It is very easy to become famous. But one of the paradoxes of fame is that people who have longed for fame and striven for many years to become famous, to have their picture on the cover page of weekly magazines, after achieving fame come to envy anonymous people like us. It is so good not to be known. It is so refreshing to be anonymous, to live on the blessed anonymous level. Nobody recognizes us, nobody bothers us, everybody ignores us. Well-known figures from all over the world will say how much they deplore publicity. But if I may say so, if we do not want publicity, nobody is going to give it to us. There is no difficulty in remaining obscure, which is the ideal condition for leading the spiritual life.
It is very easy to make money. It is very easy to become famous. If we can unify our desires, even for a finite goal, we can attain it; but once all of our desires are unified, we will find that nothing finite can ever satisfy us.
In the Upanishads, there is a glorious passage that is one of the central principles of mysticism. It sums up the secret of all life: “You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your deep, driving desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.” All of us are capable of immense desires, but our capacity to desire and love is unfortunately cut up into innumerable little desires for profit, power, pleasure, and prestige. It is possible, through the dynamic discipline of meditation, to recall our innumerable detrimental desires from the wasteful channels into which they have flowed. And when we recall our desires from the restaurant, from the bank, from our wardrobe, and from all the petty little channels which consume our vital wealth, they all merge into one huge, all-consuming desire that can never be satisfied with anything finite. It is only those who live on the superficial level who can be satisfied by money, material possessions, pleasure, or fame. There is no point in blaming them. They live on the superficial level, and their mouth is very small, just a little parrot beak. Put one cherry in, and they are satisfied. But as our meditation deepens, our capacity to desire grows greater, and as a Hindi proverb says, you cannot satisfy the hunger of a camel by putting a mustard seed in its mouth.
Our capacity to desire is infinite when all of our desires are unified. Nothing finite can ever really satisfy the immense desires of a human being. St. Augustine – who used to paint Carthage red and knew what he was talking about – would say, “Lord, how can I ever find peace anywhere else when I am made to rest in thee?” This is written in every cell of our being, and paraphrasing it in applying it to modern times, I would say, “When you and I are made to find our joy in the Lord, how can we find it in LSD, in money, in food, in clothes?”
Once when Christine and I were going for our walk, we saw a little girl playing a game I hadn’t seen since we left India. She was making mud pies. I was so delighted on seeing a little girl making mud pies, just as they do in all the villages of Kerala, that I watched her for some time and, just to make conversation, asked her, “What are these?”
“Oh,” she said, “mud pies” – adding, just as her mother would, “but I don’t make them as well as I used to.”
I said, “Will you please let me have a few to eat?”
She looked at me and said, “They’re horrible! You shouldn’t eat mud pies. If you’re hungry, you should go home and ask your mother or wife to give you lunch.”
Unfortunately, what most of us are trying to do in life is eat mud pies.
The Lord says, “Don’t waste your love on money; that love is meant for Me. Don’t waste your love on your own petty pleasure and profit. This is misusing the capacity for love that I have given you to find Me present in everyone, everywhere.” The Lord has given us all a wide margin for experimenting with our desires. It requires a certain amount of juggling with the senses to find out they will not bring us abiding joy, but it becomes very tragic when we keep on juggling all our lives: first three balls, then four, then five, until finally we are the expert, juggling with sixteen balls while riding on a horse.
Over and over again, the Gita will say that this is not a moral issue at all; it is an engineering issue. Sri Krishna has given each of us a certain amount of fuel to undertake the long journey to the goal of life. The Lord is not miserly, either, so with all the responsibility of love, he gives us a few extra gallons for making a few detours. If he were an efficiency-minded fuel manager, he would say, “This is all you need, not one drop more.” But he loves us so much that he says, “I know the quirks of your mind, and I have given you some extra fuel.” He knows that before setting out on our trans-Atlantic flight we will want to go to Milpitas or Walnut Creek once or twice, just to see what is going on. And as long as we make a few trips and find out that there is nothing doing in Milpitas, the Lord is satisfied, and life has served its purpose. But tragedy strikes when we use all of our great total of fuel in just making little local flights, going around and around in the same old circle, so that when the time comes to try the flight across the Atlantic, we find we do not have any gas. This is what may happen to all of us if we postpone the spiritual search too long.
13. The distinctions of caste, guna, and karma have come from Me. Understanding that I am their cause, realize that I am changeless and beyond all action.
The perennial philosophy in the Hindu tradition interprets the cosmos in terms of three gunas – sattva, rajas, and tamas. Sattva means law, rajas means energy, and tamas means inertia. According to this theory of the gunas, there may be surface differences between all of us, even though at bottom we are one. If you look at the five fingers of your hand, Booker T. Washington used to say, they all look different. Even the names are different. The thumb will say, “Don’t call me finger. I am Mr. Thumb.” And another will say, “Don’t just call me finger. I am Little Finger.” Another says, “I point. I am the Index Finger.” The vision of people who are living on the physical level, going by physical appearance, living just for the moment, is only on the fingers. They see everything as separate. But as Booker T. Washington put it, if you look below at the palm, you will see there is only one.
It is only on the surface of life that we all look different and feel separate, only on the surface that sometimes, in order to bring about our own satisfaction, we clash with those around us. But if we can only deepen our awareness through the practice of meditation and direct our vision deep below, we shall begin to see that, as Meher Baba has said, “You and I are not ‘we’; you and I are One.”
The lowest guna is tamas, the state of inertia. This is a state familiar to all of us. When duties call for us to act, we feel inclined to say, “What does it matter? Why not drop out of society? Why not live in my ivory tower, the world forgetting, by the world forgotten?” One of the interesting characteristics of our time is the belief that by dropping out of society and turning our back upon the world, we can become aware of the indivisible unity of all life. But the Bhagavad Gita says emphatically that this is not the path for us to follow, and the language it uses is to the point: it is all right for a rock not to act, it is all right for a stone just to sit, but you and I as human beings have to respond to the challenges of the day and make a contribution in our own way to the solution of its problems. In one of the strong verses of the Gita (3:12), Sri Krishna says the person who refrains from action and drops out of life, when there are such terrible problems pressing upon us, is stena, a thief. The Gita is a call to selfless action, not action just for feathering our own nest but for contributing to the greatest extent possible to the welfare of our family, community, and world.
On the campus, the application of this verse is not to procrastinate, not to postpone last quarter’s project until next quarter. This only makes the problem worse. When we try to postpone we are making tamas more established instead of transforming it into rajas. When I was a professor at my university in India, during finals time all the usual symptoms that I see in Berkeley used to break out there, too. But there was one additional thing that I used to see in the Hindu temples, particularly in the villages. Many stu
dents who had seldom been to the temple would feel a sudden spurt of devotion on the eve of the finals. They would ask the Lord for his blessing and break coconuts in front of Lord Ganesha, who is called “the remover of obstacles.” The faculty used to say that when the price of coconuts has gone up, it means that finals have begun. And when the price of coconuts went down, I knew that finals were over and that students were not going to the temple any more. When she saw students going to the temple on the eve of finals, my Grandmother used to remind me that not even the Lord would help those who postponed and did not study. She would say that it is good to go to the temple to show our faith in the Lord, but he expects us to study well all the same.
Whenever there is a tendency to postpone, it is good to get down to work immediately whether it is at our job, on the campus, or in the home. When there is something not very pleasant to be done, do it immediately. The pleasant things can wait a little, but the unpleasant things should be done immediately.
Here the practical hint I would give is that when you feel lethargic, unequal to the tasks that are incumbent upon you, go for a good, long walk repeating the mantram. This can change your attitude in less than an hour’s time. It is the initial leap that you have to make. You just have to press hard on the arms of your chair and leap like a mustang. The initial leap should give you the momentum to go for a long, fast walk, and once the blood has started spinning in your veins, the lungs have started going strongly, and the rhythm of the mantram has started echoing in your consciousness, in an hour’s time your attitudes change. There is no longer what you thought was a permanent resistance to work, no longer the diffidence in yourself. Even to prepare for the most important occasion, I would suggest a good, long walk repeating the mantram.
The body is meant for motion, but in our modern way of life, we have almost begun to forget this. In the morning we move about from the bedroom to the dining room where we sit. Then we go into the garage, get into the car, and sit until we reach our office, where we sit again at our desk. We come back in the evening and sit in front of the bridge table or television set. It is helpful to remember that the heart is not what the poets represent it to be – a delicate, brittle instrument. It is a sturdy old pump, and it has an immense capacity to keep itself well, to keep itself strong, provided we obey the simple, sensible rules of good health: eat moderately, eat only what is nourishing, eat only when hungry, keep walking whenever there is the chance, and keep repeating the name of the Lord whenever there is agitation, fear, anxiety, or conflict. If we observe these simple rules, we shall see in our own life how easy it is to be well.
The way to transform tamas into rajas is through activity. Then slowly we have to transform rajas into sattva; we must begin to direct all of our energies to the selfless service of those around us. We can harness our energy and restlessness and direct it to the supreme goal. Whenever we feel restless, that is the time not to run away, but to sit down, meditate, and sink down into the depths of our own consciousness.
The third stage, sattva, is known by its characteristics of serenity, tranquility, and detachment, which all of us need, particularly today in our troubled times. In sattva we work arduously but not for our own personal aggrandizement. Even in sattva, however, we still believe that we are the doer; therefore we are still involved in the fruits of action. It is not enough if we attain the sattvic level, because the supreme purpose of life according to the scriptures of all religions is to realize the Lord of Love who is present in everyone. The person who has become aware of the Lord is said to have gone beyond the three gunas. He has realized the unchanging reality, the indivisible unity which underlies the world of change. In every religion there are those who have gone beyond the three gunas, like Jesus the Christ, the Buddha, or, in our own times, Mahatma Gandhi, who is an inspiring example of one who transcended the limitations of space, time, and causality to become the perfect instrument of the Lord.
Applying the categories of the gunas to human evolution, the Gita says that the least evolved are the apathetic who do not act at all. Higher are those who act, even though part selfishly. Higher than they are those who act selflessly, but the highest are those who have realized the indivisible unity of all life, who have seen the Lord within all. This spiritual evolution is the original basis of what is called the caste system in India. But though in ancient times a man could move from one caste to another depending upon his personal merits, the system became rigid so that a man’s caste was determined only by birth, not by merit. In modern times the caste system in India became a great source of suffering and exploitation to all of us. It was a crying evil which Mahatma Gandhi tackled with his indomitable weapon of nonviolence, so that today the system is dying out in the cruel form it had gradually acquired over the centuries. In the early days, one of the questions that I had to face often on the platform was, “What about the caste system?” I would ask in turn, “Where?” Every country has its own caste system wherever there is exploitation or discrimination, whether because of nationality, religion, property, race, color, education, or sex. There is one kind of caste system in India, another kind in Europe, a third in America, and a fourth in Africa; everywhere there is a caste system as long as we do not treat all those around us with complete love and respect, knowing the Lord is present in everyone.
14. Actions do not cling to Me because I am not attached to their results. He who understands this and practices it lives in freedom.
In this verse, Sri Krishna, the Lord of Love present in all hearts, gives us the secret of selfless action, called karma yoga. Anyone, according to Sri Krishna, who pursues personal pleasure and profit, anyone who indulges in action for money, for material possessions, power, or prestige, is a prisoner in action.
This is a marvelous concept which most of us cannot even grasp, because we live in the prison of the ego, compelled and driven into action for the sake of money, material possessions, power, and pleasure. As long as we continue to act while propelled by these personal motives of self-interest, we are not free agents but robots, automata being pushed from behind by forces out of our control. We can live selfishly, doing as much as we like and working very hard, but we know from the Gita that this action will only imprison us more and more. There may come a time, later in life, when the walls of this prison have become so high we cannot climb over them at all.
As long as we are living only for ourselves, to make a little money or to acquire a little prestige, we cannot have access to the deeper resources within us. On this point, my Grandmother would sum up the message of the Gita in a few simple words. She would say that Sri Krishna gives me two ways to live. One is for myself, and when I live for myself I wither away and die. The other is to live for those around me, no matter how painful it may be at the outset, and to widen the circle more and more until it at last embraces all creation. With this path, the more I live for others the more resources will come into my hands.
A few days ago, on the way to San Francisco, we saw the new arrangement at the tollgate of the Bay Bridge. The traffic was particularly heavy, bumper to bumper, but there was one lane marked Exact Change where you keep your change ready, throw it in the basket, and shoot through. There is a rare kind of person who has this kind of ego. It is just little and crumpled up from living for his parents, partner, children, family, community, country, and world. He has always been thinking about others and never about himself, so his ego is tiny like a peanut. In life he goes through the Exact Change line, throws his ego into the basket, and shoots through. The others come with their egos on trucks – sometimes huge trucks with two trailers, which are so large that they have to wait for all the other trucks in front to pass through first.
On the spiritual path, we have one choice, whether we live in a rich or a poor family, whether we are ignorant or learned, whether we are healthy or ailing: shall we go after what pleases us, or shall we go after what promises to bring the increasing happiness of all those around us? When we work under the compulsion of sel
f-will, we are preventing the Lord from using us as instruments of his work. But if we let the Lord act through us and realize that he is the operator, we go beyond the law of karma, no longer to be bound by actions.
15. Knowing this truth and desiring liberation, the spiritual aspirants of ancient times engaged in action. Perform action in the manner of those ancient sages.
Sri Krishna now tells Arjuna about mumukshu, which means ‘he who is very eager to have awareness of the indivisible unity of life.’ It is this eagerness to know for ourselves, in our own consciousness, that parents and children are one, husband and wife are one, boyfriend and girlfriend are one, friend and friend are one, and even friend and enemy are one, that will deepen our meditation, strengthen our willpower, and enable us to turn our back upon what is petty and selfish in all of us. Whenever people have deeply desired liberation, whenever they have wanted to realize the Lord of Love who is ever present in all creatures, they have always learned to act selflessly, to live for others, and to turn their back upon whatever selfish satisfaction they may have wanted in their earlier days.
Whatever mistakes you may have committed in the past, once you turn your back upon personal profit and pleasure and set your eyes on the shining goal, then the past begins to fall away from you. Thus, Sri Krishna adds, you, too, have the latent, seldom-suspected capacity within yourself to change yourself completely, to become mumukshu. It is this divine unpredictability which is the mark of the mystic, and in everyone there is this capacity. Through the practice of meditation, one of the most delightful pastimes you develop is the capacity to change your habits at will. You can take tea and become a tea addict, like Dr. Johnson, for a few months, and when your body is beginning to clamor for tea in the morning, you can just give it a cup of coffee. There is no “Et tu, Brute?” Then you give it coffee for a number of weeks, and when the body has forgotten tea and has become addicted to coffee, you give it Sanka. This is how you win the freedom of the body.
The End of Sorrow Page 24