Easwaran on Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ: Talk 36

Posted on October 31, 2011 by  | Add Comment

This is the 36th in a long series of talks Eknath Easwaran gave on The Imi­ta­tion of Christ by Thomas a Kem­pis. In this talk Easwaran con­tin­ues to read and dis­cuss Book 3, Chap­ter 5, “Of the Won­der­ful Effects of Divine Love.”

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

The Illusion of Separateness (from Easwaran’s new book Essence of the Bhagavad Gita)

Posted on October 28, 2011 by  | Add Comment

Our next excerpt from this new book is from a chap­ter with an intrigu­ing title: “The Sticky Illu­sion of Sep­a­rate­ness.” There’s a new story, too, about a very old game.

“How did we come to iden­tify our­selves so com­pletely with the phys­i­cal urges and pri­vate predilec­tions that make up such a small frag­ment of who we are? Why can’t we shake off this night­mare of sep­a­rate­ness – one party against another, one nation against another, one race against another, one indi­vid­ual against another? The Gita’s answer is sim­ple but far-reaching: this is our bio­log­i­cal legacy. When we are dri­ven by anger, fear, lust, or greed, it is not hard to rec­og­nize the con­di­tion­ing of our evo­lu­tion­ary past. It is this con­di­tion­ing that makes us iden­tify our­selves with body and mind – makes us think that is what we are.

“San­skrit calls this obses­sive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion maya, the cre­ative power of illu­sion that is implicit in the human mind. But ‘illu­sion’ is mis­lead­ing, for so long as we see life this way, this illu­sion is very real.

“Maya explains why we see what is not there and fail to see what is. The word has been con­nected with the Eng­lish word magic, which may not be sound ety­mol­ogy but makes a fruit­ful image. The main prin­ci­ple in magic is to divert the atten­tion of the audi­ence. If I can get you to give com­plete atten­tion to my left hand, I can do any­thing I like with my right and you won’t notice. Sim­i­larly, to con­ceal the Atman, no one has to hide it under a blan­ket; that would be very poor magic. The best magi­cians can hide some­thing sim­ply by mak­ing us look some­where else. And that’s just what maya does: it con­ceals the Self within us by assur­ing us that what will sat­isfy us lies ‘out there,’ just around the cor­ner – in phys­i­cal attrac­tions, in the allure of power or pres­tige, in the promise of roman­tic love. That’s why we always go look­ing for ful­fill­ment in chang­ing sit­u­a­tions – in the flux of appear­ances, the world of the senses, the world of change.

“I can give a sim­ple illus­tra­tion of maya from my vil­lage in South India, where we used to play a game prob­a­bly thou­sands of years old. The per­former sits by the road­side with three coconut half-shells upside down on a piece of cloth, shows bystanders a lit­tle ball, and says, ‘I’m going to put this ball under one of these shells, and then I’m going to move the shells around in front of your eyes while you watch. My hands are so fast they’ll make your head spin. If you think your eyes are faster, you place some money in front of the shell that has the ball. If you’re right, I’ll give you dou­ble – but if you guess wrong, I get to keep what you bet.’

“Then he puts the ball under one of the shells and moves them all around in a blur while we watch like hawks. ‘Now who wants to bet?’ There would always be some­one to step for­ward and put his money down – and every time, when the shell was lifted, there would be noth­ing underneath.

“I never saw any­body win that game, but we always felt so sure. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that the ball might actu­ally end up in the palm of his hand. Raman would try and lose; then Shankaran would say, ‘I saw the ball, I really saw it, just under the first shell.’ He feels so cer­tain that he puts down his quar­ter, but there’s noth­ing there. One by one, each places his bet, loses his money, and stands aside to watch the next fel­low – and then goes and bets again.

“Some­times a per­former like this would come to school dur­ing lunchtime, spread out his mat, and start his spiel. Old-timers would warn the first-year stu­dents, ‘We’ve played this; you will never win.’ Deaf ears. They would go, play, and lose every­thing, and then next year they too would tell the next batch of stu­dents, ‘Don’t play that game. You will never win.’ And of course the new­com­ers go on to play and lose.

“This is maya: some magic spell that makes us think we see joy where it is not and fail to see joy where it is. You put your money down and maya makes you feel absolutely pos­i­tive the ball is there. Every time. It may not work with Ros­alind, but it’s sure to work with Juliet – and if not Juliet, well, maybe Viola or Miranda . . .

“That’s the kind of game that maya plays, and as long as we have per­sonal desires to ful­fill, the Gita says, we can­not help get­ting caught in it. Only when we are detached – when we cease ask­ing life to give us some­thing for noth­ing – will we stop and think, ‘Wait, no one has ever won this,’ and refuse to put our money down. In life, of course, even more than money, we put our feel­ings down – our hopes, our needs, our love. And when feel­ings are the stakes, they get hurt – and that is just what maya likes, because hurt feel­ings keep us in the game. ‘Just one more time . . .’”

- Essence of the Bha­gavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran, pages 85 – 88

Easwaran con­tin­ues with a vivid descrip­tion of moha, which he trans­lates as delu­sion, con­fu­sion, and hal­lu­ci­na­tion. And in the fol­low­ing chap­ters he’ll tell us how we can free our­selves from both maya and moha through the prac­tice of yoga and med­i­ta­tion. We’ll pub­lish another excerpt next week.

This book is avail­able for pre-order from Ama­zon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite inde­pen­dent book­store. We hope you’ll find it as inspir­ing as we do!

Silence: A Passage for Facing Difficult Situations

Posted on October 27, 2011 by  | Add Comment

A friend in the med­ical pro­fes­sion told us recently that when she has to face a very dis­tress­ing sit­u­a­tion at work she chooses a pas­sage from God Makes the Rivers to Flow – Easwaran’s anthol­ogy of sacred texts from the world’s tra­di­tions. She then copies that pas­sage out to calm her mind, so that she can find her own deeper resources of strength and com­pas­sion, and be in a bet­ter state to help her patient.

This is a pas­sage she chose recently:

Silence

I weave a silence onto my lips.
I weave a silence into my mind.
I weave a silence within my heart.
I close my ears to dis­trac­tions.
I close my eyes to attrac­tions.
I close my heart to temptations.

Calm me, O Lord, as you stilled the storm.
Still me, O Lord, keep me from harm.
Let all tumult within me cease.
Enfold me, Lord, in your peace.

- God Makes the Rivers to Flow, page 150

Is there a pas­sage from God Makes the Rivers to Flow, or from Easwaran’s other anthol­ogy, Time­less Wis­dom, that you use when you need to calm your mind? If so do con­tact us via the com­ments box or by email at info@easwaran.org, with “Time­less Wis­dom blog: Pas­sages to calm the mind” in the sub­ject line. We’re always very pleased to hear from you!

A Practice for Today: Increasing One-Pointed Attention

Posted on October 26, 2011 by  | Read Comment | Add Comment

“Devel­op­ing a one-pointed mind will enrich your life moment by moment. You will find that your senses are keener, your emo­tions more sta­ble, your intel­lect more lucid, your sen­si­tiv­ity to the needs of oth­ers height­ened. What­ever you do, you will be there more fully.

“Enter­ing a home, you won’t slam the door because you will be there to hear it. You won’t so eas­ily trip or spill things or bump into peo­ple because you will be aware of your move­ments. You won’t for­get things, because your mind is engaged. You won’t become men­tally fatigued, for you are con­serv­ing your pow­ers. You will not be fickle or vac­il­lat­ing because you will have healed the mind of its divi­sions. And per­haps most pre­cious of all, you will not ignore the dis­tress or joy of oth­ers, because in look­ing into their eyes you will be look­ing truly into their hearts.”

- Eknath Easwaran

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

That Thou Art: The Perennial Philosophy

Posted on October 24, 2011 by  | Add Comment

In this talk, Easwaran lays out the fun­da­men­tal posi­tions of what Aldous Hux­ley called the Peren­nial Phi­los­o­phy, a set of cen­tral truths that under­lie all reli­gions. Easwaran presents the prac­tice of spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines as our means to real­ize these truths, thereby enabling us to act on them effec­tively in daily life.

In this excerpt, Easwaran quotes one of the so-called “great state­ments” of ancient India, or mahavakyas as they are called in San­skrit: tat tvam asi. Tat means “That” – the Supreme Real­ity, or God. The sec­ond word, tvam, means “you.” And asi means “you are.” So this mahavakya means “That is what you are,” or “You are That.”

The com­plete talk, DVD 14: Learn­ing to Live in Unity is avail­able here.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow

Essence of the Bhagavad Gita: The first in our series of excerpts

Posted on October 21, 2011 by  | Read 2 Comments | Add Comment

We’re start­ing our series of excerpts from the com­pletely new book by Easwaran, Essence of the Bha­gavad Gita: A Con­tem­po­rary Guide to Yoga, Med­i­ta­tion and Indian Phi­los­o­phy. As back­ground, here’s the Publisher’s Note from the front of the book:

“This book has been pro­duced by Eknath Easwaran’s senior edi­tors, long­time stu­dents who worked closely with him since his first book in 1970 and were charged by him with con­tin­u­ing to com­pile his books from tran­scripts of his talks after his passing.

Essence of the Bhagavad Gita

“In his last edi­to­r­ial plan­ning meet­ing, in 1998, Easwaran gave instruc­tions about the books in progress that he wanted com­pleted from his unpub­lished tran­scripts, out­lines, and notes. Essence of the Bha­gavad Gita is the first of those posthu­mous projects to be pub­lished, Easwaran’s final dis­til­la­tion of the Gita’s teach­ings. It is some­thing rare and pre­cious: the legacy of a gifted teacher shar­ing a lifetime’s immer­sion in a sacred text, con­veyed in his talks and infor­mal ses­sions with some of his clos­est students.

“It is a great priv­i­lege to pass such a work as this on to Easwaran’s read­ers around the world.”

Here’s the first excerpt, from the Introduction:

The Epic Set­ting

The Bha­gavad Gita appears in the sixth book of an immense epic called the Mahab­harata, which tells the story of the strug­gle between two rival branches of the same dynasty: the Pan­davas, five broth­ers, and the Kau­ravas, their cousins. But this story is only the back­bone of the Mahab­harata. India’s oral tra­di­tion, like India itself, is syn­cretic, and over the cen­turies many, many other sto­ries and bits of mythol­ogy, lore, and wis­dom were grafted onto this main storyline.

The Mahab­harata is not so much a sin­gle work as a lit­er­a­ture in itself. Though it can be con­densed into a run­ning nar­ra­tive, the vast major­ity of us in India absorb it in pieces, episodes that are told or sung or dra­ma­tized on their own.

The Bha­gavad Gita is one of these inde­pen­dent episodes and seems to have been always con­sid­ered a work of its own. It is not so much part of the Mahab­harata as an Upan­ishad, slipped into the nar­ra­tive about a third of the way in – a view sup­ported by the tra­di­tional colophon that ends each chap­ter, which iden­ti­fies the Gita as an Upan­ishad on yoga.

So far as drama goes, in any case, the Gita’s place­ment in the sto­ry­line is bril­liant. Despite attempts by the Pan­davas to pre­serve peace, the Kau­ravas have insisted on war – a cat­a­clysmic con­flict that will draw in almost every king­dom in India.

The Gita begins on the morn­ing before bat­tle is joined. Arjuna, one of the Pan­davas, instructs his char­i­o­teer, Sri Krishna, to drive their char­iot into the open field between the oppos­ing armies. There, see­ing fam­ily, friends, and teach­ers prepar­ing to destroy one another, he throws his bow to the ground and tells Krishna he can­not go on.

At this point the story is sus­pended, and we are lifted out of time while Sri Krishna gives Arjuna com­pre­hen­sive instruc­tion in the essen­tials of life and death: the Bha­gavad Gita. Then the teach­ing con­cludes, we drop back into the nar­ra­tive, and the Mahab­harata con­tin­ues – thou­sands upon thou­sands of verses giv­ing the tragic details of a con­vul­sive eighteen-day war in which vir­tu­ally all the major com­bat­ants on both sides com­pro­mise their honor and are slain.

It is sim­plest, of course, to see the Gita as an inte­gral part of this story, an episode that needs no expla­na­tion. Yet its over­all char­ac­ter is so dif­fer­ent from what comes before and after that it is easy to see why instead it has often been con­sid­ered an alle­gory. The names them­selves encour­age this: the bat­tle­field – Kuruk­shetra, “the field of the Kuru dynasty” – is dubbed dharma-kshetra, “the field of right­eous­ness”; King Dhritarashtra’s name can mean “he who has usurped the throne”; the names of his sons all begin with du-, “evil,” and their eldest, Dury­o­d­hana – lit­er­ally “dirty fighter” – leaves us no doubt about how well his name fits. On the other side is Sri Krishna, no less than an incar­na­tion of God, and Arjuna and his four broth­ers, each of whom has a god as his father. While things are never quite black and white – the Mahab­harata is as com­plex as Shake­speare – no one has ever won­dered who the “good guys” are, or doubted that this war is a strug­gle between good and evil.

Mahatma Gandhi took this a step fur­ther: the war the Gita describes, he held, actu­ally takes place within our­selves. There is a field called Kuruk­shetra north of Delhi where this bat­tle is said to have taken place, but in Gandhi’s view the real bat­tle– field is one’s own life, where the strug­gle between right and wrong, good and evil, rages from birth to death. There is ample sup­port for this view in the text itself: for exam­ple, when Sri Krishna tells Arjuna that the ene­mies he must con­quer are lust, fear, and anger. The dia­logue between these two then becomes not so much sym­bolic as a search­ing of the soul – an inter­pre­ta­tion that becomes liv­ing truth when one tries to trans­late the Gita’s teach­ings into thought and action. Like so many other dia­logues between God and man in mys­ti­cal lit­er­a­ture East and West – The Imi­ta­tion of Christ, the Psalms of David, the Katha Upan­ishad, the writ­ings of Hein­rich Suso or of Mechthild of Magde­burg – this is the heart’s appeal for wis­dom and guid­ance, answered, as it only can be, from within. Then the choice of a dia­logue for­mat may remind us of Plato: the wis­dom is within us, not in the text; the Gita only serves to draw it out.

One last point brings the Bha­gavad Gita directly into our times. The cen­tral mes­sage of the Gita is that life is an indi­vis­i­ble whole – a con­cept that con­tem­po­rary civ­i­liza­tion flouts at every turn. Until we learn the prin­ci­ples of unity and how to live in har­mony with them, the Gita would say, we can­not have abid­ing peace or live in har­mony with each other and the planet; we can­not even enjoy the real and last­ing progress that is the hall­mark of civilization.

The Gita doesn’t ask us to take this on faith. It sim­ply offers a frame of ref­er­ence through which we can look afresh at what we see around us, scru­ti­nize the plans and promises offered by con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics, and judge for our­selves how use­ful any approach can be that does not begin with the essen­tial unity of life.

- Essence of the Bha­gavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran, pages 15 – 18

“This is the heart’s appeal for wis­dom and guid­ance, answered, as it only can be, from within.” We liked that sen­tence so much that we put it on the back jacket.

We’ll fol­low with another excerpt next week from the chap­ter titled “The Nature of Real­ity.” The book is avail­able for pre-order from Ama­zon, Barnes & Noble, or your favorite inde­pen­dent book­store. We hope you’ll find it as inspir­ing as we do!

A Practice for Today: Slowing Down

Posted on October 19, 2011 by  | Add Comment

“It is impor­tant not to con­fuse slow­ness with sloth, which breeds care­less­ness, pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and gen­eral inef­fi­ciency. In slow­ing down, attend metic­u­lously to details. Give your very best even to the small­est undertaking.”

- 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 35

Posted on October 17, 2011 by  | Add Comment

This is the 35th in a long series of talks Eknath Easwaran gave on The Imi­ta­tion of Christ by Thomas a Kem­pis. In this talk Easwaran con­tin­ues to read and dis­cuss Book 3, Chap­ter 4, “That We Ought to Live in Truth and 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

Holding to the Constant: A Taoist Passage for Meditation

Posted on October 14, 2011 by  | Read 2 Comments | Add Comment

In a pre­vi­ous post a young friend men­tioned a pas­sage by Lao Tzu that she was using for med­i­ta­tion. It’s on page 34 of God Makes the Rivers to Flow, and here:

Hold­ing to the Constant

Break into the peace within,
Hold atten­tion in still­ness,
And in the world out­side
You will ably mas­ter the ten thou­sand things.

All things rise and flour­ish
Then go back to their roots.
See­ing this return brings true rest,
Where you dis­cover who you really are.
Know­ing who you are, you will find the con­stant.
Those who lack har­mony with the con­stant court dan­ger,
But those who have it gain new vision.

They act with com­pas­sion;
within them­selves, they can find room for every­thing.
Hav­ing room, they rule them­selves and lead oth­ers wisely.
Being wise, they live in accor­dance
with the nature of things.
Emp­tied of self, and at one with nature,
They become one with the Tao.
The Tao endures for­ever.
For those who have attained har­mony with the Tao
will never lose it,
Even if their bod­ies die.

And here’s a note about Lao Tzu:

Lao Tzu (“Mas­ter Lao,” c. 604 — 531 B.C.E.), a leg­endary sage of ancient China, is con­sid­ered the founder of Tao­ism. The leg­ends relate that he worked as an archivist in the royal court until he decided to with­draw com­pletely from worldly activ­i­ties. As he was leav­ing the king­dom for­ever, a gate­keeper begged him to record his teach­ings for pos­ter­ity. He sat down and quickly wrote out a series of poetic state­ments about how to live in har­mony with the nat­ural order of the uni­verse — verses that have been trea­sured for twenty-five hun­dred years as the Tao Te Ching. “Hold­ing to the Con­stant” is one of the trans­la­tions writ­ten for this book by Stephen H. Rup­penthal and included in his Path of Direct Awak­en­ing: Pas­sages for Med­i­ta­tion (Berke­ley Hills, 2003).

Meditation, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and the Fruits of Perseverance

Posted on October 14, 2011 by  | Read 2 Comments | Add Comment

“I have been hav­ing prob­lems with enthu­si­asm over the past few weeks,” wrote an hon­est young friend.

“Med­i­ta­tion has felt like noth­ing more than a chore; I’ve been miss­ing evening spir­i­tual read­ing most days; etc. Yes­ter­day in par­tic­u­lar was going really badly: I couldn’t muster the willpower to med­i­tate in the morn­ing, telling myself I’d do it in ‘just a lit­tle while.’ Just a lit­tle while turned into a lit­tle while longer, and a lit­tle while longer; finally, after bak­ing a batch of choco­late chip cook­ies, eat­ing too many of them, and read­ing an entire novel all day long, I told myself at 8:00 PM that I really had to med­i­tate now. I sure didn’t feel like it, but I haven’t missed a day since Jan­u­ary 1, 2011 and I didn’t want to break my record.

“Ok, so far this may seem like just the oppo­site of an inspir­ing e-mail :)

“How­ever, what hap­pened is that, to my com­plete sur­prise, I had the most won­der­ful med­i­ta­tion I’ve had in months. I was med­i­tat­ing on ‘Hold­ing to the Con­stant,’ and I felt that I felt and under­stood the mean­ing of the words like never before. It’s funny — I’ve been med­i­tat­ing on that pas­sage most days for weeks, but last night I felt like I had never even heard it before, it felt so real and sig­nif­i­cant in such a new way.

“I felt such a peace and tran­quil­ity that when my 30 min­utes were over I didn’t want to stop. (Of course, I did stop, remem­ber­ing Easwaran’s reminder not to go longer than 30 min­utes.) Luck­ily that sense of peace didn’t imme­di­ately go away when I stopped med­i­tat­ing. I did some spir­i­tual read­ing, and came across this pas­sage from Vol­ume 1 of the Bha­gavad Gita for Daily Living:

“Every day the work you do in med­i­ta­tion is prepar­ing you for shanti. You may have slept a lit­tle, digressed a lit­tle, or lost the pas­sage at times; still your med­i­ta­tion is bring­ing you closer to the supreme ful­fill­ment that is shanti. One day when you least expect it, your con­cen­tra­tion will become com­plete...” (p. 141)

“I’m sure that my con­cen­tra­tion wasn’t fully com­plete last night — far from it — but it was a lot closer than ever before, at least recently, and it cer­tainly did hap­pen when I least expected it! I’m sure this wouldn’t have hap­pened if I hadn’t gone through all those days of med­i­ta­tion that seemed, at the time, so pointless.

“Any­way, after that expe­ri­ence last night I resolved to put more energy and deter­mi­na­tion into my prac­tice. I repeated my mantram for all I was worth while falling asleep, woke up early and med­i­tated this morn­ing, and tried my hard­est to remain one-pointed and slowed down dur­ing my work today.

“I guess I would say that for me, this has bol­stered my belief that per­se­ver­ance will pay off sooner or later. I’m sure I will go through many rough peri­ods of lag­ging enthu­si­asm again, but I will try to keep in mind that if we just con­tinue to do the best we can — even if on some days that might not be very much — we will begin to reap some of the rewards. Last night after med­i­ta­tion I felt that it really was worth it, and more — all those days on which med­i­ta­tion had been such a strug­gle and I hadn’t seemed to be get­ting anywhere.”

Our thanks go to our friend for shar­ing her expe­ri­ences — and this really did turn out to be an inspir­ing email! If you have a story to share with us, please write in to us via the com­ments box, or email us at info@easwaran.org with “Time­less Wis­dom blog” in the sub­ject line — we would love to hear from you!

And if you’d like to know the words of the pas­sage “Hold­ing to the Con­stant” that our friend used in med­i­ta­tion, we’ll be pub­lish­ing that text in a follow-up post.


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

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    And we’ll post items from some of Easwaran’s many friends around the world who have brought his prac­ti­cal wis­dom into their lives.

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