ONCE YOU GET that first glimpse of living Spirit, once your heart opens even for a moment to unconditional love, everything in your life becomes grist for the mill of your awakening. That awakening is from ego consciousness, your limited self, to the Self, the universal Spirit present in each of us, the God consciousness. It’s such grace to share this path of the heart together.
Although I went through a major transformation on my journey, that’s not how the journey goes for everyone, nor is rapid transformation necessary. For many people, their inner transformation occurs through subtle changes over long periods of time. In any case, it is a fallacy to think you’ll get closer to God by changing the outer form of your life, by leaving your partner or changing your job or moving to another place, by growing your hair or cutting your hair or giving up your material possessions.
It is not the outer form that changes; it is the nature of the inner being that fills the form. If you’re a lawyer, you go on being a lawyer, but you begin to use being a lawyer as a way of coming to God. One form is no more spiritual than any other. The essential work of developing a spiritual consciousness is quieting the mind and opening the heart.
The game of enlightenment starts from exactly where you are in your life at this moment. It’s not about rejecting or walking away from any part of your life. The game is to bring all of your life into harmony at every level, to act according to dharma, the law of the universe, truth, how it all is.
Your karma is what you are given to do in your life, based on past actions. Making a spiritual practice out of your karma, using it to go to God, is what brings karma into dharma, life into harmony with the spirit. From a spiritual standpoint, the intent and the manner of doing something are more important than the act itself. When you bring all of your life into harmony at every level, you act in accord with dharma. Another way to say it is you’re doing God’s will.
All forms of yoga are ways of coming into union with God. Karma yoga is putting all the activity of your life—work, relationships, service—toward consummating that union. How you go about your work in the world determines whether your work is a vehicle for your spiritual awakening or for getting more caught in māya, increasing the illusion of separation. Karma yoga uses selfless action and service as a way of bringing your life into harmony with the One.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna to do what he does, but to offer the fruits of his actions to him, to Krishna, to God. To use your daily life and work as a conscious spiritual path means relinquishing your attachment to the fruits of the actions, to how they come out. Instead of doing it for a reward or a result, you do your work as an offering, out of love for God. Through love for God, your work becomes an expression of devotion, of bhakti.
Loving service to others is also a way of offering your work to God. In the Rāmayana, Hanuman expresses his devotion through his service to Rām. Hanuman exemplifies that combination of bhakti (devotion) and karma yoga (service). Hanuman personifies Khalil Gibran’s statement, “Work is love made visible.” Like Hanuman, you serve others as a way of honoring God. It’s an attitude you develop, an attitude of offering. Every action you perform, you offer as selfless service, “seva” in Sanskrit. In the same vein, Christ says about service, “What you do for the least of my brothers and sisters you do for me.”
Seva doesn’t have ego in it; it’s all soul. Any action can be seva. Everything you do—cooking, working, gardening—is an act you can offer to God. Offering your work and all your actions to God takes daily life out of the realm of ego and into the higher Self. Karma yoga is a great practice, especially for us Westerners who are so addicted to doing, because it opens us to being even while we’re doing. Letting go of the doer lightens your load. It’s not even your load any more. “Not my will, but Thy Will.”
I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE
Find someone or something that needs help, and help out. Work on yourself to make it a conscious act of seva. Gandhi said, “The act that you do may seem very insignificant, but it’s important that you do it.”
Another term for karma yoga is “right action.” In the West the concept of right action is a difficult one to hear because it runs counter to our achievement and goal-oriented culture. In India, they have a very deep sense of doing one’s dharma. From that view, it’s natural to attune yourself to be in harmony with the laws of the universe. Your life is the part you play. You go from being the star of your own show to becoming an actor in the divine play.
That Bhagavad Gita instruction to be unattached to the fruits of your actions is the key. If you are a parent raising a child, don’t get attached to the act of raising the child. That doesn’t mean you’re not a loving, active parent. Your job is to love and nurture, feed and clothe, take care and guard the safety of the child, and guide him or her with your moral compass. But how the child turns out is how the child turns out. Ultimately he or she is not your child; who they turn out to be is up to God and their own karma.
Your attachment, your clinging to how the child is going to turn out, affects every aspect of how you parent. A lot of our anxiety comes because we are attached to how a child is supposed to come out—smart, successful, creative, whatever it is we want for our child. Of course, you parent your child as impeccably as you can. “Parent” is your role to play because that is your dharma, and naturally you become immersed in your role in life. But it is also important to remember you’re a soul playing a role. Who your child is and who you are are not roles.
As a conscious being, you do all you can to live in your soul and to create a space for others to be in their soul too. But you do so without trying to change the existing karma. You don’t need to change your karma, only your attachment to it. Attachment is what keeps you stuck in your limited reality. Your attachment, wishing your loved ones to be different than they are, keeps them the same. Just allow them to be the way they are and love them. Then they may change. But it’s not up to you. Samuel Johnson said, “He who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts.”
Just keep working on yourself until you are radiating love for each of the beings in your life. When you are radiating love, then everybody else is free to give up their stuff when they’re ready to give it up. Like a skillful gardener, you create a space for people to grow when they’re ready to grow. As a parent you create the garden for a child to grow (that’s why they call it kindergarten), but you don’t grow the flower. You cultivate and fertilize the earth and keep it weeded and moist, and then the flower grows naturally.
The essence of karma yoga is to free yourself from attachments to the events of your life, to stop creating more karma that gets you more stuck, and to get free of your existing karma. The minute your awareness grasps at anything, whether through attraction or aversion, you create karma from that link between awareness and the acts (or thoughts or emotions) that follow from the desire or the aversion. Action arising from awareness not identified with attraction or aversion creates no karma. Karma is the residual effect of an attached act. No attachment, no karma.
The Great Way is not difficult
for those not attached to preferences.
When neither love nor hate arises
all is clear and undisguised.
Separate by the smallest amount, however
and you are as far from it as heaven is from earth.
If you wish to know the truth,
then hold to no opinions for or against anything.
To set up what you like against what you dislike
is the disease of the mind.
When the fundamental nature of things is not recognized
the mind’s essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
…
When you try to stop activity to achieve quietude
your very effort fills you with activity.
…
Do not remain in a dualistic state
avoid such easy habits carefully.
If you attach even to a trace
of this and that, of right and wrong,
the Mind-essence will be lost in confusion.
Although all dualities arise from the One,
do not be attached even to ideas of this One.
When the mind exists undisturbed in the Way,
there is no objection to anything in the world,
and when there is no objection to anything,
things cease to be—in the old way.
SENG-TS’AN, FROM HSIN-HSIN MING, VERSES ON THE FAITH-MIND,
TRANSLATED BY RICHARD B. CLARKE
One way to get free of attachment is to cultivate the witness consciousness, to become a neutral observer of your own life. The witness place inside you is simple awareness, the part of you that is aware of everything—just noticing, watching, not judging, just being present, being here now.
The witness is actually another level of consciousness. The witness coexists alongside your normal consciousness as another layer of awareness, as the part of you that is awakening. Humans have this unique ability to be in two states of consciousness at once. Witnessing yourself is like directing the beam of a flashlight back at itself. In any experience—sensory, emotional, or conceptual—there’s the experience, the sensory or emotional or thought data, and there’s your awareness of it. That’s the witness, the awareness, and you can cultivate that awareness in the garden of your being.
The witness is your awareness of your own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Witnessing is like waking up in the morning and then looking in the mirror and noticing yourself—not judging or criticizing, just neutrally observing the quality of being awake. That process of stepping back takes you out of being submerged in your experiences and thoughts and sensory input and into self-awareness.
Along with that self-awareness comes the subtle joy of just being here, alive, enjoying being present in this moment. Eventually, floating in that subjective awareness, the objects of awareness dissolve, and you will come into the spiritual Self, the Atmān, which is pure consciousness, joy, compassion, the One.
The witness is your centering device. It guides the work you do on yourself. Once you understand that there is a place in you that is not attached, you can extricate yourself from attachments. Pretty much everything we notice in the universe is a reflection of our attachments.
Jesus warned us, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt … For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Desire creates your universe; that’s just the way it works. So your first job is to work on yourself. The greatest thing you can do for another human being is to get your own house in order and find your true spiritual heart.
After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance, your stuckness, more clearly. You see the mental struggles, inner dialogues, self-narrations, the ways you procrastinate or resist life changes. Don’t try to change the patterns; just notice them. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don’t have to change them. When you’re being here now, in loving awareness, things just change.
By cultivating the witness consciousness, you move your identification from your ego to your soul. Your soul is in your spiritual heart. The soul witnesses the incarnation. If you stay in the witness, your soul witnesses your feelings, your desires, your experiences, not identifying with those desires or attitudes or any of those things. Then you can just watch the show. Sit back from your ego and your other thoughts and just watch the show of your incarnation like a movie, enjoying the characters and loving the melodrama. It turns out how it turns out. I like to sit back with my guru inside my heart. He is a loving and compassionate, peaceful and wise soul friend. You also can have a soul friend—inside yourself—a guru or a good spiritual friend to keep you oriented toward God.
Think of the witness as your inner guru, silently illuminating the workings of your mind. There is this quiet place, this conscious entity that’s hanging around and showing you, “Oh, you just got uptight.” Not judging, as in, “You’re such a failure, you fool. You got uptight again,” but just, “OK, you got uptight again. How interesting!”
The quickest way to get through your stuff is to learn to listen to that place inside. The inner guru is always there for you once you recognize it. You have to honor your own path and be able to trust that there is a place in you that knows what is best. There is a tendency to look to others for guidance, but really only you know what is suitable for you. Trust your intuitive heart. The Quakers call it the still, small voice within. When it speaks, listen. If, as you listen to your heart’s intuition, it feels right to do something, do it.
Witnessing is a doorway to living in your spiritual heart, your soul awareness. The more you listen to your internal witness, the more you stop living by other people’s judgments and expectations. You start doing what you need to do. In trying to decide what to do with your life, listen to your heart. The more you live in your spiritual heart, the more you see yourself and others from the soul perspective. Seeing things as a soul changes everything. The program is much farther out than you think. I never thought I’d be a yogi.
Each of us has our own unique karmic predicament, our own unique work to do. The predicament is that there is nowhere to stand, because our identification with the person who has the karma is changing too. As you develop the witness and identify more with your spiritual heart, karma just is. As you awaken, you realize that personal karma is just another illusion. The illusion is that this is the only reality. The witness helps you to see that there are choices, different ways to perceive reality.
When you are pouring morning tea or pouring the water into the coffee-maker for your family, is that all it is? Or is it God pouring God into God to serve God? Always choose what you feel is most at one with the Way of things, the Tao, your dharma.
Back in the ’70s we put out a boxed set of records called Love, Serve, Remember. It was a really nice box, with six records and a beautiful booklet with text and photos and drawings. My father, the lawyer and CEO, looked at it and said, “This is pretty good. How much do you sell it for?” I told him we sold it for just a little more than it cost to produce. He said, “You know, you could charge much more for this. It’s worth it, and you could make more money.”
I asked Dad how much he charged Uncle Henry when he represented him in a legal matter. He replied, “Well, of course I didn’t charge him anything. That’s Uncle Henry. He’s family.” I said that was my dilemma too—I see everyone as Uncle Henry. The way I see it, we are all one family. Now, whether I can actually live so everybody is my family and we are all one depends on how trapped I am in my separateness, and whether I see others as “us” or as “them.” Of course, how you see others starts with how you see yourself. Who you think you are is a matter of perspective. I like the story about a disreputable-looking Sufi named Nasrudin, who is attempting to do some business in a bank. The bank teller asks him if he can identify himself. He pulls out a mirror and says, “Yep, that’s me.”
Don’t take your melodrama so seriously. Let’s remember who we really are—that is, souls, not egos. The ego is who you think you are. Who you think you are will die with the body because it’s part of this incarnation. But your soul, which has these qualities of deep wisdom and love and peace and joy, is just here, watching it all go by.
Again, karma yoga is not about renouncing external actions but about renouncing your attachment to them. We’re really talking about giving up being the central character of your own melodrama, who you think you are and how you think it is. All this self-narration of the ego is what keeps your personal melodrama going.
Ego is neither good nor bad. The ego has a function. It is the vehicle through which you relate to the external world. But the ego is a collection of thoughts, and to the extent you identify with your thoughts, they keep you from being here now. Once you let go of the identification with your thoughts the melodrama goes on, but it’s no longer your melodrama. Appreciate the experiences but don’t get caught in them.
The art of spiritual growth has to do with how quickly you recognize attachments and how quickly you can release them. If you can admit that you can’t see or hear clearly because of attachment, then the full wisdom of things will begin to shine through. As long as you have some desire about how you think it ought to be, you can’t hear how it is.
A Zen story about a monk living in a monastery in the hills above a town exemplifies life without attachment. A local girl got pregnant by a fisherman, but she didn’t want to get the fisherman in trouble, so she said the monk on the hill was the father. The townspeople went up to the monastery with torches, and they knocked on the gate. The monk opened the gate, and they said, “This is your baby. You must raise it.” The monk said, “Aahh, so.” And he took the baby and closed the gates. Nine years later, the girl was dying but didn’t want to die without confessing this terrible injustice, so she told the people. They were mortified, and they went rushing up and knocked on the gate. The monk opened the gate, and they said, “We’re terribly sorry. It wasn’t your son. We’ve come to relieve you of this responsibility.” And he said, “Aahh, so.”
From the soul’s point of view, you come to appreciate that each one of us is living out his or her own karma. We interact together, and those interactions are the grist for each other’s mill of awakening. From a personality point of view, you develop judgment, but from the soul’s point of view, you develop appreciation. This shift from judging to appreciating—to appreciating yourself and what your karmic predicament is, and who other beings are with their own karma—brings everything into a simple loving awareness. To be free means to open your heart and your being to the fullness of who you are, because only when you are resting in the place of unity can you truly honor and appreciate others and the incredible diversity of the universe.
When I perform a wedding ceremony, the image I invoke is of a triangle formed by the two partners and this third force, which is the shared love that unites and surrounds them both. In the yoga of relationship, two people come together to find that shared love but continue to dance as two. In that union, both people are separate and yet not separate. Their relationship feeds both their unique individuality and their unity of consciousness. Love can open the way to surrendering into oneness. It gets extraordinarily beautiful when there’s no more “me” and “you,” and it becomes just “us.”
Taken to a deeper level, when compassion is fully developed, you are not looking at others as “them.” You’re listening and experiencing and letting that intuitive part of you merge with the other person, and you’re feeling their pain or joy or hope or fear in yourself. Then it’s no longer “us” and “them”; it’s just “us.” Practice this in your relationships with others.
At a certain point, you realize that you see only the projections of your own mind. The play of phenomena is a projection of the spirit. The projections are your karma, your curriculum for this incarnation. Everything that’s happening to you is a teaching designed to burn out your stuff, your attachments. Your humanity and all your desires are not some kind of error. They’re integral parts of the journey.
One way of getting to this place of compassionate action is by honoring others and being patient. Look at the people you don’t like and see them as an exercise for you to open your spiritual heart and to develop your compassion. The quieter you are, the more you hear the true nature of compassion. The intuitive compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.
This story from Aikido master Terry Dobson is one of my favorites because it shows how to bring about harmony by embracing conflict with compassion and understanding:
The train clanked and rattled through the suburbs of Tokyo on a drowsy spring afternoon. Our car was comparatively empty, a few housewives with their kids in tow, some old folks going shopping. I gazed absently at the drab houses and dusty hedgerows.
At one station the doors opened and suddenly the afternoon quiet was shattered by a man bellowing violent, incomprehensible curses. The man staggered into our car. He wore laborer’s clothing and he was big, drunk, and dirty. Screaming, he swung at a woman holding a baby. The blow sent her spinning into the laps of an elderly couple. It was a miracle the baby was unharmed. Terrified, the couple jumped up and scrambled toward the end of the car. The laborer aimed a kick at the retreating back of the old woman but missed as she scuttled to safety. This so enraged the drunk that he grabbed the metal pole in the center of the car and tried to wrench it out of its stanchion. I could see that one of his hands was cut and bleeding. The train lurched ahead, the passengers frozen with fear. I stood up.
I was young then, some twenty years ago, and in pretty good shape. I had been putting in a solid eight hours of aikido training every day for the past three years. I liked to throw and grapple. I thought I was tough. The trouble was, my martial skill was untested in actual combat. As students of aikido, we were not allowed to fight. Aikido, my teacher had said again and again, is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection to the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it.
I listened to his words. I tried so hard. I even went so far as to cross the street to avoid the kids, the pinball punks who lounged around the train station. My forbearance exalted me. I was both tough and holy. In my heart, however, I wanted an absolutely legitimate opportunity whereby I might save the innocent by destroying the guilty. This is it, I said to myself, as I stood up. People are in danger. If I don’t do something fast, somebody will probably get hurt.
Seeing me stand up the drunk recognized the chance to focus his rage. “Ah ha!” he roared. “A foreigner! You need a lesson in Japanese manners.” I held on lightly to the commuter strap overhead and gave him a slow look of disgust and dismissal. I planned to take this turkey apart but he had to make the first move. I wanted him mad so I pursed my lips and blew him an insolent kiss. “All right,” he hollered, “You’re going to get a lesson.” He gathered himself for a rush at me.
A fraction of a second before he could move, someone shouted “Hey!” It was ear-splitting. I remember the strangely joyous, lilting quality of it as though you and a friend had been searching diligently for something and he had suddenly stumbled upon it—“Hey!” I wheeled to my left, the drunk spun to his right.
We both stared down at a little old Japanese man. He must have been well into his seventies, this tiny gentleman, sitting there immaculate in his kimono. He took no notice of me but beamed delightedly at the laborer as though he had a most important, most welcome secret to share. “Come here,” the old man said in an easy vernacular, beckoning to the drunk. “Come here and talk with me.” He waved his hand lightly. The big man followed as if on a string. He planted his feet belligerently in front of the old gentleman and roared above the clacking wheels. “Why the hell should I talk to you?”
The drunk now had his back to me. If his elbow moved so much as a millimeter I’d drop him in his socks. The old man continued to beam at the laborer. “Whatcha been drinkin?” he asked, his eyes sparkling with interest. “I’ve been drinking sake,” the laborer bellowed back, “and it’s none of your business.” Flecks of spittle spattered the old man. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” the old man said, “absolutely wonderful. You see I love sake too. Every night me and my wife, she’s seventy-six you know, we warm up a little bottle of sake and we take it out in the garden and we sit on our old wooden bench and we watch the sun go down and we look to see how our persimmon tree is doing. My great-grandfather planted that tree and we worry about whether it will recover from those ice storms we had last winter. Our tree has done better than I expected though, especially when you consider the poor quality of the soil. It is gratifying to watch when we take our sake and go out to enjoy the evening even when it rains.” He looked up at the laborer, his eyes twinkling.
As he struggled to follow the old man’s conversation, the drunk’s face began to soften. His fists slowly unclenched. “Yeah,” he said, “I love persimmons too.” His voice trailed off. “Yes,” said the old man, smiling, “and I am sure you have a wonderful wife.” “Nah. My wife died.” Very gently, swaying with the motion of the train, the big man began to sob. “I don’t got no wife. I don’t got no home. I don’t got no job. I’m so ashamed of myself.” Tears rolled down his cheeks. A spasm of despair rippled through his body.
There I was standing in my well-scrubbed youthful innocence, my make-this-world-safe-for-democracy righteousness. I suddenly felt dirtier than he was. The train arrived at my stop. As the door opened, I heard the old man cluck sympathetically. “My, my,” he said, “that is a difficult predicament. Sit down here and tell me about it.” I turned my head for one last look. The laborer was sprawled on the seat, his head in the old man’s lap. The old man was softly stroking the filthy matted hair. As the train pulled away, I sat down on a bench. What I had wanted to do with muscle had been accomplished with kind words. I had just seen aikido tried in combat, and the essence of it was love.
You and I are in training to become conscious, compassionate beings, in the truest and deepest sense. Become an instrument of joy, an instrument of equanimity, an instrument of presence, an instrument of love, an instrument of availability, and at the same moment absolutely quiet. Since we all spend so much time in our relationships, why not turn them into a yoga for getting free? Living a spiritual life is a strategy for working on yourself for the benefit of all beings. That’s another way of saying that the optimum thing you can do for someone else is to work on yourself—not out of some idealistic sense of altruism, but because getting to oneness for yourself means resolving your sense of separateness to where we’re all family.
Use every situation you have with other people as a vehicle to work on yourself. See where you get stuck, where you push, where you grab, where you judge, where you do all the other stuff. Use your life experiences as your curriculum.
When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a whole range of reasons we get together and ways we interact. Some are transactional, but the deeper impulse of every human relationship is to evoke the love and oneness that unites us. But what actually happens is that many relationships reinforce our separateness because of our misperception of ourselves as separate beings, and because of our desire systems, which are based on separateness or ego. Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one.
Relationships and emotions can reinforce our separateness, or they can be grist for the mill of awakening. When it comes to love relationships we are like bees looking for a flower. The predicament is that the emotional power of loving somebody can get you so caught in the interpersonal melodrama that you can’t get beyond the emotion. The problem with interpersonal love is that you are dependent on the other person to reflect love back to you. That’s part of the illusion of separateness. The reality is that love is a state of being that comes from within.
The only thing you really ever have to offer another person is your own state of being. When you’re not entrapped by another person’s appearance or behavior, you can see behind all that to a deeper level of their being because your mind has tuned itself; you’ve shifted your focus just that little bit to see their soul. That soul quality is love.
When I was growing up, I used to be somebody. We were all in somebody training in those days. You become somebody, and then you tell everybody who you are. You hand out business cards, and you say, “How do you do? I am Somebody, and I do such and such.” Everybody is very important and special, and each person assesses how much more important they are than everybody else. We were all in that training.
I became somebody because my parents wanted me to be special and my educators wanted me to be special, and they trained me how to do that. It’s called ego structuring. I really made it. I was really somebody. My parents were proud of me. I could look in their eyes and see pride and appreciation. That part was very gratifying.
The only problem was, inside I felt lousy. I felt like somehow I should be happy. But I wasn’t. I thought, “Well, happiness isn’t everything, is it? As long as I am what everyone wants me to be, isn’t that enough?” But it wasn’t, and I felt very weird.
There is a story I’ve told many times that describes that feeling of weirdness. A man wanted to have a suit made. So he went to the best tailor in town, who was named Zumbach. Zumbach took his measurements and ordered the best material.
The man went in for the final fitting, and he put on the suit. One sleeve was two inches longer than the other. He said, “Zumbach, I don’t want to complain. It’s a beautiful suit. But this sleeve is two inches longer than that sleeve.” Zumbach looked affronted. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with the suit. It’s the way you are standing.” And he pushed one of the man’s shoulders down and the other one up, and he said, “See, if you stand like that it fits perfectly.”
The fellow looked in the mirror again, and there was all this loose material behind the collar. He said, “Zumbach, what’s all this material sticking out?” Zumbach said, “There is nothing wrong with that suit. It’s the way you are standing.” And he pushed in the man’s chin and made him hunch his shoulders. “See, it’s perfect.”
Finally the suit was fitting perfectly, and the man left. He was walking to the bus in his new, perfectly fitting suit, and somebody came up to him and said, “What a beautiful suit! I bet Zumbach the tailor made it.”
The man said, “How did you know?”
“Because only a tailor of Zumbach’s skill could make a suit fit so perfectly on somebody as crippled as you are.”
Well, that was what I felt like. Everybody kept telling me what a beautiful suit I was wearing, but I felt like I was in Zumbach’s suit.
Wearing Zumbach’s suit is sort of what you feel like in some relationships. When you take off the suit and start to see behind the veils, it’s as if you’re looking at someone and saying, “Are you here? I’m here. Here we are. Far out!”
If somebody at work is a problem for you, they’re not the one who needs to change. If someone is a problem for you, it’s you who needs to change. If you feel they’re causing you trouble, that’s your problem. It’s on you. Your job is to clear yourself.
If they’re creating a problem for themselves, that’s their karma. When Christ was being crucified and he said, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he was trying to help others out of being a problem for themselves. They weren’t a problem for him, because he was clear.
Ideally you clear yourself right in the situation, but often it’s too sticky and you can’t do it. Step back then and do the practices you do in the morning and evening or on weekends to stay clear. Do the stuff that quiets you down inside.
Next time you go into that work situation, you may lose it again. Just go home and see how you lost it, examine it. You go in the next day and lose it again. You start keeping a diary of, “How did I lose it today?” Then you go and do it again. After a while, when you’re starting to lose it, you don’t buy in so much. You start to watch the mechanics of what it is that makes you lose it all the time. When you get to the point of seeing stuff as it’s actually happening, the tendrils of attachment will begin to loosen.
If you don’t appreciate me, that’s your problem. If I need your love or your approval, then it’s my problem. Then my needs are giving you power over me. But it’s not your power—it’s the power of my desire system. The power other people have to shake you out of your equanimity and love and consciousness has to do with your own attachments and the clinging of your mind.
This is where your work is on yourself, where you need to meditate more, where you need to reflect more, where you need a deeper philosophical framework. It’s where you need to cultivate the witness more. It’s where you need to practice opening your heart more in circumstances that aren’t optimum or easy. This is your work. You were given a heavy curriculum, a full course load. This is it. There’s no blame; you’re not being graded. It’s just what’s on your plate at this moment.
Using relationships as a vehicle to freedom means we have to learn to listen—listen to each person at each level of their being. The art of listening comes from a quiet mind and an open heart. Listening uses all of your senses, and it is a subtle skill. Listen, just listen—not only with the ear, but also with your being. Your being becomes the instrument of listening. Your sensing mechanisms in life are not just your ears, eyes, skin, and analytic mind. It’s something deeper, some intuitive quality of knowing. With all of your being, you become an antenna to the nature of another person. Then for the relationship to remain as living spirit, one of the best ingredients to put into the stew is truth.
Gandhi spent his life in what he called “experiments in truth,” just learning how to be truthful. He said, “Only God knows absolute Truth,” and further, that he, being human, knew only relative truth, and that his understanding of it changed from day to day. Gandhi said that his commitment was to truth, not to consistency. It is important to honor your own truth even though to other people you may appear to be inconsistent. In a speech to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama quoted from the Koran, “Be conscious of God and always speak the truth.” Compassionate use of truth requires discriminating wisdom, which comes from awareness of God within.
For a long time I thought truth was expressed in words, but that’s not always so. There are truths that are communicated only in silence. You have to know when to use words and when to use silence. There is a difference between paranoid silence and cosmic silence. Cosmic silence is a plane of consciousness that cannot be expressed in words. From that place, words are like a finger pointing at the moon. Silence is a luxury we can afford when we feel safe together in shared awareness.
When I went to India for the second time, I brought Maharaj-ji a copy of the book Be Here Now. I didn’t hear anything for a while, then one day he called me up to where he was sitting and said, “You’re printing lies in this book.”
I said, “Oh no, Maharaj-ji. Everything in the book is true.”
He said, “It says here that Hari Dass Baba went into the jungle when he was eight years old.” (You may recall that Hari Dass Baba was assigned by Maharaj-ji to teach me yoga.) Maharaj-ji said, “He didn’t go into the jungle when he was eight years old. He worked in the Forestry Department until 1962.”
Then he called a man over and asked, “What do you do?”
The man said, “I am the head of the Forestry Department.”
Maharaj-ji said, “Do you know Hari Dass Baba?”
He said, “Oh yes, he worked for me until 1962.”
Maharaj-ji said, “OK, go.”
Then in similar fashion he showed me a couple of more fallacies in two more paragraphs, and he said, “Why did you write that?”
I said, “Well, somebody told me all that stuff. I don’t know who told it to me, but somebody did, and it was somebody around you. And I believed it because it was all coming with love.”
He said, “Are you so simple that you believe everything everybody tells you?”
Hari Dass Baba was a beautiful silent yogi, and he was just being who he was. Maybe I’d developed this trip about him and listened to it because I wanted my teacher to be special.
Maharaj-ji said, “Whatever the reason, it’s a lie. What are you going to do about it?”
I said, “Well Maharaj-ji, I’ll change it. Eighty thousand copies are already distributed, and I can’t call them back. But the second printing is coming up, and I will change it then.”
I sent a telegram to the Lama Foundation, which was printing the book in Albuquerque. I told them to please delete the two paragraphs about Hari Dass Baba in the next printing. Steve Durkee, the then-head of Lama who is now called Nur al Din, wrote back and said, “It can’t be done now. I was just in Albuquerque”—which is a couple of hundred miles from Lama, where there’s no phone—“I told them to go ahead and print it, and they were going to press that day.” It was the pre-Christmas rush, and it was probably already printed. Steve said, “I received your telegram too late. We will change it in the third edition, which will be printed in three months.”
I went back to my guru and I said, “Maharaj-ji, I can’t change it until the next edition. To change it now would cost at least $10,000. We would have to throw away the whole printing.”
He looked at me and he said, “Do it now.” And he said, “Money and truth have nothing to do with one another.”
I went back and cabled Lama again and said, “Forget the expense. Maharaj-ji says change it now. It’s his book.”
A cable came back from Steve saying, “The most remarkable thing happened. The day your cable came telling us to change it anyway, a note came from the printing company. When they put the job on the press, one of the plates was damaged. That page included a photo of Maharaj-ji, and when they went to the file to find the original, that particular picture was missing. It was the only thing missing. So they took the whole job off the press and wrote for further instructions.”
Money and truth have nothing to do with one another. Maharaj-ji was playing with the book and the printer and my mind.
The Tao Te Ching says, “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.” Often we don’t fully hear the truth because of our mind’s clinging or attachment; we hear only the projections of our own desires. So again and again we make decisions that end up not being in the deepest harmony with the Way of things. Working through an attachment means you have to work with that desire until you are no longer attached to that desire. The desire may still be there, but you are no longer attached to it.
When we see without attachment, truth becomes self-evident. When we are fully present in the moment, truth just is.
One way to heal your emotional problems is to cultivate another part of your being, like the witness. Use the witness to cultivate awareness in dealing with emotions one by one. As the witness gets stronger, your emotional problems become less relevant to your existence.
By witnessing, you can divest emotions of their power. When you’re deep in the psychological realm and you keep trying to work it out, you just keep investing in it. It’s a bottomless well of stuff.
Witnessing will allow you to acknowledge the feelings and appreciate them as part of the human condition. That’s the quickest way through an emotion: to acknowledge it, allow it to be, and release it, give it up. You can do that in a variety of ways. For example, you can use the body energy of hatha yoga to keep working out the chemical stuff and the tension that builds up in the body. Sometimes music helps, or just becoming aware of your breath. Just keep letting go and letting go. Singing to God—as in the practice known as kirtan—can give rise to ecstatic states that have the power to free you from your personal emotional melodramas.
As your spiritual practice gets stronger, you are able to see your emotional stuff before it gets so overloaded and invested with adrenalin. You no longer let it get that intense. If those feelings get out of control, the best thing to do is to sit quietly. Let them pass. Bhagavan Das once said to me, “Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.”
That capacity to dwell in the witness makes all the emotional stuff and stresses of life much lighter. The art, as I understand it, is to cultivate these other planes of consciousness, and then you no longer have to push the stuff away because it falls into perspective. It’s as if you just shift your focus and see it from outside of yourself, so you are no longer identified with the way you were thinking. Einstein said, “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.’’
On the devotional path, you can change levels by offering an emotion to God or your guru as a way to give it up. “Here, you take it. I offer it to you.” And by appreciating your own humanity: “Yeah, here I am. I just lost it again. Ah, so. Right. OK.” It’s the ability to see it without denying it. “I’m upset. Far out. Here we are again.” It is like talking with God and saying, “Look how deliciously human I am.”
When I studied people’s personalities in psychology, I saw that at the root of almost every problem was a feeling of inadequacy or not-enoughness. These are the seed components in personality structure. Understand these issues and see that you’re subject to that pathology just like everyone else. That wisdom leads to compassion and love for yourself and others.
Go behind your own polarities too—not to “I am good” or “I am loveable,” but go behind them to “I am.” “I am” includes the fact that I do beautiful things and I do crappy things. And I am. As you start to rest in the space of “I am,” you begin to feel emotions from a different perspective and become impeccable in the way you play the game. Loving those emotions helps to release them.
When you hunger for love, that is the longing to come home, to be at peace, to feel at one with the universe, where lover and Beloved merge. It’s a place to be fully in the moment, to feel completely fulfilled, to just be in love.
Watch how your mind judges. Judgment comes, in part, out of your own fear. You judge other people because you’re not comfortable in your own being. By judging, you find out where you stand in relation to other people. The judging mind is very divisive. It separates. Separation closes your heart. If you close your heart to someone, you are perpetuating your suffering and theirs. Shifting out of judgment means learning to appreciate your predicament and their predicament with an open heart instead of judging. Then you can allow yourself and others to just be, without separation.
The only game in town is the game of being, which includes both highs and lows. Every time you push something away, it remains there. The pile under the rug gets very big. Your lows turn out to be more interesting than your highs because they are showing you where you’re not, where you have work to do.
You just say, “Thank you for the teaching.” You don’t have to judge another being. You just have to work on yourself.
When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.
Maharaj-ji told me to love everyone. “Love everyone, there is only one. Sub ek—it’s all one, just love everyone. See God everywhere. Just love everyone. Don’t get angry. Ram Dass, don’t get angry. Love everyone, tell the truth, love everyone, don’t get angry.”
You know, when people say things like that to you, you say, “Yeah, sure, right, absolutely!” And it sort of goes through you like Chinese food because you’ve been told that since you were a child.
I had just returned to India after two years as a holy man in the West. It had been too heavy a trip for me because I was still full of lust and greed and laziness. There were so many more pizzas I still had to eat, and it was hard to sneak in a pizza when somebody was always looking. Finally I had fled back to India, hoping to hide out in a cave until I could get my head together. But all the time in India, wherever I would go there were Westerners wanting to hang out. Slowly I grew to hate them all. How could I go into a cave and get holy with forty Westerners?
After a year, except for a couple of weeks, I remained totally immersed in Western consciousness in the middle of India. We were all with Maharajji, and finally I decided, “Well, he keeps saying tell the truth and don’t get angry, but the truth is I am angry. I have spent too long outwardly pretending I love everyone. Inside my mind is full of anger. The hypocrisy is driving me up the wall. Maharaj-ji said to tell the truth. I think for a change I will tell the truth, since I can’t do both.”
People would come to visit me in my room. They were lovely beings, and I would say, “Get the hell out of this room, you lazy bastard. You’re too nice. You nauseate me.” Pretty soon I had effectively alienated the entire group. They didn’t want to take me seriously, but I was persistent. At that time I was doing a sadhana, a practice, where I didn’t touch money. To get to the temple every day from town, we usually shared a bus or a taxi, and somebody would pay for me. But I was so mad at everybody that I couldn’t be in the same space with them on the bus. So I walked to the temple, which took several hours.
One day I got there late, having walked, and I was really angry. Everyone was sitting in the courtyard across from Maharaj-ji eating the blessed food, the prasad. There was one leaf plate left for me. One of the guys I was particularly angry at brought the food over and put it down in front of me. I was so angry I picked it up and threw it at him. Maharaj-ji was watching all of this and called me over. “Ram Dass, is something troubling you?”
“Yes. I can’t stand adharma, I can’t stand impurities. I can’t stand all those people, and I can’t stand myself. I only love you. I hate everybody else.”
At that point I started to wail—to just cry and cry as if all the anger in me was just pouring out of me. Maharaj-ji sent for some milk, and he was feeding me milk and patting me on the head and pulling my beard, and he was crying along with me. And then he looked at me and he said, “Love everyone and don’t get angry.”
I said to him, “Well, you told me to tell the truth, and the truth is I don’t love everyone.”
He leaned close to me—like nose to nose and eye to eye—and very fiercely he said, “Love everyone and tell the truth.”
I started to say, “But …,” and at that point the whole rest of that sentence became self-evident to me. He was saying, “When you finish being who you think you are, this is who you will be.” I was thinking I was somebody who couldn’t love everyone and tell the truth. He was saying, “Well, when you give that one up, I am still here, and the game is very simple. Love everyone and tell the truth.”
I looked across at the group of Westerners—after all, this was an order from my guru. I looked at this group of people I was so angry with, and now I could see there was a place in them I did love.
Then he said, “Go take food.” I went over and started eating. I was still crying.
He called everybody over to him and said, “Ram Dass is a great saint, go touch his feet.” That completely infuriated me.
Usually when you are angry with somebody, what you do is sit down and talk it out until everybody saves face. You know how that’s done: “I was wrong, I’m sorry.” “Well, that’s good of you to say so …” The trouble was, he didn’t say I should save face. He just said to love everyone and tell the truth. He was telling me to give it up.
I saw that the only reason I got angry was because I was holding on to how I thought it was supposed to be. So I cut some apples into pieces, and I went around and I looked each person in the eye. I couldn’t feed them the piece of apple until I was free of the anger, because to give food with anger is like giving somebody poison. The vibration of anger gets transmitted along with the food. It’s the opposite of healing. I looked each person in the eye, and I saw everything I was angry at. And it began to dissolve. I could feel that the only thing that was between us at this point was my pride. I just didn’t want to give up my righteousness. But I saw in each case that I had to just shed it—just let it go until I could look into their eyes and just see my guru, see myself, see their soul. I had to let go of our individual differences. It took quite a long time because I had to give it up with each individual, and some took longer than others.
After that kind of teaching you might think that I don’t get angry anymore. I do. But when I start to get angry, I see my predicament and how I’m getting caught in expectations and righteousness. Learning to give up anger has been a continuous process. When Maharaj-ji told me to love everyone and tell the truth, he also said, “Give up anger, and I’ll help you with it.” Maharaj-ji offered me a bargain: “You must polish the mirror free of anger to see God. If you give up a little anger each day, I will help you.” This seemed to be a deal that was more than fair. I readily accepted. And he’s been true to his end of the bargain. I found that his love helped to free me from my righteousness. Ultimately I would rather be free and in love than be right.
If you feel a sense of social responsibility, first of all keep working on yourself. Being peaceful yourself is the first step if you want to live in a peaceful universe.
Have you ever noticed how many angry people there are at peace rallies? Social action arouses righteousness. Righteousness ultimately starves you to death. If you want to be free more than you want to be right, you have to let go of righteousness, of being right.
That reminds me of a story. There’s this Chinese boatman, and he hits another boat in the fog. He starts swearing at the other boatman. “You SOB! Why didn’t you look where you were going?” Then the fog lifts for a moment, and he sees there is nobody in the other boat. And he feels like a fool.
Righteousness is roughly the same thing. Say, for instance, you hold a grudge against your father, and you talk to him in your mind as if he’s there inside you. But he isn’t there. Psychologically you think he is there, because you’re identified with who you think you are, but once you begin to see this is all just a bunch of thoughts, your psychological father is just another set of empty phenomena. You are busy saying, “I forgive you, I forgive you,” to that psychological father, but it’s like saying “I forgive you” to a clock. There’s nothing there. You’re the same as the boatman.
There’s no rush. Go on being right just as long as you can. You’ll see that being right is actually a tight little box that is very constraining and not much fun to live in. Righteousness cuts you off from the flow of things. When I’m locked in a situation in a relationship with someone, it isn’t that they have done something to me. They’re just doing what they’re doing. If I get caught up in judging, the responsibility lies with me, not with them. It becomes my work on myself. I often say, “I really apologize for whatever suffering I’ve caused you in this situation.” We start to work from there. And after a while they will come forward and will examine themselves and say, “Well, maybe I was …” Our predicament is that our ego wants to be right in a world of people who don’t understand how right we are.
There is a way of representing what is right, the dharma of the moment. But if you get emotionally attached to a model of how the world ought to be that excludes how human beings are, there’s something wrong with where you’re standing. You should be standing somewhere else. Getting lost in your emotional reactivity isn’t where you want to be. Just allowing your humanity and that of others to be as it is, is the beginning of compassion.
We are in a human incarnation. We can’t walk away. To walk in the dharma is also to hear other human beings.
As you tune into your own dharma, you become motivated to confront the places in yourself that keep you trapped. When there is fear, you aren’t free. President Franklin Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Fear is a protective mechanism in the sense that you experience free-floating anxiety about that which threatens you. Fear makes you want to hold on to familiar structure in your life. If you are busy identifying yourself as a separate entity, you fear the extinction of that being. When you are identified with your soul, there is no fear. The soul doesn’t identify with the ending of the incarnation, which we think of as death.
Since meeting Maharaj-ji, I do not experience a fear of death as a real fear when I get into situations where death seems imminent. I don’t have any of my earlier usual reactions of anxiety or fear, and yet I protect the temple that is my body, because it is the vehicle for my work. I don’t protect it out of fear, because the fear of death seems somehow to have flown the coop somewhere along the way. The absence of that fear changes the nature of my daily experience. Now each day is just what it is.
When you experience fear, you are caught in your separateness, feeling cut off and vulnerable. When you’re experiencing love, you’re part of the unity of all things. Love is the antidote for fear because it goes to the place behind separateness. As you cultivate that unitive quality, the fear dissipates. As fear dissipates, you feel at home in the universe. If you stay in the soul, you will stay in love. It’s not a concept or a belief. When you have faith, there’s no fear—only love. True “faith” arises when you know that you are the soul, and that the soul is love.
Once, back in 1970, I was driving on the New York Thruway in a 1938 Buick limousine that I had converted into a camper. I was going very slowly because it was a very old car, driving with one hand on the steering wheel and doing my māla beads with the other—just hanging out with various forms of the Divine. I was holding the steering wheel with just enough consciousness to keep the car on the road. I was singing to Krishna, a radiant, blue incarnation of God who plays the flute. Krishna represents the seductive aspect of the Beloved. I was ecstatically hanging out with blue Krishna and driving along the New York Thruway when I noticed a blue, flashing light in my rearview mirror. I thought, “Krishna has come!”
There was enough of me focused on driving that I knew it was a state trooper. I pulled over, and he came up to the car window. He said, “May I see your license and registration?”
I was looking at him as Krishna, who had come to give me darshan. It was 1970. Wouldn’t Krishna come as a state trooper? Christ came as a carpenter.
Krishna asked for my license. I would have given him anything; he could have my life, but all he wanted was my license and registration. So I gave him my license and registration, and it was like I was throwing flowers at the feet of God. I was looking at him with absolute love.
He went back to his police car, and he called home base. Then he came back, and he walked around the car, and he said, “What’s in that box on the seat?”
I said, “They’re mints. Would you like one?”
He said, “Well, the problem is you were driving too slowly on the thruway, and you’ll have to drive off the thruway if you’re going to drive that slowly.”
I said, “Yes, absolutely.” I was just looking at him with such love.
If you put yourself in the role of a state trooper, how often do you suppose they get looked at with unconditional love, especially when they’re in uniform? So after he had finished all the deliberations, he didn’t want to leave, but he had run out of state trooper-ness. So he stood there a minute, and then he said, “Great car you’ve got here!”
That allowed me to get out. And we could kick the tires and hit the fenders and say, “They don’t make ’em now like they used to,” and tell old car stories. Then we ran out of that. I could feel he still didn’t want to leave. I mean, why would you want to leave if you’re being unconditionally loved?
So finally he ran out of digressions. He knew he’d have to come clean that he’s Krishna, so he said, “Be gone with you,” which wasn’t state trooper talk, but what the hell. As I got into the car and started to drive away, he was standing by his cruiser. I looked in the mirror and saw that he was waving at me.
Tell me, was that a state trooper or was that Krishna?
As these spiritual practices start to work, your reasons for being with people start to change, and who you want to be with changes too. Sometimes it’s not easy, as longstanding relationships or jobs are discarded. Your old friends might find you a little dull because you’ve experienced a taste of a certain kind of truth—a deeper truth connected to a different quality of being. Social interactions that used to be engaging pale next to the attraction to the Beloved, and social life begins to seem surreal. Not everyone can “hear” the quality of the spiritual experience you are having. You are looking for God, for whatever form of the Beloved touches your heart. You are looking everywhere.
The poet-saint Kabir says:
Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in
synagogues, nor cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck,
nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me instantly—
You will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says, Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
When you are first awakening and developing a spiritual perspective, satsang is especially supportive. Satsang is like having a spiritual family. Satsang is a community of truth seekers. It is a group of people with the shared awareness that there is a spiritual dimension to the universe. Goethe had this beautiful thought: “The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and who, though distant is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”
Once we get a taste of the freedom that comes with letting go of our stuff—anger, righteousness, jealousy, our need to be in control, the judging mind, to name just a few—we start to look at those things in new ways. That is the teaching of being in the moment. For someone who understands that this precious birth is an opportunity to awaken, is an opportunity to know God, all of life becomes an instrument for getting there—marriage, family, job, play, travel, all of it. You just spiritualize your life.
Christ said to be in the world but not of the world. You are simultaneously living your story line—keeping your ground, remembering your zip code—and having your awareness free and spacious, not caught in anything, just delighting in the richness of this timeless moment.