the past, lost all judgment, that person’s life might as well be written off as a complete waste. Such a person, whatever else he may do in life, will be bringing misery upon himself as well as on those connected with him. He will leave this life having proved to be a burden, instead of being a contributor to the welfare of others.

Arjuna is now terrified because the Lord of Love does not talk in this way very often. These verses are meant to remind you and me that we cannot play the sensory game for long, saying, “Oh, we can always run away when it gets too hot.” By restraining ourselves we do not lose joy; by indulging ourselves we lose all joy. By putting other people first, we do not lose joy; by putting ourselves first, we lose all joy. Many young people are under the impression that the only way to build a relationship is on the physical level. They are not aware that there is an alternative basis for relationships, which can grow in mutual understanding, love, and respect with the passage of time. The physical relationship promises what it cannot give, while the spiritual relationship gives and continues to give an abiding sense of joy all our life.

SRI KRISHNA: 64–65. But when you move amidst the world of sense, free from both attachment and aversion, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self.

To go beyond suffering, to live in the full confidence that our life is meant for the service of others and that the Lord has given us ample resources to perform this service whatever the obstacles, we must shed all likes and dislikes. We cannot afford to say, “I like this; I dislike that. I like him; I dislike her.” To try to translate this into neurological language, our nervous system is meant for two-way traffic. It should be able to move towards pain, if necessary, as well as towards pleasure. Now in the case of most of us, our nervous system will flow only one way, towards what we like. Most forms of allergy are a screaming protest from the nervous system: “You can’t do this to me! I move in one direction only.” If we are forced to go towards what we do not like, we get an ulcer in our stomach, a creeping sensation under the skin, and numbness of the fingers. Finally we faint, and then ask, “Do you blame me?” In order to grow up to our full beauty and maturity, we have to learn very often to go near what we have turned away from, to go with appreciation to the person we have always avoided. There is joy in this, and there is fulfillment in this, because we can do it for the sake of others – the parent for the child, the husband for the wife, the wife for the husband, and the friend for the friend. When the nervous system has been reconditioned for serving others, we will find ourselves free to enjoy what we do not like just as much as what we like. In the monastic order, I am told, they apply this kind of discipline with artistic perfection. If there is someone who has always been fond of books, out he goes into the garden, and if there is someone who is always after the potato bugs, in he goes to the library. The principle is to free ourselves.

We all can begin this discipline in many little ways in our daily life, particularly between parents and children, and husband and wife. We can fill the hours with freshness by putting the other person first. Whenever, for example, we go to a restaurant, it is good for the wife to give the menu to her husband and ask him to choose for her, or for the husband to ask the wife. In the early days the going may be hard, but if we can repeat the mantram and persist, we will find that gradually each person will be thinking only of what pleases the other. This exercise in the reduction of self-will can be done in all the little matters of daily life – hairstyle, books, movies, attitudes, and even opinions. I am very much in the prehistoric tradition. I have been charged with living five thousand years in the past, and I wouldn’t disagree with this because, after all, my life is entirely based on the spiritual values proclaimed by the illumined sages of ancient India and the great mystics of the world. These values are timeless. They were completely valid five thousand years ago; they are completely valid today; and they will be completely valid five thousand years hence. Whatever unites people permanently is spiritual and heals individuals, families, and society. On the fundamental issues of life, a man and woman cannot help but see alike if they realize the unity underlying life. This is not losing one’s personality but gaining it. All of us need to work towards realizing this unity in all our relationships.

The person who has gone beyond likes and dislikes, Sri Ramakrishna will say, is like an autumn leaf floating in the wind. It floats gently here when the wind blows here, it goes there when the wind blows there, and slowly it settles to the ground. On most occasions we can be pliable and ready to bend without any disloyalty to our ideals. People who will easily bend our way under normal circumstances can stand like a rock when a great crisis comes. Sometimes good things come to us, sometimes bad. We can learn from both; we have enough resources to meet any challenge that comes. This awareness does not denude life of joy, but enables us to accept the joy that comes, and also to face the sorrow that comes, with equanimity and resourcefulness.

SRI KRISHNA: 66. The disunited mind is far from wise; how can it meditate? How be at peace? When you know no peace, how can you know joy?

Here there is no mention of religion, or of the spiritual life, or of God; Sri Krishna simply asks Arjuna what intelligence anyone has who is not united within. To bring this into a modern context, try to imagine an automobile whose four wheels want to go off in four different directions. This is actually what is happening to you and me. The senses are always running out towards stimulation; the mind runs out in the direction of agitation; the intellect goes in the direction of argumentation; and the Atman just sits there watching and says, “We cannot do anything with this car. These people shouldn’t be given their driver’s license, and this particular car should be recalled.” Meditation and the disciplines recommended by the great mystics of all religions are for putting the four wheels of our car back on the same road.

Na ‘sti buddhir ayuktasya na ca yuktasya bhavana: “If you are not united inside, with all your desires flowing towards one goal, you cannot get access to your deeper creative faculties.” This is practical language. If you want to be a great painter, you do not try to be a sculptor, a financier, and a linguistic expert, saying, “Well, painting is one of the many things I am going to do.” If you are going to paint, you paint. Then the Lord continues, Na ca ‘bhavayatah shantir: “If there is no harmony inside, if there is no unity inside, how can you have peace?” This is something all of us can understand. If we are restless inside, if there is a war going on inside, wherever we go, no matter what abundance we live in, we will never be able to know security. Then, Ashantasya kutah sukham: “When you have no peace in your heart, how can you know joy?” The purpose of meditation and spiritual disciplines is to lead us to joy. It is understandable if we are rather skeptical about this in the earlier stages. We may even be unable to associate joy with meditation. “Getting up early morning when it is more joyful to sleep? Eating less when it is more joyful to eat more? And putting other people first? Have you heard of a more ridiculous idea of joy?” These are not unnatural questions for us to ask. We may feel the discipline dull and dreary in the early years of our sadhana, but the goal of meditation is complete, abiding joy, releasing the great capacities for service which lie untouched in all of us.

Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion or selfless love, is the very best way for ordinary people like ourselves to move towards the total unification of consciousness that is the climax of meditation. People often ask me how to deepen the vein of devotion that is in all of us, and I reply that by unifying our desires and undergoing the disciplines of meditation, we can all become devoted to the Lord and aware of his presence in everyone around us.

The other day we saw a movie filmed on the Himalayas, and in one scene a group of pilgrims was crossing a deep ravine on a rope bridge. While on the bridge, which is swinging like a pendulum, they are all saying Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama with as much devotion as they can muster. But as soon as the first step is taken on terra firma, it is likely to be kama, kama, kama, kama. When there is trouble and turmoil we are very responsive to the mantram; but as soon as the current turns, when our health is good, income is steady, and pleasures are all flowing smoothly, we forget the Lord.

When trouble and turmoil come, let us remember that it is the Lord’s way of saying, “Don’t forget me.” Let us be grateful when God sends us joy, because we all need joy. But let us also be grateful when he sends us sorrow – physical ailments, mental distress, financial breakdown – because these can enable us to turn inwards to remember him.

Sri Ramakrishna was fond of saying that our love of God should be as great as the love of a miser for his gold, the love of a mother for her child, and the love of a lover for the beloved, all combined. That is the kind of bhakti we should try to cultivate. Most of us have our infinite capacity for love dissipated into innumerable little channels, but we can all develop single-minded, concentrated devotion by putting the welfare of those around us first. Devotion in any relationship helps to unify consciousness, and in the modern world, people who find it too difficult to accept a divine incarnation with complete love and loyalty can all cultivate devotion, or selfless love, in personal relationships.

Many of us may not find it easy to choose a personal incarnation to whom we can surrender our entire devotion. My suggestion to such people is to let the personal incarnation choose them. Instead of shopping around the pantheon of incarnations, why not just say, “We are at your feet. We are pretty bad, and we are going to be an encumbrance. Now will someone who has mercy, and who doesn’t mind having a stone around his neck, pick me up?” There are great mystics who say in complete self-surrender, “Will somebody please pick me up?” and that is all there is to it. Because they have so completely unified their love for the Lord, their travail is over within an instant. The Lord comes to them immediately.

In our repetition of the mantram, we are asking the Lord to come and help us out because we cannot lift ourselves up by ourselves. For those who have this simple faith, the time may come when they will receive an indication that the Lord is coming to say, “You are mine.” This is grace. And when the Lord puts his mark on us, every samskara picks up its bag and leaves. This experience of grace is not unlikely to come to most of us who are steadfast in their meditation and who, even though they have occasional lapses, are doing the very best they can.

SRI KRISHNA: 67. When you let your mind heed the Siren call of the senses, they will carry away your better judgment as storms drive a boat off its safe-charted course to certain doom.

68. Use all your power to set the senses free from attachment and aversion alike, and live in the full wisdom of the Self.

These two verses are a comment upon the fate our modern civilization faces if we do not correct the sensate philosophy on which it seems to be operating at present. Anyone who tries to follow the seductive call of the senses, which promise satisfaction, security, and fulfillment, is likely to meet with disaster. The Lord therefore tells us to train our senses, to turn them from turbulent masters into obedient servants. Without this period of discriminating sense restraint, all of us risk the danger of rebellion and continuous riots inside.

These two verses are of direct application every day, from morning when we go to the breakfast table until night when we finish the midnight snack. There is a close connection between letting the palate have its way and letting the mind have its way; Gandhi says that the control of the palate is a valuable aid to the control of the mind. Today the mass media subject us to so many skillful advertisements which tickle the palate that even the most vigilant among us may find themselves falling into their trap. We must consistently retrain the palate by giving the body nourishing, temperate food, rather than responding to the advertiser’s slogans, which try to make us eat things that are undesirable and unnourishing. Even during the past ten years there has been an increase in concern about good nutrition. More and more dieticians and doctors are telling us how necessary it is to restrain the palate in order to be physically healthy. There is likely to be a certain initial resistance by the senses, which are used to being pampered, but we can all change our food habits gradually to anything that we approve of. Here each person is at liberty to do a certain amount of experimentation. We need not be too harsh, nor should we be too lenient, in changing our food habits. The changeover, for example, from nonvegetarian to vegetarian food can be made gradually. In most textbooks on nutrition we find statements about what foods to avoid and what foods to rely on, and often the ones to be avoided are nonvegetarian, especially in the case of heart disease. Even if they do not advocate it consistently, nutritionists seem to be slowly coming to the conclusion that the vegetarian diet is good for physical as well as mental well-being.

Vegetarianism not only helps us to maintain our health on the optimum level but also has the spiritual purpose of deepening our awareness of the unity of life. I am fortunate in being born in a Hindu family that has been vegetarian probably for over a thousand years, but I am not a vegetarian because my ancestors were; I am a vegetarian because I have come to know that I form one unity with everything around me. As our spiritual awareness deepens, we will come to have great compassion for animals and will never want to be a party to their ill-treatment. Vegetarianism affirms the unity of all life.

SRI KRISHNA: 69. Such a sage awakes to light in the night of all creatures. That which the world calls day is the night of ignorance to the wise.

What is night to the vast majority of human beings is day to the illumined man; and what we call day is night to the mystic. The world of our ego is the world of sense data, and as long as we identify ourselves with the body, we move in the sense-world of samsara, that which is moving all the time. As long as we live in the field of the senses, as long as we live in the sea of flux, none of us can escape change, which culminates in the great change called death.

As our meditation deepens, our view of even the external world will change considerably. I do not see the world today as I used to see it twenty years ago. I do not see people as I saw them twenty years ago. Everything changes in an almost miraculous fashion. Where we looked upon someone as a threat to us, we come to regard that person as a friend; we begin to see the unity underlying all life. This change comes on so gradually that we are not even aware of it unless we stop to compare how we saw life a few years ago with how we see it today.

Most of us see life not as it is, but as we are. We look at life through our own needs and prejudices, and the ultimate narrowing of vision occurs when we look at everything as pertaining to ourself. Most people look at life through a very narrow ego-slit. We should never say we see life as it is, and never denounce the world as evil and tempestuous, because we are looking at it through one tiny slit. If we could ask Sri Ramana Maharshi or Sri Ramakrishna what they see in the world, we would be heartened to hear them say they see it whole. They do see the turbulence and violence, but for them the world is a hospital where we are all being treated and made whole. Ramana Maharshi, with his dry humor, said that the body is the biggest disease of all; and Sri Ramakrishna told his disciples that no one can be discharged from the hospital without being fully cured. The Buddha also, in the Four Noble Truths, declares that in the world we are all suffering from the same devastating disease, tanha, the fierce thirst of selfish desire, and to cure this disease he gave us the regimen of the Eightfold Path.

All we need learn in life is to forget ourselves little by little by not dwelling upon the dullest, dreariest subject on earth, “I.” In order to widen the ego-slit, we put first the welfare of those with whom we live as good friends or family, and realize the unity of life in that circle. Someone once asked me if it is possible to realize the unity of all life just by putting first a few people with whom he lived. I answered, “If you want to be the tennis champion of the world, do you go and play against every tennis player in the world? You just go to the central court at Wimbledon and beat the few there, and when you get the cup, you have become champion.” Even in a small circle of good friends, if we can consistently try to put their welfare first, this will enable us to widen the slit until finally there is no slit at all, and we see the whole panorama. This is what nirvana means: removing the constriction that makes me see only what conduces to my own profit and pleasure, until I see all life as it is, as one.

SRI KRISHNA: 70. As the rivers flow into the ocean, but cannot make the vast ocean overflow, so flow the magic streams of the sense-world into the sea of peace that is the sage.

The first word is apuryamanam, ‘ever full.’ This is your nature and mine. Our idea, born of ignorance, that we will become full if we can make a lot of money or enjoy a little pleasure is absurd, because we are already full. Our account is full; we cannot add to it, nor can we take away from it. Within ourselves we have the biggest bank in the cosmos, but instead of going in to claim our legitimate account, we go to little banks asking for petty loans. As long as we live on the egocentric level, we will never suspect what fullness and security lie within ourselves. We will always have an emptiness inside that only Self-realization can take away.

The Compassionate Buddha tells his disciples that the egocentric life consists of duhkha. On one level, the word duhkha means ‘sorrow.’ As long as we live as separate fragments in a world of separate fragments, clashing against one another, we cannot but suffer. There is also another connotation to the word: duh means ‘bad’; kha means ‘hole.’ The Buddha says there is a fathomless hole running through our consciousness. To fill this emptiness inside, we keep running to bring pail after pail of dollars and pour them in; but at the end of the day it is still duhkha, the fathomless hole. We pour in money, material possessions, pleasure, power, prestige, and it all goes down the fathomless drain. Once we begin to realize that nothing can fill this chasm, we will understand St. Augustine’s cry: “Lord, how can I ever find rest anywhere else when I am made to rest in thee?” Sri Krishna tells Arjuna, “Why waste your life going after things that pass away? You do not need them. You are already full because I am living in the depths of your consciousness. You have only to look within to realize me.”

The second word is achalapratishtham, ‘established in motionlessness.’ This is the complete stillness of Brahman, the complete motionlessness of the supreme Reality. In order to be established in the changeless, immutable Reality called God, we have to still the turbulent mind completely. If you want to see what your mind is like, go stand on a high parapet overlooking a rocky seacoast when there is a storm. The only creatures who enjoy this maelstrom are the sea lions. They float along with the waves, and when a giant one comes, they all jump up to ride on it with joy. But being made in the image of the Lord, and having been brought into the human context, our glory is to play in the sea that is still. The mind is often compared in Sanskrit to the sea, ever moving, ever rolling, ever restless; but even though there are turbulent waves on the surface, in the depths of our consciousness is the divine stillness which, through the grace of the Lord, we enter as our meditation deepens. Ten years ago, when I used to talk about the still mind and transcendental wisdom, people would sometimes object: “But we are rational people. Ours is an age of reason.” I agree that if we could act as rational people, there would be a good deal of satisfaction in it, but our mind is not used to rational thinking. Very few people have the capacity to concentrate completely on a given topic. In the morning, when you are brushing your teeth, try to keep your mind on the toothbrush for just two minutes; you will find the mind jumping about from one topic to another, all irrelevant, and each more disconnected than the last. Most of our tension, frustration, conflict, fatigue, and lack of will are due to the continuous working of the mind. And in people who are self-centered and capable of resentments, this constant, undisciplined activity of the mind can lead to a terrible drain on energy. When we have a resentment, prana, or vital energy, is leaking out all the time, even in our dreams. This is why some people may get up in the morning after eight hours of sleep saying, “Why is it I am so tired?” In order to stop this continuous draining of vital energy that demoralizes and debilitates us, we have to learn to keep the mind still.

Meditation in the early stages is a discipline to slow down the mind, which is now traveling at breakneck speed, weaving from lane to lane and observing no signals, no regulations. If you are practicing meditation sincerely, systematically, and with sustained enthusiasm, there will be certain times when the mind becomes concentrated. Just for ten minutes there may be complete concentration on the second chapter of the Gita, and you feel as if you are getting control over a very powerful car. You are on U.S. 101, there is very little traffic, and you are able to travel fifty-four miles per hour without even turning the wheel or stepping on the brakes. Everything is under control. You go down one lane only; there are no turns, no merging traffic. When you can concentrate on one thought, there is no tension because there is no division; there is complete security because there is complete concentration. On the other hand, most of us are like the drivers we see in San Francisco during the Christmas rush. You have only to look at the tension on their faces to see how much effort is required; they seem to be trying to lift the car and throw it forward. This is what we are doing in life – taking all our weight upon ourselves and trying to push ourselves forward, when the Lord is behind us saying, “Why don’t you let me do it? I have many arms.”

When we realize the complete fullness and complete stillness within us, it is an extremely satisfying experience, which, in the course of time as our meditation deepens, many of us may have. Just for a little while all the wires are disconnected, and there is no contact with the external world. The Buddha, using a negative term, calls it shunyata, the Void, where there is no friction, no disharmony, no separateness. The Hindu mystics describe this stillness as purnata, complete fullness.

Even after we have attained deep spiritual awareness, however, occasional desires may still come into our minds. This may happen to all of us because we are encased in the body; we are corporeal beings functioning in a physically oriented world. But when we are aware spiritually, even if desires come, we will not identify ourselves with them or be upset by them. Desires will come into the mind just as rivers come into the vast sea, which remains full and established in stillness. As long as we are living on the separate level, putting ourselves first, when a canal brings in a little water there are huge waves and landslides, and banks are swept away. But when we begin to live in the depths of our being, realizing that all of us are one, however different we may appear, then even a big river like the Ganges, coming down from the Himalayas with the monsoon flood, will not disturb the sea of stillness within.

The last word of this verse is kamakami, ‘the desirer of desires.’ One friend who is going to accompany us deep, deep into our meditation is kama in the form of sexual desire. Even after many years of meditation, when we think we have at last parted from this companion, we will sit down to meditate one morning and there he will be, as friendly as ever. Kama, which is personified in the Hindu tradition as Kamadeva, has many names:

Madano manmatho marah pradyumno minaketanah

Kandarpo darpako ‘nangah kamah pancasharah smarah

Manmatha is ‘he who churns the mind’: when Kama comes with his cosmic churner, we cannot sit quiet; we cannot breathe; we cannot think. This is a very penetrating name, because sex is not just on the physical level. It is very much in the mind, and it is in the mind, not just the body, that we must learn to control this powerful force. Mara is ‘the striker.’ Smara is ‘he who will not let you forget.’ Once we have had a sexual experience, we just cannot forget it; such is the power of Kama that no matter what we try to do, we cannot help dwelling on it. The only refuge we have at that time is Shiva – Smarari, ‘the enemy of Smara,’ who enables us to forget and to recall our vital power. Pancashara is ‘having five arrows.’ When Kama draws back his bow to the end of the world, aims at our heart, and begins to fire his arrows, we feel we are completely lost. Our refuge then is in the mantram.

When a strong desire is threatening to sweep us away, we grapple with it in morning meditation and still the mind a little. But the real challenge comes afterwards, during the rest of the day, in using the power released in meditation to meet the temptation. We still have the desire, but we turn against it. Whenever desires threaten to agitate us, we have an opportunity to remain calm and compassionate and repeat the mantram. This is the greatest challenge in life. Every time we push these desires back, we strengthen the will; and gradually we begin to realize that He who made the sea and sun, sky and moon, is within us, giving us the infinite power and immense energy to transform our desires. The control of sex is not the negation of it. Sex is closely connected with kundalini, which is evolutionary energy, and when we learn to control this power instead of being controlled by it, all our creative abilities and capacities for selfless service are released.

SRI KRISHNA: 71. They are forever free who break away from the ego-cage of ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine’ to be united with the Lord of Love.

In this verse the Lord gives us the secret of how to attain shanti, “the peace that passeth all understanding,” that resolves all conflicts, fulfills all desires, and banishes all fear. In our consciousness there is a division, just a little split at first, that prevents our being completely loving and loyal. When we allow conflicts to rage within us, or disloyalty to separate us from others, the split grows wider and wider until finally it runs clear through our consciousness. Meditation is the process of healing this split so that the two parts become one indivisible unity. This is the purpose of meditation: to do away with the internal divisions of our heart and mind and to mend the external division that separates us from our family, community, and world.

If we are trying to unify our consciousness, we cannot afford to be disloyal to anyone. If we are disloyal to our parents, the same disloyalty will enter our relationship with our partner and our friends. Right in our home, in our early days, we can learn how to unify our fragmented love and loyalty. Otherwise, once we have left home and begun to deal with the problems of the world, disloyalty may begin to disrupt our relationships.

Disloyalty gave the Buddha serious problems, as it did Jesus the Christ. Peter was always promising Jesus, “I am completely loyal to you.” But Jesus said, “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.” Just as disloyalty breeds division, loyalty brings union. Every relationship is an opportunity to develop complete loyalty. When I suggest that the family context is the ideal situation in which to learn this art, I do not mean that we should all be married and have a dozen children. Where friends live together, or where people play or work together, there is a family. We all have somebody to put first, and if no friend is available, then we can always find an enemy. Someone may have said or done something harsh towards us. If we can bear with such a person, we are becoming loyal. If, instead of retaliating, we try to help him get over his problem, we are healing the division that splits his consciousness and ours too. As St. Francis reminds us, the man or woman who has not learned to forgive others has lost the greatest joy in life.

In the Hindu tradition, religious functions such as marriages and funerals always conclude with the words Om shanti shanti shanti, because everyone is destined for this peace which words cannot capture nor concepts convey. Every day the work you do in meditation is preparing you for shanti. You may have slept a little, digressed a little, or lost the passage at times; still your meditation is bringing you closer to the supreme fulfillment that is shanti. One day when you least expect it, your concentration will become complete. Then the mind quietly puts down a pillow and sleeps for just a few minutes. You look at the slumbering mind and say, “God bless you; may you never wake up.” This is what the Buddhists call the state of no-mind. No-mind is a profound condition in which you know intuitively and directly, without the medium of the senses or the intellect. All mystics tell us this immediate knowledge far exceeds the limitations of the intellect.

It takes a long time to have even a preliminary experience of shanti. When you have this experience even for a few minutes, it is as if the factory of the mind has closed down completely. Everywhere there is a soothing stillness, a silent splendor. Only when you experience this state can you know how healing it is for the body, senses, mind, and intellect, and how bad it is for the ego. This is the only party who suffers. I have said more than once that I am not competent to perform a marriage or a funeral ceremony. But for the funeral of the ego you may call me any time, and I will come immediately. This is the job I love. When you have the ego lying on the funeral pyre, light the torch and give me the signal; I will set it on fire. Shanti is the supreme state of perfect peace and purity in which we become love itself, loving not only this or that person but all creation, for we have realized the unity underlying all life.

To be nihspriha is to be without sensory craving, without any desire for satisfaction from the outside. One by one, each of these desires has to be given up. This is why it takes a long, long time to attain spiritual awareness. If we had only five desires, it might take us just five weeks; but we have an almost endless number of desires, for the nature of the mind is to desire, to desire, to desire. Most of us seem to believe that if we could make a lot of money, or win prizes, or have our portrait unveiled in the city hall, we would be happy. I have even heard people insist that the day they made their first million, or the moment the curtain fell from their portrait, they were very happy. Patanjali is a wet blanket to such people when he explains what really happens on these occasions. He says we are happy because one desire has temporarily subsided, and there is not time for another desire to well up in our mind. The mind-factory is closed down for the weekend. Happiness comes when the mind is at rest. We can all attest that when one desire has been fulfilled, there is an interim period of peace before another desire rises. I do not deny that this temporary satisfaction can be very pleasant, but when we yield to one desire, the next one is usually stronger, and if we continue to give in to selfish desires, the interval between them will become shorter and shorter until there is hardly any respite at all.

A close relationship exists between the constant desire for things outside ourselves and the drain of vital energy. Window-shopping is considered an inoffensive relaxation. Maybe it does not affect our bank balance, but it does affect our vital wealth. When we look at things and want to have them, or look at people and envy them, vitality is ebbing out. To become nihspriha we must vigilantly ask, “Should I go after this?” By asking this question in every situation, we will gradually learn which things are really necessary and which are only cumbersome.

Then Sri Krishna adds nirmamo. Just as the sense of ‘I’ can be very painful and can cost us our best friendships, so can the desire for ‘mine.’ In politics this is particularly true. War breaks out when the concept of ‘mine’ becomes outrageously inflated. All of us can be caught in mass estrangement. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” he is telling us, as does Sri Krishna, that you and I can help bring friends, communities, countries, and enemies together by the example of our own personal lives.

Nirmamo should also remind us that the Lord gives us all the resources and life of the earth to care for as trustees. Sri Krishna is the landlord and we are poor tenants. What we have done to his apartment no human landlord would tolerate. Just try to misuse the apartment you are renting – fill it with smoke, pollute the water, punch holes in the walls, smash the windows – and see how fast you are evicted. The Lord, though, keeps on putting up with us. He doesn’t even collect his rent. The rent he expects from every one of us is that we live for other people, and very few will pay so much. We want to live for ourselves, and we expect him to subsidize our selfishness and our self-will. Yet nothing on earth is ours; everything is the Lord’s. We have always assumed we could use as much air as we like, as much water as we like, because there would be an unending supply. Now we know our resources are limited and must be used carefully. When we abuse our environment, our water and air, it is at the cost of future generations.

Nirahamkara means free from self-will. I have just been reading the life of St. Francis of Assisi, and I am captivated by the saint’s capacity to extinguish his self-will. Jesus says that if we want to find ourselves we have first to lose ourselves, and the Sufi mystic Ansari of Herat tells us in glorious language: “Know that when you learn to lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other secret to be learnt, and more than this is not known to me.”

In order to lose myself, I have to stop thinking about that most dreary topic, ‘me.’ When your spiritual awareness deepens, you will find what a monotonous, infernal bore the ego is, always wanting to be the cynosure of all eyes and the center of attention. As a matter of discipline, it is good to remain in the background. Sometimes I cannot help chuckling at the ways young people here in Berkeley try to attract attention. On one occasion I saw a truck drive past the campus carrying a piano at which a young fellow was sitting and playing away as the truck moved along. Naturally, everyone stopped and looked at the pianist, and his face beamed. There is a similar purpose behind dressing in unusual clothes. This is all right for a child, Sri Krishna tells us, but you and I do not want attention from those outside; we want to draw the attention of the Lord of Love who is within. The way to draw the Lord is to repeat the mantram. Keep on calling him, Jesus, Jesus or Rama, Rama. When we grow more secure, we shall see there is no need to search for security outside ourselves. We are all very important because the Lord lives in us. We need not daydream, “I wish I were like him; I wish I were like her.” One of the nicest things anyone has said about me is, “He is very much at home with himself.” When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.

SRI KRISHNA: 72. This is the supreme state. Attain to this, and pass from death to immortality.

When the ego dies, we come into eternal life. When in the climax of meditation called samadhi we break through the wrong identification with the body, senses, mind, and intellect, learning experientially that we are the Atman, the Christ within, the Krishna within, we go beyond death and know our immortality. This promise of immortality is given us by mystics of all religions who have attained illumination. When Sri Ramana Maharshi talked about death, he was able to convey to those who were deeply responsive and devoted to him that death need not come to all. Sri Ramana Maharshi attained complete illumination when still a high-school boy. He was not Sri Ramana Maharshi then; he was just Venkataraman, a high-school student trying to cut classes like everyone else. He had some difficult exercises to do in English grammar, and behaving as any schoolboy would, he did not go to school that day. Instead, he just lay down in his room and killed his ego. It was all done in half an hour’s time. In the language of mysticism, what died during that thirty minutes was not Ramana Maharshi, but the separate, finite ego. This is nirvana: the annihilation of the finite boundary of separateness in which we realize our true, immortal Self.

To throw a little light on this elusive spiritual phenomenon, we must look at what takes place in meditation. In meditation, over a long, long period of time, we learn to recall all our vital energy from the past and future. In samadhi the future vanishes, the past vanishes, and we live completely on the pinpoint of the moment. To live completely in the moment is to realize immortality, here and now. Mystics who have lived like this tell us that in the complete unification of consciousness we are released from time; we are delivered from time into eternity.

My spiritual teacher, my grandmother, used to go every morning for many, many years to a sacred spring near our village. This spring is considered to have been sanctified by Rama. Legends say that when he and Sita were wandering through South India during their period of exile, Sita became thirsty. She told her husband, “You have great love for me, so you must be able to give me a drink of cool water.” There was no water in that place, so Rama took an arrow and, sending it deep into the earth, caused a spring of sacred Ganges water to come up. Today the spring is a place of pilgrimage. On one side, roughly hewn in black stone, are the feet of Rama. Just the feet alone are considered to be a beautiful, respectful way of representing an incarnation, and this humble image is in the best spiritual tradition. My simple grandmother, after having her ceremonial bath, would stand looking at the rough, long, black feet in stone and repeat the mantram. She must have done this every morning for half a century, and when the time came for her to shed her body, according to my mother’s own words, the last she said was, “I have caught Rama by his feet.”

This experience at the time of death is narrated of many mystics who have attained immortality. Until we experience a unification of consciousness and are released from the bondage of time, we cannot realize that it is not going to satisfy us to live a hundred or even a thousand years. Our need is to live forever.