Easwaran on the Gita: Getting Our Wheels Back on the Road

Posted on January 26, 2011 by  | Add Comment

In the fol­low­ing excerpt, Eknath Easwaran com­ments on chap­ter 2, verse 66 of the Bha­gavad Gita from the book The End of Sor­row:

Verse 66:
The dis­united mind is far from wise; how can it med­i­tate? How be at peace? When you know no peace, how can you know joy?

“Here there is no men­tion of reli­gion, or of the spir­i­tual life, or of God; Sri Krishna sim­ply asks Arjuna what intel­li­gence any­one has who is not united within. To bring this into a mod­ern con­text, try to imag­ine an auto­mo­bile whose four wheels want to go off in four dif­fer­ent directions.

“This is actu­ally what is hap­pen­ing to you and me. The senses are always run­ning out towards stim­u­la­tion; the mind runs out in the direc­tion of agi­ta­tion; the intel­lect goes in the direc­tion of argu­men­ta­tion; and the Atman just sits there watch­ing and says, ‘We can­not do any­thing with this car. These peo­ple shouldn’t be given their driver’s license, and this par­tic­u­lar car should be recalled.’ Med­i­ta­tion and the dis­ci­plines rec­om­mended by the great mys­tics of all reli­gions are for putting the four wheels of our car back on the same road.”

Read more from chap­ter 2 of The End of Sor­row: The Bha­gavad Gita for Daily Liv­ing, Vol­ume 1: The Illu­mined Man.

A Practice for Today: Putting Others First

Posted on January 25, 2011 by  | Add Comment

“Make a game of find­ing ways to put the wel­fare of oth­ers first, start­ing with your fam­ily and friends. Let the other per­son choose din­ner for both of you, for exam­ple, or go to a film the other per­son wants to see.”

– Eknath Easwaran

Putting oth­ers first means gain­ing free­dom from self­ish­ness and sep­a­rate­ness, and find­ing joy in help­ing oth­ers. Click here for basic instruc­tions on putting oth­ers first.

Easwaran on The Imitation of Christ: Talk 16

Posted on January 24, 2011 by  | Add Comment

This is the six­teenth in a long series of talks Eknath Easwaran gave on The Imi­ta­tion of Christ by Thomas a Kem­pis. In this talk Easwaran con­tin­ues read­ing and dis­cussing Book 1, Chap­ter 25, “Of the Zeal­ous Amend­ment of Our Whole Life.”

For pre­vi­ous talks, see Easwaran on Thomas a Kem­pis, under Categories.

Note that all of the talks in this series are avail­able for down­load from our store. The series is described on this page.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

Conquest of Mind: Spoken Book

Posted on January 21, 2011 by  | Read Comment | Add Comment

Lis­ten to Paul Bazely read­ing an excerpt from the spo­ken book Con­quest of Mind by Eknath Easwaran.

Lis­ten to Chap­ter 4, “Juggling.”

The com­plete spo­ken book is avail­able here.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

Fighting the War Within

Posted on January 17, 2011 by  | Add Comment

The fol­low­ing excerpt is from the book The Con­stant Com­pan­ion, a com­men­tary from Easwaran on the tra­di­tional Hindu names of God. This is a com­men­tary on the name Sarva-Praharana-Yudha: Who Has All the Weapons of Battle.

“This name is quite a mouth­ful, but well worth the effort when under­stood. When we love the Lord with all our heart, he gives us every weapon we need to fight the war within.

“Our ene­mies in this war, the Bha­gavad Gita tells us, are ulti­mately three: anger, fear, and self­ish desire. And the most basic of the three is self­ish desire, which stands for all com­pul­sive crav­ings. This is essen­tially an expres­sion of self-will, the com­pul­sive drive to get what we want what­ever it may cost oth­ers. Noth­ing stands between us and the Lord, the mys­tics say, except self­ish desires and self-will.

“Com­pul­sive desires are like a net. We are like fish, Sri Ramakr­ishna used to say, caught in a net of desire, and our dri­ving need is to escape. Unfor­tu­nately, we often feel we like nets. Yet every time we yield to a com­pul­sive desire, we tighten the net a lit­tle more.

“Some­times, when I try to untie my shoelace, I only suc­ceed in knot­ting it tighter. The more I pull, the more impos­si­ble it gets. That is what we are doing when we give in to a sen­sory urge or self-centered desire. Med­i­ta­tion is the undo­ing of knots, and indul­gence only ties them tighter.

“As a boy, if I gave in to a desire when I should have said no, my grand­mother would say qui­etly, ‘Have you for­got­ten what hap­pened the last time? Now you have to go through that all over again.’ Those words always struck a respon­sive chord. I didn’t want to have to go through the same sit­u­a­tion and its con­se­quences over and over and over. I didn’t want to tie the knot of desire any tighter than it already was.

“As Spin­oza would say, most peo­ple mis­take desires to be deci­sions. The prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion can enable us to have free­dom of choice where desires are con­cerned. To right desires we yield, but wrong desires we resist, gen­er­at­ing power that can enrich the immune system.”

Read more from The Con­stant Com­pan­ion by Eknath Easwaran.

Being Patient with Ourselves

Posted on January 13, 2011 by  | Add Comment

The fol­low­ing excerpt is from the book Patience, by Eknath Easwaran.

“Just as it is good to be patient with oth­ers, it is good to be patient with our­selves. We can all be haunted by our past mis­takes, by the amount of time and energy we have wasted, but we must accept our­selves with all our strengths and weaknesses.

“There are many obsta­cles in life, and they can­not be over­come unless we have infi­nite patience with our­selves. When we are patient with oth­ers, we can­not help being patient with ourselves.

“Ath­letes, I under­stand, often keep a daily record of their train­ing. In the same spirit, I take a few min­utes every evening to get a bird’s-eye view of my day to see where I can improve.

“This is not a neg­a­tive sur­vey. You are not find­ing fault with your­self. You are ask­ing, ‘Where can I be a lit­tle more patient? Can I be a lit­tle more lov­ing toward Amelia tomor­row? Can I be a lit­tle more help­ful to John?’ These are pos­i­tive ways in which we can improve the qual­ity of our daily liv­ing tomor­row in the light of what we have done today.

“Because of our human con­di­tion­ing, we all have a com­pet­i­tive instinct, which we can har­ness to com­pete not against oth­ers, but with our­selves. The ques­tion is not, ‘Can I be bet­ter than Harry?’ but ‘Can I be bet­ter tomor­row than I was yesterday?’

“Inter­est­ingly enough, this makes every day new. Tomor­row is never the same old day. There is always some­thing more to be done: one or two steps to take on the path upward, some greater care to avoid the mis­takes that all of us make in some small way. Instead of brood­ing over mis­takes or feel­ing resigned to them, I would sug­gest tak­ing every pos­si­ble care not to repeat those mis­takes tomor­row and mak­ing at least a lit­tle improve­ment in our daily behavior.

“When you refrain from unkind­ness, you are uncov­er­ing your real nature. Unkind­ness is not really char­ac­ter­is­tic of any­one. Beneath the self­ish con­di­tion­ing that brings such sor­row to us and oth­ers is a core of good­ness that is an essen­tial part of the human per­son­al­ity. The behav­ior that cov­ers this good­ness is a mask, which we grad­u­ally remove in the course of spir­i­tual growth. We don’t have to make our­selves lov­ing; we have only to remove unkind­ness from our speech and finally from our hearts.”

Read more from the book Patience

Easwaran on The Imitation of Christ: Talk 15

Posted on January 10, 2011 by  | Add Comment

This is the fif­teenth in a long series of talks Eknath Easwaran gave on The Imi­ta­tion of Christ by Thomas a Kem­pis. In this talk, Easwaran reads and dis­cusses Book 1, Chap­ter 25, “Of the Zeal­ous Amend­ment of Our Whole Life.”

For pre­vi­ous talks, see Easwaran on Thomas a Kem­pis, under Categories.

Note that all of the talks in this series are avail­able for down­load from our store. The series is described on this page.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

Free E-books on January 1st: A Report on What Happened Next

Posted on January 7, 2011 by  | Add Comment

Nearly 700 peo­ple requested free Easwaran e-books in response to our offer on Jan­u­ary 1st. Almost half of the email addresses of read­ers who signed up for this offer were new to our site.

We received some lovely com­ments and email mes­sages from read­ers who appre­ci­ated hav­ing a spare copy of Easwaran’s books to share with friends, par­tic­u­larly when their loaned copies had dis­ap­peared – we rec­og­nize that problem!

For those of you who took this oppor­tu­nity to intro­duce some­one to Easwaran’s books, that’s wonderful.

Thank you to the reader who com­mented that our offer clearly reflects the mis­sion of the Center.

Thanks also to those who patiently sent us email when we expe­ri­enced some tech­ni­cal snags, which we hope were all resolved quickly. It was a good oppor­tu­nity for us to repeat our mantram, and we also appre­ci­ated being able to com­mu­ni­cate with some of you personally.

If you tried but weren’t able to down­load the free e-books from the links we sent to you on Jan­u­ary 1st, please let us know.

We hoped this offer would encour­age more peo­ple to visit to our web site, www.easwaran.org, and this blog. It did! Nor­mally our site receives about 1,000 vis­its per day. On Jan­u­ary 1st, the site received 1,730 vis­its. All in all, a great start to 2011!

The Art of Detachment

Posted on January 6, 2011 by  | Add Comment

This excerpt from Eknath Easwaran appeared in the Win­ter 2009 issue of our quar­terly Blue Moun­tain journal.

“When sci­en­tists began con­tem­plat­ing the con­quest of space, the first prob­lem they encoun­tered – a prob­lem that had to be solved before they could make any head­way at all – was how to get beyond the pull of the earth’s grav­ity. A rocket has to build up a speed of twenty-five thou­sand miles per hour to escape this pull, and engi­neers quickly ran into a kind of ‘catch-22′: to attain this speed, an ordi­nary rocket would have to be so large that its sheer weight would never allow it to escape the pull of gravity.

“Yet the human spirit delights in over­com­ing obsta­cles. Undaunted, sci­en­tists finally came up with the idea of a mul­ti­stage rocket, with one or more inde­pen­dent boost­ers attached. Each booster holds fuel, which it burns in one great leap upward. As soon as its fuel is expended, its job is done and the booster is dropped, free­ing the space­craft from the bur­den of its great weight.

“Explor­ing inner space con­fronts us with a sim­i­lar prob­lem. What makes it so dif­fi­cult to turn inward in med­i­ta­tion is the pull of objects and expe­ri­ences out­side us, the attrac­tion of the phys­i­cal world. Even mem­o­ries, anx­i­eties, plans, and so on draw their power from expe­ri­ences of the senses: things we have felt, seen, heard, smelled, or tasted, which we want (or fear) to expe­ri­ence again.

“This attrac­tion is only nat­ural, and there is noth­ing inher­ently wrong in it – just as grav­ity is nat­ural, and there is noth­ing wrong with stay­ing on earth. Prob­lems arise only when we want more: new worlds to explore, a higher real­ity. Then we dis­cover that the pull of our body, our senses, and our pri­vate, per­sonal sat­is­fac­tions is what keeps us earth­bound, pre­vent­ing us from soar­ing to those heights where we can look back and see that all of exis­tence is one indi­vis­i­ble whole.

“To rise above this pull, we have to build up a great deal of momen­tum. Just as in launch­ing a rocket, immense power is required. But where are we to get such power? Space sci­en­tists can exper­i­ment with explo­sive mix­tures such as liq­uid hydro­gen and oxy­gen, but what do we use as human beings? The mys­tics give the answer: the power that dri­ves a human being is desire. Our desires are our fuel.

“I am full of admi­ra­tion for the world’s astro­nauts, who undergo such ardu­ous train­ing in their desire to go where no one has gone before. That desire is so great that it over­rides all lesser predilec­tions. For the sake of a few days in outer space and the thrill of see­ing the earth float­ing free in a sea of stars, they are will­ing to learn all kinds of strange new skills and put up with end­less deprivations.

“To reach our true Self, called the Atman in San­skrit, shin­ing like the full moon in the depths of con­scious­ness, requires the same mea­sure of ded­i­ca­tion and train­ing – and here, too, the secret is desire. If it is the power of our per­sonal desires that keeps us earth­bound, it is that same power, when released and har­nessed, that will pro­vide the fuel to launch us into higher consciousness.

“To apply this we too need a booster rocket strat­egy, and the mys­tics of all reli­gions have given us one, based on their own per­sonal expe­ri­ence. In Eng­lish it is called detach­ment: the art of with­draw­ing desire from lesser things, let­ting them fall away, so as to har­ness their power to reach the heights of what a human being can attain.”

Read the full arti­cle here

Gandhi the Man: Half-Price Sale

Posted on January 1, 2011 by  | Add Comment

A new edi­tion of Easwaran’s clas­sic biog­ra­phy, Gandhi the Man, will become avail­able on our web site and in book­stores start­ing in April. This is the first book pub­lished by Nil­giri Press (in 1972), and we’ll be describ­ing the book’s his­tory and the mak­ing of the new edi­tion in upcom­ing blog posts.

This new edi­tion will include a new intro­duc­tion by Easwaran and a detailed chronol­ogy of Gandhi’s life with maps and back­ground notes. It also fea­tures higher qual­ity pho­tographs repro­duced from a col­lec­tion of orig­i­nal neg­a­tives pro­vided by the Gand­hiS­erve Foun­da­tion archive. The rest of the book, includ­ing Easwaran’s mov­ing essays on Gandhi’s spir­i­tual evo­lu­tion, will remain unchanged.

Mean­while, we’re offer­ing the cur­rent edi­tion of Gandhi the Man as a spe­cial offer at $7.95, half price, while stocks last.

Here’s a short excerpt from the end of the last chap­ter, fol­low­ing Easwaran’s descrip­tion of the tragedy of Gandhi’s assassination:

“A human being is an immense spir­i­tual force barely con­tained in a phys­i­cal form. When all his hopes, all his desires, all his drive, all his will fuse together and become one, this force is released even in his own life­time, and not even the death of his body can imprison it again. Gandhi made him­self the force of non­vi­o­lence. He is a force which can­not die, which awak­ens again wher­ever a per­son or a com­mu­nity or a nation turns to non­vi­o­lence with all its strength and all its will.”


  • A few times a week we’ll post some­thing here to show­case the time­less wis­dom of Eknath Easwaran.

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