It is not enough if we walk on two legs, part our hair, and go about in a new suit. That does not make us a human being. The capacity to forget our own personal pleasures, and to bless those who curse us – these are what mark a human being.
Arjuna cowers now because there is lightning darting out of the eyes of the Lord when he says asvargya: “You have locked the door of the kingdom of heaven within by refusing to eliminate your ego, by failing to turn your back upon self-will and separateness.” The Lord shocks Arjuna out of his torpor by using these strong words, and when he has been pulled out of his despondency and despair, Sri Krishna continues in the third verse:
3. It does not become you to yield to this weakness. Arise with a brave heart, and destroy the enemy.
Sri Krishna asks Arjuna to come out of this whirlpool in which he has been caught, saying, “It is unworthy of you. You are a blessed human being now and you cannot say that these challenges are too great to face.”
When the senses are driving us, we cannot make the excuse that we are unable to resist. We cannot say that just because there is food nearby we must eat. We cannot say that everybody smokes, therefore we must smoke; everybody drinks, therefore we must drink. However difficult circumstances may be, however formidable the challenges may be, we can be certain that because the Lord is within us we have the infinite resources of his love and wisdom to meet the challenge. When our dear ones are agitating us, we cannot complain that we cannot live with them, because the Lord will answer: “Why can’t you? I am in you. Draw upon Me to return love for hatred, goodwill for ill will.”
Having thus made short work of Arjuna’s ego, Sri Krishna now tells him to get up, to rise to his full stature, to straighten his head until it reaches the stars with the whole sky as a crown. He says, “Arjuna, you have such valor in you because I live in you; all you need do is to draw upon Me and you can destroy the enemy completely.” He ends the verse by addressing Arjuna as parantapa, ‘destroyer of the foe,’ which is the ego.
ARJUNA:
4. How can I ever bring myself to fight against Bhishma and Drona, who are worthy of reverence? How can I, Krishna?
5. Certainly it would be better to spend my life begging than to kill these great and worthy souls; if I killed them, every pleasure I found would be tainted.
Even though Sri Krishna has been taking Arjuna to task for bemoaning his helplessness and his inability to conquer his own sense cravings and selfish urges, Arjuna still feels that the senses are his friends. He turns to Sri Krishna and says, “What kind of counsel are you giving me? These senses are good, steady friends of mine. I should receive them with hospitality and give them everything they ask for. I am shocked that you should use such unspiritual language and ask me to defy the clamor of my senses.”
In our own daily life we can see how much conflict we have where the senses are concerned. When the eyes want to see something agitating, we feel we must show them all kinds of violent sights. When the ears want to hear raucous music that will agitate the mind and damage our hearing, we tell the Lord, “You don’t expect us to say no, do you?” Since we do not want to be cruel to our ears, we take them to all kinds of parties where the din is so great it lifts the roof. Then food – what the palate demands must be good for the body. Highly spiced, deep-fried, overrefined – this is the stuff the palate enjoys; so we conclude that it is very good for the body.
In the early part of our spiritual development this conflict is likely to come to all of us because we have given license to our senses most of the time. Similarly, we have never consciously tried to go against our self-will, and therefore even the discipline of putting our family and friends first is going to take a long time to master. We are likely to complain to the Lord that by asking us to put other people first all the time, he is making our path too difficult. “Why should I inflict violence on my self-will?” we moan. “This agitates my mind, making meditation difficult.”
6. I don’t even know which would be better, for us to conquer them or for them to conquer us. The sons of Dhritarashtra have confronted us; but why would we care to live if we kill them?
Arjuna now raises a question which many of us may be tempted to ask when we are having difficulties on the spiritual path. He says, “After all, even if I conquer the senses, how do I know that I will be able to control my mind? And even if I control my mind, how do I know that I will be able to eliminate the ego? This is all speculation. I am not convinced that all this is so carefully connected. It appears too logical. What does it matter if I conquer my senses or my senses conquer me? What is the use of rising to the summit of human consciousness and conquering the world if I am not there to enjoy it – if my senses are detached, my mind cannot get excited, and there are no more likes and dislikes?”
It seems to Arjuna that he is being asked to throw himself into an even more painful, agitating state. He is completely bewildered, and now breaks down and asks for spiritual guidance from Sri Krishna, the Lord of Love, who has been listening quietly and compassionately all the while.
7. My will is paralyzed, and I am utterly confused. Tell me which is the better path for me. Let me be your disciple. I have fallen at your feet; give me instruction.
Arjuna tells Sri Krishna, “I am your disciple. Now be my teacher and instruct me.” In the orthodox Hindu tradition, until we ask the teacher to be our guru, showing our readiness to receive his guidance on the path of meditation, he does not offer to do this for us. It is a great moment in the Gita when for the first time Arjuna declares himself the devoted disciple of Sri Krishna and asks him to be his beloved teacher. The word guru means ‘one who is heavy,’ so heavy that he can never be shaken. A guru is a person who is so deeply established within himself that no force on earth can affect the complete love he feels for everyone. If you curse him, he will bless you; if you harm him, he will serve you; and if you exploit him, he will become your benefactor. It is good for us to remember that the guru, the spiritual teacher, is in every one of us. All that another person can do is to make us aware of the teacher within ourselves. The outer teacher makes us aware of the teacher within, and to the extent we can be loyal to the outer teacher, we are being loyal to ourselves, to our Atman. We are told in the scriptures to select a teacher very carefully. We should not get carried away by personal appearance – because we like his hair style or his saffron robe. We have to listen carefully, judge carefully, and then make our own decision. Once we make a decision and select an outer teacher who is suited to our spiritual needs, we must be completely loyal to him.
If I may refer to my own small example, I have committed the innumerable mistakes that most of us commit in our modern civilization, but in giving all my love to my Grandmother, I was able to attain some spiritual awareness. When the disciples love the guru, it is this love that unifies their consciousness. At the time when we are ready for it, the spiritual teacher will step aside to show us that all the love we have been giving him has been directed to our own Atman. The guru, who has become complete in himself, does not need anyone’s love to make him secure; it is in order to unify the consciousness of the disciple that the relationship exists.
If you are prepared to undertake the long journey, the teacher will give you the map and all necessary instructions, but you have got to do the traveling yourself. That the teacher cannot provide. The purpose of visiting a spiritual teacher is to be reminded that there is a destination, there is a supreme goal in life, and we all have the innate capacity to undertake the journey. When people used to sit in the presence of Sri Ramana Maharshi and praise him, he would just smile as if to say, “There is no Sri Ramana Maharshi. I am just a little keyhole through which, when you fix your eye with complete concentration, you can see the beckoning, irresistible vision of the Lord.”
The Lord is most eager to meet us. He is much more eager than we are. He has been waiting and waiting for millennia, and we are standing him up. Every minute he is looking to see whether there is anybody coming home at last,
and finally, after millions of years of evolution, when all our toys are broken, we decide reluctantly to turn back. When we go back like this after millions of years of separation, the Lord tells us out of his infinite love, “What good boys and girls to have come on your own.” In this verse Arjuna begins to turn to the Lord, by asking him to lead him forward on the path to Self-realization.
8. What can overcome a sorrow that saps all my vitality? Even power over men and gods or the wealth of an empire seems empty.
SANJAYA
9. This is how Arjuna, the great warrior, spoke to Sri Krishna. With the words, “O Govinda, I will not fight,” he became silent.
Arjuna, taking his bow and arrows and putting them away, looks silently at the ground. His actions tell the Lord, “I am not going to fight because I do not have the strength, the will, or the wisdom to turn all my endeavor toward the conquest of myself.” It is impossible for any of us to take on the ego, which is really a formidable foe, without undergoing tremendous spiritual disciplines. When, in the early stage of their meditation, people complain to me about difficulties in controlling the palate, or giving up smoking or drinking, the Job’s consolation that I give them is that these are just preliminaries. The fight has not begun yet; you are just clearing the arena. The real fight begins only when the ego, huge and ferocious, comes onto the field.
Yesterday I was listening to a reading from the Bible about the combat between David and Goliath, which I took as a firsthand description of the spiritual life. Goliath comes and tells the armies of Israel to send their best man; if their man wins, then Goliath and his followers will serve the Israelites, but if Goliath wins, then the Israelites will become the servants of their enemy. The description of Goliath is impressive and terrifying. His armor is invulnerable. He stands on the field like a giant. When David comes up with his five little stones and his puny sling, Goliath gets furious and says, “What are you trying to do, catch a dog?” David takes a little pebble and hits Goliath with a fatal blow right on the center of his forehead. I interpret such stories spiritually. One of the Shiva mantrams is called pancakshara, the ‘five-lettered’ mantram, and for me the five pebbles that David was carrying were a five-lettered mantram with which he was able to defeat his own ego.
The ego’s size can be gauged by our anger, and the further we get into the depths of our consciousness, the more we shall see what anger surges in us when our self-will is violated. To defeat this colossal ego will take a long, long period of struggle with many reverses. But finally, the Gita and the scriptures of all religions assure us, through the grace of the Lord we will be able to eliminate our ego and extinguish our self-will, which is the only barrier between us and the Lord.
10. As they stood between the two armies Sri Krishna spoke with a smile to Arjuna, who had fallen into despair.
The Lord, Sri Krishna, does not get angry or agitated while listening to Arjuna’s many objections, but smiling with great affection for his disciple and friend, he now begins to teach.
SRI KRISHNA
11. You speak sincerely, but your sorrow has no cause; the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.
It is a marvelous line where the Lord implies: “You speak very wise words, but your action is just the opposite of wise. You say you want joy, but the direction in which you are going is towards sorrow. You say you want fulfillment, but what you are going after every day is frustration.” Sri Krishna is now implying all this to Arjuna by pointing out that the way he uses words is one thing, but the way he lives is another.
Do we want joy, security, and fulfillment? This is the question you and I have to ask ourselves first, and then we must move towards these goals. We all say we want peace. There is no individual that says he does not want peace, no nation that says it does not want peace. But if we want peace, we must do the things that make for peace. If we do the things that make for war, only war will come. Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany, used to say, “I do not want war; I only want victory.” On the individual level, too, we are tempted to say, “I don’t want to fight with my parents, but I want to have my way. I don’t want to have any conflict with my partner, but I want to have my way.” In answer to statements like these, Sri Ramakrishna would say, in a childlike outburst, “If you want to go east, you mustn’t go west.” It is not enough if we talk about peace; we must work for it. Even today, after more than two thousand years of recorded history scarred by frequent wars, all the countries on the face of the earth say they long for peace but keep producing armaments, keep suspecting other countries. The Lord of Love therefore asks you and me through Arjuna, “If you want peace, why don’t you work for peace?”
In the second line the Lord, in strong words, gives us the secret of our nature. Arjuna has been talking about death, saying that he does not want to be killed, that he does not want to kill, but Sri Krishna reminds him that it is only the body which is born and which dies. You and I were never born, nor will we ever die, because our real Self is not limited by our physical body. We are spirit eternal, infinite, and immutable. This is the great discovery we make in the climax of meditation, that we are not the body, senses, mind, or intellect, but supreme spirit.
When Sri Ramana Maharshi’s body was about to be resolved back into the five elements at the time of his death in 1950, all India wept for him, saying, “You are leaving us, you are going away.” His simple reply was, “Where can I go? I am everywhere. How can I leave you?” This is the supreme experience of unity that comes to us in samadhi. No adventure in the external world, however great, can ever be compared to the experience of Sri Ramana Maharshi seated on his little bamboo cot, going beyond time, place, and circumstance and seeing the cosmos as one, all creation as one in the Lord.
12. There has never been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.
We are now getting into one of the central themes of the Gita. Looking at Arjuna compassionately, the Lord tells him, “You have always been; you will always be.” This is the realization we have to make in life – that we are immortal, that we have everlasting life. Jesus in the Christian scriptures often says, “I have come to bring you everlasting life.” It is into this experiential discovery that we shall move in the course of our meditation. As our meditation deepens, we shall find we are delivered from time into the Eternal Now.
One of the ways to test our progress on the spiritual path is to see how much we are able to free ourselves from the oppressive pressure of time. The clock is the most eloquent symbol of the tyranny of time. I sometimes speculate that before long we may be wearing watches with only one hand, showing a second divided into sixty subseconds. When we make an appointment we will say, “Come at two seconds and thirty-nine subseconds after two thirty.” This is the direction in which we are moving as we become more and more conscious of time. I notice that if at a traffic signal the automobile in front delays ten seconds, immediately the other drivers begin using the horn. I always ask, “What is the harm if that person repeats the mantram for ten seconds and gives us all a chance to slow down?”
The constant craze for going faster, faster, faster throws us more and more into consciousness of time; and curiously enough, when we are oppressed by time, we make many mistakes. It is possible to do our work and attend to our duties without in any way being oppressed by time, and when we work free from the bondage of time we do not make mistakes, we do not get tense, and the quality of our living improves.
One of the easiest ways to free yourself from the tyranny of time is to get up early in the morning. When we used to go for our walks in Oakland in the morning, I would invariably see a few people – usually the same people – making a dash to catch the bus as if they were participating in the Olympics. Often they would be too late, and I always wanted to ask, “Why do you want to run to miss the bus? You might as well walk slowly and miss it.” This is the irony. You run and you still miss the bus, and in addition, th
e expression you direct at the bus driver is far from loving. You think that he has been doing it on purpose – just waiting until he saw you coming, then stepping on the gas.
This simple step of starting the day early in the morning gives you an opportunity to get up leisurely, take a short walk, and then have your meditation. In meditation, also, do not be aware of time. The moment you become aware of time in meditation, there is an unfavorable factor introduced. When we were having our large class of four or five hundred people on campus, the first night in meditation a few people kept looking at their watches, which I did not object to. But I did begin to protest when they started listening to see if the watches were still ticking. Once you start meditating, forget about time. There is no need to check the clock; you can learn to time the length of the meditation fairly well by the length of the passage you are using.
In order to regain our birthright of eternal life we have to rise gradually above the physical level. Any habit that ties us to the body through a sensory bond eventually has to be thrown away. Right at the outset of the spiritual life we must begin to rid ourselves of physical habits, such as smoking, drinking, and overeating, which will impede our progress. This is not at all a moral or ethical problem; it is a question of spiritual engineering. As long as we tie ourselves to the body by stimulating the senses, and especially by building relationships on the physical level, we cannot realize this legacy of everlasting life.
13. As the same person inhabits the body through childhood, youth, and old age, so too at the time of death he attains another body. The man of wisdom is not deluded by these changes.
Just as the body, with which all of us identify ourselves, changes from childhood to youth to old age, similarly, Sri Krishna says against the background of reincarnation, we acquire a new body when we pass from one life into another after the last great change called death. There is no need to subscribe to the theory of reincarnation to lead the spiritual life, but it cannot be easily dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders as a feverish product of the tropical imagination. There is a wealth of evidence based upon scientific research available to those who want to understand this subject before pronouncing a verdict on it. Somerset Maugham, who came to India in the late thirties and had the glorious opportunity of meeting Sri Ramana Maharshi, from whom he drew the saint in his novel The Razor’s Edge, says that even for a nonbeliever it is very difficult to attack the philosophical structure on which reincarnation is based.
The End of Sorrow Page 5
