ARJUNA: 1. O Krishna, what is Brahman, and what is the nature of action? What is the adhyatma, the adhibhuta, the adhidaiva?

2. What is the adhiyajna, the supreme sacrifice, and how is it to be offered? How are the self-controlled united with you at the time of death?

SRI KRISHNA: 3. My highest nature, the imperishable Brahman, gives every creature its existence and lives in every creature as the adhyatma. My action is creation and the bringing forth of creatures.

4. The adhibhuta is the perishable body; the adhidaiva is Purusha, eternal spirit. The adhiyajna, the supreme sacrifice, is made to me as the Lord within you.

This chapter begins like a seminar. Sri Krishna has just told Arjuna how to go beyond death, but he is teasing him by using words which Arjuna does not understand. So Arjuna keeps asking, “What does this mean? What about that?” Then he hesitates, his face full of doubt. There is still one more question. He has saved it until last because it bothers him most. Now his tone changes, and he asks in simple, direct words the searching question that has troubled thoughtful people in all religions. “At the time of the great change called death, how can I remember you in the depths of my consciousness? How can I become united with you and go beyond death?” The answer to this question is the theme of chapter eight.

The Chandogya Upanishad, one of the oldest of the Sanskrit scriptures, tells us about a young man named Shvetaketu who has just returned home from the ancient Indian equivalent of our University of California. Having completed his formal education, Shvetaketu now wants to learn how to live, and he asks his father to teach him the secret of Brahman. In reply, his father gives him one of the greatest spiritual formulas anywhere in mystical literature: Tat tvam asi, ‘That thou art’: Brahman, the supreme Reality, and Atman, our real Self, are one and the same.

This is a very difficult concept to understand, but the Upanishads bring it out with a vivid image. They say that this very Brahman, who is beyond all change and limitation, has brought all things into existence as a spider spins her web out of herself. It is not so much a process of creation as of emanation. A spider doesn’t need to go out to a yarn shop and buy fine silk thread for her web; she has everything she needs right within her. Similarly, the creative power of the Godhead, Maya, spins out the cosmos so that a little bit of the Godhead is present everywhere. Sri Ramakrishna will say that these two – Brahman and Maya, the Godhead and the power that creates and dissolves Its creation – are inseparable, like fire and its power to burn. We cannot imagine fire without the power to burn, or the burning power of fire without the fire itself. Similarly, Sri Krishna is reminding us, it is just as absurd to talk about the cosmos as separate from the Lord, who is present everywhere and in every being.

In living creatures, this divine presence is called adhyatma, the Atman or Self. Adhibhuta refers to the countless seemingly separate houses in which this Self dwells, of which our own body is one. This house is constantly changing. Only a while ago we were toddlers, as sweet and angelic as any baby we see today. Just look at your old baby pictures and you cannot help wondering what happened to that wide-eyed child of not too many years ago. With the passage of time the body inevitably undergoes certain natural changes, the last of which is death. The dweller within the body, however, is unaffected by these changes.

The implication is that the body is only a powerful tool which the Lord lends us for this life. He trusts us to look after this tool, and to recycle it when our time is up; but we are not it, and it is not ours to do with as we like. Just as there are specific steps to follow in caring for more conventional power tools like ripsaws or hedge clippers, there are specific steps we should take to keep our body healthy, too. We should eat nourishing food, get plenty of vigorous exercise every day and our full quota of sleep every night, and find time for wholesome recreation with our family. We don’t have to fall for the belief that good food can be had only in gourmet restaurants; we can prepare good-tasting, nutritious meals at home and share them with family and friends. We don’t have to go to an expensive health club for exercise; a good, brisk walk is excellent exercise at any age. All these things help to keep the body strong and the nervous system resilient, which are particularly important in the practice of meditation.

Adhidaiva refers to the Lord as the Inner Controller in all. It doesn’t apply only to human beings; it means that the Lord is present as the Operator in all the natural forces around us. In the sun he generates heat and light; in the tree he makes new branches grow and blossom. The force of gravitation, the energy transformations in a cell, the beating of our hearts all take place under his direction, not from without but from within.

The next term, adhiyajna, refers to Him to whom any real sacrifice in life is made. It is a rather subtle concept. Whenever we give up something for the sake of others – a movie we want to see, a vacation we want to take, the money we’d like to spend on ourselves – it is really an offering, not so much to others as to our real Self. It is not that others do not benefit from these things; they do. But it is we who benefit most, because it is we who grow.

All spiritual progress requires the sacrifice of self-will, not so much in one grand gesture as in a thousand and one little acts of thoughtfulness during the day. The responsibility for making this sacrifice rests squarely on each one of us; no one can do it for us. Spiritual teachers are like signposts pointing the way to immortality, but it is we who must make the journey. This is quite reasonable. After all, when we pass a signpost on the freeway, we don’t expect it to get into the driver’s seat and do the driving while we lie down in the back to take a nap. Similarly, we cannot expect other people to pick us up and carry us along the spiritual path. It is up to us to meditate regularly and with sustained enthusiasm, and to reduce our separateness from others in every way we can.

Since most of us have rather large amounts of self-will, we cannot expect to get rid of it overnight. Those who are terribly eager may expect to put all their self-will and selfishness in one big truck and cart it all to the dump. Unfortunately, there is no truck big enough, and even if there were we would not have the strength to get all our self-will into it. The safest and simplest method for people like us is to cart off a little bit of selfishness every day, day after day, year after year, until one day we find to our great surprise that all our separateness has been removed. Then the compulsive identification with body and mind will be completely broken, and death will be no more a change than taking off a jacket, hanging it up, and going home. The Sufi mystic al-Ghazzali puts this beautifully in a poem composed while he was dying:

When my friends weep over my dead body,

Ask them, Do you mistake him to be this?

Tell them I swear in the name of the Lord

That this dead body is not I. It was

My dress when I lived on earth; I wore it

During my stay there.

SRI KRISHNA: 5. Those who remember me at the time of death will come to me. Do not doubt this.

6. Whatever occupies the mind at the time of death determines the destination of the dying.

These verses are a quiet statement of a powerful spiritual law. Whatever we think about most, whatever we labor for most, whatever we desire most, that will be the content of our consciousness at the time of death. When we think about something constantly, it sinks deep into our consciousness, and when the time for death comes we will be able to think of nothing else. The Hindu and Buddhist mystics say that at that time the powerful desires in our deeper consciousness will explode like a depth charge, sending us into the next life.

There is a great deal of interest in reincarnation in the West today. Almost every week it seems I get mail announcing some workshop in rebirth, in which people talk about who they were in previous lives. I usually ask, “Don’t they want to know who they are in this life?” It’s a much more pressing question. But I must admit that reincarnation, as it is presented in the Sanskrit scriptures, offers a powerful explanation of how we shape our lives by our deep desires.

The Upanishads throw light on reincarnation in a very scientific way. Psychologists will tell us that in sleep we pass in and out of the state of dreaming and the deep, restful state of dreamless sleep. In the Upanishads, these levels of awareness – waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep – are said to be only different orders of reality. In dreaming sleep, they tell us, consciousness is withdrawn from the body and the senses, and we live completely in the world of the mind. It’s not a particularly restful state, as all of us can testify, and these sleep researchers can show us all kinds of diagrams to show that the mind factory is really working overtime during these hours of dreaming. But in dreamless sleep, consciousness is withdrawn from the mind as well, and we rest in the lap of the Self. In this state, we are completely unconscious; the ego is completely asleep. Here the Upanishads ask a very penetrating question: where is your personality when this takes place? You are not aware of any desires, any fears, so at that time you have no desires or fears. Yet they are all there latent in the room of the mind, waiting for you to come back in and pick them up again when you wake up into the dreaming or waking state.

In a flash of insight, the Upanishads tell us that this is just what happens between death and life. When we die, consciousness is withdrawn from the body just as it is in dreamless sleep, and just as all our desires and fears wait for us to reclaim them and live them out again in a dream-body, they wait until they can take form again in another physical body and another life. In both cases, it is the restless desire for personal satisfaction that draws us back into separate existence.

This is difficult to grasp at first, but all of us can understand that when we think about something constantly, when we desire something deeply, we are training our minds to be focused on this even at the hour of death. Our deepest desires at the moment of death sum up this life and determine the context for the next. The consequences of this are tremendous: what we do each day shapes our destiny. We do not suddenly wake up one morning free from the lurid dream of separateness; unitary consciousness is the result of long years of trying to act, speak, and think for the welfare of all. The choices we make throughout life have a powerful, cumulative effect. The other day I saw a sign in a restaurant which read, “You are what you eat.” How simple life would be if this were true! We could all be living in health and security simply by eating three good meals a day. Unfortunately, however, we are not what we eat; our body is. When the Compassionate Buddha gave us the Dhammapada, he did not begin by saying, “All that we are is the result of what we have eaten”; he said, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”

In other words, it is the little choices we make every day that determine what we become. Life is the sum of all these small thoughts and actions. One of the many reasons I admire Mahatma Gandhi is that he could give his complete attention to the smallest problems of daily living as well as the immense problems presented by India’s struggle for independence. Day in and day out, in even the smallest details, he did everything possible to realize the unity of life. This kind of determination was characteristic of Gandhi. From his early days as a student in London he refused to be overwhelmed by anything. When he was in London and could not find any vegetarian restaurants, he started cooking in his room. His specialty was carrot soup, but it is said that those who dropped in at his place at dinnertime never did so again. Then, when he was a lawyer in South Africa and the white barber refused to cut his hair, he did not become angry or try to get back at the man; he went out and bought a pair of scissors and cut his hair himself. The day after this historic haircut, when he went to court as usual, his fellow barristers teasingly asked him if the mice had been nibbling at his hair. Gandhi didn’t mind; he just didn’t like to depend on anyone, or to throw up his hands and say, “There is nothing I can do.”

Meister Eckhart tells us, “Those who have God in mind, simply and solely God, in all things, carry God with them into all their works and into all places, and God alone does all their works.” Those who use every minute of their lives to serve the Lord in those around them, as Gandhi did, carry God with them wherever they go. When the assassin’s bullet took his life, the only word that escaped Gandhi’s lips was his mantram, Rama. He had made his life a continuous effort to remember the Lord, so he felt no hatred at the moment of death; his mind had no thought of anything but the Lord. Similarly, Sri Krishna promises each of us, “If at the time of death your heart is filled with love for me, if your consciousness is permeated with love for me, then you will come to me. Of this there can be no doubt.” Men and women of God all over the world have corroborated this countless times. They have imbued their consciousness with such depth of love that at the time of death they are able to maintain continuing awareness of God. Their bodies do suffer, because the body is subject to the stress of pain, but inside there is continuing awareness which neither physical pain nor emotional suffering can disturb.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. Therefore, remember me at all times and fight on. With your heart and mind intent on me, you will surely come to me.

If shraddha is the key to destiny, meditation is the key to shraddha. Here it helps greatly to remember that the Gita is no pastoral discourse; it is set in the middle of a battlefield, with elephants trumpeting and swords flashing and conchs calling the regiments to battle all around. If the Gita were written today there would be bombers overhead and tanks rolling over the ground while Sri Krishna tells Arjuna how to go beyond death. The point is that if we really want to live – not just driven by negative conditioning, but in complete mastery of ourselves – then we have to be prepared to fight. This is the grimmest battle any human being can face, and it has to be faced every day, day in and day out, until victory is won.

It isn’t possible even to dream how terrible this fight is until we get below the surface level of consciousness and begin to see the forces ranged against us. Even then, for a long time we do not guess their real strength; all we see is the front lines. First there is the infantry, which is fear – all kinds of fears, most of which we are not even acquainted with. We may not think we have much fear to reckon with, but it is as deep as our separateness, which cuts deep into the consciousness of every one of us. Then there is the cavalry, which is anger. If you can imagine the effect that cavalry and chariots had when they suddenly made their appearance in some of the great civilizations of the ancient world, you will see how apt a comparison this is; a cavalry attack is much more ferocious than infantry and much more difficult to conquer. But the real backbone of the army in ancient India was the elephantry. Throughout India’s long history there have been many occasions when another country would try to plunder our rich material resources. But when these invading armies would look up and see huge armored elephants coming down on them by the hundreds, sometimes by the thousands, they would be panic-stricken. The elephantry is self-will, and it is a thousand times more fierce than anger and fear. All this is what we have to overcome in order to be masters of ourselves, and those who have won this battle, even giants like the Compassionate Buddha, will tell us that nothing on earth is more difficult, more precious, or more exhilarating than this victory.

This fight goes on twenty-four hours a day; even at night there are going to be skirmishes. The alarm goes off in the morning and the fight is on: to get up or not to get up? Years of conditioning are whispering to you to doze on a few minutes more; it’s the distant thunder of the cannon on the battlefield. No mystic has ever denied that at a time like this, especially when it’s cold outside, it’s very pleasant to turn up your electric blanket and go back to sleep. All they will say is, You’re going to lose the fight. Here I can offer a simple and very effective tactic: don’t stay there to weigh the pros and cons; throw off the blankets and jump out of bed. It will be a little difficult, but after a few days you will realize that the first skirmish of the war is over and you have won. It’s a very good feeling, because this isn’t a war in the grand old Clausewitz style. It’s all guerilla warfare, and every skirmish counts.

So you jump out of bed, and the same instant you’ve won one encounter, you’re in the middle of another one. Even once you’re out of bed, the prospect of sitting down to meditate isn’t exactly inviting. After all, the newspaper is waiting at your door; you can always sit in a beanbag chair with a cup of coffee and read the news instead. Nobody will say this isn’t more pleasant than meditation. A beanbag chair may not do much for your spine, but at least it doesn’t take much effort to sit in it; journalism may not be particularly nonviolent these days, but it is stirring. Here it is that you don’t even give the beanbag chair a glance, let alone the paper; you go straight to your meditation room, sit down quietly, and start trying to meditate.

But the fight has only begun. It’s not as if you left the battlefield with the beanbag chair; the battlefield is right inside you. You’re sitting quietly in meditation, trying to keep your mind on the Prayer of St. Francis, and after a few minutes you find you’re a little drowsier than you suspected. It’s very difficult to fight when you’re getting sleepy in meditation. For one thing, if your meditation is going well, it may not be normal sleep that’s coming on. It may be what the Sanskrit scriptures call yoganidra, the wave of oblivion that comes over the mind when you try to stay conscious beneath the conscious level. In yoganidra there’s not much motivation to fight; there’s not much will. But there is no choice; you have to fight. Otherwise you cannot go forward. And when someone asks me, “What do I do when I don’t have much motivation?” I just say, “You make it much – by trying.” There is no other way. This is a problem that will keep coming up in meditation for many, many years, and if you don’t begin to fight it now you will find it almost impossible to take on the fight later on. The point is not ever to yield, to say, “There is nothing I can do.” As my grandmother used to say, there is always something you can do. If you yield, you have lost the fight; but if you do not yield, you are beginning to win.

Then you finish meditation, and after all these conflicts, all you want to do is take it out on the refrigerator. It’s an opportunity again; it’s another skirmish. Instead of tucking into things to which you have been conditioned – say, a few pieces of nice, light bread that weakens the body in twelve ways, loaded with butter and jam – get out the whole wheat bread. After two pieces of toast there’s a foray by a third, but you fight it off. As you get to be a seasoned fighter, even your hand will get accustomed to fighting. Instead of reaching automatically for the coffee it will say, “Coffee, you’re no friend of mine; all you give me is caffeine.” Do you see why I say that there’s no boredom in life once you take to meditation? You can’t get bored in the middle of a battle; you’ve got to be alert all the time just to save your skin.

It’s like this all day long. You go to work and immediately the ego says, “What’s the least I can give here and the most I can get?” It’s bad for work; it’s bad for you; it’s bad for everybody. So there is fighting again – you have to try to give as much as you can. At lunchtime you can sit around and join in some gossip, or you can take a fast walk repeating the mantram. And when you go home, you bring the battlefield with you even in the car; if you can keep calm, everybody in the cars around you will be a little safer.

By the end of a day like this, if you’ve really been giving your best, there is every reason to want a chance to come home, put your feet up, and hang up your sadhana until the next morning. It’s a very reasonable request. The problem is, your opponent wouldn’t even dream of fighting by the rules. In his book, any minute is right for a sneak attack. Things haven’t been going so smoothly at home either. The children have had a bad day, the cat is missing, the dryer is broken; there are all kinds of problems. The natural reaction is to say, “I’ve had my share of problems already,” and to take it out on the first person who comes to greet you. Of course, you have had your share of problems; no one is denying that. But the cat and the dryer have sprung this sneak attack, and the only choice is whether you’re going to win or lose.

There is a thrilling kind of satisfaction in this. You step out of the car into no-man’s-land and little Susie comes up to tell you that George has broken your new hi-fi. That’s all; no “Hello, daddy,” just this news about George. It takes real stamina to say at a time like this, “Oh, sure, let’s see if we can fix it. After all, hi-fi’s aren’t eternal.” It may be a hi-fi or a tennis racket or a sewing machine or anything else that is your favorite; the point is, you can come back even to an upset home and immediately set to work at bringing peace into it again. Nothing in the world can give more satisfaction than this, and nothing can make you more precious to those around you. Everyone in the family will be looking forward to your return. Even your neighbors will be watching over the fence and saying, “There goes someone who really deserves a peace prize.” They don’t know that you’re still fighting.

There’s no end to this fight, and there is no end to the satisfaction it can bring, because there is always more you can give. Instead of rushing through dinner to go bowling, you can stay and listen with genuine interest to Susie’s rambling account of what happened to her at school. That’s what really makes a meal satisfying, not just the food. And after dinner, when you just want to go off to your room to watch the late show or plow on through The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you can drop in at your neighbor’s, where things have been getting a little strained, and say, “I’ve got the evening free; why don’t your children come out with ours for ice cream so that you two can have a little time to yourselves?” You’re not only fighting your own battles then; your example is making it a little easier for others to fight too, and helping to build up a neighborhood where there is solidarity and trust.

If you have been fighting like this all day and really giving it your best, it will be a great solace to go to bed at night. No waterbed in the world can ever give the kind of rest that comes when you have been trying your hardest all day to lead the spiritual life. Then, after your evening meditation, when you lie down, close your eyes, and give all your mind to the mantram, it is very much like dropping off to sleep in the arms of the Lord. When you fall asleep in the mantram it will go on in your consciousness throughout the night, nursing the wounds of the day and strengthening your spirit for the fight that will come the next day. You know now that you are fighting for the Lord, and He will give you all the health and strength and endurance you need until finally the battle is won, and you come – as this verse promises – to be united with Him forever.

SRI KRISHNA: 8. When you make your mind one-pointed on the Lord through the regular practice of meditation, you will find the supreme glory of the Self.

A clever verse from ancient India describes the mind as a restless monkey that is stung by a scorpion, drunk, and possessed by a demon, all at the same time. We are all proud owners of this monkey, which gives us a clue as to why it is so incredibly difficult to bring our mind under control. Yet control it we must if we are to go beyond the conditioning of the mind.

The symbol of the monkey is easily understood in a country like India, where monkeys run about as freely as cats and dogs in the United States. Often in India you will see little monkeys trained to perform and entertain. My wife and I once saw a little one that had been taught to act just like a reluctant child on the way to school. He dragged his feet, kicked at pebbles, and kept looking back over his shoulder and watching the birds in the trees just as any schoolboy would. Then, on the way home, he jumped and ran cheerfully. Now, this restless creature did not learn schoolboy gestures overnight; his master trained him over a period of time. Similarly, we do not still our minds in a week or even a year; it takes a long, long period of steady, enthusiastic effort. We should never be impressed by anyone who claims to give us complete control over the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels of the mind in a four-week seminar. But even if it takes a lifetime to attain this state, it is worth all our time and attention.

It always amazes me to see the kind of skills people spend their time perfecting. We know of one boy who delivers his newspapers from a precarious perch atop his unicycle. On college campuses you will find a lot of students who have managed to embroider a whole garden of exquisite flowers on their blue jeans. These are all skills which demand a great deal of concentration to master, and whenever I see anyone with the capacity to excel in his or her chosen field, whether it is sculpture or gymnastics or jumping motorcycles over the Grand Canyon, I know that if that person would only take to meditation, he or she could really go far.

One of the signs of this capacity for concentration is that you will not get distracted when you are talking with someone; all your concentration will be on that person. This is an art which all of us can cultivate; it will help our meditation and our personal relationships too. There is a story about Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet, that illustrates this point. Coleridge was an enthusiastic talker, full of ideas and theories. One day, it is said, he saw his friend Charles Lamb on his way to his London office and went up to him, saying, “Lamb, stop a minute; I’ve a new theory of literary criticism. Wouldn’t you like to hear it?”

Lamb said, “Sorry, old chap, but I’ve an appointment at the office.” “Let me give you just a few minutes’ summary, then,” said Coleridge. And he started on the theory that underlies the Biographia Literaria.

Now, just as Coleridge had developed a talent for talking, Lamb had developed a talent for escaping from long-winded conversations. So Coleridge, knowing Lamb’s ways, grabbed hold of his friend’s coat button to keep him from getting away. Minutes passed, an hour passed, and Coleridge went on and on; he had closed his eyes in concentration and was well into his exposition, secure in his hold on Charles Lamb’s coat button. But he had underestimated his friend’s resourcefulness. Lamb had pulled out a pair of pocket scissors, quietly clipped the button from his coat, and slipped away to get to his appointment.

Hours passed, and Lamb, who was a very busy man, went about his business in the City and forgot about his long-winded friend completely. But on his way home late in the afternoon, to his amazement, there was Coleridge, still hanging on to his button and holding forth on literary theory. It may be an exaggerated story, but it illustrates the concentration of genius. If only Coleridge had taken to meditation instead of drugs for inspiration, he could have gone very far on the spiritual path.

SRI KRISHNA: 9–10. The Lord is the Supreme Poet, the First Cause, the Sovereign Ruler, subtler than the tiniest particle, the support of all, inconceivable, bright as the sun, beyond the darkness of Maya. Remembering him in this way at the time of death, through devotion and the power of meditation, with your mind completely stilled and your concentration fixed in the center of spiritual awareness, you will realize the Lord of Love.

The Supreme Poet is at work wherever we look; we can see his touch in the beauty of the sky, in the vast oceans and the rivers, in the mountains and forests, in all the creatures who live on the earth. Even our careless habits, which have covered the earth with a blight of pollution, cannot obscure the infinite beauty of the Lord reflected in every blade of grass, every drop of water. Look at even that humblest of flowers, the dandelion, the plague of gardeners and a nightmare to anyone who wants a perfect carpet of green for their front lawn. How beautiful even this little yellow flower is! Look at any leaf and you can see the miracle of life, the perfect pattern created by the Supreme Poet. The German mystic Nicholas of Cusa looks at a simple nut and sees in it the creative force of the Lord; in one little nut lies the potentiality of thousands of trees to come.

In the Upanishads the source of all this creativity is called “the uncaused Cause.” If some scientist were to decide that the ultimate constituents of the universe are protons, I would ask, “Who put those protons there?” If an astronomer tries to tell me that the cosmos was born from a black hole, I would still want to know, “Who bored that black hole?” This line of questioning has no end within the world of cause and effect; we can always ask where that primordial particle or black hole came from. But this infinite regression of questions comes to a halt where the Lord is concerned. If you ask Sri Krishna who created him, he will say, “Me. I put myself here.” In mysticism everywhere the Lord is called the Self-created, the First Cause, which means that everything else, including you and me, is an effect.

All this is not just beautiful poetry; it has a terribly practical point to it. In this verse and those which follow, Sri Krishna is telling Arjuna in very precise terms how to maintain unbroken awareness through the cataclysmic changes we call death. It is important to realize that whether we prepare for it or not, death will come to us all. As the Katha Upanishad tells us, the body is like a city with eleven gates, and just as historical cities change, grow old, and eventually become archeological relics, the body too is bound to come to an end. Yet, as all the world’s great scriptures assure us, we do not have to die when the body dies. If we have trained our consciousness over the years to be united with the Lord, we shall be able to guard ourselves against the rupture in consciousness that takes place for almost all human beings when the body is shed.

The key to this almost unimaginable achievement is devotion. It is all very well to talk about the Ultimate Reality, the Great Void, but we cannot love a Void, and I doubt very much if ordinary people like us would find much about the Void to remember as we entered the moment of death. Here it is that we need the Lord in the aspect we can love and understand – the Supreme Poet, the sustainer and protector of all, from whom we came into existence and to whom we shall return. For this, we need a divine ideal like Sri Krishna, Jesus the Christ, the Compassionate Buddha, or the Divine Mother, a divine incarnation in which the supreme Godhead assumes a human form. We have only to look at the picture of Jesus holding a lamb or reassuring the children of Galilee for our hearts to go out to him. We have only to see one of those South Asian statues of the Buddha seated in meditation, full of compassion and tenderness, for us to want to become like him. The great incarnations come to live among us, to talk and laugh and weep like us, so that we can love them more than we love ourselves. When we can love like this, it will be impossible for all our love not to flow to the Lord at the hour of our death. Absorbed in him completely, secure in the realization that we are neither body nor mind, we can shed the body as naturally as a dead leaf falls from a tree.

When we are setting out on this final journey, there should be nothing in our knapsack. We cannot afford to have a lot of things on our backs, like the hitchhikers we see on University Avenue all loaded down with transistor radios and guitars and camping gear. Similarly, on the last journey there should not be a movement in the mind. Every attachment, every desire, every resentment must be left behind, which means that the mind must be completely stilled. When there are no lingering desires and thoughts to tie us to the body, we can keep our minds absorbed in the Lord without any trace of reservation. This is the theme of the verses which are to come.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. I will briefly tell you of the eternal state all scriptures affirm, which can be entered only by those who are self-controlled. Those who are selfless in their daily lives and free from selfish attachments attain this supreme goal.

In a village in India it is impossible to be ignorant of death. Everyone knows everyone else, everyone’s life is connected with the lives of everyone else, and it is not uncommon to hear that someone you saw only the other day, or with whom you played, or whose mango trees you used to climb, has passed from this life completely. It is a continual reminder of the transiency of all life. This kind of thing happened many times while I was growing up, and often people on their deathbed would send for my grandmother to come sit with them and hold their hand and ease their hearts a little in going through the agony with which most people face death. I don’t think any of them had much idea of my granny’s real stature, but everyone was aware that she was a great source of strength, and in moments like those all you had to do was look into her eyes to glimpse the great truth all scriptures tell us – that we are not the body, we are imperishable spirit, and death is no more than a change of rooms.

Even when I was a little boy, my grandmother would insist that I come with her on these deathbed vigils. It used to horrify everyone in my family, for no one, certainly not I, ever had any idea of why she should want to take an impressionable child to scene after scene of agony. But no one would argue with my granny. She was a very loving but a very determined spiritual teacher, and many years later I came to see that all those scenes of death and dying planted deep in my consciousness the fervent desire to go beyond death once and for all. The suffering I witnessed at those scenes still haunts me. There is no isolation from the dramas of birth and death as there often is in this country; life ebbed out in the presence of family and friends, and their grief used to add to the agony of the dying, which often went on for hours and sometimes even days.

Once, I remember, I took courage and asked my grandmother why there had to be such suffering. Granny didn’t have much of a way with words; she taught me by how she lived. So she didn’t quote the Gita at me; she just asked me to sit down in a chair and hold on to the arms with all my strength. Then she tried to pull me out of the chair. I was a rather strong fellow, and I held on for all I was worth; but she was stronger, and with one painful wrench she had me up on my feet. “That hurt, Granny,” I said. “Now sit down again, Little Lamp,” she told me, “but this time don’t hold on.” I sat down again, and she reached down and lifted me gently into her arms.

This is the secret of facing death. As long as there is something we want to get out of life before we go – a little more money, a little more pleasure, a chance to get in a parting dig at someone we think has hurt us – there will be a terrible struggle with death when it comes. As long as we think we are the body, we will fight tooth and nail to hold on to the body when death comes to wrench it away. The tragedy, of course, is that death is going to take it anyway; it was never ours to begin with. So the great mystics all tell us, “Give it away now and be free.” Give up all these selfish attachments; then, when death does come, we can give him what is his without a shadow of regret, and keep for ourselves what is ours, which is love of the Lord. There is great artistry in this; that is why it appeals to me so deeply. Death comes and growls something about how our time has come and we just say, “Don’t growl; I’m ready to come on my own.” Then we stand up gracefully, take off the jacket that is the body, place it carefully in Death’s arms and go on home.

SRI KRISHNA: 12–13. Remembering me at the time of death, close down the doors of the senses and place the mind in the heart. Then, while absorbed in meditation, focus all energy upwards to the head. Repeating in this state the divine name, the syllable Om that represents the changeless Brahman, you will attain the supreme goal.

A decade or so ago there seemed to be a veiled conspiracy to pretend that death did not exist. Now it is just the opposite. Courses on death are given on university campuses; books on death are prominent in every bookstore. Yet, though most people will now admit “Oh, yes, we know we have to die; everyone has to die sometime,” I have met very, very few people – even including those with terminal illnesses – who really believed it. The proof is that if you really believe you’re going to die, you will do something about it. That is where the Gita comes in.

Some of the books on death we see in stores go so far as to recommend shedding the body in a state of mind where the senses are satiated. This seems to be the modern way – to hope to die with the senses all aroused. The Gita suggests a far different approach. It is not much help to die in a state of sense-pleasure – say, after having eaten a gourmet meal. The ultimate goal is to be able to shed the body without any rupture in consciousness at all, and for this we must be prepared to train ourselves for decades.

These two Gita verses follow closely the very precise description of the death process given in the Upanishads. First, the Upanishads say, the vitality of the senses is withdrawn into the mind. Then the mind, along with the life-force, descends into the heart, into the realms of deeper consciousness. Finally the Self, accompanied by mental impressions, departs from the body, following one of the tracks leading from the heart. In the case of the man or woman of God, the Self is said to depart upward through the crown of the head.

At the hour of death, the doors of the senses are completely closed. If we are to maintain awareness of the Self at that time, nothing can be allowed to take away from the complete concentration within. There is no hearing, no seeing, and there should be no desire to see or hear. Everything must be centered on the Self. For most of us, however, the onset of death precipitates a terrible longing for sensory experience and a feeling of agonized deprivation in the mind. That is when the real agony of death begins. All the attachments we have formed, all the virulent self-will we have cultivated, tie us down in the mind completely so that we cannot break loose. Yama, the King of Death, must tear us away. If I may use a grim image, this tearing away is like being thrown through the windshield in an automobile accident. It is horrible to be thrown through the windshield, but it is much worse to be thrown through the rigid barrier of self-will and selfish attachments when our body is wrenched away in death. This is the agonizing horror of death, even beyond the physical level.

I am not at all against alleviating the physical pain of death through the wise use of drugs, but these cannot relieve this kind of pain in the mind. The only way to be able to still the mind at the time of death is to train it from now on to be filled with love of the Lord, whom we must see in every creature around us. Then at death there is nothing in the heart but love of the Lord. There is no personal attachment or self-will; there is no conflict, no anger, no fear. The body may suffer, but there is no suffering in consciousness, for the mind is full only of the mantram or holy name.

One of the secrets of the Gita is how to use the mantram at the time of death. When vitality has been withdrawn into the mind and the mind into the heart, you have gone beyond the mind; therefore, you have gone beyond memory. This is a terribly practical point. You will not be able to remember the inspirational passage at that time. But when the mantram has become ajapajapam, when it repeats itself without any conscious effort, you do not need memory; you do not need coherence or connections between words. You do not have to remember to repeat the mantram; it will go on of itself.

There is a beautiful verse from the Mundaka Upanishad that describes ajapajapam:

Take the great bow of the sacred scriptures,

Place on it the arrow of devotion;

Then draw the bowstring of meditation

And aim at the target, the Lord of Love.

The mantram is the bow, the aspirant

Is the arrow, and the Lord the target.

Now draw the bowstring of meditation,

And hitting the target be one with him.

For the great mystics, the mantram has taken root and become established in their consciousness; the holy name echoes continuously in the depths of the heart. In sickness and in health, in favorable circumstances and in times of turmoil, the mantram continues to fill the heart and mind. When this happens, we are so established in God-consciousness that death loses its terror. At the time we shed the body there will be no break in consciousness, for we have become continuously aware of the Lord who dwells within.

The mantram mentioned in these verses is Om, which is not really an external sound. It is an internal sound, which may occasionally be heard in very deep meditation. The Sanskrit scriptures call it “the unstruck sound”; in Zen it is alluded to as the “sound of one hand clapping.” The most ancient of all the mantrams in the Hindu tradition, Om is considered to be the fundamental vibration which pervades the cosmos. So Om is not just an idle sound, but a powerful spiritual formula. For the mystics, this sound may come and go in their consciousness. But at the time of death, when they have trained their consciousness to be completely filled with the love of the Lord, Om is the sound that will reverberate in their hearts, drowning all mortal noises.

SRI KRISHNA: 14. I am easily attained by the person who always remembers me and is attached to nothing else. Such a person is a true yogi, Arjuna.

Our home on the Blue Mountain in South India was near the road to town, and every Saturday during the summer holidays the local tribal people used to go by our house on their way to the race track. They were a lively group when they passed our place in the morning. Somehow fifty of them could squeeze into a bus intended for thirty; they didn’t mind having to stand the whole way with someone’s elbow in their ribs, because they were having such a good time speculating on how much money they were going to win at the races. But in the evening it was a different story. The same bus would return shrouded in silence. My mother used to stand at the gate and watch them go by, and being a tender-hearted woman, she felt sorry to see them going home so depressed after all that cheering and singing in the morning.

This is the story of us all. We are conditioned to believe that we only have to pursue our pleasure, to pick up whatever profit we can and put it in our wallet; but the pleasure is never quite what we had hoped, and our wallet is sometimes snatched away in the bargain. In his mercy the Lord allows us a margin for experimentation, but after a while he expects us to get the point – that we cannot find fulfillment in making money or in stimulating the senses. Life on the sensory level is fraught with such frustration and anger that once we begin to make some progress on the spiritual path we can only ask, “How can people enjoy this kind of life?” We have only to look around us to see how much suffering there is in living for oneself – thinking about money and material possessions, comparing oneself with others, competing against even one’s nearest and dearest. To the mystic, this is not living at all, and in an earlier verse in the Gita Sri Krishna says, “What most people call day is the night of ignorance to the sage.”

In the deepest stages of meditation, when concentration has become complete, we go beyond the attraction of the sense-world once and for all. In this state, consciousness is withdrawn completely from fleeting pleasures and personal possessions, and all sense of separateness goes. All our vitality is consolidated within us, and the doors of the senses, which are usually in one position only – open to all incoming traffic – now swing completely shut. Consciousness has been withdrawn into the mind and the mind into the Self, just as at the moment of death. The all-important difference is that in meditation this is something we learn to do intentionally, over a period of many years of spiritual practice, so that instead of blacking out, our consciousness is intensely awake and filled with peace. In death all our selfish attachments are torn from us, but in the climax of meditation they have been thrown away of our own free will. Afterwards, when we return to the world of the senses, we are free to enjoy whatever is in harmony with the welfare of all, but we can never again be misled by anything life has to offer. We have already died to our little self to come to life in the Atman, our real Self. So a great mystic like St. Paul will say, “I have already died to my little ‘I’; how can I die again? Not I, not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

In every tradition there is a rare man or woman who embodies this ideal, so perfectly symbolized by the Compassionate Buddha, Jesus the Christ, and Sri Krishna, or by the Virgin Mary in the Catholic tradition and the Divine Mother in Hinduism. If you want to see beauty in its most radiant form, look at men and women who are trying to be like these, whose daily life reflects the divine presence. The other day, seeing a particularly striking statue of the Compassionate Buddha seated in meditation, I could not help thinking with humility but with great love: “I will do anything to be like him! I do not care about what others think of me, about what image I project; I just want to be like the Buddha.”

SRI KRISHNA: 15. Great souls make their lives perfect and discover me; they are freed from mortality and the suffering of this separate existence.

16. Every creature in the universe is subject to rebirth, Arjuna, except the one who is united with me.

In the early days of the Blue Mountain Center I once gave a series of talks on meditation to a group of hard-headed Kaiser businessmen, who followed most of what I had to say with attentiveness and appreciation. Once, however, I happened to refer casually to the Hindu and Buddhist concept of reincarnation. After the talk one of these men came up, took me aside, and said very persuasively: “You’ve been so rational all this time; you haven’t said anything that we can’t accept, even with all our scientific training. Why do you have to start dragging in these esoteric theories?”

Though reincarnation is emphasized in these verses, Sri Krishna is not going to require us to pass an exam on the theory of rebirth in order to attain the goal of life. There is no necessary connection between the practice of meditation and belief in reincarnation. We can believe in many births and still lead an unspiritual life, just as we can believe in only one birth and still lead a selfless life. But there is no contradiction at all between the theory of reincarnation and the theory of evolution. Both mystic and scientist agree on the stages through which life evolved; the mystic is only adding that there is another level than that on which the physical drama of existence is played out. In a crude form, each of us recapitulates these stages of evolution in the mother’s womb, from the simplest organism – the single cell – up to the human being. To make this concept a little more personal, I like to imagine the dog-lover as once having been a little pup playing with a shoe, and when I come across someone who is especially partial to cats, I tell them they were once curled up by the fireside themselves, purring contentedly. The Sufi mystic Jalalu’l-Din Rumi expresses this universal evolution eloquently:

I came forth from the Unmanifested

And pitched my tent in the forest of life.

I was a mineral, then vegetable,

Then became an animal. I evolved

Into a man, and in the company

Of good people I wandered round and round

The house of prayer. At last I chose the road

That leads to Him, and became a servant

At His gate. No longer were He and I

Separate, for I was lost in Him.

Twelve years ago I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Evans-Wentz, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Tibetan mysticism. According to Evans-Wentz, the Tibetan contribution to the theory of reincarnation is vividly picturesque. Like the ancient Hindu sages, the Tibetan mystics say that we really have two bodies: the physical body, sthulasharira, and the subtle body, sukshmasharira. The subtle body, which consists of our thoughts and emotional tendencies, is immaterial, nonphysical. This is why we find it difficult to believe it exists, and go through life thinking of ourselves as being so many inches tall and weighing so many pounds. But within this physical sheath there is a subtle body too, which has an ego so many units broad, a lot of samskaras – what you call “hang-ups” – a subtle mass of tamas or inertia, some rajas or energy, and a little sattva or serenity.

At the time of death, this subtle body and the physical body part company. The physical body is shed and resolved back into its constituents of calcium, phosphorus, and other elements, while we go in our subtle body to a kind of prenatal waiting room which the Tibetan mystics call Bardo, the ‘in-between state.’ These mystics say that we often have to wait in Bardo for a long while before the proper situation for our next birth becomes available. The Upanishads tell us penetratingly that there is some similarity between this state and the state of dreamless sleep between two periods of waking. It can be a source of great consolation to those who are facing death. In deep dreamless sleep, the Upanishads add, our problems all disappear for the time being; we are not conscious of either the body or the mind. But when it comes time to wake up, don’t we still wake up the same person, into a world that is changed only by a short passage of time? It is the same in Bardo. At the moment of death, consciousness is withdrawn from the physical body, and we get a long period of rest and recuperation. Then, when we are ready, we wake up again into the physical context to give it one more try.

The other day I went with my wife to a large drop-in clinic in Oakland for our annual physical examinations. One of the first tests they always give you is to see how long you can wait. Finally I presented my card, and they decided that I was who it said I was. It can take some time, because the only proof I have of my identity is not the kind that clerks are prepared to accept. Then they took me into another room, took away my clothes, and gave me a white paper gown to wear while I went from room to room to wait for test after test.

Bardo is very much like that. You have to stand in a queue to register; then you show your identification card to the receptionist and she tells you to sit in the waiting room until she calls your name. There’s always a certain amount of waiting, because it’s not easy for the administration to find the right constellation of circumstances for you. If you haven’t been very kind to your parents in this life, you have to be born into a home where you will have rebellious children – which actually is not too difficult to find. If you haven’t been very considerate to your wife, you have to be born into a context where you will have an irate husband, which also is not too difficult to find. And if you have been a very poor neighbor, walling yourself off and ignoring those around you, you have to be placed in a neighborhood where people will look right through you and not even remember your name. It’s like that even down to your dog or cat; you have to have the right dog or cat in your home, too. Everything must be perfect for your future growth. When these circumstances are put together, among the millions of possible homes there is only one into which you can be born that is just right.

In this verse, Sri Krishna says that until we become united with the Lord, all of us have to keep coming back into our old context, exactly where we left off at the time of death. It is a brilliant theory, because it places the responsibility for our life in our own hands. If we can lead a selfless life, contributing to our family and community, then we will have made a better life for ourselves in our next birth. On the other hand, if we lead a selfish life marked by lack of love and respect for others, we are setting the stage for unfavorable circumstances the next time around. You and I are responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves, and there is no point in blaming our parents or our partner or our children for it. Instead we can take our life in our own hands, practice meditation, learn to reduce our selfishness, and create a better life now as well as for the next time around.

In other words, whatever context we find ourselves in is a suitable one in which to overcome our problems and grow to our full height. We tend to look upon the other home as peaceful, the other couple as perfect, the other parent-child relationship as ideal, but this is not very likely. Whenever she heard someone talking like this, my grandmother used to remark pungently, “The jasmine in your neighbor’s garden always smells sweeter.” Most of us, if I may say so, have nice parents, and most of us have good friends and children. Naturally they all have certain liabilities as well as assets; this is part of the human condition. If our parents were completely perfect, they would not be here; according to the theory of reincarnation, they would have passed the parent test in the school of life summa cum laude. The very fact that we have come into this life shows we have some imperfections to correct. The mystics are loving realists. They don’t say, “Let me see your angel’s wings”; they remind us that we all make mistakes in life, and that without making a reasonable amount of mistakes, most of us cannot learn to improve. So none of us need be depressed about our past or present; on the path of meditation, even past mistakes can be made into powerful assets if we have learned something by making them.

To put it in simple terms, life is a kind of school where we keep coming back until we realize the unity of life. Only then can we graduate. Suicide, according to this theory, is the worst crime we can commit against ourselves. Both the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures agree that those who commit suicide when they find themselves in an extremely difficult situation will be born again and again into a similar web of circumstances until they learn to improve that situation. Even in this life, the purpose of difficult situations is to get us to master something in ourselves, and until we do this by facing such situations squarely, they will come to confront us again and again, more complicated and more distressing each time around. No matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, however distressing they may be, the Lord expects us to try to reduce our selfishness and forget ourselves in contributing to the welfare of those around us. He does not promise any easy way out of our problems, but he does tell us that by eliminating our separateness we can be united with him and see him dwelling in the hearts of everyone, even our enemies. Then we shall have attained the goal of life and need not enter the cycle of birth and death again.

There is a powerful story about Arjuna’s oldest brother Yudhishthira, who is a remarkable character in Hindu spiritual lore. One of his many names is Ajatashatru, ‘he who has no enemies.’ When he is banned from his kingdom with his brothers, Yudhishthira goes to live as an exile in the forest for thirteen years. During this time he is visited by sages who come to cheer him up and bring news of his kingdom and countrymen. One such sage, curious about his epithet, asked him, Sir, how can you claim to have no enemies when you have been driven from your kingdom and subjected to more difficulties than ten men put together? Yudhishthira replied, “It’s true that I have been exiled for many years from those I love, but I don’t think of my usurpers as enemies. I’m still prepared to serve them in any way that contributes to the welfare of all. They may call me their enemy, but as far as I am concerned, they are my friends.” He had learned to see the Lord in every living creature, even in those who attacked and cheated him. This is the lesson which we are all born to learn, and the scriptures go on to say that Yudhishthira was not born again, but was reunited at the time of his death with the Divine Ground of all existence.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. Those who understand the cosmic laws know that the day of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas and the night of Brahma ends after a thousand yugas.

18. When the day of Brahma dawns, forms are brought forth from the Unmanifest; when the night of Brahma comes, these forms merge in the Formless again.

19. This multitude of beings is created and destroyed again and again in the succeeding days and nights of Brahma.

Hindu cosmology divides the history of the earth into four periods or ages called yugas. In satya yuga, the Age of Truth, right after creation, everybody put the welfare of the whole first, and there was a real kingdom of heaven on earth. This period is traditionally represented by a bull standing firmly on all four legs – steady, balanced, and secure. Gradually, however, selfishness crept into our desires. Pleasure and profit became more important, robbing mankind of support. In this period, treta yuga, the bull loses one of its legs and begins to wobble. He is still able to balance, but not quite so steadily. Then, as self-will increases, the poor bull loses another leg, leaving him with one in front and one in back – a very precarious position, as you’ll see if you can get a bull to demonstrate it for you. This third age, called dvapara yuga, is characterized by a half-for-me, half-for-others attitude. You never know when someone is going to pursue his personal pleasure and when he is going to contribute to the happiness of the whole. Finally, the bull loses its third leg, which marks the beginning of our age, kali yuga. It is a very factual name for our era, because kali here means anger and violence, qualities which have come almost to dominate our times.

These four yugas taken together constitute one great yuga, or a yuga of the gods. One thousand such great yugas make up what is called a kalpa, which Sri Krishna here tells us is a day of Brahma, the Creator. It’s a very personal conception. The Lord wakes up and the world of name and form comes into play, very much as it does when we wake up out of deep sleep. Creation starts; matter and energy, time and space, all come into existence; the great chain of evolution begins. There are even some calculations made by the sages of ancient India as to how long all this should take; according to them, one day of Brahma is 4320 million years.

But, the Hindu scriptures tell us, after a while the Lord becomes tired of all this cosmic play and wants to take a nap. When you or I take a nap there is no awareness of the world outside us; it drops out of our consciousness completely. So here the Lord curls up on his endless serpent Ananta, and the whole of creation, which the Sanskrit scriptures tell us is just a thought in the consciousness of the Lord, is withdrawn into a state of latency, with no more reality than the tree which will sprout from a seed. This state of primordial equilibrium is the night of Brahma, in which everything is dissolved and all creation returns to the Unmanifest.

Recently I have been dipping into a few books on astronomy, because it fascinates me to see how easily the two major theories of cosmology are accommodated in the Gita. One of these is called the evolutionary or “Big Bang” theory; the other is the steady-state theory. Supposedly they represent opposite camps, but in the light of the Gita they become different aspects of one and the same truth. It’s like picking up a cosmic kaleidoscope: turn it to the left, look inside, and the universe was created and will someday be dissolved; turn it to the right and look again, and the universe has neither beginning nor end. In meditation we gain a higher mode of knowing which enables us to look behind this kaleidoscope and see the Lord at his divine play, making beautiful patterns with galaxies and quasars, gathering the pieces back into his hands, and then spreading them out again into another magnificent pattern, another universe.

The Big Bang theory is similar in many ways to the insights we find in the Sanskrit scriptures. The first modern statement of this theory came from a Belgian priest, Abbé Georges Henri Lemaître, who conjectured that the universe began at a specific point in time, at least ten billion years ago. At that time it was an incomprehensibly dense mass which was equal to the mass of the universe today. All matter that ever existed was stuffed into what Lemaître called a “primeval atom” or “cosmic egg” – a term, by the way, which closely translates the Sanskrit term brahmanda. In one of his most pregnant statements, Lemaître suggests that in this primordial state there was not even time or space. Then the cosmic egg exploded, sending matter and energy outward in every direction. I can imagine the Lord jiggling the kaleidoscope ten or twelve thousand million years ago to make the universe start expanding, as it still is today.

When Lemaître formulated his theory he thought that the universe would come to an end someday, since no new matter was being created. But astronomers after him decided that there were some other alternatives. “After the universe explodes,” they asked themselves, “mightn’t the gravitational attraction of all this matter gradually slow its expansion to a halt? Eventually all the galaxies would start drifting in towards the center again until finally all matter would rush into a single point, forming a new cosmic atom. Then it would explode again, starting the universe once more.” This theory of the oscillating universe, as it is called, is so close to the presentation of the Gita that I can almost see Sri Krishna smiling to himself and saying, “These fellows are beginning to catch on to my game.” Just as we have day followed by night, then day again, month after month, year after year, so too the day of Brahma follows the night of Brahma over and over again without end. In India you often find the Lord represented as a mischievous little boy, and I can imagine little Krishna here chewing bubble gum, blowing the bubble of the cosmos out of his mouth, and then sucking it back in again, over and over.

The other camp of astronomers, the steady-state adherents, has had a good look through the cosmic kaleidoscope too. According to them, there was no specific beginning to the universe. It did not decide to start itself up at 12:30 on a Friday afternoon billions and billions of years ago; it has always existed and it always will exist, without beginning, without end. Not only that, it is continuously coming into being, because new matter is always being created as the universe expands. It sounds surprising, but as one astronomer points out – from the other camp – whether we talk about Big Bang or steady state, matter has to come into existence somehow, and it is no more unlikely for it to come little by little than in one big explosion.

One gifted proponent of the steady-state theory, Sir Fred Hoyle, is a particular favorite of mine, because he is capable of great insight and yet uses language that any of us can understand. I had an opportunity to attend one of his lectures on the Berkeley campus; before the talk I was sitting right behind him and was delighted to see the friendly way he greeted everyone, from the professor emeritus to the young graduate student. He was completely at home with his subject and made a number of very penetrating remarks, some of which had a creative touch that reminded me of the Gita. Of course Sir Fred was not able to refer to the supreme goal of life, which is usually considered out of bounds for astronomers, so his lecture ended on a note of pessimism. But a few of his more positive remarks can help us understand the cosmology of the Gita.

Hoyle’s position is that all matter has a beginning, but the universe itself has neither beginning nor end. It is far greater than all these separate bits of matter of which it is composed. He also pointed out that the universe is everywhere. Substitute the word Lord for universe and you have the Gita; as Sri Krishna says earlier, the universe exists in him, so he is everywhere. Then, in a flash of insight, Hoyle suggests that there is a creative principle at work throughout the universe. Just as there is a nuclear field binding together atomic nuclei and a gravitational field binding together the stars and galaxies, so we can speak of a field of creation from which all matter comes. This creative source is similar to what the mystics call the Divine Ground underlying all that exists. An imaginative scientist tells us that matter comes forth from and returns to a creative field of forces; the mystic tells us that all creation comes forth from and returns to the Divine Ground of existence. It is a superb instance of how the principles of science converge on spiritual truths.

Recent evidence has led Hoyle to modify his position somewhat in an even more suggestive theory. In this new view, the mass of an object is not something independent of its environment; it is a function of the “mass field” of the universe as a whole. It’s not just Hoyle’s idea; other great scientists, including Einstein, have believed that the properties of the universe at any place are affected by the rest of the whole. Among other things, this means that mass can vary from place to place and from time to time. With rigorous mathematics, Hoyle points out that instead of talking about squeezing the whole mass of the universe into an infinitesimal point, we can talk just as precisely about a universe that has always been the same size, in which the total mass “cancels out” from time to time. The Big Bang still occurs, but it’s not really a creation out of nothing; the universe as a whole was never created and will never be destroyed.

Examples like this are helpful in bridging the chasm of misunderstanding that has developed between science and the spiritual tradition. The reason for this misunderstanding is not in scientific or spiritual principles, but in not knowing how to use the contributions of science to interpret the insights of the mystics. In samadhi we develop the higher mode of knowing called turiya, which is a kind of intuitive leap beyond the intellect to a unified state of consciousness in which knower and known become one. In this state there is no Sir Fred Hoyle searching the universe with his powerful instruments; Hoyle and the universe are one. Then we get a glimpse of the Lord of the immense, starry heavens at work, boring black holes, twirling Milky Ways, and setting the universe in motion as effortlessly as a college student sends a Frisbee spinning through the air.

SRI KRISHNA: 20. Beyond this formless state there is another, unmanifested Reality, which is eternal and is not dissolved when the cosmos is destroyed.

When the universe is withdrawn into the Lord at the end of a kalpa, there is no more earth, no more sea, no more galaxies, no more life; everything is dissolved back into the formless state. But Sri Krishna says, “I will still be there, for I am eternal.” It is a quiet way of telling us that we are immortal too. When the sun has burnt itself out, when the galaxy has disappeared into a black hole, Sri Krishna says, “I will still be here, and so will you, for I am your deepest Self.” In the Katha Upanishad we have the same declaration in beautifully exalted words:

The supreme Self is beyond name and form,

Beyond the senses, inexhaustible,

Without beginning, without end, beyond

Time, space, and causality, eternal,

Immutable. They who realize the Self

Are forever free from the jaws of death.

Do you see the prize that is being offered us by the Lord? It is inconceivable, beyond the grasp of the most brilliant intellect or the most fertile imagination. It is so great that no price would be too high to pay for it; compared to this supreme goal, any material comforts or honors the world can offer seem utterly insignificant.

In other words, the mystics all say, if you want illumination, do not ask about the price. Do not complain, do not begrudge what the Lord takes from you; when you begin to see this wisdom and love within you, nothing else will seem worthwhile. Illumination is only for those who are prepared to pay the highest price, who will never haggle. When we have difficulties with the palate, when we cannot get up early for meditation, we are haggling. When we act self-willed, we are trying to bargain with the Lord, which means we can only lose.

SRI KRISHNA: 21. Those who have realized the supreme goal of life know that I am unmanifested and unchanging. Having come home to me, they are never separate again.

Whether we were born and raised in America or Europe, in Africa or Asia, none of these places is our real home. We are all transients on earth, and to most sensitive people there comes now and then a strange feeling of homesickness for our permanent home, which Sri Krishna calls here mama dhama, the land of abiding joy and security within us. The main reason for restlessness, for the recurring impulse to travel, is this desire to find our real home. If we go to Iceland to find peace of mind, or try to escape to the “land of the kangaroo,” as the travel advertisements put it, what we are looking for will only slip through our fingers. We will come back tired and frustrated, and those of us who are sensitive will confess that what we really want is something that the world of change and limitation can never give us.

In meditation we travel inwards, beyond the frontiers of time and space, to discover our true home. This is a journey to the land of light. To visit this land we do not have to reserve tickets or get a passport or a visa; all we need to do is throw away our biggest piece of luggage, the ego. If we can extinguish our selfishness, if we can put an end to our self-will and separateness, then wherever we go, whether it is Iceland or Australia, we will find ourselves in the kingdom of heaven.

In describing our true nature, Sri Krishna uses the word akshara, ‘that which does not age, decay, or die.’ Our real Self can never die, but it is the nature of the body to change continuously until it comes to the last great change that is death. My mother, who lives with us as an important member of our spiritual family, has a special way of remembering this fact. When she came to stay with us in this country, she brought with her from India a supply of ashes. The customs official must have been a little puzzled; probably he could not have guessed their grim purpose. Every morning she puts a mark on her forehead with these ashes to remind everyone, including herself, that someday this is what our bodies will become. There is a very practical purpose behind many of these Hindu customs, and often it is to help us remember that the purpose of life is to learn to go beyond death. Every mystic worth his or her mantram will tell us not to waste a single day, not to postpone the practice of meditation even a single morning, but to start living today in such a way that we will be able to transcend the body when death takes place.

I remember once reading a story about a man who kept putting off taking to the spiritual life in order to have just a little more pleasure, or one more windfall of profit. Again and again he vowed that next week, or next month, or next year, he would change his life. Then one night he had a terrible dream: he dreamed he was about to die. There was no chance now to change his direction; time had passed him by, and all the plans he had had for making a new start in life could never be. It was a terrifying experience, and as he struggled to wake up and shake it off he vowed passionately not to put off the practice of meditation a single morning more. But when he tried to sit up, he could not make his body obey him. Then, wide awake at last, he realized that the dream was true.

We cannot afford to put off changing our habits, even for what appear to be very good reasons. If we are not in the best physical condition, meditation will improve our health. If we have emotional problems, either with others or with ourselves, in meditation we will be able to get beneath these problems at their source. Any difficulty, any problem can be an incentive for practicing meditation. No matter how many drawbacks we may have, no matter how many mistakes we may have made, the Lord will accept us joyfully. This is why in Hinduism he is called Mitra, our truest friend.

SRI KRISHNA: 22. This supreme Reality which pervades all existence, the true Self of all creatures, may be realized through undivided love.

This one short sentence gives away the secret of the spiritual life. The medieval Cloud of Unknowing says in very similar words: “By love may He be gotten and holden, by thought never.” The supreme Reality cannot be attained by any amount of reasoning, for He is one and indivisible, beyond all duality. But by loving Him “with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our strength,” we can come to live in Him completely and go beyond death here and now. And St. John of the Cross gives us the reason: we do not live in what we think; we live in what we love.

There is nothing abstract about this kind of love, nothing philosophical. Loving the Lord means loving those around us, in each of whom he is present as the innermost Self. The chief thing is somehow to increase our capacity to love. Here, at the beginning, everyone has the same question: how? I imagine people have been asking this question for as long as there have been spiritual teachers on earth. And the answer has been the same all along, in every spiritual tradition. There is a charming story about St. Francis of Sales, a very practical spiritual teacher in sixteenth-century France, that puts it beautifully. One of his disciples, a young bishop of the church, asked Francis how to attain perfection. Francis’s answer was straight from his Master: “Love the Lord with all your heart, and your neighbor more than yourself.”

These were scarcely new words to the bishop, and he was a little frustrated by them. “I don’t want to know what perfection is,” he objected; “I want to know how to attain it.”

“Oh,” said Francis. “Then you must love the Lord with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself.”

And that was all the bishop could get out of his friend, though he kept on asking several times more. Finally, seeing his frustration, Francis explained with words we can all remember: “Many people have asked me for a secret way to perfection, but there is no secret except undivided love of God, and the only way to gain that love is by loving. You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.”

Love grows by practice; there is no other way. Whenever you forgo something you want to do in order to give your time and help to those around you, you are increasing your capacity to love. Naturally, at the beginning, there will be reservations in your heart: “All right, we’ll go to the opera – but I still want to go to Gone With the Wind!” That is the time to ignore your reservations, put on a smile, and repeat the mantram instead. As you begin to forget yourself and see how much your partner is enjoying the opera, or how much your little girl is enjoying her fourth performance of Alice in Wonderland, your reservations will fade away. St. Teresa of Ávila says beautifully, “Amor saca amor”: love draws out love. By putting the people around you first, you are loving more, not only them but the Lord himself, in whom they and you are one.

SRI KRISHNA: 23. There are two paths, Arjuna, which the soul may follow at the time of death. One leads to rebirth and the other to liberation.

24. The northern path, the path of light, of fire, of day, of the bright fortnight, leads selfless souls to the supreme goal.

25. The southern path, the path of smoke, of night, of the dark fortnight, leads the others to the light of the moon and to rebirth.

These three verses borrow symbolic language from the Upanishads to describe two paths which the soul travels after death. The meaning of these verses is rather obscure, and scholars have had some difficulty in interpreting these two paths. One is called uttarayana, ‘the northern path,’ and the other is dakshinayana, ‘the southern path.’ The usual interpretation is that the northern path is a reference to the six months during which the sun appears to move across the northern hemisphere of the sky, and the southern path is a reference to the six months of the sun’s southern passage. This is the literal explanation, but for me it is much more practical to interpret these paths in terms of the destiny we choose for ourselves.

Every one of us – rich or poor, educated or not so well educated – has to choose continually between what leads to personal, private satisfaction and what leads to the welfare of the whole. But while most of us can appreciate the ideal of living for others, we still do not know how to translate this ideal into our own lives. As long as we are self-centered, we are not even likely to see what is in another’s best interest, and often we make the wrong choices unwittingly. Our problem has a very simple diagnosis: clouded vision. We have cataracts of self-will that keep us from seeing life as it really is. Even with the best of intentions we may do things that disrupt personal relationships, and then we give up and retire into our own seemingly safe pursuits. But clouded vision is not an incurable disease. It is possible for us to clear our eyes, and as we do so, we will be able to distinguish more and more surely these paths of light and darkness.

When I was growing up in my village, I heard from my grandmother many stories that help to explain difficult verses like these in the Bhagavad Gita. One story, from the Mahabharata, was of a patriarch called Bhishma. Bhishma was a splendid spiritual teacher, but unfortunately he was a teacher to the Kauravas, the forces of darkness, and though he tried to win them away from violence, they would not listen to him. Unable to understand his teaching, they ignored his warnings and went to war against Arjuna and his brothers at Kurukshetra, the very battle in which the dialogue of the Gita unfolds. Bhishma was mortally wounded in this battle. Pierced by many arrows, he lay in agony for fifty-eight days – “on a bed of arrows,” as the epic poet says. Despite this terrible suffering, however, he kept his body alive through a great effort of will until the sun had crossed the equinox from the southern hemisphere to the northern, so that he could shed his body during the northern path of the sun, the time considered auspicious for death according to ancient Hindu tradition. He was prepared to suffer any amount of pain in order to attain the path of the sun, the path of light and unity.

My grandmother never read a book on the Gita, but all these things were a natural part of her daily life. She was a simple Hindu woman with complete, unshakable faith in Sri Krishna’s message, and for her, to believe something was to live in accord with it. When she was stricken with a fatal illness at the age of seventy-seven, which is a ripe old age in India, it was the dark period of the sun’s path, the six months of dakshinayana. In spite of our doctor’s prediction that her death was imminent, my grandmother, who had utter faith in Sri Krishna, bravely kept her body functioning until the period of uttarayana came. Her deep faith in the Lord enabled her to wait until the remaining months of the southern path were finished. Then, as soon as uttarayana began and the sun entered its northern path, she gave up her body. It showed us all that anyone with great love for the Lord, who lives not for herself but for the welfare of those around her, has a deeper will to sustain her and support her.

We, too, should count no cost too high for attaining the realization of God. When we start training our senses, most of us who have not had any experience of this discipline suffer acutely. But we should cheerfully put up with any feelings of deprivation, for the time will come when training the senses is a source not of suffering but of joy.

In this verse, uttarayana is called the path of light; dakshinayana is the path of darkness. Those who let their senses run amuck, who follow the call of self-will, are traveling on the dark path. Often such people quickly lose their vitality and fall victim to sickness; and in the latter part of life they find themselves left in the worst state any human being can endure – having all the strong desires they had when young but no capacity to indulge them; having fierce self-will and no one left near them on whom it can be imposed. Feeling life to be desolate, they wait for death to come and relieve them of their burden. That is the path of darkness. There are millions of people treading this path because they cannot bear to pay the price of suffering that comes in changing habits; they cannot face the suffering that comes in reducing self-will. This is the price that is asked. If we remember this interpretation of the path of light and the path of darkness, these three verses can provide deep motivation for the practice of meditation.

SRI KRISHNA: 26. These two paths, the light and the dark, are said to be eternal, leading some to liberation and others to rebirth.

In the Hindu scriptures, there are said to be seven realms of consciousness, each of which is associated with a particular center along the spinal column. In most human beings, who have not made a disciplined effort to arouse spiritual awareness, the evolutionary energy called kundalini circulates among the three lowest centers. These are the centers of physical consciousness, connected with the functions of the body. It is when kundalini rises to the higher levels of consciousness, the fourth center and beyond, that you begin to see the light spoken of in this verse.

Along with this vision of light comes a greater capacity to see life clearly, because every experience in the depths of meditation has its effect on daily life. This is the test of any so-called spiritual experience: does it have a beneficial effect on your conduct and character? If at any time, especially during meditation or at night, you experience a vision of light or have some similar experience, the following day there must be an immediate benefit. Old inhibitions will have fallen away; a long-standing conflict in personal relationships may be resolved; you will have a much clearer perception of the unity of life. This is the test. If such changes do not take place, I would say your experience has not been a valid one. But if these changes do occur, then there is no mistaking your progress.

When you have been leading an ordinary life for many years, for a long time you will have no perception of the light within. If you manage to rouse kundalini to the fourth center, there will seem to be only a few dim rays of light. Actually, the mystics say, the room is full of light; it is only that you haven’t yet learned to see inside. As Cardinal Newman puts it, you are still “blinded by the garish day.” You cannot yet see clearly, but you are beginning to make out the outline of things. You now have a consuming enthusiasm for meditation, and you are beginning to perceive the unity underlying life. It is not enough now to be concerned for your family’s welfare alone; you must expand your love to a much wider circle. You cannot help grieving when a child in Africa is hungry, and you feel a sense of loss even at the death of the smallest creature – not out of sentimental attachment, but out of a deep awareness of unity.

Slowly, as kundalini begins to travel upwards towards the fifth center, at the level of the throat, you begin to see more and more clearly. At last, after many long years of intense spiritual struggle, kundalini reaches the center between the eyebrows, the center of Krishna-consciousness or Christ-consciousness. Then you see quite clearly. As St. Paul tells us in those wonderful lines from Corinthians, “Now we see as through a glass darkly; but then we shall see face to face.” The Hindu scriptures call this state savikalpa samadhi, a state of deep concentration in which we have the vision of our chosen spiritual ideal. After that we will see the Lord present everywhere, which means we can never bring ourselves to harm any living creature.

When, in a few very rare men and women, kundalini finally rises to the seventh center, there is nothing but light, a light that can never be seen by physical eyes. This is the complete unitive state, called nirvikalpa samadhi. The light is so bright it is like the direct light of the sun, which we cannot bear to look at lest our eyes be burned or our vision lost forever. This is why it is so important on the spiritual path for us to strengthen our will, train our senses, and master our passions; otherwise we cannot bear to look at even a small ray of this light, let alone the dazzling radiance of samadhi. Only the rare person who has prepared himself or herself over many decades or many lives can withstand this stupendous experience, which is the goal of spiritual evolution.

This ascent through the seven centers of consciousness is the bright path, the path of the sun, which is also called devayana, ‘the path of the gods,’ ‘the divine path.’ It is this path we set out on when we make the choice to practice meditation and turn our backs on petty, personal pursuits. The Mundaka Upanishad describes very precisely those who travel by this path to reach the supreme state:

But those who are pure in heart, who practice

Meditation and conquer their senses

And passions, shall attain the eternal Self,

The source of all light and source of all life.

On the other side is the dark path, the path of the moon. The moon has no light of its own; it has only borrowed light. When they stood on the moon, our astronauts said, the earth looked beautiful but the moon was cold and bleak, completely devoid of life, altogether unlike the shimmering image we have of it in earthly skies. In the Gita, the path of the moon symbolizes the path of greater and greater darkness. To me this refers not to astrological phenomena but to successive stages in life. When we dwell on ourselves, indulge ourselves more and more – eating what is not nourishing, eating too much, growing addicted to alcohol or to drugs – in the long run, as Jesus says, the whole body becomes filled with darkness. Health goes, and health is the light of the body, the very basis of beauty. Those who do not have the will to control their senses soon lose not only their health but their physical beauty, too.

Look at those who pursue the life of pleasure – people who are often envied for their wealth or youth, as in the song my friend Jeff sings, “If I had his money, I would do things my way.” The Gita would say, “If you had his money and did things your way, you would probably just fall sick.” In our twenties, we can get away temporarily with quite a lot – if we want evidence of the mercy of the Lord, all we have to do is look at our past and see what we have got away with. But we are not going to be in our twenties for the rest of our lives. Finally, as the Buddhist scriptures are so fond of telling us, we must all grow old. Then, after the ebullience and vitality of youth have passed, we may well be left feeling rootless, without any direction in life at all. We can still be vitally alive even in our last years, but not when we use our body for pleasure or cling to it for security. Then the body will lose its strength far more quickly than is necessary.

The more self-willed we are, the more darkness there will be inside. Always in the dark, we will always be insecure, not knowing how to relate to people or how to be at home with others. Not knowing how to love or how to be loved: that is the path of darkness. Just as in meditation we go from light to more light and finally to light that is infinite, so in living a selfish life we go from darkness to increasing darkness – not only on the physical level, but on the emotional level also.

As self-will increases, rigidity increases too. Rigid people cannot change habits; they have to have their way always. Most tragically, they cannot even understand how other people can have different ways and different conditioning. Without this understanding, how can they be patient? After thirty, it becomes increasingly difficult for the impatient person to learn patience, increasingly difficult for almost all of us to change our ways. There is no statement more poignant to me than an older person saying, “I can’t change.” I hear this often, and not only from older people, either. I always reply that everybody can change. It is going to be more and more difficult as we grow set in our ways, but no matter how long we may have spent on the path of darkness, we can always cross over to the path of light.

SRI KRISHNA: 27. Once you have known these two paths, Arjuna, you can never be deluded again. But to attain this knowledge, your perseverance must be unfailing.

In Sanskrit the delusion of separateness, symbolized by the path of darkness, is called lila, the play of the Lord. It’s not a play that takes place somewhere off Broadway; the entire universe is lila, and it is the Lord, simultaneously wearing countless billions of masks, who plays all the parts.

The tragic part of this play is that all of us have forgotten that we are in costume. We have been playing our little drama for so many billions of years that we have forgotten who we really are. Little by little we have become completely entangled in the part we are playing. This is the delusion of Maya. It is only when our ego is dissolved and our self-will extinguished that we make the remarkable discovery that we, along with everybody else, have been participating in a cosmic theatrical production, sometimes playing our role well and sometimes botching our lines completely.

Some time ago, for example, we saw Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a film version of The Taming of the Shrew. Both of them played their parts with enthusiasm, and I greatly enjoyed the crucial scene when Petruchio finally bends a bedraggled Kate to his self-will:

“Kate, I say it is the moon that shines.”

“I know it is the moon.”

“Nay, then, you lie; it is the blessed sun.”

“Then, God be blessed, it is the blessed sun.”

It was all very convincingly done. But I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if Richard Burton kept on thinking he was Petruchio after the scene was shot and they both went home; I don’t think he would have got so far. Yet that is just what we do in life; we forget all about our costumes and makeup and keep on acting the same old part twenty-four hours a day.

Tragically, the drama we are acting out isn’t always a comedy; all too often it’s more like Othello or King Lear. Try watching Othello with real detachment; then, when Othello is raving in jealousy, you’ll want to climb up on the stage, tap him on the shoulder, and say, “That’s just a handkerchief you’re getting so excited about; you can get four of them for a dollar at Penney’s. It’s your imagination that is driving you into a frenzy.” Even in life, that is all that is behind most of our misunderstandings. At breakfast our husband or wife makes some innocent remark that we don’t appreciate and in a few minutes, because of what we imagine he or she was saying, both of us are so agitated that we cannot even finish our toast. Do you see the absurdity of it? We are getting indigestion not over what was said or even what was meant, but over our idea of what the other person really meant. That is why the Buddha says so penetratingly, “The problem is not with the other person; the problem is with your mind.” When our mind is calm we can see clearly, and we can act all our parts in life with consummate artistry. This is a very refreshing change of perspective. I think it was Noel Coward who was asked for the secret of good acting. He replied, “Speak your lines clearly and don’t bump into people.” When all is said and done, when you can get through life without bumping into people, you have managed a great deal.

Once I began to see through this game of lila, I used to go into my classroom very much as if I were going onto the stage. I would put on my professorial robes, put on a suitably intellectual look, and say, “Now you’re Eknath Easwaran the professor of English,” and I would go into my classes and give them all a really good show. Not only that, I used to do all the paperwork in just the same spirit. But when the last class was over and it was time to go home, I would hang up my professorial role right there with the robes, and step into my next role like one of those quick-change artists you see in the circus. There is a lot of satisfaction in this, and once you master it you have gone a long way towards mastering the art of living.

SRI KRISHNA: 28. There is merit in studying the scriptures, in selfless service, in giving of oneself, and in going against self-will, but the practice of meditation carries you beyond all these to the supreme abode of the Lord of Love.

Meditation is the very basis of the spiritual life. It is meditation that enables us to understand the teachings of the mystics and apply them in our daily life; it is meditation that gives us the immense power to stay patient and forgiving when all our conditioning is crying out for an eye or a tooth. There is nothing exciting about meditation, nothing glamorous, and I have never presented it as anything but a lot of hard, hard work. But when the alarm goes off in the morning, even in the dead of winter when the bed is warm and the blankets don’t want to let them go, my friends get up for their meditation with eagerness and enthusiasm every day, rain or shine, well or not so well, because they know now from their own experience that meditation is the key to the art of living. This is the theme of the next chapter.