By Eknath Easwaran

I said I developed this program, yet it would be more accurate to say I discovered it. Like a buried treasure, it lay there waiting to be found when I needed it.

At that time, I can honestly say, meditation was the farthest thing from my mind. My days were full with a job I loved, teaching English literature on a beautiful college campus in central India. I had begun to make a reputation as a writer; I had friends with whom to enjoy music, theater, tennis, and the quiet pleasures of good company; everything I wanted was flowing into my hands. It was a very satisfying situation, and if I had had time to think about it, I would have assured you I was happy.

Instead, I was surprised to find myself feeling empty inside. Something deep could not be satisfied. Old, old questions began to come unbidden as I lay awake at night: Why am I here? What is life for? What happens when I die?

Nothing in my education had prepared me for such questions. Nothing I read could answer them for me. Only when I discovered meditation did I find the higher vantage I needed to see life whole – and that discovery opened the door to a way of life so much more fulfilling that my days before seem like a dream.

As so often happens, it was death that precipitated the crisis. In a few short months, one after the other, I lost people passionately dear to me: Mahatma Gandhi, who had been my beacon since college; my beloved grandmother, my spiritual teacher; then a friend almost exactly my age. Systematically, every support I leaned on had been dashed away. With my world upside down, I came home from a walk one day and found that one of my dogs, who doted on me, had been run over by a passing truck. It was as if she stood for all of us: for Gandhi and Granny and everyone else who had died; for all of us still living, for whom death was simply biding time.

Instinctively, like so many before me, I turned to traditional wisdom. I was not at all religious, but at an early age I had fallen in love with India’s best-known scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, simply because of its poetry. I knew most of the verses by heart; nothing could be more natural than to turn to them in a time of crisis. I remember sitting down with eyes closed and letting the words roll through my consciousness:

Never was the Self born; never shall it 
Cease to be. Without beginning or end, 
Free from birth, free from death, and free from time, 
How can the Self die when the body dies? 

The words must have taken me in, because when I opened my eyes at last it had grown dark. Time had been suspended, and the burden of sorrow was gone. I felt as if I had returned from another world – an inner realm beyond time and space where somehow I was at home.

Over the next few weeks I revisited those verses, and many others, in the same way, seated in silence in the early morning, drawn by the way the words nourished my consciousness and anchored my life. Gradually it dawned on me that there was ancient tradition behind what I was doing. I was meditating – becoming absorbed in the words of the Gita just as I had seen Mahatma Gandhi doing years before. India had refined this to a science thousands of years ago, but I had known nothing of it. I had been looking everywhere for a treasure hidden at home.