5
We have been talking about karma yoga and jnana yoga, two of the practices Krishna presents to Arjuna. We have been considering them as means for getting somewhere we seem to want to go. But what is the “there” we’re trying to get to?
In this chapter, we’re supposed to talk about the “there”—about what, in order to have a name for it, we are calling Brahman, which is the Light Inside, which is the One of the Universe. But there’s an interesting predicament with all that: We’re trying to speak of something which by its very nature can’t be spoken of. It can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled, either. Even in giving it a name, in calling it Brahman, we’re trying to give form to the formless—yet the minute it has any form, it isn’t the formless any longer. Ram Tirth said, “A God defined is a God confined.” Interesting predicament.
Here we are, trying to extricate ourselves from our attachment to our thought-forms, and our description of what we’re aiming toward is but another thought-form. Any label for Brahman is wrong. Any attribution of any form is wrong; that means even the most subtle ones, notions like Voidness or Emptiness. It is, in the Tibetan chant, “Gate, gate . . . paragate . . . parasamgate”: Gone, gone . . . gone beyond . . . gone beyond even the concept of beyond. That’s Brahman.
Ramakrishna said that the one thing that can’t be soiled by man’s tongue (by words, that is) is Brahman, because what Brahman really is can’t be spoken of. We can talk about it, but we’re talking from one plane about something in another plane which in its very nature is completely different from anything that is “speakable about.” A name or a word can be a reference point, but it can never be a definition of the thing.
(We should notice, by the way, that the word “Brahman” is used in two different ways in the Gita, referring to two different aspects of God—one of them the formless aspect, and the other that aspect which creates form. The same word is used interchangeably for both, so we have to distinguish which way we’re using it; in this chapter, we are talking only about the formless aspect of Brahman.)
Although we can’t define this thing we’re calling Brahman, maybe we can approach an experience of it by immersing ourselves in a kind of collective description of it. There are mystics in every tradition who have visited that plane and then tried to convey what it’s like, and even though we can’t conceptualize Brahman, our minds can play around the edges by imagining it through those descriptions.
The Tao Te Ching is an example of that kind of mystical writing, a very pure and beautiful expression of the experience. It comes from a different lineage, so it doesn’t use the word “Brahman,” but you can see that it’s referring to exactly the same thing.
There’s a story, by the way, about how the Tao Te Ching came to be written. It’s probably apocryphal—I doubt it’s the way it really happened; but it’s a good story, anyway. It’s said that the keeper of the library at Peking was going home to die; he was a very old man.When he came to the boundary between his home province and the place he was leaving, the guards stopped him and said, “You have to pay a fee to cross this boundary!” He said, “How can I pay? I don’t have anything.” They asked, “Well, what did you do in life?” He replied, “I was a librarian.” They said, “Well, go over and sit under that tree, and write down everything you learned. Leave that with us—that will be your payment.” So he sat down, and he wrote out the eighty-one verses of the Tao Te Ching.
Here is Verse 14: “They call it elusive, and say that one looks, but it never appears. They say that indeed it is rare, since one listens but never a sound. Subtle, they call it, and say that one grasps it, but never gets hold. These three complaints amount to only one, which is beyond all resolution. At rising, it does not illumine. At setting, no darkness ensues. It stretches far back to that nameless state, which existed before the creation.” That’s written by somebody who’s managed to come just about as close as you can to expressing the essence of Brahman.
Then there was Janeshwar, who wrote this next passage. He was an interesting fellow; he was something of a trickster. For instance, there was at one point some question raised as to whether he was a phony. Some of the priests were accusing him of being a fraud, and they came to check him out. As a test, they asked him to recite some obscure passages from the Vedas for them. Janeshwar said, “Huh— even a dumb animal could do that,” and he walked over to a water buffalo that happened to be standing in the courtyard, and had it recite the Vedas for the Brahmin priests. That seemed pretty convincing to them.
Janeshwar’s writing is very poetic in its descriptions of Brahman. He says, “Brahman, though existing in forms subject to change, does not undergo change. He appears to have mind and sense organs, but as the sweetness in a lump of sugar is not in its form, so these sense organs and qualities are not Brahman. . . . It is at the same time knowledge, the knower, and that which is to be known, and it is that by which the goal is reached.” 1
A Sufi mystic used a similar image when he said, “Pilgrim, pilgrimage, and road were all but myself towards myself, and my arrival but myself at my own door.”2 Ramana Maharshi said, “If it is said that liberation is of two kinds, with form or without form, then let me tell you that the extinction of the two forms of liberation is the only true liberation.”3
The mystics of Western science have their own rational mind-take on the experience. In the 1970s, I attended a conference that was put together by John Lilly and Alan Watts, where a group of us had a chance to meet G. Spencer Brown. G. Spencer Brown was a very colorful fellow from England; he was a don at Oxford, a chess master, and a sportswriter. He also had an engineering firm, and was hired by a British railway company to set up a computer program to determine whether the number of railway car wheels that went into a tunnel was the same as the number that came out of the tunnel; they wanted to make sure of that, I guess for obvious reasons. Brown did set up the program, and it worked; but in solving the problem, he found himself using imaginary numbers, and when his counterparts at the British railway system heard about that they got a bit uneasy, because their boxcars seemed terribly real to them. So to convince them, Brown started to construct a logical sequence with which the railway company would be satisfied, tracing back from the railway car wheels going in and out of the tunnel, all the way back to whatever turned out to be the beginning of the sequence.
Well, he got carried away with going back and back and back, and he went all the way back to the beginning of the universe, and out of that he wrote a book called Laws of Form. But in the book, instead of starting the way he had with the railway company, he started the other way around. So on the first page he said, in the beginning there is nothing, and the first thing you must do is to make a distinction. He drew a line down the middle of the page to mark the distinction between the differentiated state and the nondifferentiated state.That’s the first act. Once he’d made that bifurcation, he then (with a very few more assumptions) built the entire universe on it.
But then in a footnote—a very interesting footnote—he said, Of course in order to make a first distinction, you must have some kind of value system on which you’re going to differentiate “this” from “that”—like, darker/lighter, better/worse, right/left, whatever. Then he said, “And since, of course, before the first distinction was made there was no value system on which to make the first distinction, in fact the first distinction was never made. Therefore this book is written to describe a universe that would exist had the first distinction been made.” Well, if you can handle that footnote, you’re already through the door into Brahman. If you balk . . . ah! There you are, clinging.
And then, finally, coming back to the Gita, here is this description of Brahman from the thirteenth chapter: “Now I shall tell thee of the end of wisdom. When a man knows this, he goes beyond death. It is Brahman: beginningless, supreme. Beyond what is, and beyond what is not. . . . From him comes destruction, and from him comes creation. He is the light of all lights, which shines beyond all darkness.”
In Hinduism, the expression that is used for entering that state of Brahman is chitta vriti naroda—the cessation of the turnings of the mind.The image is of an ocean, on which there are waves of all shapes and sizes. The waves are thought-forms: feelings, personality traits, sense data, ideas—wave after wave. And then gradually the waves quiet into ripples, and slowly the ripples get quieter and quieter, until there is just a vast, calm ocean, out of which the ripples came, and back into which they returned. That still, endless ocean is the image of Brahman.
You can see the problem with trying to conceptualize a state of being like that. Ramakrishna, the Indian saint, used to go into very high states of samadhi all the time. There are photos of him with light pouring out of his body. He always wanted to share with his disciples what he was experiencing, so he’d try to tell them what that state was like. He’d say, “Well, now, when the shakti, the kundalini, comes up, and it gets to the third chakra, you experience this.” And he’d describe the experience. “When it gets to the fourth chakra, the anahata,” he’d say, “you experience this. At the fifth chakra, you experience this. And when you get to the sixth . . .” And he’d go off into samadhi. His body would be standing there, luminous, but he would be somewhere else. One of his disciples wrote, “He would differ from a dead man only in that he retained his physical life heat and that his senses were still available to him—but his consciousness was somewhere else altogether.” Then after a while, Ramakrishna would come down and he’d start over again, and he’d say, “It gets to the third . . . and the fourth . . . and the fifth . . .” and out he’d go again. After three or four tries, tears would be streaming down his cheeks. He said, “I really want to tell you, but the Divine Mother won’t let me.” He couldn’t do it, because what it is can’t be expressed.
Ramakrishna said that our attempts to go to Brahman and report back what it’s like are like sending a salt doll—a doll made out of salt—to the bottom of the ocean to determine its depth. On the way, the doll will totally dissolve, and there will be nobody left to report back. That was Ramakrishna’s predicament.
But although Ramakrishna couldn’t describe it, he could be it, he could lose himself in it. He couldn’t report back, but he could experience what it was like. One of the devotees tried to describe Ramakrishna’s samadhi; he wrote, “In that rapturous ecstasy, the senses and mind stopped their functions. The body became motionless as a corpse. The universe rolled away from his vision, even space itself melted away. . . . What remained was existence alone. The soul lost itself in the Self, and all ideas of duality, of subject and object, were effaced. Limitations were gone, and finite space was one with infinite space. Beyond speech, beyond experience, beyond thought, Sri Ramakrishna had become the Brahman.”
What Hindus call becoming the Brahman, Buddhists call nirvana or nibbana—meaning “the blowing out of the candle.” In that state, everything you and I know ourselves to be falls away from our minds completely. What remains is a profound and total sense of fulfillment—what Franklin Merrill Wolfe referred to as “a state of utter satisfaction.” This isn’t Mick Jagger’s idea of satisfaction—the kind he can’t get none of. This is like the essence of everything in your life that’s ever given you satisfaction. It’s a quality of total enoughness, or completeness, or peace. It isn’t the big ice cream cone in the sky, which can never be satisfying for long; it’s the essence of the big ice cream cone in the sky, which is totally fulfilling.
Brahman isn’t an experience. To experience something, you have to be separate from it. We use techniques, like karma yoga and jnana yoga, to arrive at the state of Brahman, to immerse ourselves in it. A meditation practice is one of the first things we often try, in order to quiet down our thinking minds. As our meditation deepens, we will find we have many kinds of experiences, and some of them will be like an experience of emptiness. It might be a very appealing experience, but it isn’t Brahman. It can’t be Brahman, because no experience is it, and the “experience of emptiness” is another experience. Brahman is outside the realm of “experiences.”
I personally arrived at the kind of states we’ve been talking about via the yoga of using psychedelics, and while I recognize that psychedelics might be just an astral analog of the real thing, at least they gave me a glimpse of what it must all be about. They gave me some purchase on those other states of being. I can vividly recall some of the sessions we had in a meditation room in our house back in Newton, Massachusetts, whereTim and I were living and taking LSD. Some incredible trips took place in that room. For three or four hours (by the clock time we returned to later) there was no universe, there was no experience of no universe, and yet it wasn’t empty. That’s paradoxical, but it’s all paradox, because Brahman contains everything, all of it.
I’ll tell you a funny story about one of those sessions. The meditation room I mentioned was sort of unusual.We had put up a false wall in the living room and situated the meditation room behind it, so it appeared that the room didn’t exist. There was no door into the room; you had to come into it by way of the basement, going down the stairs from the kitchen, then climbing up a ladder and entering the room through a trapdoor in the floor.
After one of our sessions, when I finally got back into my body, I climbed down the ladder, made my way through the basement, and went upstairs into the kitchen. There was a woman in the kitchen, who had arrived at the house the day before. She’d come up from the south by bus, to get a job in the north; she had come to our house, and was thinking of working there. She was sitting in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee, when I came up from the basement. She took one look at me, and whatever it was she saw must have blown her mind, because the coffee cup went flying, and she came running over and fell at my feet. Well, that completely freaked me—I mean, here was this woman, in her fifties, very solid, straight, conservative-looking, kneeling at my feet; it drove me running out of the room. Later, she told me that when I came up the stairs from the basement, all she saw was a radiant, golden light. (As you can see, we had some pretty good LSD in those days!)
Now here is the way I understand the phenomenon that occurred: that whatever that Brahmanic state was which I had entered into during the trip, it was using me to blow that woman’s mind and therefore to prompt her next step in her journey, whatever that might be. That was the way I interpreted what happened. I didn’t take it personally.
But the point is that even after a trip like that, I came down. As long as there is stuff in us that pulls us back into this world (be it desires, longings, attachments—even the subtlest attachment to knowing something), that state of Brahman is elusive. We may be able to work with energies of one kind or another and override the system, so we can experience for a moment a little taste of what it might be like, and that’s useful. But then our habitual thought patterns reassert themselves, and back we come. There were still too many things that had their hooks in me for me to be able to stay in that state for very long.
Let’s try on a few more of these descriptions of Brahman, to help us cozy up to the experience by filling ourselves with these images of it. Each passage is some mystic’s attempt to describe an experience of Brahman, the indescribable.
Maybe right now these descriptions seem very abstract to us, irrelevant to our own lives. Let me suggest that the way they will become our own, the way the bones will take on flesh, is through our clothing them with our own experiences. Just hearing what other people have written about Brahman will never be satisfying. We have to feel it for ourselves.
And yet the hearing about it has its purpose. It may resonate in a place within us where we sense the validity of it, where we touch the realness of our identity with something other than what we think we are. That sense of validity in turn gives us faith; it’s right at the point where we touch that sense of certainty in ourselves that faith is generated. And that faith is what makes us actually step in and consent to fight our own battle of Kurukshetra.
The Upanishads say: “An ocean One the seer becomes, without duality. This is the highest path, the highest prize, the highest world, the highest bliss. It is that bliss on but a fraction of which other beings live.”
A Buddhist text describing the mind of the Buddha says, “Freed from form, sense perception, feeling, habitual tendencies and consciousness, he is deep, incommensurable, unfathomable, like the great ocean.”
And here is the way the Third Chinese Patriarch wrote about the experience. He said: “In this world of suchness, there is neither self nor other than self. To come directly into harmony with this reality, just say when doubts arise, ‘Not two.’ In this ‘not two’ nothing is separate. Nothing is excluded, no matter when or where. . . . Words. The way is beyond language, for in it, there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.”
I’m a Westerner, with roots in the scientific tradition, so I’m attracted by the reflections of Brahman that I find in physics models. They appeal to the jnana yogi in me. Those models tell us that as we go down into smaller and smaller units of matter, what seems like our bodies, or what seems like this book, or what seems like the air, or what seems like Mars—all these turn into tiny units of energy. And when you get down to those tiniest somethings of energy (which, you remember from the Oppenheimer quote, you can’t say are either this or that, but just some sort of patterning of the energy), then everything in the universe is made up of the very same stuff, and it’s all absolutely interchangeable at every moment.The electrons of you are indistinguishable from the electrons of me are indistinguishable from the electrons in a star. It’s all totally the same, and it’s all totally interrelated.
What’s fun is that when you’re no longer attached to being one separate part of it, you get to be part of all of it. At that point the “all” is known to you subjectively, and you are everywhere at once, because you are no longer pinned in a space-time locus by your separateness. Metaphysics tells me that, and physics tells me that. Everything I have experienced in all of my inner work points to that. So does Maharajji’s continual reminder, “Sub ek!” (it’s all one). “Can’t you see, Ram Dass? It’s all one. Sub ek.”
When we’re dwelling in that place of all-Oneness, the quality associated with it is a sense of bliss, the “state of utter satisfaction,” as Franklin Merrill Wolfe called it. Wolfe was an interesting American-scientist type, who used to live with his wife in a little cabin up in Lonestar, California. These experiences happened to him in 1937, when he was in his early forties; he had been doing a lot of meditation practice up in his cabin. He wrote: “The event came after retiring. I became aware of a deepening effect in consciousness that presently acquired or manifested a dominant emotional quality. It was a state of utter satisfaction. When in every conceivable or felt sense all is attained, desire simply has to drop out. . . .While fused with the state, all other states that could formerly have been objects of desire seemed flaccid by comparison. . . . The secular universe vanished, and in its place there remained none other than the living and all-enveloping presence of divinity itself.”4
Suchness . . . Oneness . . . bliss . . . the descriptions do their best to paint a picture of the experience for us, to give us a little taste of it. But “painted cakes do not satisfy hunger,” and finally we have to do the work that allows us to enter the state for ourselves.
In chapter 8 of the Gita, Arjuna asks, “Who is Brahman?” and Krishna proceeds to tell him, and to describe how to get there. Were the Gita to stop at that point, I think that its Buddhist tone would be dominant: leave form behind and merge with the One. But the Gita is about to point us toward a whole new level of wisdom.
See, here is the predicament: We talked about there being those two different aspects of Brahman—the formless, and the creator of form. The question is, are they mutually exclusive, like purusha and prakriti? Does the formless one rule out the creation?
We’re actually a little scared of Brahman. We figure that were we to go back into the One, were we to merge totally with it, there wouldn’t be anything more happening after that. It’s a good question. Would there? Would there be any more manifestation? Or would nothing ever happen again?
Krishna addresses that one for Arjuna by pushing him into deeper practice. He says that until Arjuna has quieted down, until his mind is completely cooled out, until his purification exercises are all done— in other words, until he is residing in Brahman—he won’t even begin to recognize Krishna.You have to be in Brahman before you begin to recognize that something lies beyond it. Krishna is suggesting that beyond both that which is form and that which is without form, behind both purusha and prakriti, behind the Brahman and the shakti, there is still some other . . . what? Something. But what is it? It seems there is still the dharma, there is still law, there is still some kind of directionality to things.
Whatever Brahman is, we know that it is the ultimate paradox, the simultaneous presence of all paradoxes. In Brahman, there is no space: everywhere is here. In Brahman, time has stopped: past, present, future, all are right now. So there is freedom from both space and time.
Now we can begin to talk about true freedom, the real freedom that is possible on this journey. It’s the freedom from limited view, the freedom from limited sensation, the freedom from standing anywhere, the freedom from holding on to any models. Beings like Maharajji are operating from that perspective all the time.They are in the world, but they are not subordinate to the world. They have transcended the gunas, the forces of nature, the strands of rope that create the world. “I have passed through the market. I am not a purchaser.” If absolutely nothing entices us anymore, we are equanimous, imperturbable. We can let go of the separate self and just be with everything.
There are those of us who have gone in and touched that place, but have come right back because we still have more karma to unfold. Our attachments bring us back—and yet we did touch the possibility, and that changed us. I suspect that many of you who are reading this book have done that.
Then there are others. In India, there are beings who go into what’s called nirvakalp samadhi—samadhi without form—and just stay there. After some period of time (Maharajji said forty-three days, although I’ve also heard twenty-one) the being totally merges into that state of nirvakalp samadhi, and the body disintegrates. It just falls apart, because there’s nobody in there keeping it together anymore. It’s an interesting way to leave an incarnation.
And then there are others still, who go into that state and reside in it, and yet their manifestation continues—only now it’s different. Now it is the manifestation of Brahman coming through a human form. It’s like nobody came back, and yet there is something there. For such a being, there are no more rules in the game, because the compassion has become all embracing. Any of our models of “You must do this because it’s good” or “You shouldn’t do that because it’s bad!” come out of our limited perspective.Their compassion, on the other hand, comes out of their total consciousness of the whole of it all.
Trungpa Rinpoche talked about that—it was what he termed “crazy wisdom.” Crazy wisdom, he said, is “outrageous wisdom, devoid of self and of the ‘common sense’ of literal thinking. Crazy wisdom is wild—in fact, it is the first attempt to express the dynamics of the final spiritual stage of a Boddhisattva, to step out with nakedness of mind, unconditioned, beyond conceptualization.”
Hakuin’s Zen poem—the beautiful Zen poem we used to recite at four every morning in the temple in Kyoto—says, “If we turn inward and prove our True Nature, the true self is no self, our own self is no self, we go beyond ego and past clever words. Then the gate to the oneness of cause and effect is thrown open. Not two and not three, straight ahead runs the way. . . . Now our thought is no thought, so our dancing and songs are the voice of the Dharma.”
So our dancing and songs are the voice of the dharma . . . so our dancing and songs are the voice of Krishna . . . so our dancing and songs are a true harmonizing with the divine law that incorporates form and formlessness, life and death, creation anddestruction, the law that incorporates all conceptual polarities and possibilities.
Operating from that space of Brahman, we come to a new understanding of karma yoga, a wider understanding. Before, karma yoga meant doing something from within our karmic predicament that we hoped would bring us to the One. Our actions were our path, our practice. Now, residing in the One, we come into a relationship with the Tao, with the way of things, with the law, such that all our actions henceforth are simply a pure statement of the dharma. Nothing else. We have transcended the gunas; we arenirguna,beyond the attachment to the strands of nature that bind us. A being residing in the Brahman is qualitatively an entirely different entity from everybody else, because there is literally nobody there. There’s nobody home! That’s one of the awesome and exasperating qualities, when you’re around a being like that.
Take my guru, for example: from November 1967, when I first met him, right up until this very moment, in all the years I have hung out with him, thought about him, studied him, reflected about him, analyzed him—I have never been able to find anybody there! I keep projecting onto him, because there was, of course, a flesh-and-blood body there. And it walked and it talked and it smiled and it laughed and it did all its stuff. But when I go toward that guru, when I look into those eyes or I reside in that heart, when I quiet down and meditate on what lies behind that form, it’s like I’m entering into nothing other than vast emptiness and vast fullness at the same time. I am entering into the state of Brahman, and that is the state where a being like Maharajji makes his home. Brahman encompasses a panoramic view of all form: It’s the physical plane, the astral plane, the causal plane—all the conceptual levels of form, all the way back to pure idea. All of it folds back in on itself, back into that which is unknowable, immeasurable, indefinable—and yet is . . . and yet is. We give that state a name; we call it Brahman.