The End of Sorrow

by Eknath Easwaran

  When we realize the complete fullness and complete stillness within us, it is an extremely satisfying experience, which, in the course of time as our meditation deepens, many of us may have. Just for a little while all the wires are disconnected, and there is no contact with the external world. The Buddha, using a negative term, calls it shunyata, the Void, where there is no friction, no disharmony, no separateness. The Hindu mystics describe this stillness as purnata, complete fullness.

  Even after we have attained deep spiritual awareness, however, occasional desires may still come into our minds. This may happen to all of us because we are encased in the body; we are corporeal beings functioning in a physically oriented world. But when we are aware spiritually, even if desires come, we will not identify ourselves with them or be upset by them. Desires will come into the mind just as rivers come into the vast sea, which remains full and established in stillness. As long as we are living on the separate level, putting ourselves first, when a canal brings in a little water there are huge waves and landslides, and banks are swept away. But when we begin to live in the depths of our being, realizing that all of us are one, however different we may appear, then even a big river like the Ganges, coming down from the Himalayas with the monsoon flood, will not disturb the sea of stillness within.

  The last word of this verse is kamakami, ‘the desirer of desires.’ One friend who is going to accompany us deep, deep into our meditation is kama in the form of sexual desire. Even after many years of meditation, when we think we have at last parted from this companion, we will sit down to meditate one morning and there he will be, as friendly as ever. Kama, which is personified in the Hindu tradition as Kamadeva, has many names:

  Madano manmatho marah pradyumno minaketanah

  Kandarpo darpako ‘nangah kamah pancasharah smarah

  Manmatha is ‘he who churns the mind’: when Kama comes with his cosmic churner, we cannot sit quiet; we cannot breathe; we cannot think. This is a very penetrating name, because sex is not just on the physical level. It is very much in the mind, and it is in the mind, not just the body, that we must learn to control this powerful force. Mara is ‘the striker.’ Smara is ‘he who will not let you forget.’ Once we have had a sexual experience, we just cannot forget it; such is the power of Kama that no matter what we try to do, we cannot help dwelling on it. The only refuge we have at that time is Shiva – Smarari, ‘the enemy of Smara,’ who enables us to forget and to recall our vital power. Pancashara is ‘having five arrows.’ When Kama draws back his bow to the end of the world, aims at our heart, and begins to fire his arrows, we feel we are completely lost. Our refuge then is in the mantram.

  When a strong desire is threatening to sweep us away, we grapple with it in morning meditation and still the mind a little. But the real challenge comes afterwards, during the rest of the day, in using the power released in meditation to meet the temptation. We still have the desire, but we turn against it. Whenever desires threaten to agitate us, we have an opportunity to remain calm and compassionate and repeat the mantram. This is the greatest challenge in life. Every time we push these desires back, we strengthen the will; and gradually we begin to realize that He who made the sea and sun, sky and moon, is within us, giving us the infinite power and immense energy to transform our desires. The control of sex is not the negation of it. Sex is closely connected with kundalini, which is evolutionary energy, and when we learn to control this power instead of being controlled by it, all our creative abilities and capacities for selfless service are released.

  71. They are forever free who break away from the ego-cage of ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘mine’ to be united with the Lord of Love.

  In this verse the Lord gives us the secret of how to attain shanti, “the peace that passeth all understanding,” that resolves all conflicts, fulfills all desires, and banishes all fear. In our consciousness there is a division, just a little split at first, that prevents our being completely loving and loyal. When we allow conflicts to rage within us, or disloyalty to separate us from others, the split grows wider and wider until finally it runs clear through our consciousness. Meditation is the process of healing this split so that the two parts become one indivisible unity. This is the purpose of meditation: to do away with the internal divisions of our heart and mind and to mend the external division that separates us from our family, community, and world.

  If we are trying to unify our consciousness, we cannot afford to be disloyal to anyone. If we are disloyal to our parents, the same disloyalty will enter our relationship with our partner and our friends. Right in our home, in our early days, we can learn how to unify our fragmented love and loyalty. Otherwise, once we have left home and begun to deal with the problems of the world, disloyalty may begin to disrupt our relationships.

  Disloyalty gave the Buddha serious problems, as it did Jesus the Christ. Peter was always promising Jesus, “I am completely loyal to you.” But Jesus said, “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.” Just as disloyalty breeds division, loyalty brings union. Every relationship is an opportunity to develop complete loyalty. When I suggest that the family context is the ideal situation in which to learn this art, I do not mean that we should all be married and have a dozen children. Where friends live together, or where people play or work together, there is a family. We all have somebody to put first, and if no friend is available, then we can always find an enemy. Someone may have said or done something harsh towards us. If we can bear with him, we are becoming loyal. If, instead of retaliating, we try to help him get over his problem, we are healing the division that splits his consciousness and ours too. As St. Francis reminds us, the man or woman who has not learned to forgive others has lost the greatest joy in life.

  In the Hindu tradition, religious functions such as marriages and funerals always conclude with the words Om shanti shanti shanti, because everyone is destined for this peace which words cannot capture nor concepts convey. Every day the work you do in meditation is preparing you for shanti. You may have slept a little, digressed a little, or lost the passage at times; still your meditation is bringing you closer to the supreme fulfillment that is shanti. One day when you least expect it, your concentration will become complete. Then the mind quietly puts down a pillow and sleeps for just a few minutes. You look at the slumbering mind and say, “God bless you; may you never wake up.” This is what the Buddhists call the state of no-mind. No-mind is a profound condition in which you know intuitively and directly, without the medium of the senses or the intellect. All mystics tell us this immediate knowledge far exceeds the limitations of the intellect.

  It takes a long time to have even a preliminary experience of shanti. When you have this experience even for a few minutes, it is as if the factory of the mind has closed down completely. Everywhere there is a soothing stillness, a silent splendor. Only when you experience this state can you know how healing it is for the body, senses, mind, and intellect, and how bad it is for the ego. This is the only party who suffers. I have said more than once that I am not competent to perform a marriage or a funeral ceremony. But for the funeral of the ego you may call me any time, and I will come immediately. This is the job I love. When you have the ego lying on the funeral pyre, light the torch and give me the signal; I will set it on fire. Shanti is the supreme state of perfect peace and purity in which we become love itself, loving not only this or that person but all creation, for we have realized the unity underlying all life.

  To be nihspriha is to be without sensory craving, without any desire for satisfaction from the outside. One by one, each of these desires has to be given up. This is why it takes a long, long time to attain spiritual awareness. If we had only five desires, it might take us just five weeks; but we have an almost endless number of desires, for the nature of the mind is to desire, to desire, to desire. Most of us seem to believe that if we could make a lot of money, or win prizes, or have our portrait unveiled in the city hall, we would be happy. I have even heard people insist that th
e day they made their first million, or the moment the curtain fell from their portrait, they were very happy. Patanjali is a wet blanket to such people when he explains what really happens on these occasions. He says we are happy because one desire has temporarily subsided, and there is not time for another desire to well up in our mind. The mind-factory is closed down for the weekend. Happiness comes when the mind is at rest. We can all attest that when one desire has been fulfilled, there is an interim period of peace before another desire rises. I do not deny that this temporary satisfaction can be very pleasant, but when we yield to one desire, the next one is usually stronger, and if we continue to give in to selfish desires, the interval between them will become shorter and shorter until there is hardly any respite at all.

  A close relationship exists between the constant desire for things outside ourselves and the drain of vital energy. Window-shopping is considered an inoffensive relaxation. Maybe it does not affect our bank balance, but it does affect our vital wealth. When we look at things and want to have them, or look at people and envy them, vitality is ebbing out. To become nihspriha we must vigilantly ask, “Should I go after this?” By asking this question in every situation, we will gradually learn which things are really necessary and which are only cumbersome.

  Then Sri Krishna adds nirmamo. Just as the sense of ‘I’ can be very painful and can cost us our best friendships, so can the desire for ‘mine.’ In politics this is particularly true. War breaks out when the concept of ‘mine’ becomes outrageously inflated. All of us can be caught in mass estrangement. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” he is telling us, as does Sri Krishna, that you and I can help bring friends, communities, countries, and enemies together by the example of our own personal lives.

  Nirmamo should also remind us that the Lord gives us all the resources and life of the earth to care for as trustees. Sri Krishna is the landlord and we are poor tenants. What we have done to his apartment no human landlord would tolerate. Just try to misuse the apartment you are renting – fill it with smoke, pollute the water, punch holes in the walls, smash the windows – and see how fast you are evicted. The Lord, though, keeps on putting up with us. He doesn’t even collect his rent. The rent he expects from every one of us is that we live for other people, and very few will pay so much. We want to live for ourselves, and we expect him to subsidize our selfishness and our self-will. Yet nothing on earth is ours; everything is the Lord’s. We have always assumed we could use as much air as we like, as much water as we like, because there would be an unending supply. Now we know our resources are limited and must be used carefully. When we abuse our environment, our water and air, it is at the cost of future generations.

  Nirahamkara means free from self-will. I have just been reading the life of St. Francis of Assisi, and I am captivated by the saint’s capacity to extinguish his self-will. Jesus says that he who wants to find himself has first to lose himself, and the Sufi mystic Ansari of Herat tells us in glorious language: “Know that when you learn to lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other secret to be learnt, and more than this is not known to me.”

  In order to lose myself, I have to stop thinking about that most dreary topic, ‘me.’ When your spiritual awareness deepens, you will find what a monotonous, infernal bore the ego is, always wanting to be the cynosure of all eyes and the center of attention. As a matter of discipline, it is good to remain in the background. Sometimes I cannot help chuckling at the ways young people here in Berkeley try to attract attention. On one occasion I saw a truck drive past the campus carrying a piano at which a young fellow was sitting and playing away as the truck moved along. Naturally, everyone stopped and looked at the pianist, and his face beamed. There is a similar purpose behind dressing in unusual clothes. This is all right for a child, Sri Krishna tells us, but you and I do not want attention from those outside; we want to draw the attention of the Lord of Love who is within. The way to draw the Lord is to repeat the mantram. Keep on calling him, Jesus, Jesus or Rama, Rama. When we grow more secure, we shall see there is no need to search for security outside ourselves. We are all very important because the Lord lives in us. We need not daydream, “I wish I were like him; I wish I were like her.” One of the nicest things anyone has said about me is, “He is very much at home with himself.” When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.

  72. This is the supreme state. Attain to this, and pass from death to immortality.

  When the ego dies, we come into eternal life. When in the climax of meditation called samadhi we break through the wrong identification with the body, senses, mind, and intellect, learning experientially that we are the Atman, the Christ within, the Krishna within, we go beyond death and know our immortality. This promise of immortality is given us by mystics of all religions who have attained illumination. When Sri Ramana Maharshi talked about death, he was able to convey to those who were deeply responsive and devoted to him that death need not come to all. Sri Ramana Maharshi attained complete illumination when still a high-school boy. He was not Sri Ramana Maharshi then; he was just Venkataraman, a high-school student trying to cut classes like everyone else. He had some difficult exercises to do in English grammar, and behaving as any schoolboy would, he did not go to school that day. Instead, he just lay down in his room and killed his ego. It was all done in half an hour’s time. In the language of mysticism, what died during that thirty minutes was not Ramana Maharshi, but the separate, finite ego. This is nirvana: the annihilation of the finite boundary of separateness in which we realize our true, immortal Self.

  To throw a little light on this elusive spiritual phenomenon, we must look at what takes place in meditation. In meditation, over a long, long period of time, we learn to recall all our vital energy from the past and future. In samadhi the future vanishes, the past vanishes, and we live completely on the pinpoint of the moment. To live completely in the moment is to realize immortality, here and now. Mystics who have lived like this tell us that in the complete unification of consciousness we are released from time; we are delivered from time into eternity.

  My spiritual teacher, my Grandmother, used to go every morning for many, many years to a sacred spring near our village. This spring is considered to have been sanctified by Rama. Legends say that when he and Sita were wandering through South India during their period of exile, Sita became thirsty. She told her husband, “You have great love for me, so you must be able to give me a drink of cool water.” There was no water in that place, so Rama took an arrow and, sending it deep into the earth, caused a spring of sacred Ganges water to come up. Today the spring is a place of pilgrimage. On one side, roughly hewn in black stone, are the feet of Rama. Just the feet alone are considered to be a beautiful, respectful way of representing an incarnation, and this humble image is in the best spiritual tradition. My simple Grandmother, after having her ceremonial bath, would stand looking at the rough, long, black feet in stone and repeat the mantram. She must have done this every morning for half a century, and when the time came for her to shed her body, according to my mother’s own words, the last she said was, “I have caught Rama by his feet.”

  This experience at the time of death is narrated of many mystics who have attained immortality. Until we experience a unification of consciousness and are released from the bondage of time, we cannot realize that it is not going to satisfy us to live a hundred or even a thousand years. Our need is to live forever.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Selfless Service

  ARJUNA

  1. O Janardana, you have said that knowledge is greater than action; why then do you ask me to wage this terrible war?

  Arjuna addresses Sri Krishna as Janardana, ‘he who stirs up the people,’ because he is being aroused by the Lord’s wisdom and love. But, like a worthy man of the world, he is not prepared to admit it. Inst
ead he asks, like a modern man, “If you say that spiritual wisdom is the best path to Self-realization, then why do you ask me to fight against my passions and tyrannize over my senses? Just show me the path to spiritual wisdom and stop talking about discriminating restraint of the senses. Tell me about the spirit. As for the senses, I am content to believe you when you say I am not my senses. Let’s leave the matter there.”

  Arjuna believes the paths of knowledge and action to be separate or even inconsistent. But there is no contradiction between these two paths. St. Francis will say that our knowledge is as deep as our action. There may be no connection between intellectual knowledge and the will, but spiritual wisdom always reveals itself in our actions.

  2. Your advice seems inconsistent, O Keshava; give me one path to follow to the supreme good.