Download Easwaran’s Learning to Love: Free just for today and tomorrow!

Posted on February 13, 2012 by  | Read 4 Comments | Add Comment

How do we build last­ing rela­tion­ships? Not through can­dle­light and roses, but through patience, kind­ness, and for­give­ness. A gen­tle sense of humor also helps, as Easwaran demon­strates in this new short e-book – avail­able free for only two more days.

Happy St. Valentine’s Day!

Down­load the free e-book Learn­ing to Love

“Call it not love that changeth” from Easwaran’s Learning to Love

Posted on February 3, 2012 by  | Add Comment

“I once spoke to a group of high school girls at a lun­cheon in Min­neapo­lis. After my talk I answered ques­tions, and the girl who presided asked, ‘You’ve used the word love many times. What does love mean to you?’ I gave her a straight answer: ‘When your boyfriend’s wel­fare means more to you than your own, you are in love.’ She turned to the rest of the gath­er­ing and said can­didly, ‘Well, I guess none of us has ever been in love.’

“I think that can be said of most peo­ple. If you look at pop­u­lar nov­els, gos­sip mag­a­zines, syrupy soap operas, and movies, you come away with the impres­sion that falling in love is some­thing that just hap­pens. Here you are, saun­ter­ing down Fourth Street mind­ing your own busi­ness, when sud­denly you spy a cer­tain some­one com­ing out of a shop and you fall in love as if into a man­hole. True love is much harder to come by than that.

“The mys­tics are the world’s author­i­ties on love. When Saint Teresa says ‘Amor saca amor,’ she is giv­ing us the basic prin­ci­ple: ‘Love begets love.’ One of the most beau­ti­ful things about love is that even today it can­not be pur­chased. It can­not be stolen, it can­not be ran­somed, it can­not be cajoled, it can­not be seduced. Amor saca amor: only gen­uine love begets love.

“All of us have been con­di­tioned, even though we may not put it in such crass terms, to believe that if you love me six units, I should love you at most six units in return. I can feel secure in lov­ing you six units because you have already com­mit­ted your­self that far. But if you get annoyed with me and stomp out, slam­ming the door, I should get annoyed in return — and pull back, at least tem­porar­ily, my six units of love. This is the type of bar­gain that more and more so-called lovers strike today. Saint Teresa would say uncom­pro­mis­ingly, ‘Don’t pre­tend that this is love. It falls more accu­rately under the head­ing of com­merce.’ Shake­speare put the mat­ter in per­fect per­spec­tive: ‘Call it not love that changeth.’

“The whole thrust of what Teresa is con­fid­ing to us is sim­ple: With prac­tice, every­one can learn to love like this; every­one can live in end­less love. After all, even if you don’t learn Esperanto, your life is not nec­es­sar­ily going to be dull and drab. Even if you are not inti­mately acquainted with ancient Sumer­ian sculp­ture, you can make it through life with­out suf­fer­ing seri­ous depres­sion. But if you do not learn how to love, every­where you go you are going to suffer.”

This excerpt is from a new, short e-book by Easwaran, titled Learn­ing to Love, and com­piled from excerpts from his writ­ings. We’ll be offer­ing this short e-book free on St. Valentine’s Day (more infor­ma­tion to be pro­vided as the date approaches).

The Great Transformer

Posted on January 30, 2012 by  | Add Comment

This excerpt from Eknath Easwaran appeared in the Win­ter 2008 issue of our quar­terly Blue Moun­tain journal.

“In my col­lege days in India I was on the debat­ing team, and I enjoyed debat­ing very much. I enjoyed prepar­ing ahead of time to present both sides of the issues that the debat­ing mas­ters pro­posed. And when fac­ing a well-spoken and well-prepared oppo­nent, I enjoyed the inten­sity of debate itself. For me it had all the drama of an ath­letic event, with its pos­si­bil­i­ties for mas­tery of a dif­fi­cult skill and for grace under pressure.

“What I didn’t like, how­ever, was the feel­ing of intense stage fright that I felt for about an hour before each debate was to begin. Dur­ing that hour, I suf­fered all the well-known symp­toms of this com­mon mal­ady: sweaty palms, irreg­u­lar breath­ing, a pound­ing heart, and, worst of all, the ques­tion that would go through my mind over and over: Why did I ever join the debat­ing soci­ety? And the anguished answer: I wish I never had! I can’t go through with this; I can’t go through with this. 


“I was a young Hindu boy, from a small vil­lage in Ker­ala State, South India, and it was my first year at a Catholic col­lege where Eng­lish was the medium of instruc­tion. All debat­ing was, of course, done in Eng­lish. I had stud­ied Eng­lish in my high school, but it was not my native lan­guage. Need­less to say, I felt inse­cure about my abil­i­ties to speak Eng­lish on the debat­ing platform. 


“There I was, just start­ing my col­lege career, with a love for pub­lic speak­ing and espe­cially for debat­ing, about to give it all up because I couldn’t bear that hour of ter­ror before step­ping up onto the plat­form. Yes, it was unrea­son­able; but it seemed an obsta­cle I just couldn’t overcome. 


“Then I went to my grand­mother, my spir­i­tual teacher, and asked her what to do about the anx­i­ety that gripped me when­ever I had to stand and speak before an audi­ence. She told me not to dwell on the anx­i­ety, but just to keep repeat­ing in my mind the words Rama, Rama, Rama. I knew this was a mantram that my granny used. When I was a child, I used to wake up every morn­ing in our spa­cious ances­tral home to the sweet sound of her singing her mantram as she swept the court­yard with her coconut fiber broom. At that time I didn’t give the mantram much thought; it was just some­thing I heard every morn­ing from the lips of some­one I loved very deeply. 


“So I knew that Rama was used as a prayer or mantram, but I wasn’t a par­tic­u­larly devout young man, and my unspo­ken reac­tion to my granny’s advice was, ‘That’s too easy, too sim­ple, too mirac­u­lous.’ I was skep­ti­cal, but such was my love for my grand­mother that I tried it any­way. ‘I hope it works,’ I said, and the next time I sat on the plat­form wait­ing my turn to speak, I kept repeat­ing the mantram in my mind. It seemed to help. 


“After that, when­ever I was called upon to debate, I would silently repeat the mantram before­hand, and after a while I said, ‘I think it works.’ I would still get a few but­ter­flies in my stom­ach, but I no longer suf­fered from a pound­ing heart and irreg­u­lar breathing. 


“Then I began to use it on any occa­sion that I found stress­ful. Today, after many years of using the mantram, I can say, on the strength of my own per­sonal expe­ri­ence, ‘I know it works.’


“Thanks to the wis­dom of my grand­mother, I enjoyed debat­ing through­out my col­lege career, which was crowned by the day our team won the inter­col­le­giate debat­ing cham­pi­onship. Later in life, also due to her bless­ings, I have enjoyed two careers involv­ing pub­lic speak­ing: one as a col­lege pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and one as a teacher of med­i­ta­tion. And I have never been par­a­lyzed by stage fright, all because I fol­lowed her sim­ple advice to ‘just repeat Rama, Rama, Rama.’”

Read the entire arti­cle here

A New Year’s Resolution: Refry your memory and get rid of resentments

Posted on January 1, 2012 by  | Add Comment

For a fresh start to 2012, here’s some time­less advice from Easwaran from our archives.

“Many years ago on the eve of the New Year, my wife and I were walk­ing along the streets of San Fran­cisco when to my amaze­ment it appeared to start snow­ing. Now, snow is not at all com­mon in the Bay Area, even in Decem­ber; but from all the office win­dows I saw huge snowflakes float­ing down. I must have been stand­ing there star­ing, because Chris­tine began explain­ing to me that these were all pages of old cal­en­dars, being thrown out to cel­e­brate the end of the old year and the birth of the new.

“If we truly grasp what this stands for, it is quite an appro­pri­ate cel­e­bra­tion. But unfor­tu­nately, almost all of us go into the New Year bear­ing the same old resent­ments, jeal­ousies, and con­flicts which made the old year a bur­den on us. If we do carry these encum­brances along with us, we should admit in all can­dor, ‘We’re still liv­ing in 1979.’ Even though peo­ple will wish us a ‘very happy New Year,’ the prospects are all too likely that we will have the same ‘unhappy Last Year’ all over again.

“In order to have a ghost of a chance for a really happy New Year, we must learn how to tear out all the pages in our men­tal note­book where mem­ory has recorded in grue­some detail every­thing unpleas­ant that was said or done to us. In other words, I would say tear out all the old resent­ful episodes from 1979 and never bother dwelling on any of them again. Oth­er­wise they are going to cause a lot of pain in the year to come. Then go into the New Year with a fresh resolve to keep that kind of episode from caus­ing fur­ther anguish in the eight­ies. This is the most press­ing New Year’s res­o­lu­tion there can be.

“In India we had a dear friend with a cook who used to agi­tate her very much. My friend con­fided her prob­lem to me, and after some con­sid­er­a­tion I hit upon a sim­ple idea. Her lit­tle cot­tage sat on an exten­sive prop­erty, and the gate was a good hun­dred yards from her door, clearly vis­i­ble from her win­dow. ‘As soon as this lady appears,’ I advised — ‘in fact, as soon as you hear the click of the gate sig­nal­ing her arrival — start repeat­ing your mantram. Don’t wait for agi­ta­tion to strike.’ It was always a race between the resent­ment and the mantram, but in the long run the mantram won out.

“This is the first word of advice I would give any­one who is try­ing to come to grips with a resent­ful mem­ory: do not let your mind give it even one sec­ond of atten­tion if you can help it. Start repeat­ing your mantram as soon as you feel the slight­est stir of resent­ment in your mind, and over a long period of time I can assure you that the mantram will be able to defuse that time bomb and dis­con­nect its emo­tional charge.

“When we have been able to make some of these dif­fi­cult choices, old mem­o­ries of some­one being rude or dis­loyal to us or cheat­ing us can­not have any emo­tional charge what­so­ever. When these mem­o­ries do come up, as they well might from time to time, it will be like watch­ing a play. They are just mem­o­ries that are nei­ther for nor against any­one in particular.

“In San­skrit there is a delight­fully homely phrase for this: these par­tic­u­lar mem­ory seeds have been fried. It shows you the humor of some of the Hindu sages. Fry a seed and then you can throw it on the ground with­out any fear of its ger­mi­nat­ing. So I would advise every­one, ‘Fry 1979 — with all its resent­ments, its jeal­ousies, its petty hos­til­i­ties, dis­ap­point­ments, and frus­tra­tions. Fry it, deep-fry it, then refry it.’ Then you can mix with all the same peo­ple who used to agi­tate you and find that there is no adverse emo­tional response. Then you are free. So let us treat our­selves to a great feast for the New Year — refried memory.”

Please see our online course if you’d like to read more from Easwaran on choos­ing and using a mantram, for refry­ing those mem­ory seeds.

Finding the Common Ground

Posted on December 30, 2011 by  | Add Comment

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

“For Gandhi, love and self­less action were one. ‘I don’t want to be at home only with my friends,’ he said, ‘I want to be at home with my ene­mies too.’ It wasn’t a mat­ter of speak­ing; he lived it out through forty years of solid opposition.

“The other day I saw some doc­u­men­tary footage of Gandhi with a promi­nent polit­i­cal fig­ure who opposed him so relent­lessly that peo­ple said he had a prob­lem for every solu­tion Gandhi offered. These scenes were shot in 1944, when the two lead­ers met for a series of talks in which lit­er­ally mil­lions of lives were hang­ing in the bal­ance. It took my breath away to see Gandhi treat­ing his oppo­nent with the affec­tion one shows an inti­mate friend. At the begin­ning of each day’s dis­cus­sions, the man’s face would be a mask of hos­til­ity; at the end of the day, both men would come out smil­ing and jok­ing. Then, by the next morn­ing, the man would have frozen over again, and Gandhi would start all over with the same cheer­ful patience, try­ing to find some com­mon ground.

“That is how the mys­tic approaches con­flict, and it pulls the rug out from under all the tra­di­tional the­o­ries. There is a lot being writ­ten these days about con­flict res­o­lu­tion, which I am glad to see. But no mat­ter what you read, they will always say in effect, ‘This is how you deal with your oppo­nent.’ Gandhi, Saint Fran­cis, Saint Teresa would all say, ‘No. The moment you start think­ing about the other per­son as an oppo­nent, you make it impos­si­ble to find a solu­tion.’ There are no oppo­nents in a dis­agree­ment; there are sim­ply two peo­ple fac­ing a com­mon prob­lem. In other words, they are not in oppo­site camps. They are in the same camp: the real oppo­nent is the problem.

“To apply this, you have to set aside the ques­tion of who is to blame. We have a say­ing in my mother tongue: ‘It takes two to get mar­ried and two to quar­rel.’ No mat­ter what the cir­cum­stances, nei­ther per­son bears sole respon­si­bil­ity for a quar­rel. It is an encour­ag­ing out­look, because if both are respon­si­ble, both together can find a solu­tion – not merely a com­pro­mise, but a way to resolve the quar­rel peacefully.

“To do this, it is nec­es­sary to lis­ten – and lis­ten with respect. For how can you end a quar­rel if you do not even hear what the quar­rel is about? How can you solve a prob­lem with two sides if you never hear what the other side is? More than that, if you can’t lis­ten to the other per­son with detach­ment, you will not have the detach­ment to under­stand your own posi­tion objec­tively, either. It’s not just one side of the prob­lem you can’t see; it’s both. So lis­ten with respect: it may hurt you, it may irri­tate you, but it is a heal­ing process.

“Grad­u­ally, if you can bear with this, you will find that you are no longer think­ing about ‘my point of view’ and ‘your point of view.’ Instead you say, ‘There is a point of view that is com­mon to you and me, which we can dis­cover together.’ Once you can do this, the quar­rel is over. You may not have reached a solu­tion – usu­ally, in fact, there is a lot of hard work left to do. But the quar­rel itself is over, because now you know that there are two of you play­ing on the same side against the problem.”

Read more from the book Patience

Easwaran on Christmas

Posted on December 23, 2011 by  | Add Comment

Christ­mas shop­ping, even when it’s sim­pli­fied, can feel drain­ing. Easwaran helps us get back in bal­ance in this excerpt from a talk on the Prayer of Saint Francis.

“The great excite­ment at Christ­mas has become look­ing in your stock­ing and open­ing presents,” he writes. “But our needs are much too big to be sat­is­fied with things, no mat­ter how many we can man­age to get. It often seems that the more we try, the more acutely we feel those needs. What I would say is, ‘Don’t you want to find your stock­ing filled with good things every morning?’

“We can, every morn­ing right after our med­i­ta­tion, only we can­not expect to find our stock­ing filled if we leave it hang­ing there full of stuff. Just as with Krishna’s flute, there will be no room for the Lord to put any­thing in unless we empty our­selves every day by giv­ing all we can in the way of kind­ness and lov­ing help. Then every morn­ing we will find our­selves full again: of love, of under­stand­ing, of for­give­ness, and of energy with which to carry these to others.

“Every day we can receive these gifts and every day we can share them with all, whether peo­ple are par­tic­u­larly friendly with us or not. The more we share, the more we will win the love and respect of all — and the more we win their love and respect, the less our tur­moil and trou­bles. Bur­dens will lie very lightly on us.

“For every­body who has prob­lems or who wants to go for­ward steadily on the spir­i­tual path, my recipe would be, ‘Hang up an empty stock­ing and every day you will find your life fill­ing more and more with joy.’”

True Strength in Kindness

Posted on November 21, 2011 by  | Add Comment

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

“Strength is often equated with the capac­ity to attack, but to me it means the inter­nal tough­ness to take what­ever life deals out with­out los­ing your human­ity. It is those who never stoop to retal­i­a­tion, never demand an eye for an eye, who are truly strong. They have the tough­ness to be ten­der, even sweet, while resist­ing vio­lence with all their heart. By con­trast, those who are ready to strike back at the slight­est provo­ca­tion are not strong but frag­ile. They may espouse a higher view of human nature, but almost any­thing can break them and make them lash back at those they oppose.

“When some­one is being sar­cas­tic or cruel to you, the nat­ural response is to retal­i­ate. If you want to be unshake­able, you have to train your mind in patience and endurance, the most gru­el­ing train­ing that life offers. Life shows no mercy to those who lack this inner strength. Every virtue requires the tough­ness never to retreat in the face of challenge.

“My grand­mother had a very pun­gent phrase for dif­fi­cult peo­ple: ‘A lash in the eye.’ We all know from expe­ri­ence how an eye­lash in the eye can be so irri­tat­ing that we just can­not think about any­thing else. That is exactly how dif­fi­cult peo­ple affect those around them. But for the mys­tics, this lash in the eye is an oppor­tu­nity for learn­ing the skills in life that mat­ter most:patience, for­give­ness, and free­dom from likes and dis­likes. When they think of some­one who has been a thorn in their flesh, they will say to them­selves, ‘With­out you, how could I ever have learned to be patient? How could I ever have learned to forgive?’

“It is a very poor eval­u­a­tion of human beings to think that impa­tience and vio­lent reac­tions are part of human nature. We have to look to peo­ple like Mahatma Gandhi, who was kind under any provo­ca­tion, to see what human nature is really like. Gandhi’s life showed over and over that even avi­o­lent per­son will respond if exposed to some­one who, by always being kind, focuses con­sis­tently on the high­est in our nature.”

Patience, the book

Yoga as Skill in Daily Living (from Easwaran’s new book Essence of the Bhagavad Gita)

Posted on November 11, 2011 by  | Read 3 Comments | Add Comment

This excerpt comes from chap­ter eight in the new book by Easwaran that will be in book­stores in a few weeks’ time, and that has been com­piled from pre­vi­ously unpub­lished mate­r­ial. Here he is telling us how – even in the midst of life today – we can attain the higher state that the Upan­ishads call ananda, or joy.

“One of the char­ac­ter­is­tic con­tri­bu­tions of the Bha­gavad Gita is its empha­sis on life as a dual­ity. Plea­sure and pain, heat and cold, honor and dis­honor, profit and loss, friend and foe – paired phrases like these, in the Gita’s usage, are short­hand for the posi­tion that life as we expe­ri­ence it is always an encounter with oppo­sites. How­ever much we might wish this were oth­er­wise – and always wish­ing it to be oth­er­wise seems part of our men­tal makeup – no one has ever suc­ceeded in iso­lat­ing plea­sure and avoid­ing pain, in win­ning respect with­out incur­ring dis­ap­proval, or gen­er­ally get­ting any­thing the way one wants in any aspect of life at all. It sim­ply is not pos­si­ble; that’s not how life is.

“Of course, we all know this, but that doesn’t stop the mind from inces­santly wish­ing that things were dif­fer­ent – which, as my grand­mother liked to say, is like ask­ing a banana tree to give you mangoes.

“How­ever, the Gita isn’t talk­ing about being real­is­tic about what we want. It is mak­ing a point that is absolutely cen­tral to under­stand­ing how to live. The dual­ity of life as we expe­ri­ence it is not a fea­ture of life as it is; it is imposed by the makeup of the mind itself. It is an upadhi, an appar­ent lim­i­ta­tion imposed on real­ity by each level of the mind.

“In fact, at one of these lev­els – that of bud­dhi, the intel­lect or higher mind – defin­ing oppo­sites is the basic func­tion. Its very pur­pose is to make dis­tinc­tions, so that we can decide what is ben­e­fi­cial and what is not, what is true and what is false, and so forth. We would be well enough off if things stopped there, but they do not. The lower mind steps in to insist on what it desires, which of course is often opposed to the higher judg­ment about what is ben­e­fi­cial; and the stick­ier our attach­ment to get­ting what we want, the more likely it is that the higher mind is going to get over­ruled. At the phys­i­cal level, the body and senses join the dis­cus­sion with their own insis­tence on get­ting what is pleas­ing. And at the root, as usual, is the ego, with its divi­sion between itself and the rest of life.

“This makes life a roller-coaster ride. The mind is con­stantly up, down, or wob­bling, depend­ing on how much we like or dis­like what the world is giv­ing us at the moment. Hap­pi­ness will come our way today, sor­row will come tomor­row, and we get elated when hap­pi­ness comes and down­hearted when sor­row fol­lows. Sim­i­larly, as long as we are sus­cep­ti­ble to adu­la­tion, we are going to be sus­cep­ti­ble to cen­sure; as long as we get elated by suc­cess, we will get depressed by fail­ure. We will be happy when peo­ple like us and unhappy when we think they don’t. This is the prac­ti­cal mean­ing of that abstract idea about a split in con­scious­ness: it dri­ves the mind to con­stant tur­moil and vacillation.

“And the Gita, of course, is telling us that we don’t have to live this way. We can’t stop life from going up and down, but we don’t have to go up and down with it. Instead of wish­ing the world would give us what we want, we can, through the dis­ci­plines of yoga, go beyond the dual­ity of a divided mind. And when we do, we find that instead of lik­ing this and dis­lik­ing that, we live con­tin­u­ously in a higher state that the Upan­ishads call ananda: joy. Lik­ing and dis­lik­ing are emo­tions, plea­sure and pain are sen­sa­tions; all these belong to the phe­nom­e­nal world. Joy is a state of con­scious­ness, on a dif­fer­ent level altogether.

“The Indian scrip­tures illus­trate this with a beau­ti­ful image. In a trop­i­cal coun­try the weather can be quite dra­matic, par­tic­u­larly dur­ing a mon­soon storm. You can watch masses of indigo-blue rain­clouds gather at the hori­zon and sweep towards you minute by minute till they cover the sky, so you can see nei­ther the sun dur­ing the day nor moon and stars at night. But the sky itself is unaf­fected. When black clouds come, the sky doesn’t curl up and hide; it’s not even touched, and we know it’s only a mat­ter of time before the clouds are swept away. Sim­i­larly, the scrip­tures say, when thoughts flit across the mind, they needn’t affect us. Even dis­turb­ing thoughts such as anger or fear, which come to all of us, are no more than clouds that darken the mind as they pass.

“In prac­tice, this means that when neg­a­tive thoughts come, we can try to behave as if we are not influ­enced by them. For exam­ple, even if you don’t like some­body, try to behave as if you do by talk­ing to him with respect and lis­ten­ing to his point of view. All you have to do is not act on what you feel. Don’t use harsh words, don’t walk out, don’t refuse to coop­er­ate. Every time you try this, it brings more detach­ment. It is dif­fi­cult; no one has ever called it easy. But if you can prac­tice this sys­tem­at­i­cally, day by day, most of the agi­ta­tion in the mind will stop, which means there is no wear and tear on the ner­vous system.

“Of course, the com­ment this imme­di­ately pro­vokes is, “Isn’t this utterly hyp­o­crit­i­cal? Does the Gita want us to pre­tend?” Not at all. This is our real nature; it is anger that is hypocrisy. Even if kind­ness seems a pre­tense, it is being true to our real Self. All things con­sid­ered, given that we are deal­ing with many years of con­di­tion­ing to the con­trary, it is remark­able how quickly we come to under­stand that this is our real nature. This can hap­pen almost mirac­u­lously when con­scious­ness is unifed, as Sri Krishna promises in verses that have con­soled millions:

What­ever you do, make it an offer­ing to me – the food you eat, the sac­ri­fices you make, the help you give, even your suf­fer­ing. . . .

Even sin­ners become holy when they take refuge in me alone. Quickly their souls con­form to dharma and they attain to bound­less peace. Never for­get this, Arjuna: no one who is devoted to me will ever come to harm. (9:27, 30 – 31)”

- Essence of the Bha­gavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran, p. 150

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!

The Challenge of Karma Yoga (from Easwaran’s new book Essence of the Bhagavad Gita)

Posted on November 4, 2011 by  | Add Comment

In the chap­ter titled “The Mean­ing of Yoga,” Easwaran addresses the three major paths to the ulti­mate goal: jnana, karma, and bhakti yoga. (All San­skrit terms are defined at the end of the excerpt.) Here he is describ­ing the chal­lenges of karma yoga, the way of self­less action.

“This way appeals to those who want to make some con­tri­bu­tion to the wel­fare of oth­ers, but karma yoga is more than ser­vice. Ser­vice – work that ben­e­fits oth­ers – is nec­es­sary for every human being, the Gita main­tains; it is incum­bent on us to give back to life as we take from it. But this becomes yoga only when it is self­less: when we for­get our­selves in that work and desire noth­ing from it for our­selves, not even recog­ni­tion or appre­ci­a­tion. When we learn to act in this way, ego­tism shrinks and sep­a­rate­ness grad­u­ally dissolves.

“Such self­less ser­vice is rare. Much more com­mon – among those who help the world at all – are those who do good but need some kind of recog­ni­tion or reward. Such peo­ple have ben­e­fited the world enor­mously, so these words are not meant at their expense. The ques­tion is sim­ply what effect this work has on them. If it loosens ego­tism, pride, and the bonds of sep­a­rate­ness, it can be called karma yoga, but not if it is mak­ing these bonds stronger.

“The word karma comes from the San­skrit word for doing, and refers not only to phys­i­cal action but to words and even thoughts. Any­thing that has an effect in the field of prakriti, whether the phys­i­cal world or the mind, is karma. Even when we are think­ing, we are act­ing. Angry thoughts, for exam­ple, affect not only our­selves but those around us. Just go and sit near an angry per­son for a while; by the time you leave, you will feel you had been squeezed dry.

“So the word karma means not only actions but the con­se­quences of action, in the fullest sense of the word. Every action has effects which go on to become causes, in an end­less chain of cause and effect. The virtue of karma yoga is that when we act with­out thought of self, there is no chan­nel for the results of our actions to act on us again. Every human being has an immense load of past karma – actions that must have effects. But as each of these fails to become a fresh cause, the bur­den of karma is reduced; and when it is reduced to zero, the Gita says, there is noth­ing to com­pel action; we act and live in freedom:

They live in free­dom who have gone beyond the dual­i­ties of life. Com­pet­ing with no one, they are alike in suc­cess and fail­ure and con­tent with what­ever comes to them. They are free, with­out self­ish attach­ments; their minds are fixed in knowl­edge. They per­form all work in the spirit of ser­vice, and their karma is dis­solved. (4:22 – 23)

“Karma yoga is praised through­out the Gita; since all of us must act in one way or another, Sri Krishna says, we should learn how to act self­lessly because that alone will help us free our­selves from the results of past karma. But you can see why a true karma yogi is so rare. The best exam­ple I can point to in our own times who embod­ies this path is Mahatma Gandhi, and he is quite can­did about how dif­fi­cult he found it to work tire­lessly for oth­ers with­out get­ting attached to things turn­ing out his way.

“The key to this is given in some of the most famous verses in the Gita:

You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inac­tion. Per­form work in this world, Arjuna, as a man estab­lished within him­self – with­out self­ish attach­ments, and alike in suc­cess and defeat. For yoga is per­fect even­ness of mind. (2:47 – 48)

“This sounds pre­scrip­tive, but Sri Krishna is just point­ing out some­thing we all know but can’t eas­ily accept: we have really no con­trol over the results of what we do. Even with some­thing that seems com­pletely within our domain, a mil­lion things can go wrong; a mil­lion events can change the out­come in an instant. We can’t con­trol the uni­verse; we are doing well if we man­age to con­trol our­selves. There­fore, Sri Krishna says, it is within our power to act wisely, but wise not to be anx­ious about get­ting what we want. Gandhi sum­ma­rized this in a mem­o­rable apho­rism: ‘Do your best, then leave the results to God.’

“Krishna goes on to explain the value of this kind of detachment:

Those who are moti­vated only by desire for the fruits of action are mis­er­able, for they are con­stantly anx­ious about the results of what they do. When con­scious­ness is uni­fied, how­ever, all vain anx­i­ety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill.
There­fore, devote your­self to the dis­ci­plines of yoga, for yoga is skill in action. (2:49 – 50)

“In prac­ti­cal terms, he is remind­ing us that worry, vac­il­la­tion, and other divi­sions in con­scious­ness only weaken our resolve and dis­turb our focus. When Mahatma Gandhi had to make a deci­sion, he would put his atten­tion on the prob­lem com­pletely, work out the pros and cons, and lis­ten to trusted advice before decid­ing what to do. Then, once he had made his deci­sion, he didn’t pay the slight­est atten­tion to praise or blame or even threats. It’s not that he ignored the out­come; when he decided he had mis­cal­cu­lated, he could reverse him­self spec­tac­u­larly. But he was always in the driver’s seat, not pushed and pulled about by what other peo­ple thought.

“The result of this is just mar­velous: you don’t lose your nerve when things go wrong. The main rea­son why we get afraid of obsta­cles and anx­ious about prob­lems, the Gita says, is that we become entan­gled in get­ting the results we want. The secret of karma yoga lies in using right means to achieve a right end, and then not get­ting anx­ious over the out­come. When we have learned to drop attach­ment to get­ting what we want while work­ing hard and self­lessly for a great cause, we can work with­out anx­i­ety, with con­fi­dence and peace of mind. Reverses will come, but they will only drive us deeper into our consciousness.

Bet­ter indeed is knowl­edge than mechan­i­cal prac­tice. Bet­ter than knowl­edge is med­i­ta­tion. But bet­ter still is sur­ren­der of attach­ment to results, because there fol­lows imme­di­ate peace. (12:12)

“As I said ear­lier, this is a very tall order. One could prac­tice it for a life­time and still feel a begin­ner, as Gandhi said. Nev­er­the­less, it is impor­tant for every one of us to do our best to learn this skill in every aspect of our lives, because the need for self­less ser­vice has become so urgent. We live in a world of immense tur­bu­lence. You have only to pick up a news­pa­per to see that none of us can afford to chase after per­sonal profit or plea­sure while the world seethes with prob­lems which glob­al­iza­tion brings right to our front door.”

- From Essence of the Bha­gavad Gita, by Eknath Easwaran

From the Glos­sary (where longer expla­na­tions can be found):
karma yoga: The way of action; the path of self­less ser­vice
jnana yoga: The way of wis­dom that seeks knowl­edge of the form­less god­head.
bhakti yoga: The way of love. One of the major paths to Self-realization in the Gita.
prakriti: The basic energy from which the men­tal and phys­i­cal worlds take shape.

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!

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!


  • 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.

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

    We hope you’ll join the con­ver­sa­tion as well.

    RSS FeedSub­scribe with RSS

  • Subscribe by email

    Subscribe below to receive a notification via email every Friday with links to our posts of the previous week.

    We will not share your email address with anyone. To change your email address or to unsubscribe, fill in the information for your subscription above and click Unsubscribe

  • Administration

    •