The End of Sorrow

by Eknath Easwaran

  One of the common questions about the theory of reincarnation that people ask is, “How is it we do not remember anything of our previous lives?” Sri Krishna is now implying that just as it is very difficult to remember even our childhood in this life, it is impossible for most of us to remember our past lives. If the Lord were to ask us what we were doing on our birthday when we were one year old, we would say that we do not remember. If he said, “Then you didn’t exist,” we would object to his teasing and say, “Of course we existed. We received presents and great love from our parents on that day.”

  Sri Krishna now hints to Arjuna, “Just take your thoughts back to your childhood and look at yourself as a child.” If we go back as far as we can to our childhood and picture ourselves as we were then, what our needs, ambitions, hopes, and desires were, we just cannot believe that it is the same person. Today what makes us happy is money, and to a child money means nothing, gold means nothing. One of my cousins, when she was going to the elementary school in our village, had a beautiful gold necklace made by our village goldsmith. One day when she was about eight she came home at noon for lunch, and her mother was alarmed to see that the necklace was not around her neck. “Have you lost your gold necklace, our family treasure?” she asked. And the little girl smiled and said, “No, mommy, I haven’t lost it. I traded it for a mango.” Somebody had offered her a mango, which was much more important, much more enjoyable, and she had just given the necklace away.

  In these verses we are being led gradually to the question of death. I think it is Dr. Carl Jung who tells us that in the deep consciousness of most people there is a great fear of death, even among those who say they want to die. One of the most beneficial effects of meditation is that as our meditation deepens, we gradually lose our fear of death. This is the proof that we are rising above physical consciousness. If we talk about death to a great mystic like Sri Ramana Maharshi, who attained illumination at age seventeen, he will just chuckle quietly and say, “I died when I was seventeen.” When at the time of samadhi we lose our ‘I,’ our separate ego, that is death. This is the experience of St. Paul when he says, Not I, not I, but Christ liveth in me. Even intellectually we can ask ourselves the question: when our ‘I’ is wiped out, who is there to die? As we keep putting the happiness of others first all the time, our little ‘I’ is erased, and with the elimination of the little finite ‘I,’ the Immortal ‘I,’ which is the Lord of Love, is revealed in our consciousness.

  14. When the senses contact sense objects, Kaunteya we experience cold or heat, pleasure or pain. These are fleeting; they come and go. Bear them patiently, Arjuna.

  Sri Krishna is now telling Arjuna the nature of the stimulus and response relationship that our body, senses, and mind have with the finite world. When the material object that is the body comes in contact with other material objects, such as the dollar, then there is some kind of relationship established with which we have nothing to do at all. Sri Krishna, as I imagine him, now almost seems surprised and asks Arjuna, “Why should you get elated or depressed if one material object has its physical reaction with another material object?”

  Depression has become one of the scourges of the modern world. Here the Gita can give immediate advice: when you are getting excited, when good things are happening to you, when fortune is smiling on you and you want to go on talking, telling everyone about how happy you are, that is the time not to get elated. On such occasions of elation – when your play is on Broadway, when your novel is on the best-seller list, when people are wanting your autograph – I am usually a bit of a wet blanket and say, “Now is the time not to jump up. Don’t pick up the telephone. Don’t call people. Just keep repeating the mantram.” When the mind is getting agitated, when the waves of elation are starting to rise, do not give them a chance.

  Elation expresses itself in many ways in many people. We have some friends for whom the danger signal is the tendency to talk constantly; for others it is grandiose visions of the future. Apparently modest, apparently humble people can have such grand visions of the future that it is difficult to remind them how ordinary most of us are in the present. People with a talent for writing, drama, music, or painting, however mediocre, may get caught on such occasions in the visualization of scenes of great grandeur. They see audiences looking adoringly at them, fighting for their autograph, and in their elation they actually believe that these things can come true. The Gita suggests that when we conjure up elated visions of grandeur, we should guard ourselves against this kind of excitement. If we keep our equilibrium when good things happen, then when fortune frowns, as she surely will because that is her nature, we can sit back with fortitude and forbearance and remain secure.

  When you are in a depression, do not withdraw into yourself. There are people with the best intentions who say, “We don’t want to come and force our depression on others.” This is another trick of the mind, which tells you, “Since you’re in a depression now, why not confine yourself to your little cell?” This is likely to make you more and more depressed. When despondency comes, I would suggest a smile. Even if it does not look quite like a real smile, it does such good for everyone, because even a smile comes from a deeper level of consciousness. If you can at least repeat the mantram and smile, the great process of relaxation begins.

  Not allowing ourselves to get elated is neither callousness nor passivity; it leads us into a deeper level of awareness where we find we are completely secure and joyful. Anything that tends to make us elated is inevitably going to throw us into depression, and one of my grievances against psychedelic drugs is the very deceptive state of euphoria into which they lead us. In order to guard ourselves against elation and the following state of deprivation, we cannot allow our senses to be stimulated unduly.

  In the language of the Gita, not only elation and depression, not only pleasure and pain, but everything in life is a duality; and in order to attain samadhi, one of the magnificent disciplines taught by Sri Krishna is evenness of mind. He will say, Samatvam yoga ucyate: “Yoga is evenness of mind.”

  15. The person who is unaffected by these, who is the same in pleasure and pain, is truly wise and fit for immortality. Assert your strength to realize this, Arjuna.

  The Lord of Love begins to tell us how we can prepare ourselves for reclaiming our birthright of everlasting life. In the scriptures of all religions this promise of eternal life is given, but people usually understand it only as a very inspiring metaphor, not to be taken with scientific gravity. The mystics say that it is time that is an illusion; eternity is the reality.

  How is it that you and I see people, very often our own dear ones, dying around us, and yet never ask ourselves the question: “Is this one day going to happen to me, too? Is there no way by which I can transcend death?” In my beautiful village in Kerala state, whenever a death took place, which is not infrequent in a poor country like India, my Grandmother would always insist that I accompany her to the scene of sorrow, even when I was still an impressionable and sensitive child. As I sat by the side of dying people while my Grandmother held their hand, it used to torture me. Even in my dreams, I long remembered the sight of all this agony I witnessed during the days when I was growing up at my Granny’s feet.

  Later on, when through her blessing I began to turn inwards, I realized why she had taken me to those scenes of great bereavement. It was to make me ask if there were any way to transcend death. Her grace enabled me to know that in the midst of life I am in death, and it made me want above everything else to go beyond death, to attain immortality in this very life. As my meditation deepened, I was able to harness even the fear of death, turning it into power to help me to overcome death.

  As I began to recall the words of my spiritual teacher, it began to dawn upon me for the first time that man is not mortal. When Einstein was asked how he discovered the law of relativity, he said that it was by questioning an axiom accepted by all the world, and the scriptures say the stage will come in your meditation when
you will begin to question whether death is inevitable. This is not an intellectual question at all, but an experience in which some lurking suspicion comes into your consciousness and whispers that you are not mortal. Once you hear that, there is great hope, and a great desire to turn your back upon all lesser desires so that you can use all your capacity to make the supreme discovery that you are eternal.

  In every religion, the great founders will promise us everlasting life. In the Bhagavad Gita it is enunciated in very clear terms. The Gita says that as long as we identify ourselves obsessively with our body, we will keep falling into the jaws of death. In meditation we can very skillfully minimize this obsessive identification with the body. On many levels, in many ways, we can practice the spiritual disciplines which will gradually lift us above physical consciousness, giving us a continuing sense of freedom and a continuing sense of progress on the spiritual path.

  16. The impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal. Those who have seen the boundary between these two have attained the end of all knowledge.

  The main difficulty with Arjuna, as with all of us, is that he looks upon himself as the body, as the biochemical mechanism with which all of us identify ourselves. Sri Krishna is trying to help Arjuna break through this wrong identification to remind him that he is not the perishable body, which is only the house in which he dwells. He is the imperishable Atman.

  In this verse Lord Krishna distinguishes between what is real and what is unreal. With the far-reaching spiritual penetration of the Sanskrit scriptures, the Gita says that whatever perishes is not real. Whatever exists in reality, exists always. That which comes into being today and passes away a hundred years from now cannot truly be said to exist. In this sense the body, which is conditioned by time, is unreal.

  Mahatma Gandhi, who studied Sanskrit while in jail, pointed out that the Sanskrit word sat has two meanings: the first is ‘truth,’ and the second is ‘that which is.’ When asked for a definition of God, Gandhi said, “Truth is God. God alone is and nothing else exists.” During the campaign to free India of British domination, he told the oppressed millions of India that evil has no existence in itself; we support evil, therefore it exists, but if we withdraw our support, it ceases to exist. In the example of his own life, Gandhi applied this truth on the practical level in his campaigns of nonviolent resistance against British exploitation.

  Those who see the supreme Truth, the Lord, in their own consciousness, says Sri Krishna, know that that which is not real has no existence, and that which is real has no nonexistence. Arjuna just gets confused. He looks at his body, he looks at Sri Krishna’s body, he looks at Sri Krishna’s peacock feather, and he just cannot believe that all this is an optical illusion. This is why the Lord limits the vision of the unreality of the passing phenomenal world only to the great mystics, who have realized that beneath the apparent, impermanent world, the world of separate fragments, there lies the changeless Reality called God. But this vision does not apply to the vast majority of human beings. As long as we believe we are a separate fragment, as long as we identify ourselves with our body, we have to deal with the phenomenal world which is very real to us. I am real. Every one of us is real. Even after we realize the truth that all life is one, we can continue the activities of the workaday world, establishing personal relationships with loving artistry. We learn to show our love to each individual in the way that is most correct for that special relationship, though never forgetting the underlying unity of all.

  17. Realize That which pervades the universe and is indestructible; no power can affect this unchanging, imperishable Reality.

  Sri Krishna is driving into Arjuna’s consciousness the great truth that he is neither the perishable body, nor the changing senses, nor the unsteady mind, nor the wavering intellect, but the Atman, as immutable and infinite as Brahman itself. The Lord of Love tells Arjuna the nature of that which pervades the cosmos. All that we see in life is pervaded by the immortal, immutable, infinite Reality we call God.

  18. The body is mortal, but he who dwells in the body is said to be immortal and immeasurable. Therefore, O Bharata, fight in this battle.

  This body of ours will come to an end, but we, the Atman, are eternal. Here again there is the reminder that we have no end, and therefore never should confuse ourselves with the perishable body. The body is changing from moment to moment, and even in the few minutes you have been reading these words, the body has already moved closer to the great change called death. The mind is subject to even more rapid changes. We have only to look at our desires and moods to see how much the mind is subject to change. In Sanskrit the word for the phenomenal world is samsara, ‘that which is moving intensely’ – being born, dying, being born again, dying again.

  Whenever we cling to anything that is continually changing, we will become more and more insecure with the passage of time. When we identify ourselves obsessively with the body, every morning begins to pose a threat as we get older and move into the latter half of life. Every morning we look in the mirror to see if there are new wrinkles on the face, bags under the eyes, or grey showing in our hair. Even if, with the advance of modern surgery, these bags and wrinkles can be removed, after ten or twenty years the same fate will come to us. Such is the paradox of life: when we cling to the body, it loses its beauty, but when we do not cling to it, and use the body as an instrument given to us to serve others, even on the physical level it glows with health and beauty, as we can see from the lives of many great mystics. When Sri Ramakrishna walked along the streets of Calcutta, legends say people were dazzled by his beauty. His spiritual radiance was so great that it would shine through the body. Ramakrishna did not like drawing the attention of people, so with his childlike simplicity he got an old blanket and covered his body when going out. When our consciousness becomes pure, even the body begins to reflect its light.

  The body is the temple of the Lord and must be looked after with care. Even at the age of seventy-seven, my Grandmother had a beautiful, healthy body because she was always aware that this temple had to be kept in good order, swept with the mantram broom, and purified through the daily practice of meditation and discriminating restraint of the senses. We show respect for the Lord within by keeping the body healthy, clean, and beautiful. Any attempt to misuse the body, or to indulge the senses at the expense of the body, is a violation of the divine presence. Where books, movies, television, and our eating habits are concerned, we must be vigilant to see we are not indulging the senses at the cost of the health of our body or mind. Even with those who are making progress on the spiritual path, the senses can play havoc if vigilance is relaxed. In order to transform our belief that we are the changing body to identification with the Atman, we begin by governing the senses very carefully for many years. This is not done in an ascetic spirit, or for the purpose of mortification, but to see that every day we give the body what is needed to sustain it as a spiritual instrument.

  Just as we purify the physical body, called sthulasharira in Sanskrit, with vigilant care of the senses, healthy physical exercise, and repetition of the mantram, we purify the subtle body, sukshmasharira, by cultivating healthy thoughts. Thoughts are the food of the subtle body of samskaras, our mental and emotional conditioning. We are eating this food all the time, and every time a thought rises in the mind we have added either to the nutrition of the subtle body or to its malnutrition. The unhealthy effect on the mind of anger, resentment, and hostility is so great that it can cause far-reaching damage even on the physical level. To keep the subtle body pure and healthy we must first and foremost cultivate the virtue of forgiveness.

  19. One person believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both these are ignorant; there is neither slayer nor slain.

  20. We were never born, we will never die; we have never undergone change, we can never undergo change. Unborn, eternal, immutable, immemorial, we do not die when the body dies.

  Sri Krishna continues to explain our real nat
ure in this verse, which is a favorite of mystics in India. Na jayate, we were never born; na mriyate va, therefore we will never die; na ‘yam bhutva bhavita va na bhuyah, we have never undergone any change, and we will never undergo any change. Aja, never born; nitya, eternal; shashvata, immutable. And finally, in a flash of subtle humor, the Lord adds purana, ‘the ancient one’: compared to us the Himalayas are like a newborn baby. When the world was not, when the galaxies were not, we were already greybeards faltering with a staff.

  The play of the Lord, in which he assumes a body and seems to pass through childhood, youth, and old age, is beautifully portrayed in Kerala in the Guruvayur Temple, dedicated to Lord Krishna. Sri Krishna is worshipped there in three different forms during the three periods of the day. In the morning if you go to the temple you will see a little baby Krishna in a cradle being fed, bathed, and sung to sleep. Most children like to go for the morning service. They see that the Lord is even younger than they, and they have such compassion for him, and feel so protective, that they do not want any harm to come to the little one. This protective feeling towards the Lord as a little boy is very good discipline for spiritual awareness. At noon Sri Krishna is a young man straight as a palm tree, outgoing and very vigorous. You see Lord Krishna as the embodiment of physical fitness at its best. You find the peacock feather, the garland of wildflowers, the yellow silk dhoti, and the bamboo flute. Young people like to visit the temple at noon, when it is easy for them to identify with the Lord. In the evening, when the sun is about to set and tropical India is at its artistic best, the old people like to go and see the Lord, who, hardly able to stand up with a staff, is ready to shed the body. The different images serve to remind you that these are all changes which affect only the body, and that you should learn to rise above the physical level so that you do not get caught in the cycle of change.