This is a book that is based on a course about an ancient Hindu text, which was taught at a Buddhist university, by a Jew who has a great love for Christ and Muhammad—so you can imagine what you’re in for!
When I say this is “about an ancient Hindu text,” I don’t want to mislead you. This isn’t really a book “about” the Bhagavad Gita. It isn’t an analysis of the Gita, or a commentary on the Gita, or anything like that. Rather, it’s a series of reflections about the major themes of the Gita—themes that touch on the various yogas, or paths for coming to union with God, that the Gita investigates. It’s an attempt to look at how those yogas might be relevant to our own lives, in this day and age.
The Buddhist part of the equation, Naropa, was an institution founded by Trungpa Rinpoche, a tulku of a Tibetan Buddhist lineage. But it was an institution concerned as much with the development of the intellect as with its Buddhist lineage, with scholarship as much as with tradition. And that presented me with a number of interesting challenges, because my course on the Gita was primarily concerned with issues of the heart—with the devotional and karmic-yogic aspects of life. Mine was not “the thinking man’s” course.
I should point out that I’m not anti-intellectual. I think the intellect is a beautiful instrument that can be used very productively, when one isn’t attached to the idea that thinking is what it’s all about. But we are coming out of a kind of sickness here in the West, a sickness in the way in which we have overthought, the way in which we have been intellectually way ahead of our hearts’ and our bodies’ wisdom. We’re just now learning how to quiet down a bit, and get it all together, which means that people who are trying to work with the intellect as their primary yoga are dealing with a very hot fire. I honor them, but it isn’t my own major path.
Besides feeling a little intellectually out of place, I had some other qualms about my plans for the course. In talking with Swami Muktananda (a very beautiful holy man from India) just before I went to Naropa to teach that summer, I expressed to him my feeling of presumptuousness at attempting to teach about the Gita. What could I possibly have to say about it? Most people in India probably know more about it than I do. In India, many ordinary people are great scholars, really, who have made extensive studies of the Gita. Often in India I’ve gotten into long, philosophical discussions about the Gita with a railway conductor, or a sweeper—people who, when they’ve finished with whatever job they do for a living each day, do their important work, which is studying spiritual books like the Gita or the Ramayana.
So I was telling Swami Muktananda that I thought I was being a little presumptuous in imagining that I had anything to teach about the Gita, and in response, he told me this story.
Krishna, at one stage of his incarnation as an avatar, was a beautiful, young boy (something you’ll need to know to understand this tale). Now there was a great student of the Gita, an old man. He was so intent on studying the Gita that he had stopped doing all of his work; he wouldn’t do anything but read the Gita all day long. Soon he and his wife were without food. His wife was very harsh with him, saying, “You have a duty to go out and bring food home for the family.” She kept pressing him, making his life very difficult, but he’d just go off into the woods and study the Gita every day.
One day, as he sat in the woods studying the Gita, the old man came across a line in the book in which Krishna said, “If you offer all of your devotion to me, you need worry about nothing in the world. It will all be taken care of.” And the man thought, “Well isn’t that a peculiar line? I mean, here I am, totally devoted to the Gita, to Krishna, but my wife and I have no food, and she’s all upset with me. It says right here that if I am devoted to the Gita, everything will be taken care of. Why isn’t everything being taken care of? Could there possibly be something wrong with the Gita?” At that point he took his pen and drew a line through that sentence, because he wasn’t sure about it.
Now at that moment, back at his house, there was a knock at the door. The wife went to the door and there stood a handsome young man, with bags of rice and of lentils and of flour—huge bags, a supply to last for many months.
The wife said, “Who are you? What is all this?”
The young man said, “This is for the family of somebody who studies the Gita.”
As the young man started to carry the bags of food into the house, the wife noticed that his shirt was open, and that there was a wound on his chest, with blood oozing out of the wound. She said to him, “What happened? Who did this to you?”
He said, “This was done to me by a man studying the Gita out in the woods.” He said no more, put down the bags of food, and left.
When the husband came back home and saw all the food, he asked his wife about it. She said, “You know, the most peculiar thing happened.” She proceeded to tell him about the young man’s visit, and she said, “When I looked at him, I saw there was blood coming out of a wound on his chest. And when I asked him how it had happened, he said it had been done by a man studying the Gita out in the woods.”
At that point, Swami Muktananda told me, the old man realized what had happened, and he fainted. Because he saw that when he had underlined the book out of his sense of doubt, he had wounded the body of Krishna. Swami Muktananda said, “You see, you have to understand:The Gita isn’t a book about Krishna—the Gita is Krishna.” And then he said to me, “You don’t have to worry about teaching the Gita—that’s none of your business.The Gita will teach itself. Krishna will do it in spite of you.” So I felt I was taken off the hook by Swami Muktananda.
One important reason why I agreed to teach at Naropa that summer was because I wanted to honor its founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and the lineage he represented. Once we here in the West began to turn our attention to consciousness and the spirit, we discovered that there were traditions that had been concerning themselves with those questions for a long, long time. Trungpa represented one of those exquisitely pure traditions or lineages.
Ram Dass and Chögyam Trungpa: Chögyam, the Tibetan founder of Naropa and a graduate of Oxford, and Ram Dass, the Harvard social scientist, would hold colloquia in the afternoons and debate the fine points of bhakti, or devotional practice, versus Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism. It was a very playful exchange, but behind the laughter both shared a deep understanding of dharma and an appreciation for one another’s spiritual paths.
We in the West seem to have become very reactive toward traditional religious forms, which I think comes from the way we’ve seen rituals and ceremonies used as ends in themselves—as a mechanical, ritualistic priestcraft, with the living spirit gone out of it. That has certainly happened in the East, and it’s happened in Western religions as well.
A lot of us now have come through a time of throwing over one tradition after another. In this culture, we’ve thrown over sexual traditions; we’ve thrown over traditional social relations concerning marriage and the family; we’ve thrown over traditions about economics and working conditions; we’ve overthrown all kinds of political traditions. In most cases, that’s come out of a healthy awakening to the deadness of the existing structures. But somehow we’ve gotten a little lost in thinking that traditions per se are bad, when maybe what’s needed is not to throw them away, but to reawaken them. I think that one of our challenges now is to become sophisticated enough not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I have gone to a lot of traditional religious ceremonies in both the East and the West.You go into a church or a temple, and often what you see is that everybody’s going through the motions: they go through the ritual as if they were checking off their shopping lists at the supermarket. They may be singing wonderful songs about resurrection and rebirth, but nothing’s happening. The ceremony and the ritual originally came out of living spirit, but that’s gotten lost in the shuffle, and what’s left is just the mechanical stuff.
But now if I come back to it with eyes that are tuned to other planes of consciousness, and if I can center and not get lost in my old reactions to the situation, suddenly there it all is: Living Spirit again. I think that we are all being prepared—all of us—to serve in that capacity of reinvesting our society with Living Spirit. And that happens through our becoming Living Spirit—because the only thing you really transmit to another person is your Being. The fancy words don’t mean a thing.
In that awakening process we’re all going through, there are various stages, levels in the evolution of consciousness, and some of those stages are characterized in the Gita, as we trace Arjuna’s awakening through the eighteen chapters of the book. First there’s despair, then there’s possibility, then there’s the beginning of awakening. Then comes the opening of the mystic vision, and the deepening of the direct experience—that’s in chapters 7 through 12. Then comes the last part, which happens when the faith is strong: there’s an opening to the deeper wisdom. That’s the way the phases of the journey are spelled out in the Gita.
We represent among us many different levels of consciousness. It’s not a matter of better or worse, we’re just at various stages of the trip. Some of us are just beginning to feel the first touch of unease, a little discomfort with the way the game’s been going. And at the other end of the scale, some of us are so drunk with the bliss of mystic visions that it’s all we can do to stay here and not go running off to a cave!
As we move through levels of consciousness, we find that our understanding about the nature of our lives changes. Just to get the flavor of the transformation, let’s listen to the statements of some of the beings who have gone the whole journey. For example, this is Jakob Böhme, the Christian mystic, speaking: “The external world, or the external life, is not a valley of suffering for those who enjoy it, but only for those who know of a higher life. The animal enjoys animal life, the intellect the intellectual realm. But he who has entered into regeneration recognizes his terrestrial existence as a burden and a prison.” 1
Kabir said: “Dancing is not for me any more. The mind no longer plays the tune. The vessel of desire is broken, the gown of desire has become frayed. Parts enough have I played; I can act no more. Friends and companions have all forsaken me. God’s name alone I now have.”2
And Thomas Merton: “The lightning flashes from east to west, illuminating the whole horizon and striking where it pleases, and at the same instant, the instant liberty of God flashes in the depths of a man’s soul, and he is illumined. At that moment he sees that, though he seems to be in the middle of his journey, he has already arrived at the end. Although he is a traveler in time, he has opened his eyes for a moment in eternity.” 3
Each of those is a statement of the possibility inherent in human consciousness. And while some of them may be spoken in ways that are difficult for us to hear just now, perhaps in the course of exploring the Gita we will start to have a new perspective on things.We may notice that our primary identification is no longer with the plane of reality that we started out with; we may notice that we are already participants in another realm or plane of consciousness, which has become more real to us than the one we left behind. (This new realm, too, will turn out to be an illusion, of course . . . but that will come in its own due time.)
As we start to reperceive the nature of our lives through a book like the Gita, it gets harder to play out some of our old social roles. I remember when that began to happen for me: It was back at Harvard in the early sixties.Tim Leary and I were doing research on psychedelics under the umbrella of the university, and Harvard was getting a little concerned, because we had just ordered half a million dollars’ worth of LSD from Switzerland. So the university set up a “watchdog committee.” It was unheard of for faculty members to watch over each other, but Harvard was getting pretty desperate. I was on that committee, actually, and we couldn’t agree on anything; finally, some of the members took things in their own hands, and arranged a public meeting to put down our work. The thrust of the meeting was that we were not being “scientific”—mainly, they said, because we were ingesting the chemicals ourselves, and how could you be a “scientist” when you were changing your perceptual viewpoint in the midst of your observations?
Now there is, in fact, a very rich tradition in psychology called “introspectionism,” which deals with inner experience, but it was held in very low repute in those days because of the takeover of psychology by the behaviorists. Behaviorism had embraced physics as its model for the study of the human mind, and so it rejected anything that could not be seen from the outside. Our interest in presenting the things that were happening inside of us as the data in our experiments flew in the face of all that behaviorist theory.
At the meeting,Timothy took the stand and said, “You’re wrong— I am a scientist.You people just don’t understand what real science is.” He argued that they were persecuting scientific inquiry because of their own preconceptions.
Now, Timothy happens to have been a darned good philosopher of science, and I think he had a very good argument, but it wasn’t quite the same as mine. The most powerful things that had ever happened to me were happening to me through our Saturday night sessions with psychedelics, and somehow that was more real to me than what I was teaching on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I was not sure, though, that I could make the point about our scientific methodology, so I took a stance very different from Timothy’s. I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re absolutely right. I am no longer a scientist. I’m turning in my badge. From now on, I should be considered a ‘datum.’ I’m the data, and you may study me, to see what happened to him who ‘did that in the sixties.’ You can be the scientists; you can have that role. I give it up. I really don’t want it anymore.”
Why didn’t I want it? Because I’d discovered it’s a drag. If I adopt that role, I’ve got to sit in intellectual judgment on everything that comes to me. I’ve got to say, “Will I accept this? What is its statistical likelihood? What is the probability of its recurrence?” I’ve got to live inside a probabilistic model, and sit with a skeptical stance of doubt.
I had realized I didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted to be at the place where, later on, when I sat in a village in India, and heard people tell me miracle stories that would set off the doubt alarms in all my Western scientific friends, I could say, “Yeah! Of course! Far out!”—and mean it! I had realized I’d rather cultivate faith than skepticism. It was a new definition of who I am.
Now, we have been talking about this whole process as a transformation, as an evolution of consciousness. But maybe it’s less a matter of evolving or changing, than of simply acknowledging who we already are. The way I see it is that there are states of consciousness that are always available to us if we have not veiled ourselves from them through our attachment to our own thoughts. All of it is always available to all of us—but whether we know that or not (or, better, the degree to which we know it) depends on who we think we are. What the Gita does, then, is to present us with a template for expanding our definitions of who we are, and therefore for appreciating our lives in a whole new context.
P. D. Ouspensky said an interesting thing—he said: “I found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize they really heard new things—that is, things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe that there might be anything new.” 4 He’s reminding us of how hard it is to open to something new without immediately labeling it in terms of our old formulas, our old attachments.
I’d like to encourage you to come to our exploration of the Gita being open to the possibility of hearing something new—that is, being open to a new perspective, to a new understanding of how we might perceive and live our lives. The Gita is Krishna, remember, and Krishna is a manifestation of our own inner being, so opening to the study of the Gita will open us, in a profound way, to our own deeper selves.
In what I’m going to be saying now, I’ll have to assume that you’re familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, at least in a general way. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so; it will only take you about three or four hours. I would suggest that you read it through that first time just as a very interesting story: Who is Krishna? Who is Arjuna? And how do they find themselves in this peculiar predicament, sitting in a chariot, out on a battlefield?
I would further suggest that you plan to read the Gita twice more. I would suggest that you read it again after we have finished our discussion in chapter 1 about the basic conflict in which Arjuna finds himself, and after you have personalized that conflict sufficiently so as to understand what his predicament is. I suggest you read it that time identifying with Arjuna; that is, once you have figured out what your own conflict is, your own spiritual struggle, then use that as the framework, and listen to Krishna telling you how it all is regarding your own battleground.
Then, when you are ready, may I suggest a third reading of the Gita, in which you read it identifying with Krishna. Because that, in fact, is also who you truly are.
Now, that last reading may raise some interesting problems for you. If you are Krishna, then you are the Gita. Maybe you’ll be reading along, and you’ll come to a line and you’ll think to yourself, “I would never say that!” But the fact is, the Gita does say that, and we’re supposed to be taking Krishna’s perspective. What to do?
This is where your spiritual exercises come in, like the ones we’ll be talking about or the ones in the syllabus. For instance, you might work with your perplexities through a practice like contemplation:You sit down in front of your puja table or in any quiet space; you take both the line as it’s written and the line as you think it ought to be, and you sit with both those thoughts.The process will show you exactly where you’re hanging on.You’ll think, “I never would have said that!” Ah!— there it is. That’s the one!Who is the “I” who would never have said that? Where is the clinging? Those are the lines that will turn out to be the richest ones for you, because they will show you where you’re holding on, where your secret stash of attachment lies.
Implicit in the suggestion that you use an exercise like contemplation to go deeper with your third reading of the Gita is a more general thought about the way you might want to approach this exploration. Since this book emerged within the context of a workshop, it includes suggestions for practices, like the contemplation exercise we just talked about. The practices offer an opportunity to expand your experience outside the covers of a book, and to engage with the material in a deeper way.The practices can profoundly enrich your appreciation of the way the Gita’s teachings work.
Here’s another example: journal keeping. Since going through this experience will, in a way, be like going on a journey of exploration, you might want to consider keeping a journal as you make your way through this book. When you travel, don’t you keep little journals of all the far-out things that happen to you? Writing about those things can be useful, in showing you transformations that might otherwise slide by or be forgotten. Something that puzzles you this week may seem crystal clear a few weeks from now, and that’s interesting to notice. Or something that happens through your reading disconfirms some cherished belief system; if you don’t write it down, you might selectively forget it, in order to keep your ego-sense consistent.That’s why journals and diaries can be very useful devices.
(Maharajji, my guru, always kept a diary. Every day he would close himself up in his room and write two pages in his diary. Now, you might wonder, “What would a guru’s diary be like? What would he write in it?” Would it be “I saw this many people today. . . . I gave them ‘the touch.’ . . . I spent the afternoon with Krishna and Rama and Christ. . . . Christ is looking much better these days”? What would he put in a diary? After Maharajji had left his body, we were finally shown the diaries. For each day, there would be the date, and the name of the place where Maharajji was staying; and then there would be two pages where the major events of the day were written: “Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram . . .”—on and on, for two pages. The name of God was all that seemed to have been relevant that day. And the next day. And the next.)
If you decide to keep a journal, please start right away; you’ll find it’s much more useful if you do it continuously, right from the outset. You can use it to record your reflections about lines in the Gita, or examples of the ways you personalize the teachings of the Gita through your own experience.You can add quotes or pictures. Some of the journals I’ve seen over the years are incredibly beautiful, filled with artwork, with wonderful poetry, with all the stuff of our ruminating minds.
So keeping a journal is one more way you might consider deepening your participation in this journey. There will be more suggestions as we go along, so you can jump into the whole process at whatever level of involvement feels right for you.You can simply read this book, and maybe find in it some thoughtful perspectives about the Gita and about Hinduism. Or you can personalize it, you can use it in a different way: you can dive into it as a spiritual exercise, with journals and puja tables and contemplation practices and all the meshuga stuff. Those are all like the side trips on a tour, and you can take as many or as few of the excursions as you’d like. It’s up to you to decide what feels right for you at this moment.
As we read the Gita, we’ll notice that it is designed in a very interesting way. Everything that really needs to be said is pretty much said in the first two chapters. After that, it’s said over and over again, but with more and more exquisiteness and with more and more detail. The whole book becomes like a spiral, and we find that we see the themes of the Gita from many different vantage points as it unfolds, and as our engagement with it deepens.
This book will unfold in the same way, with ideas appearing again and again in new contexts, and with methods and practices that complement and build on one another. That whole process will keep presenting us with new perspectives and new possibilities as we go along, and each one will be an invitation to go a little deeper, something coaxing us to awaken a little more.
And if this book really works, it will turn out that who you are at the end of it won’t be quite the same you as the one who’s reading these words right now.