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I will tell thee a supreme mystery,” says Krishna, “because thy soul has faith. It is vision and wisdom, and when known, thou shalt be free from sin.” Remember what’s happening here—that Krishna is now in the “how-to” part of his discourse. He’s instructing Arjuna in the various techniques he can use as yogas for getting to God, and this statement of Krishna’s begins a fascinating part of that dialogue. The “vision and wisdom” that Krishna is talking about belongs to the path of jnana yoga, of understanding, which comes via the thinking mind.
No matter what practice we do, in order to understand it completely we have to apply the “vision and wisdom” that Krishna is talking about. Whenever we think about our practices or talk about our practices, the thinking and the talking are forms of jnana yoga. When I describe to you the practice of karma yoga or the practice of bhakti yoga, the description is a jnana yoga technique. To understand devotional yoga, to understand why we meditate, to understand why we do mantra, we have to develop the kind of discriminating wisdom that can differentiate the real from the unreal, and the path of developing that discrimination is jnana yoga. Our meditation practices are meditation practices; our devotional practices are devotional practices; but when we talk about them, we’ve become jnana yogis.
We can see that from the way the various forms of spiritual practice rely on one another; they don’t stand alone, they support and work hand in hand with one another.That’s true in Hinduism, and it’s true in other practices as well. In Theravadan Buddhism, for instance, panna, or “right understanding,” is one of three aspects making up a spiritual practice. Sila and samadhi are the other two—sila being purification, and samadhi, concentration. The three aspects work in relation to one another in a kind of spiral fashion; you keep going around and around among them, but the practices complement one another and augment one another, and you wind up a little higher each time around. They’re synergistic.
Unless you had already developed a certain level of wisdom, for example—wisdom meaning that you recognize there is something going on outside the game—you wouldn’t have picked up a book like this. Maybe because of reading this book, you’ll decide to start meditating. Through meditating, you’ll quiet down and so you’ll develop more wisdom.That added wisdom may point out to you some of your impurities, which will lead you to doing purifications. When you’ve purified more, that will intensify your meditation. As your meditation gets stronger, you will go deeper, and you will develop more wisdom. On and on.
In one way and another, all of the practices of jnana yoga work with our intellectual faculties and with different levels of the mind to get to something that is finally beyond the mind’s grasp. It’s called higher wisdom, and higher wisdom is a different thing altogether from knowledge. It’s not like it’s the same thing but more of it—it’s a different creature altogether. Knowledge is a function of the intellect; higher wisdom goes beyond mind and intellect. So higher wisdom is what we’re aiming for, and it’s outside our minds; but we have to find ways to get there (or we think we do), and the route of knowledge and the intellect is one more of those ways.
Now every method has its traps, so let me say right off that it seems to me there is a dilemma connected with the use of the intellect as a vehicle. The intellect is like a siddhi, a yogic power, and like all such powers, it’s very seductive. It’s easy for us to get seduced by all the fascinating things that we can know about. But our knowing isn’t wisdom—it’s knowledge; and all of that fascination with knowing things can end up drawing us outward rather than inward. We get trapped in the world of knowing.We busy ourselves collecting more and more worldly knowledge, and focus on the matrix of the rational mind instead of opening into our deeper wisdom. And then the very tool we’re trying to use to escape becomes our trap, because with knowing there’s always still a “knower” and a “that which is known.” You can get right up to the door and knock, but you can’t get through as long as you need to know you know. “Sorry!” says Saint Peter. Only when the knower and the known become one does that One get through the door. Nobody who knows anything gets through the door— which means that the ultimate sacrifice for the gyani, the intellectual, is giving up knowing anything.
In saying this, I don’t want in any way to belittle the intellect. I think we just have to change what we thought thinking was all about. The intellect is an exquisite tool. It’s our strong suit as humans, really, and in a way, it’s the most powerful tool we have at our service for getting on with our journey—once we understand what the journey is, and understand that the intellect is supposed to be the servant, not the master. Then we can use our intellects skillfully, without getting trapped by our fascination with all the wonderful things we find out, or by the subtle ego trip of “knowing how it all is.” We can stop being the captives of our own minds.
Knowledge, if it is used purely enough and with fierce enough one pointedness, can certainly take you through. Einstein once said, “I didn’t arrive at my understanding of the basic laws of the universe through my rational mind.” He had obviously developed his rational mind to an exquisite degree of clarity; it took him right to the edge— and then . . . ahhhhh! That’s where the wisdom comes—it’s in the “ahhhhh.”
To give you an example of the way that edge tantalizes a scientist: J. Robert Oppenheimer writes, “If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron’s position changes with time, we must say no. If we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say no. If we ask whether it is in motion, we must say no.” That sounds to me a lot like Ramana Maharshi’s practice: “Neti, neti—it’s not this, and it’s not that either. Oppenheimer’s statement is so far out, and it shows how, if you push the intellect far enough, if you take your knowledge of the outside world right to the very edge of understanding, it flips you beyond intellect into wisdom. But to use your intellect in that way takes a very disciplined mind, a mind that’s tuned like a laser beam, with complete one pointedness in problem solving.
Now, let’s say that you’d honed that kind of intellect, and you’d decided that you wanted to turn it inward instead of outward. What would you do? The most likely thing is that you’d start by using your mind to make models of what you were experiencing, because models are something our minds can play with. What we find when we turn inward is the same for everybody, but the description of what we find there depends on who’s doing the describing, and so there are many, many different models of consciousness which have originated in different traditions.
Here, for instance, is a model that uses one of our own cultural artifacts—a slide projector. Probably all of us know roughly how a slide projector works: There is a source of light; you put in a slide, and the light passes through the slide, which determines what patterns and colors of light come through on the other side and fall onto the screen.
Now let’s say for a moment that you’ve been watching a slide show for a while, and that you’ve decided you’ve had enough of watching pictures and you want to know what the screen itself looks like. The problem is, all you can see of the screen is what the slides allow you to see. If a slide were totally filled with picture, you wouldn’t see anything of the screen at all; on the other hand, if a slide had nothing on it, if it were absolutely transparent, you would see the screen perfectly.
Well, now, you could apply that to yourself, as a model. Imagine that inside you is the light, which we will call the atman—or, since you are a jiva, an individual, we’ll call it the jivatman, because it’s your atman; it’s the little drop of light, out of all the light in the universe, which happens to be at your center. Forget for now where the neurophysiological point of that center is located; just allow that there is that source of light in you, and that it is sending out everything: white light, the entire universe. But what is getting through and being reflected on your screen is determined by a number of translucent veils that the light has to go through on its way out. And those veils are the veils of your mind, your thinking mind. The veils are your thoughts, the veils are your sense desires, the veils are your feelings— they’re all the different parts of your personality.They’re what’s called your ahamkara, your ego structure. What that means is that what you end up seeing out there in the world is merely the projection of your own slide show.
That’s nothing new, of course—I think we’re all basically familiar with that idea; it’s certainly a common one in modern psychology. Any psychologist can cite dozens of experiments that prove that motivation affects perception. If you’re hungry and you walk down the street, you only see what’s edible—you only notice the doughnut shops and the pizza parlors. On the other hand, if you’re horny and you walk down the street, you only notice what’s makeable. Now it may be that when you’re horny and you walk down the street, you pass a really good doughnut shop. You’d never notice it. Later on, somebody might say, “Is there a good doughnut shop in that town?” You’d answer, “Gee, I don’t really know”—but you could tell them how many sexual competitors, potential makeables, and irrelevants there were!
In other words, your desires determine what seems to be out there. Seems to be out there.You don’t know what’s really out there— you only know what you think is out there. The manas, the lower mind, is connected with sense desires and with thoughts; it’s collecting now this sense desire, now that thought, now some emotion, and building a whole mosaic out of it, that we experience as our ego universes. What you think is out there, and what I think is out there, is just us out there. We don’t know if anything’s out there. Maybe if neither of us were here, there wouldn’t be anything out there at all . . . or then again, maybe there would be. We just don’t know. We can sit around inside our opacities and think about all that, but all of our thoughts will be affected by our opaqueness—by our desire that there be something out there, or by our desire that there not be something out there, whichever. Finally, the only way to get a truer picture of it all is to become less opaque. And doing that is the game of our sadhana.
We could visualize it as a series of concentric circles, with sense objects “out there,” in an outer circle. (As you think about these circles, by the way—the ahamkara [or ego], the manas [or intellect], the buddhi, or even the atman—don’t get caught in thinking of them as if they were fixed, solid things; they’re more like Oppenheimer’s electrons, patterns of energy that are always in flux. They happen to have an intensity that makes them seem solid for a moment, but they aren’t static.)
So first there are the objects of our senses. Then come the senses themselves (the indrias), and then the thoughts, which are the manas or lower mind. Next comes the ahamkara, or ego-structure, which is the vector or the locus of all those various thought patterns, and which represents our model of the world around us.
The next circle in is this thing called the buddhi, which is the higher intellect; it’s the only part of our nature package that is capable of grasping the higher realms within us. It’s sometimes thought of as being related to third-eye wisdom, but actually the buddhi has a kind of “swinging door” quality connected with it, so it can go either way—it can get sucked into the lower mind and go out into the world, or it can turn back inward and aim toward the light, toward the atman, toward the source of it all. It’s like a pivotal process. The dawning of wisdom comes with a recognition of the inner light, when the buddhi first turns inward rather than outward. At that point, the buddhi begins to use the intellect to search more deeply within, to move inward.
The buddhi is still part of our “package,” however; it still reflects a separate “me.” In the West, we would call it the soul. In the mystic Christian literature, we find the statement, “When thine eye be single, thy being will be full of light.” That’s the buddhi. It’s still part of who we are, but it’s right there on the brink. It lies between spirit and matter, and it can aim in either direction.
Then, in the innermost circle, is the atman. The Bhagavatam says: “The atman, or divine self, is separate from the body. This atman is one without a second, pure, self-luminous, without attributes, free, all-pervading. It is the eternal Witness.” Think about that: It’s what’s inside you—right now. It isn’t something external to you; it isn’t something you have to acquire. It’s already there! There’s a Zen teaching that says, “The brilliant gem is in your hand.” It’s not “out there” someplace; you’ve already got it. You alreadyare it—you only think you’re not! Isn’t that bizarre?
In the New Testament, Luke writes: “And being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God cometh, he answered them and said, ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation [not through your senses], neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, lo, there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ ” Within you! But are you living in the kingdom? Between that inner you and the you you seem to think yourself to be are all the veils of thought, all the opacities of color and form, that make up the slide projections, which create the world you experience.
Now that entire process we just went through, constructing and explaining that slide-projector model and its ramifications, was a form of jnana yoga practice. We used our intellects to construct a model, which pointed us toward that which is beyond the intellect. That’s exactly what the process of jnana yoga is all about. So you begin with the lower intellect, the manas, and you start to study:You study the scriptures, you study with teachers, you read books, you attend retreats; you collect knowledge. None of that is wisdom, you understand—it’s merely the vehicle that’s going to help you get there. You use your intellect to acquire that knowledge, to get you ready to do the next thing. But then it turns out that one key part of “the next thing” is to get rid of all that knowledge.You have to let go of it.You can’t be attached to knowing; it’s just another attachment. The knowledge is disposable; it’s served its purpose—let it go. Later on you’ll discover that it’s all still there, but it will be there in a whole new way. And before you can get to that new way of being with it, you have to really let go of all that beautiful knowledge you’ve so busily collected.
Knowledge is like Joseph’s coat of many colors: it’s groovy, and it’s fun to flash it. I mean, when I was a Harvard professor, we’d all sit around flashing our knowledge at one another. It was exquisite! “Well I know this.” “But can you quote that?” “I’ve read the latest research paper.” It was astounding how much we knew! Yet when I looked inside myself, I found a considerable discrepancy between my knowing and my being. You can know knowledge, but you have to be wise. I saw that I could be horribly, hypocritically, depressingly empty of wisdom, at the same time I was snowing everybody around me with my knowledge. Knowledge all by itself, without deep wisdom, ends up becoming despair.
Actually, at any given level of development, it’s only possible for us to use a certain amount of knowledge anyway; beyond that, we’ve just overfilled the cup. We can’t absorb it, because our being hasn’t developed enough.You can get a three-year-old to recite complex mathematical formulas, but that doesn’t mean the child understands them. There has to be a balance between the development of a person’s inner being and the development of their knowledge in order for their knowledge to be useful. Montaigne wrote that filling the mind with too much material is like overwatering a plant, and that being “clogged with a great variety of things, the mind must lose the power of freeing itself, and the weight of them must keep it bent and doubled up.”
Gurdjieff said: “Knowledge which is not in accordance with being cannot be large enough, or sufficiently suited to your real needs. It will be always a knowledge of one thing, together with ignorance of another, a knowledge of a detail, without an understanding of the whole; a view of the form without a capturing of the essence.”1 He also said, “Knowledge may be the function of one center, the thinking center. Understanding, however, is the function of many centers. The thinking apparatus may know something, butunderstanding appears only when a man feels or senses what is connected with it.” What he’s saying is that as we move toward wisdom, we move on a path from intellect to intuition, from knowing we know about something, to an intuitive sense of our interconnectedness with everything. Intuitive wisdom is a nonconceptual appreciation of something through becoming one with it. That’s a deeper way of understanding things, and it’s a doorway to becoming wisdom.
Our desire to know, which is our desire for a sense of certainty, becomes one of the hindrances that gets in the way of our developing intuition. Ramana Maharshi had a beautiful statement about knowledge as an obstacle; he said: “For men of little understanding, wife, children and others comprise the family. For the learned, there is a family made up of countless books in their minds, which are also obstacles to yoga.”2 Ramakrishna said, “Only two kinds of people can attain to self-knowledge: those whose minds are not encumbered at all with learning—that is to say, not overcrowded with thoughts borrowed from others—and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realize that they know nothing.” That last part is when the jnana yoga path is really working, because the “know nothing” is the next step in this trip.You learn and you learn and you learn until you realize that with all you’ve learned, you don’t know anything—and that’s the route through.You use your intellectual models to get you going—they’re really helpful for that—but you don’t cling to the models; you keep letting go of them, letting go of the intellectual structures. Otherwise they get in your way.
In Miracle of Love, I told about having lunch one day with Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist. He asked me about Maharajji, and I proceeded to tell him a number of stories. He was fascinated, and he could allow for the truth of what I was telling him, until I got to a story about how Maharajji had appeared in two places at the same time. To that, the physicist said, “That’s impossible. The very basis of physics says that something cannot be in two places at once.” I said to him, “That may be true. But you see, Maharajji did it anyway.”
Somebody sent me this poem:
The freer I get, the higher I go. The higher I go, the more I see. The more I see, the less I know. The less I know, the more I’m free.
That’s really that whole sequence! You collect knowledge, and you get just enough so it allows you to see over the next hill—and when you do, you realize that your knowledge isn’t worth a thing. So you throw it away, and then you’re freer than you were before you started.
As we turn in these new directions, a lot of the stuff we’ve filled our minds with starts to get in our way. When you sit down to meditate, you will begin to rue how much you have fed into your mind, as it all starts to pour back out again. I used to sit in the temple, trying to do my breathing meditation: “rising . . . falling . . . rising . . . falling . . .” and I would be remembering “amo, amas, amat,” or “area equals πr2,” or something like that.You find you have to clean house a lot. Nowadays, I try not to get caught in filling my mind up quite so much, so I won’t have as much to clean out later on.
There are Eastern traditions that have developed techniques for getting rid of that mental clutter.There’s the Abhidhamma, for instance, which is a Buddhist system of psychology; it uses a very analytical technique for studying the experiences of existence, and then uses that same analytical process to extricate you from the process itself. It’s beautiful. Basically, the Abhidhamma is an exquisite category system. It’s like having one of those old-fashioned pigeonhole desks, the kind with all the little places to put paper clips and rubber bands and messages. If you have the kind of obsessive-compulsive nature that likes that kind of desk, you will absolutely delight in the Abhidhamma— because there’s not one single thing you can think about for which the Abhidhamma doesn’t have a compartment. There are little places underneath and around the back, and there are secret doors . . . it’s an incredible desk.
Meditation in the Main Hall: Meditation classes were held twice a day: in the early morning, and before the afternoon talks. The photograph gives a good sense of the gritty industrial space that was hastily converted into an auditorium for the first year of classes at Naropa.
What’s useful about the system is that it gives you a way to get rid of everything—so your desktop, which is your mind, is always perfectly clean. When you get good at the category system, you know where every pigeonhole is located; something appears on your desk, and automatically your hand reaches out and puts it in the right place, and your desktop is clear again.You have a thought or you have a feeling, and you remember, “Oh, that’s category four-six-three-sub-two.” Zip—into the pigeonhole! Gone. Besides clearing them away, that view of your thoughts and feelings also tends to depersonalize things very quickly, to take the romance out of the experience, and to get rid of the feeling, “I’m really somebody going through something.”
The Abhidhamma is only one of the practices developed in the East for working with the mind. There are many, many exquisite techniques that use the intellect to get beyond the veils. One of them was the method of Vicharasangraham that was taught by Ramana Maharshi, a beautiful saint who lived in southern India during the first half of the 1900s. He had an interesting history: Ramana Maharshi was someone who, at seventeen years of age, had seemed a pretty ordinary young man. He had done no sadhana whatsoever, he hadn’t studied any spiritual traditions particularly, he was just busy being a high school student. One day, as he was sitting on the floor of his uncle’s study, he suddenly felt very powerfully that he was about to die. Instead of struggling against his death, as most of us might do, he surrendered into it—he experienced himself as having died. He watched his body being carried away to the burning ghat and cremated there. His body was gone, his personality had fallen away . . . and then he experienced an intense sense of Presence, of the “I” that isn’t part of being born or of dying. That experience transformed him.
Some of us, through whatever means, may have had experiences like that. The difference between Ramana Maharshi and the rest of us is that he didn’t come back. Well, that’s not exactly true: He stayed around for another fifty years, but who it was that stayed around was totally different from who he’d been before all that happened. That is, he didn’t come back into his habitual thought forms about who he was.
Ramana Maharshi’s practice was to continually ask himself, “Who am I?” It’s a form of self-inquiry. He wrote, “If the mind uninterruptedly investigates its own true nature, it discovers that there is no such thing as mind. Such constant practice is the shortest path for attaining true wisdom.” A practice like that is a beautiful method—if you can stand it! It’s a practice of self-knowledge, or self-investigation that takes incredible intellectual discipline. Here’s how you might work with it:You sit down in your meditative posture, and you ask yourself the question, “Who am I?” And then to whatever it is that arises, you say, “Neti, neti”—meaning, “I am not that, I am not that.” That is, you’re using your thoughts to cut through your thoughts about who you are. So you begin. You ask yourself, “Who am I?” and you say, “I am not my senses.” Then one by one, you make the processes of each of your senses the object of your attention. Maybe you start with your ears—you notice your ears hearing.
Have you ever really done that, by the way—noticed your ears hearing? It’s a good meditation. You draw your attention inside until you can, so to speak, watch the whole process. You observe the way waves of sound come into your auditory canal and vibrate against the cochlea and the vestibular membrane and all those little mechanisms . . . and then the way the energy of that goes on to stimulate the auditory nerves that send the signals up into your brain . . . and then the way your brain starts interpreting the signals, assigning them meaning. All that is going on, every time you hear a sound; all of it is happening, mechanically running on, even though we hardly ever notice it. So we start to notice it; we turn hearing into a meditation. We sit back and let our attention get more and more subtle, and watch that whole fantastic trip unfold.
But that’s another practice altogether. In a practice of self-inquiry, instead of attending to the process, you notice your ears hearing, and then you detach yourself from that—you say, “I am not my ears hearing. That’s not me.” Then you do the same thing with your other senses, with your eyes seeing and your nose smelling and your tongue tasting and your skin feeling. As you look at each experience, you see it as object and you say, “I am not that.”
After you’ve detached yourself from each of your senses, you move on to the next category; you say, “I am not my organs of motion”— that’s your arms, your legs, your tongue, your anal sphincter, and your genitals. They’re called the organs of motion or the organs of action in certain systems in India.You experience each of those parts of yourself, but in each case objectifying it, so it’s no longer you.You stop thinking of it as “my anal sphincter”—it’s just “look at that anal sphincter.”
Then next you go on to your internal organs, and you do the same thing with them—you say, “I am not my heart beating. . . . I am not my lungs breathing. . . . I am not my stomach and intestines digesting.” Neti, neti, neti.
Finally, after you’ve gone through all the physical stuff that you may think of as you, you’re left with just one more thing, which is your thinking mind itself. All the parts of your physical body are gone; they’ve been dismissed, and your thoughts are all that’s left of you. It’s like you’ve climbed a tree, and gotten further and further out on the branches, until you’re out on the final, smallest twig. All that’s left is your identification with the thought “I.” And then the final statement is “I am not this thought.” You lop off that last little branch, and you fall free.
If you can stay homed in on that discipline, extricating yourself little by little from the body, from the senses, from the emotions, from everything, right back to the last little thought—you’re through the door! You’ve used the intellect to beat the intellect, and you’ve become one with the atman. But to do that takes a level of discipline which is incredibly fierce! You’ll get rid of your eyes, your ears, your nose, you’ll be all the way to your respiratory system—and suddenly you’ll hear something. At that moment, you’re your ears hearing again. You’ve got to go back and do that one all over again, in order to cut yourself loose from it. It’s the fiercest gyan method I know, and you have to be very quiet inside in order to be able to work with it. But it’s a powerful technique for cutting through.
Just to round this out, let me mention another method, which at first blush seems to contradict the one we’ve just been talking about. Instead of a practice of saying, “I’m not this, I’m not that,” and cutting off your identification with thing after thing, you can work instead with a practice of embracing everything into yourself. That is, instead of saying, “Neti, neti,” to each thing you experience, you say, “Tat twam asi”—“I am that.” You expand and expand and expand who you see yourself to be, until it’s all included within you.
A beautiful saint named Ram Tirth described what it feels like to be in that place. He said: “I am without form, without limit . . . beyond space, beyond time. I am in everything, and everything is in me. I am the bliss of the universe. Everywhere, I am. I am sat [absolute existence], chit [absolute knowledge], ananda [absolute bliss]. Tat twam asi—I am that.” He’s talking from inside, now. He went inside deeply enough to experience those places in himself, and now he’s telling us who we all are—all of us: We’re beyond space, beyond time, beyond form, and beyond limit. That’s who you are. Sat, chit, ananda.
Those two methods—“Neti, neti” and “Tat twam asi”—come from opposite poles, but they end up at the same place. In the one practice, you detach from everything, and in the other practice you embrace it all, but they turn out to bring you to the same place. Empty? Full? All the same.
Practices like those of Ramana Maharshi and Ram Tirth come out of the Hindu tradition, but there’s a practice that comes out of Buddhism—Zen Buddhism—that is a variation on the jnana yoga theme of using the mind to beat the mind. It’s a technique most of us have heard of—the Zen koan, the insoluble riddle. A koan poses a question that the intellect just can’t process, so the thought processes go “Tilt!” and that flips you outside your thinking mind.
My own introduction to the Zen koan came, improbably enough, at a Benedictine monastery in Elmira, New York. There was a gathering of holy beings happening there, and we were all taking turns doing our trips for each other. So at four o’clock one morning, I found myself seated between Swami Satchitananda and Swami Venketeshananda, as we were being taken through a Zen sitting by Joshu Sasaki Roshi—a very fierce Japanese teacher from one of the schools of Zen that uses the koan (not all of them do). First, Sasaki Roshi taught us how to sit; it’s an incredibly fierce meditation posture, with the back rigid, the hands held just so, the elbows out, the chin down—very tight, a state of great tension.Then he gave us our koan: “How do you know your Buddha nature through the sound of a cricket?”
Now, what you’re supposed to do is to think about that question as you’re sitting in that miserably uncomfortable position at four o’clock in the morning.You’re supposed to keep saying to yourself, “How do I know my Buddha nature through the sound of a cricket?” You sit and you sit and you sit, and you think and you think and you think. Then, later on, you get called in for dokusan, which is a personal meeting with the Roshi.There’s a strict form to the meeting:You come in, and you bow, and you touch your forehead to the floor so many times. Then you sit down on the student cushion. He’s sitting across from you, with a bell and a stick.
“Ah, doctor,” he says, “how you know your Buddha nature through sound of cricket?” Well, I’d been working for several hours getting ready for this moment, right? And I had arrived at a plan: What I had decided I would do was that when he asked me the question, I would cup my hand behind my ear, like Milarepa does, when he’s sitting in front of his cave listening to the universe. I figured, “Since I’m a Jewish Hindu and he’s a Japanese Buddhist, I’ll throw him a Tibetan answer. It’ll confuse him, if nothing else.” I hoped at least I’d snow him a little bit. So he asked the koan, and I cupped my hand behind my ear. He picked up his bell, looked over at me, and said, “Sixty percent.” Then he rang the bell to end the interview.
Now that, of course, sucked me in completely.The Jewish achiever in me just had to get that other 40 percent!
Some months later, I was basking in a sauna bath in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Allen Ginsberg and Bhagawan Das and a Tibetan nun— we were quite a colorful group of people, sitting around naked in the sauna. A telegram arrived for me. It was from Mount Baldy—Sasaki Roshi’s Zen Center in southern California—and it said, “There will be a rohatsu dai sesshin, starting . . . ,” and it gave the date, which was two days later.The telegram went on, “This is the most difficult sesshin of the year. It will go on for nine days. We have reserved a place for you.” I thought, “Oh, my God! Nine days of that?” One day of it in New York had been enough for me! There I was, sitting in the sauna in total Sensual-ville; I’d come planning to spend two weeks just lying around, enjoying myself. But there was something in the telegram that drew me. And there was still that other 40 percent. . . .
So I called them immediately, and I said, “Well, thank you so much for thinking of me, and I certainly would like to sit with you sometime—but I’m only a beginner, and this sesshin is for advanced students.” I was hoping to get myself off the hook, but they said, “Oh, you can do it.” Which got me in my next vulnerable place.
The following day, I found myself on a plane headed to Los Angeles, and after the flight and a car ride up into the mountains, I arrived at the Zen center. I was met by a fellow in a black robe with a bald, shaved head. He asked, “Name?”
I said, “Ram Dass.”
“Upper bunk, cabin four.” He handed me a towel and a black robe and a pillow. I was taken to cabin four and told, “You will be in the zendo in five minutes, please, in your robe.” Nobody said, “Gee, Ram Dass, great that you came.” There was not one tiny bit of ego feeding in the whole scene.
I put on my robe, and walked into the zendo. There was a space with my name on it, and I sat down, and they taught us the sitting practice. And then began something that . . . well, I’ll tell you, it was hard to believe that something like this was going on in America, not thirty miles from Los Angeles! We started every morning at 2 A.M., and we went until ten o’clock at night, so we had only four hours of sleep. When we got up at two, we had exactly five minutes to wake up, wash, and be in the zendo.
Once you sat down on your cushion and the bell rang, you were not allowed to move. You had to sit still—and I mean perfectly still. There was a man walking back and forth in the hall—a tough-looking guy with a big stick—and if you moved so much as a muscle, he’d notice. He’d come striding over to where you were sitting. He’d stop in front of your cushion, and first he’d hit the floor with the stick; now everybody knew that you’d been caught. Then he would bow to you, and you would bow to him, and then you’d lean forward in one direction, and he’d beat you three times on that shoulder with his stick, and then you’d lean forward the other way, and he’d beat you three times on that shoulder. And I mean he’d beat you—it really stung for about fifteen minutes afterward! Then you thanked him, and he thanked you, and you went back into your sitting position.
It didn’t even have to be something blatant that you did that got you the stick. Imagine that you just woke up; your sinuses are full, and you’re sitting there, and the mucus starts to drip out of your nose and over your mustache and down your beard . . . so you go “Snifffff.” That would do it! The first day you might get just a “Shhhh”—but the second day, you’d get the stick!
If you needed to go to the bathroom, you had to get up and go over to one of the monks and whisper, “I have to go to the bathroom.” He’d say, “OK, but be quick!” And you’d say, “Yes,” and run out to the bathroom. Then you’d find you couldn’t go, because you were so nervous about making it back in time. Every minute was programmed and controlled—it was a fierce discipline.
We were given koans to solve by Sasaki Roshi. We’d see him for dokusan—five times a day. Five times a day, I’d have to go and see him, and he’d ask me my koan, and I’d give him whatever answer I’d been busy thinking up.The first time I went in fordokusanand gave him my answer he just said, “No,” and rang the bell. Later he got into subtleties like “Oh, Doctor, I’m so disappointed. I expected more of you than that!” That was a nice one.
Besides all that, it was very, very cold on the top of the mountain— there was even snow on the ground at times—and by the third day, I was really sick. I had a terrible cold, I was running a fever, and my back had gone out on me. I was thinking, “I don’t need a Roshi—what I need is an osteopath!” I had become totally, wildly paranoid. I mean, I was sure they were really out to get me. I thought, “The guy on the cushion next to me, they never beat him at all. And me, a professional holy man, they’re whipping left and right!”
By the fifth day, I was so sick and so uptight and so furious that I realized I really didn’t give a damn—about the koan, or the cricket, or any of it. I’d had it. I went in for dokusan, and Sasaki Roshi said, “How you know your [whatever it was that he was asking me that day].” I couldn’t care less how I’d know—I just didn’t give a damn, and I said to him, “Good morning, Roshi.”
His face brightened, and he broke into a smile. “Ahhhh!” he said. “Now you are becoming beginning student of Zen.”
Well, I went out of there, and I was walking two feet off the ground. I mean, I’d just solved a koan! I was so stoned by the whole scene, by the total experience, that it pushed me out into another plane. It was like an acid trip: all the bushes had flames leaping out of them, and everything I looked at was washed with a kind of luminous radiance, and no matter which koans I was given, the answers kept popping right out, koan after koan.
Now, all that turned out to be just another passing moment. I’d had what’s called a minor satori, a temporary experience of increased awareness.When you still have attachments that are strongly invested, when thought-forms and habits of thought are deeply ingrained and you’re still very attached to them, then even though you may override those attachments for a moment by intense sadhana practices— whether Zen koans or kundalini yoga or psychedelics or whatever— you will most likely reenter back into the old thought-forms after a while.You’ll come back slightly different, to be sure, but you’ll probably come back. The transformation isn’t complete. You went to the wedding, but you weren’t wearing the wedding garment, so you got kicked out.
Nonetheless, the seed has been planted, the awakening has begun.
In each of these jnana yoga practices, we’ve seen tools that are able to take us outside of the rational mind by way of the rational mind. That’s the interesting trick. The practices are carefully designed systems that use the intellect as the lever for freeing ourselves from the intellect’s control. Isn’t that exquisite?
When we follow any of these techniques, any of these jnana practices, and start turning the mind inward, what our intellect and our knowledge bring us to is the sense that there is within us a light . . . a consciousness . . . an awareness . . . a knowledge of how it all is. That’s something already within us—already there—so we see that it’s not a question of acquiring something new, that we just have to let go of all the stuff we don’t need anymore, all the stuff that’s getting in our way. Once we recognize that, our whole life becomes a process of shedding the veils that come between us and that Awareness.
Our yearning to do that, to be rid of whatever stuff it is that’s keeping us separate, leads us to begin paying more attention to the inner voice of our intuition, because that’s the clue to what we should be doing. We start to listen for the tiny, intuitive whisper that the Quakers call “the still small voice within.”
In shifting our focus that way, in turning from knowledge to intuition, we actually make a shift in our whole relationship with the universe. Knowledge is objective; we know about something. An intuitive relationship with the universe isn’t objective—anything but! It’s a subjective relationship: We’re all in it together. And that’s getting very close to the concept of “Oneness,” the description of the atman.
My first experience of that inner feeling of at-Oneness—or at least the first experience of which I have any conscious memory—came the first time I took psilocybin. In the course of that experience, I was ripped out of being a “knower of objective knowledge,” torn out of seeing the entire world—even myself!—as an object external to me. With the mushrooms, it all became subjective, an internal matter. And that experience of inner truth was so powerful that there is a part of me that never returned from that moment.
Of course, a lot of me did return, just as it did after the sesshin. A few days later, it was all just another memory of something that had happened, one more moldering butterfly in my collection. But even though the memory faded, the experience itself had carried such a powerful sense of validity that there wasn’t a chance it would be completely lost. After a breakthrough like that, we are literally never the same again. From then on, our lives are lived as a way of “getting on with it,” as a way of getting rid of whatever it is that’s keeping us trapped in our thinking minds. We start looking for the tools we can use to do that, using our actions in the world as karma yoga, parlaying our strengths, like the siddhi of our rational thinking minds, into techniques for parting the veils.
As all these methods start to work, they take us outside of the rational mind that created the systems. That is the “vision and wisdom” that Krishna was talking about: to be extricated from that flood of thoughts and sense data that is always rushing through us, carrying us along, so that we can turn back inward, turn back toward the atman. And when we can do that, when we can see beyond all the slide projections of who I am and who you are, when we can look past all the overlay of our habitual thought, we find to our surprise that there is only one of us.We find that it’s all an internal matter, that it’s always just God dancing with God.