EPILOGUE

Krishna and Arjuna have now reached the end of their dialogue. It’s twilight on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. There’s a cool breeze moving over the now-quiet field, bringing a faint smell of the river that lies beyond. Arjuna has gotten up to stretch, and to bring a cup of water to Krishna, who is seated under a small banyan tree at the edge of the field.

As Arjuna sits down on a log next to Krishna, they both realize that the wondrous dialogue has reached its conclusion. How long have they sat here talking? For weeks? For months? For years? Arjuna really does not know. It seems as though lifetimes have elapsed.

Krishna turns his head to look directly into Arjuna’s eyes, and asks, “Have you understood the teaching? Have you listened with attention? Are you now free from your doubts and confusion?”

Arjuna hardly knows how to answer. The whole dialogue seems like an intense and vivid dream. Arjuna knows, though, that he has been mysteriously transformed. “My memory has been restored!” he cries. Through communing with Krishna, he has remembered who he really is. Arjuna is no longer deluded into thinking that he is his mortal body, or his personality, or even his various tasks and roles, noble as they are. He knows that his True Self is unborn, is undying, uncreated—immortal.

But the most important outcome is this: Having remembered who he is, Arjuna now knows how to act. Remember that from its very opening sentences, the Bhagavad Gita has been a treatise on action. When you know who you are, you will know how to act.

Arjuna returns Krishna’s gaze with a faint smile. He feels a wave of gratitude wash through him. “You have dispelled my doubts and delusions,” he says, “and I understand through your grace. My faith is firm now, and I will do your will.” Arjuna is no longer paralyzed by doubt. He is ready to move back into action. But it will now be action with a difference: It will be action guided by the voice of the Inner Divine.

Krishna, in the final chapter of the Gita, describes the magnificently transformed Arjuna: “Free from self-will, aggressiveness, arrogance, anger, and the lust to possess people or things, he is at peace with himself and others and enters into the unitive state. United with Brahman, ever joyful, beyond the reach of desire and sorrow, he has equal regard for every living creature and attains supreme devotion to me. By loving me he comes to know me truly; then he knows my glory and enters into my boundless being. All his acts are performed in my service, and through my grace he wins eternal life.”

Arjuna looks again at the field of Kurukshetra. He anticipates the massing armies that will come with the morning. He perceives again the odor of war.

You have been wondering how the story ends. Will Arjuna fight the battle?

Arjuna will fight, yes. But what is the real nature of this fight? At the outset of our tale, Arjuna saw at Kurukshetra only the great battlefield of a conventional war. Now he has new eyes. He sees that the battle Krishna has called him to fight is really the battle of life. And this battle is revealed to be the battle of separation—the separation of sons from fathers, the separation of cousins from uncles, the separation of caste, the separation of race. But most of all, the separation from God.

Arjuna is still a warrior. But his duty now is to fight a different kind of battle. Henceforth he will be engaged with all of his might and passion and skillfulness in the moral equivalent of war.

So, we have reached the end of our journey together. Of course, the Bhagavad Gita is just a tale. But do its teachings bear out in real life? In your life?

If you bring forth what is within you it will save you.

Do you think this is so?

My own view is this: There are some things, alas, from which we cannot be saved. Indeed, we cannot be saved from most of the things from which we most desperately want to be saved. We cannot really be saved from pain, from loss, from failure, from dissatisfaction. We cannot be saved from grasping and aversion.

And yet, dharma clearly does save us in many wonderful ways. Dharma saves us not by ending but rather by redeeming our suffering. It gives meaning to our suffering. It enables us to bear our suffering. And, most important, it enables our suffering to bear fruit for the world.

I have come to believe that dharma gives us the one thing we need to be fully human: Each of us must have one domain, one small place on the globe where we can fully meet life—where we can meet it with every gift we have. One small place where, through testing ourselves, we can know the nature of life, and ultimately know ourselves. This domain, this one place that is uniquely ours, is our work in the world. Our work in the world is for each of us the axis mundi, the immovable spot—the one place where we really have the opportunity to wake up.

Dharma provides us with the perfect vehicle through which we can fruitfully die to our smaller self and be reborn to Self. And make no mistake: This mystic death—this death that our egos abhor—this taking ourselves to zero—is absolutely required in order to be fully human.

My good friend Luke is a Christian monk, living in a monastery not too far from Kripalu. He tells me that the most important work of his life—his work of prayer, his dharma—mostly takes place in his little ten-by-ten monk’s room. In his tradition, this little room is called a “cell.” Luke also sometimes refers to his little cell as his “tomb.” For a while I thought he was joking about this. But no. In his tradition the monks are told early on: “Your cell is your tomb where you die and arise to new life.”

Luke showed me his cell one day. It was simple, sparsely furnished, whitewashed. But that simplicity belied the complex work that I knew went on there. Prayer is hard work. I could practically see the gnash marks in the white plaster walls. As you pit yourself against any real dharma, the problems of mastery, the challenges of selflessness, and the need for sustained courage all arise. In every case, the authentic pursuit of dharma results in gnash marks. Your dharma is your tomb where you die and arise to new life. You only get yourself when you lose yourself to some great work. And whatever your authentic work is—I believe it is great. It is the great work of your life.

Do you have a sense that you know more about your dharma now than when we began this journey together, twelve chapters ago? I hope so.

As for me, I can say that studying the lives of Goodall and Thoreau, of Lonny and Ethan and Mark, of Corot and Tubman and Gandhi, has helped me tremendously. It has helped me resolve my midlife confusion about dharma—the confusion I spoke about in the Introduction to this book. I see now that I had been confused about dharma because I had both too high an opinion of it and too low an opinion of it all at the same time. I thought that life should always be high art. I thought, indeed, that I should always be jumping out of bed in the morning, ripping open the curtain to meet the day. When we study the lives of truly fulfilled exemplars of dharma, we discover that, alas, it is just not like that, even for the most accomplished among them.

I have come to see that dharma is more like craft than high art. Those of us struggling to live our dharmas awake every morning like everyone else—to the sound of the alarm. We roll over. We take a deep breath. Another day. We know what we have to do. We get up. We make the coffee. We work away at the work we were put here and set here to do, like plodding, persistent craftsmen—putting one foot in front of the other. We are part of a team of craftsmen building a cathedral. We may not live to see the whole structure completed. In fact, our small part of the magnificent whole may not even be visible to the eye once the thing is finished. No matter. It is not really about us anyway. It is about the cathedral.

Through studying the many extraordinary lives that appear in these pages, I have come to see that our understanding of dharma today is obscured by our fondness for the cult of personality and for self and for celebrity. Our understanding of dharma is obscured by the narcissism of our time. Studying the lives of great exemplars of dharma has helped me to see that the primary distortion in my dharma life has been the age-old misery of self-absorption. Deep in midlife I had begun to feel the awful burden of wanting to be special; wanting to be better; wanting to experience every possible adventure in this life; wanting to be, as we have sometimes said at Kripalu, an “expanded self.”

Oh, for God’s sake. It is just too damned much work to be an expanded self. Couldn’t I just be an ordinary self?

The great twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton encountered precisely the same spiritual exhaustion partway through his life. The chief source of this exhaustion, he writes, “is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a sparkling success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men.” His vision of the possibility of relief from this burden occurred to me as brilliant: “We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do.”

What? Miss something in almost everything we do? That is allowed?

Merton says it is: “We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us—whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.”

This has the feel of truth to me. A difficult truth. But a truth that may free me from the obviously false hope that I can have everything—indeed, from the view that I must have everything in order to have a fulfilling life.

Authentic dharma frees us from this false hope. Merton sees deeply into the nature of this freedom: “… the fulfillment of every individual vocation demands not only the renouncement of what is evil in itself, but also of all the precise goods that are not willed for us by God.” We are not called to everything. We are just called to what we’re called to. It is inevitable that authentically good parts of ourselves will not be fulfilled. What a relief.

“We can do no great things,” wrote the nineteenth-century French saint, Teresa, “only small things with great love.”

Thomas Merton—who struggled through his whole life with his longing to be considered a great author—writes of this: “… we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.”

Merton here catches exactly the spirit of Thoreau and Anthony and Tubman—and all the others. These great exemplars of dharma each took a craftsmanlike view toward life: Do your daily duty, and let the rest go. Poke away systematically at your little calling. Tend the garden a little bit every day. You do not have to exhaust yourself with great acts. Show up for your duty, for your dharma. Then let it go.

In monasteries of old, the monk’s dharma, his purpose in life, was said to be this: to support the choir. In Latin, propter chorum. Literally, his life was lived “in support of the choir.” He was not a soloist. He was not a diva. He was part of a magnificent whole.

The holy dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna is at an end. It has been so powerful that it has transformed all who have listened to it. Sanjaya himself—the narrator of “the wondrous dialogue”—has been changed by it. Just recalling the scene of their dialogue lights him up with ecstasy. “The wonder of it makes my hair stand on end!” he exclaims.

“Whenever I remember these wonderful, holy words between Krishna and Arjuna, I am filled with joy,” he says. “And when I remember the breathtaking form of Krishna, I am filled with wonder and my joy overflows.”

Sanjaya speaks the final words: “Wherever the divine Krishna and the mighty Arjuna are, there will be prosperity, victory, happiness, and sound judgment. Of this I am sure!”