SRI KRISHNA: 1. With your mind intent on me, Arjuna, discipline yourself with the practice of yoga. Depend on me completely. Listen, and I will dispel all your doubts; you will come to know me fully and be united with me.

We are dropping into the middle of a long conversation between Arjuna, a prince in ancient India, and Sri Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer and spiritual teacher, who represents the Lord, present in the hearts of us all. This is not an external conversation; it is very much internal. Arjuna is every man and every woman, and in the Bhagavad Gita we have slipped into his heart to listen in on a dialogue between two levels of our own consciousness. The voice we recognize belongs to the surface level of awareness – intelligent and well-intentioned, but full of doubts about the meaning of life and how we ought to live. The other voice, so full of wisdom, is the voice of our real Self, the Lord of Love, whether we call him Sri Krishna or the Christ, Allah or the Buddha or the Divine Mother.

As long as we are living for ourselves, dwelling on our own separate needs and problems, we cannot help identifying with our apparent self. It is very much like wearing a mask too long, so long that we think we are the mask and forget who we really are. But through the practice of meditation and its allied disciplines, all of us can learn to take off this mask and discover beneath it our real Self, called the Atman in Sanskrit, who is the source of all love, all security, all wisdom, and all joy.

In 1960, when I first began teaching meditation in the United States, these ideas were still very new. In those days, if you told someone you were interested in meditation, you had to be prepared to face a certain amount of laughter. Later, when I offered a credit course on meditation on the University of California campus in Berkeley – probably the first course of its kind to be offered by an American university – it drew about six hundred people and thirteen dogs. Now meditation is in the air, and I think the idea must be familiar to everyone in this country. Yet I think there is still no more maligned word in any language than the word yoga, with which Sri Krishna opens this chapter. Yoga is not exercises or physical postures; it is not a religion; it is not art or archery or music or dance. It is a body of dynamic disciplines which can be practiced by anyone, from any religious tradition or from no tradition at all, to enable us to remove this mask of separateness and learn to identify ourselves completely with our real Self.

Every spiritual tradition has its own formulation of these disciplines, but though they may differ in name and detail – the Sermon on the Mount, the Noble Eightfold Path, the Eight Limbs of Yoga – there is no difference between them when it comes to the actual practice and their effect on daily living. In my own life, I have found a set of eight points to be tremendously effective in leading the spiritual life in the modern world. I have listed these points in the Introduction, and everything I say is with an eye to how they can be applied.

The heart of this program is meditation, which Patanjali, a great spiritual teacher in ancient India, divides conveniently into three stages: dharana, dhyana, and samadhi. Patanjali’s exposition is so precise and so free from dogma that I don’t think it can ever be improved on in these qualities. But it is written in a kind of lecture note style, in the expectation that other teachers will elaborate on these notes in their own way on the basis of their experience. So instead of quoting Patanjali, let me tell you from my own experience what these three stages in meditation amount to in their impact on daily living.

In the first stage of meditation, called dharana, we make an astonishing experiential discovery: we are not the body. It is not an intellectual discovery, it is an experiential discovery, and the first time we hear this statement it doesn’t make sense at all. If this body is not us, what is it? This is the question I was always asked after my talks, and I have developed all sorts of ways to convey what this experience of dharana means.

For one, this body of mine is very much like a jacket. I have a brown jacket with a Nehru collar, made in India, which has served me very well; I take good care of it, and I expect it to last me at least another five years. In just the same way, this body of mine is another brown jacket, made in South India and impeccably tailored to my requirements by a master tailor, whose label is right inside. This jacket has to last me much longer than the other, so I am very careful with it; I give it the right amounts of nutritious food and exercise and keep it clean inside as well as out. But just like my Nehru jacket, this body-jacket will someday become too worn to serve me well, and having made this discovery that I am not my body, when death comes I will be able to set it aside too, with no more tears than I would shed when I give my Nehru jacket to the Salvation Army.

In this discovery that you are not your body, you discover simultaneously that others are not their bodies either. The consequences of this are far-reaching. For one, you no longer see people as white or black, yellow or red or brown; you see people just like yourself wearing different-colored jackets. The whole question of race or skin color becomes absurd: black is beautiful, white is beautiful, and of course brown is beautiful too.

Secondly, when you no longer identify others with their bodies, you will be able to see them as people instead. It lifts an immense burden from your relationships with the opposite sex. No matter what the media try to tell us, I don’t think anything is more certain to disrupt a relationship than treating the other person as a physical object. On the physical level, all of us are separate, and it is the very nature of physical attraction to change with the passage of time. On the other hand, nothing is more certain to deepen a relationship than concern for the other person’s real welfare, which we can see clearly only when we cease identifying people with the body-jackets they wear.

Another way I sometimes look at my body is as a compact little car, built for service. It doesn’t guzzle a lot of gas; I can park it anywhere; nobody notices it at all. But it is the car; I have to be the driver. I don’t let it pick me up in the middle of the night and take me off to some casino; it has to go where I choose to drive it. As St. Francis put it, speaking of his body, “This is Brother Ass. I will wash him, I will feed him, but I am going to ride on him; he is not going to ride on me.”

The practical implication is that in this stage of meditation, we gain some measure of control over problems at the physical level. Many of our problems have a physical component, even if their roots are in the mind, and in dharana we learn to have some say in things that used to be compulsive. Overeating, for example, is not really a physical problem; it can be solved only in the mind. But if you have a problem with overeating, it is a tremendous help to be able to tell your hand what to do. I have friends with this problem who sometimes come to me and confess, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” I can understand this kind of craving easily, but what used to puzzle me was, even if we want something terribly, why should we have to put our hand out and put it into our mouth? If we know we shouldn’t eat it, we should be able to sit on our hands and that would be the end of the matter. But when I mentioned this to my friends they would just reply, “I couldn’t help myself. Some unseen power took over my hand and put the whole lemon meringue pie into it.” This kind of eating is compulsive, which means there is very little enjoyment in it. But in dharana, as we begin not to identify with the body, our whole perspective on eating changes; we begin to have some say in what we put into our mouths.

The second stage of meditation is called dhyana, from which the Japanese get their word for meditation, zen. In this stage we make an even more astonishing experiential discovery: we are not the mind either. When I used to say this in my classes on meditation on the Berkeley campus, there would be groans from the back of the lecture hall. “First he says I’m not my body; now he tells me I’m not my mind.” And they would ask, “Then what is the mind?” My answer is that just as the body is the external instrument we use in life, the mind is the internal instrument. If the human body is like the body of a car, the mind is very much like the engine. It is capable of tremendous power, but most of us spend so much time on the appearance of the body of the car that we don’t get around to opening up the hood to see if the engine is still there. It is there, but in order to get it running properly, it is essential not to think that we are a part of it. And once we get this perspective in dhyana, we can lie down on our backs on our little meditation trolleys, just as mechanics in garages do, get under the mind, and say, “Oh, yes, that old resentment; there’s a little screw over there that’s too tight.” Then we make the necessary adjustments and the problem is gone.

In other words, emotional problems like depression and insecurity are only mechanical difficulties with our engine, the mind, which means that every one of them can be solved. The implications of this are tremendous. Most of us go through life thinking that we can never be different from what we are. We may like it, more often we may dislike it, but we cannot get rid of the liabilities with which we have been born or which we have acquired in growing up. As long as we think that we are the body and the mind, this is true. But just as in the first stage of meditation we see that it is possible to change any physical habit, in the second stage of meditation we gain the capacity to change any emotional habit, to transform insecurity into security, rigidity into flexibility, hostility into compassion, hatred into love.

The secret of this transformation is breathtakingly simple: we become what we meditate on. There is a story in ancient India about a sculptor who was so gifted that his statues almost seemed to come to life out of the stone. Once, lost in admiration over his stone elephants, one of his students asked, “How do you do this? These elephants are more real than real elephants are; you can almost hear them trumpeting.” And the sculptor replied, “There’s no secret to it. I just go and get a big block of stone, set it up in my studio, and study it very carefully. Then I take my hammers and chisels and slowly, over a number of years, I chip away everything that is not elephant.”

When I see a person sitting quietly with eyes closed, giving all his attention to the Prayer of St. Francis, I like to think of this great sculptor, studying his big block of stone with such intense concentration that he really can see the elephant coming to life within: the trunk, and the big ears, and those keen, absurdly small eyes. We see only a block of stone, but for the sculptor, the elephant is already right there inside, struggling to be released. This is very much what we do in meditation, only instead of an elephant, it is the Atman who is imprisoned within us. In meditation, each of us is in a life sculpture class in which we are both the sculptor and the rock. Billions and billions of big, shapeless rocks – no wonder we are sometimes uncomfortable with ourselves or think the world is ugly. But a mystic like St. Francis might say, “Of course, the rock is shapeless; no one would deny that. But look within, with intense concentration, and you can see the halo and the harp.”

In meditation we give the mind a shining model and study it very carefully every morning and every evening until it is printed on our hearts. Then, throughout the rest of the day, we go along chipping away at everything that is not Self. It takes many years, but in the end, the great mystics of all religions tell us, every bit of anger, fear, and greed can be removed from our consciousness, so that our whole life becomes a flawless work of art. This is the third stage of meditation, called samadhi. Samadhi really is not a stage at all, but a stupendous realization in which all the barriers of separateness fall. Then there are no walls between the conscious and unconscious, no walls between you and others; your consciousness is completely integrated, from the attic to the cellar. When this happens, Patanjali says in one of the grandest understatements in mystical literature, you see yourself as you really are: the Atman, the Self, who dwells in the hearts of us all.

Most of us cannot even glimpse how miraculous this transformation is until we try to achieve it ourselves. Then we shall see why the mystics tell us there is no greater challenge on earth than the challenge of Self-realization. The Compassionate Buddha puts it beautifully in one simple word: patisotagami, “going against the current” – the current of all our conditioning, in how we act, how we speak, and even how we think.

In my village in Kerala state, South India, when the sky was a solid wash of water and the river was swollen from the monsoon rains, we boys liked to jump into the river and swim to the other side, not with the current – anyone could do that – but against it. It wasn’t just that the current was fierce; the river would be full of branches and all sorts of other debris, so that even if you had good, strong arms and a lot of stamina, there was the danger of being drowned. That was the challenge of it. It might take an hour to get across, and there were very few who could reach the other side exactly opposite the point from which they left. Most of us would end up a few hundred yards downstream. But there were one or two – we used to admire them tremendously – who were such strong swimmers that they could make it straight across. It required strong muscles, powerful lungs, a lot of endurance, and – most of all – an indomitable will.

That is just the kind of spirit you need in meditation. When a flood of anger is sweeping over you with monsoon swiftness, that’s no time to let yourself be carried away. As Jesus might say, “Anyone can do that.” Swim against it; that’s what it means to live. You will find your arms almost breaking, your endurance stretched to the limit, but you’ll find there is such satisfaction in the achievement that nothing easier will seem worthy of your effort again. That is why the spiritual life appeals so deeply to the young and adventurous. It is only when you take on this challenge and begin to understand the extent of it, the daring and the courage and the resolute, dauntless spirit it requires, that you can look at St. Teresa of Ávila or Sri Ramakrishna and see that this is someone who has climbed the Himalayas of the spirit, who has stood on Mount Everest and seen the entire cosmos aflame with the glory of God.

Can you see from this what Sri Krishna means when he says in this verse, “Depend on me completely”? No one in the world is so self-­reliant as those who have realized God, just because they have put all their faith in the Lord within. When the mystics talk about God, when they refer to the Lord or the Divine Mother, they are not talking about somebody outside us, floating in space somewhere between Uranus and Neptune; they are talking about the Self, the Atman, who is nearer to us than the body is, dearer to us than our life. In samadhi, when all the barriers between us and the Self fall, there are no more doubts about the meaning of life, no more vacillations, no more sense of inadequacy or insecurity. We become part of an infinite force of love that can never perish, and all the resources of the Lord within flow into our lives to be harnessed for the welfare of the whole.

SRI KRISHNA: 2. I will give you both jnana and vijnana – spiritual wisdom and the capacity to apply it to daily living. When both these are realized, there is nothing more you need to know.

Once, while the Compassionate Buddha was camping in a shimshapa grove with his disciples, one of the more philosophical among them was asking him all kinds of abstract questions – whether or not there is a God, whether or not there is an immortal soul, whether the universe had a beginning and will have an end. In reply, the Buddha is said to have picked a few leaves from a shimshapa tree and asked, “Are there more leaves in my hand or on this tree?”

Everybody agreed, “Of course, there are many more leaves on the tree than the Blessed One has in his hand.”

“Similarly,” the Buddha replied, “there is much more in my consciousness than you can see, much more than you can grasp, much more than you can use. What I give you is only what you need to free yourself from the conditioning in life that is the cause of all your sorrow.”

That is the sense in which Sri Krishna tells us here, “I will give you jnana and vijnana; that is all you need to know.” It is not that there is not more to know; it is that these two together are the key to the art of living.

According to Shankara, an eighth-century Indian mystic and one of the greatest spiritual authorities of any age, jnana is spiritual knowledge and vijnana is spiritual experience. Spiritual knowledge is not intellectual knowledge; it is direct experiential knowledge of the unity of life. As Sri Ramakrishna, the great saint of nineteenth-century Bengal, puts it, it is knowing for oneself that God dwells in all beings, which is the discovery we make in the climax of meditation called samadhi. But what is vijnana, “spiritual experience”? Sri Ramakrishna goes on to tell us in his inimitable way, “He who has only heard of milk is ignorant. He who has seen milk has jnana. But he who has drunk milk and been strengthened by it has attained vijnana.”

This interpretation can be made even more practical to meet the needs of the world today. In the light of my own small experience, I would say that jnana is spiritual wisdom and vijnana is the capacity to apply this wisdom in daily living. Jnana is knowledge of timeless truths; vijnana is putting this knowledge into action – to solve problems, to deepen personal relationships, and to show those around us how to wake up from this dream of separateness in which virtually everyone is caught today. Vijnana, in other words, is “inside” knowledge. Once you have realized the unity of life and begin to live it out, you begin to see into the heart of life. It’s very much like being taken into a family; you’re on such close terms with the head of the house that everything is opened to you. Here you are on such intimate terms with the source of life that all you have to do is knock at the door of a problem and it will open, so that you know both its cause and its cure.

There is nothing mysterious about this capacity; it is simply a matter of wisdom and will. When, after many years of meditation, you attain the realization that all life is one, you will find it impossible to think or act like a separate creature again. You will not be able to exploit anyone, or discriminate against anyone, or do anything that is at the expense of life; and you will never forget that the welfare of each of us can only be found in the welfare of all. But to solve the grave problems that are making life impossible today – violence in the streets, environmental pollution, loneliness, the breakdown of the family and of personal relationships – it is not enough just to live in constant awareness of this unity. For that you need vijnana, the skillful capacity to apply this awareness of unity to heal the deep divisions in people’s hearts and minds and to bring them together in trust and harmony.

You don’t get this skill overnight; it comes with the overwhelming desire to help. When, after many years, you have succeeded in freeing yourself from all the things that people suffer from, you will not be able to sit by and let others go on suffering; you will have to come up with solutions that are of immediate value to everyone. Not only that, it must all be very skillfully and attractively done. You can’t just say, “Here, now, stop competing with each other; don’t you know that husband and wife are one?” You have to offer a more desirable alternative, and package it attractively in your own life so that people can look at you and say, “Oh, yes, now I see; that’s what it means for two people to complete each other. I want to be like that too.” With some of these problems this may take years. But you won’t take no for an answer; you just will not rest until all these problems are solved. Your desire, your concentration, is so intense that it can penetrate into the heart of the matter. You will be able to see below symptoms to the underlying cause and come up with a creative solution.

In other words, this is a skill that flows naturally from the intimate realization that all of us are one. Once this realization comes, with your eyes you will still see people around you as different – different names, different faces, different hair styles, different ways of thinking and acting – but in your heart you will never forget for an instant that there is no real separation between you and others at all. When you talk to your friend Jessica, you will be Jessica. You will be able to put yourself in her shoes and see the world through her eyes, which means that you will understand her completely. You will be incapable of judging her, because you will see how any problems she has have evolved. But you will be able to help her, because you will not be caught in her perspective; you will have the vantage point of your own experience from which to extend a hand.

Once you reach this state, there is no possibility of misunderstanding in personal relationships. I’m not saying there will not be differences of opinion, there will be. But in my experience it is not differences of opinion that disrupt relationships; it is lack of faith, lack of love. When you have jnana, you will trust Jessica completely. You will know that she is incapable of doing anything that can harm you, and that her deepest need is to love and be loved. And when you have vijnana, you will find all kinds of little ways to express your trust and draw your friend Jessica to you, no matter how different your views might be on inflation or French novels or the causes of the First World War. That is why I said that vijnana is “inside” knowledge. You don’t stand around outside a problem the way you do when you meet someone at church on Sunday; you get right inside, into the kitchen, and see it as it is at home.

This doesn’t apply just to your own relationships; it applies to every human problem. If you have vijnana, wherever you go you will be a peacemaker – as Jesus puts it, “a child of God.” Wherever there are differences of opinion, no matter how serious, you will be able to slip behind the lines on each side and see things through their eyes, probably better than they can see for themselves. From your perspective you will see the problems, but you will also see the underlying unity in which the welfare of both sides is included. Both sides can come to see the other’s point of view, and when this happens, though it may take a lot of work, it is only a matter of time before you can find a point of view that is common to all.

I can give you a small example of this from my own experience. It’s not something that happened after I had become established in meditation, either; it took place at the very beginning of my teaching career in India, when relations between Hindus and Muslims were particularly strained. Even in the college where I was teaching, where tempers were not yet so inflamed, Hindu and Muslim students had begun to isolate themselves in groups on opposite sides of the room and refuse to speak to each other. All this used to hurt me deeply. As I said, I still had a long way to go in my meditation, but from my association with my grandmother I already had some awareness of the unity of life, and it grieved me deeply to think that our campus might become divided into warring camps.

Now, it happened that one of my closest friends on the faculty was a Muslim, and a devout Muslim at that. He and I had gone to graduate school together, where we were inseparable, and it had never occurred to us that there was anything in our two backgrounds that put us in opposite camps.

After we graduated we went separate ways, and we lost track of each other. Then, after a few years, I was posted to a beautiful campus in central India. On the long train journey from Kerala I was wondering where I was going to stay, because suitable rooms are not readily available in small college towns in India. But when I got down from the tonga, the horse-drawn carriage, my Muslim friend just walked up from nowhere with a big grin on his face. “Come on,” he said. “You’re coming home with me. What are you looking so dumbfounded about?” That was the kind of bond we had; it wasn’t something that could be broken by communal quarrels that had nothing to do with religion at all.

So when Hindu-Muslim antagonism began to disrupt our classrooms, instead of criticizing one community or the other, my friend and I quietly went to share the home of a Muslim aristocrat who had gone on pilgrimage to Mecca. It wasn’t a deliberate effort; it just came about naturally, without planning, out of the depth of our concern. At first our students couldn’t believe that we could live peacefully under the same roof. People kept telling us, “It’s an extremely dangerous situation; both of you will be hurt.” Neither of us were very brave. But we put our heads together and said, “If we are going to get hurt, we might as well get hurt together.”

What was important was that we hadn’t done this as some political gesture. Everyone knew we were the very best of friends, and yet both very deeply in love with the heritage of our different faiths. So though people criticized us sharply, they were watching us very closely to see how we held up. And gradually, as our friendship only deepened, our students began to feel a little ashamed. One by one, some of our bolder students began sitting next to each other again. Then they began to talk to each other, and finally they were laughing and working together just as they had before. It opened our eyes to how just two little people trying to practice the unity of life can change the direction of a whole community. That is vijnana, and there is no art more essential to daily living today.

In later chapters, Sri Krishna will show how this art can be developed through the practice of meditation. First, however, he will tell Arjuna more about the unity of life.

SRI KRISHNA: 3. One person in many thousands may seek perfection, yet of these only a few reach the goal and come to realize me.

Many years ago, before the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation was even founded, I gave a series of talks on the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita in a little bookstore in San Francisco. In those days very few people had heard of meditation, and if you told them they were not the body, they might just call the police. So I used to introduce topics like this very gradually, and in a public lecture I never gave instruction in meditation at all. But this particular audience was quite responsive. Many of them were from the “beat generation,” and when I told them they were never born and would never die they wouldn’t even bat an eye. I began to get the idea that they could take to meditation, and finally, toward the end of the series, I gave them the instructions you will find summarized in the Introduction and suggested that we all close our eyes and give it a try for just ten minutes. When I opened my eyes, there were only three people in that room: me, my wife, and the store owner.

Many people have read about mysticism, many have attended lectures on meditation, but few have the daring to lead the spiritual life. The majority will admit, “We concede the validity of spiritual living, but we are not prepared to pay the price.”

Meditation is dull, hard work; I would be the first to admit it. To continue to practice meditation day in and day out requires real depth of desire and commitment. This should not be surprising; after all, to attain excellence in anything we have to work at it morning, noon, and night. The outstanding tennis player thinks tennis, eats tennis, and dreams tennis. The members of his family never worry about him, because they always know where to find him – on the tennis court. An Olympic swimming champion doesn’t go for her workout to the Richmond Plunge once a week on a Sunday afternoon; she swims for hours every day. Whether it is in swimming or tennis or meditation, mastery does not come from dabbling.

Today it is a rare person who can give himself or herself completely to a great purpose. Granted, there are many who are prepared to give themselves to a not-so-worthy cause. But even these are to be preferred to people who sit on the fence until, as some wit said, the wood finally enters their soul. Those who vacillate achieve nothing in life. They go out by the same door they came in, and the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures add that such people keep coming in and going out again and again, until the door falls off its hinges. It is good to have consuming enthusiasm, especially sustained enthusiasm that motivates you to give your best; but it is better still to have it for the right purpose. Look at our films, our folk art festivals and rock concerts, and see what talent is lavished on an embroidered shirt or on a guitar or a piece of pottery. Some of these people have tremendous potential and the capacity to subordinate everything in life to a single purpose. When they take to meditation, they can go far.

In spite of our best efforts, however, there will be times in meditation when we find ourselves in a difficult predicament – times when the senses defy us, when self-will goes on a rampage. Then it is that an experienced, skillful spiritual teacher can come to our rescue. The spiritual journey is long and full of peril. It is fortunate that we are not able to enter the depths of consciousness in meditation until we have already gone some distance towards our goal. The seabed of consciousness is a vast, uncharted domain, full of mountains and canyons where selfish passions roam like monsters in the darkness. If we do not have a map of this world showing what to avoid and how to make the return trip, we can become completely lost. This is why it is essential to have the guidance of someone who has made the journey before us and who knows how to avoid the pitfalls we can encounter on the way.

Once, on a drive in the country, my wife and I somehow managed to back our car into a particularly awkward position with the axle over a rock, so that we could go neither forward nor backward. Three strong young fellows who happened to be walking by stopped and tried to help, but they only succeeded in getting the car more completely wedged in. Finally a friend called a nearby service station to bring a tow truck, and in less than fifteen minutes we were able to drive away. That is the kind of service a spiritual teacher performs. A good spiritual teacher is like a tow truck driver who is on call twenty-four hours a day, and one of the hooks in his vast assortment is just the right size for us. When we get ourselves stuck in meditation and find we can’t go forward or back, he pulls us forward just enough to get us free. Then, the moment we can move again, he removes the tow chain and lets us go forward again on our own.

SRI KRISHNA: 4. Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intellect, and ego – these are the eight divisions of my prakriti.

Now, as he promised, the Lord begins to reveal to Arjuna his real nature.

This verse always makes me think of a market scene in village India. When you want to buy curry powder, you go to the marketplace and find a stall which has all the basic spices in separate pots. The merchant takes a large banana leaf and puts the spices on it as they are selected: a bit of turmeric, a pinch of chili powder, some cardamom, pepper, and coriander, and maybe a ­little garlic. Then the merchant puts them all together, wraps up the packet, and ties a strand of fiber from the banana leaf around it so you can carry it home.

This is very much like what the Lord does with prakriti, which is the basic stuff of which the universe is created. I like to imagine Sri Krishna going to his cosmic marketplace and picking out just the right pair of brown eyes, the right ears, mouth, and other organs, even the right mind, with just the right weakness for classical literature – wrapping them all up in a beautiful brown skin for protection from the tropical sun of India, and calling it this body. Even to the biologist, that is all the body really is: a compact package of chemical components, which when I was going to school used to be worth less than two dollars. By now, because of inflation, that two dollars may be more like five, but that has nothing to do with the value of you or me. We are not this packet of chemicals; the body is only a house for our real Self.

In this verse and the one which follows, Sri Krishna is explaining the vital distinction between what the Sanskrit scriptures call prakriti and Purusha. Purusha is eternal spirit, the Atman or Self, beyond all change and limitation. Everything else, everything that is subject to change, belongs to the realm of prakriti, the world of birth, decay, and death. The body, of course, is part of prakriti; made up of the five elements, it was assembled in the process called birth and will one day be resolved back into its constituents in the change called death. We like to think of the body as relatively stable, but this is because our vision is so limited. If we could see more deeply, we would see that every cell of the body is in a state of constant change. It is just the same with the mind. If we could perceive our thoughts more clearly – as we gradually learn to do through the practice of meditation – we would see that our interior world, too, is in a constant state of change. So prakriti includes not only the material world of matter and energy, but emotion, thought, and ego as well. All these came together when our body was born, and all will go their separate ways again at the time of death.

The Katha Upanishad describes prakriti in terms of a chariot drawn by horses straining at the bit:

Know the Self as lord of the chariot,

The body as the chariot itself,

The discriminating intellect as

The charioteer, and the mind as 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.

To use more contemporary language, I sometimes describe this body of mine as a rented car, which I leased at birth and which I would like to return with as few dents, rattles, and broken parts as possible when the lease is up. Discrimination – buddhi, the discriminating intellect – is the driver of this car. He has special instructions from the Boss not to exceed the speed limit or grind the gears, to make sure it gets regular checkups, and to use the best gasoline and oil so that the engine will last a long time. But he is only the chauffeur; it is I who decide where to go.

Unfortunately, however, most of us do not realize that this car needs a careful driver, and we let it take us wherever it likes – to the bar, or Reno, or one of these “disaster” films, or wherever the senses tell us that joy is being given away to all. This, of course, takes quite a lot of gas, and with all these side trips we slowly use up our supply of fuel until finally we run out completely. Soon it is time for us to return the car to the rental agency without even having realized there is a destination to reach. It is only when we no longer let our energy and vitality leak out in activities which take us nowhere that we will be able to reach the journey’s end.

The day we take to meditation, we begin the long process of breaking through our obsessive identification with the body. At first this may produce a cry of protest. The senses will complain that they are being starved; the body will tell us that all the fun has gone out of life; the mind will complain that it’s restless and doesn’t want to quiet down. It is like trying to train a dog when you have always let him chase cars, sleep on the couch, and run about freely all night. Just the other day, for example, someone was telling me how he had managed for a week to keep to three nutritious meals a day until he happened to walk by a Danish bakery and got sucked in by some mysterious power. So we shouldn’t get angry with the palate for not knowing about vitamins and trace elements and amino acids; we haven’t educated it along these lines. If we could have a private talk about nutrition with the palate, it would say, “Nutrition? Never heard of it. George Briggs? Jean Mayer? Never heard of them. Ask me about Marco Polo, without whom we wouldn’t have ice cream; I can tell you about him.”

In the spiritual life, it is especially important to eat fresh, nutritious food, have daily physical exercise, and get the right amount of sleep every night. If we set ourselves up as stoics, eating only soy grits and sleeping on the bare floor, we will only ruin our health and deprive ourselves of the strength we need for serving others. Instead we need to train the senses by making wise choices. One of the most noticeable benefits of meditation is the growing capacity to turn a deaf ear to the clamor of the senses when they demand wrong food, cigarettes, alcohol, or other things to which they have become addicted. When we have a great purpose that we are eager to achieve and the powerful tool of meditation with which to achieve it, it is only a matter of time before even the most tenacious addiction will lose its power over us. Hundreds of people who have been meditating with me have given up smoking, drinking, and drugging. I don’t criticize them when they come to me, and I don’t insist that they change their ways in order to start meditating. I know that once they take to meditation these old habits will get up and leave of their own accord, because in meditation we gradually lose our obsessive identification with the body, senses, and mind.

Actually, training the senses is not a physical problem; it is a mental problem. When I first began to speak in this country about the world within the mind, scientists used to tell me, “We don’t understand all this talk about a ‘world within.’ Our instruments can’t measure it.” To talk about a world without and a world within, as if these were two places we could identify in an atlas of the universe, is to create an artificial division. What we call external and internal are part of one continuous whole. Health, for example, is not maintained just by following certain physical rules; there are also mental and spiritual rules which we must follow. Illness is not only caused by harmful bacteria and viruses, but by destructive passions and negative states of mind. If we cannot control our competitiveness, it may lead to ulcers; if we cannot control deep-seated resentments, we may end up victims of severe breathing disorders like asthma.

Hindu and Buddhist spiritual psychology accounts for this by pointing out that the mind is no less a part of prakriti than matter is. Thoughts are things, even though we cannot hold them in our hands or see them with our eyes. This is very different from our usual view. Usually we consider thoughts as immaterial, so we are not aware of how a fleeting thought can affect us. If I throw a beach ball at you, it won’t hurt much; in five minutes you will have forgotten about it. But if I say something harsh to you, you will not be able to forget that thought; you will take it home in your mind, have nightmares about it, and wake up oppressed the next morning. We all know from personal experience how a harsh comment from a parent or a friend can rankle in our consciousness for years. This is the immense power of thoughts.

The intellect is also classified as an aspect of prakriti, for intellectual knowledge too is subject to change. When I was a boy, I used to run home after school every day to tell my grandmother and mother what I had learned. Once, I remember, I told my mother they had taught us something quite astonishing – that the earth is round. She laughed until tears came to her eyes. Even years later she was still telling her friends with great amusement, “He’s a professor of English; he writes for the newspapers; he gives talks over All India Radio – but he still believes the earth is round.” When I was a boy, of course, I tried to convince her that those who know about geography would say that her idea of a flat earth was a dinosaur. But it is not impossible that in the next century some geophysicist may discover that the earth is not spherical either, but is constantly changing in shape. This is the nature of intellectual knowledge; it is always subject to revision because it describes a relative, changing world that is limited by space, time, and circumstance.

Lastly, the ego itself is classed as prakriti, because it has no more permanence than the thoughts or emotions it claims to own. The implications of this are tremendous. If our thoughts and emotions are constantly changing, what we call our personality must be constantly changing too. We like to think of ourselves as always the same person, yet as Somerset Maugham points out, most of us are a bundle of endless contradictions, behaving differently to different people innumerable times every day. Yet through all these inconsistencies, there is something deep within us whispering that we are the same person from day to day. The Gita would say, very reassuringly, “Yes, you are the same. The problem is that this fickle collection of thoughts and desires is not you; it is just a mask with which you’ve come to identify. Underneath that mask is your real Self, which is beyond all change.”

SRI KRISHNA: 5. Beyond this prakriti I have another, higher nature, Arjuna; it supports the whole universe and is the source of life in all beings.

When I first came to this country and was still growing used to American English, I remember being driven to some engagement or other by a young woman who suddenly turned to me and exclaimed, “I’m out of water!” I was really alarmed; I thought perhaps she had some rare disease in which all the vital fluids dry up. But instead of going to a hospital, she pulled into a gas station. Only then did I realize that she didn’t mean herself; she meant her car.

When we are asked to identify ourselves, most of us pull out our driver’s license and list our vital statistics or launch into a discussion of our personality. It is very much like thinking we are the car we drive. This is not our real identity; this is the limited, egocentric, ever-­changing mask which lies within the realm of prakriti. Our real personality, called Purusha in the Sanskrit scriptures, is infinite, immortal, and immutable.

Shankara, the great spiritual teacher of ancient India, has given us a profound principle called adhyaropa to explain why we make the colossal mistake of identifying ourselves with what is subject to change and death. Scholars usually translate adhyaropa as the “theory of superimposition,” which sounds rather forbidding until we realize how it applies in our own lives. According to this principle, each of us confuses his or her limited, mortal ego and the real, immortal Self. This is what we do when we say “I am five foot seven” or “I like to ski”; we are looking at prakriti – the body and mind – and imagining we see Purusha instead. As long as this confusion clouds our minds, we can never see life as it is; we have to look at everything through this narrow little ego-slit we think is us: Sagittarius, thirty-five years old, slightly more open-minded than most of the people we know, with a weakness for spinach crepes and a slight tendency to begrudge opinions different from our own.

Of course, we are not just confused about our own identity, we are also confused about the identity of everyone else. Each of us has certain needs and expectations which we tend to project, or “superimpose,” onto those around us. It’s as if we had taken our own needs and expectations and shaped them into plastic molds with eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth. We carry these molds around with us and try to put them on our parents, our partner, our children, our friends, everybody. Then, of course, we expect people to behave exactly like the mold we have imposed on them. In India we have a beautiful marriage ceremony in which bride and groom each place a garland of flowers around the other’s neck. It signifies marriage so deeply that in my mother tongue you have only to say “So-and-so was garlanded the other day”; everyone will understand you mean a wedding. Actually, in most marriages all over the world, what really happens is that in place of garlands, the bride and groom use their adhyaropa molds. They stand facing one another, raise their molds, and pull them down over their partners, folding over an ear and pushing the nose to one side until each is squeezed into the other’s image of what he or she should be like. Most of us, in fact, carry around an extensive collection of molds like this that we have accumulated over the years, and when we meet someone we hurry to our private collection, select a mold, and mentally cram him into it. When our unsuspecting friend goes on acting the way he is used to, we become outraged because he is ruining our mold. Then we wonder why our relationship is falling apart. Shankara would answer that the estrangement has nothing to do with our friend; the problem is what we have imposed on him.

To repair our relationships, we have to stop playing this game of adhyaropa and put a padlock on the mold-room door. There is only one way to do this, and that is to break out of the mold we have imposed on ourselves. This is not at all a pleasant task. The prospect of pulling apart someone else’s mold isn’t too distressing; what we find heartrending is breaking open our own mold, which we are absolutely convinced is just right. It may take years, but if we can even get a glimpse of ourselves as we really are, not separate from anyone but a part of the whole, the mold will crack. When we have learned to translate this insight into our daily living, the mold will be in a hundred pieces at our feet, and with it all the molds we once imposed on others. Then we will see ourselves, and others as well, as we really are: the Atman or Purusha, who is pure, perfect, and immortal.

SRI KRISHNA: 6. In these two aspects of my nature is the womb of all creation. The birth and dissolution of the entire universe take place in me.

7. There is nothing which exists separate from me, Arjuna. The entire universe is suspended from me as my necklace of jewels.

In India when you go to see a film they usually fill out the program by showing a trailer, in which the highlights of the coming films are all run together so that you have something to which you can look forward. These next few verses are like that; they are a kind of preview of what is to come in the following chapters. Sri Krishna is stirring up Arjuna’s love for him until finally, in chapters eleven and twelve, Arjuna will beg to see the Lord’s real nature and be united with him forever.

Here the Lord begins by giving us a glimpse of the vastness of his glory. Everything in the cosmos, he tells Arjuna, takes its rise from him, and one day it will be dissolved back into him again. This is not a matter of the Lord standing here and creating something over there; Sri Krishna is trying to explain in these verses that the everchanging world of time and space, matter and energy called prakriti, and the changeless Reality which underlies that world, are simply two aspects of his divine nature. Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch mystic, calls this the finite world resting on the bosom of the Infinite, as if the universe were just the restless surface of the infinite, motionless expanse of God. Ramdas, the delightful mystic of South India whom my wife and I had the blessing of meeting some years ago, puts it simply when he says, “The world is God.” This is the great truth that will be developed throughout this volume of the Gita: the Lord is everywhere, in everything, for those who open their eyes to see. In the next few chapters Sri Krishna will go into the mysteries of his real nature, how he creates, pervades, supports, and dissolves the cosmos. Now, to whet Arjuna’s enthusiasm, he just mentions casually that this whole vast universe, with all its galaxies and forms of life, is no more than a necklace adorning his dark neck.

Recently I have been looking into a few books on astronomy to see the backdrop against which these insights of the Bhagavad Gita are set. The sweep and majesty of it can take our breath away. Now, for example, we take space travel for granted, and every schoolchild probably knows that it takes a ray of light just one second to reach us from the moon. It makes me feel very comfortable; I can look up at the moon and think, “Just one second! You might as well live next door.” If we could ride a beam of light, we could get here from the moon before we even had a chance to say where we were going; that’s how fast light travels. Yet even at that rate it would take us eight minutes to get from here to the sun, ninety-three million miles away. It should make us pause to think. Ninety-three million miles isn’t exactly next door – until we back up a little. Even at the speed of light – about 5,878 billion miles a year – we would be riding that light beam for four whole years before we came to the nearest star. That gives us the units our sun must be thinking in; for him, “next door” means four light-years, which is already more than we can comprehend. For the sun, a long voyage is something like crossing the Milky Way, a vast galaxy of stars and incandescent gases one hundred thousand light-years across, where Mr. Sun is tucked away in a little corner towards the outside edge. It isn’t possible even to imagine a distance like that. Yet the Milky Way is just one of the countless galaxies our modern instruments have detected in the starry sky. If we could back up still further, we would see these vast galaxies sprinkled by the millions across incomprehensible stretches of empty space, each just a single jewel in the necklace of the Lord.

Astronomers have become quite humble about all this. They no longer talk about the universe as it is; they say, “This is what we know about the observable universe; what’s beyond that we just can’t say.” They tell us there are stellar objects billions of times brighter than our sun and “black holes” into which billions of tons of matter disappear without a trace; and when we ask how all this can be, even the most hard-boiled of astronomers will just shrug and answer, “We don’t know.” And Sri Krishna smiles mischievously as if to say, “Keep on going. Even if you could travel till the end of time, you would never find a place where I am not, or reach the limit of my creation.”

I read about these things and I am not lost in wonder, I am found in wonder. One of the books I have been reading is by Sir Fred Hoyle, a brilliant British astronomer whom I like very much. Sir Fred seems to have been working recently with an Indian astronomer, because when I read one of these astounding statements and then look down at the footnote I see it is attributed to Sir Fred Hoyle and Jayant Vishnu Narlikar. It always makes me smile, because Vishnu is one of Sri Krishna’s names. He is the Author of all these wonders, and whenever I run into that little footnote I glance up at the picture of him above my bed. His body is a deep blue like the monsoon sky or a stormy night, above his forehead he wears a peacock feather, shimmering with all the colors of the universe, and in place of the traditional necklace I see bright galaxies and quasars and black holes like dark, lustrous gems strung in garlands about his neck. I look at him and think, “Is it true? You really did all this?” And he just smiles as if to say, “Read on; that’s only the beginning.”

SRI KRISHNA: 8. Arjuna, I am the taste of pure water and the radiance of the sun and moon. I am the sacred word and the sound heard in air, and the courage of human beings.

Now Sri Krishna startles us: he is not only the infinitely vast; he is the essence in every created thing. In India, where the sun can get terribly hot and the monsoon rains literally make the difference between life and death for millions of living creatures, water is precious every day of the year. In summer, one of the services my ancestral family used to perform was to keep huge earthen pots of water in the outer courtyard so that travelers in the hot sun could quench their thirst without anyone ever asking who or why. In this kind of heat school begins early in the morning so as to let out early in the afternoon, and when I was a boy, as soon as school was out, we all used to run back to the village to play soccer together for hours. After even a little of this, running constantly in the heat of an Indian afternoon, every pore of your body is crying out for water; and when it was time to go home we would throw ourselves on those huge pots and drink them almost dry. Nothing could have tasted better to us than that water did after hours of playing soccer in the sun, and if Sri Krishna could have got my ear then he would have whispered, “Do you know what’s so satisfying in that water? It’s me.”

The Compassionate Buddha must have had a village like ours in mind when he called the ego’s fierce cravings for personal satisfaction tanha, the kind of burning thirst that will not let us rest until it has been satisfied. No earthly waters can satisfy this thirst. Our need for fulfillment is infinite, and as long as we think we are the body and try to find satisfaction in things that come and go, we are only going to get more and more parched. That is the point of the story of Jesus and the woman of Samaria, whom Jesus asks for a drink of water. When she questions him because he is a Jew, he replies: “Whoever drinks of this water shall thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water I give him shall never thirst; the water that I give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”

Then Sri Krishna adds, a bit playfully, “When you were quenching your thirst on those hot days, I wasn’t just in the water you drank; I was also the blazing radiance of the sun.” It is not just beautiful poetry; it’s a simple statement of fact, though one which is very difficult to comprehend. The Sanskrit scriptures tell us that just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, the sun only reflects the light of the Self, from which all forms of energy come. If our vision were not so drastically limited, physicists tell us, we could look beneath the illusion of solid forms to see the whole of creation as a dance of light, from which elements and substances emerge and to which they return. This pure energy is the light which is the source of all the light we see. The Katha Upanishad says:

There shines not the sun, neither moon nor star,

Nor flash of lightning, nor fire lit on earth.

The Self is the light reflected by all.

He shining, everything shines after him.

Similarly, just as the Lord is the Light in all forms of light, he is the Sound that underlies all sounds. In the Hindu scriptures this sound is said to be approximated by the sacred syllable Om – or, as it is sometimes pronounced, Aum. This is not a physical sound, so it cannot be heard by the ear. But after many years of meditation, when your concentration is so deep that you are no longer aware of the cars on the road or the birds outside your window, this sound may sometimes be heard reverberating throughout consciousness.

In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Om is often repeated as part of a mantram or spiritual formula. But the use of such formulas is not confined to Hinduism and Buddhism; it plays an important part in all the world’s great mystical traditions, usually in connection with the holy name. In Christianity, for example, the name of Jesus is one of the most powerful of mantrams. In Jewish mysticism, we have similar formulas in Barukh attah Adonai and the Shema – “Hear, O Israel; the Lord thy God, the Lord is one.” Muslim mystics repeat the name of Allah or a formula like the Bismillah: “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” One of the oldest Buddhist mantrams is Om mani padme hum, referring to the Self as the “jewel in the lotus of the heart.” And the most common Hindu mantram is simply Rama, Rama, calling on the Lord within us as the source of all joy. In all these traditions, we are urged to choose one mantram and then repeat it over and over again whenever we have an opportunity. It sounds simple, but these formulas carry tremendous power. Over a period of years, they can transform everything negative in our consciousness into what is positive: anger into sympathy, impatience into patience, hostility into love.

After many years of mantram repetition, or japam in Sanskrit, the mantram becomes an integral part of consciousness. In Sanskrit this is called ajapajapam, ‘japam without japam.’ The person who becomes established in this state carries the Lord with him wherever he goes. Sri Ramakrishna says that such people are like office workers who retire on their pension after many years of working with the company: they don’t have to work any more, but they still receive their check every month in the mail for all the years of work they have done before. Similarly, after many years of making an effort to repeat the mantram, it becomes as much a part of you as your breathing or the beat of your heart. Then you don’t have to work at it; you don’t have to think about it; it will go on unceasingly of itself.

SRI KRISHNA: 9. I am the sweet fragrance in the earth and the heat in fire; I am the life in every creature, and the effort of the spiritual aspirant.

To appreciate this verse fully you have to experience the onset of the monsoon season in a tropical country like India, when the ground has been parched for months by the burning sun. It isn’t just the villager with his little rice field that waits almost breathlessly for rain; the food supply of the whole Indian subcontinent depends on the monsoon. Everybody waits for the dark clouds to gather on the horizon, and as the day gets close, no matter what you are doing, you always have one ear open for the first sweet clap of thunder proclaiming the advent of rain. You can almost hear the earth panting for water. Then, the great Sanskrit poets say, there is no fragrance so satisfying as Mother Earth’s when the rain clouds finally break and pour heavy rain on her dried, burnt soil; it delights the senses and soothes the mind and spirit. Sri Krishna says, “As the earth gives a deep sigh of joy and gratitude when the monsoon waters slake her thirst, so the longings of all those who have been parched for lasting joy and unshakable security are fulfilled by union with me.”

Calling our little planet Mother Earth is a beautiful way of expressing the unity of life, for every aspect of life on earth is part of an interrelated whole. Not only can we not raze a rain forest in the Amazon basin without affecting the lives of the millions of creatures who live there; that rain forest in Brazil influences long-range climatic patterns as far away as India. And when the monsoon rains of India fall into the ocean instead of on the continent, leaving the croplands barren – as they are now beginning to do, through just such pillage – it means suffering to Mother Earth and all her children, not only in India but in Russia and America, too.

That is why I say it is not enough simply to have jnana, the ­knowledge of life’s unity; we have to learn to apply this knowledge to the problems of daily living. In the case of the environment, this means learning to be trustees for all the earth’s resources. We would never dream of throwing old beer cans into our bathtub, yet many people do not think twice about tossing their cans into a river or dumping tons of garbage into the ocean. If our house has faulty plumbing or a leaking roof, we can always call the repairman or figure out a way of solving the problem ourselves. But the poor creatures of the earth have no say in the condition of their home. All they can do is suffer in silence until you and I, their trustees, realize what we are doing and clean up the mess we have created.

In clear, simple language the Lord is telling us that all life is sacred: jivanam sarvabhuteshu, ‘I am the life in every creature.’ It’s not just a philosophical statement. When I go out in the morning and see all these quail scurrying around outside our meditation hall, I do see them as quail, but only with my eyes, with my intellect. With the little spiritual awareness that has come to me from my grandmother, I see that the power that makes them scurry and peck is the power of the Lord; their very life is the divine energy that moves us all. That is why we should not kill. This is the way to show respect for life – by not injuring any being, because the Lord is present in every creature on the face of the earth. When I walk down the lane to our home there are usually cows and calves grazing on both sides of the road, and on summer evenings the calves frolic about playing games that look very much like those our boys and girls play. The mother cows mutter among themselves while their little ones romp, and to my ears their maa, maa becomes ammama, which in my mother tongue means uncle. They are telling their children, “Hey, there goes your uncle, who is helping to save your life.”

The other two key words here are tapas and tejas, ‘heat’ and ‘brilliance’ – not just of an external fire but also of the fire within. This is an image you see often in the annals of mysticism all over the world, and probably no one has used it more beautifully than St. John of the Cross:

O fire that burns to purify,

O wound that brings love of the Lord,

Whose soft hand and tender caress

Reveals new life, cancels all debts,

And, slaying, grants eternal life.

This inner fire is not a figure of speech; it is associated with the rise of an immense source of energy called kundalini in Sanskrit. Kundalini is the power behind the process of evolution. By virtue of our being human, each of us has a vast amount of this energy, but very few ever learn to harness it. As long as we are living for ourselves we have no access to kundalini, though we can get a glimpse of its power in the tremendous drive of sex. But when, through the practice of meditation, we begin to harness our personal desires for the sake of a higher goal, kundalini slowly gets released into daily living. We find ourselves more patient and more cheerful; things that used to rankle in our consciousness for weeks now no longer bother us; we have more energy for giving to others, and a greater ability to understand the problems around us and come up with a lasting solution. And when some old attachment comes and wants us to dance to its tune – to smoke this, or sniff that, or buy this, or nibble at that – we can turn our backs on it. All these are signs of kundalini rising, and when this power is completely harnessed, as in great mystics like Mahatma Gandhi or St. Francis, it can transform every negative factor in the personality into a positive force. This is why the Hindu mystics say that in meditation you can take your evolution into your own hands: by getting hold of kundalini, you can learn to go beyond all biological conditioning.

Of course, it isn’t at all easy to turn your back on a strong desire; often it is quite painful. It’s very much like learning to use a stiff arm again. When your arm has been cramped and twisted into a rigid position, even the slightest little movement becomes painful. Yet you have to learn to move it in order to regain the use of your arm. There is suffering in this, as there so often is in any kind of growth. This suffering, this painful effort, is tapas, and it should be a source of great consolation to remember that whenever you choose to go against some self-centered desire for the sake of spiritual growth, the Lord says here, “I am your effort; I am your suffering; I come to life in your will.”

SRI KRISHNA: 10. O Partha, my eternal seed is to be found in every creature. I am the power of discrimination in those who are intelligent, and the glory of the heroic.

The Lord is the seed of creativity in every being. Meister Eckhart uses the same image when he says that the seed of God is in everyone. Just as pear seeds grow into pear trees and apple seeds grow into apple trees, so this God-seed within us will grow into a God-tree of love and service if we nourish it and protect it from weeds.

These days, I am glad to say, more and more people seem to be growing their own vegetables. I’m told there are even office buildings that offer little plots to their workers to make a cooperative garden. This is a very encouraging movement, but though it is good to know how to raise your own food in your backyard, it is much more important to know how to cultivate the God-seed in your heart. If you want to grow tomatoes, you buy some seeds and plant them in your garden. But what would you think of someone who looks out the window the next morning, can’t see a single tomato, and phones the store to complain that their merchandise is bad? It would require a great deal of patience on the part of the storekeeper to explain that tomato seeds don’t produce tomatoes overnight, and that the seeds need just the right conditions before they will germinate and grow. It is very much the same with the God-seed; we need to nurture it carefully if we want it to grow and bear fruit.

Fortunately, however, this seed is indestructible. It does not need to be planted on a particular calendar date, for it is already within us. In the depths of the Dakota winter, at ten degrees below zero, the God-seed can thrive; in the heat of Death Valley it can still flourish. No matter what our past has been, no matter how many mistakes we have made, the God-seed is still intact. When at last we begin to search for it we discover it is covered with weeds – weeds of fear and anger and giant thistles of greed that try to choke out everything else. But once we take to meditation and start making all the little choices that strengthen it every day, the weeds begin to wither and droop, and finally they fall to enrich the soil where the God-seed has begun to grow.

In Sanskrit, all the little choices we make in weeding out this inner garden are ascribed to buddhi, ‘discrimination’ or ‘intelligence.’ Buddhi is the precious capacity to discriminate between what is pleasant for the moment and what is fulfilling always. In the chariot image from the Katha Upanishad a few verses earlier, buddhi is the charioteer; when it takes its directions from the Atman or Self, it can guide us intelligently down even the most dangerous road. Today, surrounded by a bewildering array of attitudes and lifestyles and models of behavior, most of which promise just the opposite of what they deliver, we need this capacity to make wise choices every moment just to keep from being swept away.

Buddhi and the will – the capacity to see clearly what is wise and the capacity to translate that insight into action – go hand in hand. So this verse is very much like the last; Sri Krishna says, “Whenever you make an intelligent decision, even if it is unpleasant at the time, I am the wisdom in your choice.” Once you begin to taste the freedom of this, you will find a certain fierce joy in choosing something of lasting benefit over what you crave right now. But for a long, long time, these choices are never easy, for they go against the very grain of our conditioning. It takes real courage and endurance to go on making such choices day in and day out, and that is why even climbing the Himalayas or venturing into space would seem tame to a great mystic like Gandhiji or St. Teresa. So the Lord returns to this word tejas again: “If you have the courage to take to this challenge, I will be your courage.”

Do you see the insight these verses give us into the nature of God? It’s not as if the Lord were something outside us, in a given place at a given time; he is right within, in our will, in our determination, whenever we are giving our very best to achieve the goal of life. As a Sufi mystic puts it, God is the life of our life, nearer to us than our body is; throughout creation he is the principle of creativity itself. One astronomer I have been reading recently calls it cowardly to conclude that God created the universe just because we cannot comprehend the conditions of its creation. He is still thinking of someone outside, holding court beyond the Andromeda galaxy; he hasn’t glimpsed that all this is God, and wherever there is light, or beauty, or excellence in anything, we are seeing a little more of God’s glory.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. In those who are strong, I am strength, free from passion and selfish attachment. I am desire itself, if that desire is in harmony with the purpose of life.

Often over the years I have met people who amazed me with some of their physical exploits. They could run very fast, or jump very far, or lift immense weights, or dive from great heights into shallow pools in the river that runs by our village in Kerala. It always used to surprise me to see how many of these people, endowed with uncommon physical capacities, would just go to pieces when faced with some emotional crisis. Gradually, as I began to observe my granny, I came to understand that real strength has nothing to do with developing a set of muscles that is the envy of Muscle Beach. Strength is endurance, resilience, stamina, the capacity to face everything life sends you squarely and turn it into an opportunity.

This kind of strength can only come from self-control. During the struggle for Indian independence Gandhiji used to ask us over and over again, “What kind of strength does it take to retaliate, to lash back at others?” Retaliation simply means that the person is out of control, and if you watch someone who gets angry easily, you will see that he or she is vulnerable to any little impulse that comes along. But when you can rein in your passions and hold them in check, you have enormous power at your fingertips to harness for the welfare of all.

When I was learning English in my little village school, we used to encounter the phrase “a bull in a china shop.” It didn’t mean much to us, since we had never even seen china, much less a china shop. We used to eat off fresh banana leaves, which make perfect plates for curry dishes; and after a meal, instead of washing the dishes, we would feed them all to the cows, to whom banana leaves are like ice cream. So our English teacher, who was my uncle, would explain it in terms of a mad elephant. That we understood. An elephant is one of the most powerful of creatures; no animal except perhaps a tiger would even dream of attacking an elephant, and even the tiger has to resort to a sneak attack by lying in wait on the branch of a tree and jumping on the elephant’s head. Usually this giant of a creature is, as the Bible puts it, “slow to wrath.” But there is a peculiar condition called must – fortunately rare – in which the elephant will suddenly go into a rage and run amuck, tearing up everything that gets in its way. It is a terrible sight, and the moment they hear cries of “mad elephant!” everyone in the village will run for cover. Anger is like that; it is immense power that is running amuck and striking out at anyone who gets in its way. But when that same power, instead of running amuck, is doing something constructive, it is no longer anger; it is immense strength. It is much the same with other nearly uncontrollable emotions, too. Fear, for example, is as great a source of power as anger; and an obsessive desire, especially for pleasure or power, is a real Niagara. It takes a lot of endurance to turn your back on a powerful emotion or an obsessive, self-centered desire, but when you can do this, Sri Krishna says, “that endurance, that strength, is me.”

Then, as if reading the look in Arjuna’s eyes, the Lord adds: “But if that desire is not self-centered, I am that desire too.” This is the real artistry of the Gita. You don’t have to give up all desires to be strong; you just have to give up all selfish desires. For example, when you have food that strengthens the body, especially when it is cooked and served with love and eaten in the company of family or friends, you don’t need to pass it up just because you like the taste of it. The Lord would say, “Dig in; I am in that desire too.”

I am very much like my grandmother in this respect. When there was a feast coming I don’t think she ever thought about the food before or after; but while she was eating I have never seen anyone enjoy a meal more. At our ashram, whenever there is a special occasion, whether it be Jewish or Christian, Hindu or Muslim, we really have a feast. And when someone comes in and puts a steaming platter of blintzes on the table, we don’t turn our eyes away and say, “We can’t eat blintzes; they’re not mentioned in the scriptures.” We sit down, repeat the mantram, and polish them off.

On the other hand, you can’t expect Sri Krishna to be present in, say, Puerto Rican rum, which you drink when you can’t solve a problem. There the way to celebrate is to ignore the rum and solve the problem; then, if you still want to celebrate, ask for another problem and solve that one too.

The question in all these matters is, are you doing this for yourself or for others? You can’t go to a wedding and have lentil soup and ice water when everyone around you is having quiche and champagne; it makes people feel a little sour. So when I go to the wedding of one of our friends, I have champagne too. Once in a way I have two glasses, one for the bride and one for the groom, and if afterwards a little poetry comes out, a speech from Shakespeare or a few lines by Shelley, I don’t mind at all; it’s part of the occasion. Once I went to a wedding where sparkling cider was served instead of champagne, and nothing came out but prose.

It is much the same with the other legitimate pleasures of life; they all can have a place in spiritual living. Though I lead a very busy life, I still find time to go swimming with my wife and friends, or follow championship tennis, or attend a concert of South Indian devotional music or a movie of Satyajit Ray’s. In fact, I go to our local repertory theater so regularly that when we went to see Hamlet the other day I couldn’t help nudging Christine and whispering, “That’s not Hamlet; that’s last month’s Bluntschli in Arms and the Man.” In other words, we don’t need to turn our backs on the innocent delights of life to be spiritual. We can participate fully in life as long as we are trying our best to put those around us first.

SRI KRISHNA: 12. The states of sattva, rajas, and tamas come from me. They are in me, but I am not in them.

13. These three gunas deceive the world, so people fail to look beyond them to me, supreme and imperishable.

According to the Sanskrit scriptures, the universe evolved out of a state of undifferentiated consciousness, in which there was not a trace of separate existence. The world was a thought lying unexpressed in the consciousness of the Lord, as the impressions of our waking and dreaming states lie latent in the mind when we rest in dreamless sleep. In their usual vivid way, some of these scriptures picture this unimaginable state as the Lord – Vishnu, ‘he who pervades everything,’ of whom our own Sri Krishna is an incarnation lying fast asleep on his favorite bed, the endless serpent Ananta, in the cosmic sea. There is very little to disturb the scene. Not only is there no light, there is nothing else: the sea is Vishnu, Ananta is Vishnu, everything is Vishnu. Then, it is said, the Lord begins to dream. The dream is our own world, called Maya in Sanskrit, and the substance of this dream is the three qualities called gunas: sattva, rajas, and tamas, which may be roughly translated as law, energy, and inertia. At the time of creation the gunas begin to interact with each other, and out of this interaction, step by step, the world of prakriti evolves.

We can see these three forces at work in our own evolution as human beings, too. Although each of us has some measure of sattva, rajas, and tamas, usually there is one of the three which dominates our character. Those who are overcome by inertia and lethargy, who procrastinate and give up easily, are under the sway of tamas. They may as well be statues; you could put them on a pedestal and come back after a month to find they had not moved a hair’s breadth. But it is more positive to look on tamas as frozen power, latent drive which has been kept in a deep freeze of disuse for so long that it has turned into a block of ice. Through the practice of meditation, this glacier inside begins to melt, releasing tremendous energy for overcoming old habits of lethargy and apathy.

It is a very different story with those in whom rajas predominates. They have left tamas behind them, often for the sake of achieving great success in the eyes of the world. Rajasic people are certainly more evolved than those governed by tamas, but unfortunately they are frequently the victims of tempestuous passions. They are the movie idols, the empire builders, and the marathon walkers who make newspaper headlines. They enjoy competing and breaking records; if there is a pie-eating competition, the rajasic man or woman will walk away with the prize. Such people may have great enterprise and remarkable digestion, but they often have little sense of direction. For them the greatest danger lies in getting caught in things that are enjoyable but meaningless.

It amazes me to see the extent to which rajas is running wild in the world today. It is rajas that drives individuals and nations to manipulate others for their own ends. It is rajas that drives us to pollute the earth for profit. And it is rajas that drives us to keep adding to our own convenience and comfort, even if it brings harm to our fellow creatures. One example is “junk food” – food that is produced essentially for profit rather than for nutrition. Years ago I read that we pay some thirty billion dollars on medical bills for ailments related to poor nutrition. Since that time the Surgeon General, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and other expert bodies have linked poor diet to a much larger percentage of health problems, many of which are the result of eating things because they look lavish, fill a craving for calories, or have a catchy theme song. More and more of the items I see on the so-called food shelves of today’s supermarkets have only “empty calories”: sugar and fat, but very little nutrition. We Americans consume on the average about one-third pound of sweetener per person per day: in terms of calories, nothing else every fourth day. Imagine giving your child a bowl of white sugar for breakfast, some lunch, and a glass of honey for dinner! And when I first heard about additives in food, I naturally thought they were to preserve our health. Then I learned that we eat dangerous quantities of chemical additives whose purpose is to prolong not our lives but the shelf-life of processed foods, so that a real banana can sit for weeks without changing much more than a plastic banana would.

Another sign of rajas is restlessness, which is endemic in our modern civilization. Whenever you see someone who is restless, who travels around the world once a year or takes up one job after another, this may be a sign that he or she has real potential for meditation. In this connection I remember a story about Paramahamsa Yogananda, the distinguished spiritual teacher from India who established the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. One of Yogananda’s students, James J. Lynn, was an oil magnate who had begun to see that money could not bring the security and lasting satisfaction he sought. When Yogananda asked Mr. Lynn in his simple, sweet manner if he would like to learn to meditate, Lynn replied, like many of us, that his desires made him too terribly restless; he had to keep on drilling for more and more oil. Beneath the restless surface of consciousness, however, Yogananda recognized a deep spiritual longing. He told Mr. Lynn to turn all his drilling desires inwards in meditation until he hit the deep strata of unitive awareness, where he would find an endless source of joy, security, and wisdom. Lynn responded with all the energy and enthusiasm that had gone into drilling for oil. First, through meditation and its allied disciplines, he learned to transform rajas into sattva, bringing every aspect of his life into balance. Then, through Yogananda’s close guidance, he learned to go beyond the conditioning of the gunas altogether and attain the abiding joy of Self-realization. It is a perfect example of how the restless energy of rajas can be harnessed to reach the supreme goal of life.

Through meditation and its allied disciplines, all of us can learn like this to transform the self-directed energy of rajas into the selfless power that is characteristic of the third stage of consciousness, called sattva. Then instead of becoming angry, we will find it natural to forgive; instead of becoming irritated, we will find it easy to be patient; instead of grabbing all we can, we will work to fulfill the needs of others. People in whom sattva predominates appear serene, but we should never make the mistake of thinking they lack energy. Instead of scattering their energy over a lot of restless activity, they make effective use of it when it will do some good and conserve it when it will not. This sense of discrimination gives them an evenness of mind and constancy of action that make them a blessing wherever they go.

SRI KRISHNA: 14. These three gunas make up my divine Maya, difficult to overcome. But they cross over this Maya who are devoted to me.

15. Others are deluded by Maya; performing evil deeds, they have no devotion for me. Having lost all discrimination, they follow the way of their lower nature.

Years ago I spent a week as a guest in an hospitable retreat not far from San Diego, where I had a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean. I used to take long walks along the beach there and watch the surf, which makes me think of the restless sea of the mind and the “sea of birth and death” that we call everyday life. But what fascinated me was the surfers. I had never seen surfing in India, and I really enjoyed the ease with which these young people had learned to ride the waves.

One day I was surprised to see among the surfers a young woman with Indian features. Sure enough, she had a good Sanskrit name, Maya, and when she found out I was from India she invited me to her home for dinner just as my students used to do in India. Her parents were from the Punjab, a part of India noted for its hospitality, and in keeping with their tradition, I was given a real Indian feast. Then, after dinner, the daughter asked me if I could tell her the meaning of her name. I can still remember telling her that if I could explain this Sanskrit word Maya, I would have given her the secret of life.

Maya cannot be explained because it permeates everything; it conditions all our thinking and perceiving. Maya is the hypnotic spell of separateness that is the source of all our confusion. It is very much like a kind of hypnotic trance, or a vivid but frustrating dream in which everything appears to be just the opposite of what it is. We see people as separate when we are all one; that is Maya. We think that pleasure, or power, or material possessions will make us happy, that it is absurd to say “it is in giving that we receive.” Yet the more we go after the things that please us, the less they seem to satisfy; the more we look for excitement, the more everything in life seems stale; the more we try to manipulate people, the more insecure we become. This is Maya, which hides the source of joy from us and then drives us to look for joy everywhere but where it is.

In the Sanskrit scriptures, these two aspects of Maya, the powers of concealing and diverting, are ascribed to the gunas of tamas and rajas. The gunas are the very substance of Maya. Tamas, inertia, keeps us wrapped up in ourselves, always thinking we are the body and separate from everyone else. Then rajas comes along, restless energy, and whips up an endless series of desires for selfish satisfaction that sends us racing after mirage after mirage, always thinking that what we are after is just around the corner. We may have been down a particular blind alley a thousand times before, but with rajas at the wheel it doesn’t matter; we’re always surprised when we see the same old brick wall at the end. Sometimes there is a little twinge of memory: “Oh, yes, haven’t I seen this wall before? . . . Why do I ever listen to you?” But rajas just says, “I say, old fellow, look over there; why don’t we back up and try that alley across the way?” And before we have time to think, we’ve forgotten our suspicions and are off towards another dead end.

It is this bewildering razzle-dazzle of what we desire for ourselves that keeps us from seeing life whole. As long as we go after happiness just for us, as long as we see everything in terms of what we want for ourselves only, there will always be this wall of separateness between ourselves and others. And one of Maya’s cruelest tricks is that as we begin to get more frustrated, more lonely, more alienated behind our wall, we try to grab more fiercely at what we want and end up building the wall even higher.

Even before I took to meditation, I had a great love for natural beauty and a deep interest in people. I had a rather keen eye for human nature and could sympathize easily, and nothing could have convinced me that I was not seeing the world clearly. But all this was nothing like the way I see life today. Earlier, when I saw a mountain or a river or looked at the stars in the autumn sky, the response to beauty was deep and immediate, but it was still just an aesthetic response. Now, if I may try to put it into words, it’s like seeing the beauty of the hills and the stream and the starry night and the faces of those around me and knowing that all this is one. That is what happens when the veil of Maya falls. Afterwards, though you are back in the world of separateness and know how real it is for everyone still caught in it, you will never forget that all the bewildering array of differences in the world around you – different faces, different habits, different races, different beliefs – is just window dressing; beneath all this there is no one but the Lord.

When I came to this country on the Fulbright exchange program, all the talk was about how different everything was going to be; you’d have thought I was going to Mars. Some of the orientation programs I went to must have been intended to disorient us, because the emphasis was never on what Indians and Americans had in common but always on how we differed. To me it was absurd, because all these little differences are only on the surface; they are no more significant than differences in food or dress. The mystic doesn’t deny these differences; all he or she says is, “So what?” When our ship pulled into New York harbor we all stood at the rail and watched the skyline. I don’t think I had ever seen a building more than three or four stories high, and here were buildings a hundred stories high. A British lady by my side looked at me and said, “Aren’t you overwhelmed?” I just asked, “By what?” People don’t get overwhelmed by more bricks piled on top of each other or more wire strung together; they get overwhelmed when they see someone whose patience is inexhaustible. So that night, when my colleagues wanted to take in Times Square, they all stood around looking up at the tall buildings and the neon lights, but I was looking at the people. That gave me more delight than anything else: seeing how different they all looked and how alike they all were inside. It really makes you appreciate the magic of Maya to see Times Square and realize that there is no one there except the Lord.

The explanation for all this is that it is not our eyes with which we see; it is our mind. And the mind can operate only in a world of differences. It has to have separate people and different things to like and dislike; otherwise there isn’t any mind. Where there is no anger, no fear, no greed, no separateness, the mind just goes to sleep; it cannot operate at all. There is nothing to get excited about, nothing to take notice of; there is only pure joy, which is something the mind simply can’t experience. This is what the Buddhists call the state of no-mind, and it gives us the clue to going beyond Maya. The more you can still the mind, which is the whole purpose of meditation, the more you will be able to see beneath the surface level of life and remember its unity. Everything that quietens the mind helps to weaken the spell of Maya, just as everything that agitates the mind works to strengthen the spell of Maya. That’s why I say over and over again not to think about yourself but to think always of others; give yourself freely, be patient always, slow down, and don’t ever dwell on your problems or your resentments, because these are the things that inflame self-will and fan the fires of separateness. The agitation of the mind is Maya, and if you can remember that you are seeing everything and everyone through the medium of the mind, that will provide motivation for keeping it calm and clear always.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. Good people come to worship me for different reasons. Some come to the spiritual life because of suffering, some in order to understand life; some come through a desire to serve humanity, and some come seeking self-knowledge.

People come to the spiritual life for all sorts of different reasons. First, and by far the most numerous, are those who come because of suffering, either physical, emotional, or spiritual. Like most people, before I began meditating I did not understand the lesson suffering has to teach us. Only when I had some deeper awareness of life did I realize the truth of my grandmother’s words, that the grace of God often comes in the form of sorrow. If we are not prepared to realize the unity of life, the Lord in his infinite love will let us suffer until we are forced to change our ways.

Probably the most acute kind of suffering is the spiritual anguish that comes from an intense sense of deprivation, of being alienated from ourselves. When, suffering from this anguish, we turn inwards in meditation, we find that the Lord has been waiting for years to console us, support us, and inspire us. We may wonder how he who is the embodiment of love can let us suffer so, until we realize that his sole purpose is to bring us closer to him. The purpose of suffering is to take us beyond all suffering. It is the driving force to be separate that is the cause of all our estrangement, and the person who extinguishes his or her self-will has no more need of sorrow.

The second category Krishna mentions is jijnasu, ‘those who desire to know.’ It is quite an interesting group. These are people with a restless curiosity. They have tried all sorts of things in their search for fulfillment: different restaurants, different nightclubs, different countries, different drugs. But finally, after trying these things for a while, they will conclude: “Going to restaurants only makes you fat; taking drugs only leaves you addicted. There has to be more to life than this.”

This kind of restlessness is what drives people to seek out anything they haven’t yet seen. If there is a veil over an empty box, they must peek under the veil to see what’s hidden inside. Mention a big hole you saw by the roadside and they won’t be satisfied until they go there and see this hole for themselves. Curiosity like this is the beginning of inquiry, which is the basis of knowledge in any field. The person who is curious about the nature of the universe, for example, asks all kinds of questions that don’t usually trouble the rest of us: “Where does matter go when it passes into a black hole in space? Does it fall over the edge of the universe?” This same capacity for asking questions can be transformed into asking about the meaning of life.

There is another group of people in this category, too, who have shown up often in our classes in Berkeley: those who are artistic. With a half-humorous, half-serious tone, they will confide to me, “We know we have something inside, but we just can’t get it out. There’s a stoppage somewhere; the flow just doesn’t come.” I tell them, “Why not try meditation?” Meditation can unlock the reservoir of creativity inside every one of us. Near my village in Kerala there used to live a simple, uneducated man who had received deep inspiration from one of the greatest of Indian sages, Sri Ramana Maharshi. A friend of mine told me, “This man has written some poetry. You’re a professor of literature; why don’t you look at his work and evaluate it?” This is a job that every professor of English has to do at times, and having been steeped in the university tradition, I took it for granted that this man’s efforts couldn’t amount to much. After all, what could he know about meter, or scansion, or rhetorical devices? I wasn’t prepared to take him seriously, but I accepted a manuscript in what looked like a child’s handwriting and read a little. I was amazed. Here was living poetry from the depths of the heart. I hadn’t seen anything like it, from my colleagues or my graduate students or in any literary magazines. Since then I have tried to warn people taking to meditation, “Watch out; you may become a poet.”

This leads to the fourth group, those who take to meditation because they want to know what the purpose of life is and how to fulfill it. They have discovered that making money is not living, owning an elegant home is not living, indulging the senses is not living, acquiring a position of power is not living. Now they ask, “How can we find lasting joy?” Eventually, everyone who is meditating sincerely and systematically will come to ask this question, even if they had some other purpose in mind when they began. In time, many of those who came with a particular emotional or physical problem will become interested in tapping their deeper resources, and finally they will join the ranks of those who want to know how to live in permanent peace and abiding joy.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. Unwavering in devotion, always united with me, the man or woman of wisdom surpasses all the others. For such a person I am the highest goal, and he or she is very dear to me.

18. All those who follow the spiritual life are blessed. But they who are always established in union with me, for whom there is no higher goal than me, they may be regarded as my very Self.

The key word here is nityayukta, ‘always united with me.’ Such a person fills Sri Krishna’s heart with joy, for with such people he can lift the hearts and relieve the suffering of many, many others.

To inspire us, Sri Krishna goes on to say in the next verse: “Whenever you see a person like that, you are seeing me.” Jesus uses almost identical words when he tells his disciple Philip, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” It is a magnificent tribute to the many men and women over the centuries from both East and West who have devoted their lives to the Lord. Moses, Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa of Ávila, St. Francis of Assisi, John Woolman, Jalalu’l-Din Rumi, Sri Ramakrishna, Mahatma Gandhi – all these and many ­others of all religions were born as we were born, suffered more than we have suffered, and yet realized the divine unity underlying life by meditating and practicing selfless living until they were united with the Lord of Love. So when we see someone seated in a corner with closed eyes, completely absorbed in meditation, it is wise to remember that he or she is not just a friend or relative, but someone through whom the Lord is beginning to do his work.

SRI KRISHNA: 19. After many births the wise learn to meditate on me, seeing me everywhere and in everything. Such great souls are very rare.

One of the names for Sri Krishna in Sanskrit is Hari, ‘the thief.’ The Lord is a divine pickpocket who has stolen our heart and then sent us out into the world to search for him. People who ski on precipitous slopes or go skindiving in exotic waters are really looking for the Lord. Others are looking for him in a safe-deposit vault or on the floor of the stock exchange. Scholars think they hear him calling from the library; the expression on their faces as they enter the stacks would make you think the Lord was curled up in a rare book. But no matter what we think we are looking for, all of us suffer ultimately from a gnawing sense of deprivation at being separated from our real Self.

In this verse, the Gita is using the traditional language of reincarnation to explain why some of us take a long, long time to understand that exploits like these can never fill the vacuum within us. In this view, selfless men and women are said to be highly evolved; they have learned to see through the games we all play. It is those who have had little experience of life who are fascinated with these games. Often, for example, it is the person born into a wealthy family who is detached from money and knows how to use it wisely. He or she has enough experience with it to know its true value. For those who have only recently acquired wealth – whom my grandmother used to call “today’s mushrooms after last night’s rain” – ­everything about money is still new; everything money can buy is still exciting. Most of us have to play with material possessions a bit in order to discover that they are just toys. That is the advantage of living in an abundant economy. In a poor country, where the products of technology are expensive and hard to come by, people set a high value on material things. Take the craze for television. Our friend Sultana, who was born in Greece, tells me that when television first became available there everyone wanted to watch it, even though all the programs were in other languages which most people couldn’t understand. In the United States, where there is television all around us, it shouldn’t take much imagination to see that no amount of watching television can ever make us happy. The same is true for everything else in the material world. Happiness has nothing to do with having two cars in the garage, or a terraced swimming pool, or the latest dress from Paris. Happiness lies within us, and the more desires we have for this and that, the less happy we are going to be. Nothing we can buy, nothing we can own can ever fill the aching void within us, and the restlessness of modern living is really a signal from the Lord that it is time to turn inwards and find the source of all joy, wisdom, and security in our own hearts.

When we finally attain this source of joy, we shall see that there is no one in the universe but the Lord. It is not an intellectual concept; everything we see will be whole, and everything will be full of God. The beautiful expression in this verse might easily be the refrain of this volume: Vasudevah sarvam, ‘The Lord is everything’; there is no place where he is not found. St. Angela of Foligno uses much the same language to describe her own experience of God:

The eyes of my soul were opened and I beheld the fullness and perfection of God, in which were comprehended the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and ocean of all things. In all this I saw nothing but the power of God, in a way that is beyond the power of words to explain; so that the soul, through excess of marveling, cried out with a loud voice, saying, This whole world is full of God.

SRI KRISHNA: 20. There are others whose discrimination is misled by many desires. Following their lower nature, they worship the gods of the sense-world in their actions.

In the Hindu tradition, many of the forces which motivate our behavior are represented as gods and goddesses. There is a great deal of practical wisdom to this, because these personifications give us a vivid picture of these forces which all of us can understand. For example, people who build their lives on the pursuit of money are called devotees of Kubera, the god of wealth, who lives in a temple of twenty-four karat gold studded with sapphires, diamonds, and rubies. Each time we play the stock market or switch jobs for better pay, we are paying homage to Kubera in hopes that he will grant our desire for wealth. Kubera’s devotees see opportunities for making money everywhere, and people can become so driven by this desire that they will find ways of increasing their bank account even if it means that someone else has to suffer.

Pleasure-seekers too have their god in the Hindu pantheon: Kama, the god of selfish desire, who is portrayed as an archer with five arrows tipped with flowers – one for every sense organ – which he shoots at the hearts of his devotees. It is a comment on our times that a man’s (or woman’s) fancy for Kama is no longer limited to spring; worship is continuous throughout the year.

These two desires, for money and for pleasure, are the source of most of our confusion in the modern world. This constant clamor of I want this, I want that makes buddhi’s job impossible. Buddhi is supposed to be listening to the Atman and making intelligent choices, but all it can hear is Kubera and Kama trying to get it to go in a hundred different directions at once. After some time of this, we can’t even imagine that there is a guiding principle in our lives at all, and we wonder why there is so little purpose in what we do.

In the West it is often the mass media that create and perform daily worship of these gods of money and sex. Now a third god is being added to the altar – the god of violence. Violence on television and in films is more than just a temporary form of excitement; these scenes of murder and assault get deep into our consciousness. Pleasure is glamorized, but instead of bringing joy, the drive for pleasure is leading to assault and molestation. Money is made the goal of life, but instead of bringing fulfillment, the craving for money and material possessions is spreading disregard for people, property, and resources. Gradually, we have become accustomed to living in a climate of fear. “Stop-thief” fashions such as handbags that sound an alarm and coats with purses sewn into their seams are featured in the stores. Homeowners and apartment dwellers are investing in elaborate, expensive alarms, closed circuit television, ultrasonic sensors, and computer-operated locks. These are advertised as security systems, but they should really be called insecurity systems because they only increase the fear of those who use them.

Those of us who have grown up under the influence of the mass media deserve sympathy and help, for it is very rare to have someone around to give us a higher alternative in life. This cannot be done by books or workshops or lectures. It has to be communicated through personal example, which is what vijnana means. We cannot just settle for the intellectual approach, which is to analyze the problem and then go home; we have to show in our own lives that these spiritual ideals work. That is what Gandhi did. His whole life was a showcase for his experiments with nonviolence, not just in politics but in education and economics and many other areas too, and it had such an impact that in the long run I think historians will refer to our times not as the nuclear age but as the age of Gandhi. After all, the discovery of nuclear power only marks another revolution in technology. Gandhi’s life marks a revolution of an entirely different order, for it showed that the problems we have been trying to deal with by manipulating atoms and manipulating nations can be solved for good by transforming ourselves.

Once, when a foreign correspondent asked Gandhi for a message he could take back to his paper, Gandhi wrote on a scrap of paper: “My life is my message.” In this sense all of us are teachers in the example we give others, though often not in a particularly positive way. People who live for profit are a full-scale advertisement for making money the goal of life. They talk constantly about diversified investments, they vacation in Monte Carlo and Las Vegas, they dream about the Dow Jones index; everything they do advertises their way of life. Their lives are an open book for anyone who cares to observe it, and those who observe carefully will see how the lust for money robs such people of their capacity to love. On the other hand, the man or woman who lives for others is a constant reminder of the love and wisdom that come from selfless living. People like this do not need to preach or attract attention to themselves; we cannot help being drawn to them and drawing inspiration from their life.

SRI KRISHNA: 21. When a man is devoted to something with complete faith, I unify his faith in that.

22. Then, when his faith is completely unified, one gains the object of his devotion. In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me.

There is a haunting verse in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad which says:

You are what your deep, driving desire is.

As your deep, driving desire is, so is your will;

As your will is, so is your deed;

As your deed is, so is your destiny.

The key word here is one of the most important terms in the Gita: shraddha. Shraddha has a wealth of meanings; it may be a deep desire, or strong conditioning, or the underlying assumptions which shape our thoughts and actions. The basic meaning is faith – not just intellectual adherence to something, but what we believe in, what we trust in, in our heart of hearts. Shraddha is the key to life. It is our shraddha, our conditioned assumptions, that shapes our thoughts and actions, and it is our shraddha, our faith, that shapes our will and our destiny. We become what our shraddha is, because all of us live out what we believe and desire in the deepest recesses of our consciousness.

The ancient Greek story about Midas is a story of shraddha. Midas was obsessed with gold. He may have thought he was a man of many interests – music, horticulture, Olympian wines – but in the depths of his consciousness, his deepest belief was that wealth is the source of all joy. He found himself thinking about gold, dreaming about gold, wanting gold more and more as time went on. Gradually, without realizing it, he was thinking about nothing else. He wanted everything he touched to be turned to gold, just as there are people who want everything they do to make them a profit or bring them a little power or pleasure. And – so the story goes – the gods granted his desire. Midas got up one morning, picked up his toothbrush, and in an instant it turned to gold. Midas was ecstatic. In delight he hopped around touching everything in his palace and watching it turn to gold.

After a while, however, the novelty wore off, and Midas sat down to have some breakfast. He tried some grapes, but they turned to gold. So did his toast, and his egg, and even his Greek coffee. Midas was a little irritated; he was hungry, and he had enough imagination to suspect that there might not be much future in eating now that he had this golden touch. It raised some questions which he didn’t feel like thinking about before breakfast. A little subdued, he went out to his garden to take his mind off his stomach. It was a beautiful Mediterranean morning. The roses he had been cultivating so carefully were still filled with the first liquid rays of the sun. Their beauty took him by surprise, and he bent over to pick one for his table. But in an instant the lovely petals turned into harsh, cold metal.

Midas was beginning to get the picture. He threw the gold rose into the bushes and muttered some bad Greek. Then, suddenly, he looked up and saw his little daughter running to greet him. Her smile was so bright that he forgot all about his golden toast and his golden rose, and he reached down joyfully to take her into his arms. The instant he touched her, she too turned into gold, leaving only a lifeless statue for him to love. At last Midas understood. Weeping, he fell to the ground and begged the gods to take away his curse.

Most of us, fortunately, are not as obsessed as Midas was. But his fate is not as fanciful as it might seem. Midas’s shraddha was in gold; for others it might be property, or power, or personal pleasure, but the result is very much the same. When we get caught in these things, we begin to mold our lives around them. All our capacity to love is trapped in getting what we desire, and without really wanting to, we begin to treat those around us as only figures in a game. Seen through our shraddha, they are scarcely real at all, and there are people who spend their whole lives together without ever really seeing each other, just because of their preoccupation with themselves.

There is no point in blaming people like this; to some extent, this is the conditioning of our times, and all of us have been affected by it. But all of us have the capacity to change our shraddha. Through the practice of meditation, we can learn to withdraw our trust from the things that separate us from others – wealth and pleasure, power and prestige – and place it more and more in what contributes to the welfare of us all.

SRI KRISHNA: 23. Those whose understanding is small attain only transient satisfaction. Those who worship the gods of the sense-world go to the gods of the sense-world, but my devotees come to me.

Every deep desire is a prayer. In the deepest levels of our consciousness all of us are praying constantly, and when the prayer is intense enough and consistent enough, we will live out our lives in such a way that that prayer is answered. The difference is in what we pray for. If we worship the gods of the sense-world – wealth, power, pleasure, status – we will get more and more caught up in the world of change. Every day we will play that old game with the mirror: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, how am I doing?” And more and more often the mirror will reply, “Not so hot.” But if we try to give all our love to the Lord of Love, Sri Krishna reminds us, we will gradually become unaffected by any change, even the great change called death.

Here again, the key to understanding this is shraddha. Shraddha supports our whole outlook on life. Everyone has faith in something; we cannot live without faith. When I get into our Volvo I have faith in the people who make Volvos. I take it for granted that there is still an engine there, that the wheels won’t fall off, that the steering wheel is connected to something; that is shraddha. When I take my friends out for ice cream in Berkeley and pay for it with little green pieces of paper, that is shraddha which the storekeeper and I and everyone else in the country all share. If we didn’t have this common shraddha, the entire economy would collapse. Without shraddha, we would be questioning everything; there would be time for nothing but worry.

It’s very much like this at a deeper level, too. Just as we all share this belief in money, without which this whole game of buying and selling would collapse, so we all share the deep conviction that we are separate, that we are the body, that our nature and behavior are conditioned by our genes. In this verse, Sri Krishna is reminding us that the more we identify with the world of prakriti, the physical world of change, the more we will be subject to the ravages of time and eventually death. But by placing our shraddha in the Lord, who is our real Self, we gradually come to remember our real nature, and the passage of time affects us less and less. Finally, when our faith in God is unshakable, we are united with him completely. Then, when the time comes to shed this body, there is no rupture in consciousness, any more than there is when we pass from one room to another.

This is the promise Sri Krishna is giving us in this verse. Faith in this promise is the highest kind of shraddha. It is not blind faith; it is the trust in spiritual values, the confidence in their applicability, that comes as our experience deepens. We don’t just go to bed one night and wake up with perfect faith; as the lives of all the great mystics show us, shraddha grows over a long period of time, as we try these timeless values out in our own lives. All that the mystics ask at the beginning is that we trust them enough to give what they say a try.

This is much the way a scientist works. A scientist like Sir Isaac Newton doesn’t build theories out of faith; his faith is in the method. He says, “Well, there is some reason to think that the fall of this apple and the motion of the moon are related; let’s see if that proves true.” He doesn’t say they are related; he says, “Let’s see.” He has enough shraddha in the idea to try it out; and gradually, after many experiments, his faith in a uniform force of gravity is unshakable.

Most of us, after this, never repeat these experiments, but we do trust the conclusion. At the most, I might go to the top of the campanile tower at our campus and drop a marble and a bowling ball at the same time, and when they landed at the same time, I would just say “Good, it does act equally on unequal masses” and be done with it. A great mystic like St. Francis of Assisi or Sri Ramakrishna would ask us gently, “Don’t you at least trust us as much as Galileo or Sir Isaac Newton? We’re not telling you about things we’ve read about or things we’ve heard from others; we’re telling you what we know, from a lifetime of personal experience.”

There is a story much like this in the Buddhist tradition. The Compassionate Buddha was once speaking to a large number of villagers about nirvana and the way it can be attained. After he had finished, one of them asked: “Blessed One, everything you have told us about nirvana is wonderful. All of us would like to go beyond sorrow and death. But this Eightfold Path of yours isn’t easy, and if it doesn’t work we would have thrown our lives away in looking for the impossible. How do we know there is a nirvana that people like us can attain?”

The Buddha smiled. “Are there any mountains to the north of here?” he asked.

“Of course,” the villager answered; “the Himalayas.”

“How do you know? Have you been to see these ‘Himalayas’?”

“No,” the man admitted, “but everybody says they’re there. My father has told me all about them; they’re the source of the Ganges and it has to come from somewhere.”

“Has your father seen these mountains?”

“No, but he heard all about them from his father, whose uncle went there on pilgrimage many years ago.”

“Perhaps this uncle had a vivid imagination.”

“Oh, no, he wouldn’t have misled us like that! Everyone remembers him as a very honest man.”

“My friend,” said the Compassionate Buddha gently, “if you have such faith in the words of someone whom you know of only by hearsay, don’t you think you can have faith in someone who has seen nirvana and who stands in the flesh before you?”

SRI KRISHNA: 24. Through lack of understanding, people believe that I, the Unmanifest, have been born as a person. They fail to realize my true nature, which transcends birth and death.

Shankara, the great saint from Kerala state in India, has a profoundly inspiring invocation which begins, “O Thou from whom all words recoil.” This is the supreme, unmanifested Reality, called Brahman in the Sanskrit scriptures. Brahman cannot be described, for It has no attributes. As a youth, Shankara wanted to have the famous seer Gaudapada teach him how to realize Brahman. After an extensive search, he finally found Gaudapada on the banks of the river Narmada. But when Shankara asked him to be his teacher, the sage refused. He had resolved to remain absorbed in union with the total Godhead, in which state there is no teacher and no one to teach. So he directed Shankara to his foremost disciple, the sage Govindapada, who had realized the personal form of God.

In the ancient Hindu scriptures, union with the impersonal Godhead is called nirvikalpa samadhi. This is a state of pure, undifferentiated consciousness, and it is attained by very few. The more devotional form of union with God is called savikalpa samadhi, or union with the personal God. Devotees are absorbed in meditation on the Lord, but they still have one foot in the world of dualism. There is still a difference between subject and object for them, and they remain devotees who are in communion with the Lord.

For the vast majority of us, limited as we are by our human condition, it is not possible to love the impersonal Godhead. We may feel intellectually attracted to the concept, but intellectual attraction is not enough. In order to undergo the tremendous transformation of personality that the spiritual life demands, we need a personal form of God that we can love, an embodied ideal that can draw us with all our heart. So Sri Ramakrishna says that God is with form and without form: the formless Godhead seems to take on form through the powerful lens of the devotee’s love.

In an earlier verse in the Gita, Sri Krishna explains that whenever the human condition becomes heartbreaking, the Lord of Love is born on earth in the form of a human being, to rekindle our love for God. In Sanskrit this is called an avatara or divine incarnation: someone like Jesus the Christ, or Sri Krishna, or the Compassionate Buddha. Laughing like us, talking like us, weeping like us, the incarnation of God seems to pass like us through all the changes of birth and death. But though the Lord allows himself to appear limited in this way, he is really beyond all limitation. Later, in chapter eleven, Sri Krishna will lift the veil of his Maya for an instant to remove his disguise and reveal to Arjuna his cosmic form as Lord of the universe, who transcends all space and time.

I sometimes amuse my friends by imagining how our dogs and cats must think of God. It is a very helpful shift in perspective. Our dog Muka would tell his friend Hebbles, “What’s all this talk about God as a human incarnation? God has four legs and a tail, and his barking resounds throughout the universe.” And the cats would be saying, “Those dogs have no sense; bow-wow is all they know. God must be a cosmic Cat, filling the universe with an endless meow.” It’s easy to laugh at this sort of talk from dogs and cats, but we need to keep the same sense of humor with regard to our own quarrels about God. We too are trying to limit what cannot be limited, to confine in words that which cannot be confined.

SRI KRISHNA: 25. Few see through my veil of Maya; not knowing that I am without birth and changeless, the world is deluded.

The ice show we took our nieces to see recently is a good example of how Maya works. Just before the show started, the stadium was plunged into darkness. After a fanfare of trumpets, lights of blue, gold, and rose began to play on the ice rink, and one by one, graceful figures in beautiful costumes came gliding onto the ice. Usually our finances give us the privilege of watching shows like this from afar, and distance makes the view even more enchanting. From our position the skaters were incredibly graceful, showing skill which must have taken years to develop. The costumes, the tinted lights, the makeup which must have taken an hour to apply, all made everyone appear breathtakingly beautiful. It was only after Maya’s show was over and the skaters had removed their makeup and shed their costumes for street clothes that I could see their real beauty, which came not from these external trappings but from the Lord of Love within us all.

Imagine watching an ice show for so long that you forget when you came in. It would never occur to you that there was a world outside, or that there was something much more real than greasepaint and tinted lights. The stadium would be your universe. Doesn’t Hamlet say, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”? You would spend your life studying the performances and analyzing the costumes, and if someone were to suggest that you turn in your ticket and get your money back you would object, “What are you talking about? This is the only show in town.”

In a great leap of insight, the Hindu scriptures will tell us that all this world of separateness and change is Maya, from the farthest galaxy to the body itself. Everything that is prakriti is Maya, which means everything that is subject to change – not only matter, but mind and ego as well. Even the passage of time has no reality apart from the mind. Vast and varied as this universe is, it is only the surface of reality. It is real, just as a dream is real to the dreamer, but like a dream it is a lower level of reality out of which we can awaken.

We are so captivated by the promises of this dream that we do not want to wake up; in fact, we cannot even imagine what waking up would be like. All our attention is on the dream. But the mystics of all religions assure us that as our longing for fulfillment becomes more and more acute, and our dreams become more and more stale, we will begin to struggle to wake up into the state of joy. This is the touch of grace. As Sri Ramakrishna says, once the Divine Mother casts a glance at you out of the corner of her lovely eyes, the blandishments of Maya will begin to fade. And when you finally awaken, you will rub your eyes in wonder that you ever could have been taken in by this dream of separate existence.

The wonder of this awakening can never be expressed in words, but it can be glimpsed in some of the marvelous stories we have in the Hindu tradition. One of these stories is about a famous sage named Narada. Narada was deeply devoted to Sri Krishna, and there are many stories told in the scriptures about their adventures together. One day, it is said, Narada was taking a walk with Sri Krishna. The Lord was very pleased with his devotee and told him to ask for a boon, anything he might desire. Now, Narada was already illumined. He had no personal desires worth speaking of, so he had to think some time before he could come up with an answer. Finally he remembered something even he had never understood, for all the breadth and depth of his spiritual experience. “Lord,” he said, “explain to me how you have become the cosmos, from the smallest atom to the greatest star. Tell me how in every being you hide yourself in countless forms, so that people never see that beneath all life there is only One. Show me how you hide yourself as many; tell me the secret of your Maya.”

Sri Krishna smiled and did not answer immediately, for the secret of Maya is the final riddle of existence. But he had to say something; after all, he had given his word. “All right, Narada,” he said. “But first, I am very thirsty; will you please bring me a glass of water?”

The sun was burning fiercely in the tropical sky, but Narada ignored the heat and immediately set off for the nearest house to fetch some water. It took some time, for the village across the rice fields that had seemed so near proved to be a much longer walk than he had guessed. The sun went down, and his feet grew tired; he began to think he might as well ask for two glasses of water, and drink the second one himself.

At last, very tired and thirsty, Narada reached the village and knocked at the door of the very first house he saw. Who should open the door but a breathtakingly beautiful girl, who looked at him with such lovely dark eyes that he forgot all about his thirst. Narada did not know what to say. He hemmed and hawed, and all the time he was hemming and hawing she just stood there with a gentle smile, looking at him with those eyes. Finally he blurted out, “Will you marry me?”

They got married and settled down, and Narada was very happy. They had children, then some more children, and the children all graduated from school and got jobs in the village and settled down. Gradually, one by one, their children too got married and had children of their own. The years flew by. Narada became the patriarch of a great dynasty; everything he turned his hand to prospered, and his family became a hundred strong, until their fields stretched for miles around.

Then, one day, a terrible flood overcame the village. It swept away cottages, it swept away cattle and human beings, and it devastated the land. Before his eyes, everyone in his family was drowned except Narada, who was overwhelmed by grief. In a matter of hours, everything he had built up around him over the years – wife, family, home and lands – had been wiped out. With nowhere else to turn he cried out from the depths of his heart, “Help me, Lord!”

Immediately, as if a veil were lifted from his eyes, Narada saw Sri Krishna standing before him with the peacock feather dancing in his hair and a playful smile on his lips, looking just as he had so many years before. “Narada,” Sri Krishna asked gently, “where is my glass of water?”

Then Narada remembered, and he fell at the feet of the Lord. In one tremendous insight he had seen the nature of Sri Krishna’s divine play.

SRI KRISHNA: 26. I know everything about the past, the present, and the future, Arjuna; but there is no one who knows me completely.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, I think, astronomers took it for granted that the Milky Way galaxy was the whole of the universe. Any student who questioned that would have been failed on the spot. Now, less than three quarters of a century later, we know that there are a billion galaxies within the limits of the observable universe alone. Our own sun used to be the featured player in the drama of astronomy, everybody taking orders from him, everybody dependent on him; now he is just another extra. It’s like taking Hamlet and giving him a job holding a spear in the wings; if he doesn’t want to come, there are lots of others the Lord can call. When the first quasar was discovered, a lot of prestigious astronomers got together and agreed that it was just another star within our galaxy. It took only a few years for these same men and women to realize that this was actually something a million million times brighter than our sun, and so far removed from our galaxy that our imagination fails to grasp it. This is the nature of scientific knowledge: it grows through trial and error, and it is always capable of growing more; there is no end to it.

Scientific knowledge, in other words, is confined to the everchanging realm of prakriti. Its mode of knowing is the intellect, which can only proceed by dividing something further; that is why intellectual inquiry can never satisfy us with a last word. In Spinoza’s language, this is all knowledge of the surface world. It can tell us a lot about the ripples, but it can never see below the surface to the vast ocean in which all these ripples are held together in one whole. That’s why I’m so fond of that image of Sri Krishna wearing the galaxies in a garland about his neck. Until recently, astronomers have been studying one bead in this necklace. Now we have discovered there are two beads, and everyone is very excited: remember, each of these is a little cosmos much vaster than we can comprehend. Who knows? At the end of the century we may have even found a few beads more. But the mystics, though they may be deeply impressed by the beauty of all these worlds, understand that this is a necklace that simply has no end. They are not satisfied with two or three beads; they want to realize the Wearer.

The only way to understand creation is to know the Creator: after all, he wrote all the rules, which is just another way of saying he is the source, the underlying unity, from which all the laws of nature derive. As the Upanishads say, “What is that One by knowing which all other things are known?” This knowledge is jnana, knowledge of the unity of life, whose laws never need to be revised. Astronomy textbooks have to be rewritten every few years; sometimes they are outdated while they are on the press. But a scripture like the Bhagavad Gita, or the Sermon on the Mount, or the Dhammapada of the Buddha can never become dated. The values these scriptures teach – patience, for example – are as valuable now as they were five thousand years ago. And five thousand years from now, when we may be transporting ourselves to other solar systems and eating algae in undersea restaurants with mermaids to serve us and Neptune at the till, we will still need patience in order to be at peace.

SRI KRISHNA: 27. Delusion arises from the duality of attraction and aversion, O Bharata; every creature is deluded by these from birth.

The Compassionate Buddha had a rather mischievous saying: “Not to have that which we want is sorrow; to have that which we do not want is sorrow.” We have conditioned our nervous systems to one-way traffic only – away from what we dislike towards what we like. This is all right as long as everything is going our way, but unfortunately, all too often things are going someone else’s way instead. Then it’s as if everybody in town has decided to stage a motor parade down our one-way street the wrong way. The nervous system screams in protest, which it lets us hear about in all kinds of ways: tension, headaches, asthma, peptic ulcer, numbness in the toes. Most of us respond to this by putting up bigger and bigger one-way signs: “Stop! Do not enter! Go back! This means you.” The Buddha would say, this isn’t going to work; life is two-way traffic, and there isn’t any way to change it. Instead of trying to make life fit us, it makes more sense to accommodate our roads to traffic in both directions. Then if things go our way, of course we will be pleased, but if things don’t go our way we will be just as even-­tempered and enthusiastic as before. For a long time in meditation this is what most of us are doing: reconditioning the nervous system to accept two-way traffic.

The Katha Upanishad gives us two words that shed light on this reconditioning: preya and shreya. Preya is what is pleasant now, though in the long run it leads to insecurity and distress. Shreya is what is permanently beneficial, though it sometimes seems unpleasant at first. We are so poorly educated in the art of living that we prefer temporary satisfaction, even though it may lead to permanent loss, to the adventure of bearing a temporary displeasure that leads to permanent fulfillment.

We have to make this choice between preya and shreya continually every day. When we see a chocolate éclair in the bakery window, for example, the immediate appeal of it is so great that before we know it we have gone into the bakery, eaten one or two, and bought a dozen to take home. It never occurs to us that we have a choice. There is a chocolate éclair in the window; we like chocolate éclairs; therefore we must go in and eat one. For two minutes of satisfaction we eat something that gives us cavities and puts on fat. But just as we have developed a taste for wrong food, so with a little effort we can develop a taste for food that is nutritious. I remember trying chocolate candy for the first time when I was a teenager in India; it took several tries before I could develop a taste for it. We may not be mad about whole-grain bread or green salads, but by cultivating a taste for food that is healthy and learning to prepare it with a creative flair, we can soon become as enthusiastic about fresh garden vegetables as we are about chocolate éclairs.

Like our habits of likes and dislikes in eating, tension too develops only with sustained practice. This is particularly true in personal relationships. The collision of likes and dislikes is greatest in situations where we have to work closely with other people. After all, they have likes and dislikes too, and theirs are not likely to be the same as ours. So one of the most effective ways of reducing tension is to learn to work harmoniously even with people who do not do things our way. In our ashram family all of us were raised in different homes, but we have all learned the skill of working together harmoniously. At first it was far from easy. In the kitchen, for example, one person liked to keep the salt near the stove, another used to put it in a cupboard; then the first would search through the cupboards to find the salt and put it back near the stove. In every little detail, agitation can creep in. Even the way food is served can be a source of irritation. The clever voice of the ego ventriloquist is constantly whispering inside, “I don’t like this; that’s not the right way.” When this goes on inside us for many years, our nerves gradually get more and more tense until at last we cannot bear to live with others; we have to live alone.

It is by reversing this process of estrangement and doing what adds to the joy of others that we release ourselves little by little from the tyranny of likes and dislikes. For example, in taking a job we can look for something that benefits others instead of something that happens to pay very well or offers an office overlooking San Francisco Bay. At home we can learn to enjoy our partner’s Waldorf salad even though we can’t stand walnuts, or join in our children’s four-square game now and then, or look for projects like a backyard vegetable garden which the whole family can enjoy together. When we begin looking upon everything as an opportunity to draw closer to others, the days of the ego are numbered.

SRI KRISHNA: 28. But those who have freed themselves from all wrongdoing are firmly established in worship of me. Their actions are pure, and they are free from the delusion caused by the pairs of opposites.

Dvandva, the ‘pairs of opposites’ – happiness and sorrow, good and bad, pleasure and pain, and all the rest – are the very texture of Maya. Self-will thrives on these dualities, especially likes and dislikes; they are the ego’s way of self-expression. In every country and every community, no matter whether rich or poor, there is a rare type of person who from birth has very little self-will, who can forbear and forgive very easily. People like this are like freestone peaches; you have only to open them up and the seed of self-will falls out easily. The vast majority of us, however, are cling-peach types. With cling peaches, the seed seems glued to the rest of the peach. Not only does it not fall out easily; you have to put in a lot of effort prying all around it with a sharp knife in order to pull the seed out and throw it away. The knife the Lord gives each of us to perform this operation of ego-extraction is double-edged; it has patience on one side and suffering on the other. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to use this knife as long as we cling to our likes and dislikes. But, Sri Ramakrishna would say, we don’t have to go on clinging forever. No one is making us cling but ourselves, and it is up to us to let go.

The more you learn to change your likes and dislikes at will, the more clearly you will be able to see the core of purity and selflessness that is the real Self in everyone. This is seldom easy. Some people are a little more irritating and self-willed than others; there is no doubt about it. But instead of criticizing such people, which only makes their alienation worse, you can focus all your attention on what is best in them. This is one of the most practical skills I have learned from my grandmother, and it can be tremendously effective in helping those around you. It is something like turning a flashlight on a particular spot. I don’t diffuse my attention to take in both positive and negative behavior; I keep concentrating on what is kind, what is generous, what is selfless, and the amazing response is that this kind of support draws out and strengthens these very qualities. Not only that, as they become more secure, such people begin to spread this consideration to their other relationships too.

My grandmother had a very pungent phrase for difficult people: “A lash in the eye.” We all know from experience how an eyelash in the eye can be so irritating that we just cannot think about anything else. That is exactly how difficult people affect those around them. But for the mystics, this lash in the eye is an opportunity for learning the skills in life that matter most: patience, forgiveness, and freedom from likes and dislikes. They will go and put their arm around someone who has been a thorn in their flesh and say with gratitude, “Without you, how could I ever have learned to be patient? How could I have learned to forgive?”

SRI KRISHNA: 29. Those who take refuge in me, striving for liberation from old age and death, come to know Brahman, the Self, and the nature of all action.

Growing up close to my grandmother, I had the blessing of hearing early in life the tremendous truth that you and I are not this finite, mortal body but an eternal, immortal force. As a child I used to run home from school every afternoon to be with my grandmother, and every afternoon I would find her standing by the front gate waiting for me. Eagerly I would tell her everything that had happened that day – what I had learned in school, what the teacher had said, what had happened on the playing field. One day, though, I came walking slowly up the road with a cloud of gloom over my face. “What’s the matter?” my grandmother asked. “Bad news, Granny,” I said. “Today in geography our teacher told us that compared to the sun, we are just insignificant bits of dust.” She laughed. “This sun will burn out,” she replied, “but you and I will never come to an end.”

This is true of every one of us. You and I were never born; therefore we will never die. We are not limited to this physical body; our real Self is divine. Compared with this Self, our sun is just a youngster. Astronomers tell us that it was born perhaps five billion years ago, long after countless millions of similar stars had come, blazed out their lives, and passed away; and, like them, in a few more billion years it will exhaust itself and die. Everything in the created world is part of this continuous process of birth and change and death. But this will in no way affect the Self, the eternal witness within your body and mine.

In the climax of meditation called samadhi we rise above physical consciousness completely, once and for all, to realize that this body is only an instrument which has been given us to use for the benefit of all. In these violent times, each one of us has a crucial role to play in reversing the destructive trends we see around us. Here Mahatma Gandhi gives a personal example we can all follow. So influential was his daily life that Nehru said of him, “Where he sat became a temple; where he trod was holy ground.” We too can learn to make our contribution wherever we go by living not for our personal satisfaction but for the welfare of all – as the Buddha would say, bahujanahitaya, bahujanasukhaya, ‘for the welfare of the many, for the happiness of the many.’

SRI KRISHNA: 30. Those who see me ruling the cosmos, who see me in the adhibhuta, the adhidaiva, and the adhiyajna, are conscious of me even at the time of death.

In this verse Sri Krishna uses three rather technical terms from the Upanishads. Arjuna is not familiar with these terms; he is a man of action, not a philosopher, and in the next chapter he will ask Sri Krishna to explain this verse. Here, however, he is completely absorbed in what the Lord is telling him about the time of death.

When we take to the spiritual life and begin to practice meditation, we come to see into the heart of life, and our awareness of unity in the world around us deepens immensely. Finally, we come to see the presence of the Lord everywhere: in the sky, in the sun and moon, in animals and birds, and of course in the “human face divine.” For the God-conscious person, the wind sighing in the trees whispers of God; the waves sweeping across the beach sing the mantram. Everything is pervaded by the presence of the Lord.

When the mind is permeated like this with consciousness of God, there is no rupture in consciousness at the time of death. My grandmother sowed the seed of this awareness in me while I was still a child. Every morning she would go to our ancestral temple to worship Lord Shiva. On returning home she always placed a flower from the temple behind my ear with this simple blessing: “May you be like Markandeya.” In the Hindu scriptures, Markandeya is an illumined teenager whose parents had prayed for a son who would be completely devoted to Lord Shiva. Their prayer was granted, but with the sad condition that the boy would die on his sixteenth birthday. As a baby, Markandeya’s first words were, “Shiva, Shiva,” and his love for the Lord grew daily until it filled his consciousness.

Finally, however, the day of his sixteenth birthday dawned. His parents, overcome by grief, came to him and told him that Yama, the King of Death, would claim him that very day. When he heard this, Markandeya sat down in deep meditation and became united with Shiva, who is known as the Conqueror of Death. When Yama appeared to claim his victim, from the depths of Markandeya’s meditation Lord Shiva arose to protect his young devotee. Placing one hand on Markandeya’s head in infinite love, and with the other pointing his trident at the King of Death, Lord Shiva said, “Don’t you know that anyone who takes refuge at my feet has gone beyond your power? Markandeya has now become immortal through my grace.” This is the secret of going beyond death, on which Sri Krishna will elaborate in the following chapter.