But while it is good to be friendly with trees and animals, it is most important to be friendly with human beings. It is most of all in our human relationships that we realize the unity of life. Trees don’t talk back. Animals don’t say, “Now you listen to me.” This give-and-take is the joy of the human situation. Wherever we go and say, “Now you listen to me,” the other person will say, “You first listen to me.” Where we find the you-first-listen-to-me attitude, there is the opportunity for patience. If there weren’t impatient people around us, how would we learn patience? I once asked my Grandmother, my spiritual teacher, why there should be people to scold me, criticize me, attack me. Her reply was, “How else can you learn patience?” Left to ourselves we find it quite pleasant to say “Quiet!” and prevent others from talking. People who are not used to hearing no can become insufferable. When we purify ourselves by learning to be patient, by learning to forbear, we come at last to see the Lord hidden in our own and everyone’s heart.
39. The man or woman who has spiritual wisdom as the highest goal, whose faith is deep and who restrains the senses, attains that wisdom quickly and enters into perfect peace.
40. But the ignorant, who are indecisive and without faith, waste their life. They can never be happy in this world or any other.
If I haven’t come to have faith in the Lord within, who is my real Self, how can I be secure? How can I be at peace? How can I live for others or be loved by others? Here “faith,” or shraddha in Sanskrit, does not mean mere blind faith, but a deep belief based on personal experience. When we lead the spiritual life, we will begin to see an inner power guiding and protecting us in even the most difficult situations. When we experience this over and over again, we come to have a deep faith or shraddha in the Lord within. It is not enough if we have blind faith in spiritual ideals, based on the testimony of the scriptures or sages. We must realize these truths for ourselves, in our own life and consciousness. As the Buddha was fond of saying, the spiritual teacher only points the way; we must do our own traveling. The personal experience of others may plant the seed of shraddha in our hearts, inspiring us to lead the spiritual life, but shraddha can develop fully only if we experience these truths for ourselves.
While in South Africa, Gandhi made many friends among the people of the Christian community. One of these acquaintances tried to convert Gandhi to Christianity by assuring him that if he only had faith in Jesus he would be saved in spite of all his sins. Gandhi replied, “I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself, or rather from the very thought of sin.”
Without using the words religion or Lord, we can comment on this verse by recalling the famous inquiry of Sri Ramana Maharshi, Who am I? The whole purpose of spiritual discipline is to discover who we are. In the supreme climax of meditation called samadhi, I discover that there is no separate me, no separate you, that all of us are governed by the underlying unity that is divine. On making this discovery, the rest of our life becomes an earnest endeavor to live in harmony with this unity, never inflicting suffering upon any creature but contributing to the best of our capacity to the progress of those around us.
Sri Krishna emphasizes that until and unless we come to have at least a dim awareness of the Lord within – which is what he calls shraddha, faith in oneself, faith in the unity of life, faith that the Lord is present in all – it is not possible to live in peace. Violence, in whatever form we see it, is a negation of this central unity. Any attempt at violence can only move people further and further apart. In every home and community there are likely to be occasional differences, occasions when someone may make a mistake. But the home or community can be held together if we believe in this underlying unity and act upon it.
41. O Dhananjaya, the man or woman who is established in the Self, who has renounced selfish attachments in work and cut through doubts with spiritual wisdom, acts in freedom.
It is only after we have dehypnotized ourselves from the enticements of money and the blandishments of pleasure that we find how good it is to work when there is no paycheck coming. It is so soothing to work hard for the welfare of those around us without a mercenary motive that we forget all our tensions and frustrations. Some of us may contribute our time; for others it may be energy or skills. For still others it may be material possessions, or expert advice. But it is incumbent upon everyone to devote part of his or her resources to the welfare of others without any thought of personal profit or prestige.
Whatever we contribute to the welfare of others without a thought for our own profit or advancement is an offering made unto the Lord. On a poignant occasion, Jesus took his disciples to task by saying: “I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and you took me not in; naked, and you clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and you visited me not.”
And the disciples perhaps answered him, “We never saw you hungry; we never had any occasion to quench your thirst.”
Then Jesus really hit hard in answer: “Inasmuch as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.”
When people agitate us, it is often their way of asking for help. Anger is often a cry for help, and when we immediately get angry in return, we are actually pushing away a person who is half paralyzed. When someone is angry, the very best help we can render him or her is to be patient. The first time we do this the other person may actually take advantage of it, thinking, “Here is somebody who is very patient. I want a suitable outlet for my anger, and here is a godsend, just waiting for me to let him have it.” But we cannot improve the situation by returning anger for anger. This does not mean that we simply let the other person have his way, but that we patiently help him to see that his anger and self-will are not only harmful to others but to himself as well.
42. O Bharata, cut through this doubt in your heart with the sword of spiritual wisdom. Arise; take up the path of yoga!
Yoga is neither belief, nor dogma, nor metaphysics, nor philosophy. It is a method of union, a way of uniting all that is divided in our consciousness, uniting all life into the Divine Ground which is one. Yoga has very little to do with physical postures; the correct word for them is asana. We find all kinds of misuses of the word yoga in newspapers, magazines, and books, but in the Hindu scriptures yoga refers to the method, the spiritual disciplines, used to unify our consciousness so that we can come to love the Lord within.
Sri Krishna gives us a secret useful in daily life when he says we should be free from doubts. Most of us are plagued by doubts: “Does she love me? Sometimes I think so, but maybe she doesn’t.” She is also thinking the same thing. My Grandmother had a severe statement to make about this kind of misgiving. She would say that we doubt whether others love us because our own love is divided. Wherever we have some reservation or division within ourselves, we look at others through it and immediately say, “He isn’t loving me enough.” The whole secret of love is not to ask how much others love us but to keep on loving – as St. Francis would say, more than we can. The more we try to love, the more we will be able to love. The passage of time should enrich our love: the person who loves at sixteen should be able to love much more at thirty. It is possible for all of us to deepen our capacity to love by constantly trying to put the welfare of those around us first, until we are finally able to love the Lord in everyone around us.
When we begin to practice meditation, too, it is not unnatural for us to have some doubts and misgivings about the timeless truths of the spiritual life. We all accept the infallibility of physical laws, but when it comes to spiritual laws we are not quite sure. We all believe in the law of gravity, but we sometimes ignore the law of karma. The spiritual teacher does not say that physical laws do not work; he says that spiritual laws, however, are also valid. The charge of fanaticism should really be leveled at the worldly person, because it is he who says, “Only the physical world is real. I only believe in what I see with my eyes, hear with my ears.” But we have the personal testimony of
those who have rebuilt their lives on these timeless truths that they are not only real, but accessible to all. Gandhi, who practiced complete nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, said, “I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.” Gandhi, who always claimed he had no more than ordinary capacities, is proof that these spiritual laws do work, and that by obeying them we can transform our character and consciousness. Gandhi belongs to our own century and faced many of the problems we ourselves are facing today, and even though physically dead, he still continues to give new direction to our civilization.
Even when we do come to believe in the validity of spiritual laws, we may still doubt our capacity to reach the goal by following all the drastic disciplines of meditation and sadhana. It is natural that this doubt continue to haunt us for a long time, but as we go deeper and deeper into our consciousness through the practice of meditation, this doubt also will disappear when our desires are completely unified. What is most urgent is that we start now without allowing our purpose to be weakened by doubts and misgivings, and follow with resolute enthusiasm the path recommended by the Gita.
Sri Ramakrishna used to say that if you repeat Gita, Gita, Gita it becomes tagi, tagi, tagi, which means ‘one who has renounced.’ The Gita does not ask us to renounce our family or the world, but to renounce our self-will and separateness, which are the only barriers between us and the Lord of Love enshrined in our hearts. The English word “renounce” strikes a cold note, but the Sanskrit word tyaga implies a positive, joyful act in which we find fulfillment. In the words of Jesus, we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves.
When Gandhi was asked to sum up the secret of his life in three words, he quoted the opening of the Isha Upanishad: Tena tyaktena bhunjithah, “Renounce and enjoy.” Only when we renounce all selfish attachment, he meant, can we really enjoy anything in life. I would go farther and say, “Renounce and rejoice.” When we renounce our petty, finite ego in living for the welfare of all, we find infinite joy. In self-naughting we gain the joy of self-mastery and the limitless capacity to love others more than we love ourselves.
We can practice this in the midst of our own family if we try to keep the happiness of our parents, partner, children, and friends first in our consciousness, and our own happiness last. The going may be rough, but gradually we will gain the love and respect of everyone in our family and community. In time all those who come in contact with us will benefit by our sadhana and our selfless living.
CHAPTER FIVE
Renounce & Rejoice
ARJUNA
1. O Krishna, you have recommended both the path of selfless action and also sannyasa, the path of renunciation of action. Tell me definitely which is better.
In the last chapter, Sri Krishna was talking to Arjuna about sannyasa, renunciation of action, and karma yoga, performance of action. In particular, he was telling Arjuna that it is by karma yoga, through hard, intense, selfless performance of action, that we reach the unitive state where by our very presence we help those around us and even influence our environment.
Arjuna now shows how representative he is of all of us in his tendency to classify everything into this or that. We can imagine Sri Krishna listening to him with a friendly smile in the same way that we listen to our little children at home when they ask questions which amuse us. For example, the other day little Geetha asked me whether she could tie the laces of my shoes. When I said yes, she asked, “Tight, loose, or medium?” For a first-grader I thought she was commanding a wealthy vocabulary. She is right in the Arjuna line of thinking, but while he talks only about two classes, she had three.
This need to categorize is a characteristic of the intellect; it must divide everything into two. One has to be either good or bad according to the intellect. However, there isn’t any person who falls into such categories. Most of us are sometimes good, sometimes bad, and at other times both. Just as there is no human being who cannot show signs of utter selflessness, there is no one among the majority of us who also cannot show signs of utter selfishness.
SRI KRISHNA
2. Both renunciation of action and performance of action lead to the supreme goal. But the path of action is better than renunciation.
It is difficult for us to understand those rare creatures in the history of mysticism who help people around them by their very presence. Sri Ramana Maharshi was one of these. Sometimes when people came to him for help, he would sit reading the newspaper. This is not our usual conception of action: somebody sits rustling his newspaper and helps people. But many who were sore in spirit, or insecure and resentful, having knocked on all other doors, have gone into Sri Ramana Maharshi’s presence as a last resort, sat and looked at him, and come out with their burden relieved, with their heart strengthened and their spirit soaring.
A distinguished philosopher once went to Ramana Maharshi’s ashram with his pocket bulging with a long series of questions. He wondered whether the sage would have time to answer all his questions in detail. With utter simplicity, not very characteristic of a distinguished philosopher, he tells us how he went in and looked at Sri Ramana Maharshi, kept on looking at him, and found that none of his questions were necessary. This is the best way to answer questions – by making them unnecessary. Remember, too, the story of Jesus; troubled people had only to touch the hem of his garment, and they would find an upsurge of security and strength within. This is an experience even you and I can have when we go into the presence of someone who has attained the supreme state. When we are with such people, by some strange means of communication they send some of their strength, love, and wisdom into our hearts.
A Westerner once asked Sri Ramana Maharshi why he wasn’t leading a productive life. Sri Ramana Maharshi just chuckled. As far as I know, he is one of the few productive figures the world has produced. Because he was always meditating on the unity of life, everyone belonging to the human species has received an unearned bonus. Gandhiji, however, gives us another ideal: that of helping through selfless action. Sri Ramana Maharshi’s way of helping is as effective as Mahatma Gandhi’s, and both have a legitimate, important place on the spiritual path. It is the same whether we try to help through selfless action or selfless inaction; the whole world will receive the benefit of our contribution.
Arjuna, however, is an intellectually oriented person given to action, and he doesn’t understand that there is a place for both selfless action and renunciation of action. Confused, he asks Sri Krishna which path is better: “Now, think clearly, and don’t be vague. Can’t you put these two ways in the balance and tell me which is faster, safer, and easier? That’s the only language I can understand.”
Sri Krishna, so loving, so patient, begins from Arjuna’s point of view. He says, “It’s true. I have placed renunciation of action before you as a great ideal, and I have also placed intense selfless action before you as a great ideal. But since you have an intellectual need for comparison, and an inescapable tendency to weigh one thing against the other, I am prepared to concede that selfless action is better for you than renunciation of action.” At present we are not ready to renounce action. Even if we try not to act, even if we take a vow not to act, we will be forced into action. If there is no action physically, action still continues to go on all the time in the mind. The choice, therefore, for you and me is: shall we act selflessly for the benefit of all, or shall we act selfishly for our own personal aggrandizement? Meister Eckhart advises us in glorious words: “To be right, a person must do one of two things; either he must learn to have God in his work and hold fast to him there, or he must give up his work altogether. Since, however, man cannot live without activities that are both human and various, we must learn to keep God in everything we do, and whatever the job or place, keep on with him, letting nothing stand in our way.”
In the practice of meditation, particularly as concentration increases, you should see to it that you engage
yourself in intense, selfless action during the day. You should ask yourself if you have plenty of opportunity to be with other people. Suppose you have been meditating for a number of years alone in the forest, away from the hurly-burly of life. When you come back to the city and somebody pushes you aside on the sidewalk, not all your meditation in the forest is going to make you smile sweetly and say, “Forgive me for having been in your way.” This capacity comes through regular meditation, and by walking on sidewalks where people push and are pushed about. Then you learn that if somebody pushes you, he may be just looking in the shop window and not seeing you. It is only by being with people who are irascible, sometimes because of you, that the angles and corners of your personality are slowly smoothed out. You, of course, are never short-tempered, but you sometimes run into people who are short-tempered, who do not easily understand your point of view. The answer here is to repeat the mantram, become patient, listen respectfully to the other’s point of view, and be even more persuasive in presenting your position.
The world has become so difficult, so violent, that no one today can afford to keep quiet. No one can afford to drop out of society or fail to make a contribution. Each one of us can change the whole world by changing himself a little. When, instead of reacting violently, I renounce all violence in action, in word, in thought, and in my relationships with everybody else, I have actually changed my environment. When I can show others love instead of hatred, goodwill instead of ill will, respect instead of criticism, I not only change myself but also those who come in contact with me. In everything I do, every day, I am affecting my environment either favorably or unfavorably. To make this influence completely beneficial, and to enable it to reach as many people as possible, hard, intense, selfless action is a necessity.
The End of Sorrow Page 30
