In our villages in Kerala, bags of rice, water jars, and other heavy burdens are often carried on the head. Villagers will walk long distances to market with their produce balanced on their heads. After carrying a bag of rice for many miles, when the villager wants to rest, he finds it difficult to sit down, take the burden from his head, and then, after resting, put it back on his head and get up again. So by the side of the rugged country roads they have constructed stone parapets, called athani in my mother tongue, which are about the height of a man. When I have been carrying a heavy burden for a few miles, I come to a stone parapet, and all I have to do is move close to the athani, nod my head, and the bag of rice will slide onto the wall. I can lie down and rest peacefully, and when I have refreshed myself, I can go back to the slab, give the bundle a little push, and balance it on my head again.
Vallathol Narayana Menon, a Malayali poet who was a Hindu, but who was deeply in love with Jesus as a divine incarnation, wrote a poem about Mary Magdalene in which he uses this image of the athani. In this beautiful poem in my mother tongue, with the title “Magdalana Mariyam,” Jesus tells Mary: “Why do you carry the load of your guilt, the burden of your sins on your head? I am here, like the stone parapet. Don’t stand far away. Come close to me; keep your head right near me, and when you nod your head, I am ready to take your burden.”
This is an experience that will come to all of us when we lead the spiritual life and are prepared to live for others around us. Sometimes our problems will be greater, sometimes the challenges will be immense, but the Lord will always say from within, “I am the stone parapet. I am your support. Shift your burden to Me.” My spiritual teacher, my Grandmother, who had more than her share of problems – partly because she had me on her hands – was never oppressed by her burden nor trapped in action and the results of action. When she had a great problem facing her, all that she had to do was close her eyes, surrender herself to the Lord, and then come back to us with wisdom, love, and the skill to help me or the family solve the problem.
The God-filled person, who is an instrument in the hands of the Lord, doesn’t get discouraged or fatigued. He is so completely identified with the Atman, so sure that the Lord is the operator, that he does not get entangled at all in the interplay of senses and sense objects, in which all of us are caught when we live for ourselves. His every action is done with utter detachment, as an offering to the Lord. Even when he eats, it is not for the sake of satisfying the palate; it is for the sake of serving the Lord. When we eat nourishing food as an offering unto the Lord, it strengthens the body, the mind, and the intellect. Similarly, we can keep our body strong and healthy with exercise so that it can be used for many years in selfless service.
We have another opportunity to move closer to the Lord when we go to sleep repeating the Holy Name. Between the last waking moment and the first moment of sleep there is an arrow’s entry into the depths of our subconscious, into which the name of the Lord, whether it is Jesus or Rama, can enter if we keep repeating it as we go to sleep. It takes some effort and perseverance, but when we have learned to fall asleep in the mantram, throughout the night the healing process continues in our sleep, and we wake up refreshed in body, mind, and spirit.
Every activity of ours should be performed as a service to the Lord if we are to become completely united with him. No harsh word, no sarcastic crack, no resentful look should come from us. We can see how demanding the Lord is: even the opening and closing of our eyes should be done with love. In all our little acts, we should come to feel that we are an instrument of the Lord. My Grandmother used to say that even in our dreams we should not have resentful thoughts or hostile attitudes toward anybody. We can come to have such mastery over our consciousness that even in our sleep we reach the state where nothing but love and the awareness of unity pervades us.
10. Those who have surrendered all selfish attachments in work to the Lord are like the leaf of a lotus floating clean and dry in water. Sin cannot touch them.
The lotus is a favorite flower in the Sanskrit scriptures, both Hindu and Buddhist. Pankaja, ‘born in the mud,’ is one of the Sanskrit names for this flower which grows abundantly in the pools and lakes of India. Born in the mud and dirt at the bottom of the pool, the lotus grows up through the water, rises above its surface, and blossoms towards the sun. The leaf of the lotus, which floats on the surface of the water, is a large one. In the villages, it is often used as a plate because it is waterproof; you can pour water on it and the water will not soak through the leaf but will just run off. Similarly, when we surrender ourselves to the Lord and become his instruments for carrying on selfless service, even though difficulties are sure to come to us, they will not cling to us; we will be able to face challenges without fatigue, tension, or diffidence.
11. Those who follow the path of service renounce their selfish attachments, and work with body, senses, and mind for the sake of self-purification.
12. The man whose consciousness is unified abandons all attachment to the results of actions and attains supreme peace. But the man whose desires are fragmented, and who is selfishly attached to the results of his work, is bound in all he does.
All of us begin the spiritual life with mixed motives. Perhaps we perceive dimly that selfless action is a sure way of removing the barrier between ourselves and the Lord, and we want to contribute to the welfare of those around us; but at the same time, we are concerned with ensuring our own private advantage. It takes quite a while for most of us to become fully aware that our welfare is included in the welfare of all and to realize that when we are working for everybody, we are also ensuring our own well-being.
To imagine that we are going to learn the secret of selfless action in a few months, or even years, is being a little optimistic. Even sincere philanthropists, who do a lot of good for the world, are sometimes motivated by personal drives. I, for one, do not think it possible for anyone to become completely selfless in action without the practice of meditation. It is rather easy to think that we are living for others and contributing to their welfare, but very often we may not even know what the needs of others are. In order to become aware of the needs of those around us, to become sensitive to the difficulties they face, we must minimize our obsession with ourselves. This requires the discipline of meditation, which enables us gradually to reduce self-will and preoccupation with our private needs.
It is all right for a child to be very aware of its needs and unaware of the needs of others, but for grown-up people like you and me to be conscious only of our wants and blind to those of others puts us back in the nursery. Sometimes I think that whether or not we have children, the nursery is an essential component of the modern home. When we are designing our house we shouldn’t forget to include a nursery, into which we can crawl whenever we lose our adulthood and maturity and begin to brood upon ourselves. On such occasions we can simply crawl into the kiddie corral and put up a little sign, “Spoil me or spank me.” Even brilliant intellectuals and people who are very effective in action sometimes crawl into their kiddie corral and do not know how to come out at all. For this reason, I would question whether it is possible to lead the spiritual life without being able to draw from a deeper source of power the energy we need to reduce our self-will. Meditation is the method we can use to reach these inner resources which are hidden deep in our consciousness. It is the bridge from the individual to the universal, from the ephemeral to the eternal, from the human to the divine.
We all have to begin the spiritual life with action that is partly egoistic, partly egoless, and none of us need be discouraged when we find, in the early days of our sadhana, that there is some motive of enlightened self-interest driving us on to action. Without this motive in the beginning, action may be difficult. But even though we may act partly for selfish reasons, we must make sure our action is not at the expense of other people. Any occupation harmful to others is not right occupation. Take, for example, the field of advertising. Though advertising of cigaret
tes has gone off television, we can see the increased vehemence of the advertiser’s campaign on all the roadsides. Not content with billboards, the companies are giving out sample cigarettes on the streets. The other evening, coming back from San Francisco, we were grieved to see young girls distributing free cigarettes. Just imagine the cupidity of the human being: when people walking by were offered attractive cartons of cigarettes by these nicely dressed girls, they would turn and go out of their way to take them. Even though these girls are not doing this with any ill will, even though it may be just a job to them, they are going to acquire a certain load of karma because they are actually tempting people to get cancer. They are selling cancer to the people around them. Every day we have to ask ourselves how much of our life and work is for the welfare of mankind. If it is to the detriment of anyone, it does not matter how much money we are making, or how much power the job is bringing us; it is much better to live and die in poverty than to continue working at such a job.
When we are driven by the motive for personal profit, continually working for money, power, and prestige, anxiety takes a heavy toll on the nervous system. It is not work that tires us, but profit motivated work: always doing work we like and avoiding work we dislike. It is the preoccupation with results that makes us tense and deprives us of sleep. When we are enmeshed in the results, anxious whether we will fail or win, our very anxiety exhausts us. For the majority of us, uncertainty is worse than disaster. Disaster comes to us only rarely; worry depletes us often. We never know whether we are going to get a brick or a bouquet. If we knew for certain it would be a brick, there would be no anxiety. We would just say, “Throw it and be done with it.” For the person who has become aware of the Lord, however, it is all the same whether it is brick or bouquet, praise or censure, success or defeat. These will neither intoxicate him nor discourage him. When we can say, “Whatever disasters come, we will not be afraid because the Lord is within us,” then this resoluteness and faith will enable us to work in complete security, free from tension, agitation, and fear of defeat. The person who works with this attitude is always at peace, always secure, because he is not anxious about the results of his action.
13. Those who are self-controlled, who through discrimination have renounced attachment in all their deeds, live content in the city of nine gates. They are not driven to act, nor do they involve others in action.
If you want to enjoy life, you have to renounce, not the world, but your ego. If you really want to have a merry time, all you need do is take out your ego and hide it where nobody will be able to find it. Unfortunately, the ego usually does not want to be thrown away; every time you try to throw it away it will come back to you.
No amount of trying to throw it away, no amount of resolving to be completely selfless from this moment on, is going to rid us of this unwanted ego-burden. Only by gradually learning to think about others, to love others more than we love ourselves and serve them rather than our own self-interest, can we finally get rid of the ego. By some strange magic, the more we love others, the wider we extend the circle of our love, the less the ego seems to like us; and one day, when we forget ourselves entirely, it disappears. Then we are free of it once and for all.
In the second line of the verse, there is the dryly humorous description of the body as the little town with nine gates. Our eyes are two wide-open gates through which sights are marching in procession. Our ears are two gates where sounds are coming through in long, long queues. Most of us are firmly convinced that we are the body; we are not aware that the body is just the little city in which we dwell. Because we identify others as well as ourselves with the body, we go through life without ever really seeing those around us. We do not even really get to know our own dear ones. Even after years of marriage, we have never seen our partner. Living with the members of our family all our life, we pass out of this world without even having seen them as they really are: as the Atman, the pure, perfect dweller within the body.
14. Neither self-will, nor actions, nor the union of action and result comes from the Lord of this world. They arise from ignorance of our own nature.
15. The Lord does not partake in the good and evil deeds of any person. When wisdom is obscured by ignorance, a person’s judgment is clouded.
Though we may have committed many mistakes in life, as most of us do in our ignorance, the Lord will never desert us. Sri Krishna is telling us with great simplicity: “I love everyone because I am in everyone. How can I hate anyone, even though he commits mistakes, when I am in that person?” We often forget in dealing with people who have gone astray that the Lord continues to dwell in them even though they have made mistake after mistake. It is a great art to be able to resist wrongdoing without withdrawing our love from the wrongdoer. To be able to love someone very deeply and yet resist firmly the wrong he may be doing us in his ignorance is one of the most important arts we can learn in life. No one can resist for long when we use the spiritual technique of embracing him with all our love while still resisting what is selfish in him. Under no circumstances should we condemn a person even if he is being selfish and self-willed. It serves no purpose to attack such people. The only thing to do is to love and respect them because the Lord is present in them, and to resist them nonviolently, bearing patiently whatever suffering they may be inflicting upon us in their ignorance.
Mistakes are a natural part of growing up, and there is no need to brood over the sins of the past. The purpose of making a mistake is to learn not to make that mistake again. As my Grandmother used to tell the young girls in my ancestral home when they began to work in the kitchen, we can all expect to do a little spilling and burning in order to learn to cook. Even though we have a certain margin for error, the sooner we can learn from our mistakes, the less suffering we will have to undergo in life. Mistakes are inevitably followed by consequences. The consequences of a mistake may last for many years, and in making a major decision, many of us are prone to overcalculate the satisfaction we are going to get out of it and overlook the suffering involved for ourselves as well as others. We often forget that the action we are contemplating contains the seed of its result. We try to connect wrong means with right ends, which will never work. Right ends are included in right means; wrong ends are included naturally in wrong means.
16. But ignorance is destroyed by knowledge of the Self within. The light of this knowledge shines like the sunrise; it reveals the supreme Brahman.
17. The person who has cast off all sin through this knowledge, whose mind is absorbed in the Lord, and who is completely established in the Lord as his one goal and refuge, is never born again.
When our self-will dies completely, when our separateness is extinguished completely, then we see the splendor of the Lord.
Yesterday we had a triune celebration at Ramagiri. It was Easter, the wedding reception of our dear friends Steve and Debbie, and also the Kerala New Year. I had forgotten all about New Year, so I was a little surprised when I came out of our room after meditation on Sunday morning and found our two little nieces waiting on either side of the door. I had my red knit cap on. They said, “Close your eyes, uncle.” I closed my eyes like an obedient uncle, and they pulled the wool over them. Taking my hands, they led me into their room and had me sit down. Then they asked, “Would you like to see the Lord?”
“Very much,” I replied.
“Then open your eyes!”
I did, and found myself looking into a mirror all beautifully decorated with fruits and flowers. The face I saw was my own.
This is the Kerala tradition, in which all members of the family are led to a mirror and reminded that the face they see there is the Lord’s. Once this tradition has seeped into our consciousness, it is enough for a woman in the home – mother, sister, wife, or niece – just to say in a very loving voice when we are getting angry: “Don’t you remember where you saw the Lord on New Year’s Day?” I have seen angry people breaking out in angelic smiles when they heard this. It is a beautiful
thing to remind someone when he is angry that he is really trying to prevent the Lord within him from looking out through his eyes.
In order to see the Lord within we must do what the Bible commands us: “Be still and know that I am God.” This supreme state is stillness of the body, mind, intellect, and, of course, the ego. In the Katha Upanishad the King of Death tells his disciple that when all these have been stilled, that is the highest state, in which he will find the Lord in his own heart and in the heart of everyone around him.
We cannot attain this state as long as we are searching for fulfillment without. It is difficult for us to understand that we are always out, always going on a trip somewhere. Today, when we were coming back from Ramagiri, we saw an unusually large number of hitchhikers with all kinds of sign boards. They have now started making changes on these little placards: formerly it was just “LA” or “SF,” but today we saw one board which read, “Chicago – sister’s wedding.” I thought this was a personal way of getting the message across, something that touches all of us. After all, we have to give him a lift if he is going to attend his sister’s wedding. Then there was a very quiet sign, “East, please.” To me this also was rather personal. Another sign, probably by an Eskimo, just read “North.” Now, if you ever find me with a placard by the roadside, it will read “In.” This is what we do in meditation; we try to recall all our wandering energies back to the original source which is our home.
18. Those who possess this wisdom have equal love for all. They see the same Self in a spiritual aspirant and an outcaste, in an elephant, a cow, and a dog.
In the one beautiful word samadarshin – ‘looking upon all equally,’ having equal love for all – the Lord tells us the mark of those who live in God. The person who lives in God will love and respect all, without ever deprecating anybody because he or she is of a different religion, country, race, culture, or sex. Once we have realized the unity of all life, we will be incapable of feeling that we are superior to another, no matter what surface differences there appear to be.
The End of Sorrow Page 32
