by Stephen Cope
Beethoven’s battleground is harmony and theme and variations. Music itself becomes a way of working through soul-shattering conflict. His own desperate need to work through his inner divisions gave the world a wholly new way of working with the problem of doubt and despair.
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Beethoven’s fragile compromise with life broke down one more time before his death. Between the years 1815 and 1820, he survived a series of devastating psychological challenges: the severe illness of his brother Caspar Carl; the threatened loss of his nephew—and “adoptive son”—Karl (and with it the loss of his fantasy of “family”); the loss of his dream of marriage and the final renunciation of his hopes for domestic happiness.
Once again, Beethoven was on the brink of despair, and he found himself on the edge of emotional breakdown. His suicidal impulses were reawakened, and he talked of suicide with his friends and companions. “I often despair and would like to die,” he wrote. During this period, his physical appearance once again deteriorated, and his friends took to buying him new clothes—trying in vain to clean him up. On one now-famous occasion he was almost arrested in Vienna as a vagrant. “I learned yesterday,” wrote a Viennese acquaintance, “that Beethoven had become crazy.”
During these years, Beethoven was again at times close to the breaking point. Many of his symptoms were precisely what we might expect of a man who had been profoundly traumatized as a boy, and who had had no help to integrate this trauma: He had sudden rages, experienced increasing obsessive states (especially around money), felt unreasonably persecuted, and experienced ungrounded suspicions. He was in some ways—as Vienna saw daily—“a sublime madman.”
And yet, underneath these outward signs and symptoms was still percolating the very best of Beethoven—his capacity to use his work to survive, and to transmute his suffering into sublime creations.
During these years, Beethoven embarked on a new phase of his spiritual journey. He read voraciously, studying the core scriptures of many of the world’s great religions. He discussed his existential questions with a small circle of friends, through the vehicle of his “Conversation Books.” He developed a series of notebooks through which he communicated with his friends—intimates who were some of Vienna’s leading citizens, writers, philosophers, musicians, civil servants, journalists. He investigated various views of God. Above all, during these difficult years, Beethoven increased his sense of dedication to his own duty. “God sees into my innermost heart and knows that as a man I perform most conscientiously and on all occasions the duties which Humanity, God and Nature enjoin upon me …” Humanity, God, and Nature: These became Beethoven’s spiritual pillars.
What rose in Beethoven now was an intense determination to bring forth the best that was within him. He set to work. He knew that he would not have time to finish all of the fantastic musical creations that he had already envisioned. He knew that he was in a race against time. But he was determined to bring forth what he could. “I must leave behind me what the Eternal Spirit has infused into my soul,” he wrote. “Why, I feel as if I had hardly composed more than a few notes.”
Beethoven identified with Arjuna’s doubt and questioning, and with the idea of action that is redemptive. He copied into his diary a number of Krishna’s teachings about dharma: “Perform thy duty! Abandon all thought of the consequence.” Beethoven had understood Krishna’s lesson: Your soul can be saved only through action in the performance of your own dharma. He had copied another pillar of Krishna’s teachings into his diary: “Let not thy life be spent in inaction! Depend upon application!” And so, the Master launched into his final period of action. What emerged was another astonishing period of productivity.
Beethoven was remarkably clearheaded in mapping out the work that he wished to finish before his death: There was the great Ninth Symphony, of course; the Missa Solemnis; his spectacularly modern Diabelli Variations; and of course his late string quartets. He put his work above everything and organized his life exclusively around it. “My motto is always: nulla dies sine linea [no day without a line] … and if I let my Muse go to sleep, it is only that she may be all the more active when she awakes. I still hope to create a few great works, and then like an old child to finish my earthly course somewhere among kind people …”
In his search to fully express the sublime music he now heard in his head, Beethoven scoured the history of Western music. He turned backward in his final years toward Bach and Handel, toward the earlier geniuses of fugue and polyphony. What resulted was a remarkable final maturation of his style. In his last several years, we see Beethoven making new connections—expanding sonata form to its very breaking point. His creations were thrilling to those few who could understand what he was doing. And for those who could not understand it, he had little use.
Beethoven was now fiercely determined to offer his final contribution to mankind. He dedicated himself wholly to work. He stripped his life down to absolute essentials. He let go of social niceties. He cared not what others thought. He withdrew into himself when necessary. (And he found a rationale for this turn inward—yogis call this “introversion”—in the literature of the world’s great religions. As he himself wrote in his journals, he discovered the kind of deep meditative states and ritual silence described by Brahmin novices. Time both slowed down and speeded up. He became, indeed, a yogi, during these last years—experiencing a decided maturation of his mind, of his capacity to focus, and of his capacity to perceive subtle patterns in musical forms, patterns that few of his contemporaries could perceive or understand.
It was, indeed, Beethoven’s late-in-life genius that I had experienced in my struggle with his piano sonata opus 110. In this sonata, Beethoven was working through The Wound with such fierceness and with such skill that his arresting musical design caught me up in its net. There was something new and dangerous here that reached far down into my soul to touch my own Gordian knots—and my own longing for freedom. It was indeed the music of a Seer: wildly free, though brilliantly married with form.
Beethoven’s music has changed my life. What has it given me? It has given me not only inspiration and hope, but a visceral way to work through my own neurotic conflicts—a path through my own inner tangles. Every time I play his sonata, I touch a part of myself that nothing else can reach. And afterward, I have the distinct feeling of having been sorted out. Beethoven, in working through his own suffering with integrity, has carried some kind of load for me. This is the mystical effect of dharma.
It is this very effect that we see shining forth from the lives we have examined in this book so far. It shines forth from Marion. From Keats. From Thoreau. From Anthony. Each one of them was able to discover the secret of turning his own particular wound into light—and a light that illumined not only their own lives, but the life of the world.
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Toward the close of his life, a fantastic transformation took place in Beethoven. The more Beethoven became vulnerable to the deterioration of age—both psychologically and physically—the more his Soul clapped its hands … and louder sang.
Two remarkable sketches survive of Beethoven on his deathbed—one by Joseph Teltscher drawn rapidly just before Beethoven’s death, and another by Josef Danhauser drawn just after his death. Both portray a man who is entirely spent. Spent, yes. But like Hokusai on his deathbed, still wanting to get up and work.
Solomon describes the moment of his death: “Late in the afternoon on the final day, during a snowfall and a great thunderstorm, he momentarily opened his eyes, lifted his right hand, and clenched it into a fist. When his hand fell back from this effort, Beethoven was dead.”
Ludwig van Beethoven has become for me one of the greatest exemplars of dharma. His courageous struggle with his vocation shows us the precise relationship between the salvation of the individual soul and the salvation of the world.
If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you.
Now we can add a
codicil: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world.
From the very beginning of our story, Krishna has been teaching Arjuna about action; about making decisions; about hard choices. Do I fight? Do I not fight? Do I act at all? At the outset of their dialogue, Krishna produces a stunning little gem of wisdom for his student (and here again I paraphrase):
“Arjuna, you do not know how to act because you do not know who you are.”
You do not know who you are.
Arjuna does not quite get this the first time around.
But, of course, Krishna persists. He teaches that our decisions about our actions flow inexorably from our understanding of who we are. And if we do not know who we are, we will make poor choices.
Krishna plays this theme softly at first. But it will gain in volume through the course of the dialogue, until it reaches a crescendo in the psychedelic theophany of Chapter Eleven.
Krishna knows that he must help Arjuna—and the reader—move toward a clear understanding of his True Nature. And he knows that only this knowledge will allow Arjuna to make wise choices.
“Arjuna,” he says, in effect, “we have a Divine nature that we only faintly recognize. Our true nature is unborn, undying, unmanifest, inconceivable to the ordinary mind.”
Unborn? Undying? What does this really mean? Well, it’s not easy to grasp. It means that those aspects of our lives that we take to be our True Self—our personality, our body, our career, our house, our stories—are not our True Self at all. Our True Self is our soul. This soul is immortal, and is not limited to present forms. Our present bodies and personalities are only temporary shelters, fleetingly inhabited by our souls. These ephemeral forms are, alas, short-lived. The True Self, however, is immortal. It cannot be destroyed.
[The Self] is not born,
It does not die;
Having been,
It will never not be;
Unborn, enduring,
Constant, and primordial,
It is not killed
When the body is killed.
This is really quite a speech. But its import is lost on our friend Arjuna.
Krishna gives this teaching several times through the course of the Gita, trying out various metaphors to describe the difference between our apparent self and our True Self—hoping to find the image that connects. The metaphor that I have found most helpful is the classic “wave” metaphor (which is often cited in other yogic texts, though not explicitly in the Gita). The self (and here we mean the small “s” self, which is our current form and personality) is described as a wave. We’re all familiar with the action of the wave: The wave rises in the sea, and having arisen appears to have its own form, to be a “thing in itself.” In fact, however, the wave is always and everywhere one with the sea. It arises from and returns to the sea. It is made of the same stuff as the sea. It is the sea in every way. Indeed, even in the fullness of its apparent individual being—its apparent individual “wave-ness”—it is never really other than the sea.
Krishna teaches Arjuna an enduring view of the self taken directly from the Vedantic stream of yoga philosophy. In this view, all individual souls (or atman) are one with the Ground of Being (or Brahman). Because we are One with the great sea of being, we are all just a single soul, “One without a second.” Our True Nature is identical to the nature of Brahman: sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-bliss.
Human beings throughout the ages have spent their lives seeking. But seeking what? Seeking God? Seeking consciousness? Seeking the Truth? Krishna’s teaching cuts through this seeking: “We are,” he says, “what we seek.” Tat tvan asi: Thou Art That. You are already That which you seek. It is inside. It is already You. It is a done deal. Call off the search! as one great Hindu scholar has written.
Krishna continues his teaching: “Creatures are unmanifest in origin, manifest in the midst of life, and unmanifest again in the end.” Another series of obscure phrases from our friend Krishna. To put them in ordinary words, we could say that we manifest from lifetime to lifetime in particular forms: particular bodies, personalities, stories. But these forms—these lifetimes—are transitory.
This teaching is slippery. Indeed, all of the classic yoga texts declare repeatedly that it is a teaching that really cannot be grasped by the mind at all. But (and yogis all agree on this) it can be realized. It can be known intuitively. Indeed, each of us has intimations of our True Nature from time to time throughout our lives—moments when we know utterly that we are One with all of life. William Wordsworth, in one of his greatest poems, referred to these moments of knowing as “intimations of immortality.” These “intimations” sometimes spontaneously arise in our consciousness in moments of quiet—in moments of contemplation, in meditation, in yoga, or just in sitting on the beach at twilight watching a sunset.
But intimations of immortality can also rise in the midst of our hectic lives. Perhaps we are on the subway during a visit to New York City, and we suddenly (and for no apparent reason) feel One with the whole stream of sweating humanity hurtling with us in the rattling underground rocket toward our destination uptown. Suddenly we have this wonderful moment of knowing our Oneness with all beings.
Or, hiking in the woods, we feel an upwelling of kinship with a deer we encounter quietly grazing in a field. Has this happened to you? We are One with that deer. These moments of “knowing” bring with them a calming intuition that everything is OK. That we can really relax. That we can relinquish our striving. That we are that which we seek—that, as many yoga texts declare, we are “born divine.”
Arjuna has already had these fleeting experiences of Oneness, as Krishna knows. Indeed, each of us has. But Krishna wants Arjuna to notice something particular about these realizations. He wants him to see simply this: When we are living in these brief realizations—even for a few moments—they change how we act. They change how we behave. They change the choices we make. Just for these few minutes we’re different. We’re better. We’re our best selves—our True Selves.
I know this to be true from my own experience. Back to the subway analogy for a moment. This is an experience that I actually had recently, and it is still very much alive in my memory. I was in New York City on the subway, and I had one of those moments of Oneness. In that mix of smelly, chaotic humanity on the subway I had a moment of feeling at One with all beings. My heart was full of wonder. Of generosity. Of compassion. I gave up my seat. I prayed for those around me. I knew that in absolutely every way that counted I was exactly like the elderly black woman sitting next to me. I knew that she and I were completely alike inside. When I got off the subway, I gladly dropped a five-dollar bill into the hat of the guy playing the guitar on the platform. In those few moments, I was different. Just for those moments, I was the best version of me. The truest version of me. The power of this moment evaporates quickly, of course. I got off the subway and was off about my business in Manhattan. I probably passed by the next subway musician without a thought. But the moment of awakening left behind a trace of something—a trace of knowing.
Have you had an experience like this? In these moments of Oneness, we often feel as if we had dropped in from outer space, and just for a moment are inhabiting our real lives. These are moments of waking up from the dream of separation in which we ordinarily live.
If you’ve had such an experience, you know for a fact that these little awakenings change the way we act. And they highlight the troubling fact that most of the time we live in exile from our True Selves.
You do not know how to act, because you do not know who you are.
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So, Krishna tells Arjuna that his most perilous problem is that he has forgotten who he is. Do you relate to this? I think it’s one of Krishna’s best metaphors.
Often throughout the course of his teaching in the Gita, Krishna will refer to “the brokenness of our memory.” “
From broken memory understanding is lost,” he says, “and from loss of understanding, [we are] ruined.” Ruined!
This is a central view of the dilemma of the human being in the yoga tradition: We are “wanderers” moving from lifetime to lifetime. Asleep. When we die—when we leave this particular form—we momentarily wake up. We are momentarily rejoined with the Ground of Being. But when we take birth again, we forget. Wordsworth, in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, states the case with vivid images:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
In the yogic view, as in Wordsworth’s, it’s through remembering who we really are that we are liberated. The transformation of the self is not about adding anything. It is about finding what was already there. In the epigraph of her fine commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Columbia University scholar Barbara Stoler Miller appropriately quotes T. S. Eliot’s lines on memory from The Four Quartets.
This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.
These lines from Eliot might have come directly from the Bhagavad Gita. In remembering who we really are, we are liberated from our striving to be somewhere else, to be someone else. Knowing who we really are liberates us from both the past—our overidentification with past experiences of form—and from the future, our hopes and fears about future forms.
