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This is true of adventurers of every kind, but especially of those who seek to explore not mountains or jungles but consciousness itself: whose real drive, we might say, is not so much to know the unknown as to know the knower.
And the third of these classics, the Bhagavad Gita, gives us a map and guidebook. It gives a systematic overview of the territory, shows various approaches to the summit with their benefits and pitfalls, offers recommendations, tells us what to pack and what to leave behind. More than either of the others, it gives the sense of a personal guide.
If the landscape seems dark in the light of sense perception, they tell us, it has an illumination of its own, and once our eyes adjust we can see in what Western mystics call this “divine dark” and verify their descriptions for ourselves.
The battlefield is a perfect backdrop, but the Gita’s subject is the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious.
If this is so, it would imply that the same systematic attitude the Indus Valley dwellers applied to their technology was applied also to study of the mind. This was brahmavidya, the “supreme science” – supreme because where other sciences studied the external world, brahmavidya sought knowledge of an underlying reality which would inform all other studies and activities.
Their findings can be summarized in three statements which Aldous Huxley, following Leibnitz, has called the Perennial Philosophy because they appear in every age and civilization: (1) there is an infinite, changeless reality beneath the world of change; (2) this same reality lies at the core of every human personality; (3) the purpose of life is to discover this reality experientially: that is, to realize God while here on earth.
To those who take this dramatic setting as part of the spiritual instruction and get entangled in the question of the Gita justifying war, Gandhi had a practical answer: just base your life on the Gita sincerely and systematically and see if you find killing or even hurting others compatible with its teachings. (He makes the same point of the Sermon on the Mount.)
When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union. (6:32)
If I could offer only one key to understanding this divine dialogue, it would be to remember that it takes place in the depths of consciousness and that Krishna is not some external being, human or superhuman, but the spark of divinity that lies at the core of the human personality.
A physicist would remind us that the things we see “out there” are not ultimately separate from each other and from us; we perceive them as separate because of the limitations of our senses. If our eyes were sensitive to a much finer spectrum, we might see the world as a continuous field of matter and energy.
“The external world of physics,” wrote Sir Arthur Eddington, “has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we remove the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions.”
In profound meditation, they found, when consciousness is so acutely focused that it is utterly withdrawn from the body and mind, it enters a kind of singularity in which the sense of a separate ego disappears. In this state, the supreme climax of meditation, the seers discovered a core of consciousness beyond time and change. They called it simply Atman, the Self.
The Upanishads delineate three ordinary states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Each is real, but each has a higher order of reality. For beyond these three, the Upanishads say, is the unitive state, called simply “the fourth”: turiya. Entering this state is similar to waking up out of dream sleep: the individual passes from a lower level of reality to a higher one.
“We behold what we are, and we are what we behold.”
Life cannot offer any higher realization. The supreme goal of human existence has been attained. The man or woman who realizes God has everything and lacks nothing: having this, “they desire nothing else, and cannot be shaken by the heaviest burden of sorrow” (6:22). Life cannot threaten such a person; all it holds is the opportunity to love, to serve, and to give.
we never really encounter the world; all we experience is our own nervous system.
Reshape yourself through the power of your will; never let yourself be degraded by self-will. The will is the only friend of the Self, and the will is the only enemy of the Self. (6:5)
Evolution, according to the Gita, is a painfully slow return to our native state.
But even this is not the end. The goal of evolution is to return to unity: that is, to still the mind. Then the soul rests in pure, unitary consciousness, which is a state of permanent joy.
In the still mind, in the depths of meditation, the Self reveals itself. Beholding the Self by means of the Self, an aspirant knows the joy and peace of complete fulfillment. (6:20)
The Gita does not present a system of philosophy. It offers something to every seeker after God, of whatever temperament, by whatever path. The reason for this universal appeal is that it is basically practical: it is a handbook for Self-realization and a guide to action.
The common answer is that it presents three yogas or even four – the four main paths of Hindu mysticism. In jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge, aspirants use their will and discrimination to disidentify themselves from the body, mind, and senses until they know they are nothing but the Self. The followers of bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, achieve the same goal by identifying themselves completely with the Lord in love; by and large, this is the path taken by most of the mystics of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In karma yoga, the yoga of selfless action, the aspirants dissolve their
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Indians like to classify, and the eighteen chapters of the Gita are said to break into three six-chapter parts. The first third, according to this, deals with karma yoga, the second with jnana yoga, and the last with bhakti yoga: that is, the Gita begins with the way of selfless action, passes into the way of Self-knowledge, and ends with the way of love.
As always, its emphasis is on the mind. It teaches that we can become free by giving up not material things, but selfish attachments to material things – and, more important, to people. It asks us to renounce not the enjoyment of life, but the clinging to selfish enjoyment whatever it may cost others. It pleads, in a word, for the renunciation of selfishness in thought, word, and action – a theme that is common to all mystics, West and East alike.
Mahatma Gandhi encapsulates the Gita’s message in one phrase: nishkama karma, selfless action, work free from any selfish motives.
Nishkama karma is not “good works” or philanthropic activity; work can benefit others and still carry a substantial measure of ego involvement. Such work is good, but it is not yoga. It may benefit others, but it will not necessarily benefit the doer. Everything depends on the state of mind. Action without selfish motive purifies the mind: the doer is less likely to be ego-driven later. The same action done with a selfish motive entangles a person further, precisely by strengthening that motive so it is more likely to prompt selfish action again.
By detachment I mean that you must not worry whether the desired result follows from your action or not, so long as your motive is pure, your means correct. Really, it means that things will come right in the end if you take care of the means and leave the rest to Him. “But renunciation of fruit,” Gandhi warns, in no way means indifference to the result. In regard to every action one must know the result that is expected to follow, the means thereto, and the capacity for it. He who, being thus equipped, is without desire for the result and is yet wholly engrossed in the due fulfillment of the
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So the Gita classifies the karma of attachment as pleasant at first, but “bitter as poison in the end” (18:38), because of the painful bondage of conditioning.
The whole point of the path of love is to transform motivation from “I, I, I” to “thou, thou, thou” – that is, to surrender selfish attachments by dissolving them in the desire to give.
Whoever has God in mind, simply and solely God, in all things, such a man carries God with him into all his works and into all places, and God alone does all his works. He seeks nothing but God; nothing seems good to him but God. He becomes one with God in every thought. Just as no multiplicity can dissipate God, so nothing can dissipate this man or make him multiple.
The person who has realized God, he says, mirrors both His aspects: “tranquility according to His essence, activity according to His nature: absolute repose, absolute fecundity.”
To live without the daily sacrifice (yajna) of selfless service – to work just for oneself, or worse, to do nothing at all – is simply to be a thief (3:12).
Arjuna has just been told about Self-knowledge; now he asks a very practical question: when a person attains this knowledge, how does it show? How do such people conduct themselves in everyday life? We expect a list of virtues. Instead, Krishna delivers a surprise: the surest sign is that they have banished all selfish desires. Their senses and mind are completely trained, so they are free from sensory cravings and self-will. Identified completely with the Self, not with body or mind, they realize their immortality here on earth.
One last untranslatable concept and I will let the Gita speak for itself. That concept is shraddha, and its nearest English equivalent is faith. I have translated it as such, but shraddha means much more. It is literally “that which is placed in the heart”: all the beliefs we hold so deeply that we never think to question them. It is the set of values, axioms, prejudices, and prepossessions that colors our perceptions, governs our thinking, dictates our responses, and shapes our lives, generally without our even being aware of its presence and power.
Shraddha reflects everything that we have made ourselves and points to what we have become. But there is nothing passive about shraddha.
“Yoga is evenness of mind”: detachment from the dualities of pain and pleasure, success and failure.
Those who are established in wisdom (sthita-prajna) live in continuous, unbroken awareness that they are not the perishable body but the Atman. Further, they see the same Self in everyone, for the Atman is universally present in all.
At the very close of the chapter, Krishna introduces the idea that it is not enough to master all selfish desires; it is also necessary to subdue possessiveness and egocentricity.
What can overcome a sorrow that saps all my vitality? Even power over men and gods or the wealth of an empire seem empty.
Those who are unaffected by these changes, who are the same in pleasure and pain, are truly wise and fit for immortality. Assert your strength and realize this!
The Self cannot be pierced by weapons or burned by fire; water cannot wet it, nor can the wind dry it.
The glory of the Self is beheld by a few, and a few describe it; a few listen, but many without understanding. 30 The Self of all beings, living within the body, is eternal and cannot be harmed. Therefore, do not grieve.
On this path effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure. Even a little effort toward spiritual awareness will protect you from the greatest fear.
Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to seek me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless. 42 There are ignorant people who speak flowery words and take delight in the letter of the law, saying that there is nothing else. 43 Their hearts are full of
Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to seek me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.
Just as a reservoir is of little use when the whole countryside is flooded, scriptures are of little use to the illumined man or woman, who sees the Lord everywhere.
Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment and you will amass the wealth of spiritual awareness. Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.
When your mind has overcome the confusion of duality, you will attain the state of holy indifference to things you hear and things you have heard.
They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, who have renounced every selfish desire and sense craving tormenting the heart.
When you keep thinking about sense objects, attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession that burns to anger.
