2. Therefore, Arjuna, understand that renunciation and the performance of selfless service are the same. Those who cannot renounce attachment to the results of their work are far from the path.
The expectation of getting money, prizes, prestige, or power, the idle imagination of rewards or results, is called sankalpa in Sanskrit. My Grandmother, who was as good as Aesop, used to tell a story which conveyed to me the idea of sankalpa better than great scholars have been able to do. In her simple manner, she would describe a village girl of about ten, walking home gracefully with a pot full of milk on her head. Under the spell of sankalpa, the little girl begins to daydream: “I am going to sell all my milk for five rupees, and with the money I’ll get a dancing dress and real anklets with bells.” Then she dreams of how she will be able to dance; and carried away, she starts dancing. The pot falls and the milk spills. This is what we do every day, only we say, “When my novel has gone into its sixth edition, and the movie rights have been bought, I am going to buy a yacht and a villa on the Mediterranean.” People are given to this kind of imagining in all kinds of terms: money, pleasure, fame, and worst of all, power.
As long as we are subject to sankalpa, we are imprisoned in our selfish ways of thinking, and have no access to the deeper capacities in our consciousness that clamor to be used. There is no more effective way to rid the mind of sankalpa than the practice of meditation. Every time we meditate we free the mind a little more by not allowing it to wander off on a trail of fancy or vague associations. I am the first to admit that bringing the mind back over and over again to the words of the Prayer of St. Francis is dull, dreary work, but over a period of time this effort will free us from the oppressive memories of past events and the expectations of future actions. One of the signs that we are coming closer to this freedom is an increase in our vitality, energy, and capacity for selfless work. The more we work for others, stretching out our arms to embrace all those around us, the stronger our arms will grow.
3. For aspirants who wish to climb the mountain of spiritual awareness, the path is selfless work. For those who have attained the summit of union with the Lord, the path is stillness and peace.
Now Sri Krishna uses an image from mountain climbing, a sport that requires great endurance and skill. He compares two types: one is arurukshu, someone who wants to climb the mountain of spiritual awareness; the other is yogarudha, the adept who has already made it to the top. In order to climb the Himalayas within us, we have to train ourselves, little by little, every day. Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Mount Everest for the first time, did not just stand at the bottom, take one leap, and land on top of the Himalayas. He practiced climbing mountains for a long time to learn all the required skills; and for you and me to climb the spiritual mountain, we too have to strengthen our muscles over a long, long period of time.
When those of you who lead the householder’s life are asked what you are doing, you can say, “Learning to climb a mountain.” You are getting your training experience in the heart of your family. In mountain climbing, you tie yourself to others with ropes so that if somebody slips you do not say, “Have you hit the ground?” or “Good riddance”; you try to prevent that person from falling by hauling him up and saving him. Similarly in living with family or friends, if somebody slips you do not say, “Aha! Served him right,” or “You’ve been asking for that for a long time.” Instead you pull him up. Even if he has offended you, do not tell him, “Remember what you did last week? You’d better just stay there on the floor.” If you do not like him, it is good for both of you if you can pull him up and support him. A person whom others have abandoned, who is looking at you through his own selfishness, expects you to walk away and wash your hands of him. At first he does not believe you are coming to help him, but when you support him, help him walk, and then give him something to get home with, he begins to think about what you have done; and on the way home he begins to like and finally love you.
There is no other way to deal with people who are difficult, who make mistakes. Demonstrating violently against them only makes the situation worse by making everyone blind with fury. This is where the practice of meditation is invaluable: when we are surrounded by people who cause us harm, we can help them by being patient and loving and returning good for their evil. To work like this for those whom we do not like, especially when we are involved in a tense emotional situation, is hard work. But when we work wholeheartedly in the service of others without thought of profit or prestige, we are using karma yoga every day as a mighty ladder to climb safely and steadily on the spiritual path. For a long, long time we will be aware only of the distress and the difficulty of always trying to turn our back upon ourselves; but after a period of years, when we think we have been stagnating all the time, we turn the corner and suddenly the goal is in view. We are no longer in the foothills; we are near Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, high among the clouds. We can see the Ganges flowing down, we can see views of some of the peaks, and we cannot help but thrill with exultation.
After we have reached the top of the spiritual Mount Everest, shama, perfect peace, becomes our ladder. This stillness of the ego means that we have become infinite love: that all our agitation has died down, all our anger, fear, greed, malice, and envy have died down, and there is a vast ocean of love flowing in our consciousness. This is what we discover after many years of assiduous effort. When our ego is completely eliminated and we have become all love, we no longer work; the Lord works through us. Our work then is to be the still center in the eye of the storm of the world which rages all about us.
4. When a man has freed himself from attachment to the results of work, and from desires for the enjoyment of sense objects, he ascends to the unitive state.
Here we have a perfect picture of the person who has climbed to the summit of human consciousness, who sees the complete unity of all life and has the wisdom, the will, and the energy to live in harmony with it. The Buddha calls such a person one who has attained nirvana – that is, one who has broken out of the prison of selfishness, self-will, and separateness in which most of us spend our whole life.
The person who has become established in the Lord within himself cannot be pushed about by selfish cravings, which can overwhelm even the most cultured and humanitarian among us if we let ourselves be drawn by prestige, fame, and power. Entirely independent of the external world for his support, the man who has attained the unitive state lives in abiding joy and security. As long as we lean on anything outside ourselves for support, we are going to be insecure. Most of us try to find support by leaning on all sorts of things – gold, books, learning, sensory stimulation – and if these things are taken away, we fall over. To the extent that we are dependent on these external supports, we grow weaker and more liable to upsets and misfortune.
Our sole support is really the Lord within. In a magnificent verse at the end of the Gita (18:66) Sri Krishna tells us not to cling to anything outside ourselves, but to cast aside all other supports and embrace only the Lord of Love who is within us all. Then we shall be free. It is a strange paradox that when we surrender everything to the Lord, we receive everything: when we depend entirely on the Lord, we become independent. In meditation we slowly learn to depend more and more on the Lord by increasing our concentration on the words of the inspirational piece. When the mind tries to slip out to the movie theater or the ice cream parlor and we bring it back to the words of St. Francis or the Gita, we are gently dislodging external supports and turning our eyes to the Lord.
5. A man should reshape himself through the power of the will. He should never let himself be degraded by self-will. The will is the only friend of the Self, and the will is the only enemy of the Self.
No one can help us grow up, no one can help us become beautiful, except ourselves. We cannot expect anyone on the face of the earth to do the work necessary for our own enlightenment. Great teachers only show the way; we have to travel it, and the first step we can take is to accept responsibility f
or the position in which we find ourselves today and not try to leave it at the door of our parents, our partner, our children, or our society. By accepting this responsibility we immediately gain the certainty that if we brought ourselves into this morass, then we have the power to pull ourselves out completely, reshape ourselves, and become perfect.
The seed of perfection is within all of us. Meister Eckhart, in his inimitable way, tells us that as apple seeds grow into apple trees and pear seeds into pear trees, so the God-seed within us will grow into a mighty God-tree if it is watered, weeded, and protected. In India, the price of seeds goes up during the rainy season because that is the right time for planting. Because the seeds are expensive, the foolish farmer says, “I think I’ll wait until there is a fifty-percent reduction in the price of seeds. During the summer months you can pick up two packets of seed for the price of one.” But at that time, when there is not a drop of water in the ground, nothing is likely to grow. Similarly, the right time for leading the spiritual life is now. When my Grandmother used to ask me when I was going to do a certain good deed, I would say, “One of these days, Granny.” She would immediately retort in my mother tongue, “One of these days is none of these days.” Most of us have a tendency to put things off until the right moment, the auspicious day, when everything is right. There are people who throw away jobs or move to a new home just because what they have now doesn’t feel right. I would suggest a little less concern with feeling right and more with doing things now. If you want to lead the spiritual life, the time to start is immediately, and not one minute later. We have a venerable Hindu friend who says, in frightening language, “Don’t postpone the spiritual life until tomorrow. How do you know you will be here tomorrow?”
Whatever mistakes we have committed, whatever difficulties we have, all that we have to do is leave aside all supports and trust the Lord completely, because he is right within us. In trusting the Lord, we are trusting our real Self; in putting our life under his guidance, we are letting our life be governed by the wisest part of our consciousness. Ultimately we have only one friend in the world: the Atman, the Lord within, who is our real Self. He is telling us all the time, “I will forgive you whatever you have done, provided you now try to remove all selfishness from your heart and your life. I’ll support you despite all the mistakes of the past, if you will now start to live for your family and your community. And I will bring you into your full beauty and wisdom if you will meditate on me and remember that I am present in every creature that lives on the face of the earth.”
6. To those who have conquered themselves, the will is a friend. But it is the enemy of those who have not found the Self within them.
We all have within us that curious pair, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That is, we all have a pure, perfect, divine Self, side by side with a hobgoblin with cloven feet and wagging tail who tries to make us believe that he is our real Self. This hobgoblin is called by many names. When Jalalu’l-Din Rumi, the great medieval Sufi saint, would talk to his disciples about the devil, they used to retort in their sophistication: “Devil? Devil? Never heard of him! We don’t believe in him.” And Jalalu’l-Din Rumi replied, “You never heard of him? Just turn your ear inward and listen to some of your thoughts. ‘I hate him. Drop dead.’ That’s the voice of the devil.” We don’t have to go outside ourselves if we want to meet Mr. Mephistopheles. We have only to ask for an appointment, and he will tell us to come any time – to walk right in, sit down, and make ourselves at home. This is the selfish part of us, the monstrously ugly part of us. When we hate, when we carry resentments, when we refuse to forgive or become violent in our home, on the street, or on the campus, we are telling Mephistopheles that we look upon him as our leader and will do whatever he wants.
Side by side with this hobgoblin is our pure, divine Self. One of the beautiful names for this Self in Arabic is al-Rahim, ‘the Merciful.’ The beauty of forgiveness, compassion, and love is that they heal all the wounds within us, leaving not even a scar. Where there is no forgiveness, not only are there scars; there are festering wounds which sap our vitality. Remember the words of the Buddha in the Dhammapada: “Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love. This is an unalterable law.” He did not say it is advisable to love, or it is recommended; he said it is an unalterable law: breaking it, we break ourselves; obeying it, we fulfill ourselves.
To learn to return love for hatred, all of us have to struggle for a long, long time. Learning any skill takes considerable effort, and we should not be surprised that learning to be selfless is the result of many, many years of difficult, exhilarating labor. Our niece Geetha has taken about a year to graduate from reading in that odd alphabet called ITA to the kind of books you and I read. When she came to us a year ago, she knew only a few words of English. Then she started going to school and saying b-u-k spells book, which really puzzled me. I would look this word up in the dictionary and say, “I don’t think buk is English.” She would say, “Uncle, it’s that thing you’re looking at – buk. “Oh,” I said, “that’s b-o-o-k.” Now she too is beginning to read book, and there is such joy in the achievement. This morning, while Christine and I were meditating, a little slip of paper was passed underneath the door with a message written by Geetha, consisting of five words, every one of them lovingly misspelled: Anti, ples pik ar dreses; “Aunty, please pick our dresses.” We were so overjoyed that we didn’t see spelling peculiarities; we said, “How beautiful – she is able to communicate,” which we often forget is the purpose of language.
In communicating with the Lord, for a long time we are going to say “ples Lord,” and he is not going to consult the great mystics in heaven and say, “Poor English!” Instead he will say, “This person has turned to me and wants my help.” In other words, we are not going to be perfect for a long, long time. We are going to have lapses, outbursts of temper, and difficulties, but as long as we keep trying our very best, the Lord is more than happy to receive our offering.
7. The supreme Reality stands revealed in the consciousness of those who have conquered themselves. They live in peace, alike in cold and heat, pleasure and pain, praise and blame.
To grow up we all need to learn to maintain an even mind in pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, and we will find that keeping our balance, no matter how difficult the challenges we face, leads to security, cheerfulness, and the permanent happiness that is Rama. In our world we are slowly forgetting that, as Meher Baba puts it, “Cheerfulness is a divine virtue.” We go on a bus and see eyes that are glazed and faces that have no expression at all. It is as if some kind of arctic weather is blowing inside us all: our emotions are beginning to freeze; glaciers are forming, and icebergs are looming up everywhere. We are feeling less and less for others and less for ourselves as well. The impersonality of our modern urban society has become so frightening that people are trying to form smaller groups, smaller societies, where they can know and serve one another. It is a source of unending delight to all of us at Ramagiri to live as members of a large family, loving one another, working hard, and always being cheerful.
There are times when it is difficult to smile, but that is the perfect time to learn. When you are already happy, there is no effort in trying to smile. But when things are slowly beginning to look a little blue, when morale is sagging at the edges and people around you are beginning to irritate you, that is the time to start smiling. In the very act of smiling there seems to be some secret switch that is turned on, and somewhere inside a little fountain of joy begins to play.
Yogananda Paramahamsa has a beautiful suggestion for thawing the arctic state of our feelings; it is for all of us to become smile millionaires. This is the kind of millionaire that everyone can be, because everywhere we go we can always smile. Wherever you find someone seated alone, not knowing what to do, feeling utterly desolate, just smile at him. Almost everyone will thaw immediately and smile back. When you have been smiling at people in the park, at meter-maids passing by, at the mailma
n, and at schoolchildren, one day when you go to the mirror you will find smiling has become a habit. Your mouth has forgotten to droop at the corners; you try your best to scowl but you have lost the ability. Depression, unsociability, and lack of goodwill are beginning to get erased from your consciousness.
Every smile can be beautiful when we repeat the mantram, because gradually the mantram brings the smile into our eyes. We start smiling with our lips and end up smiling with our eyes as well. Once we have learned to do this we can never really be angry again. It is good to be with people who have smiling eyes – we do not even have to talk to them because communication is going on all the time at a deeper level.
8. They are completely fulfilled by the knowledge and wisdom of the Self. Having conquered their senses, unmoved by opposition, they have climbed to the summit of human consciousness. To such a person a clod of dirt, a stone, and gold are the same.
It is good to remember that gold is not valuable by itself; it is valuable because there is so little of it. If sand were found only in small quantities, people would treasure it in their safe-deposit boxes; they would buy sand certificates, on important occasions they would exchange a little sand, and they would have the expression “as good as sand.” It shows how gullible we are and how little sense of value we have. What really gives value to anything is its usefulness in serving others. Our body draws its value from its usefulness in serving others, and our life draws its value not from the money we make, or the prizes we win, or the power we wield over others, but from the service we give every day to add a little bit more to the happiness of our family and our community. There is no better epitaph than “He lived for others,” and this is all that the Lord asks us to do in order to move closer to him day by day.
The End of Sorrow Page 35
