The End of Sorrow

by Eknath Easwaran

  22. They live in freedom who have gone beyond the dualities of life, and who never compete. They are alike in success and failure and content with whatever comes to them.

  The nature of life is to bring us sunshine and shadow, pleasure and pain, success and failure, praise and censure. Wherever we live, in the West or in the East, on the campus or in the bazaar, this inescapable duality of life will always be around us. It shows our pathetic condition that almost every one of us hopes that one day we will be able to isolate pleasure from pain. This is one of the everlasting projects of humanity. It may not have been done by anybody in history, but I am going to do this one day in my lab; and when I have isolated the pleasure bacillus, I will be free. There are others who would like to isolate praise. Most of us appreciate praise, but it is disastrous to become dependent on it. If we are going to allow our security to be bolstered up by the praise, appreciation, and applause of others, we are done for. I have even heard about a well-known movie star who goes to sleep at night with an applause record playing. This is going to make him more and more insecure.

  Under no circumstances should we be agitated if someone ignores us. I for one cannot find enough words for the advantages of being ignored. Nobody recognizes me – how good it is! I can walk anywhere in freedom, for nobody thinks I am anybody – how good it is! I always say that if I could write a play I would call it “A Place to Be Nobody,” which means that I do not want any attention from others, I do not want any appreciation from others, I do not want any support from others, because I have the source of all appreciation, support, and security within me. In life there are occasions when we are ignored and sometimes forgotten. That is the time for us to remind ourselves, “Oh, I am forgotten, very good! Nobody attends to me – excellent! Why should I need anybody’s attention?” This is the attitude of the real mystic, who is content because he is complete. We have a standing invitation from the Lord within, who says, “Any time you feel like it, you can make yourself free. Come to me. I have a banquet spread for you with ambrosia, the nectar that gives everlasting life.”

  These attitudes can be cultivated skillfully. When I see the kind of feats performed in the circus, I know they must have required enormous endeavor. Most of us have seen two trapeze artists swinging over and under each other across the tent to exchange trapezes in midair; you don’t just go on the trapeze one day and say, “I am going to jump from one to another.” It is the same kind of practice, the same kind of skill, that people develop who win tennis championships. You do not go to Wimbledon on the first day you play tennis; you keep practicing, you develop your skills, and one day you will be at Wimbledon playing on the central court. It is the same on the spiritual path. These are attitudes that all of us can develop; even those of us who are the most sensitive to praise and appreciation can learn to be so secure within ourselves that the word rejected can be expelled from our dictionary. The one person who will never reject us is the Lord, and that is enough to make up for all the rejections we may have to undergo at the hands of everyone else.

  One of the central ideas of the Gita is that as long as you look at life through the spectacles of pain and pleasure, success and failure, praise and censure, you will never see life whole. One of the fatal flaws of the intellect is that it can thrive only in the land of duality. You take the intellect from the sea of duality and throw it on the land of unity, and it dies. It says, “You mean, I can’t divide, I can’t categorize, I can’t classify things? I’m done for.” When Sri Ramana Maharshi used to tell people to go beyond pleasure and pain, they would ask, “Do you mean be indifferent?” His answer would be, “When you go beyond pleasure and pain, you reach abiding joy.”

  Pleasure is something that comes and goes; joy is something that abides, and it is this state of abiding joy for which the mantram Rama stands. We enter into this state when we gradually go beyond the duality of pleasure and pain, success and defeat, praise and censure.

  The next word is vimatsara: “Do not compete.” It is a strong word, and a concept which is alien to us today. We have come to believe it is only when we compete that we can give our best. I think there are other ways in which we can be inspired to give our best, and one is by reminding ourselves that when we contribute to the welfare of our family, our community, our country, and our world, we are actually serving the Lord. If we want to be aware of the Lord, if we want to be united with the Lord, we must contribute as much as we can to the happiness of those around us, turning our back upon our own petty pleasures and profit when necessary.

  This word vimatsara also touches upon the harmful way in which most of us tend to compare ourselves with others. This, too, has become so common today that in order to esteem myself, I should always be able to say, “I am better than he, so I am good.” We have a distinguished American spiritual teacher in India, nearing his hundredth year now, who took the Sanskrit name Atulananda. It is a lovely name which means ‘one who does not compare people.’ As our spiritual awareness grows, we will know that the Lord is present in everyone and that there is a uniqueness about everyone. The truly spiritual person never tries to compare himself with others, or others among themselves. I have never been able to understand the origin of this phrase “keeping up with the Joneses.” It does not matter very much whether we keep up with Tom Jones or anybody else; what is important is for us to keep up with the Lord by serving him in everyone around us. Even here, as long, as we compete with each other and compare one with another, a certain amount of envy is inescapable. There is a girl in Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala who has a very beautiful name: Anasurya, ‘she who is free from jealousy.’ This is a very rare type, an ideal we can all try to imitate by not competing among ourselves or comparing ourselves to others around us, remembering that all of us have complete worth and value because the Lord is present in us all the time.

  Samah siddhav asiddhau ca. Siddha is success; asiddha is failure. Sri Krishna again repeats these important words, saying, “If you want to love Me, you must remain alike in success and failure.” In my humble observation it is not so very difficult to remain calm in failure. It is much more difficult to remain calm in success, which goes straight to the head. Those who have made money, who have become famous, for example, sometimes drop their old acquaintances and move out of their old area. In the spiritual tradition, it is when you become famous that you go to your old area and say to your old friends, “Now you can all bask in my success. We have grown up together, and you have taught me so many things that I owe my upbringing to you.” This is the kind of reverse perspective we can all try to follow. The higher we rise the more we should remember those who are less fortunate. Whether people recognize us, or praise us, or drop us, or even denounce us, there is no need for us to lose our calmness, our security, and our awareness that the Lord is within us all the time.

  23. Those without attachment to the ego are free; their minds are purified by the knowledge that all life is one. They perform all work freely, in the spirit of service.

  Here Sri Krishna gives us the word gatasanga, ‘he who is free from attachment to his own ego.’ All of us have immense resources of love, most of which swirl around our own ego. As long as we are in love with our own ego, dwelling upon ourselves, dreaming about ourselves, it will not be possible for us to love our family or our community. In meditation, we gradually release this swirling whirlpool into channels of fruitful service which flow towards others. The more we think about ourselves, the less we can love others; the less we think about ourselves, the more we are able to love others. When the great day comes when I forget that most monotonous subject in the world, myself, on that day I am free to love everybody.

  We all can enter into this state of abiding love by working at it every day, particularly in our domestic relationships, where we have the greatest opportunities for forgetting ourselves. It is absurd to talk about leading the spiritual life when we do not try to put the welfare of our family first. This is the training ground, and though the training
is not easy at all, it can be accomplished by all of us with the repetition of the mantram. When irritations or conflicts occur – as they are bound to occur between two people who are brought up differently, who are conditioned differently, who have been exposed to different cultural influences in their early days – do not try to move further away; do not say, “I am not going to talk to you; I don’t want to see you.” That is the time to say, “I am going to get closer to you, and I am going to try to put your welfare first.” This is the challenge of friction; even friction can have spiritual value. The Bhagavad Gita throws a flood of light on how the unfavorable circumstances in our life can be utilized. If we do not utilize them, we are failing to take advantage of the great opportunities that come to us for removing friction, for banishing conflict, and for moving closer to the Lord in everyone around us.

  The next word is one of Sri Krishna’s favorites: muktasya. Mukta means free. Sri Krishna asks, “Don’t you want to live in freedom?” When somebody is angry at you, and you are angry at that person, you are not living in freedom; you are living in bondage. You are only doing what the other person is making you do.

  I used to get amazed at my Granny, my spiritual teacher, when she would tell me that when I retaliate, when I move away from people, when I get estranged, I am only dancing to a tune anybody can play. I was a little puppet, she said, whose wires were being pulled by some of my high school classmates whom I disliked. If I want to be free, all that I have to do, whatever others may do, is try to stand calm, move closer, and give them greater love and greater respect. In my own small personal experience, when people get angry and cause trouble in personal relationships, I have found they are often crying out, “Help me to move closer to you.” We all have such experiences. Every one of us can do something in his own home, in his own life, to apply these precious words of the Lord to enable him to live in freedom.

  We should remember that “freedom” here implies not only my own freedom, but also the freedom of all around me, in which I find my freedom. According to the Gita, it is not possible to find freedom by one’s own self; it is not possible for X, Y, or Z alone to become free and lead a free life. Freedom is indivisible, and in order for me to be free, I have to help others to be free. When we use the word “freedom,” what we usually mean is that as long as I am free, it does not matter whether or not you are free. What does matter is that I should be free, my community should be free, my country should be free. The Gita implies that this concept is preposterous; all life is one, and it is only in this total freedom that I can enjoy freedom.

  The most challenging effort of freeing ourselves by helping those around us to become free begins, as usual, in the family. I have been reading a good deal lately about the family becoming obsolete. This is the fantasy of those who do not understand the value of the family in training us to learn to find our freedom by living for the freedom of all those around us. The family is really a free university. We are now familiar with free universities; we find them in Palo Alto and Berkeley. Everywhere now people are trying to establish free universities. I would say this is carrying coal to Newcastle. We all have a free university at home, where we really get our finest education in freedom. If we do not learn that the freedom of the family is the freedom of the individual members of the family, we are likely to be misfits in life for a long, long time. I would have no hesitation in saying a good son or daughter makes a good husband or wife, a good father or mother, and a good citizen. We can all start acting on this concept of freedom right in our own family, which does not mean Papa, Mama, Junior, and Janie, but all the members, including grandparents, uncles and aunts, and country cousins. The family can include our dearest friends and those who participate closely in all our endeavors.

  To begin the spiritual life, which will enable us to become free, we need not play a part on a gigantic scale. Mogul art, one of the great periods of artistic achievement in India, often is in miniature. The artist concentrated on very small areas, on little things, and worked with such tenderness and precision that only somebody who understands art will be able to see all the love and labor that has gone into it. Family living is like Mogul art, worked in miniature. The canvas is so small, and the skill required is so great, that most of us really do not evaluate the vast potentialities of family life which can enable us all to find our freedom.

  My wife and I can draw a little parallel from our own life at Ramagiri with my mother and the children. We usually keep one day in the week for outings, and last Sunday, a beautiful, balmy day, we took them to Santa Rosa. On the way, I was seated with Meera on one side and Geetha on the other, and they were asking me all kinds of questions to which it is very easy to say, “Keep quiet.” From an adult viewpoint, most of their questions were juvenile. But that is exactly what children are – juvenile people who are asking me juvenile questions that are just right for them. In fact, if they had asked me some adult question, I would have said, “Keep quiet.” All the time I was trying to remember what most of us older people forget: that every child has a point of view. They have their outlook on the world, their way of looking at life, which makes them ask these questions, and for them, these are matters of vital importance. They wanted to know, for example, why Texaco and Mexico should be spelled differently, why Texaco should be spelled with an a and Mexico with an i. To this you just do not say, “They are not the same.”

  I had my arms around both of them. They had those high rainboots on, so every now and then I would get a kick from both sides, and it hurt. They are children, active and lively, and they sometimes kick. They do not intend to kick others, but my legs happened to be in the way so they got hit. In all these little details, we have to remind ourselves, “These children are not really kicking me; they are kicking their heels in the air, and my legs happen to be in the way.” I had to repeat the mantram, Rama Rama, to keep smiling. It is in these little things that we learn how to be loving. In order to love, to find our freedom, we do not have to go to the Himalayas or the Sierras. We just go to Santa Rosa in one of those little VW bugs, where we are so constricted that every kick is amplified.

  When we got to Santa Rosa, we had to walk slowly because my mother is nearing her eightieth year. But the children wanted to run. We were in a crowded shopping center, where it is not proper for a sedate professor to be running about. But they were saying, “Uncle, we want you to run; to run is fun.” I did not say that a pompous professor like me should not be running; it would take away from my pomp. Instead I said, “I don’t care what people say; I’ll run with you,” and I started to make a good dash for it. I thought I was going to meet with appreciation, but little Geetha came up to me and said, “You are not supposed to step on the lines.” There was no “Thank you,” there was no “Well done,” so I had to do it all over again. This is the way you show love for children.

  We usually conclude our visit to Santa Rosa by dropping in at an ice cream parlor. Little Geetha has just learned to read, and she was looking at the big board and asking, “What are all those flavors?”

  I said, “There are many there.”

  She tried to read a few, and then she said, “What is that long word I can’t read?”

  I said, “Pistachio.”

  “That’s my flavor.” So she got that, double dip, and Meera got butter brickle. They wanted to nurse their ice cream cones all the way back to Ramagiri. I was in the back seat again with both of them on either side, and such is their love for each other that every now and then they would exchange licks across my lap. It was dripping all along. I do not like suits being spoiled by pistachio and butter-brickle drips, and my first impulse was to say, “Stop dripping all over me.” Instead, I again tried to look at the situation from their point of view. For them it is not clothes that are important; it is their ice cream. I could see they were cone-conscious, and so I let them drip all the way home.

  My mother, watching all this, was very happy that I still have not forgotten how to be tender to my own family. I
learned how to be tender from my mother and from my Grandmother, because they were able to show great tenderness to me. It is in this way that we find our freedom, by being tender and unselfish and putting up with innumerable discomforts for the sake of adding to the joy of the members of our family, and then gradually extending our love to include our friends, our community, our country, and our world.

  Finally we come to jnanavasthitacetas, ‘he whose mind has been purified by the knowledge that all life is one.’ When we begin to realize the unity of life in all our personal relationships, our mind becomes purified.

  24. The process of offering is Brahman; that which is offered is Brahman. Brahman offers the sacrifice in the fire of Brahman. Brahman is attained by the man who sees Brahman in every action.

  This is an image taken from an ancient form of ritualistic worship in the orthodox Hindu tradition. In this ritual, called yajna, or sacrifice, the sacrificial fire is lighted and butter is poured as an oblation into the fire which represents the Lord. When we live for others in peace, in love, and in wisdom, our life becomes divine, and everything we do becomes an offering unto the Lord.

  25. Some aspirants perform sacrifices to the gods. Others offer selfless service as sacrifice in the fire of Brahman.