Spiritual Reading for the Weekend: The Ticket Inspector, Part 1

Posted on September 30, 2011 by  | Read Comment | Add Comment

Easwaran has some very enter­tain­ing ways of help­ing us under­stand the work­ings of the mind. Here he likens it to a crowded rail­way sta­tion in the first of three short extracts.

“The orbit in which our minds travel lies well out­side the realm of words. It encom­passes regions pop­u­lated by those elu­sive things we call thoughts, which come and go like the faintest of shad­ows. Yet though they are often too elu­sive to hold and iden­tify, thoughts leave indeli­ble traces on our lives. For this rea­son, get­ting hold of the mind is a strate­gic under­tak­ing, fraught with dif­fi­cul­ties and star­tling dis­cov­er­ies but well worth the effort.

“Often we can grasp the work­ings of the mind more eas­ily by draw­ing a par­al­lel with some more tan­gi­ble thing. A cou­ple of days ago it struck me that the mind has a great deal in com­mon with a crowded train sta­tion. New York has Grand Cen­tral Sta­tion; in India I am most famil­iar with Madras Cen­tral, well down on the south­east­ern coast. Madras Cen­tral is vast. As soon as you enter the upper deck you see two huge boards, ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES. From that van­tage point you can look on as thou­sands of trav­el­ers descend to the ter­mi­nal floor to board trains for many parts of India and points beyond. The Grand Trunk Express runs to Delhi, the nation’s cap­i­tal, a dis­tance of over a thou­sand miles. The Cal­cutta Mail trav­els the length of India’s east­ern coast. The Bom­bay Mail cuts across the heart of the sub­con­ti­nent; the Ramesh­waram Express goes to the south­ern tip. The Ban­ga­lore Mail trav­els west to Mysore, and the Mal­abar Express goes to my native state of Ker­ala on the west­ern coast. And I must not omit the Blue Moun­tain Express, which trav­els to Met­tupalayam at the foot of the Nil­giris or Blue Moun­tain, where I later made my home. With all these expresses and many more local trains, called shut­tles or pas­sen­gers, Madras Cen­tral is quite a busy junction.

“The scene in the mind is very much like this. When you descend below the sur­face level of con­scious­ness, it is almost as if you see the same two big boards: ARRIVALS and DEPARTURES. On the arriv­ing trains come phys­i­cal crav­ings, mes­sages from sense stim­uli, annoy­ances from the envi­ron­ment; every train is full to capac­ity. At the far end, the depart­ing trains are full of responses. This too is a very busy junc­tion; arrivals and depar­tures are sched­uled every moment.

“Why is the sched­ule of arrivals so full? Because we have taken great pains to lay down incom­ing sense-ways in highly reg­u­lar routes. Stim­u­la­tion from food, for instance – reg­u­lar or meter gauge – arrives every cou­ple of hours; thoughts of sex, mostly broad gauge, arrive on a moment’s notice. Quite a num­ber of minor sen­sa­tions too try to hitch rides on the trains that ply these tracks. And most often they suc­ceed, for the engi­neers rather enjoy mak­ing unsched­uled stops.

“If this is our sit­u­a­tion, there is no rea­son to blame our­selves. Most of us have become con­di­tioned to heavy sense traf­fic through­out our present life, and per­haps, accord­ing to Hin­duism and Bud­dhism, for thou­sands and thou­sands of years. The routes have become fixed. Elec­tronic sig­nals have been installed to speed sen­sa­tions along, so that as soon as a car is put on the tracks, it goes. Every­thing is auto­mated; there is no longer any need for an engi­neer. As soon as our day begins, all the traf­fic in the direc­tion of what we are pleas­antly used to is routed right in, and the rest is con­ve­niently side­tracked. That is why it is so dif­fi­cult for us to exer­cise any seri­ous con­trol over our thoughts.”

- Climb­ing the Blue Moun­tain by Eknath Easwaran, pages 81 – 83

Join us on Easwaran’s Time­less Wis­dom blog tomor­row for more insights into life on Indian trains.

A Practice for Today: Learning to Meditate

Posted on September 28, 2011 by  | Add Comment

“Set aside a place in your home to be used only for med­i­ta­tion and spir­i­tual read­ing. Don’t use it for any other pur­pose. The place of med­i­ta­tion should be calm, clean, and cool. I would add, well-ventilated – and, if pos­si­ble, quiet.

“If you can­not have an entire room, reserve at least one cor­ner. But what­ever you use, keep it only for med­i­ta­tion. Don’t talk about money or pos­ses­sions or friv­o­lous things there; don’t give vent to angry words. Grad­u­ally, your room or cor­ner will become holy.”

- Eknath Easwaran

Pas­sage med­i­ta­tion is the silent rep­e­ti­tion in the mind of mem­o­rized inspi­ra­tional pas­sages from the world’s great reli­gions. Click here for instruc­tions on pas­sage meditation.

Learn to Med­i­tate on a Pas­sage (Online Course)

Pas­sages for meditation

The Nature of Desire

Posted on September 26, 2011 by  | Add Comment

In this short excerpt from a 1987 talk, Easwaran dis­cusses the nature of desire and that desire is what gives value to any­thing in life. He dis­cov­ered that “the source of all joy and ful­fill­ment lies inside.”

The dis­cov­er­ies Easwaran recounts in this talk all grew out of his intense spir­i­tual search to dis­cover the Self. He speaks of his active engage­ment with the many details of daily life – eat­ing, read­ing, speak­ing, work­ing – which he tried to per­form with a new under­stand­ing. Easwaran learned to use every act and thought as a way to deepen his rela­tion­ship to the divine, or in Gandhi’s terms, to appre­ci­ate the true cor­re­spon­dence between the Maker and himself.

The com­plete talk, DVD 8: What Is Life For? is avail­able here.

Kindle Offer on Gandhi the Man Through September

Posted on September 23, 2011 by  | Add Comment

Our new edi­tion of Gandhi the Man, which includes more than 70 pho­tos, a new chronol­ogy, notes, and an intro­duc­tion by Easwaran, is cur­rently being fea­tured in Kin­dle Book Deals on Amazon.com.

The Kin­dle offer price is $3.99 (reduced from the list price of $16.95) and it will last until the end of Sep­tem­ber. We’re delighted to see that more than 1000 read­ers have taken advan­tage of this offer in the first half of Sep­tem­ber. The world needs this book!

Easwaran ends his account of Gandhi’s life with this mar­velous quote from the Mahatma:

“I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cul­ti­vate the same hope and faith.”

Gandhi the Man on Amazon.com

A Practice for Today: Slowing Down

Posted on September 21, 2011 by  | Add Comment

“Cul­ti­vate patience. Don’t rush those you live and work with. Give them time; you will be giv­ing your­self time as well.

“Reduce the time you spend on activ­i­ties that hurry your chil­dren. It will help them to sim­plify their lives and enjoy what they do, and it will give you more time for them too.”

- Eknath Easwaran

Slow­ing down means set­ting pri­or­i­ties and reduc­ing the stress and fric­tion caused by hurry. Click here for instruc­tions on slow­ing down.

Easwaran on Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ: Talk 33

Posted on September 19, 2011 by  | Add Comment

This is the 33rd 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 3, Chap­ter 3, “That the Words of God Are to Be Heard with Humility.”

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

A Completely New Book: Essence of the Bhagavad Gita, by Eknath Easwaran

Posted on September 16, 2011 by  | Read 6 Comments | Add Comment

Stephanie wrote in recently, with a num­ber of very thought­ful ques­tions on the role of the intel­lect on the spir­i­tual path. She ends by say­ing she wishes she could ask her ques­tions to Easwaran himself.

We have good news, Stephanie! We have a com­pletely new book by Easwaran com­ing out soon, based on tran­scripts of talks he held with close stu­dents towards the end of his life. It’s titled Essence of the Bha­gavad Gita, and we think you may well find your answers in that book.

It will be avail­able in Novem­ber, and next week we’ll be post­ing the new jacket on this blog and post­ing a series of extracts from the book. For now, here’s a list of chap­ter titles:

1 The War Within
2 The Nature of Real­ity
3 The End of Sor­row
4 Lev­els of Per­son­al­ity
5 The Sticky Illu­sion of Sep­a­rate­ness
6 The Mean­ing of Yoga
7 Wis­dom through Med­i­ta­tion
8 Yoga as Skill in Daily Liv­ing
9 Heal­ing the Uncon­scious
10 Life After Life
11 The Long Jour­ney of Evo­lu­tion
12 Into Battle

Thanks for con­tact­ing us, Stephanie, and for your patience. We’ll write more about the new book by Easwaran next week.

A Practice for Today: Increasing One-Pointed Attention

Posted on September 15, 2011 by  | Add Comment

“When talk­ing with some­one, give that per­son your full attention.

“When dri­ving, give full atten­tion to the road. Don’t lis­ten to music or talk to your pas­sen­gers; tell them you need to con­cen­trate. Sim­i­larly, when you’re a pas­sen­ger, don’t dis­tract the driver.

“Don’t bring your work home, in your brief­case or in your mind. And don’t bring the prob­lems of home into your work.”

- Eknath Easwaran

One-pointed atten­tion means giv­ing full con­cen­tra­tion to the mat­ter at hand. Click here for instruc­tions on one-pointed attention.

Postscript on Karma: Becoming an Instrument of God’s Peace

Posted on September 14, 2011 by  | Add Comment

What’s the link between under­stand­ing karma and act­ing as instru­ments of peace? Easwaran explains: “When I get angry with some­one, I can­not say, ‘This is just between George and me.’ It is not. It is between me and George and his wife and their neigh­bors and co-workers and all the other peo­ple who will pass my anger along. ‘I am involved in mankind,’ John Donne wrote. We are all involved, through the web of karma.

“In the later stages of med­i­ta­tion, we get glimpses of how vast this web is, how far it extends. Every­thing we do affects oth­ers, even every­thing we think. That is why it so essen­tial to learn to break the chain of cause and effect, so that we become not an instru­ment of oth­ers’ karma but in the beau­ti­ful words of Saint Fran­cis, an instru­ment of God’s peace.”

- Essence of the Upan­ishads by Eknath Easwaran, pages 170 – 171

If you would like to share any thoughts on this sub­ject, please write in – we are always pleased to hear from you!

The Nature of Happiness

Posted on September 12, 2011 by  | Add Comment

This excerpt is from a talk given dur­ing the Autumn of 1985, in which Easwaran draws on the teach­ings of the Bud­dha to present the art of “swim­ming against the cur­rent,” or learn­ing to make choices inde­pen­dent of our per­sonal con­di­tion­ing or the rigid, self­ish, or unthink­ing pat­terns in the world around us.

Dur­ing the course of this talk, Easwaran exam­ines the var­i­ous ways in which we are con­di­tioned by soci­ety to indulge our likes and dis­likes and to pur­sue our self-interest. That river of con­di­tion­ing is hard to cross. Its cur­rent is swift and strong. But the spir­i­tual aspi­rant who swims against this cur­rent will even­tu­ally find a true, last­ing hap­pi­ness in con­tribut­ing to the wel­fare of the world.

In this excerpt, Easwaran explains that our hap­pi­ness con­sists in mak­ing oth­ers happy. In his lan­guage, this is putting the wel­fare of oth­ers first.

The com­plete talk, DVD 10, Encour­age­ment from the Bud­dha, is avail­able here.


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

    We’ll also post items about the Blue Moun­tain Cen­ter of Med­i­ta­tion – new book announce­ments, retreat sched­ules and updates, news from our fel­low­ship groups.

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