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Before we approach the Bhagavad Gita, we need to have a contextual framework for the way it fits into the Mahabharata, of which it’s a part.The Mahabharata is one of the two great Indian epics (the Ramayana being the other). The Mahabharata is a huge book—a typical edition runs to nearly six thousand pages. It is said to be the longest literary work in the world; it is seven times the length of The Iliad and The Odyssey combined, and the only unabridged English edition runs to twelve volumes. It’s thought to have been written somewhere between 500 and 200 B.C., and it covers a distant period of Indian history: tradition places the battle of Kurukshetra in 3102 B.C., although historians say it was probably more like 1400 B.C. when the events that inspired the Mahabharata took place.
At one level, the Mahabharata is an historical study of a kingdom; but at another level, it is an extraordinary symbological study of all human interactions, of all human emotions and motivations. It’s like an incredible psychology book cast in the form of a drama, and it’s written from a very conscious point of view, which means that although it can be read just for its romantic, melodramatic story line, it can also be read to uncover its deeper symbolism. And right in the middle of the Mahabharata, on the eve of the climactic battle between the kingdom’s two warring families, comes the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that’s called the Bhagavad Gita, or “the Song of God.”
The story of the Mahabharata concerns the kingdom of Bharat, in northern India. The king of Bharat had two sons, Dhritarashtra and Pandu. Dhritarashtra was the elder brother, and ordinarily would have been next in line to inherit the throne after their father died; but he had been born blind, and the traditions of the time didn’t allow for a blind king, so Pandu became the king instead, and ruled the kingdom.
Now, what it is that Dhritarashtra’s blindness represents in the story is something that has been expounded upon with great relish by countless Hindu pundits over the centuries. Some say his blindness represents his attachment to his son, Duryodhana, which makes him blind to the dharma, blind to truth or to higher wisdom. Some say the blindness represents the nature of the human condition, which is blind because it lacks the higher intellect.The symbolism is very rich.
Pandu, the younger brother, the king, had two wives—Kunti and Madri—and he had five children by them. Of these five children (and these turn out to be the good guys, by the way—the Pandavas), Yuddhisthira was the eldest.Yuddhisthira was virtually the embodiment of dharma, although he did have one minor failing, which was that he gambled—he liked to play dice—and that, we will see, is what ultimately leads us to the predicament we find ourselves in at Kurukshetra. Bhima, Pandu’s second son, was very strong and rather reckless. Arjuna, the third, was pure, noble, chivalrous, and heroic; he turns out to be our hero in the Gita. And there were two younger sons, twins by Madri.
Dhritarashtra—the elder, blind brother—had a hundred children, all by one wife. (I know—a hundred children—but we’re just going to have to allow for these strange things in the Mahabharata.We make room for them in the Old Testament, with 120-year-old men having scores of children. So let’s just assume that things are different in different times.) Dhritarashtra’s wife, Gandhari, was incredibly devoted to him. She was so devoted that since he couldn’t see, she kept her own eyes bandaged throughout her entire married life, because she said that it would be unseemly for her to see when her husband was blind. That’s devoted!
Well, a few years into his reign, Pandu accidentally killed a Brahmin. Killing a Brahmin, even by accident, is a very bad thing to do, so
Ram Dass Blowing the Conch Shell: The conch shell is significant in Hindu symbology; the spiral form reflects the upward journey of the soul, and since the shell is one of the articles carried by Vishnu, the preserver of creation, its sound is considered auspicious. The conch shell is blown at the start of rituals such as arti to summon the deities and to awaken the power of Truth, which the shell represents.
to atone for it, Pandu retired to the forest to do tapasya (penances), leaving the kingdom in the care of Dhritarashtra. After some years, while he was still away in the forest, Pandu died as the result of a curse, and Dhritarashtra just went on ruling Bharat.
As the children grew up, Duryodhana, Dhritarashtra’s eldest son, grew more and more jealous of Yuddhisthira, the eldest son of Pandu. You can see that the laws of succession would be a little hazy in this situation, but it looked as though Yuddhisthira, as the eldest Pandu son, was going to be the one to inherit the kingdom whenever Dhritarashtra died—and Duryodhana wanted it for himself. He pulled every dirty trick in the books to try to get it; the Mahabharata devotes hundreds of pages to descriptions of all the ways Duryodhana went about scheming to get rid of the Pandavas, so he could take over the kingdom. Finally, Duryodhana held a huge celebration, and invited all the Pandavas to attend. He had a magnificent palace built to house them, but he had it made of some very flammable material, and during the night, when he expected all the Pandavas to be asleep inside, he set the building afire. Luckily, the Pandavas had been forewarned by a loyal servant, and so they—the five boys and their mother—had escaped through an underground passage and gone off into the jungle, into hiding.
Now, just to give you a little more of the flavor of this story:While they were in hiding, living in a cave in the jungle, the Pandava boys heard that there was to be a swayamvara, a husband-selecting ceremony, for Draupadi, the beautiful daughter of a very high king, to find a suitable mate for her. All the princes would be there, of course, because they all wanted to marry this rich, beautiful lady.
At the gathering, a number of tasks were set for the would-be suitors: stringing a magical bow, shooting a target by looking at its reflection in a pool of water, feats like that. All the princes tried, and all the princes failed. Then this poor young Brahmin priest came along, and he easily accomplished all the tasks, one after the other. That was Arjuna in drag, of course. So Arjuna won Draupadi’s hand, and he and his brothers took her and headed back to their cave in the jungle.
As they approached the cave where they were living, the boys yelled out to Kunti, their mother, Come out, Ma! See what we have brought today!
Kunti was in the cave and couldn’t see her sons, but she called out, Whatever it be, share it equally among all of you. That’s a good thing for a mother to say to her five children—usually! But this time it meant that all five brothers ended up being the husbands of Draupadi—she had five husbands by the mother’s “boon.”
Well, after some years in hiding, the Pandavas made their way back to the kingdom of Bharat, and Dhritarashtra (who wasn’t a bad guy, really—it was his son who was out of control) insisted that Duryodhana give them a piece of land to rule. Duryodhana, as you’d expect, picked out the worst piece of land in the kingdom to give to the Pandavas; it had nothing going for it. But in spite of that,Yuddhisthira and his brothers made a go of it, and created a very good kingdom, prosperous and well ruled. That just made Duryodhana more jealous than ever, of course; he grew insanely jealous, and all he could think about was plotting against the Pandavas.
Duryodhana remembered that Yuddhishthira, the oldest Pandava brother, really liked playing dice, so he challenged Yuddhisthira to a dice game, and got a crooked dice player to play opposite him. The two of them played out their dice game, and in the course of it Yuddhishthira lost everything: He lost his kingdom, he forfeited his brothers into servitude, he sold Draupadi down the river—everything he had, went.
Duryodhana was ecstatic! He was so haughty about what he’d done that he had Draupadi brought in, planning to strip her naked in front of the court, to shame her. But when he went to pull off her sari, he found that no matter how many saris he pulled away, there was always one more underneath. He had piles of saris everywhere, but Draupadi was still clothed, because she was protected by the purity of the dharma. (And, of course, Krishna, whom the Pandavas had met while they were off in hiding, was helping secretly, on the side.)
When Dhritarashtra heard about the episode with Draupadi, he was so embarrassed by his son’s behavior that he offered Draupadi three boons. She said,Well, for the first one, let my husbands go free, and for the second, give them back their weapons. And that’s enough—I won’t even need the third boon. They’ll be able to take care of things from there.”
Well, Dhritarashtra kept his promise and freed the Pandavas; but as soon as the brothers were free, Duryodhana sucked Yuddhisthira into another dice game. (Yuddhisthira just never seems to learn, does he?) In this dice game, the losers (who, of course, turned out to be Yuddhisthira and his four brothers) had to go off and live in the jungle for twelve years. And then, in the thirteenth year, it got even worse: They had to hide out for that whole year, because if they were found by Duryodhana during the thirteenth year, they’d have to do still another twelve years in the jungle. But if they made it through all that, Duryodhana promised that at the end of their exile they’d get their kingdom back.
So back they went to the jungle. They did their twelve years, and in the thirteenth year, in order to hide out, they became servants to a king in a neighboring kingdom. Duryodhana tried everything to find them, but he couldn’t. At the end of the thirteenth year, they came back to Bharat and presented themselves before Duryodhana and said, “OK, we did it. Now we want our kingdom.”
Duryodhana said, “ Tough. I’m keeping it.” He said, “I wouldn’t even give you enough land to carry on the tip of a needle.”
Now that is the background to the situation in which we find ourselves at the time when the events in the Bhagavad Gita are about to take place. That is, Duryodhana has finally pushed the Pandavas too far, and they have no choice now but to fight. Injustice has taken over their kingdom. Arjuna and his brothers have been cheated and lied to; truth has been trampled on. The dharma has to reassert itself—the good guys have to make a statement. War is their only recourse.
At this point in the story, an interesting event takes place: Arjuna and Duryodhana both go to Krishna, who happens to be God in an avataric form, and they both ask him for his help. In a kind of Solomon-like decision, Krishna says to them, “OK, here are your options: One of you can have all of my weapons and all of my armies . . . and the other one can have me, but without any armies or weapons.” Arjuna immediately says, “Well, I want you—forget about the armies.” His mind was turned toward God, and so he said, “All I want is God on my side.”
Well, Duryodhana was very pleased with that! He, being the worldly, adharmic fellow, said, “That’s perfect! I’m very happy. I get all the arms and all the might.” So now the bad guys have this huge army, while the good guys have a much smaller force. And Krishna, although he’s God, is only the charioteer for Arjuna—he’s not even carrying a bow.
At this point, let me introduce you to a little more of Krishna’s story, so we can see how he came to this moment on the battlefield. Krishna was the child of Vasudev and Devaki, and Devaki had a very mean brother named Kamsa. Kamsa was so mean that he put his own father in jail, just in order to take over the kingdom.
But mean though he was, Kamsa had a soft spot in his heart for his sister Devaki. So when she married Vasudev, Kamsa threw a big celebration for her, with a great feast, and afterward announced that he would drive the chariot himself to take the couple to their new home. While they were on their way there, however, a great voice suddenly spoke from the sky and said to Kamsa, “Beware! The eighth child of this couple will kill you.”
Well, that, of course, freaked the brother completely! He was about to kill Devaki and Vasudev right on the spot, but they begged for their lives, and he finally relented. He said, OK, I won’t kill you. But you’ll have to agree to live in jail for the rest of your lives, and to give me all your children as soon as they’re born.
What could they do? They agreed.
So Devaki and Vasudev were imprisoned, and their first seven children were taken away the minute they were born. The first six were killed by Kamsa; the seventh has a complicated story of his own, which we won’t go into here.
When the time came for the eighth birth, Kamsa was especially wary. He put extra guards on duty at the prison, and he locked Vasudev and Devaki in chains. But as the time of the birth approached, the guards began to feel very sleepy, and they all dozed off. And then the baby was born. As he came out of the womb, the baby (who, of course, was Krishna) said, “Take me to Gokul, to Nanda’s house, and there you will find a girl-child. Substitute me for that baby girl.”
Vasudev said, “How can I take you to Gokul? The doors are locked, and I’m in chains.” At that point, Vasudev’s chains dropped away and the prison door flew open. Well, Vasudev felt that was a pretty clear message, so he took baby Krishna to Gokul and brought the baby girl back in his place. The guards woke up and saw the baby, and went to tell Kamsa.The wicked brother came to the cell, and thinking that the little girl was his sister’s child, he grabbed the baby by her feet, planning to throw her to the floor. But as he touched her feet, she flew out of his hands and up into the sky. As she was going, she called back, “I would have killed you, but you touched my feet; and even though you did that intending to kill me, I will treat it as though you were honoring me and let you go this time.” Then she disappeared up into heaven.
That left baby Govinda (which is what Krishna was called as a child) over at the other house in Gokul, where he was raised by a simple village woman—Yasoda, the wife of Nanda. As Govinda was growing up, all sorts of miracles kept happening around him, but everybody just treated them as if they were hallucinations. I mean, how could anybody believe that they had the avatar of the ages living right there, in their village!
For instance, at one point somebody came to Krishna’s mother and said, “Yasoda, your little boy, Govinda, has been eating mud!”
Yasoda said, “That’s terrible! Come here, Govinda—open your mouth and let me see.” Govinda opened his mouth, and Yasoda looked in . . . and there inside his mouth she saw the entire universe: all the galaxies, and all the stars, and all the planets—even a little Earth, with her and Govinda on it.Yasoda freaked completely! And then, the Puranas say, “Govinda, out of the compassion of his heart, veiled her eyes again with mother love.” Isn’t that a beautiful image? So once again she saw only her child standing there, and she dismissed what she had seen. She said, “Why—I thought I saw . . . tsk, tsk! I’d better lie down, I think I’m feeling faint. ” You know how that goes.
When Govinda was still a tiny baby in the cradle, a demon was sent to kill him, and Govinda kicked the demon so hard that he went spinning into the air and was killed.The people of the village said, “Wasn’t it lucky the way that hurricane came and carried the demon away, so the baby wasn’t hurt?” When Krishna killed a huge poisonous snake that was living in the river, everyone said, “It’s a good thing that snake drowned before it could bite Krishna.” Nobody could accept what was really going on, so they found other explanations for what they were experiencing. (Sound familiar?)
But even though everybody in Gokul dismissed the miracles, they couldn’t help being thoroughly charmed by Krishna. He was a cowherd as a boy, and he was very mischievous, very much the rascal, stealing butter, and teasing the village women. But he was hardly ever punished because he was so incredibly captivating. And, of course, he played a very good flute!
We have to understand that this is an aspect of God we’re talking about here, in the same way that Jehovah is. Krishna is an expression of a certain quality of God. But whereas Jehovah is the righteous face of God, Krishna is the loving, playful, rascally aspect. It felt so good to be around him that wherever Krishna went, everyone wanted to hang out with him. The other cowherd boys loved him as a playmate, and all the Gopis—the milkmaids—were absolutely drunk with love for him, and followed him everywhere he went.
Krishna is perhaps the most joyful avatar we have. He was always laughing, playful, active, enthusiastic. He was like warm, radiant life itself, which is an incredible image to have of God.
Well, after a time, word of the miracles made its way to Kamsa, and he realized who this Krishna must be. So he came up with a plot. He planned a big festival, and he invited Krishna to attend. And at the festival there was a huge wrestler, who challenged little Krishna—little twelve-year-old Krishna—to a wrestling match. Krishna, of course, accepted the challenge, and killed the wrestler with no difficulty. Then he leaped up into the stands. He grabbed hold of his uncle and said, “Your time has come, too!” and he threw him down to the ground and killed him. He released Kamsa’s father from prison, and made him king again.
But at that point Krishna had shown his hand. I mean, you just couldn’t think of him any longer as “that little boy from down the street who causes all the mischief.” So he didn’t go back to Gokul after that—in fact, his whole manifestation changed at that point. He went off and built a city called Dwarka, and lived there; and from then on his role was that of a sort of kingmaker, a guide and helper to the leaders of the society. He advised on diplomacy and statecraft, but he lived as a perfect yogi, giving away everything he had, always helping everyone. And in the course of that, he befriended the Pandavas.
Now, that brings us to the point in the story where we find Krishna talking to Arjuna out on the battlefield. But just to finish Krishna’s story: After this battle at Kurukshetra, when practically everybody on both sides has been killed and all one hundred of the Kurava sons have been wiped out, Gandhari, the mother of the hundred sons, is walking through the battlefield lamenting, and she meets Krishna. She says to him, “You stood by when all this was happening.You let this slaughter take place. Now there will be killing within your own family, and thirty-six years from now you yourself will be slain in the midst of warfare.”
Krishna’s response to that is interesting: He bows to her and says, “Thank you, Mother, for helping me to find the way out.” In other words, Krishna sees that Gandhari’s curse will give him the means for getting finished with his incarnation, and he takes that to be a blessing. (The Gita keeps forcing us to jump levels that way: “Oh, that’s terrible!” “No, that’s wonderful!” We’ll see the way the book constantly flips levels on us like that, reminding us that all is not as it first seems.) Eventually, Gandhari’s curse came true: As Krishna lay down to rest during a time of battle, he was killed by a hunter, who mistook him for a deer. But at the other level, that was just the ruse Krishna needed in order to drop his body; and so, as he died, Krishna thanked the hunter and blessed him, and the hunter immediately went to heaven.
So now we come back to the other main character in our cast: Arjuna. We’ve already seen quite a bit about him through his exploits with his brothers. Arjuna is a kshatria (a member of the warrior caste). He’s a prince, and a pure, good son. He does his duty perfectly. He’s very moral, very intelligent, but he’s basically very practical and pragmatic. He’s not a philosopher; he’s definitely a man of action—and that makes Arjuna an appropriate mirror for our own society, because ours is that kind of active, rajasic culture.
In the situation of the battlefield, Arjuna and Duryodhana are a study in contrasts. Duryodhana is totally inflated with his own ego; all he does is to get more and more haughty—the rougher things get, the haughtier he grows. He ends up ordering the elders around, even commanding his guru what to look at, showing no respect for anyone. Arjuna, on the other hand, facing the very same crisis, takes an entirely different tack: He turns to God. And because Arjuna is very principled and because his karma is good, he’s ready to go the next step: He’s fit to receive higher knowledge.
Since it’s our ability to empathize with Arjuna’s predicament as it’s laid out in the first chapter of the Gita that will decide how much significance the rest of the Gita has for us, it’s worth taking the time to make sure we’re clear about the various levels of meaning that the conflict represents. To begin with, here is the way the Gita lays out the scene.
Krishna said, “See, Arjuna, the armies of the Kurus, gathered here on this field of battle.” Then Arjuna saw, in both armies, fathers, grandfathers, sons, grandsons, fathers of wives, uncles, masters, brothers, companions, and friends. When Arjuna thus saw his kinsmen face to face in both lines of battle, he was overcome by grief and despair, and he spoke with a sinking heart: “When I see all my kinsmen, Krishna, who have come here on this field of battle, life goes from my limbs and they sink, and my mouth is sere and dry, a trembling overcomes my body, and my hair shudders in horror. I see forebodings of evil, Krishna.”
At the first level, the predicament that that reflects is a social one: Arjuna has looked at the enemy, and he’s seen that it’s us. He has seen the human face of the enemy, seen that the people he’s about to fight aren’t some abstract evil, which he’d be happy to destroy; they’re his friends and family. Here is somebody who is about to go to battle— to go to Vietnam, say, and fight the “holy war” for the United States. But then he takes a good look at the guys he’s supposed to fight against, and when he looks at them he suddenly sees that they’re not them, but us. All of a sudden, the whole identification with national interests is in conflict with a different identification—an identification with a moral sense of the brotherhood of man. That was really the whole issue we confronted with the Vietnam War: moral law versus social duty. At what point do people become “us” instead of “them”?
Who is “them”? I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth repeating because it spells out the issue so beautifully. It concerns a discussion I once had with my father (this was back in the early 1970s), about a set of records I’d issued called Love, Serve, Remember.
My father said to me, “I saw those records you put out. They look great. But I can’t understand: Why are you selling them so cheaply? You’re selling six records for four and a half dollars? You could probably get fifteen dollars for those records—well, nine, anyway!”
I said, “Yeah, Dad, I know, but it only costs us four and a half dollars to produce them.”
He asked, “How many have you sold?”
I said, “About ten thousand.”
He said, “Would those same people have paid nine dollars for them?”
I said, “Yeah, probably they would have paid nine.”
“You could have charged nine,” he said, “and you only charged fourfifty? What are you, against capitalism or something?”
I tried to think how I could explain it to him. My father was a lawyer, so I said, “Dad, didn’t you just try a case for Uncle Henry?”
He said, “Yeah.”
I asked, “Was it a tough case?”
“Oh, you bet. Very tough,” he said
“Did you win it?”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I’ll tell you, I had to spend a lot of time on that damn case. I was at the law library every night, I had to talk to the judge—a very difficult case.”
I said, “Boy, I’ll bet you charged him an arm and a leg for that one!” (My father used to charge pretty hefty fees.)
My father looked at me as if I’d gone crazy. He said, “What!—are you out of your mind?! Of course I didn’t charge him—Uncle Henry is family.”
I said, “Well, Dad, that’s my predicament. If you show me anybody who isn’t Uncle Henry, I’ll happily rip him off.”
Once it’s all “us,” it immediately changes the way we deal with other people. How can it not? And in Arjuna’s case, it really is all family. The people he’s supposed to face in battle are all relatives and teachers and friends. Arjuna might be a kshatria, but he doesn’t want to go around killing the people he knows and loves.
There’s also another side to Arjuna’s reluctance about fighting against members of the family. Apart from his feelings of kinship and love for everybody on both sides of the battle, he also sees a social context to the situation: He sees the conflict as a potential breakdown of family loyalties. He’s attached to his family not only by bonds of affection, but by binding social ties. In order to fulfill his dharma, he’s being asked to set aside not only family love but family loyalty, and that flies in the face of some very powerful values in Arjuna’s culture, things that were a deep part of who he saw himself to be. He’s being asked to turn his back on all that, and to act out of a completely different set of motives. In other words, he’s being asked to throw out the rule books and rely on what Krishna tells him to do.
The only thing that makes possible that level of transformation in our behavior is a deep inner change—a change so profound that it makes us willing to go up against things we would never have dreamed of questioning or opposing. It requires a change that shifts the very source from which our actions are determined.
After I took psilocybin for the first time, at Tim Leary’s house one wintry night, I walked the few blocks to my parents’ home, where I was spending the night. It was four o’clock in the morning.There had been a tremendous blizzard, and I decided to shovel the snow from my parents’ walk. I felt healthy and alive, and there was all this snow, so . . . I’d shovel the walk. I started shoveling away—and suddenly my parents’ faces appeared at the upstairs window. They flung open the window and they said, “Come in here, you silly idiot! Nobody shovels snow in the middle of the night!”
Now right there was the voice of authority, saying, “This is the rule. You do it this way.” I had always listened to that voice. Up until then, I had been a really good boy all my life. That’s how I got to be a professor at Harvard, after all—by always listening to what “they” said about things like when you should shovel the snow. But now, inside my heart, I felt this way: “You know what? It’s OK to shovel snow anytime. Isn’t that far out?” Buoyed up by the drug, yanked out of my cultural / social / adaptive / other-directed / Reissman-ized ways, I was connected to an inner place that was saying, “Right on, baby. Shovel snow!” So I looked at my parents, and I smiled and I waved, and I went back to shoveling the snow. And that was the beginning of the melodrama of my life for the next few years, as I watched myself slowly moving further and further away from the culture’s rites and rituals.
I think some experience like that is familiar to many of us. We found ourselves growing up within a set of traditions and cultural expectations: how you cut your hair, where you go to school, what kind of education you get, what you do with it, whom you marry, how you live after you’re married, when you have children, when you don’t, how much you save, how much you pay for your car, what kind of television set you have . . . on and on. Many of us found ourselves in conflict with some of those values, and we know how painful it was, and the inner wrenching we felt. That’s the experience Arjuna is facing at Kurukshetra, and it’s significant for us when we uncover the parallel experiences in ourselves so we can empathize with him. He is hearing Christ’s statement, “He who loves mother or brother more than me cannot follow me.”
That’s the first level of Arjuna’s predicament.
But that’s only the first level; that’s just the beginning of it.The issue in the Gita isn’t just a conflict between moral law and social duty, or the shedding of family ties, or a confrontation with cultural values. The game in the Gita is much bigger than that. At a deeper level, it’s really about all of that versus higher consciousness. In other words, it’s about the game of awakening, about the game of coming into Spirit. Shedding social roles is just the beginning; the changes Arjuna is going to confront will go much deeper than that.
You see, in a way all of Arjuna’s arguments against fighting at Kurukshetra have been focused around what we might call “enlightened self-interest.” He’s a member of a caste, so he says, “I don’t want to screw up the castes.” He’s a member of a family, so he says, “I want to protect the family.” In other words, Arjuna’s arguments are based on his social roles, which means they are based on his models of himself from the outside looking in. That’s the objective model, which is the model of the thinking mind. And what will be demanded of Arjuna is that he let go not only of some particular models of himself, but of his very reliance on the thinking mind out of which the models have come.
The way a culture socializes its children (and we are all products of the process) is by teaching them to rely primarily on judgments from outside themselves.To socialize a child, you need to instill in him only three basic principles: to accept his information from the outside; to look outside for his rewards; and to ignore his inner voice if it conflicts with what comes from outside authority. That’s the way you train a child to be a member of a society—so that when Mother says, “Do this,” you do it, even if in your heart it doesn’t feel right. If you get good enough at doing that, you become a “success” in the society; if you don’t, you’re an outcast.
When we say, “Trust your intuition,” when we start to encourage that, we’re reversing the process. As we awaken, we begin to act from the inside out rather than from the outside in—and that’s the transformation we’re really looking for. It leads to behavior that is based not on enlightened self-interest, but on the workings of an awakened heart.
Awakening is like moving from one plane to another in the flow of consciousness, and at times it may seem that we’re being forced to go against the current of the old plane in order to come into some deeper harmony with the new one. Arjuna finds himself in that kind of situation. He’s still attached to all his old values, his old definitions of himself. They are in conflict with the new understanding that is beginning to unfold for him, but they’re deeply ingrained, and he isn’t free just to drop them at will.
That’s the problem we all have with our egos. When we look closely at them, we see that our egos are just a gestalt, a constellation of thought-forms defining our universe—thoughts that tell us who we are, and who everybody else is, and how it all works. But those patterns of thought go very, very deep, and we can’t just will them away. In order to move into the next level of perception of the universe, we have to extricate ourselves from that entire web of thought-forms. We have to slip out of it. The predicament is that the web of thought was designed precisely to keep us in it; it’s not going to let us go so easily. And that’s where the work of the spiritual journey comes in. We look for practices that will give us a foothold outside our thought-forms, or that will jolt us outside of our thinking minds, and set us free.
Meditation, for example, is a good practice for extricating ourselves from our thoughts. It lets us see clearly the way in which we keep re-creating the very network of thought-forms that’s trapping us. Say, for example, that you’re sitting in meditation:You’re focusing on your breath and quieting your mind . . . quieting your mind . . . quieting your mind. And then suddenly something “happens” inside of you: You feel a sense of peace, or you notice some movement of energy. You think, “Wow! It’s happening to me!” and you get a rush. That’s the ego that’s just rushed in. The ego was being pushed out by the meditation practice, by the “breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out.” There’s no room for much psychological stuff or much self-concept, when you’re just “breathing in, breathing out.” (Note that it’s not even “I’m good at ‘breathing in, breathing out’ ”— it’s just “breathing in, breathing out.”) But believe me, the ego is very tenacious, and right up to the very end, it’ll be lurking there, waiting to jump back in.
My own primary spiritual practice is Gurukripa—the grace of the guru—and it works in its own way to break the limitations of thought-forms, to free me of them the way Arjuna had to be freed of his ideas about who he was. Maharajji was constantly doing things that would foil my rational mind and cut through the models I had of myself. Here’s the kind of thing I’m talking about: At one point, he cast me in something like Arjuna’s role—he made me “commander in chief.” He said to me, “Ram Dass!You are the commander in chief. Take all these Westerners back to the place where they’re living, and don’t let them come here again until six o’clock.” Well, now—I had clear instructions from my guru, right? Simple enough. I took everybody back to the hotel, and I said, “Don’t go until six.” I just did my duty.
But some of the people went at four, thinking, “Who the hell is Ram Dass, to tell us what to do?” When they got to the ashram, Maharajji fed them, loved them, sat with them, laughed with them. At six, I arrived, leading the rest of the troops. Maharajji went into his room, closed the door, and wouldn’t see anybody.
The next morning, Maharajji called me up to his tucket and he said, “Ram Dass, you’re the commander in chief, remember? Yesterday you let people come at four. Today, don’t let anybody come until six!”
So I took everybody back, and I said, “Now look, don’t go until six!” Well, the same people who’d gone at four the previous day figured they’d go at four again, and some more figured they’d go, too . . . so now at least half the people went at four o’clock. Maharajji fed them, loved them, talked to them. I came at six, leading the diminished ranks. Maharajji shut himself in his room and wouldn’t see anybody. He kept doing that to me, foiling me and frustrating me, and finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I said to his eldest Indian devotee, “Maharajji just isn’t being fair!”
The devotee said, “Well, I think you’d better tell him that yourself.”
I said, “I will!” You can hear that place in me, can’t you—in me, and probably in yourself, you know? You’ve been pushed to your limit: “I just can’t take any more of this.”
So I went to Maharajji’s room. He was sitting on his bed, with his blanket wrapped around him. He looked up at me and said, “Kya?”— that’s like, “What is it? What’s the trouble?”
I said to him, “Maharajji, you know my heart. You know what the trouble is.”
He kept pressing me, saying, “What is it? What is it?”, making me spell it out.
Finally I said, “Well, Maharajji, you’re just not being fair.” And I gave him my list of grievances.
I finished—and then, as I would do in a reasonable discourse with reasonable people, I sat back and waited for an explanation. Maharajji looked at me for a moment. Then he leaned forward, pulled on my beard, and said, “Ram Dass is angry!” And he burst out laughing— cackling away. Then, when he’d finished laughing, he sat back and he looked at me, as if to say, “OK, it’s your move. You just had my explanation.”
Now I was faced with a predicament: Either I had to give up my models, my ideas about “fairness,” or I had to give up my guru. He’d put it right to me:Which way you gonna go, baby? Was I going to walk out and say, “Well, if you’re not going to play my way, I’ll find a guru who will. I’ll find a guru who suits my model of how God is supposed to be.” Because I was only asking for reasonable things—you understand that. I wasn’t being unreasonable—he was being unreasonable. And he didn’t even care!
So I thought about it for a moment. I saw what the issues were. And I stayed.
Like Arjuna, what I was facing in that moment was the disconfirming of a certain image of myself. In that situation with Maharajji, I had to give up the model I had of myself as “somebody who is pursuing a reasonable course of action.” And when I did that, a part of my ego shattered. Arjuna is going to have to give up seeing himself as “somebody who doesn’t go to war against family.” He’s going to have to give up the entire system on which he’s been basing his actions; he’s going to have to give up his models about protecting family and caste; he’s going to have to change the entire way he defines himself. And doing that will crack open his ego and take him to the next stage.
When we start to examine the self-definitions that make up the structure of our egos, we see that there seem to be different intensities to them, and that some of the models feel much more deeply “us” than others do. So when it comes to letting go of them, some will be harder to work with than others. Maybe you’d find it easy to give up things like wealth and fame, for example.You might even find it possible to give up familial and social approval—the things that are confronting Arjuna.
But what if we take it a step further: How about giving up pleasure? Are you ready for that? Pleasure? I mean, isn’t that what the whole game’s been about—to get the maximum pleasure for yourself as a separate entity? But then you find that there are changes going on inside of you, changes that are leading you to identify yourself with something that sees pleasure as . . . just one more experience. That can be a scary moment.
The process of awakening brings you into a struggle with every habitual way you have of thinking about the universe, even the deepest ones, because every one of them has you locked into being some facet of who you think you are. “I’m somebody who’s really getting on toward enlightenment, aren’t I?” says the ego. Right up until the very last whisper, the ego is always lurking there, ready to play its next card.You’ve got to expect that the battle will never be over until the last vestige of self is gone.
What often happens when we face this stripping away of our models is that we will give up this and that, and instead grab onto that and this. It’s too uncomfortable not to have anything to cling to, and so we substitute a new set of attachments for the old ones. We give up family, we give up social forms—and we start clinging instead to spiritual leaders and spiritual forms. Uh-uh. It’s all gotta go. Big clearance, everything must go.
That doesn’t mean we have to give up everything at once; we can give things up as we come to not need them quite so badly anymore. And it doesn’t mean we can’t use spiritual forms; we just have to remember as we’re using them that sooner or later they’re going to have to go, too.
Knowing all that makes us feel very vulnerable: There’s no authority we can turn to, nobody to tell us what to do. We can only keep turning to our hearts, listening for what feels like the right next move. We have nothing to hold on to.
It requires mental discipline to be in that place without flickering, and that’s a kind of discipline Arjuna isn’t used to. He’s been used to the security of always knowing what’s right, of having a fixed set of social rules to live by, rules that tell him how to behave and what to believe. He could always say, “I know what I ought to do, because I’ve got it written down right here.” Now he’s faced with the kind of discipline which Trungpa Rinpoche talked about in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism: the discipline of not being attached to any patterns whatsoever, the discipline of standing nowhere. That’s a very scary discipline. It’s terrifying to stand on the edge that way, to have no definitions you can cling to: no reference groups, no identifications, no self-concepts, no models. Will you dare do it? Will you dare to throw everything over?
It’s only at the point where the conflict has become that real for you—where there is incredible confusion, and you don’t know where to stand in order to judge what to do next—it’s only at that point that you are open to the possibility of something new happening. It’s only at that point that you are ready to hear something you never heard before.
That’s why the message of the Gita has to begin with this crisis situation. Arjuna has to be shaken to his very roots before he can hear what Krishna has to say to him. Krishna and Arjuna have been hanging out together for a long time, remember—they’ve been good friends for years. But Arjuna wasn’t ready before to hear what Krishna had to tell him. Not until they found themselves in the middle of a battlefield, not until that moment of crisis awakened Arjuna, was he ready to hear something new. And that something new will take Arjuna on a journey from giving up his attachment to things like family and caste to letting go of his attachment even to form itself.
Because that is the deepest level of the Gita’s teaching. The final thing Arjuna faces is Shiva. He faces God in the form of chaos, God in the form of destruction—the destruction of all our illusions. Arjuna is facing the pain of having to ask, “If there is a God, if there is law, if there is any meaning to all of this, how can I be asked to make war on my own family? How can I be asked to do this horrible thing?” Arjuna is facing a terrifying fact:You cannot use reason to understand God’s law.
In the Ramayana, Ram says over and over again, “Unless you honor Shiva, you cannot come to me.” That is, until you have fully embraced the existence of chaos—chaos!—you cannot go through the door. If you want to be a preserver of love and beauty, you’ve got to be able to look at the destruction of love and beauty with wide-open eyes and say, “Yeah, right. And that, too.” In nature there is creation, preservation, and destruction. Suffering and pain and catastrophe and death— all of those are as much a part of God’s plan as delight and joy and renewal and birth.
At Kurukshetra, Arjuna comes face to face with Shiva. He’s confronting a situation in which his rational mind can’t help him, a situation in which his reasoning won’t work, a situation in which surrender is the only way through. His image of himself as a good guy, his attachment to rational thought, his attachment to form itself—he has to say good-bye to all of them. He has to let go of every one of those attachments. The very basis of who he thinks he is will have to be torn apart in order to make room for something new.
So now the scene is set. We know who the armies are—the Kauravas and the Pandavas—and we also know what it is they represent for us. We’ve figured out what they’re doing out there on the battlefield.We’ve understood Arjuna’s predicament. And even more important, we have come to recognize that the choices facing Arjuna are the same choices facing us: How ripe are we to let go? How free of our egos are we ready to be? How willing are we to surrender to the mystery of God’s plan? Those are the questions confronting Arjuna.That’s the battle we face. That’s what will be decided at Kurukshetra.