In English poetry, Edmund Spenser, the author of the Faerie Queene, is often called the poet’s poet because he has inspired so many poets. I sometimes feel tempted to call Sri Ramana Maharshi the saint’s saint because he has inspired so many saints. That is the kind of saint who takes my breath away. It is said also of Mahatma Gandhi that his glory lay in transforming little people into heroes. We go into the presence of a great mystic, look at him, listen to him, open our hearts to him, and even those of us who are clay are transmuted into gold.
The small quantity of spiritual awareness that has come to me is through my deep love for my Grandmother, my spiritual teacher, who, without knowing how to read or write, is the most educated person I have ever known.
When I was a student at college, every weekend some students would have a holiday by going boating; but my idea of a holiday was to make for my village, about fifty miles from the college, to be reunited with my Grandmother. It became quite a standing joke on the campus; everyone would say, “He has gone to see his Grandmother.” Slowly, however, they began to see, even in this simple gesture, how intensely I yearned to be with her, and how intensely I felt the deprivation of being away from her. I used to go by train to the little town close to my village. On one Saturday morning I didn’t have a penny, but I had to go. I had such faith that I went to the railway station where the train was waiting. The guard of the train was watching me rather curiously because I looked so wistful. He asked me where I was going, and I said, “I want to go and see my Granny.” He suppressed a smile and told the driver that there was a boy who wanted to go and see his Granny. Then he asked, “Where does your Granny live?”
“Near Palghat.”
“Have you got a ticket?”
“That’s the problem. I don’t have any money.”
Touched, he said, “Hop into my compartment. Don’t tell anybody. Don’t put it in your college magazine or I’ll lose my job. Just jump in here.” And he told the driver, “We have to take him to see his Granny.”
There was such love in my eyes and such eagerness that even a railway guard, who sometimes can be pretty tough, was prepared to go out of his way and put me into his compartment. He let me out at Palghat and said, “Now run!”
From Palghat to my village it was seven miles of beautiful road with big trees on either side, sometimes with monkeys swinging from them. I used to enjoy walking along it, but more than the monkeys, and more than the trees, and more than the brooks, what gave me joy was the knowledge that every step would bring me closer to my Granny. At that time I didn’t know she was my spiritual teacher; she was just my Grandmother. When I arrived home, she would hold my hands and look and look at me; she didn’t need words. The first question she would ask me was, “What did you learn this week?” This gave me just the opportunity I had been waiting for. I would put my hands behind my back and say, “Now, Granny, listen carefully. This week the professor who teaches me logic has taught me what a syllogism is.” She used to gasp with admiration. “Syllogism!” Then, like most scholars, I would indulge in academic jargon to my heart’s content. Today I use very simple language; my standard is that what I say must be completely understandable to the garbage collector as well as the graduate student. If I were to consult some of my old academic colleagues on this, they would say I have become simplistic. I really thought my Granny was simplistic, though I didn’t dare call her so. With the childlike simplicity of the spiritual woman, she would say, “Now, son, give me an example of this great learning that you have absorbed.” So I would quote my logic professor and say, “All men are mortal. I am a man. Therefore, ergo, I am mortal.” She just laughed and laughed and said, “I pay all this money so that you can learn this trash?” Then this unlettered, untutored woman stated the syllogism perfectly: “All men, all creatures, are immortal because the Lord lives in them. I am a creature. Therefore I am immortal.”
The secret of absorbing such spiritual wisdom is to open our hearts wide and give all our love to our spiritual teacher, who symbolizes our Atman for the present. When I would run home to see my Granny, I did not know I had an Atman. Now that I look back I see that my Grandmother was my Atman. That is why I loved her; she was my real ‘me,’ my perfect ‘me,’ my pure ‘me.’ I didn’t know this intellectually, but deep inside, from the very depths of my heart, a little voice was saying, “That’s you.” This is what happens to us when we see a great saint like Sri Ramana Maharshi. People whose hearts are not open, who have the window of their consciousness bolted and barred, look and see only a dapper, brown little man in a dhoti. But those whose hearts have opened, who are searching for the answer to the riddle of life and have flung the doors of their consciousness wide open, have only to see Sri Ramana Maharshi seated quietly before them to hear that little voice within them say in its sweet tones, “That’s you.” Beautiful hymns have been composed to Sri Ramana Maharshi; great singers and poets have described his beauty. But he will quietly say, “There is no Ramana Maharshi here. There is nobody here. It’s all empty. I am just an empty keyhole.” You apply your eye closely and look through this empty keyhole, and in the dim distance, you see the immense glory of the Lord flaming up against the background of the cosmos.
It is by this process of osmosis that spiritual awareness really comes to all of us. Books can never give spiritual awareness; it is only by seeing someone who has become united with the Lord through His grace that ordinary people like you and me can learn to discover our real Self.
35. Arjuna, having attained this wisdom you will never again be deluded. You will see yourself in all creatures, and all creatures in Me.
Once we wake up through the grace of the Lord from the long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness into the indivisible unity that pervades all life, we will never fall asleep again. Once we have awakened into this higher state of consciousness in which we see all as coming from God, subsisting in God, and returning to God, we cannot fall back again into the old dream of separateness. This is a significant verse because some people – great writers and artists, for example – have had an occasional flash in which they see the unity behind life for just a moment. Although they treasure the memory of this experience, they fall asleep again; they are caught again in the dream. Just as among dreams there are a few significant ones which strengthen us inwardly, so in this waking dream we may have an occasional insight into Reality, but we have no control over these experiences. Waking up permanently into a higher level of consciousness comes as the result of sustained sadhana. We can become established in the unitive state only through long and systematic discipline. These occasional flashes of mystical experience are only indications of a latent capacity which must be cultivated through the practice of meditation and ancillary disciplines if we are finally to wake up completely, never to fall asleep or dream again.
The word moha, ‘delusion,’ is used by Sri Krishna to tell us we are under a kind of hypnotic spell. We are all running after what we have been hypnotized to believe we want. We are told to go after money, and we start looking for money everywhere. We don’t want to know who we are because we are only looking for money. Some people even seem to have a dollar sign printed on their pupils; wherever they look they see possibilities for making money. They see a beautiful landscape and say, “Ah, what a nice subdivision this would make.” They go to a mountain top and see it as a good place for a motel. The same applies to pleasure. We are told to give our senses free rein by the mass media. The senses are wild horses that we can train to respond to the slightest move of our fingers. But if we do not train them, if we leave these wild horses to themselves, they will not know where to go; they will plunge headlong across moor and mountain, into morass and quagmire. We should never follow the siren call of sense-pleasures which seems to tell us, “We will give you joy; we will give you security; we will give you fulfillment.” These promises are phantoms that will lead us further and further away from joy, from security, and from fulfillment.
As we progress
on the spiritual path and awake from the confusion of separateness and self-will, we will begin to see the unity of life. We will begin to see the Lord in all. Even to be able to love a dog, we have to be spiritual. It is not enough if we buy a dog, get a collar, and call him Fido. The other day we saw a beautiful Newfoundland retriever in a car. He looked exactly like a small bear, occupying the whole front seat. The family who owned the dog must have been traveling throughout the night, because I could see from the bleary eyes of the dog that he hadn’t slept. His eyes reminded me of a scholar who has been poring over his books through the night; if he had been a human being he might have said, “I didn’t have a wink of sleep; I was up all night writing a paper on the tragedies of Shakespeare.” Instead he was trying to jump out of the car. I understand dogs very well, because I love them very much. I patted him and tried to clear his eyes a little, and he almost told me, “You know, I don’t like being cooped up in automobiles. One whole night I’ve been traveling. All I want is to jump out and run and run and run.” His eyes kept saying, “Run, run, run,” and in one moment he gave a leap and was out of the car. People thought he was a bear, and they were all running helter-skelter when his master, who would say he loves dogs, came and issued an order, “Get in!” He expected the dog to stand up and salute. The poor dog was trying to say, “All I want is a long, long run on the beach. Take me for a run, and then put me back in the car.” But there was one little boy we saw who really loved his dog. The dog was running on the beach wherever he wanted, and the boy was telling the dog, “I will follow you wherever you want to go.” The dog darted into the water, and the boy followed him into the water; then the dog jumped out of the water and onto a rock, and the boy followed him onto the rock. The boy was putting the dog first. In every relationship this is the secret of love. If I love you it means only one thing: that your happiness is more important to me than my own. This kind of love will give me the wisdom, the sensitiveness, and the will to conduct myself selflessly.
36. Even if you were the most sinful of all sinners, you could cross beyond all sin by the raft of spiritual wisdom.
Spiritual wisdom, or jnana, which is developed through the practice of meditation, can do what nothing else can do; it is a boat that can take you across the stormy, treacherous sea of life. Sri Krishna says this jnana enables you to pick up two planks, discrimination and dispassion, tie them together, sit on them, and paddle with your hands until you reach the other shore of abiding joy, peace, and love.
The Compassionate Buddha was very fond of representing himself as a boatman offering to take us to the other shore that is nirvana. We usually tell ourselves he is misleading us; we like to be on this shore quarreling, manipulating, and being separate. The thought of going across to the other shore, where there are no quarrels, makes us wonder what we would do there.
Sri Krishna too says, in a magnificent verse in the invocation to the Bhagavad Gita, that he is kaivartakah keshavah, the boatman who will ferry us across the river of life to the other shore. We, however, prefer this shore. We don’t want to begin the journey towards peace and security; the mind keeps us on this shore visiting different ports here and there. In almost every port we have a love: food, money, clothes, all kinds of exotic things to add to our collection. But in moving away from this coast to the other, we must throw all these attachments overboard.
The grace of the Lord is like a wind that is blowing all the time, but it is our responsibility to get rid of our excess luggage and set the sail correctly. For a long, long time in meditation we are merely bailing out the boat and throwing things overboard. Everybody has an antique shop right in his basement: over the years we have collected all sorts of things, this one because it was on sale, that one because we couldn’t resist it. Some of the great mystics started, as you and I did, by throwing out things they had become tired of. This is how renunciation begins, by getting rid of things to which we are not very attached. If I have two sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I can give you one. We shouldn’t blame ourselves for beginning this way, for renunciation grows slowly with renunciation.
The second stage is harder; then we begin to throw away some of the things to which we are attached. There is a tussle, an inner conflict; to throw or not to throw is the question, but out it goes. But in the final stages, when we see the lights on the other shore, when we see Jesus walking about, the Buddha meditating, and Sri Krishna playing on the flute, all we want is to get where the action is. At that time, even selfish people like you and me, who have committed many mistakes in their ignorance, want to get there so fast that they take hold of everything – their glasses, the shirt on their back, even the sail and rudder – and start throwing it all overboard. The spiritual teacher will say at that time, “Don’t throw your glasses away; you won’t be able to see Sri Krishna!” In the final stages, the great difficulty is to persuade people to keep a few things, to keep their body fit and their intellect active to serve the Lord.
After reaching the other shore, to come back and take other people in your boat seems heartbreaking. When you have reached the shore of bliss and then come back, you see wars, famines, pestilence, and selfishness. You come back, as the Bible puts it, to the “valley of the shadow of death,” which takes a lot of renunciation. Sri Ramakrishna uses language which no other mystic has ever used to describe this. He calls it a soccer match. India is a poor country, and many of the fellows who really want to see a soccer match do not have the money to buy a ticket. But they have acrobatic skills, so they say to their friends, “Let’s stand on each other’s shoulders and have the fellow on the top, who can see over the bamboo fence, describe the game kick for kick, pass for pass, goal for goal.” With great effort, one of them finally gets to the top and sees the game. The whole team is playing as one; each team is putting the other one first. Who can lose? He gets so excited and so drawn in that he forgets his friends and throws himself over the fence. But a great mystic like Sri Ramakrishna, even though he sees the game and wants to jump in, thinks of all the poor people outside in life, so caught up in strife, so utterly miserable, and he denies himself the game. He jumps backwards, goes and gets us, and stands on the bottom so that we can get up on his shoulders and watch the game too. This is what Jesus is doing, what the Buddha is doing, standing and allowing anyone who wants to climb upon their shoulders and see the game. Great saints like Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Ramana Maharshi, St. Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart, and St. John of the Cross have come and told us what the game is like. The Gita now asks us, “Don’t you too want to see this game where all become one, and to understand the game of lila, the divine play called life?”
37. O Arjuna, even as the heat of a fire reduces wood to ashes, the fire of knowledge turns to ashes all selfish attachment to work.
38. Nothing in this world purifies like spiritual wisdom. It is the perfection achieved in time through the path of yoga, the path which leads to the Self within.
Sri Krishna says that even if in the past we have lived selfishly, often trying to snatch our happiness at the expense of others, jnana or spiritual wisdom will reduce our big funeral pyre of unfavorable karma to ashes. Do not be despondent over the past. Do not let it become oppressive. All the past, with all its mistakes, will fall away from us if we turn our eyes to the Lord with a one-pointed mind and travel untiringly towards the spiritual goal. This is the Lord’s promise given to us by the Gita.
In order to develop jnana, I know of no other discipline than the practice of meditation. In all religions, meditation – sometimes called contemplation or interior prayer – is emphasized by the great mystics as the path, the ladder of love, leading to the Lord. There are many allied disciplines, too, that accompany the practice of meditation, such as the discriminating restraint of the senses and the constant attempt to put the welfare of those around us first. One of the remarkable developments in meditation is that even if we take to meditation without any desire to practice these related disciplines, after a while we will be dra
wn to them. I used to have a friend who was allergic to my talk on vegetarianism. In an attempt to initiate me into the delights of eating my fellow creatures, he actually took me for dinner to a number of restaurants. He was meditating regularly, but every time I would talk about not wanting to eat my friends, he would say, “This doesn’t apply to me. I am going to show you that it is possible to progress in meditation without changes in diet.” I didn’t argue with him, which disappointed him; but after a year of meditation, he began to have a distaste for nonvegetarian food.
If we are practicing meditation regularly with sustained enthusiasm, this development is likely to take place. As meditation dispels the delusion of separateness, we become more and more conscious of a sense of fellowship with all creatures. The other day, while going to the beach, I was delighted to see the young lambs, some black-faced, some white-faced, running about on the green hills just like children. When we got to the beach, I enjoyed watching the sea gulls and those little creatures that I love so much, the sandpipers, who are like the imp Ariel in Shakespeare’s Tempest. They go up to the very edge of the water, and when a wave rolls in, they come running back on their thin little legs. We also saw three deer, a mother and two fawns, which had come down onto the beach. The people living nearby must have been very good to these deer for them to have such confidence; they were playing about, sure that the people loved them and wouldn’t harm them in any way.
As meditation deepens, our spiritual awareness should show itself in the capacity to understand the point of view of other creatures. Ecology is beginning to teach us that even in our relationships with plants and trees, we must be careful lest we exploit them thoughtlessly. Mahatma Gandhi was so aware of this relationship that he did not even like flowers to be plucked. He said a flower is most beautiful when it is on the bush. In India we have a hoary custom of garlanding people with heavy strings of flowers. Gandhi was constantly subjected to this garlanding, but when he became aware of his kinship with plants and trees, he told everyone that he would accept only garlands of homespun yarn made by the person offering the garland. This considerably reduced garlanding.
The End of Sorrow Page 29
