2
In the previous chapter, we examined the conflict that Arjuna is facing at Kurukshetra, looking at it in a way that brought it home for us and made it very immediate. We looked at the places in our own lives where, like Arjuna, we aren’t quite ready to let go, the places where the roots of attachment still go a little too deep.We saw our dilemma as reflected in that quote from the Gospel of Matthew: “If anyone wishes to come after me,” said Christ, “let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow me. For he who would save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”
“He who would save his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” That’s a strong statement, but it isn’t too melodramatic for the place in which Arjuna finds himself. Krishna is telling him to give up his relationships, to give up his values, in effect, to give up his life—that is, to turn his back on the entire life he has known so far. Arjuna is a warrior. Probably he’s been prepared to give up his life on the battlefield. But nothing has quite prepared him for this kind of sacrifice. The Gita tells us, “When Arjuna, the great warrior, had thus unburdened his heart, he said, ‘I will not fight, Krishna.’ ” Then he threw down his bow, and fell silent.
In other words, Arjuna still wasn’t ready to surrender to his dharma; he was still too caught up in a pattern of thought that defined his version of reality. But he was prepared to listen; he “fell silent.” He was ready to hear what Krishna had to say next.
Now, in the course of persuading Arjuna to fulfill his dharma and fight, Krishna presents several arguments, and we’ll notice as we go along that they come from different levels. At one level they are the answer of an external teacher to his friend; at another level, they’re the answer of God to the individual soul; and at still another level they are the answer of our Self to our self.
Krishna’s first major argument to Arjuna is laid out in the early pages of the second chapter; in it he says: “We have all been, for all time—I, thou, and those kings and men—and we shall be for all time, we all, forever and ever. As the spirit of our mortal body wanders on in childhood and youth and old age, the spirit wanders on to a new body. Of this, the sage has no doubts.”
Now, that statement hangs on a concept which we as Westerners need to stop and consider a bit more closely—the concept of reincarnation. In the East, it wouldn’t be quite so necessary to justify the use of a reincarnational model, because reincarnation is pretty much taken for granted there. But here in the West we need to go a little more slowly and establish our ground; we aren’t quite so confident about reincarnation, and yet it’s central to the reasoning of the Gita.
When we talk about “understanding” something like reincarnation, we’re not talking about an understanding that we can arrive at through the intellect, through knowledge. How could we “know” about something like reincarnation? “Knowing” comes from the rational mind, and that is part of this lifetime. To understand about something like reincarnation, we have to rely on a higher wisdom, on the “inner voice” we talked about.
It seems to me that there are two ways by which one might come to know about reincarnation via that inner wisdom. The first way is through direct experience: If you, personally, have experienced your previous incarnations, that’s pretty convincing evidence, and there are people who report having done that. The other way is through meeting someone whose vision of things you totally trust, and having them tell you that that’s the way it is.
For me, it was the second path that was the key. It was my relationship with another being—with Maharajji, my guru—that opened me to a sense of utter inner validity regarding reincarnation, so I no longer doubt the truth of it in any way.
My relationship to my guru is such that there is absolutely no place in me that doubts him; there is no place of mistrust left. It’s the kind of trust that exists between a mother and a child.When a child is very young, there is a total openness to the mother, and to the mother’s protectiveness. Only later does the ego develop, and with it the sense of separateness. Before the separateness, there is a kind of unlimited openness to another being, and in that space of utter openness, you trust implicitly whatever comes to you from the other. You don’t sit around wondering whether you can trust it or not—you have complete, unshakable faith. Living in India, around my guru and other beings like him, I stopped asking, “Are they telling me the truth? Are they distorting the reports of their experiences?” I just opened to them: “Yeah. Right!”
Maharajji and other such beings whom I don’t doubt have told me about reincarnation. They have told me how it is. Without exception,
Ram Dass Lecturing: Rameshwar Das says, “You could hardly call these talks that Ram Dass gave ‘lectures.’ Ram Dass would weave these intricate stories, parables, and jokes that would go off on long tangents you’d think he would never be able to pull together, until suddenly there it was, some seemingly obvious fact of spiritual life, staring you in the face, punctuated by a deep, meditative silence, and a collective murmur of appreciation or acknowledgment.”
all those beings accepted reincarnation with the same level of certainty that we in the West feel toward the laws of physics, and I could hear in them the truth of what they were telling me. So from my own point of view, that’s been the primary route through which I’ve arrived at my understanding of reincarnation: Hanging around with Maharajji and with beings like him, I came to trust that that’s just the way it is.
True, I’ve had lots of far-out experiences, mainly through psychedelics, where I flipped in and out of images of myself in other realms. Were those direct experiences of other lifetimes? Was I experiencing others of my incarnations? I don’t know. But I do know that Maharajji took reincarnation for granted, and his truth communicated itself to me. Krishna said, “Of this [reincarnation], the sage has no doubts.” That’s good enough for me.
Let me read you a few quotes about reincarnation from some of those beings who, like my guru, are people I trust on this issue.
This is from Rumi, the Persian mystic: “I died as stone, and rose again as plant. I died as plant, and became an animal. I died as animal, and was born a man.Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more shall I die as man, to soar with the angels. But even from angelhood, I must pass on. For all is change, except the face of God.”1
Muhammad said. “Each person is only a mask, which the soul puts on for a season. It is worn for the proper time, and then is cast off, and another is worn in its stead.”
This is a quote from Jack London, who writes of a character who was hanged:
I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums . . . I am man born of woman. My days are few, but the stuff of me is indestructible. I have been woman born of woman, I have been a woman and borne my children, and I shall be born again. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born. And yet the stupid dolts about me think that by stretching my neck with a rope they will make me cease.2
Now, Jack London was an American author, so we can conclude from his quote that there has been in the West a rich vein of belief in reincarnation, especially in literary circles. But our general cultural attitude toward reincarnation has been shaped less by that and much more by Western religious traditions, where we don’t find so much acceptance of the idea. Reincarnation isn’t part of the belief system in most of our synagogues and churches.
And yet if we read the Bible, we notice slipping into it quotations that seem to imply a belief in reincarnation. Christ said that John the Baptist was Elijah, previously. The Wisdom of Solomon says, “To be born in sound body with sound limbs is a reward of the virtues of past lives.” The disciples ask Christ, “Was this man born blind because of something he did previously, or because of his parents, or what?” Without reincarnation, how could the man have done something before his birth to cause his blindness?
So what happened to those beliefs? In the early councils of the Christian Church, around A.D. 500 to 600, the question of reincarnation was actually hotly debated, and at first it was by no means clear in which direction church doctrine would go. But as the church fathers considered it, they realized that reincarnation wasn’t such a functional philosophy for maintaining the church’s control: after all, if this life was merely one step in a continuing dance, you couldn’t be frightened about an eternity of hellfire and brimstone. So reincarnation was rejected as a tenet of faith, but back in the time of Christ it was a common belief.
Psychology in the West, like religion in the West, has traditionally dismissed the idea of reincarnation. Recently, though, psychologists have started to become interested in it, and now it’s becoming a matter for “serious” study.
I was a psychologist, in one recent incarnation. I was a student of personality research. We tried to determine why children were the way they were, in light of their heredity and their environment, as we in psychology measured those factors. So we would measure everything that was measurable in the parents, and everything that was measurable in the environment—which was what we, in our sophisticated, theoretical way, understood to be the determinants of how you came out being who you are. We would score all the tests and feed all the data into our computers, and out would pop a prediction of who you were supposed to be. Then we would measure who you actually were, and we would see how closely our predictions matched the reality. In other words, we were building a body of scientific knowledge about cause and effect in personality, based on the assumption that you are totally the product of this lifetime, with its environment and its heredity.
Well, the best correlations we ever got with that kind of research— and we were probably about par for the course—were around 0.5, and a 0.5 correlation meant that we were accounting for about 25 percent of the total variability. That means that if I picked you and tried to predict who you were, based on knowing everything a psychologist could want to know about you in this lifetime, I would be able to predict about 25 percent of your characteristics; the other 75 percent would come out, essentially, at random.
In the face of that, I, as a social scientist, would then say, “Well, that’s due to errors of measurement.” Or I’d say, “It’s due to the fact that we aren’t complex enough in our systems.” It would never enter my mind, as a psychologist, that my theory might be wrong—because we all get very wedded to our theories. It never occurred to me that heredity and environment might not be the only things that make you who you are. And yet we can see that that unaccounted-for 75 percent leaves ample space for reincarnational theory, so it’s not necessary, really, to pit Western science against reincarnation. Reincarnation just gets lumped into the psychologist’s “errors of measurement” category.
There is anecdotal evidence of reincarnation. Here in the West, we have the lives of people like Mozart. He created sonatas at four, gave public recitals at five, and composed his first opera at seven—did he really learn all that in such a short time?
In our midst at Naropa was the interesting phenomenon of Trungpa Rinpoche, who was what is called a Tulku—the acknowledged reincarnation of a high being. In the Tibetan tradition, when a high lama dies, a group of oracles sits in meditation until they share a vision of where his next incarnation has occurred.Then they send out a search party of monks, and they tell them, “Go to a house with a blue roof, by a lake two miles north of such-and-such village, and you will find a baby who at that point will be seven months old. That will be the Tulku.”
The search party sets out. They find the house, and knock at the door, and say, “You have a son, seven months old?” The family, of course, says yes. The monks say, “Well, you didn’t know it, but this is really lama so-and-so.” And the mother says, “Oh, wow! And all this time I thought it was just my baby. I’m so honored that my baby turns out to be the reincarnation of lama so-and-so.”
Then, just to be sure, the monks give the baby a number of tests: They test it with the dead lama’s goblet and a new goblet, with the lama’s old bell and a new bell, to see which one the baby chooses. If the tests are suitably passed, the monks take the baby back to the monastery and start to teach him. And for the next nineteen years (in Trungpa’s case) there proceeds a system of intensive training to remind the new Tulku just who he really is.
Then there was the little girl I heard about in India: One day, when she was seven years old, she told her father, “You have to take me to . . . ,” and she named a small village, miles and miles away, which neither she nor her family had ever visited before. She said, “I used to live in that village. I have two children there, and I must go and see them.” She begged and begged her father, and finally she persuaded him to take her there. On the way, she told him all about the village, and how it had changed during the time she’d lived there—all of which, as the father found when they arrived there, was exactly the way it had happened. They located what the little girl said was her house, and, sure enough, there were two children of the appropriate ages. After her visit, the girl was taken back home, crying “No! No! You can’t take me away from my children.”
Or what about the experiences of what we call “déjà vu”? Haven’t you ever met someone and felt, “Don’t I know you from somewhere? Didn’t we go through all this before?” A Western scientist will say, “Well, that’s all just a similarity of cues.” Maybe—but then again, maybe it’s a glimpse of something further out than that.
Rodney Collin, in a book called The Theory of Celestial Influences, had an interesting slant on reincarnation. He said, it isn’t like the Bridey Murphy Story, where you’re born, and then you die, and then you’re born again a few years later. It’s really more like a fifth dimension: We’ve all been here—right here, in this very time and place—thousands of times. We’ve been running through the very same lifetime again and again and again. Don’t you remember? I mean, I’ve told you a thousand times. . . . I’ve told you a thousand times. . . . I’ve told you a thousand times. . . . Collin’s view of that experience of déjà vu is that it comes because the circuitry burns through occasionally, and we get a little flash of the last time we did all this.
People will argue, “But if reincarnation is true, why don’t I remember who I was? Why don’t I remember my past lives?” Lama Anagarika Govinda, the Tibetan teacher, answered: “Most people don’t remember their births, and yet they don’t doubt that they were recently born.They forget that active memory is only a small part of our normal consciousness, and that our subconscious memory registers and preserves every past impression and experience, which our waking mind fails to recall.”3
Carl Jung, in his psychological work, kept wrestling with that issue of subconscious memory. He called it “the collective unconscious,” which was a way that a Westerner could approach the idea of reincarnation, of information that was coming from outside this lifetime.
If, through whatever experiences, we allow for the possibility that reincarnation is true, then we immediately start to get curious about the mechanics of it all—how it works and why it works. There are dozens of systems to describe it; they all have their own structure of beliefs about where you go and how you get there. Sometimes they contradict one another; the Buddha told stories about people sinning and coming back as animals or insects, whereas teachers like Meher Baba claimed that each incarnation is a step forward, a progression, and that you can never backslide.There’s no way to determine which one is right or wrong. Each system is just an approximation of the truth, created by a human mind.
Nor in considering a sequence of births can we assume that reincarnation happens only on the Earth plane. In the Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna, “Those who pray to the gods, go to the gods.” That is, if you are devoted to the gods, then after you die you will go to aheavenly loka, a celestial land; that’s where you’ll be reincarnated. But that, too, will turn out to be just another plane of consciousness.You’ll go there, and you’ll stay there for some period of time—let’s say for five hundred years from an earthly point of view, though time will undoubtedly mean something very different there; but then after those five hundred years, you’ll come to realize that a heavenly loka is still a place, and that before you can get to no-place, there’s more work you have to do—maybe work that can only be done on the human plane. And so maybe you will once again take a human birth in order to get on with it.
But that’s just one more model. These are all just models, thought up by human minds for something that’s beyond what the human mind can grasp. We have no way to know how it all really works! It seems we go around and around and around, but that each time around we’re a little more conscious, until eventually we get to the level of yogic awareness, and we remember.
“Eventually” can mean a long, long time, however, when we’re talking about reincarnation. We’re talking about vast timescapes. Here is a beautiful image from the Southern Buddhist literature that gives us an idea of the kind of time spans we’re talking about.The Buddha was trying to describe the length of time we’ve been playing this game of reincarnating. He said, “Imagine a mountain one mile wide, one mile long, and one mile high. Every hundred years a bird flies by with a silk scarf in its beak, and runs the scarf once over the face of the mountain. The time it would take for the silk scarf to wear away that mountain is what we would call a ‘kalpa,’ and we have been playing this game of reincarnation for kalpa upon kalpa, through innumerable ages.”4
Apart from the mechanics of reincarnation, there’s a deeper question: “Who exactly is this ‘we’ that’s been playing this game?” That is, what is it that continues on, and what is it that changes during all those kalpas? Obviously, the you and I we usually think of as ourselves won’t be hanging around all that time, so what is it that will still be here?
Krishna says, “For beyond time he dwells in these bodies, though these bodies have an end in their time. But he remains, immeasurable, immortal.” That’s one way of describing the two aspects of our being: our bodies, which die, and that which dwells in our bodies, which doesn’t. The trouble is that talking about reincarnation in that way—“he dwells in these bodies”; “he remains” (emphases added)— can make what stays around from incarnation to incarnation sound awfully solid, like there’s a “somebody” who’s passing through birth and death and birth and death. But if not a “somebody,” what is it?
Personally, I’m comfortable with using the word “Soul” for what reincarnates.To the Buddhists, the word “Soul” carries too much connotation of solidity, and so they take me to task when I use the word. But I use it in a very specific way: The twist is that the Soul reincarnates—but at the same time the whole thing at every level, including the Soul, is an illusion. The Soul is an illusion, and the forms it incarnates in are illusions, but within the illusion is a subtle configuration, a continuity of traits, or values, or qualities, which persists despite the different forms, names, and egos it takes on, and that continuity is what I call the Soul.
The Buddha believed in reincarnation, which means he thought that something reincarnates. The Pali literature says: “There are no real ego entities hastening through the ocean of rebirth, but merely life waves, which, according to their nature and activities, manifest themselves here as men, there as animals, and elsewhere as invisible things.” “Life waves”—that’s a nice image. In Hinduism they’re called vasanas, subtle thought-forms. Every act we do creates vasanas, life waves, based on the desires connected with the act. Those life waves go out and out. Even when we die, they continue; the physical body dies, and what remains are those subtle life waves, those mental tendencies that function like a kind of psychic DNA code to determine your next round. In Hinduism that’s called karma. Karma is basically a pattern of life waves, or desire waves, that keep going and going, life after life, until they spend themselves.When they do, there’s no more individual desire, no more separation, and therefore no more incarnation. The game is over.
If you experience your present life from that perspective—as one sequence in a long, unfolding pattern of karmic law—then the time and place you took birth, what your parents are like, who your brothers and sisters are, whom you marry, whether you have children, what experiences you have in life . . . you will see all of that as part of a predetermined karmic package. The universe and you in it are just an ongoing expression of karmic law.You and everything you see around you, alive and otherwise, are perfect law unfolding.There is no chance in the system, because there is no part of the universe that is exempt from the laws of karma.
You say, “What do you mean, it’s all law? Don’t I make choices? What about free will? In the Gita, isn’t Arjuna being asked to decide whether or not to fight?”
Well, it’s a stretch for us to come to grips with the relationship between free will and determinism, because we’re so used to thinking in either / or terms. But on this issue, we have to deal with the paradox that both of those opposite realities exist simultaneously: free will, and total determinism.Things get a little clearer, though, when we see that although they exist simultaneously, they exist on different planes. That is, there is a plane of reality on which you think you are a free agent. You think you decided what to wear today, you think you decided what to eat for breakfast this morning, you think you decided whether to pick up this book and read it. On that plane, it’s necessary for you to behave as if in fact you are a free agent—to make choices wisely, to decide to do your dharma. However, there is another plane, a different perceptual vantage point, from which you begin to see that all those thought-forms that said to you, “I think I’ll have some granola this morning,” didn’t come out of the void. Well, actually, they did come out of the void—but they came conditioned out of the void. The choices arose out of a long chain of prior events that absolutely predetermined your decisions. I say, “I have free will”—that’s my karma talking!
Whenever I think I’m making a decision about something, I remember an incident that happened with Maharajji. I had gone back to India for the second time in 1971, and I had gone looking for Maharajji, but he was nowhere to be found. No one knew where he was. So I decided to join up with some other Westerners at a meditation retreat in Bodh Gaya; that’s where the Buddha got enlightened, and I figured if it worked for him, maybe it would work for me. But after a couple of weeks of meditating, I was ready to resume my search for Maharajji. One of the women in our group had come to India over land, in a big Mercedes bus, complete with a driver. She offered us the bus to take us from Bodh Gaya to Delhi, where we could celebrate Shiva Ratri, and then go looking for Maharajji from there. So thirty-five of us— thirty-four meditators and the bus driver—all set out for Delhi. After weeks in a meditation retreat, we were all looking forward to hotels with real beds and hot water, and to restaurant meals and ice cream cones.
The road to Delhi took us near the city of Allahabad, which is where, once every twelve years, a huge celebration is held, called the Kumbha Mela. Millions of people come there at an astrologically ideal moment to bathe in the confluence of three sacred rivers; it is the largest spiritual gathering held anywhere in the world. The Mela had taken place just a few weeks before our bus trip, and one of the people on the bus, who had been at the Mela, insisted that we should make a detour to visit the Mela grounds. On the one hand, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do—after all, all of us were supposed to be practicing yogis, and here was one of the most sacred sites in all of India. But it meant an extra hour or two before we’d get to Delhi, and everybody was tired and hungry and getting cranky. The discussion went back and forth, and finally everybody agreed that I, as the elder in the group, should make the decision.
I wrestled with it: Should we turn off? Should we go straight on to Delhi? Finally, when we were almost at the cutoff to Allahabad, I decided. I told the driver, “Turn right.”
We drove to Allahabad and pulled into the almost-empty Mela grounds—just a handful of people walking here and there.The fellow who had been to the Mela directed the bus driver over to a little Hanuman temple he remembered visiting. As we parked next to the temple, somebody who was looking out one of the bus windows yelled, “Hey, there’s Maharajji!” And there he was, walking along through the Mela grounds, holding on to the arm of Dada, his Indian devotee. We all poured out of the bus, crying and pranaming and touching Maharajji’s feet. Maharajji looked unconcerned with our whole thing; he just said, “Come. Come. Follow us.” Then he and Dada climbed into a bicycle rickshaw that had been waiting for them, and they started off through the narrow little streets of Allahabad, with our big bus lumbering along behind.
When we arrived at Dada’s house, his wife came rushing out to the bus to greet us. “Come in, come in,” she said, “dinner is almost ready. We’ve been cooking for you all day. Maharajji woke us up at six o’clock this morning and told us, ‘Hurry up and start cooking. There will be thirty-five people here for dinner tonight.’ ”
Now who do you suppose it was who thought he was sitting on the bus, deciding whether to visit the Mela grounds? Long before I made my decision, it was already decided—Maharajji knew all about it that morning! I played my part. I “decided” to go to the Mela grounds. But my decision was inevitable.
So if it’s already writ in stone, can a guru change your karma? That’s an interesting one, because in many Hindu traditions there is the idea that the guru can free the student by taking on his or her karma in some way or other. One day when I went to see Maharajji, I brought him a big bag of oranges, and put it down on the tucket in front of him. Usually, he would take the fruit that was given to him and start tossing it to people, but this time he started grabbing the oranges and gobbling them ravenously—he ate eight oranges before my very eyes! I didn’t know what to make of it, but afterward one of the Indian devotees told me that a guru often does something like that to take on the karma of another being.
I struggled with that one for a long time, with that question of karma and the guru. Are we all bound by law, but the guru isn’t? What’s the relationship between karma and grace? That is, if Maharajji ate the oranges to take on my karma, was he doing it because, in the grand law and design of things, it was my karma that I would come to a guy who would eat eight oranges and take on my karma? Or was it my karma just to schlock along eating my own oranges until this being, out of his incredible compassion, said, “Look at this poor jerk—he’s never going to do anything right. I’ll eat his eight oranges for him.” Is it karma or is it grace—that’s the basic issue, right?
I finally concluded that it was a question of perspective. That is, when you’re working with the path of bhakti yoga, working within a devotional system, then the guru is your all-in-all. And in that case, he ate the oranges out of his infinite compassion. But when you’re standing back in another space, you see that since the guru is one with God and so one with the Law, there would be no possible reason or motive for him to act outside the Law—and so it was just your karma to meet him and have your oranges eaten.
But surely God must be outside the laws of karma, right? Well, in a way, God is the laws of karma, and then the question becomes, why would anyone break their own laws? Sure, if you were God and you wanted to, you could act outside the laws—but you wouldn’t want to. When you’re in the place where you can move the mountain, you know why you put it there in the first place.
So then all of us and all the universe around us are a kind of sleight-of-hand manifestation of these life waves, of these karmic laws flowing on and on, through lifetime after lifetime. Our desires drive our thoughts, which motivate our actions, which create more karma, which determines the circumstances of our next incarnation. And on it goes. In our lives right now, we are reaping the karma, both good and bad, of incredible numbers of past lifetimes, and at the same moment we’re creating our karma for the next round.
When I look back at my own life, I wonder how I could ever have imagined such a plot. It’s all been too bizarre! I mean, I found myself living in an Indian village, doing sadhana, doing meditation, doing yoga—me, a nice, middle-class Jewish boy from Boston! Back when I was on the Harvard faculty, I didn’t even know the word “yoga.” If anybody had said to me, “One day, you will be a yogi,” I would have laughed at them—it was absurd. “Yogi” had no place in my professional career planning! But when I got to that place, it felt as if I were coming home. It was my spiritual connection, and so it reverberated in me with something much deeper than any of my conditioned ideas of who I was and where I was going. And so it felt absolutely right on, every step of the way.
Now—why me? What about all the rest of the people I grew up with in Newton Center, Massachusetts, who are now in the clothing business, and in the shoe business, and so forth? Why me? Hari Das (one of my teachers) once said to me, “You did a lot of yogic work in your last lifetime, but you fell.” So here I am again. It was my karma that I would reincarnate into this lifetime, and if Hari Das was right in what he said, maybe it was because I fell off the path the last time and so I had to come back around again. That was one side of my karma. But in the grace I’ve been given with experiences like taking mushrooms and meeting Maharajji, I’m also reaping the good karma of my last lifetime—maybe of the “yogic work” that Hari Das said I did. This present moment is the sum of allthat past karma. All those life waves, flowing and flowing, just to bring me to this place, to this moment.
If you’re standing outside of time, it is possible to see the whole course of those life waves—past, present, and future. There are stages of development (which I have not yet achieved) where you can watch their entire pattern through time. Maharajji was in such a place. We’ve all seen those time-lapse movies that show flowers unfolding, and blooming very quickly. Sometimes when I was sitting with my guru, I would catch him looking at me in a certain way, and I could sense that he was watching this flower of my being unfolding, just like those movies. Since I could only see the stage that I was in at the moment, I was always caught up in reaching for this or grabbing for that or pushing away the other thing. But Maharajji could see the whole pattern evolving.When you’re at that stage, you see in advance the direction the karmic waves are taking, and you know exactly why it’s all happening the way it is.
For me, it’s still a surprise, although I can see the connections after the fact. Here’s a little example. Maybe I’m invited to give a lecture in some small town somewhere. I won’t really know what leads me to accept that particular invitation, but I do. I go there, I speak to the audience, and they don’t seem particularly interested in what I have to say. I think to myself, “What am I doing here? Maharajji, what on earth did you have in mind?” I finish my talk, and I take a taxi to the airport; I’ve got half an hour before my flight leaves, so I go in to have a cup of coffee. I sit down, and somebody comes over and says, “May I share this table?” “Certainly. Sit down.” Then we look into each other’s eyes, and—there it is! There’s the connection that holds the whole meaning of the trip. In that moment, I know: “Oh—far out! So that’s what I’m doing in this town!”
Or here’s another one, even stranger: Some years ago, I was giving a lecture in Seattle. As I entered the hall and looked around at the audience, my glance happened to fall on someone who, for whatever reasons, aroused my prurient interests. It was momentary, just a passing thought, but my eyes lingered for a second on the object of my desires. Then I went on, gave my lecture, and thought no more about it. Sometime later, I received a letter in the mail. The letter said, “I was in the audience at your lecture in Seattle last year. I’d been depressed for months, and I couldn’t bear it anymore. I planned to go home after the lecture and commit suicide—I had the pills in my pocket, I was all ready. But then as you were coming into the hall, you stopped and looked at me for a moment, and I knew that you knew what I was planning to do. And because you noticed me, and because of the way you looked at me, I couldn’t do it anymore. And now it’s a year later, and I’m just fine.” So who thought that one up?
Then there’s a story about Meher Baba. He was crossing the United States by train, and when the train stopped in Santa Fe, he suddenly got up from his seat, climbed down off the train, and walked toward the center of town. At a certain corner, there was an old Indian man standing, leaning up against the side of a building. Meher Baba walked up to him, and they looked into each other’s eyes for a few seconds. Then Meher Baba turned around, walked back to the station, got onto the train, and left. He said, “Well, that takes care of my work for this trip.”
Now all that may just be incredible showbiz—I mean, if he’s playing at that level, he could certainly have done it all on another plane and skipped the walk to town. But it’s a great story—and it’s possible that that was, in fact, what Meher Baba’s trip had been all about. How would we know?
Gradually, as our perspective deepens, we begin to experience our own lives in the context of a wider purpose. We begin to look at all our melodramas and our desires and our sufferings, and instead of seeing them as events happening within a lifetime bounded by birth and death, we begin experiencing them as part of a much vaster design.We begin to appreciate that there is a wider frame around our lives, within which our particular incarnation is happening.
One of the first things that kind of perspective does for us is to calm us down a great deal. The whole game isn’t riding on this one lifetime! Whew! There’s a great feeling of release inherent in that; it removes the anxiety and the sense of urgency. We don’t have to do it all right now—and in fact we see we’re not “doing it” anyway! It’s the lawful continuity of karma and reincarnation flowing through us lifetime after lifetime, kalpa after kalpa. What a relief!
Once we’ve developed this deeper understanding of reincarnation and karma, we can see the way these ideas are framing Krishna’s response to Arjuna.They are central to the argument.That’s why we really had to come to grips with them. But how is Arjuna’s karma playing itself out here? One part of the answer would be that it is Arjuna’s good karma to be graced enough to find himself there in the very predicament he’s facing. That is, it’s grace for him that he’s beginning to awaken to the struggle.What a blessing! Just imagine the grace that allows him a birth in which he gets to hang out with God— what a great incarnation!
But the other side of Arjuna’s karma is that although he’s begun to awaken, his desires—or rather, his attachments to his desires—are still very much hanging around.
That’s not just Arjuna’s predicament; that’s the predicament in which most of us find ourselves, isn’t it? We’re caught in divided territories inside ourselves: There’s that part of us which sees through the game—and then there is that part of us that is still deeply caught in all our stuff. We have a foot in two different worlds.
So although Arjuna is graced to be in an incarnation through which he awakens, he still has a way to go, and Krishna is in the process of training him to take the next step. Krishna is helping Arjuna evolve to a point where the acts he performs will no longer come out of attachment—any attachment. And not coming out of attachment, they will no longer create new karma. At that point, Arjuna will be done with generating new stuff for himself. He’ll be done with creating new births and deaths for himself. All that will be left then will be for the old stuff to run its course, for the old, stored-up karma to run off until it’s gone.
Now notice what that last sentence implies: that even though you may be fully enlightened, even though you may be fully aware of the whole game, the dance will go on until the dance is done. As long as there are stored up karmic energies, as long as there are life waves present, the five skandas, the strands of creation, will keep manifesting.The Buddha got enlightened, but then he hung around for another forty years, running off his old karma.
However, if we want to get done with it all, it’s clear that the first step in the process is to stop creating new waves. We’re never going to be finished if we keep making new waves for ourselves every day! And as Krishna explains to Arjuna, the way to go about doing that is to stop basing our actions on attachment. Once we’re acting purely out of dharma and not out of any desire, we’re no longer making waves.
That’s the reason for all this—that’s why Krishna is giving Arjuna this whole new basis for determining his actions. He’s training Arjuna to stop acting out of his old, karma-creating patterns. Krishna in effect is saying to Arjuna, What matters here aren’t yourfeelings toward those people on the other side. There’s something bigger at stake here.You have to act out of what your karma demands. It’s your karmic predicament to have been born a kshatria at this particular moment and in this particular place, where it is your responsibility to uphold the dharma by fighting this war. And so that’s your way through at this moment.
Arjuna might not feel that he asked for that role, but there it is; now it’s his dharma to fulfill it. In picking up this book, you may not have thought you were asking to confront these tough questions about your own life and about what it all means, but by God, here you are. By God, here you are. This is it—this is the battlefield. This is Kurukshetra within yourself. And though you may think you didn’t ask for it, yet at another level, just like Arjuna, you are getting your just deserts. You are getting the benefit of all the work you’ve ever done up until now, which has put you in the place where you’re reading this bizarre book about a peculiar topic that most of the population couldn’t care less about. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? What are you doing reading this book? Why you?
Whatever karma it is that brought you to this point, it’s now your dharma to work with it. It’s now your task to work with being in the situation of reading this book, and confronting these questions. You ask, “What exactly does that mean? What do I have todoabout all this?” Well, that’s something you’re going to have to work out for yourself. We each have our own path. I don’t know what yours is—I can hardly figure out my own. What I can predict, though, is that for you, as for Arjuna, it will probably include giving up some cherished notions about yourself, some ideas about who you are and where you’re going.
Gradually, it begins to dawn on us that we are merely part of a process.Think about that:You and I are nothing more than process. I am a process of continuing mind-moments, each one separate from the others. There is no permanent “me,” being incarnated and reincarnated—there’s merely the law of cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, cause-and-effect, running on and on and on. It’s all just the passing parade of the laws of prakriti, of the laws of nature, of the laws of an unfolding illusion of manifestation.
The more you open to that kind of perspective, the more dispassionate you become in watching your own incarnation unfold.You see that every melodrama, even the wonderful melodrama of “I’m trying to get enlightened,” just creates more karma—and you can’t afford that anymore. Finally, there is no stance you can hold on to and still go through the door—so you let go of everything.
That’s the reason Krishna says to Arjuna, Let go of your models, and do your dharma.Why should you be upset about the idea of fighting your family, Krishna asks. It’s their karma and yours for this battle to take place. You can’t wage war against your destiny, so let the laws of karma unfold as they’re supposed to. Play out the role that’s been assigned to you, because when you do that, when you’ve totally surrendered to your dharma, when you’re no longer trying for anything, that’s your way through.
Krishna’s argument undercuts all of Arjuna’s objections by turning the very context of the discussion on its head.The rules have changed, Krishna says to Arjuna; your actions are going to have to start coming out of a new place now. All those social rules? They had their time and place. But Arjuna’s feelings about family and social roles can no longer be the central values in shaping his actions, because his central value now is going to Brahman by fulfilling his dharma. He has a new purpose behind his acts.
Again and again, the Gita turns our perspective upside down, just as it does here for Arjuna. It shifts our sense of what our lives are about. So as we begin to adopt the Gita’s perspective as our own, we’ll notice that our focus starts to change. Instead of always preoccupying ourselves with trying to get what we think we want or need, we’ll start to quiet, we’ll start to listen. We’ll wait for that inner prompting. We’ll try to hear, rather than decide, what it is we should do next. And as we listen, we’ll hear our dharma more and more clearly, and so we’ll begin tuning more and more of our acts to that place of deeper wisdom. As that happens, all our fascination with our roles and our plans and our desires and our melodramas will begin to fall away. More and more, we will open ourselves to just being the instruments of the dharma. And then we’ll discover that we’ve lost our lives—and found them.