SRI KRISHNA: 1. Because of your faith, I shall tell you the most profound of secrets: obtaining both jnana and vijnana, you will be free from all evil.

A few years ago, at a Halloween party we gave for the children at our ashram, my two nieces Meera and Geetha made me up to look like a maharaja. It didn’t take much in the way of props; most of the disguise was a silk sari tied into a turban, with a fancy crest which my wife had picked up for ten cents in some bargain basement. When I went to show my mother – who still hasn’t figured out what Halloween is all about – I asked her playfully, “Well, do I look like a maharaja?” With great love in her eyes she answered simply, “You are a maharaja.” It wasn’t just figurative language. Raja means king, and raja yoga is meditation, the ‘royal path,’ because by mastering meditation we become masters of our lives.

This chapter opens with the same theme with which we opened this volume: jnana and vijnana. These are the fruits of meditation. Jnana is knowledge – not of the natural world, but of the unity of life. Vijnana is the artful capacity to apply this knowledge to the problems of daily living. Sri Ramakrishna says that intellectual knowledge is like knowing that you can get a fire from two sticks; jnana is actually making the fire. But vijnana is cooking rice on the fire, eating it, and being strengthened by its nourishment.

In other words, jnana and vijnana together make up the art of living. This art is not a luxury; it is a dire necessity. Not long before he died, Arnold Toynbee, one of the most perceptive historians of any age, observed with deceptive simplicity that the main reason our civilization has made so much progress in science and technology is that a lot of people have applied themselves to science and technology. That’s all; there is no inherent reason. We have applied ourselves to the “arts” of war, so now we can kill everyone on earth several times over. We can manipulate genes; we can transplant vital organs from one body to another; we can send coded messages into outer space so that anyone out there receiving these messages will be intrigued about who we are. We can do all these things because a lot of people have tried to do such things, over a period of time. And Toynbee adds, if we remain ignorant of the meaning of our lives, if we can’t even live in peace together as individuals or as nations, it is only because we have been writing all our entries on the other side of the ledger.

There is no need to get despondent over this; it is only a matter of lack of balance. There is nothing wrong with science or technology. The problem is simply that they cannot give themselves a sense of direction. No amount of studying the physical world can ever give us knowledge of spiritual values. It is we human beings who must give direction to what we investigate, what we invent, what we apply; otherwise we are racing along at an impressive rate with no one at the wheel. If we want to change the situation in which we find ourselves today, Toynbee is telling us, we have to get behind the wheel. If we gave even a little of the attention we now give science to what Sri Krishna calls here brahmavidya, the ‘supreme science’ of Self-knowledge, most of the problems that threaten our world could be banished once and for all.

Here it is interesting to look at a current area of investigation in the neurosciences, the divided brain. The two sides of the brain seem to have very different functions. The left half, which is highly analytical, tends to dominate personality; it specializes in intellectual skills like speaking, writing, reasoning, and mathematics. This is the half with which researchers feel most comfortable: they at least understand what it is good for, even if they don’t know how it does what it does or why. But the right half of the brain is much more of a mystery, because its contribution is not to intellectual capacities but to ill-­defined realms like creativity, intuition, and the appreciation of beauty. However, though we do not know much about how the brain functions in these areas, or what else the right half of the brain does which we haven’t yet discovered, virtually everyone agrees that you can’t get along well in life with half a brain. If you have spent all your life putting muscles on the left side of the brain, you may be able to eat and sleep and work crossword puzzles and carry on an intelligent conversation, but to be a whole person you need to develop the right side of the brain as well.

This is what happens in the practice of meditation. Meditation is the integration of consciousness, and one of the many physiological developments that take place naturally as our meditation deepens is that all the activities of the brain begin to come into balance. In some of the Sanskrit scriptures these developments are said to take place with the rise of kundalini, or evolutionary energy, through the spinal column towards the brain. When, after many years of sincere effort in meditation, kundalini finally reaches the crown of the head, the billions of cells in the brain all burst into integrated activity. This is samadhi, the stupendous climax of meditation, and it brings about a complete transformation of personality. Afterwards there is a never-ending flow of creative power for solving the problems around us, and the immense endurance not to rest until a lasting solution can be found.

To take just one example of this approach, look at the problem of violence. From international organizations down to local communities, everyone is concerned about the spread of violence, but it never seems to occur to anyone that this is a problem that can actually be solved. Everywhere the assumption seems to be, “We just have to learn to live with it.” In my language, that means we will only learn to die with it. To prevent robbery and assault, we are told to put more locks on our doors, to train our dogs to bite even worse than they bark, to install burglar alarms that will upset the whole neighborhood, and to carry harmful chemicals in our pockets or purses for spraying would-be attackers. All these are just palliatives; they do not touch the causes of violence at all. I am not denying that there are some first-aid measures, such as gun control legislation, that should be put into effect as soon as possible. But the root cause of violence is separateness, and until we do something about separateness, violence is going to increase unchecked no matter what else we do.

Here the solution of the mystics is daring in its simplicity: we can show, through our own example, how to build rich, steadfast personal relationships everywhere we go. After all, this is what gives life meaning: not money, or prestige, or power, or even pleasure, but plenty of deep relationships that cannot be shaken by any change in fortune. If you think it is farfetched, just try it. Start with your home and begin to rebuild your neighborhood. Get to know your neighbors; make your home the center of your life. Don’t go to some other neighborhood every night for entertainment or sit alone with the television; go out for walks with your friends, share your porch with your neighbors on summer evenings, do things with your children and the children of those around you. It is when all the houses on your block are separate Bastilles of loneliness – or worse, just empty shells – that a neighborhood begins to be plagued by violence. When you live in a community of trust, full of friendly relationships and human activity, problems like violence will not arise at all. Not only that, they will be replaced by a way of life that is so much more satisfying that people will look back on these days of separateness and fear as a nightmare from which they have awakened into day.

SRI KRISHNA: 2. This royal knowledge, this royal secret, is the greatest purifier. Supreme and imperishable, it is a joy to seek and can be directly experienced.

Many years ago I was taken to the library of someone who had collected almost all the books ever published on meditation in any language. I had never seen so many books on meditation in my life, and I told my host, “You must meditate regularly.”

He coughed apologetically. “Actually,” he explained, “what with all these books to study, I don’t have time for meditation.” Then he asked politely, “You must be familiar with most of these titles?”

I, too, coughed apologetically. “No,” I said, “I don’t have time to read many books on meditation. I use the time to meditate.”

It is not enough to read about meditation, or talk about meditation, or do research on meditation; if you want Self-realization, you have to learn to meditate. And there is only one way to learn to meditate – through trying to meditate. Wasn’t there someone who said he would never get into water unless he had learned to swim?

Meditation is often presented as a pleasant experience in which you hear birds singing and see flowers blooming while you float along in a wonderland. Actually, floating in a wonderland is just the opposite of meditation. In order to learn to meditate, you have to put in a great deal of work. For a month or two the person who has just taken to meditation will tell you all about how grand it is. But it is only fair to point out that, once you really get started, this initial surge of enthusiasm is going to wane. To guard against such ups and downs, I would make several suggestions.

First, it is very helpful to meditate with others. A group of friends meditating along the same lines can meditate together and draw support from one another. As Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am present in the midst of them.” It is especially helpful if husband and wife can meditate together, even if it takes some rearranging of schedules. Any family in which both partners meditate is blessed, and children growing up in such a household will have a legacy of security on which they can draw throughout their lives.

Second, be very regular about your meditation. There is a saying in India that if you miss meditation just one morning, it takes seven mornings to make it up. You can see that if you miss seven mornings, you have a big job on your hands. So please do not ever skip your meditation, no matter what the temptation. If you are ill, or if you are feeling exceptionally well and think you don’t need any meditation that day, that is just the time you should meditate. The ego is such a clever customer that it waits for the slightest opportunity to regain any territory it may have lost.

You can make time for meditation anywhere. I have sometimes had to meditate on the train or even in the faculty lounge, and on board ship on my way to this country I used to have my meditation on the sports deck, which is a remarkably quiet place early in the morning when the games enthusiasts are still asleep. If you can always meditate at the same time of day, too, you will find that helps a great deal. The mind becomes used to behaving itself when the time for meditation comes around. If you are still asleep, it will start to nag at you and say, “It’s six o’clock; if you don’t get up now you’re not going to have time for breakfast,” and when you sit down to meditate, the mind will gradually resign itself to a little discipline for half an hour.

Third, it is very important to practice the disciplines related to meditation, such as repeating the mantram and putting the welfare of those around us first. These are elaborated on in the Introduction in my eight-point program for spiritual living. Meditation taps a source of tremendous power, and the other seven points in this program play a vital role in harnessing this power so that it can be used wisely for the benefit of all.

Fourth, check all your living habits very carefully – your food, your sleep, your exercise, everything. To make steady progress in meditation, you need to be as careful as an athlete during training – eating only good, nourishing food in appropriate quantities, getting the amount of sleep you need rather than more or less, and getting plenty of physical exercise. Meditation is turning inwards, and it needs to be balanced by plenty of physical activity. This body of ours is meant for motion, and one of the best ways to see that it gets it is by walking whenever you get the chance: to work, to the post office, before breakfast, after dinner. A long, fast walk is not only excellent exercise; it is relaxing and invigorating, especially when it is combined with the mantram. For those who are young, hard physical work is good too, especially when it is at something that benefits those around you.

Finally, I would emphasize the need to be with people and to contribute to life around you. When you are meditating regularly, you need the counterpoise of being with family and friends. As you begin to taste the security and joy within, you may develop the tendency to bask in this inward state. From my own experience, I would say that this is just the time to turn your attention outwards. Unless we maintain close relationships with those around us, there is the danger of getting caught inside, locked within the lonely prison of the ego. To learn to live in harmony with others, to feel at home with everyone, we need the close ties of a wide circle of family and friends. None of us can afford to retire into ourselves and do our own thing if we want to become aware of the unity of life.

After singing the praises of meditation, I would like to give a few precautions now concerning its practice. For one, make sure that you are concentrating fully on the words of the inspirational passage and not letting them slip away from your grasp as meditation deepens. Following the passage is rather like flying a kite, carefully letting the string pass through your fingers as you watch the kite become just a speck in the sky. If you do not pay enough attention to the string, which is the passage, it will slip from your grasp and you will lose the kite, which is concentration. So if you find stray words, or odd sounds, or lights and colors trying to coax your attention away, please ignore them and give your attention more and more to the words of the inspirational piece. It is important, right from the first days of meditation, to develop the habit of not letting distractions get the better of you.

Of course, the mind is going to wander somewhat in spite of your best efforts. The one thing necessary is to keep bringing the mind back whenever distractions disturb you. As St. Francis of Sales points out, “And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back and place it again in our Lord’s presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.” After many years, your concentration is going to take you into the depths of the unconscious mind. What you will be attempting to do then is to enter the unconscious while remaining completely conscious. At that time, even if you can remain awake in this uncharted area, you will not know how to walk. That is where the inspirational passage serves as a lifeline, helping you travel the vast realms of the unconscious in security. There are certain areas in the mind which resemble an Alice’s Wonderland of fears and fancies, but as long as you keep the words of the passage as your lifeline, you will be able to discriminate between the facts and fictions of the unconscious.

Another common problem to guard against is sleep in meditation. Sleepiness is bound to come as your meditation progresses, so it is good to prepare for it now. As concentration deepens, the neuromuscular system relaxes. One sign of relaxation is a very happy look on the face; then, the next thing you know, your head may be on your chest. Often people are not aware that they have gone to sleep in meditation, and sometimes they continue in this state for as much as fifteen minutes. To avoid this, draw yourself away from your back support into a firm, erect posture the moment you feel sleepy. If that isn’t enough, open your eyes and repeat your mantram – Jesus, Jesus, Jesus or Rama, Rama, Rama. But when you do this, do not let your eyes wander; your mind will wander as well. Choose some spot in front of you that helps to focus your attention – it might be a picture of Sri Krishna, or Jesus, or the Compassionate Buddha – and let your eyes rest on that while you repeat your mantram. After a while the wave of sleep will pass, and you can close your eyes again and continue with the words of the passage.

It is important to keep on memorizing new passages for use in meditation; then the words will always be fresh with meaning. The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi is a beautiful one, but if you try using nothing else for several months, it will become so familiar that the mind will not be sufficiently challenged and may move through the words mechanically. There is a wide range of inspirational passages from the world’s great spiritual traditions, some of which I have mentioned in the Introduction to this volume.

In India we have a peculiar yellow fruit called the amla which is a great favorite with children. When I first bit into an amla, I thought there must be some mistake; it was so sour that I wanted to spit it out. But my grandmother told me to keep chewing. I made a wry face but kept on chewing, and slowly it began to get sweeter. Finally it became so sweet that I asked if she had any more. Meditation is like this amla fruit. At first it is not exactly pleasant, but if you stick with it and never let anything come in the way, the time for meditation will become the most precious part of the day.

SRI KRISHNA: 3. But those who have no faith in the supreme law of life do not find me, O scorcher of the foe; they return to the world, passing from death to death.

The word used for faith here is shraddha – literally, ‘that which is placed in the heart.’ Shraddha is what we believe will bring us the fulfillment that all of us are seeking – not what we think will bring us fulfillment, but what we really believe in our heart of hearts. In this sense, everyone has faith in something. Just look at people who are devoted to skiing, who love the challenge of hurtling down precipitous slopes at top speed on two little pieces of fiberglass. These are people with a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm and nothing to do with it. They need an outlet for all this energy, so they jump at the most difficult challenge they can find. But no less tremendous than their energy is their faith – that skiing has the power to make them happy. All of us have our own equivalent of skiing, whatever we think will bring us lasting joy. The tragedy is that wherever this faith is in something outside us – money, or drugs, or personal pleasure, or the thrill of the dangerous and the unknown – it is inescapable that someday we are going to be let down. So the Buddha warns pointedly, “Don’t ever put your faith in what is changing; it has to fail you in time.”

One of the most tragic examples of misplaced shraddha is substance abuse. A CBS documentary in 1986 reported that 60 percent of the world’s illegal drugs are used in the United States, reflecting the frightening rise in cocaine addiction. But alcoholism may still be the country’s biggest drug problem. Over twelve million Americans have symptoms of alcoholism, and more than 57 percent of adult Americans report that they are “current users.” The human being has to put faith in something, and these are cases where shraddha has got locked in a bottle or a packet of powder. It is especially tragic with young people, most of whom, I feel, turn to drugs when they look around them and find no channels where the natural idealism of youth can flow. We should never look down on such people. All of us are searching restlessly for fulfillment, usually in the wrong places, and the thirst for spirits, as William James said, is really a spiritual thirst for the living waters of life.

The Gita takes an extremely positive approach towards this problem. It says that even though our faith may not be in something that is particularly relevant to living, the very fact that we are capable of such faith means that there is hope. Once our faith is changed, we can become as enthusiastic a spiritual aspirant as we were a skier or world traveler. For the skiers, all I have to tell them is, “Your kind of skiing isn’t worthy of such faith. How would you like the challenge of skiing up the slope?” This is meditation: no chair lift, no towline, no source of momentum at all. You must ski uphill, against all that is easy, against every impulse that says, “Go your own way; do your own thing.” Anyone who can respond to a challenge like this has the capacity to transform shraddha, and when shraddha is transformed, the alcoholic may emerge a stronger person than the teetotaler, because he or she has access to tremendous drives which now can be brought under control.

SRI KRISHNA: 4. I pervade the entire universe in my unmanifested form. All creatures find their existence in me, but I am not limited by them.

5–6. Behold my divine mystery! These creatures do not really dwell in me, and though I bring them forth and support them, I am not confined within them; they move in me as the winds move in every direction in space.

This is a paradox which lies at the very heart of the mystical experience. The Lord is present in every living creature, in every atom, yet he is in no way limited by any of these forms. In the climax of meditation, when we have the tremendous experience of union with the Lord, we too will be lost in wonder that he whom the galaxies cannot contain, whom the entire cosmos cannot contain, is contained in your heart and mine.

This is the mystery of Maya. How is it that this hand of mine appears solid and brown? Physicists would tell me it is not solid and brown at all, but a pattern of countless tiny nodes of energy, like the swirl of winds in the air. If I see it as having a fixed shape and color and call it my hand, that is just because of the inherent limitations in my perception. In other words, its shape and other characteristics are not in the world outside me; they are in the very fabric of thinking and perceiving. In the great leap of insight that comes in samadhi, the mystics tell us that all this world of names and forms is nothing but the Lord. As Shankara says so beautifully, “Names and forms are like gold bangles and bracelets; the Lord is like the gold.”

Towards the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare uses the language of great poetry to convey a similar idea:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were but spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself –

Yea, all which it inherit – shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Aldous Huxley, who was associated for many years with Swami Prabhavananda in this country, commented: “Prospero is here enunciating the doctrine of Maya. The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of apprehending. Our business is to wake up. . . . We must continually be on our watch for ways in which to enlarge our consciousness. We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it. . . . One must find a way of being in this world while not being of it. One must find a way of living in time without being completely swallowed up in time.”

Sometimes, to remind him that he is not the body, I tease my friend Jim by telling him there is no Jim there at all; it is only an energy process walking down the road. The truth is that until I have the direct experience that he is really the Atman and the body I see is just Maya, there is a Jim there. As long as we live in Maya, we have to treat these names and forms as real. But we should never forget, even for an instant, that under all these disguises there is no one but the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 7. At the end of the age these creatures return to unmanifested matter; at the beginning of the next cycle I send them forth again.

8. Again and again I bring forth these myriad forms and subject them to the laws of prakriti.

9. None of these actions bind me, Arjuna; I am unattached to them, so they do not disturb my nature.

According to the Hindu scriptures, the universe is created and dissolved over and over again. In the interregnum, everything in the universe rests in a primordial state without any differentiation, without time or space. But in the instant of creation this equilibrium is disturbed, setting loose the long chain of action and reaction in which all the elements and forces of the universe become manifested.

The personal aspect of this is that in each of these cycles, the whole of creation is said to be evolving towards the unity of life. When, after billions of years, we come into the human context, the Hindu scriptures say we must come back over and over again until we learn to go beyond the biological conditioning of animal life and realize that beneath all these forms of creation, we are all one in the Lord.

In other words, according to this view, all of us are going to be saved. Sooner or later, even if we do everything possible to put it off for billions of years, every one of us must reach the highest state of consciousness. If we drag our heels, the very painfulness of our mistakes and our separateness will slowly force us to change our ways. That is what evolution means on the human level. Just as a species blindly evolves certain characteristics by exposure to the world around it, we are constantly shaping ourselves by the consequences of everything we do. This is the law of karma, which states unequivocally that any suffering we cause to other people must come back to us. It is an inescapable consequence of the fact that all of us are one. That is why it grieves me so deeply to see anybody treating another person harshly; it’s like hitting yourself with your own hand.

In the traditional classification, there are three types of karma. The first may be called “cash” karma, because it is all over with immediately. John hits Joe, and Jim hits John; there is no suspense, and John’s karma comes to a fast end. The second kind is more painful; it is the consequences we reap from past actions. “Others fear what will happen tomorrow,” says the Sufi mystic Ansari of Herat; “I fear what happened yesterday.” The Compassionate Buddha describes this kind of karma as an arrow we have already shot: it is on its way, and the best we can do is accept the suffering that comes from it and learn from that suffering not to shoot that arrow again.

The third type of karma is that which we are about to create right now, in the immediate present. This is karma over which we have some control. If we can’t do anything about the arrows we have shot in the past, we can at least refrain from shooting more arrows in the future. Often we find ourselves in a situation where our passions have been roused, our anger is ready to burst, and all we can think of is retaliation. The arrow rests on the bowstring and the bow is drawn, ready to shoot. But, says the Buddha, we do not need to let the arrow go; the choice is up to us. That is the time to repeat the mantram, relax our hold, and put the arrow safely away.

Here it is that the Hindu mystics make a really daring proposal. We do not need to let ourselves be buffeted towards the Lord by our own karma over millions and millions of years; we can take our evolution into our own hands. That is precisely what meditation is for, and great mystics like Sri Ramakrishna or St. Catherine of Siena are really pioneers in consciousness who have gone millions of years beyond us in human evolution. Patanjali, the great teacher of raja yoga in ancient India, tells us that any of us can make this great leap; the capacity is within us all. We are all born with enough vital energy for the journey, and a little extra to play around with while we get used to the car. The choice is ours what we do with this energy. Some of my friends tell me that in their earlier days, they used to leave their house in Berkeley early Monday morning fully intending to drive straight to New York City. They would stop at the grocery store for some orange juice, then go to a friend’s house and listen to a record or two, then remember to get some incense on Telegraph Avenue, and by the time it was nightfall they would still not have got out of town. But there are some people – St. Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi – who want so badly to get where they are going that they don’t spend any time on side trips. They put all their energy into the practice of the spiritual life and do everything they can to learn not to repeat the mistakes that all of us make. Every one of us can choose to do this, and the harder we try, the farther we will go.

In the Sanskrit scriptures there is a vivid dramatization of this immense leap across evolution into the unitive state. The story is about Markandeya, the boy whose devotion to Lord Shiva rescued him from death in his sixteenth year. In this story, with all the daring of a teenager, he asks Sri Krishna to explain to him the secret of Maya. It’s a question which allows for some rather imaginative answers. As soon as the words are out of the boy’s mouth the Lord disappears, and in one great roar all the seven seas rush in around Markandeya and rise up to the clouds in flood, the way they did in Genesis before the world was made. Everything is engulfed in the waters, not only the earth but the sun and all the starry firmament. And Markandeya, the boy who had gone beyond death, floats on these cosmic waters for billions of years, evolving from lifeless matter up the long ladder of animate existence.

Suddenly he bursts into the human context. Life after life of selfish existence passes; he begins to shed all his selfishness and develops great devotion to the Lord. Then he sees in the distance a wonderful little baby, dark like the monsoon cloud, lying on a banyan leaf on that endless expanse of water. In a flash of recognition, Markandeya recognizes the baby Krishna, playing on the waters just as any other baby does, with one of his toes tucked into his little rosebud of a mouth.

A thrill of unutterable joy runs through Markandeya at the thought of lifting and cradling in his arms this divine infant, whose playfield is the universe. But all these eons have been just one gentle breathing out of the baby Krishna, one day of Brahma; now he begins to breathe in again, and Markandeya is sucked inside through that tiny mouth into the body of the Lord, where he sees in wonderment all the galaxies of the universe suspended in the cosmic night. Outside there is again nothing but the primeval waters; matter and energy, time and space, everything is inside while creation rests.

The experience must have lasted for billions of years. Then baby Krishna breathes out again. Markandeya is thrown out, and he is so overcome that he embraces little baby Krishna in adoration and tries to find words to express his gratitude for this vision of the Lord’s Maya. But the baby disappears in his arms, and Markandeya finds himself back in his own ashram seated in meditation. It’s a magnificent rendering of what can happen in samadhi, when we see that all the vast sweep of evolution is only the play of the Lord.

SRI KRISHNA: 10. Under my watchful eye the laws of nature take their course. Thus is the world set in motion; thus the animate and the inanimate are created.

I remember an article in Scientific American entitled “Why Doesn’t the Stomach Digest Itself?” It is a rather practical question. How is it that the stomach, which secretes hydrochloric acid able to dissolve metal, does not harm itself? What protects it from the corrosiveness of its own chemistry?

Scientific research gives us extensive information on the physiology of the body, but it cannot help us know who is closer to us than this body of ours. Although we spend millions of dollars on coronary care units, we do not know who is in our heart of hearts. Textbooks now have precise illustrations of the lens of the eye and the cochlea buried in the inner ear, but no book can show us who it is that sees, who it is that hears.

Everywhere we look we see evidence of the miracle of life. On the beach where we took our walk this morning, I was watching a little creature of which I’m very fond, the sandpiper. It waited for a wave to break, and when the water was about to reach its toes it ran off so fast that I could hardly see its legs. Where does it get the power to run? Science can describe its legs – the angle at which they move, their velocity, the condition of the sand, the wind’s resistance – but the power that enables the tiny sandpiper to outrun the tide is the power of God.

In the operations of the body, in the movements of the stars, every expression of energy in the universe is the power of the Lord. When the sun converts hydrogen into helium, the energy released is the power of the Lord, just as is the energy released in your body in the process of digestion. It is all the same energy; that is what the unity of life means. The Lord is the power of the universe, and the Law governing all laws. This doesn’t mean that the laws of motion or thermodynamics are incorrect; these laws are only aspects of the law of unity which supports all existence.

One of the key phrases in this verse is jagad viparivartate, ‘the universe turning around.’ When the universe began to evolve, the Sanskrit scriptures say, the power behind that evolution was the creative aspect of the Lord. From that dynamic imbalance, the interplay of all the forces of nature began, never to cease until they are withdrawn again into the Lord at the end of the age. It’s as if the cosmos is an immense globe like those globes of the world that children are so fond of spinning. The Lord gives this globe one big slap from inside and it goes on spinning for billions on billions of years.

In the Hindu tradition, this idea that the Lord is the source of all law is conveyed in all sorts of stories, many of which I heard often from my grandmother. One of these stories is from the Mahabharata, in which this dialogue of the Bhagavad Gita takes place. Arjuna’s enemy, Karna, had taken a vow to kill him in battle. Karna was an exceedingly skillful warrior and was armed with supernatural weapons, but as the battle raged, even though Arjuna was losing ground, his charioteer, Sri Krishna, seemed in no hurry to come to his aid. Then, just as Karna aimed the fatal arrow at Arjuna’s head, Sri Krishna caused the earth to sink beneath their chariot. The arrow passed overhead, leaving Arjuna unharmed. My granny told me stories like this in a very matter-of-fact manner, because to her it seemed obvious that he who made the whole cosmos could tell the earth to sink for his devotee’s protection. To her there was no conflict here with the laws of nature; the lower laws of physical phenomena had simply been superseded by a higher law for the time being.

There is another story about the great mystic Shankara, whose mother was an ardent devotee of the Lord. Every morning she used to walk several miles to the river for her bath and then to the temple for her daily worship. One day she fell during this journey, and her friends had to carry her home. Shankara, who was a teenager at the time, was grief-stricken. He took the Lord severely to task for not taking better care of his mother. After all, his mother was going to the temple to worship the Lord; shouldn’t He protect her? It is said that the Lord murmured something about being distracted by the problems of the world and promised to make amends for this lapse. Then he told the river to flow closer to Shankara’s home. To this day geologists speculate about the peculiar changes in the course of this river. There may be numerous other explanations, which I do not deny in the least, but they do not conflict with the capacity of the Lord to effect any number of wonders from within the forces of his creation.

Nothing can take place without the power of the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna used to say that the Divine Mother even hears the footfall of the ant. Ever since I read this I cannot look at an ant without imagining the Lord listening to the thud, thud, thud of its tiny feet. Jesus gives us the same truth when he says, “Not a sparrow falls without the will of the Father.” Just imagine the supreme master of the cosmos keeping track of all the sparrows in his huge map room. His eyes are everywhere; he sees everything and hears everything because he is everything. If his secretary reports a comet is creating a bit of trouble, he says, “Straighten it out.” Astronomers on earth, watching this comet, may gather from all over the world for a conference on its idiosyncrasies, but no conference can ever reveal who set the comet in motion. We can study the physics, the chemistry, the biology of our small corner of the universe, but only through the practice of meditation will we be able to meet the Supervisor.

SRI KRISHNA: 11. The immature do not look beyond physical appearances to see my true nature as the Lord of all creation.

12. The knowledge of such deluded people is fraught with disaster, and their work and hopes are all in vain.

To help us change our direction in life, Sri Krishna occasionally uses some rather strong language. The word he uses in these two verses is mudha, ‘slow-witted.’ Anyone who cannot see below the surface of life, who believes only in what can be touched and measured, Sri Krishna says, simply is not thinking intelligently. When we think there is no more to life than physical objects and sensations, when we identify ourselves completely with the body and deny that there is any unifying principle in life, everything we do will be futile; there will be no fulfillment in life at all. That is the nature of the physical world: everything in it is limited; everything is fleeting. Not only that, Sri Krishna warns us, this is not something that affects us alone. There can be great danger in living on the surface of life, because there will always be this blindness about the welfare of the whole. Even with the best of intentions, people with this kind of shallow vision can be led into activities that really endanger life around them.

To take just one example, look at the people who think that by producing more and more and consuming more and more, we will eventually reach the land where all troubles end. The phrase Sri Krishna uses for this self-centered way of life is quite contemporary: moghasha moghakarmano, ‘with vain hopes, and with work in vain.’ Those who go on producing for the sake of profit, who continue to consume for the sake of pleasure, will end in futility and frustration. Many of our business empires and technological exploits, built on the idea of unlimited material progress, are now facing the fact that the earth’s resources are very limited indeed. To the mystic, the real problem is not with our resources; it is what we are trying to do with those resources that is futile.

As we are forced to give up some of these activities, we make a marvelous discovery that the mystics have been trying to tell us about all along: a simple life can be a joyful life. By “simple life” I do not mean a romantic return to a rustic state. Nor is simplicity something we must just put up with because we are running out of energy. The simple life is much more creative and practical than most of us imagine. It is a life that values human qualities, one that is rich in lasting relationships with family and friends and community.

Most people do not have time to get to know their neighbors, or listen to what their children have to say, or be sensitive to the needs of their friends. They are too busy traveling between their city condominium and their country cabin. They have to work additional hours to buy two cars; then they need separate kitchens, separate bank accounts, separate televisions, separate sets of silverware, separate everything, all because they cannot live in harmony. Finally, they lose the capacity to exercise choice over their lives; the living room must be redecorated again and last year’s car has to be traded in for a new model. Before they know it, life has become incredibly complicated – and far from satisfying.

Simple living can be beautiful, right down to the smallest details. Some of the Japanese homes I have been in are remarkably beautiful with just a few well thought-out touches. On the other hand, I have also been in elaborate homes where I had to watch every move for fear of knocking an antique off its pedestal. Unfortunately, the more possessions we accumulate, the more we are possessed by them. It is only after we begin to taste the joy of simple living that we realize that these accessories can actually stand between us and our fulfillment.

Our modern way of life seems to be making us busier and busier about less and less. This is the vain superficiality Sri Krishna is warning us against. The more we divide our interests, our allegiances, our activities, the less time we have for living. The simple life doesn’t mean a drab routine; it means giving our time and attention to what is most important. For parents, it means having time and energy to devote to their children – and no matter what the latest psychological theory may tell us, our children can never grow to their fullest without continual support from the parents, particularly the mother. For friends, simplicity means taking the time to deepen a relationship, and remaining loyal in times of trouble. To remain loyal even when someone is causing us a great deal of trouble, we must know that person very well, well enough to warn our friend when he or she is about to make a mistake. Such relationships take time. We cannot get to know someone intimately in a day or establish a lasting relationship during a weekend conference. If we spend eight hours a day at our job, an hour or so at a bar after work, and the evening watching television, where is the time for cultivating close friendships? But if we simplify our lives, we shall find plenty of time and energy to be together with our circle of family and friends. These are discoveries all of us can make.

SRI KRISHNA: 13. But truly great souls seek my divine nature. They worship me with a one-pointed mind, having realized that I am the eternal source of all.

The vast majority of people have many-pointed minds. Just go to a large department store on the day after Christmas; everyone’s attention is divided between the sale tables, an old acquaintance, a crying child, and the exchange of unwanted gifts. When a person’s eyes are darting in every direction like this, it’s not only a sign of restless eyes; it’s a sign of a restless mind as well. Once this kind of distraction becomes a habit, nothing in life can hold our interest. We take up bowling, but after a week or two we become bored; we decide to master classical guitar, or pick up a little French, or learn to skin dive, but very soon we will want to do something new. But as Ecclesiastes says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” There is a limit to the new things we can do in this world, and the more restlessly we search for novelty, the less likely we are to be successful at anything we take up.

The key to this problem is not more new things but better concentration. Boredom and fulfillment have nothing to do with the world outside us. When we can give our attention to it, the classical guitar seems fascinating; when we cannot give our attention to it, it seems dull. The guitar itself is neither fascinating nor dull; all the interest is in the attention we can bring to bear on it. If we can learn to make the mind one-pointed, we will be interested and effective in everything we do.

When I was a little boy, I saw an experiment by one of our science teachers which illustrates the power of concentration. Without giving us a clue as to what he was going to do, he picked up a lens, put a lot of paper underneath, and let the rays of the tropical sun pour through the lens. We watched quizzically for a minute, totally unprepared for the climax. For a while nothing happened at all. Then there was a thin little curl of smoke, and all of a sudden the paper burst into flames. We thought it was some kind of magic. But our teacher explained that there was no magic at all; the heat that had been diffused had been brought together to bear on one point through the lens.

This is more or less what we do in the practice of meditation. Most of the time, the capacities of our mind are wasted in innumerable little cravings for things which do our bodies no good, our minds no good, and no one else any good either. Ordinarily we have no way of harnessing these little cravings; that is why most of us are not as effective as we could be, do not have particularly secure relationships, and are not able to make the contribution to life that we would like. So the question is, how do we make the mind converge? And the answer is, through the practice of meditation.

In meditation, when you go as slowly as you can through a passage like the Prayer of St. Francis without letting distractions creep in between the words, you are learning to focus your attention completely on one train of thought. Gradually your whole thinking process will become slowed down, which releases a great deal of tension and removes a great deal of conflict. It takes many years to achieve this kind of mastery of the mind, but finally, when your consciousness is unified completely, you will be able to keep your mind calm, clear, and concentrated even in the most agitating circumstances.

Slowing down thoughts is one of the most effective methods for changing negative habits of thinking. As long as the mind is working furiously, it’s not possible to stop it; it’s not even possible to make a turn. But when you are able to see thoughts going by in single file, you can recognize them and say, “Hey, you’re no friend!” You can choose not even to say hello to a negative thought, and its power to agitate you will be completely lost. This is how we learn not to identify ourselves with our thoughts, which means we have the power to pick and choose which thoughts to think.

To do this requires more than just the practice of meditation; we also need to cultivate a one-pointed mind throughout the day. There is a great deal of energy dissipated when we do or think several things at once. To be insecure, for example, consumes a lot of energy. You can’t simply sit back and say, “Now I’ll be insecure”; you have to put in a lot of time comparing people, thinking about what others did to you to foil your plans, and dwelling on how much you are to be pitied. All this requires a lot of energy. Last evening we had a fire in our fireplace, and to keep the fire going for about one hour we had to pile on a big stack of firewood and keep on piling on more. If it had been really cold and we had had to keep that fire for many more hours, we wouldn’t have had any firewood left at all. That is how insecurity works; you have to go on feeding it constantly, and there is no energy left for anything else.

Later, my friend Rick – who probably learned about fires when he was living in the jungles of Paraguay – explained to me that we had built the fire wrong and used the wrong kind of wood. So tonight he got us a good, heavy log, one that burns slowly and puts out a lot of heat, and if we hadn’t finally put it out it would still be burning now. Instead of piles and piles of wood, all we needed was that one log. There is a good deal of potential energy in a log like that, but it’s all very carefully conserved. Only a little of the wood needs to be consumed to give light and heat to all. It is the same with vital energy. When you scatter your attention everywhere, you really get drained – if you want proof of it, just spend a day window-shopping and see how you feel when you get home. But when you can work slowly, with complete concentration, at one thing at a time, very little energy is consumed. At the end of the day there will still be a lot of firewood left, which is what unshakable security means.

SRI KRISHNA: 14. Constantly striving, they make firm their resolve. They worship me without wavering and, full of devotion, sing of my divine glory.

Pelagius has a strong but very practical aphorism on the spiritual life: If you don’t want to fall back, you have to keep running forward. If that is what is required just to keep standing still, you can imagine what is called for to make real progress. To go as far as you can in meditation, you need to be striving every minute. Every morning you renew your commitment to the spiritual life.

From my own experience, I would say that the problems get tougher the farther one proceeds along this path. Palate problems – which seem to be omnipresent in the beginning – are, after all, not so serious, because you can always refrain from eating. If you don’t pick up your fork and put food in your mouth, no one is likely to do it for you. If you are tempted to overeat, you can always run out of the house and go for a fast walk. Similarly, if you feel yourself drawn to a rock concert, you can give your money away instead; if you don’t have money with you, there’s not much danger of getting past the box office. In other words, these are not serious temptations because they are external. That is the positive, practical side of Jesus’ words when he prays, “Lead us not into temptation”: do not put yourself in situations where your will may break down; do not go in and ask for trouble.

So physical indulgence is not a very grave problem. The real problems come in the deeper stages of meditation. Then you are no longer on the surface level of consciousness, and you begin to see the roots of your problems, which go deep. On the surface you see only innumerable little weeds, which you think can simply be pulled up and thrown out. But as your meditation deepens you will see that what you thought were twenty weeds have actually only ten roots. Then, deeper still, you see that these seemingly ten roots are actually ten shoots off five stout stems, each of which is so strong that you scarcely know how to get at it. At last you get to the taproot, which is self-will. Then the going really gets rough. After this long journey you realize that you have only been trekking across the prison of the ego. There are no doors, no windows, no exits of any kind. Imagine finding yourself in a room where there is no door, where you cannot even move or turn around. What effort do you make against a blank, seamless wall? That is the problem.

These problems in the deeper stages of meditation are gigantic simply because they are not outside you any more; they are inside. When they come, you cannot help fighting; there is nowhere to go. You cannot say, “Don’t look at me; I’m a lover, not a fighter. Let me know when it’s all over.” When you come face to face with the ego in the basement of consciousness, you have to do something about it. Every morning in your meditation for a long, long time you will have to fight this battle with the ego, which will call for every ounce of endurance you can muster and a little more. But every defeat only strengthens your resolve.

I saw this kind of fierce resolution the other day in a film of two fellows climbing a sheer rock wall in Yosemite. They had all sorts of climbing gear, but what is more important, they had commitment. As the commentator said, what is essential is to decide to leave the ground; after that, it is just a matter of going on. The beginner may look at the steep face of Washington’s Column and say, “I’d better think twice about this; a fall from there is going to be bad.” But these young men were dedicated climbers; they made the initial decision and then never even once thought of turning back.

These climbers were following a system of cracks up the cliff, pounding pitons into the cracks and then hanging their ropes from these pitons and slowly pulling themselves up a little higher. Everything went well until they got halfway up the face of the peak. Then the crack system stopped, and above them stretched a sheer, unclimbable rock wall with not even the tiniest crack into which to pound a piton to go higher. At that point most people would shrug, give up, and go back down to Glacier Restaurant to console themselves with a big dinner. But these two fellows had set their hearts on the top, and nothing could make them quit. The sheer impossibility of their situation only deepened their resourcefulness. One of them started swinging like a pendulum from one ledge to another, looking for a new crack system. Finally he found one, and while I watched amazed they picked up their climb from this new point and made it to the top of the peak.

In meditation too we need this kind of tenacity, the capacity to keep on climbing when the going gets rough. More than once, as we continue to climb, we will reach a point when the crack system ends. This is an inescapable part of the spiritual ascent, and it will test our dedication to the fullest. Then it is that instead of getting anxious or depressed, we renew our resolve and give everything we can to find some way to go farther. Our responsibility is only to give our very best; the outcome we leave to the Lord. When he sees that our sense of dedication is strong enough to withstand the rigors of the climb ahead, a little door will open in our consciousness and give us access to the deeper resources we need to continue climbing.

There is a beautiful story in this connection about St. Teresa of Ávila, the great Christian mystic of sixteenth-century Spain. Teresa spent decades founding convents throughout Spain, traveling long distances over terrible roads in every kind of weather. In most places she had to work with people who were adamantly opposed to her order. Often she was ill and physically exhausted, but her determination and enthusiasm never wavered. Then, towards the end of her life, she was struck in an epidemic of influenza. After that she never recovered her physical strength. But in the dead of winter the call came from her superior to inaugurate a new convent at Burgos. Teresa hesitated; after all, she was very ill. But the Lord, she said, reproved her: “I am the true warmth. What is there to be afraid of?”

As Teresa and her companions set out in their mule-drawn carts, sky and earth seemed fused in one torrential stream of water. The carts became so mired that the nuns had to wade much of the distance in their sandals. Teresa was shaking from head to foot from the exposure and her illness, but she was determined to obey the Lord and him alone.

Next day, the river Arlanzón had to be crossed. When they reached what had been the bank, all they saw was an enormous sheet of water. All the bridges had been carried away by the flood and there was only a makeshift footbridge, which was so narrow that at the slightest movement of the current, carts, mules, and nuns would roll right into the raging flood. Teresa’s carriage moved forward first. Those who were still on the bank saw it swerve and stop, then begin to tip as if to fall into the torrent below. Teresa jumped out and hurt herself. While the river raged just below her feet, she stood clinging to the cart. “Lord,” she exclaimed, “amid so many ills why do you add this to all the rest?”

In the depths of her consciousness she heard a voice reply: “Don’t be upset, Teresita; that is how I treat my friends.”

“O my Lord!” Teresa replied, as only his beloved handmaiden could. “No wonder you have so few of them!”

The Lord must not have been displeased with this answer, for the whole caravan reached the far bank unharmed.

Of course, Teresa was a great saint, so the Lord made great demands on her. But he tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and all he asks of little people like you and me is that we remember him constantly in all the small daily encounters in our family and our community. For most of us, that is quite challenge enough.

SRI KRISHNA: 15. Others follow the path of jnana, spiritual wisdom: they see that where there is One, that One is me; where there are two, they both are me; they see my face everywhere.

This verse has puzzled those who look for a hidden meaning. Actually it is a simple account of what happens in the climax of meditation, when we realize that all creation is one in the Lord. Then, though we still see beauty in all the abounding variety of life, we will always be aware that underlying this variety there is only the Lord, who the Sufis say beautifully is “the face behind all faces.” This is the hallmark of the mystical experience everywhere. In Jewish mysticism there is a charming anecdote about a Hasidic master who had to put on his glasses in order to remember that people around him saw things as separate, for otherwise he saw everyone and everything as One. And the Shvetashvatara Upanishad says:

The Lord dwells in the womb of the cosmos,

The creator who is in all creatures.

He is that which is born and to be born;

His face is everywhere.

In the Krishna tradition, there is a little story I like very much which illustrates this vision of unity. Once again, it is a story about Narada, a sage who was deeply devoted to Sri Krishna. On this occasion, Narada asked the Lord to tell him the deepest truth of the spiritual life. Sri Krishna has a rather playful way of answering these questions, and this time he just smiled mischievously and disappeared, leaving Narada standing bewildered in the bustling street of a village he had never seen before. Narada was not one to be at a loss, but even he didn’t know what to do. Was he still in heaven, or was he back on earth? He waited and waited for Sri Krishna to reappear, but there was no sign of him anywhere.

Finally, Narada began to get hungry. In India it has been a tradition for thousands of years for householders to give food to wandering spiritual aspirants; it is a great blessing for the householder and the whole family. So Narada took out his wooden bowl and went up to the nearest house to ask for a little food. But when the door opened Narada gave a start, for the woman who answered had Sri Krishna’s eyes. Not only that, as she handed back the bowl, he was sure she gave him just the hint of a wink before she disappeared into the shadows of the house again and closed the door.

A little bewildered, Narada went on to the next house, where a whole family was just sitting down to dinner. This time there was no wink from the lady of the house, but a little boy with those same eyes ran over to greet him and said a little too mischievously, “Sir, have you ever seen Sri Krishna? Can you sing us some of his praises?” It was like that in every house. In one place it was an infant, in another a teenager, in a third the grandmother, but in every family Narada visited, one of the family was the Lord. At last he realized that for all the differences in age and appearance, there was no one in that village except the Lord, and in that instant of realization the village disappeared and Narada was back with Sri Krishna again in the heavenly realm of Vaikuntha.

SRI KRISHNA: 16. I am the ritual and the sacrifice; I am true medicine and the mantram; I am the offering and the fire which consumes it, and he to whom it is offered.

This verse and those that follow serve as a prelude to chapter ten, in which the Lord will describe the endless glory of his attributes. Here the Lord is drawing his illustrations from parts of ancient Vedic ritual, but when he talks about sacrifice, he means the sacrifice of our self-will. When I want to see how well someone is doing in meditation, I don’t ask if he or she is seeing visions or hearing voices; I look to see how easily that person can go against his or her self-will. This is the way to make progress on the spiritual path, and in this verse the Lord is reminding us that whenever we turn our backs on ourselves in order to move closer to him, it is he within us who is prompting us to make the offering.

The dynamics of this process are quite interesting. Breaking through to a deeper level of consciousness in meditation is very much like trying to open a door which keeps banging shut. You just cannot keep it open; every time you open it a crack, the handle slips out of your hands and the door slams shut. At the beginning this is only frustrating, but eventually it becomes quite tantalizing. The more you are able to peek through the door, the more your concentration is drawn to what is on the other side. It is as if the Lord is standing on the other side of the door, opening it a little until you can almost see in and then quickly closing it again. Finally you decide you are going to keep that door open, come what may. You will get up from meditation with the door haunting your memory; you will go through the day without being able to get it out of your mind. This is a very hopeful sign, because it means that even in your unconscious you are working on ways to get your foot in the door.

In general, there are two ways you can strengthen yourself to solve problems like this, which are bound to come as your meditation deepens. The first is to look for an opportunity to defy your self-will. When you begin to get the motivation, you will find hundreds of opportunities for this every day. Wherever there are likes and dislikes, wherever there is friction in personal relationships, that is an opportunity for going against self-will.

The second very powerful ploy for getting through that door into deeper consciousness is to defy a strong desire. It may be for cigarettes, or for alcohol, or for some selfish activity that benefits no one – whatever it is, large or small, power is locked up in that desire. When you come to an obstacle in meditation and find that you cannot break through, you will discover the important connection between desire and will. Desire is will. Every strong desire has a great deal of will locked up in it; the problem is that usually we do not have any control over it. This is what happens in compulsive desires, the biggest and most powerful of which is sex. Every time you turn against a strong desire, it immediately strengthens the will. Often you can see the results the very next time you sit down for meditation. Whenever you can do this you will find your physical and emotional health improving, your relationships deepening, and your energy increasing. These are signs that you are going forward.

If the desire is particularly strong – something to which you have been conditioned over a period of several years – you can think of it as a continual source of power. Every time that desire comes up and you defy it, there is power generated. Once you get a taste of this and you really want to make progress in your meditation, you won’t just wait for a strong selfish desire to start to pick you up; you will go around ferreting out all sorts of little cravings everywhere.

This desire to go against desires is the surest sign of grace. To give you an idea of how far it can go, the moment a desire rises in my mind and starts to tell me what to do, my immediate response is to defy it. Then I have to step in, tap myself on the shoulder, and remind myself that after all, it is time for dinner, and there is nothing wrong with a moderate helping of spinach crepes. It is a wonderful state to be in, because it means I am always master in my own little house of the mind.

When you keep on digging away at a powerful desire over a period of years, the great day will come when you can get underneath it and pluck it out at the root. Then it is like opening a perpetual spring of power; where that desire used to be, there is now continuous access to the vitality it used to consume. You will see the effects of a breakthrough like this in every aspect of daily living. Your patience will be greater; your relationships and security will deepen; even your body will be bathed in the restorative waters of this spring. One of the surest signs that you have changed to a deeper level in meditation is that some emotional or physical problem that had been bothering you for years – a digestive problem, or asthma, or chronic headache, or high blood pressure – will begin to disappear. So Sri Krishna says, “I am aushadham, your best ­medicine”; the more you draw on him, the more he will heal, not from without but from within.

In making this sacrifice of self-will, the mantram can be a tremendously effective ally. Unlike meditation, the mantram does not call for strenuous discipline; anyone can repeat a mantram and benefit from it. We are all familiar with the power of words, if only through the effect advertisements have on what we do and even what we think. Millions of people, for example, know that smoking causes cancer; we have irrefutable evidence of this today. Yet the number of people who smoke is on the increase. To see why, we have only to look at the billboards and magazine advertisements all around us; the advertiser’s words go right into our consciousness. But just as Madison Avenue’s words work to condition our desires, the holy name from any of the world’s great religious traditions can free us from this conditioning. All we have to do is keep on repeating the mantram in our minds whenever a desire threatens to make us do what it says.

It sounds too simple, but just try it and see how powerful the mantram can be. The next time you are angry or afraid, go out for a long, fast walk repeating the mantram. Do not take your anger out on others, but use this strong emotion to drive the mantram deep into your consciousness. You don’t need to wait for a chance to exit gracefully, either; just take to the nearest door. When you return, the transformation in your consciousness will more than make up for any toes you might have stepped on on your way out.

Similarly, when you have a compulsive urge to eat something or do something – especially if it is not good for you – go for a long walk repeating the mantram. In an hour’s time, the urge will pass away. When the urge is upon you, you feel like you must yield or explode. All your concentration is on the cigarette you must smoke or the hot fudge sundae you must eat. But if you can switch your concentration over to the holy name, you will forget the cigarette or the sundae completely. Sometimes, of course, the mantram is like a car that hasn’t been driven for a long, long time; when you try to start it up, at first it only groans and growls. But all you need do is just keep trying – once it gets going, the mantram will run smoothly.

SRI KRISHNA: 17. I am the father and mother of this universe, and its grandfather too; I am its entire support. I am the sum of all knowledge, the purifier, and the syllable Om; I am the sacred scriptures, the Rik, Yajur, and Sama Vedas.

When parents in an Indian village want their sons or daughters to go to college, which is beyond the means even of most middle-class people, they look for a college in a place where they have relatives. Then their children can stay right in the relatives’ home. This is not looked upon as an imposition; it is something that everybody does, and if your sister leaves her son with you for four years while he studies engineering, you can always console yourself that when the fellow grows up and gets a job, others will billet their sons or daughters on him. But an even more important reason than saving money is that with this arrangement there is the same family atmosphere, and if your son comes back a little late one night, he will be taken to task just as if he were at home.

In this verse, the Lord is assuring us in his own very personal way that he is responsible for us completely. No matter how old we are, no matter where we stray, we can count on his support. The other side of this, which he is too tactful to mention outright, is that he is not going to let us get away with a single, solitary thing. He will keep on taking us to task, severely if the situation demands, until we are prepared to be selfless always.

This verse personifies the nature of reality with the Hindu flair for the dramatic, but we find the same basic insight in modern science. The language is quite different – instead of the Lord we have a unifying force of nature – but the truth is the same; the Lord is the unity of life, the Divine Ground in which all forces in the cosmos cohere. The same laws govern the universe everywhere. The elements here are the same as those in the farthest reaches of the universe, and so are the forms of energy. So Sri Krishna says, “I am the sum of knowledge: knowing me, you know that which supports all things.” It is the language of Spinoza also. And the Chandogya Upanishad explains beautifully: “As by knowing one lump of clay we come to know all things made of clay – that they differ only in name and form, while the stuff of which all are made is clay – so through that spiritual wisdom, dear one, we come to know that all life is one.”

SRI KRISHNA: 18. I am the goal of life, the Lord and support of all, the inner witness, the abode of all. I am the only refuge, the one true friend; I am the beginning and end of creation, and the receptacle for the eternal seed.

The Lord is everything for us. When we become God-conscious, all our needs are met; all our deepest desires are fulfilled. Sri Krishna says, “I am the supreme goal of life, your sole support; you have no other master than me. I am the eternal witness within you, your true home, your only refuge; when everyone else deserts you, I am still your friend.” Jesus puts it in very simple words: “Follow me; I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

In a beautiful little poem, St. Teresa of Ávila tells of the deep security that comes when we find our refuge in the Lord:

Let nothing upset you;

Let nothing frighten you.

Everything is changing;

God alone is changeless.

Patience attains the goal.

Who has God lacks nothing;

God alone fills all her needs.

Let nothing upset you. That is the first result of this realization: you become unupsettable. It means that none of your energy will be wasted, and you will have a long life with abounding energy to carry on the work of the Lord. Let nothing frighten you. There is going to be tragedy in life for everyone – loss of money, loss of face, loss of loved ones, and finally loss of everything on earth. You may grieve, but you never get oppressed by any loss, because through the deprivation you can see the Lord present always.

Everything is changing. The more experience I have of life, the more I appreciate the stark grandeur of this line. The other day I received a letter from India telling me that somebody I knew, somebody I loved, somebody I used to work with is now no more. When we move into the second half of life, this is the news that will come to us more and more often. The Katha Upanishad exclaims hauntingly, “Like corn, a man ripens and falls”: everything is changing, and everything that changes is going to pass away. God alone is changeless: turn to him, love him with all your heart, and you will be secure always; you will find fulfillment everywhere you go.

Patience attains the goal. The logic is as ruthless as the words are beautiful. No matter how difficult a situation is, no matter how difficult another person is, everything and everyone must yield to patience, which outlasts all obstacles. In the heart of every storm in life there is always this unchanging center which is the Lord, and when you can bear with those who rage against you and keep your trust in them, you are helping them to trust and respond to their real Self. If you can only be patient and remember these lines of Teresa’s – “everything is changing; God alone is changeless” – those who oppose you, those who differ from you, those who make life impossible for you will have to respond; it is only a matter of time.

Who has God lacks nothing. That’s why everybody throws away their defenses before a person who has realized God. Such people do not lack anything at all, so they have nothing to try to get from anyone. They live for our benefit, not for their own. You can take what you like from them; they will still be full. They can give anything away; they will still be full. You can give them any kind of trouble; they will still be full. As Teresa concludes beautifully, God alone fills all their needs.

SRI KRISHNA: 19. I am heat and light; I give and withhold the rain. I am immortality and I am death; I am what is and what is not.

Working through the forces of nature, the Lord gives life with one hand and takes it away with the other. Not only is he the force sustaining life; he is the force behind change and death as well, and the power which we harness to go beyond death to immortality. Therefore, as Swami Vivekananda is said to have remarked, if we can understand the meaning of death, we will understand the meaning of life. In Somerset Maugham’s powerful novel The Razor’s Edge, a young American, Larry, who is the hero of the story, sees one of his friends lying dead on the battlefield. With consummate skill, Maugham conveys in one short sentence the profound shock in ­Larry’s consciousness: “The dead look so dead when they are dead.” All of us can benefit from this rather grim reminder and put all our effort into going beyond death here and now.

In the Upanishads there is a profound statement that whatever is in the outside world is within our consciousness also. Many of the forces Sri Krishna talks about in verses like these apply not only to the natural world but to events we experience as our meditation deepens. When the Lord says he is heat and light, for example, he is not just referring to the sun. The mystics of all traditions describe the blazing effulgence that can take place in the final stages of meditation. If you are meditating sincerely and systematically, the time may come when you experience a sudden, dazzling flash of light in the head. It will be so intense that you might even open your eyes thinking that the sun is rising, only to discover that it is still the small hours of the night. Such flashes give a glimpse of the radiance that is within us. When at last our self-will has been removed, the Lord can show us his divine glory, which the Gita will tell us is like the splendor of a thousand suns rising at the same time. It is no wonder the man or woman who has become united with the Lord is radiant with lasting joy.

For the great majority of us, this experience would be quite overwhelming if it came on all at once, so the Lord in his mercy spreads out our spiritual development over many years. The Indian mystics are fond of drawing a comparison with the Hindu wedding processions that are a common sight in the villages. When a wedding is about to take place in a Punjabi village, the villagers can hear the band playing long before they see anything. Then the first part of the wedding party, the men bearing banners and presents, comes into view. When the villager hears the music and sees the banners and gift-bearers approaching, he calls to his friends, “There’s a wedding coming!” They stop their work to watch the procession, but for a long time they still do not see the bride or the bridegroom. Instead, the father-in-law comes by with great majesty, dominating the scene with his measured stride. Then comes the horse on which the bridegroom rides, covered with garlands. You can see the horse but not the bridegroom; all that is visible is a giant bouquet, behind which, if you look closely, you may see an arm or a bit of an ear. Finally, the wedding party reaches the bride’s home. The bridegroom gets down from the horse, the flowers are taken away, and the bridegroom and bride stand before us together at last.

It is very much like this on the spiritual path too. You do not see the Lord right away, but in the later stages of meditation there will be a number of signs that he is on the way. My suggestion is not to look for these signs. When you keep waiting for something to happen in meditation, you are actually keeping yourself from going deeper, and anything you experience is not likely to be valid. If you are waiting for a deep-hued monsoon cloud, the symbol of Sri Krishna, to float across your mind’s eye, you may find yourself thinking in meditation: “ ‘Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace’ . . . Where is that cloud?” When this happens, you are no longer meditating. So do not pay undue attention to anything you experience in meditation. If the experience is genuine, it will bear fruit in your life the very same day, whether you dwell on it or not. But if you allow yourself to get excited over it, a depression will come in its wake and your progress will be impeded.

Then the Lord says, “I give and withhold the rain.” St. Teresa of Ávila describes the soul as a garden which must be watered by meditation, which she calls interior prayer, until the Lord gives it the rain of grace.

It seems to me that our garden can be watered in four ways: by taking the water from a well, which is hard work; or by a water wheel and buckets, when the water is drawn by a windlass (I have sometimes drawn water in this way; it is less work and yields more); or by a stream, which waters the ground much better, for it saturates it more thoroughly and there is no need to water so often, so that the gardener’s work is much less; or by heavy rain, when the Lord waters it with no labor of ours, a way infinitely better than any of the others.

For a long time, meditation is like drawing water from a very deep well. The well in my ancestral home in Kerala is about a hundred feet deep, and during the summer, when the sun is scorching the plains of India, people who draw water from the well have to use almost the full hundred feet of rope to lower the bucket down into the water. Often in a very poor village the bucket will have leaks, so that by the time it reaches the top, even after all their struggle, they have only half a bucketful to take home. This is how it is when we start meditation; our bucket will have quite a few leaks. We will meditate with great concentration and finally succeed in filling the bucket with the soothing waters of forgiveness, but then the leaks – impatience, irritation, resentment, indolence begin to sap our will until we wonder sometimes if our bucket is anything more than a lot of holes put together. We may even have struggled a great deal to bring the bucket up, only to find that there is no water in it at all. On days like that we are tempted to say, “There just isn’t any water in the well.” “Oh, no,” Teresa would answer, “there is a lot of water in the well; you just need to plug up the holes.” There is no beginner’s luck in meditation. In the beginning it is only hard work and more hard work, because we can rely only on ourselves.

After some years of leading the spiritual life and practicing meditation, our awareness becomes deeper. Now, Teresa says, meditation is more like drawing water with the help of a Persian wheel – a large wheel with many buckets hung around the rim, each of which scoops up water as the wheel goes around. It is a marvelous image, which St. Teresa draws not from books but from the things she observed around Ávila. In this second stage of spiritual living, you still have to do a lot of hard work, but instead of having one old, leaky bucket you now have many good buckets. Now you are able to water the garden more abundantly with less effort, and the peace obtained in meditation is not drained away by the little anxieties and resentments of the day.

In the third stage, Teresa tells us, we see a little brook making a channel into our field, as if to say, “Just keep your bucket in a corner and let me do the watering.” The effort needed to keep the mind still in meditation is becoming less and less, and the waters of selflessness now flow continuously. St. Teresa says of this state: “The Lord is now pleased to help the gardener, so that he may almost be said to be the gardener himself, for it is he who does everything.” When we are able to forget our own needs in trying to solve the problems that threaten us all, the Lord is beginning to act through us. He is the Operator, and we become the instruments of his peace. Finally, Teresa says, the grace of the Lord descends in a shower, bathing the garden constantly in a gentle rain.

SRI KRISHNA: 20–21. Those who follow the rituals given in the Vedas, who offer sacrifices and take soma, free themselves from evil and attain the vast heaven of the gods. There they enjoy celestial pleasures. When they have enjoyed these fully, their merit is exhausted and they return to this land of death. Thus observing Vedic rituals but caught in an endless chain of desires, they come and go.

According to the traditional interpretation, people who take to the spiritual path to gain worldly ends, for the sake of their own private happiness, go after death to a heavenly realm where the satisfactions they have been searching for will be multiplied many times. Eventually, however, these pleasures will be exhausted. The grand time will come to an end, and they will return to good old terra firma to learn to make wiser choices the next time around.

There is another, more practical way these verses can be interpreted to apply to daily living. When you practice meditation for the sake of some private, personal goal, without training the senses and putting other people first, it can be a tremendously dangerous combination. The deeper resources in your consciousness are beginning to flow into your hands, giving you the capacity to fulfill some of your deepest desires, but you have no control over what these desires are. You may be able to amass an immense amount of money, acquire great prestige, even live a very long life, but there will be no more direction to your life than before. It’s all quite possible; in fact, I have known some people whose lives illustrate these verses perfectly. Instead of going to the orthodox Hindu heaven of the gods to have a grand time, they go to Acapulco or the south of France to live their life in just the way they like. It’s not necessarily unaesthetic; after all, these are people with highly refined desires and all the means with which to satisfy them. They have their meditation every morning by the Mediterranean, go for a brisk swim in some secluded cove, and then have a good, nourishing breakfast in the finest restaurant around. For entertainment they don’t sit and watch The Godfather; they fly to London for the new opening of King Lear or spend a week or two in Salzburg for a Mozart festival. And wherever they go, people get interested in them. Photographers like to take pictures of them for the weeklies; journalists gather to ask them all kinds of questions because the answers are always interesting. And they derive great pleasure from all of this; it is the fulfillment of their dreams.

But then, the next verse says, look at where all this leads. Kshine punye martyalokam vishanti: after a while, all these things begin to tire you. Kshine means ‘worn out,’ exhausted; the Sanskrit word for tuberculosis comes from the same root. All this adulation becomes a nuisance; the questions and the questioners become a bore. You get tired of the Mediterranean and try the Caribbean for a season, but it’s the same old crystal blue water, the same questions from the press, the same kind of company as you left behind. What has happened is that you have become tired of pleasure, but you don’t understand that; you think you have become tired of Nice and Cannes. So you start growing a beard, wearing dark glasses, registering in hotels under a false name; and instead of luxurious restaurants, you begin to frequent little out-of-the-way places where the furniture is deliberately mismatched and the food is served in handmade bowls. Everything that used to please you now begins to irritate you – the radical becomes a reactionary, the reactionary becomes radical, the profligate becomes more puritanical than a Puritan. Such people have simply grown tired of living for themselves, and all this time has been misspent as far as the spiritual life is concerned. As this verse reminds us, they will have to return to the “land of mortals” – the everyday world – and try again to live in harmony with others and contribute to the welfare and happiness of those around them.

Meditation is a tremendously powerful discipline, and there can be real danger if it is misused for selfish ends. I get frightened sometimes at the literature I receive by mail: learn to meditate and you will be able to influence people; learn to meditate and you will be able to get whatever you want. There will always come a time when these powers will turn against you. That is the theme of Marlowe’s Faustus, and at the end of the play, when Faustus is faced with destruction of his own making, he cries out in haunting lines:

Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me . . .

O soul, be changed to little water drops

And fall into the ocean, never to be found!

There is no place to hide when the powers you have developed and misused turn against you. To take an extreme example, even the story of Hitler may be interpreted in this way. Not too long ago I saw a powerful film in which Sir Alec Guinness, a very accomplished actor, brought Hitler to life as a maniac with tremendous power to influence the will and lives of other people. In the end the same destructive forces he had created turned against him and his party and tore them to pieces. It is for our own protection that most of us will not be able to make real progress in meditation unless we are trying sincerely to train our senses and to put the happiness of all those around us first. But if we are giving our very best to all the disciplines of the spiritual path, our progress will be swift and safe.

SRI KRISHNA: 22. Those who worship me and meditate on me constantly, without any thought for their own welfare, I will provide for all their needs.

Many years ago, when we started the work of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in Berkeley, we had hardly any money and not many dedicated friends to help us. I used to do part of the grocery shopping and the gardening; Christine was receptionist, accountant, secretary, editor of our newsletter, cook, chauffeur, you name it. Most people looked upon the whole thing as a foolhardy venture. My friends asked me, “How much money do you have in the bank?” They always looked a little depressed when I would tell them I didn’t have a bank account. “Without substantial financial support,” they warned me sincerely, “by yourselves, you cannot build any organization in this country.”

“Exactly,” I replied. “We are not building it by ourselves.”

“Then you must have a sponsor?”

“Yes, the very best.”

“Who? The Ford Foundation? Rockefeller?”

“Better than that: Sri Krishna.”

Usually there would be a stunned silence; they seemed unwilling to credit the Lord with solvency. But I wasn’t joking at all; I had the promissory note right in this verse. When we devote ourselves wholeheartedly to the spiritual life, without any reservation for ourselves, Sri Krishna says, Yogakshemam vahamyaham: “Not only am I entirely responsible for your spiritual progress; I am also responsible for paying your bills.”

No mystic from any spiritual tradition East or West has ever found this guarantee to fail. In the early years of the Center, I remember, at a time when things were looking particularly thin, we looked in our donation bowl after the evening’s class and found a bill so large that I don’t think I had ever seen a picture of that particular president before. It kept the wolf from our door for several weeks. Even Christine was a little surprised, but I have to say that I was not; I had already learned that I could trust the Lord to keep his word. On another occasion that same year we opened the bowl and found nothing but a big sheaf of Blue Chip stamps. We went out and bought seven folding chairs to use in our meditation classes, and now when I see those same chairs being used in our ashram and look around to see how much the Center has grown, it always makes me remember the promise of this verse.

SRI KRISHNA: 23.Those who worship other gods with faith and devotion will also come to me, Arjuna, but by other paths.

24. I am the object of all worship, and every act of selfless service is done for me. But those who fail to realize my true nature must be reborn.

When we were living on the Blue Mountain, my wife and I met an American spiritual aspirant who had come to India after World War II. He had grown up in a Christian family and graduated from Harvard, but when he began to feel a great need for a deeper purpose in life he went to an ashram in India, presided over by an orthodox Hindu teacher from Bengal. He lived with his teacher and practiced meditation for twelve years, which is the traditional period of sadhana. I remember him telling us in amazement, “Here I travel all the way from Boston to Bengal, where they worship Mother Kali and Lord Shiva; I practice meditation with a Hindu teacher and use a Hindu mantram, and who should reveal himself in the depths of my consciousness? Not Sri Krishna, not Lord Shiva, but Jesus the Christ.”

In our case, too, there is no need to debate the pros and cons of various incarnations. We can leave the choice in the capable hands of the Lord. One person may be meditating on the Christ, another on the Buddha, a third on Sri Krishna, but the names do not make the slightest difference. If we are meditating sincerely and regularly and trying our best to eliminate self-will, all of us are going to be united with the Lord one day. When we call upon Jesus or the Buddha, we are calling on Sri Krishna too; when we call upon Sri Krishna, we are calling equally upon the Christ, or Allah. When I was teaching at the university, I had a student whose name was Shivaramakrishna – his father hadn’t wanted to take any chances when he named him, so he just covered all the bases with one name. I used to tell him, “Wherever heaven is, you’ll find your way to it; at least one of those names is sure to open the right door.”

Though you may not be greatly drawn towards any particular incarnation when you start meditating, gradually the time will come when you will have such longing for the Lord that you will feel the need for a divine ideal of your own – an ishtadevata, as it is called in Sanskrit. Often, however, you may not know which incarnation is most suitable for you. You feel drawn to “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”; then you have a look at the Buddha, full of compassion for everything that lives, and you feel torn between the Buddha and the Christ. In such cases, it is good to leave the decision to the Lord. He – or she – will come to you in whatever form fulfills your deepest needs. At the appropriate point on the spiritual path, it is not unlikely that in a dream you will see a great incarnation or hear his or her name. You may see Jesus carrying a lamb, or you may hear resonating in your consciousness the mantram associated with the Compassionate Buddha, Om mani padme hum. Then there will be a tremendous response in the depths of your heart that will leave no doubt in your mind.

SRI KRISHNA: 25. Those who worship the devas will go to the realm of the devas; those who worship their ancestors will be united with them after death. Those who worship phantoms will become like phantoms; but my devotees will come to me.

The key to this verse is that we become what we meditate upon. If we meditate for the sake of solving a particular physical problem, often that problem will be solved. If we meditate for the sake of solving some emotional problem, that too can be solved, if we are sincere and systematic in our practice. “But,” Sri Krishna says, “if you meditate on me, you will go beyond all your problems.” As Jesus reassures us, “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and everything else will be added unto you.”

This is practical advice. We cannot find joy by solving a physical problem if we still have a lot of emotional difficulties. If we go to heaven’s gate, St. Peter will say, “Your cholesterol level is less than 220; your blood pressure is 120 over 70; you don’t have any cavities. But what a lot of fear, anger, and greed you have! Sorry, old chap, can’t admit you this time. Come back again when you’ve learned a little patience.” Similarly, after we have made our fortune, St. Peter will still say, “You’ve shown a lot of enterprise and enthusiasm, but we don’t need money up here. Why don’t you use it to work for a worthy cause, and then come and see me?” But if we seek first the kingdom of heaven, all our other needs will be provided for as well.

The Hindu tradition has a genius for dramatizing the desires which shape our lives. In the Ramayana, for example, the demon king Ravana is the perfect symbol of selfish power. Ravana has a brother named Kumbhakarna, the personification of indolence and apathy, who sleeps for six months of every year. When we sit back and fail to contribute to life, this verse reminds us, we are worshiping Kumbhakarna. When we live for ourselves, we are praying to Ravana to take us to his kingdom and make us his servants forever. In other words, it is we who choose the kingdom to which we go, even in this life, by our choice of what to desire. If we want to go to the kingdom of heaven, it is only appropriate that we not walk in the other direction.

Similarly, Sri Krishna warns, there are those who let their desires entangle them in the past. Ancestor worship is not an exotic custom, confined to communities which have yet to enter the modern age. Visit the home of an established family and look at the gallery of paintings and photographs on the walls. Your host or hostess will gladly give you a guided tour. “Here is my great-great-grandfather, who founded our town; here is my great-aunt Agatha, who dined at Buckingham Palace.” It is true that our great-great-grandparents may have had many qualities worth emulating – for one, they had a simpler way of life, from which we can learn a great deal. But we have to use our discrimination and select from the past only what is most helpful for today’s world. I understand there is a special society of people in this country who want to live as they did prior to Independence, in the days of the British Empire. The tragedy of such people is that often their wishes come true. They can come to live completely in the past, which means that in the present they are no more than ghosts. It is very much the same with people who pretend to be others. Whenever my wife and I take a walk in Berkeley or San Francisco, we see people who are pretending to be their favorite movie star or tennis champion or rock musician. Once we went to a restaurant where the waitress was trying to be like Shirley MacLaine. I was tempted to tell her I was Walter Matthau. By trying to be someone else, these people have no life of their own. They, too, become ghosts.

In another sense, this “world of spirits” Sri Krishna mentions here refers to the vast continents of fear, anger, and greed within our consciousness. The more we dwell on any negative emotion, the deeper we wander into its uncharted domain. For example, most of us are prone to all manner of fears, from loss of life to loss of hair. When we look in the classified pages to see how we can have hair grafted, or spend hours training our hair to cover a little bald spot, the motivation is really fear. As more and more hairs continue to fall out, our sense of security goes with them, for the more we dwell on a fear, even a little fear, the bigger it becomes. So in my case, when it began to look as if my head was going to become quite bald, I remember saying in the spirit of true renunciation, “All right, let it all go.” Time may have diminished my hair since then, but it has not diminished me. My niece Meera, who likes everything about me, even goes so far as to say admiringly, “Uncle, what beautiful hair you have!”

When we are meditating, instead of welcoming fear by giving him attention, we can politely tell him to leave. If our meditation is going well, he will slink out muttering, “Sorry; I must have the wrong address.” Fear wants us to worry about him. He will tempt us to study his genealogy from the time of William the Conqueror, and by the time we have finished discussing his life history he will have drawn us into his realm and shut the door behind us. Many people live in this world of fear, in which they are upset by continual anxieties. They are prone to a number of psychosomatic ailments which can lead to serious diseases, and they suffer from estrangement in their personal relationships because they are suspicious even of those they want to love. Such people can benefit greatly from meditation. Fear is concentration of which we are not the masters; it is a way of dwelling compulsively on ourselves. In meditation we gain the capacity to withdraw our attention from our problems and concentrate on the needs of those around us. When we do this, we find ourselves really coming to life in the present while our fears simply fade away.

SRI KRISHNA: 26. Whatever I am offered in devotion with a pure heart – a leaf, a flower, fruit, or water – I accept with joy.

Now we are entering the climax of this chapter. In some of the most beautiful language in the Gita, the Lord is inspiring us to make everything an offering to him. Leaves, flowers, fruit, and water are often used for ritual worship in India. In one widely used ritual, the worshiper stands before the divine image and repeats the names of the Lord, offering a flower petal at the deity’s feet with each name. Sri Ramakrishna used to worship the Divine Mother in this fashion, but with a divinely peculiar twist of his own. He would close his eyes and begin repeating the beautiful names of the Divine Mother, but soon, completely absorbed in her, he would lose all outer consciousness and begin throwing the lotus petals on his own head rather than towards the image. Such was his devotion to the Divine Mother that he had become united with her.

The practical approach to this verse is to look upon everything that we do, no matter how seemingly insignificant, as a gift to the Lord. If we hoe the garden carefully so that our family can have fresh vegetables for dinner, that is an offering to the Lord. If we work a little more than is expected of us at something that benefits others, that too is an offering to the Lord. Everywhere, in every detail of daily living, it is not a question of quantity or expense that makes our offering acceptable; it is cheerfulness, enthusiasm, and the capacity to forget ourselves completely in helping those around us. The verse that follows will go into some of the ways in which this offering can be made.

SRI KRISHNA: 27. Whatever you do, make it an offering to me – the food you eat, the sacrifices you make, the help you give, even your suffering.

Every term in this verse has a practical application in our daily living. The first is yat karoshi: “Whatever you do, make it an offering to the Lord.” Instead of doing what pleases you, what you are accustomed to, what feels right to you, try to do something that benefits someone else instead. It may be distressing at first, but if you are making your best effort, the Lord will accept your offering. The proof of it comes in your daily living. The Lord isn’t sitting at an altar somewhere and accepting what we offer him; he is right inside, and when we do something that pleases him it means that there is tension released at a very deep level throughout the body and mind.

Then the Lord says, Yad ashnasi: “Whatever you eat, make it an offering to me.” Considering the wealth of this country, it has always surprised me how poorly many Americans eat. Some of my friends were telling me the other day that it is not uncommon for people to have only a cup of coffee and a roll for breakfast, often topped off with a cigarette. Over the years such inadequate food habits contribute to very poor health – and in the case of mothers-to-be, the damage is not only to them but to their unborn children, too. Some advertisers no longer even bother to call what they are marketing “food”; they just say “products.” When we sit down to dinner, most of us don’t want to eat products; we want food – and tasty, nourishing food at that. It is so easy to cultivate a little backyard garden and have fresh fruits and vegetables for lunch or dinner. Even if there is no more than a window box or a small plot by the back door, we can still grow a few vegetables. We don’t need to resign ourselves to food that has become stale or polluted with chemicals, or to products that have no food value at all.

In Sanskrit, however, “eating” refers to more than food. The Gita means whatever we consume, not only through our mouths but through our eyes, ears, and skin. Just watch children with their eyes glued to the television: they are having a big meal, often full of sex and violence. Since the average American household watches television an astonishing seven hours a day – one hour more than in 1977 – these “TV dinners” are rather large. At best, like junk food, they displace real nutrition: the human interactions by which a child learns to love, understand, feel, and give. At worst they spoon in the lowest possible image of the human being. “You are what you think,” the Buddha warns. We all have a responsibility not to support any media production that fills our minds with junk thoughts and images.

Next Sri Krishna tells us, Yaj juhoshi: “Whatever you offer in renunciation, make that an offering to me.” This is hard-hitting advice. He is not asking us to renounce our antique almirah or our tickets to the World Series; the sacrifice the Lord wants us to make is our self-will. It is not ideological differences that cause family conflicts or lead to clashes between man and woman; it is self-will. Reducing self-will is a terribly painful renunciation to make, because the ego will try every trick in the book to undermine our efforts. Fortunately, every one of us has a defiant streak that can enable us to turn against our self-will and overcome it. Eventually there is a tremendous sense of exhilaration in this, because it frees us from the conflicts which make life so miserable for us today.

The practical question is how to make this offering of self-will. I would suggest starting on a very small scale. Just as the mountain climber does not begin with Mount Everest, you cannot get rid of all your self-will immediately. You start with little things. When you go out to dinner with a friend, instead of choosing carefully just what you like, have what the other person is having instead. It might be your favorite, but more likely it will be something you would just as soon pass over. That is the time to smile and eat. It is especially good if husband and wife can do this, for then there is the motivation to learn to like what the person you love likes. In such cases you cannot help moving closer to each other, for you will have got a little of your self-will out of the way. If you can even ask for seconds, you can mark that day on your calendar; the ego has started to pack its bags.

Then Sri Krishna says, Dadasi yat: “Whatever you give, make it an offering to me.” The finest gifts we can give are forgiveness and patience. We can’t give anyone joy or security by increasing her bank account or adding to his collection of vintage wines. The only thing these gifts will increase is the gross national product, and after some experience of life we should be able to see that there is no connection between the gross national product and real security. In the spiritual lore of India there is a story that the Lord whispered only one word in our ears when he sent us into the world: “Give.” Give freely of your time, your talent, your resources; give without asking for anything in return. This is the secret of living in joy and security. The moment you expect reward or recognition, you are making a contract.

Even parents and children suffer from this contract relationship. While I was teaching at the university in India I met some parents with good intentions who wanted to make their boy or girl into the scientist or musician they had never been. I used to be very close to most of my students, and they didn’t mind confiding in me that their real talent lay in some other field. Parents can help their children tremendously by avoiding this “I gave this to you, therefore you do that for me” approach, encouraging them instead to follow their own star.

My grandmother, who did not know how to read or write, showed great wisdom in what she expected of me. I remember how she responded to my downfall in mathematics. I was in high school and had just been introduced to the world of Shakespeare, which was so glorious to me that my mind was full of Capulets and Montagues, of Falstaff and Prince Hal. I forgot all about my mathematics class, and when my mathematics test came, I didn’t do very well. As I came home from school, my friends teased me with, “How could this possibly have happened to you?” My family was even less understanding. Only my grandmother remained unperturbed; she did not say a word about it.

That night I made up my mind to go to the top of the class in mathematics, just to please my grandmother. Her attitude of not losing faith in me gave me such motivation that I took to Euclid like a blood brother and did extremely well. Immediately, most of my family wanted me to become an engineer. I tried to tell them that I had no deep commitment to Pythagoras or Euclid, that my heart was given to literature, but the elder members of my family simply told me, “Nonsense. You’ve done very well in mathematics. India needs engineers and pays them well, too, so you should become an engineer.” They had picked out the engineering college and even the courses I should take. My grandmother did not get drawn into this debate, but when I was leaving for college she gave me her support in a way I shall always be grateful for: “Follow your own star.” It was the soundest educational advice she could have given. After all, if I had become an engineer I don’t think I would have been too eager to cross a bridge of my own design.

Finally Sri Krishna says, Yat tapasyasi: “Whatever you suffer, make it an offering to me.” This is the crux of sadhana. It is not easy to forgive someone who is bristling with hostility. It is not a simple thing to help someone who irritates you and frustrates your attempts to mend an estranged relationship. Until we learn these skills, there can be a lot of anguish in going against our self-will when everything within us is crying out to let it have its way. But if we are to make progress on the spiritual path, we have no choice but to face this suffering and grow.

To use the language of the Compassionate Buddha, we all suffer from ourselves. Most of us are inclined to lay the blame for our problems at our parents’ or our partner’s doorstep, but the culprit is not ‘he’ or ‘she’; it is ‘me.’ The day we can tell ourselves honestly, “You created this mess all by yourself; now you can get yourself out all by yourself”, we have become strong enough to pull ourselves out.

SRI KRISHNA: 28. In this way you will be freed from the bondage of karma, and from its results both pleasant and painful. Then, with your heart free, you will come to me.

All of us have had moments of regret when we look back upon the past – particularly upon our early days, when we were ignorant of the pitfalls of life and simply did not know which was the way to fulfillment. But on the spiritual path it is essential not to look back either in sorrow or in anger. Here the Gita can console and strengthen us, because it takes into account how easy it is for us to make mistakes. Instead of condemning us or criticizing us, the Gita shows us how we can correct those mistakes through the practice of meditation.

When we suffer from guilt about the past, it is very much like a record player when the needle gets stuck. We are playing our favorite song, “I should have known better,” and it keeps on repeating, “I should have known better, I should have known better . . .” The same thought goes round and round, and every time it goes round the groove becomes deeper. At times like these we forget that there is any other song in our repertoire. But there is a breathtakingly simple solution to this problem: all we need to do is reach out, lift up the needle, and move it to a new song.

This is what we do in meditation, when we recall our mental energy from dwelling on our thoughts. It is not the mistakes we have made that torment us; it is our dwelling on those mistakes. All this obsessive repetition charges them with power, and just as a demolition unit can go into a building and defuse a bomb, in practicing meditation we can defuse a memory of its power to hold our attention and agitate us. When thoughts of the past are coming up – as they will for almost all of us – what I would suggest is, don’t pay any attention to them, and don’t let anyone else talk to you about them either. It is very much like dealing with a distraction in meditation: you don’t fight it directly; you simply withdraw your attention from the distraction by giving more concentration to the words of the passage. Here, instead of dwelling on your mistake and talking it over with all your friends, go for a long, fast walk repeating your mantram. You will find that this is all it takes to change the needle to a new, positive line of thinking.

But it’s not enough if we simply repeat the mantram; we need to keep from putting the needle on that same old groove again. When we ask the Lord to forgive us, most people look upon it as a passive prayer: “Lord, forgive us, please.” If we are going to keep on committing mistakes and saying, “Lord, forgive us, please,” our whole life will be spent between erring and repenting, erring and repenting. From the little I know of Sri Krishna, he will say, “What about tomorrow?” He will forgive us; there is no end to his mercy. But as one physician used to say, “The Lord may forgive us our mistakes, but our nervous system will not.” Every time we repeat a mistake, every time we dig the groove a little deeper, we are making it more difficult for our nervous system to change.

In my interpretation, therefore, forgiveness means learning to draw upon the deeper powers in our consciousness and change the wrong ways of thinking that have conditioned us to make these mistakes. No matter what we may have done in the past, it is always possible for us to change. That is why the mystics say that the Lord’s forgiveness is always held out for us to take. But the choice to reach out and take it is left to us.

Most people in the modern world object strongly to the concept of divine punishment, because they think it means there is somebody in outer space meting out sentences with a firm hand. So instead of talking about sin and punishment, I prefer to talk about mistakes and consequences. It is the same thing; the only difference is in the language. Here the Compassionate Buddha’s approach is very easy to understand. He would say when we are angry, we are punishing ourselves; anger is its own punishment. On the physical level, for example, when we are angry our respiration changes, and in the long run this may lead to asthma. Our digestion is affected, and after many years of this we can develop serious digestive problems. Even dandruff is like that. Dandruff is not inflicted by God; it is a light sentence which we impose on ourselves. When we have been eating wrong food, or smoking, or not getting enough exercise, we are working hard at giving ourselves a really stiff punishment, and the way to ask the Lord for forgiveness is to draw on the power released in meditation to give up smoking and change our wrong habits of eating and behaving so as to have a peaceful heart.

If you want to see the miracle of the Lord’s forgiveness, you have only to look at how complete this change can be. To give you just one example, I have had friends who have given up alcohol after many years of heavy use, and I have been overwhelmed at the mercy of the Lord when I see how swiftly they can learn to relate to people well and overcome many of their physical disabilities after all those years of abuse. Even though we may have serious problems, none of us need throw up our hands in despair and say we can never stand straight again. Whatever the mistakes of our past are, however much they may have affected our body and mind, there is such resilience in our consciousness that by changing our ways, all of us can release ourselves in a large measure from the consequences of our past.

SRI KRISHNA: 29. I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with all their heart live in me, and I come to life in them.

This verse is simple but very deep in its significance. In sweet words, the Lord tells Arjuna: “I have no favorites; race or sex, place of birth or social status make no difference to me. All that is important is that your life be devoted to me.”

Arjuna looks at Sri Krishna quizzically. “Then why is it,” he asks, “that you often say of a particular devotee sa ca me priyah, ‘I am wildly in love with him, head over heels in love with her’?” So the Lord explains gently the relationship he has with those who are completely devoted to him. “Those who meditate on me with all their heart, who try to see me in every creature, live in my love and security completely.” Then he adds, “I who am infinite, whom all the galaxies cannot contain, I live in such people too.”

When we begin to realize the magnitude of this statement, we shall have profound veneration for our real Self, the divine spark within us. The Compassionate Buddha calls this body of ours a frail clay pot. Who can fathom the wonder of the Lord of the cosmos taking up residence in this brittle little vessel? The Hindu greeting namas te expresses this reverence for the Lord of Love, who dwells within each one of us. It means “I bow unto you” – not unto Jonathan Swift or Tom Jones, but to Him who is seated within Jonathan Swift, Tom Jones, and you and me.

SRI KRISHNA: 30–31. Even a sinner becomes holy when he or she takes refuge in me alone. In a short time that person is completely dedicated to the spiritual life and attains to boundless peace. Never forget this, Kaunteya: no one who is devoted to me will ever come to harm.

These beautiful verses have been a source of consolation to millions of men and women down the ages, for they remind us that no matter what our past is like, even what our present is like, none of us is ever lost in the eyes of the Lord. All of us are only frail human beings – “born to trouble,” as the Bible puts it, “as the sparks fly upward” – and all of us have committed mistakes in the past, mostly in our ignorance of the unity of life. That is human conditioning, which every one of us shares. But just as it is our nature to be liable to these mistakes, all of us have the inborn capacity – which is never lost – of erasing this futile writing on the wall which we ourselves have done through many years of wrong living.

When we really understand the implications of this approach, so loving and yet so practical, we will never again be oppressed by the burden of the past. During the many years in which I have been teaching meditation in this country, I have come into intimate contact with hundreds of thoughtful people, young and old, some of whom have led lives of no earthly benefit to anyone, not even themselves. It always touches me deeply to hear such people confide how lonely they have made themselves, how estranged from the loving support of those around them, how despairing of any chance to change. I do not pretend that their past has been flawless; I do not ask about their past at all. Instead, I remind them that no amount of mistakes can ever banish the Lord of Love from our hearts. He is always there, and because he is always there, we always have the choice to turn our backs on the past completely and learn to live in peace with ourselves and in harmony with those around us.

In other words, as Jesus puts it so tenderly, all of us are children of God, and however misguided our conduct may be, a loving father – or, as we would say in India, a loving mother – does not disavow his or her children. That is the deep appeal of Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. Here is a young man who has received his full legacy from his father and gone away to squander it all in riotous living, painting the towns red from one end of Judea to the other. Naturally, as the wheel of his deeds begins to turn against him, he eventually finds himself alone and friendless, utterly without resources, without even the means to feed himself. Then he understands the enormity of what he has done, and stricken with grief, he decides to return to his father’s house – not for a second legacy, but merely to work for his father as a servant rather than starve in a foreign land. And it is a very moving scene when Jesus tells us that the father, in the joy of seeing his son again, runs out to meet him on the road, and embraces him, and returns the young man to his full legacy with great love and ceremony, saying in words that we can remember always: “This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and now he is found.”

There is no question here of the nature of our mistakes. In every country, in every tradition, the annals of mysticism are filled with stories of men and women whose errors in life may have been much worse than ours, but who have managed to reverse their lives completely once they glimpse this birthright of forgiveness within us all. Sometimes it is those with the greatest capacity for doing harm to themselves and others who become tremendous channels for good, for when it is harnessed, all their aggression, all their militancy, all their destructiveness can enable them to go very far on the spiritual path. I think it is St. Teresa who says beautifully that the sun of God’s love is always shining, and though we may have kept the curtains drawn for a whole lifetime, filling our hearts with darkness, once we reach out and open the curtains there is no darkness so deep that it will not be dispelled by the brightness of that light.

But it is not enough to say that we are all children of the Lord; we have to learn to act as children of the Lord. In my ancestral home in India, when the younger girls were just learning to cook on our wood stoves, they would sometimes spill a little curry or burn a little rice, and their mothers or aunts would sometimes criticize them for being all thumbs. On such occasions, my grandmother would always say for the benefit of both generations, “In order to learn to cook, you have to burn a little and spill a little.” But then she used to add to the girls, “But if you never do anything but burn and spill, you will never learn to cook.” It is very much the same in our lives too. I have great sympathy for people when they come and tell me of the mistakes they have committed, because I know how easy it is for all of us to make such mistakes ourselves. But where I get bewildered is when they go on committing those same mistakes without doing their best not ever to commit them again.

All of us, as human beings, have the marvelous capacity to relearn all our patterns of living, to change every liability into a strength. I am always amazed at how quickly this transformation can take place. Here is someone who has been eating unhealthy food for years, and in a few months he is able to change his habits completely. There is someone who has been suffering from terrible bouts of anger, and after a few years of meditation she has already begun to change anger into compassion and hatred into love. Even if we have been in the slough of despond for fifty years, we need not work fifty years to get out of it. This is divine mercy. Even though we may have been very selfish, even if we have developed all kinds of unpleasant habits over the years, such as smoking, or drinking, or always brooding on ourselves, Sri Krishna says, Kshipram bhavati dharmatma: we swiftly become the soul of goodness, often even stronger in body and mind than we were before these negative habits began to drain us of our strength.

As our spiritual awareness deepens and we begin to see ourselves more clearly, there will be times when past mistakes will swim into our vision and do their best to consume us in guilt or regret. At such times, it is essential to repeat the mantram and turn all our attention outwards, away from ourselves. Analyzing our mistakes and dwelling on how to repay them is of no earthly benefit at all. But here I can offer one consoling application of the law of karma. If, when you were in Milwaukee, you happened to say something insulting about your girlfriend’s dog, it is not necessary to go to Milwaukee and find your old girlfriend or her dog to make amends. Every dog you treat with kindness will be a proxy for that dog. If you have treated a particular person badly, even if you can no longer win that person’s forgiveness, you can still win the forgiveness of yourself, of the Lord of Love within, by bearing with everyone who treats you badly and doing your best never to treat anyone else badly again. This is the tremendous practical implication of St. Francis’s words, “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” Whatever we have done, we can always make amends for it without ever looking backwards in guilt or sorrow.

Here the question I like to hear is, How do we do this? We are convinced of the folly of looking backwards, of analyzing our weaknesses or our guilt; now how do we go about changing ourselves so that all of these habits can be unlearned? This is the purpose of meditation and its allied disciplines, which gradually give us the wisdom to see what changes to make in ourselves and the will and skillfulness to translate these changes into our daily lives.

First there is the physical level, which is very much the level of the body and the senses. As the Buddha would say, we are not punished for our sins, we are punished by our sins, and I think that many of the serious diseases which have become so widespread today – heart disease, hypertension, digestive and breathing disorders, even many kinds of cancer – are influenced by things like poor diet and smoking and environmental pollution, which are entirely within our means to avoid. Even if our problems are not of this kind, a healthy body and a relaxed, resilient nervous system are essential if we are to overcome the emotional problems to which all of us are subject in some measure.

So the first step we must take once we take to meditation is to change our way of living. To begin with, our attitude towards food begins to change. Instead of eating what benefits only the palate, what appeals to our taste, we begin to eat what benefits the body. Then our whole attitude towards exercise begins to change. Where we used to drive to the corner to post a letter, we now begin to walk everywhere – after breakfast, during our morning break, every time we get a chance. Walking briskly while repeating the mantram is excellent exercise; it can go a long way towards releasing tension, and as one doctor I was reading says, virtually every muscle in the body is utilized except the jaws. And whenever we get some free time – a day off, or a weekend, or a summer vacation – instead of doing something that pleases no one but ourselves, we can give our time and our energy to people or worthwhile organizations who are in need. All these are changes we can make in our external lives which strengthen us immensely to turn our backs upon the past.

But external changes like these are only the beginning. On the emotional side, even those with strong, healthy bodies, who lead very temperate lives, are not immune to the restlessness, the loneliness, the insecurity that we see all around us today. Here, meditation and the allied disciplines can give us such peace of mind that negative states such as insecurity and depression can be banished from our lives forever. This takes more time than physical changes, but it is within the reach of every one of us. Then, when we can make these changes, the Lord says, Shashvacchantim nigacchati: in a very short time our hearts will be at peace, and we will live at peace not only with others but with ourselves.

Arjuna is overwhelmed by these statements, because he sees in this promise of Self-realization how infinite is the mercy of the Lord. Arjuna’s mother is Kunti, and this mighty warrior has become so like a little child in his gratitude and his love that Sri Krishna calls him by a very tender name: Kaunteya, ‘Kunti’s child.’ He says, Kaunteya, pratijanihi: “Always remember” – when the senses get turbulent, when the ego becomes rebellious, when the world threatens to overpower you – na me bhaktah pranashyati: “those who are devoted to me, who meditate on me, will never come to harm.” It is a promise which has been verified by so many mystics that we can trust it as an eternal spiritual law.

SRI KRISHNA: 32. All those who take refuge in me, whatever their birth, race, or sex, will attain the supreme goal; this realization can be attained even by those whom society scorns.

33. Kings and sages too seek this goal with devotion. Therefore, having been born in this transient and forlorn world, give all your love to me.

No matter who we are or what our past, every one of us can become aware of our real Self, the Atman, which is beyond any barrier life can erect – nationality, race, sex, social status, anything.

In India, there is a story about a poor peasant boy who came from one of the so-called lower castes. This boy was a great lover of Lord Shiva, always repeating Shiva’s name and meditating on him. So when it came time for the annual festival to celebrate the glory of Shiva, this boy desperately wanted to go. But all his days were committed to working in the rice fields of his landlord, whose permission he had to obtain before he could go. The landlord was a very wealthy man but not a very spiritual one, and he just laughed at the boy’s request: “Imagine you wanting to go to the Shiva festival, which is usually attended by brahmins! What do you know about the scriptures?”

The boy replied, “I don’t know anything about the scriptures. I can’t even read or write. But I have such love in my heart for Shiva that even the sound of his name thrills me.”

“That’s all very well,” said the landlord, “but the rice fields are ready for harvesting and I need you here.” Then he added in an unkind joke, “Have the harvest completely finished by tomorrow morning, and I will give you permission to go.”

Now, normally a rice harvest takes many days of backbreaking labor, and there was no way in which even a small part of this work could be done overnight. But the boy was undaunted, for his landlord had given him an opportunity that a boy of his caste would ordinarily never get. He went home, sat in his hut in deep meditation, and asked Lord Shiva from the very depths of his heart: “I have such a good landlord; he has promised to let me go to your temple and celebrate your glory if I can harvest all the rice from the fields by tomorrow morning. Help me, O Shiva, so that I may go to your festival.” Then, after he had laid his prayer at the feet of the Lord, the boy was so full of faith that without any doubts troubling him further, he lay down and fell asleep.

Early the next morning an excited crowd of villagers gathered outside his hut. Not only had the fields been completely harvested; the rice bundles were neatly tied and arranged on the bullock carts, ready to go. Everybody was crying, “Miracle! Miracle!” Even the landlord was profoundly moved. He asked the boy to forgive him and to explain how this miracle had been performed. The boy replied in utter guilelessness: “What is there so miraculous about it? I love Shiva, and he is the Lord of the universe. I just told him I had a little job to do before I could go to his celebration.” This is the faith that harvests rice fields and moves mountains, and it may be attained by any of us, no matter what our birth or background or social status.

Today, however, most of us find it so easy to support the underdog that I would like to say a good word in favor of the upper dog, too. Just because someone is cultured, or wealthy, or has led a good life, he or she is not barred from going far on the spiritual path. In my experience, those who have undergone all the discipline it takes to become scholars, doctors, engineers, lawyers, artists, and scientists can take to meditation very easily. All they have to do is take the energy, concentration, and effort they used to achieve excellence in their field and turn it towards the supreme goal of life. Wherever you find people who can concentrate with absorption, you have found promising potential spiritual aspirants. Once they understand how to harness their capacities through the practice of meditation, such people can grow to great spiritual heights.

SRI KRISHNA: 34. Fill your mind with me; serve me; worship me always. Seeking me in your heart, you will at last be united with me.

This is the refrain of the entire Bhagavad Gita. The Lord sums up the supreme secret of the spiritual life in one word, manmana: “Let your mind be filled with me.” Let your heart dwell only on the Lord and let nothing else distract you. In your dreams, see the Lord; in your sleep, hear his voice. Under no circumstances must you ever forget him. In the deeper stages of meditation, the Lord will put you to some simple tests to see if you have unified your consciousness in him. He may strike a great blow at you, and when your whole being is agitated he will say, “Now let me see you meditate.” It is a stiff, honest test. The mind may rise in tides of turmoil and object, “How can I meditate when you have struck at me like this? I’m completely stunned.” If that is so, you haven’t passed the test. But if you have been meditating steadily and enthusiastically over a long period of time, your mind will remain centered on the Lord no matter what blows life deals you. Whatever reverses come your way, your heart will always be filled with love. Then the Lord will say, “You pass.” When he says that, all your problems pass, too.

Under no circumstances should we forget that the Lord alone is worthy of our deepest love. We should never sacrifice our meditation for the sake of any other interest. When we base our life on meditation, our health, our security, our intellectual and creative capacities have to improve; there is no other alternative. If we try in this way to fill our hearts with love for him, we will be united with him without any doubt at all.