Conclusion

This being the conclusion, custom calls for us to look back over the trip we’ve been taking together, and to try and figure out where it is we’ve come with it all. In service to that, it would seem appropriate for us to do a couple of things: The first is to bring together the various strands of thought we have been following, to tie up the loose ends so we can come to some feeling of closure about it all. The other is to reflect on what all this might conceivably have had to do with the Bhagavad Gita.

To take the last one first: I think we’ve found that the relationship between this book and the Gita is a little more subtle than we may at first have anticipated. Although this is supposed to be a book about the Gita, and although it has come out of many, many years of reading and studying the Gita, a lot of it hasn’t been directly connected to the Gita in any technical sense. It clearly wasn’t a scholarly discourse on the text, for example. It wasn’t an interpretation of its slokas. I think what would be most accurate is to say that this book is a commentary on the foundation concepts on which the Gita is built, and a reflection on some ways we can bring the Gita’s practices into our own spiritual lives. Those are the aspects of the Gita that we have been exploring.

As for creating closure and bringing it all together, I suspect that that will really have to wait until it happens, in its own time, in each of our hearts, as we bring the teachings into the light of our own experiences. But although we probably can’t tie it all together in a neat package, what we can do instead is to trace the major threads that have run through this book.

Looking back, I think we can see that the underlying theme throughout all of this has had to do with the way the Bhagavad Gita provides us with a map for our own sadhana. The Gita sets out a system of practices, yogas, for bringing us into union with Brahman, with the One. And when those practices work, as they do in the case of Arjuna, then comes the Mystic Vision.

In the eleventh chapter of the Gita, we’re given a taste of what that vision is like. Arjuna says to Krishna, “I have heard thy words of truth, but my soul is yearning to see thy form as God of this all.” Then, because of the preparation Arjuna has had, Krishna gives him “divine sight,” so he can see Krishna’s cosmic form—which is Awe-ful: full of awe. Arjuna sees the whole universe there in front of him, all around him, with the radiance of a thousand suns—all of creation coming and going in Krishna.

That vision totally blows Arjuna’s mind. He says, “I have seen what no man has seen before. I rejoice in exultation—and yet my heart trembles with fear. Have mercy upon me: show me again thine own human form.” The mystic vision is too much for Arjuna’s mind to take in; he’s ready to go back to seeing Krishna in his human form again. But as a result of that experience, any remaining doubts Arjuna may have had are overridden, and he simply surrenders into doing his dharma. From that point on, Krishna starts to give him instruction in a much more direct way. The seduction is over, if you will.

Now the thing is when that experience comes to Arjuna, he’s already leading a very satvig life, a spiritually pure existence. All the non-killing, non-stealing, non-lying, non-lusting, non-giving-and-receiving stuff is simply assumed in Krishna’s dealings with Arjuna. The experience of the cosmic form comes after all that is already a given, and after a certain amount of wisdom—higher wisdom—has been developed in Arjuna through Krishna’s teachings.

Preparation for the mystic vision is important. You recall that we’ve talked about the lower wisdom and the higher wisdom—that the lower wisdom is the stuff your ordinary intellect can manipulate, conceive of, play with, conceptualize, whereas the higher wisdom is the wisdom that comes to us only through initiation. The higher wisdom comes only through direct experience; you have to become it. And the Gita runs us through that whole process. The Gita presents the lower wisdom in the first few chapters, then follows with the purifications that are the groundwork for us to open to the higher wisdom, so that through the higher wisdom we can arrive at the possibility of having certain kinds of experiences which come with it—namely, the experiences that come to Arjuna in chapter 11.

Now, what happened to many of us, through our use of psychedelics, was that the sequence got inverted. We had the chapter 11 Experience before we’d read chapters 1 through 10. We were left with a mind-blowing vision without any structural understanding of it, or any degree of purification that would allow us to receive it. That was part of what all the “bad tripping” was about. But though sometimes in a fierce way, those visions ultimately did force us to go back and seek the purification, seek the higher wisdom, so that the launching pad for our mystical visions would start to be different. And so although the yoga that has been emerging in the United States may not be sequencing in exactly the way the Bhagavad Gita outlines, now that we have used the psychedelics, and blown ourselves out of our totally externalizing/worldly/philosophical-materialist mind-set, we are ready to hear what we need to hear in order to get on with it, so we can become the statement of the higher wisdom: a liberated being.

So we look to the Gita to tell us about all those practices we’re ready to start doing. We do that, even though we know, as we said before, that in a way all practices are a hype. We do it because we feel a need for practices, because we feel intuitively drawn toward them. Something within us is simply nudging us. We see the dilemma in that, because we know that all our dramas, including the drama of “Getting Enlightened,” are just more veils, and that veils keep us from seeing who we really are. So Getting Enlightened keeps us from getting enlightened. But then that becomes the incentive for deepening our practices still further, so they’re coming from a purer place, and the cycle continues. From one level up, we see that the perfection includes our use of the methods. We realize that there is nothing at all to do, but in a state of total openness to all the possibilities in our lives, we’re drawn to work on ourselves.

When we’re ready to start doing practices, the Gita provides us with a curriculum of all the various yogas we can begin to include in our lives. A yoga is really any practice we undertake with the intention of coming closer to God. The key to it is the “intentional practice” part and so yogas can involve any and all parts of our lives. Martin Barber said, “There is no human act that cannot be hallowed into a path to God.”

But although the Gita offers us a number of different yogas to work with, it’s clear that the one it’s mainly concerned with is the path of karma yoga. The Gita was, you will recall, meant in part as Hinduism’s reply to Buddhism; it embraces a spiritual path of engagement in the world rather than withdrawal from it.

I see the Gita as basically a karma yoga manual, a guidebook for bringing spirit into action. I find the teachings of the Gita reflected in the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The Gita is a path of yoga that’s designed for a life of action rather than a life of contemplation, and it tells us how to carry on our spiritual quest right in the midst of our lives in the world. It spells out the way we can do that: by offering all our actions to God, by acting without any attachment, and by acting without seeing ourselves as the actors.

Before we arrive at that place of pure, detached action, we will go through a lot of other levels first, and each one will contribute its own little piece to our sadhana. For instance, if we’re still acting from the feeling “I ought to do karma yoga,” our actions will come tarnished with guilt and anger, and to that extent, they aren’t “pure” karma yoga. However, that very impurity will become the force that drives us to reflect more deeply about our actions; and then, as we do, and as our wisdom gets clearer, our motivation will get purer, and our karma yoga will change.

In earlier chapters, we talked about karma yoga and sacrifice as if they were separate practices. But the fact is that the highest statement of karma yoga is also a full expression of the act of sacrifice. In practicing true karma yoga, we sacrifice ourselves and our gratifications into selfless, dharmic action. The ritual of sacrifice satisfies some deep yearning in us to complete a cycle, to offer back for what we’ve been given. When Krishna agrees to come onto the physical plane as an avatar, it is an act of sacrifice. Can you imagine, being God and having to wear a people-suit? It’s itchy, and it doesn’t fit very well, and it’s so constricting. But in order to reinstitute dharma on the physical plane, Krishna manifests in form. That sacrifice has come down to us as an offering. Then, to complete the circle, to close the ring, to make the whole thing sacred, we offer our lives back up in sacrifice. The whole movement of the formless into form into the formlessness becomes one huge “Swaha!”—one huge offering into the fire of ongoing transformation.

If all that seems too romantic to you, then work with sacrificing what you do every day to your higher consciousness. Sacrifice it all to your awakening—each thing you do, all day long. If you’re driving a car, if you’re getting gas, if you’re making the bed, if you’re brushing your teeth, if you’re going to the toilet—whatever it is you’re doing, make it grist for the mill of your awakening.

Any act we perform can be looked at in a worldly way, or it can be looked at from a different vantage point—a vantage point that redefines who we are and what it is we’re doing here. Am I just “brushing my teeth”? Or am I “brushing my teeth as a way of going to God”? It’s a choice, and that process of shifting our vantage point is profound. It’s really a process of re-creating our perceptual field, re-creating our entire universe, act by act.

We can turn any part of our lives into a sacrifice, into an offering. We can turn our feelings into our sacrifice. If you’re having trouble with someone, make them your practice. Add a picture of her or him to your altar. I take the people I’m having a really fierce time with, and I stick their pictures on my puja table. Maharajji said to me, “Whatever else you do with another human being, never put them out of your heart.” And so now there’s that being whom I’m angry with there on my puja table. I go to do my morning meditation; I look at the picture, and my heart closes to him or her. So I sit there with that picture, I sit there with that being, until I can let go of the anger, until I can reperceive that being, until I am seeing her or him as God. I get as close to the fire of my feelings as I can—and believe me, it gets hot!

Sacrifice and renunciation are kindred practices. Sacrifice, in a way, ritualizes our acts of renunciation. There is a place for renunciation, tapasyas, or austerities, in our spiritual practice. It’s useful to impose disciplines on ourselves, when we feel that’s what we crave. If you crave it, it’s good to fast, because it will let you see how attached you are to food. If you crave it, it’s good to be brahmacharya, because you will see how captivated you are by your sexual desires. Tapasyas let us bring into consciousness the full extent of our attachments. If we can look at those attachments from the outside, from the place of the witness, we won’t get quite so sucked in by our sense desires all the time. If our minds aren’t always going outward so much, they’ll be free to turn inward, back toward the Light.

That’s what austerities are about. When they make us feel joyful, because we’re releasing ourselves from something that’s holding us back from God, that’s a good indication that renunciation is the right practice at the moment. On the other hand, if we’re gritting our teeth and doing it all in order to “be good,” then maybe we should wait a while. When we start measuring “How much can I give up?—that’s a pretty good indication that righteousness has crept in. “I’ve given up sex and I’ve given up meat and I’ve given up milk and I’ve given up . . . ” What an ego trip that is! That’s just being attached to being nonattached, and you haven’t even begun to renounce renouncing! The practice of renunciation is ultimately about renouncing our su fering over this or that, and when that happens, the whole melodramatic part of the renunciation trip starts to fade away. The game isn’t to see how little food we can eat, or how little sex we can have, or how few clothes we can wear—that’s nonsense. The point of the game is to be free: not attached to having, not attached to not having, but free.

Renunciation is a means to an end. Once we’re free, renunciation is irrelevant. The minute we’re free of attachment, we can use or not use anything in the universe. In fact, it all then becomes ours to use. All the energy of the universe is free energy, and once we’re free, it’s all there for us to use. But that’s only after we are without attachments, because only then can we be trusted with the keys to the kingdom. When we are without desires, without attachments, we will act only when we are drawn by our dharma to act. There will be nothing we’re looking to get from the situation that would take us away from our doing our karma yoga. Perfectly.

Although it doesn’t take center stage in the Gita the way karma yoga does, bhakti yoga is central to the Gita’s message. In chapter 12, Krishna says that bhakti is the highest form of yoga. He tells Arjuna, “Those who set their hearts on me and ever in love worship me, these I hold as the best yogis.” Bhakti yoga and karma yoga are woven together. Krishna tells Arjuna that those who serve him with love will be guided by him from within their hearts. It’s the goal of the karma yogi to act out of pure dharma—that is, to have every action guided by God’s will. And here Krishna is telling us that the way that’s accomplished is simply by adding love to the equation.

So we add in the love, we engage in the bhakti practices, although at the same moment we recognize that there is a danger of getting lost in the object of our devotion and never moving past it. There is what we’ve called the lower bhakti and the higher bhakti, and the lower bhakti can be very dualistic—it’s the worship of somebody or something “out there.” Lower bhakti usually comes with a kind of needful, clinging attachment. There’s nothing wrong with any of that; it’s part of the way bhakti works. It’s fine, so long as we understand what it’s about and we keep developing our wisdom so we can move on.

I myself started out from a place of “lower bhakti,” feeling incredible love on a very personal level for this being, Maharajji. Here was this guy who was loving me, taking care of me, feeding me, clothing me, patting me on the head, pulling my beard, and giving me great teachings. I had never been loved like that before! My heart opened to him at a very romantic level; I just loved “Big Daddy.” However, through that love I opened myself to him, and so every teaching he was laying on me was just pouring straight into me, because my heart was so wide open. And in the course of that wide-openness, the teachings that came in from him kept redefining my existence and refining my understanding until my attachment to him as a form—that personal level of love for him—started to fall away, and something else came in its place. It became a love for that which he was showing me, that which lay beyond his form. At that point, my love for him had become the vehicle for my opening. That’s the way the yoga of devotion does its work.

Chapter 9 of the Gita ends with Krishna telling Arjuna, Always think of me, always love me. “Give me your mind and your heart, and you’ll come to me,” he says. We can see a kind of daisy-chain of practices here: first karma yoga and bhakti yoga are linked— Krishna guides via the heart, the actions of his devotees. Now we see that bhakti yoga and jnana yoga are linked—to get to God, we have to give over both our hearts and our minds. We need wisdom to keep us from getting trapped in the lower bhakti; but the thinking mind needs to be balanced by the bhakti heart. When that combination of jnana and bhakti comes together, it’s powerful! The devotion gets clearer and clearer, and the wisdom gets more and more subtle. The bhakti takes us through the emptiness, and into a loving dharma.

Papa Ramdas was a beautiful Indian holy man. He was born in 1884 and spent most of his life in Mangalore, India, at an ashram he had there with Mother Krishnabai. Papa Ramdas said that since all human beings have bodies, hearts, and intellects, they need to use all three in their spiritual development; otherwise, he said, it’s like exercising one part of the body and ignoring all the rest. He said that the body is to be used for selfless service (karma yoga); that the heart is to be used for devotion (bhakti yoga); and that the mind is to be used for discernment (jnana yoga). That is, each yoga is a technique that uses some aspect of who we are, as human beings, in order to take us to a new perceptual vantage point on our lives.

All jnana yoga practices are ways of turning the mind back on itself. Papa Ramdas wrote, “Man should use the intellect forVichara— i.e., he should discriminate between the real and the unreal so as to give up attachment to the unreal or perishable things of the world.” He’s telling us to switch our attention from the unreal—which is what we usually call “reality”—to the real. Working with a statement like that, with all its implications, with the writings and teachings of holy beings like Papa Ramdas: that’s one form of jnana yoga. Then there are the forms of jnana in which we use the mind to beat the mind, practices like Zen koans or vichara atma. There are practices that focus the mind, like meditation or mantra. And there are practices that let us take a step back from the mind, like witnessing.

I think that the practice of witnessing can be a key spiritual exercise for us, because it lets us move outside the dramas of our lives. It shows us that there exists another plane from which to view our experiences. The danger of confusion in this practice is mistaking the judging voice inside our own minds for the spiritual witness. When we first begin to get some grasp of what the dance is all about, and we start to stand back a bit from our own trips, we frequently adopt a type of witnessing that is very judgmental. It’s got a standard— you’ve got Buddha as your standard, or Christ as your standard, or Krishna as your standard, or Maharajji as your standard—and next to that standard you’ve got your own behavior and your own thoughts and your own feelings. You set those two things side by side, and then judge your own behavior against the standard. That’s an extension of what is known as the superego, and it’s a heavy emotional trip that only tends to lock you more tightly into your predicament. It certainly doesn’t do much to free you.

The witness that’s useful in our spiritual work has a totally different quality. It isn’t judging—good, bad, it’s all the same. This witness isn’t trying to change anything—it’s just seeing it all. It is the completely uncommitted; it’s not committed to your enlightenment, it’s not trying to get you ahead, it’s simply witnessing, nothing else.

As we move into that perspective, however, we discover that in developing the witness, we sacrifice being the experiencer. That is, we sacrifice the thrill of the experience into the witness. Anytime we want to, we can become that part of ourselves that is the witness, which is just noticing it all, very calmly, very equanimously. It just takes a flick of our perspective—in fact, just the intention to be coming from that other place. That’s all. But to do that, we have to be ready to let go of being the experiencer.

To develop that kind of witness, you have to have a little elbow room. That’s why one of my first instructions for sadhana would be “Give yourself some space.” Don’t always be filling up your time and your mind with content; create a spacious environment for yourself, one that makes it easier to step back and notice your trip.

Then do just that. Notice it. Don’t judge it, don’t try to change it, don’t do anything at all except to notice it. You will find that a lot of your stuff has only been able to survive unnoticed; the minute you begin to bring it into the light of that “I” that is just looking at it all, it starts to change—without your ever having done a thing! All you did was to start identifying with a different part of your being, a part you could use to watch all the rest of it.

Say I’m sitting here, witnessing, and suddenly I move my hands. I’m witnessing, so I notice the movement. Now, I can say to myself, “Why are you moving your hands so much?” That’s judging. Or I can say to myself, “Well, now that you’ve noticed that you’re moving your hands, you’ll stop.” That’s a program. But behind judgments and programs, there is just witnessing: hands moving, witness noticing, nothing more.

But even with this level of the witness, we’re still operating within a dualistic framework: The witness is still witnessing something. Later on, there comes yet another kind of witnessing, a kind of pervasive perception of everything, which comes out of total nonattachment. When we come to that place, another transformation occurs: Then we are still the witness, but we are also the enjoyer. We are the experience, the experiencer, the total participant. There is no part of it we are not. And that is the witness Krishna is referring to when he says, “I am the Witness. I am the Knower of all the fields.” That’s not an ego witness; that’s not a jnana-yogic exercise. That’s Brahman. The practice has transcended itself; it has taken us to the place where we witness it all because we are it all, because we have merged. It is the Oneness out of which the higher wisdom is born. It is the “beyond the Beyond.”

So how does all of this add up? What does all of this mean in terms of our own sadhana? We are all at different places in our journey. Some of us feel we’re right at the beginning of something new. Some of us feel like we’ve fallen off the path. Some of us are doing regular practices. Some of us don’t know what to do next. For many of us, there is a lot of confusion about our sadhana: What should I do? Am I doing it right? Is some other path better for me than this one is?

In trying to figure out a way to approach our sadhana, there are a few strategies that I would suggest we keep in mind—and the first and most important one is Relax! It doesn’t really matter which next thing you do, because whatever it is, it will become your next teaching. And it isn’t the thing you do that matters, anyway—it’s who it is that’s doing it, where it’s coming from in you. That means that all those choices and all those decisions that we agonize over aren’t really quite so fraught and melodramatic as we like to make them out to be.

The second part of my strategy has to do with learning to listen within. It’s about learning to trust the inner, intuitive sense of what it is you are about at any moment. Doing that may take you down some very unexpected avenues—in fact, it probably already has. For example, I’ll bet that a large percentage of the people who are attending meditation retreats and monastic retreats these days wouldn’t even have entertained the possibility of such a thing a few years ago. Can you imagine, wasting your vacation going someplace where you sit on a pillow for sixteen hours a day? But then suddenly it feels right on. It feels like the obvious next thing to do.

So instead of preprogramming how you think your spiritual journey is going to unfold, it’s better to listen intuitively. That means you’re going to have to keep being straight with yourself. Don’t be afraid to change when your intuitive wisdom tells you to. You start a sadhana, and you go into it with total commitment, and you drink deeply of it. But then you begin to experience its limitations for you. At that point, the tendency is either to deny your intuitive wisdom in order to stay on, or to start looking for things to criticize in the method so you can justify exiting. However, I think that a more sophisticated way of dealing with it is just to say, “I have no more work to do here right now.” No judgments. It’s not that it isn’t beautiful, and it’s not that you aren’t beautiful—it’s just saying, “We don’t have any more work together at this time.”

Now, you’re going to have to trust your own heart in all that, because you’re not likely to get much support for your decision from either your teacher or your fellow students. Your teacher is going to say, “You mustn’t leave. If you leave, you’re going to fall into the pits of hell.” Don’t worry about it, scary though it may be. You’ve got to keep trusting your intuitive heart. At some point, your heart drew you to the teacher, and if you trusted your heart then, trust it now when it says, “Go on.” There is nothing wrong, either, with leaving a teacher and then coming back five years later and saying, “Well, I guess I made a mistake.” Mistakes are an absolutely necessary part of the process.

Once you relax and trust your heart, you’ll find that you will be drawn by exactly those forms and practices that are going to take you through. Work with whatever it is that’s drawing you at the moment. At one moment, you’ll sit by the river, and you’ll look at a rock, and you’ll feel its sacredness, and that will take you out of yourself. At another moment, nature won’t do it for you, but something else will. Sometimes it will be just a word about Christ that will do it; your heart will open, and you will feel that spark of Spirit. Or there will come a moment when the intellect will be so clear and precise that you will see the whole panorama, the awesome nature of the design of it all, and that will take you beyond thought. Each of those is a different moment. At one moment, one form feels comfortable, right, useful; at another moment, another form. Just keep flowing in and out of the forms. Use them and then drop them—the forms aren’t “it.” The point isn’t to cling to one practice or another, one teacher or another; the point is to use whatever can in this moment open you to living spirit.

If you have any doubts about whether you should be doing a practice, stop doing it. If you have any misgivings about doing sadhana, if there is any question in your mind as to why you are doing it, stop. Go back and live your life just the way you lived it before you ever heard the word “sadhana,” before you ever turned on, before you ever meditated or prayed, before you ever knew anything about all of this nonsense. Go and live exactly as you did, and forget this whole meshuga business. And then watch what happens. Watch the way you are drawn by some inner thread to open a spiritual book and read a few passages, or to sit quietly and watch a candle flame.

If we can just quiet down all the oughts and shoulds in ourselves, if we can be finished with that whole Protestant ethic trip we’ve been on, we will see that we are really already further out than we give ourselves credit for being. We keep thinking we have to get behind ourselves and push, when all the time we are actually being propelled full speed ahead. When we see that, we recognize that sadhana isn’t something we do to get ourselves somewhere; it’s something we do to get ourselves out of the way, so we can stop being obstacles to the process.

When we try to quiet down and listen for what to do, we often find that there’s a lot of emotional stuff standing in our way. We find that before we can get on with it, we have to get rid of all our accumulated personality stuff, and cleaning up our stuff means we first have to look at it. We all have things we keep closeted away in our minds— thoughts about who we think we are; thoughts that are so gross, so personal, so humiliating, so awkward, so . . . yick!—that we would never want to let another person see them. You can run your own personal laundry list of what those things for you—but whatever they are, they make us feel so uncomfortable about ourselves that all we want to do is hide from them. We seal them off in some dark corner of our minds and never look at them.

When I work with people, there’s a practice I sometimes use to help them get their stuff out on the table, where they can look at it. I’ll sit across from a person and say, “Let’s focus our eyes on each other’s ajna” (that’s the third-eye point—it’s on the forehead, between, and just above, the eyebrows). Then I’ll say to the person, “If there’s anything at all that you can bring to mind that would be too uncomfortable, embarrassing, disgusting, obnoxious, scary, or wild to share with another human being, share it with me. Go ahead.” Saying that is like saying, “Don’t think of a rhinoceros.” What immediately comes to mind is whatever it is you most want to hide: “When I’m alone, I pick my nose.” Or “I’d like to have sex with my mother.” Or whatever it is that you’ve been hiding. If the person can bring herself or himself to be really honest, to tell me what comes to mind, that brings it out into the light, which is the first step in letting go of it.

That exercise also lets us see that we aren’t as vulnerable as we thought we were. I’ll start to do that exercise with somebody, and that person will say, “Oh, no—I can’t tell you that!” Then he’ll wrestle with it for a while, and finally he’ll say, “Well, all right, I’ll tell you. I masturbate thinking of my father’s penis, and I tie my legs together first.” Then he waits for some kind of reaction from me—he waits for me to gasp, or draw back, or look askance or something. But I’m just sitting there with my mala, chanting, “Ram, Ram, Ram . . .” He could have said anything! Whatever it is, it’s just another thing. Yeah, right, so what else is new? What stuff could you possibly have that’s unique? Do you really think you’ve got stuff that’s so special? I’ve been doing this exercise with people for years now, and I haven’t heard anything new so far. Little permutations on this and that, but nothing really new. And furthermore, I haven’t found one thing yet that has freaked me out. From where I’m sitting, in the middle of my mantra, it’s all just stuff, stuff, and more stuff passing by.

So you let it all come out, and you look it all in the eye. But then once you’ve brought all the stuff to the surface, once you’ve looked at it in the daylight, the next question is, how quickly can you let go of it? That’s the critical next step. You don’t keep dwelling on it— haven’t you had enough of all those melodramas yet? Let them go;— it’s OK. So you are lewd, lascivious, lazy, disgusting, disgraceful, perverse, greedy, passionate, hateful, vengeful, and despicable. Right. And here we are. See? “And here we are”—in other words, it’s the human condition! We’re all part of it—what can we do? So, finally, you just let go of all your stuff. You let go of it, inside your head. You just release it—that’s all. There’s such a sense of lightness and freedom that comes with that.

After you’ve been working with bringing all the terrible stuff out into the light, it’s a good idea to balance it by flipping the exercise around, and examining your own beauty and your own divinity. Let yourself experience—deeply experience—the incredible beauty of your own being, without allowing any sense of unworthiness to hold you back. Feel the radiance of your own inner heart, touch the depth of your own inner wisdom. Sit with that, until it deeply permeates your being. An exercise like that helps offset the whole negative core-ego trip that we seem to be stuck with.

Another way to experience your divinity is to identify yourself with a Being of Light, like Christ, or Quan Yin, or Rama, or the Buddha. Start by visualizing her or him “out there,” in front of you, external to yourself. Then gradually begin drawing that Being into yourself. You can use your breath to help: with every in-breath, you draw the Being into yourself more deeply. With every out-breath, you feel that presence filling you. Draw that Being into your heart, into the center of your own being. Let that presence expand and expand, until it fills you, until it becomes who you are. Let yourself become that Being of Light and Love. Then afterward ask yourself, “During the time I was being that Being, what happened to all those ‘negative’ things in me? Where were they then?”

So my suggestions thus far are that we relax, trust our hearts, and to do whatever cleaning-up operations present themselves. My final suggestion for a strategy of sadhana is this: Trust the dharma. Trust it, even if you feel at some ego level that you’re shucking yourself a bit. It’s very helpful to our sadhana if we can start looking at the laws working around us and upon us as benevolent. Notice that I don’t mean benevolent as “nice,” in the sense of something that’s trying to keep our egos happy or even trying to keep us alive. I mean something that’s benevolently guiding us through our karma—that is, something that’s benevolent because it’s helping us to awaken.

My understanding of the dharma is that it’s a system designed to help us on our evolutionary journey. We are all part of an evolutionary journey, and every experience happening to us at every moment is a gift, a teaching we’re being given. All we need is the perceptual stance that allows us to appreciate it for what it is. This moment, right now: Do you see what a gift it is to your awakening? It’s perfectly designed to help you break out of the shell of your ego, to dissolve the separation between yourself and the Beloved.

As I understand the law of it all, we are all dwelling in Grace all the time. The only thing that ever falls out of Grace is our own thinking mind:We fall because we think we fell. The minute we give up our thoughts—just our thoughts!—there we are. God is always exactly one thought away—and the minute we quiet that thought, here we are again.

Well, the issue of the law and its workings brings us back to those still unanswered questions about free will and determinism, about karma and responsibility. I was in a dialogue with Trungpa once, in Vermont, and he said to me, “What do you do about sorcerers?” I said, “What sorcerers,Trungpa? I don’t see any sorcerers, and besides, I wouldn’t do anything about them, anyway. My guru takes care of me; that’s his business. I just love God.” And Rinpoche replied, “You’re copping out.” He said, “These are critical times, Ram Dass, and we must assume responsibility.” I thought about that for a moment, and I decided that he must be putting me on, so I said to him, “All times are critical, Rinpoche, and God has all the responsibility.” He said, “No, you don’t understand. You must take responsibility.”

I’ve come to believe that Trungpa was right, in a certain way, and that I was copping out. If I deny the “sorcerers”—that is, if I deny this physical plane with its individual differences of good and evil—then I am caught. I am caught in denial, out of fear of this plane, with all its stuff. I am no less hung up than if I had been totally preoccupied with the individual distinctions and failed to appreciate the One that lies behind it all.

So I’ve worked with that concept of “responsibility” over the years, and what has emerged is a deeper and deeper understanding of the whole question of free will and determinism, and of the paradox: that they are both simultaneously true. It’s like there are levels of free will and determinism, almost like a free-will sandwich, with determinism in between. Before we start awakening to who we really are, we’re living within the laws of karma, and it’s all just running off mechanically. But within that mechanical runoff, we think we’re making choices, and so we have to make them. We have to exercise our “free will.” Then we begin to become a little more aware, and we see that we have no free will, that it’s all just law upon unfolding law. We see that everything is just lawfully running through us, including our apparent “choices.” So we say, “I have no responsibility—I’m just my karma running off.” But then, as we keep going further still and transcend the gunas, we come into the Brahmanic state—and there our will is truly, totally, absolutely free. We can do whatever we want to do.

The only hitch is that by then there is absolutely no desire left within us. In a state of total bliss, what would you desire? From that place, the only acts we end up doing with our “free will” are the things we are drawn to do by the workings of the dharma. That is, we end up acting only to fulfill the law, because there is nothing else we would conceivably do. We exercise our free will by surrendering into being the pure instruments of the dharma. All those desires that preoccupied us for so long? We could fulfill them with a thought—except that the desires themselves are long since gone. There is no longer any personal trip whatsoever that would motivate us to act, so although we’re entirely free, we act only to fulfill our role in the way of things.

So do I have responsibility, or don’t I? Well, I do and I don’t. It all depends on where I’m standing. These days, I try to stay aware of both levels—to surrender it all to my guru, and at the same moment to assume responsibility for my dance. As far as I’m concerned, it is all being done by Maharajji—and yet I do my best to play my part as impeccably and as responsibly as I can. I am trying to learn to keep both of those perspectives going at the same time. At first, back before I met Maharajji, I thought I was making all the decisions. Then I was caught in rejecting the responsibility, and saying, “Maharajji’s doing it.” Now, more and more, I’m appreciating that it’s a both/and situation, and I am living with all the richness of that paradox.

And so it goes. We try to learn to live with all these complicated, multilayered dimensions of who we truly are. We see the trip we are on, and we see where it’s taking us. We see that it’s all an inevitable unfolding, and we open ourselves more and more to the process. In the meantime, we are all just lawfully running off our stuff. We are all each other’s karma, and it’s all the guru’s game. It’s all God’s lila: us and our lives, our melodramas and our sadhanas, it’s all just God at play.

Krishna describes the various ways in which the divine manifests in the universe: as that which creates form, as the forms that it has created, and as the essence within each of those forms. Krishna says, “I am also Brahman. I am the formless, timeless, spaceless, beginningless, endless Brahman. In each individual, the spark of that Brahman, the Atman, is me.” So Krishna produced each individual; Krishna is each individual; Krishna is within each individual. We are all Krishna. We are all God. And through the experiences of incarnation after incarnation, our souls will shed the veils that separate us from the Beloved.

Slowly, slowly, we begin to appreciate the awesome nature of the design of it all. Just think: All of this—all of it!—is a totally preprogrammed trip we are on, a trip that is taking us through this dance of incarnations, through all the myriad roles and forms, all to bring us back to God, back into the One.

Every now and then we get a glimpse behind the scenes, and we see our own lives as stories running their course. All of the choices and decisions and crises: most of the time we’re seeing them all as: “What should I do next??!” But then we turn the page—and all of it was already written. It’s like a murder mystery, where you are the butler walking toward the pantry on page 42. But you are also the person who is reading the story—and who’s read it all before, it seems, so that somehow you already know what’s going to happen when the butler reaches the pantry. And finally, when you’re ready and when the moment is ripe, you recognize that you are the author as well.

And behind the butler and the reader and the author, behind the Brahman and the prakriti, behind the formless and the forms, behind every polarity and every distinction—I am. Formlessness to form, form to formlessness—all one. Sub ek. And in recognizing that dance of the formless and the forms, we recognize the sacredness of everything. Every thing. So we begin to acknowledge that recognition, and we begin to respect that sacredness: by reinvesting our lives with Spirit; by rediscovering ways of honoring the sacred; by offering ourselves and our incarnations into the fire, as our sacrifice to God. And it all gets lighter and lighter, it all starts to become more and more transparent. We are still doing our dance, but our egos are less and less intrusive all the time. We are dancing more lightly. We are learning we can walk without touching the ground.