From the very beginning of our story, Krishna has been teaching Arjuna about action; about making decisions; about hard choices. Do I fight? Do I not fight? Do I act at all? At the outset of their dialogue, Krishna produces a stunning little gem of wisdom for his student (and here again I paraphrase):
“Arjuna, you do not know how to act because you do not know who you are.”
You do not know who you are.
Arjuna does not quite get this the first time around.
But, of course, Krishna persists. He teaches that our decisions about our actions flow inexorably from our understanding of who we are. And if we do not know who we are, we will make poor choices.
Krishna plays this theme softly at first. But it will gain in volume through the course of the dialogue, until it reaches a crescendo in the psychedelic theophany of Chapter Eleven.
Krishna knows that he must help Arjuna—and the reader—move toward a clear understanding of his True Nature. And he knows that only this knowledge will allow Arjuna to make wise choices.
“Arjuna,” he says, in effect, “we have a Divine nature that we only faintly recognize. Our true nature is unborn, undying, unmanifest, inconceivable to the ordinary mind.”
Unborn? Undying? What does this really mean? Well, it’s not easy to grasp. It means that those aspects of our lives that we take to be our True Self—our personality, our body, our career, our house, our stories—are not our True Self at all. Our True Self is our soul. This soul is immortal, and is not limited to present forms. Our present bodies and personalities are only temporary shelters, fleetingly inhabited by our souls. These ephemeral forms are, alas, short-lived. The True Self, however, is immortal. It cannot be destroyed.
It does not die;
Having been,
It will never not be;
Unborn, enduring,
Constant, and primordial,
It is not killed
When the body is killed.
This is really quite a speech. But its import is lost on our friend Arjuna.
Krishna gives this teaching several times through the course of the Gita, trying out various metaphors to describe the difference between our apparent self and our True Self—hoping to find the image that connects. The metaphor that I have found most helpful is the classic “wave” metaphor (which is often cited in other yogic texts, though not explicitly in the Gita). The self (and here we mean the small “s” self, which is our current form and personality) is described as a wave. We’re all familiar with the action of the wave: The wave rises in the sea, and having arisen appears to have its own form, to be a “thing in itself.” In fact, however, the wave is always and everywhere one with the sea. It arises from and returns to the sea. It is made of the same stuff as the sea. It is the sea in every way. Indeed, even in the fullness of its apparent individual being—its apparent individual “wave-ness”—it is never really other than the sea.
Krishna teaches Arjuna an enduring view of the self taken directly from the Vedantic stream of yoga philosophy. In this view, all individual souls (or atman) are one with the Ground of Being (or Brahman). Because we are One with the great sea of being, we are all just a single soul, “One without a second.” Our True Nature is identical to the nature of Brahman: sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-bliss.
Human beings throughout the ages have spent their lives seeking. But seeking what? Seeking God? Seeking consciousness? Seeking the Truth? Krishna’s teaching cuts through this seeking: “We are,” he says, “what we seek.” Tat tvan asi: Thou Art That. You are already That which you seek. It is inside. It is already You. It is a done deal. Call off the search! as one great Hindu scholar has written.
Krishna continues his teaching: “Creatures are unmanifest in origin, manifest in the midst of life, and unmanifest again in the end.” Another series of obscure phrases from our friend Krishna. To put them in ordinary words, we could say that we manifest from lifetime to lifetime in particular forms: particular bodies, personalities, stories. But these forms—these lifetimes—are transitory.
This teaching is slippery. Indeed, all of the classic yoga texts declare repeatedly that it is a teaching that really cannot be grasped by the mind at all. But (and yogis all agree on this) it can be realized. It can be known intuitively. Indeed, each of us has intimations of our True Nature from time to time throughout our lives—moments when we know utterly that we are One with all of life. William Wordsworth, in one of his greatest poems, referred to these moments of knowing as “intimations of immortality.” These “intimations” sometimes spontaneously arise in our consciousness in moments of quiet—in moments of contemplation, in meditation, in yoga, or just in sitting on the beach at twilight watching a sunset.
But intimations of immortality can also rise in the midst of our hectic lives. Perhaps we are on the subway during a visit to New York City, and we suddenly (and for no apparent reason) feel One with the whole stream of sweating humanity hurtling with us in the rattling underground rocket toward our destination uptown. Suddenly we have this wonderful moment of knowing our Oneness with all beings.
Or, hiking in the woods, we feel an upwelling of kinship with a deer we encounter quietly grazing in a field. Has this happened to you? We are One with that deer. These moments of “knowing” bring with them a calming intuition that everything is OK. That we can really relax. That we can relinquish our striving. That we are that which we seek—that, as many yoga texts declare, we are “born divine.”
Arjuna has already had these fleeting experiences of Oneness, as Krishna knows. Indeed, each of us has. But Krishna wants Arjuna to notice something particular about these realizations. He wants him to see simply this: When we are living in these brief realizations—even for a few moments—they change how we act. They change how we behave. They change the choices we make. Just for these few minutes we’re different. We’re better. We’re our best selves—our True Selves.
I know this to be true from my own experience. Back to the subway analogy for a moment. This is an experience that I actually had recently, and it is still very much alive in my memory. I was in New York City on the subway, and I had one of those moments of Oneness. In that mix of smelly, chaotic humanity on the subway I had a moment of feeling at One with all beings. My heart was full of wonder. Of generosity. Of compassion. I gave up my seat. I prayed for those around me. I knew that in absolutely every way that counted I was exactly like the elderly black woman sitting next to me. I knew that she and I were completely alike inside. When I got off the subway, I gladly dropped a five-dollar bill into the hat of the guy playing the guitar on the platform. In those few moments, I was different. Just for those moments, I was the best version of me. The truest version of me. The power of this moment evaporates quickly, of course. I got off the subway and was off about my business in Manhattan. I probably passed by the next subway musician without a thought. But the moment of awakening left behind a trace of something—a trace of knowing.
Have you had an experience like this? In these moments of Oneness, we often feel as if we had dropped in from outer space, and just for a moment are inhabiting our real lives. These are moments of waking up from the dream of separation in which we ordinarily live.
If you’ve had such an experience, you know for a fact that these little awakenings change the way we act. And they highlight the troubling fact that most of the time we live in exile from our True Selves.
You do not know how to act, because you do not know who you are.
So, Krishna tells Arjuna that his most perilous problem is that he has forgotten who he is. Do you relate to this? I think it’s one of Krishna’s best metaphors.
Often throughout the course of his teaching in the Gita, Krishna will refer to “the brokenness of our memory.” “From broken memory understanding is lost,” he says, “and from loss of understanding, [we are] ruined.” Ruined!
This is a central view of the dilemma of the human being in the yoga tradition: We are “wanderers” moving from lifetime to lifetime. Asleep. When we die—when we leave this particular form—we momentarily wake up. We are momentarily rejoined with the Ground of Being. But when we take birth again, we forget. Wordsworth, in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, states the case with vivid images:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
In the yogic view, as in Wordsworth’s, it’s through remembering who we really are that we are liberated. The transformation of the self is not about adding anything. It is about finding what was already there. In the epigraph of her fine commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Columbia University scholar Barbara Stoler Miller appropriately quotes T. S. Eliot’s lines on memory from The Four Quartets.
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.
These lines from Eliot might have come directly from the Bhagavad Gita. In remembering who we really are, we are liberated from our striving to be somewhere else, to be someone else. Knowing who we really are liberates us from both the past—our overidentification with past experiences of form—and from the future, our hopes and fears about future forms.
At the end of the Gita, Arjuna declares:
I have regained memory. I know who I am. By the end of the story, Arjuna will have been restored to the direct, immediate knowledge of who he is. Then his choices about action will be utterly clear. You will know how to act when you know who you are.
3
About halfway through his dialogue with Krishna, Arjuna begins to get it. And as his eyes open, he sees that Krishna, his friend and charioteer, is not just an ordinary guy. He is much more than a charioteer. To his astonishment, Arjuna begins to see that all along he has been in the presence of a Divine Being. Egad! Krishna is God!!
Upon recognition of Krishna’s True Nature, Arjuna has a wonderful and very human moment. He is embarrassed. He says to Krishna: “Sometimes, because we were friends, I rashly said, ‘Oh, Krishna!’ or, ‘Say, friend!’—casual, careless remarks. Whatever I may have said lightly, whether we were playing or resting, alone or in company, sitting together or eating, if it was disrespectful, forgive me for it, O Krishna. I did not know the greatness of your nature, unchanging and imperishable.”
This moment endears us to our warrior friend. Arjuna says, in effect, “Gosh, God, I have not been paying you the proper respect.” Krishna will later explain to Arjuna that they have been friends through countless lives—that they have known and loved each other through the rise and fall of many forms. Arjuna has forgotten the details, of course, but he realizes that it is indeed so. Step by step, Krishna has led Arjuna to understand his life—has led him to understand who he is, who he has been, and what his pilgrimage across the ages has been like.
Arjuna is now on fire with his love for Krishna. Out of his enthusiasm, he makes a somewhat premature request. He says, “I want to know you even more.” He begs to see Krishna’s divine form. “Just as you have described your infinite glory, O Lord, now I long to see it. I want to see you as the supreme ruler of creation. O Lord, master of yoga, if you think me strong enough to behold it, show me your immortal Self.”
Of course, Arjuna really doesn’t know what he’s asking for. But Krishna wants to grant his wish. He wants to give him full knowledge of his Divine Self. But because he knows that Arjuna does not really yet have the capacity to perceive his illumined form, Krishna gives Arjuna “spiritual vision” to perceive what has previously been outside Arjuna’s limited perceptual range.
What emerges now is one of the great theophanies in all spiritual writing. The narrator, Sanjaya, recounts what Arjuna sees. It is one of the most masterful descriptions of the indescribable in all of world literature. (Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted it in 1945, when he was reaching for words to describe the first controlled explosion of the atomic bomb over the desert in New Mexico.)
Krishna’s divine form, says Sanjaya, “appeared with an infinite number of faces, ornamented by heavenly jewels, displaying unending miracles and the countless weapons of his power. Clothed in celestial garments and covered with garlands, sweet-smelling with heavenly fragrances, he showed himself as the infinite Lord, the source of all wonders, whose face is everywhere.”
Sanjaya continues: “If a thousand suns were to rise in the heavens at the same time, the blaze of their light would resemble the splendor of that supreme spirit. There within the body of the God of gods, Arjuna saw all the manifold forms of the universe united as one. Filled with amazement, his hair standing on end in ecstasy, he bowed before the Lord with joined palms …”
What is the lesson here for Arjuna? Arjuna—now with “spiritual vision”—perceives the whole world, the entire cosmos, within the Divine form of Krishna. Krishna had already taught Arjuna that awakened ones see the Self in themselves and in all creatures. Now this teaching had become very concrete indeed.
4
Enough! Cries an overwhelmed Arjuna. He soon tells Krishna to take away the vision. The blinding light is too much for his senses to bear. He feels his mortal form being ripped apart by its intensity. Indeed, his consciousness has been ripped apart. As we shall see, the vision will change Arjuna. He has received the great teaching: The whole world is within each one of us.
Once Arjuna has regained his equilibrium, Krishna drives home the point: “Arjuna,” he says (and I paraphrase), “the explosion of energy and consciousness you have just beheld is also within you. Coiled and ready. Thou Art That. If only you would connect with it. You saw all beings in me. All beings are also in you.”
Krishna continues, and says, in effect: “Now seeing the whole picture, you have the information you need in order to make your decisions about how to act in this world. You now know, incontrovertibly, that the whole world is in every being. You have now seen that you are One with it all. You have seen that the whole world is one family. There is no true separation between beings. This is the Truth.”
Arjuna is stunned. Humbled. And more than a little freaked out. He wants to hold on to the Truth. But he also wants to turn away from it. “When I’m in the presence of this Truth” he says, haltingly, “I know my real nature; and I act accordingly. My actions in such a case are effortlessly noble. But I forget. I forget who I am. Krishna, help! How do I maintain the fragile connection with this Truth?”
Now Krishna gives him the keystone: “Arjuna, that is why I have given you your dharma,” he says (and here and in the following paragraphs, I paraphrase Krishna). “Your dharma is your way of staying connected with your True Nature. It is the particular way in which you can devote your life to the welfare of all beings. Your dharma is your very own way of expressing the Truth. Your dharma is the one place where you can penetrate the fleeting world of form. Where you can live as I live, fully connected with the whole world of mind and matter. Where you can live in the sure knowledge that you are not the Doer, but only a vehicle of the great Doer.”
Krishna reiterates his earlier teaching: Know your dharma. Do it with all your passion. Let go of the fruits. And now he adds a fourth and final teaching: And turn it over to me. Surrender the whole process to me. Surrender your life’s work to God—to the divine within you, and to the divine within all beings. In this way your forgetfulness and delusion will slowly disappear. When you are immersed in your dharma, the wave becomes the sea again. Don’t you see? Dharma is your path home.
“Now do you see?” says Krishna. “In this mortal life you must walk by faith. You must walk by faith, not by the sight of your limited human vision. In order to walk by faith, you must gradually learn to trust me and my guidance. You must gradually learn to surrender your will. You cannot steer your dharma with the vehicle of self-will—the will of the small “s” self. Self-will will always steer you toward delusion, toward forgetfulness, toward separation. This self-will—driven by the grasping of small “s” self—is the greatest enemy of freedom and Oneness.”
Krishna’s teaching at this point in the dialogue becomes bold and challenging: “Keep all your senses tuned to the ineffable at all times. Listen for and follow my guidance every step of the way. Let go of doubt. And finally, see Me in every human being. See the Divine within yourself. Within everyone. And act accordingly. Your actions will be effortlessly noble—and will create happiness for you and for the whole world.”
Arjuna now understands that the real task he must master in this lifetime is learning to walk by faith. And he realizes that enacting his dharma is, in itself, the greatest act of faith.
In this final section of the book, then, we will explore two of the central themes in Krishna’s powerful final lessons to Arjuna:
1. Walk by faith.
2. Take yourself to zero.
We will examine the lives of two great examplars of these principles—beginning with an investigation of the astonishing life of Harriet Tubman, a nineteenth-century American slave who surrendered her life into the hands of God, and who discovered, as Thoreau did, that one person’s freedom could burst the fetters off a million slaves. And finally, we’ll look at the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi, perhaps history’s most brilliant student and exemplar of the Bhagavad Gita. In the process, we will also revisit the stories of our old friends Brian (the priest) and Katherine (the dean) as they continue to come to grips with the perils and promise of their own individual dharmas.