Class Six: Fight in Surrender **1) Lord Krishna describes how those who are “free from the dark ignorance of pairs” are “firm in their austerity,” and “taking themselves to me.” What kind of austerity is he referring to, and how does it relate to taking ourselves to a spiritual Teacher?** We’ve already talked about the idea of being free of *dvandva—*of false choices, of what we call “diamond deals.” Generally, “austerity” refers to a spiritual practice of considerable difficulty. Perhaps the most difficult of all such practice is precisely to free ourselves from the “dark ignorance” of these “pairs.” That is, it is a difficult thing to hold a headstand longer than we are comfortable, or to sit in a cave in the loneliness of the forest, but if we push ourselves we find that in time we are able to do it. Seeing things in a new and completely different way though is quite difficult because—no matter how much we may want to do it—we find ourselves either unable to make the mental leaps necessary, or our awareness dwindles and we fall easily back into the ruts of thinking the way that we always used to, the way that the entire world around us is doing too. And so it is a much greater spiritual “austerity” to maintain an entirely new and unsteady worldview, especially under the pressure of our daily life. Our boss or some other person yells at us, and we have trouble to hold our ground to not feel upset at them: to not fall into false choices—false pairs—like agonizing over whether to report them to a superior, or to have a reasonable talk with them. It is difficult under pressure to maintain our belief that this yelling boss has been produced in fact from our own speaking unkindly to someone who reports to us, earlier on in the month. It is especially difficult to keep our mind strong upon the futility of yelling back at them—the fact that this will only bring them yelling back again at us shortly in the future. Lord Krishna says that, when our practice of this austerity is firm, and when we have used it to free ourselves from those false pairs, then we “take ourselves” to him. The point is that taking ourselves to a spiritual Teacher is itself best done in a way which avoids the same false pairs, although this is difficult because it is difficult to conceive of the idea that someone who knows more than us and who is to teach us what we don’t yet know could be coming from us. That is, *dvandva* or useless choices are particularly difficult to avoid in this situation, and we easily fall for example into a mental struggle about whether we should seek our teacher in a yoga center or a meditation center. Rather, we have to approach our search for our spiritual Teacher in the same way that we now approach every other action. First we identify what it is that we want in a Teacher; we can say, for example, that we seek someone who has a very good personal spiritual practice, and who is kind and capable in the way that they communicate this practice to someone else. Clear what we want in the result, we have to create a seed which is very similar. We try to think of someone in our life who could use our own guidance; perhaps there is someone at work who could do their job better if we agreed to coach them for a few hours a week for the next few weeks. We are sure that we prepare for the coaching sessions carefully, and that we deliver these sessions in a gentle and thoughtful way. We then do a “coffee meditation” to rejoice in what we’ve accomplished with them, to solidify the seed, and dedicate this seed to finding our own spiritual Teacher. And then we truly break out of the ignorant pairts; that is, we can do a yoga class or a meditation class, whichever one we happen to feel like on the spur of the moment, and our Teacher will come, either way, and we can “take ourselves to them.” **2) In the eighth chapter of the Gita, Lord Krishna describes the “ultimate form” of the “Pure One”—which is to say Brahma, or the Divine Being—is “immutable.” And then he says that this same form is what it is that brings into being all of creation, and destroys it as well. What are some problems with the idea that a Divine Being is solely responsible for creating our entire world? And how is it that something which never changes could ever make anything happen, since anything that makes something happen has to change to do so?** Several problems come up with the idea that a Divine Being is solely responsible for creating the entire world. First of all, there is the very basic problem of whether such a being themselves were part of creation. If they were, then another being or force that came before them would have had to create them, in order for them to exist to create the rest. This then becomes an infinite regression of divine beings creating those that came after them. If such a being were not part of creation, there comes the discussion of how they could create creation, if they themselves were not created. It’s tempting to say then that such a Divine Being might be uncreated, and unchanging; as Lord Krishna puts it here, “immutable.” This has its own problems, since for any one thing to affect another thing—especially to *create* it—then that first thing must always go through some change in the process of movement or impulse to create something else. That is, we cannot image a seed which turns into a tree without the seed’s changing its shape at all. The immutable which Lord Krishna is speaking about here though is something other than a cause or a seed or a person who makes the universe happen by growing it. Rather, Lord Krishna is once more referring to the “self” in the sense of the ultimate reality which underlies all things. He is saying that this ultimate reality is in fact the ultimate form of the divine, and the one which allows all things to happen, and all things to cease. Notice that we used here the word “allow.” Remember that the ultimate “self” is in simply the fact that the self-nature or defining qualities that make a thing what it is are in fact not something that exists *inside* that thing, in the way that we always thought it had to. The ultimate “self” of an aspirin, for example, is the simple fact that there is nothing *inside* the aspirin which makes it work. This in fact is why aspirin’s don’t always work to remove a headache. When an aspirin *does* work, though, it’s because its ultimate self—the fact that it doesn’t have anything in it that makes it work—is *allowing* it to work in the way it does. We can think then of ultimate reality as being like a blank, white movie screen. As long as it is blank, then some other image can be played upon it. As long as nothing has any pre-existing nature within it, it is open or available for us to place an image on it. In the case of an aspirin that works, this image is the way in which a karmic seed ripens within the mind. Because we have planted a mental seed in the past by helping someone else who was in pain, an image ripens out of this seed and is sent into the outside world by our mind. We experience the aspirin then as a working aspirin. The qualities of starting and ending are just the same, even with so large a thing as the entire universe. We see things around us begin because there is a place available where the seeds in our mind can open and send out a picture of something beginning. And we see them end because there is space for the same thing to happen. And so it is this ultimate “Pure One” or “Brahma” which “brings into being all of creation and annihilates it” as well. Another important argument by the way against the idea that the world is a result solely of a divine being is based on the fact that we would expect such a being to be ultimately kind or constructive as well. It doesn’t make much sense that such a being would create us normal living beings, and then go through the trouble of destroying their creation in a fiery automobile accident, or with cancer. It cannot even be argued that these painful deaths are retribution for wrong things we have done in this life, as some kind of lesson we are meant to learn from, if small infants and other innocents undergo the same kinds of deaths. **3) Also in the seventh chapter, Lord Krishna advises Arjuna to “think upon me at every moment, and fight.” In the same breath he states that if Arjuna places his heart and understanding upon Lord Krishna, then “beyond any question” he will “come” to the Lord. How does this exchange inform us as to how we ourselves relate to instructions from our own personal Teacher, and our attempt to see them as someone special?** There is a principle in the classical teachings of ancient India that a teacher will sometimes test their student by giving them an instruction which clearly contradicts what the teacher has taught the student up to that point. It is then up to the student *not* to follow the instruction, and thus display how they have in fact grasped all the teachings that came before. If Arjuna does in fact decide to fight against any other living creature, and harm this creature, then it is clear that he hasn’t understood the teachings he has received so far. Even the nominal goal of the action of the battle at this point is to assure that the members of his side of the family will no longer be harmed by the members of the side which has gone bad. It is completely impossible for a harmful action to result in harm being stopped, any more than it is possible for a cactus seed to produce a sweet watermelon. The content of the cause and the content of its result must always be similar. The entire point of the text of the Gita up to now has been to help Arjuna understand that a true action is only taken by planting mental seeds for what one wants to happen in ones life. Only a fool at this point would hurt someone in order to get them to stop hurting their loved ones. We should say rather that Lord Krishna is instructing Arjuna to “think upon” the Lord “at every moment” *by* fighting his tendency to do the opposite. We think upon our Heart Teacher not just to induce a feeling of faith in them; true devotion comes from thinking about the specific qualities of our Heart Teacher which make them precious to us. And perhaps the most precious quality of all has to be the fact that our Heart Teacher understands how to take a true action: they deal with the world by dealing with their seeds. That is, if Arjuna really does think upon the Lord at every moment, then it won’t be long before he is thinking about how the Lord himself would respond to this challenge created by the bad side of his family. The Kauravas, like a yelling boss, have been terrorizing the members of the Pandava family. If Arjuna has been listening at all to Lord Krishna so far, then he knows that the worst choice he could make would be to “yell back” at the Kauravas, and thus perpetuate their naughty behavior in his life. As usual, if Arjuna is to fight with anyone it will have to be with himself: with his own tendency to want to fight back. Keeping this in mind then, we get important insights into how we are to relate to the advice which we receive from our own immediate Teacher. At the beginning, it is very uncomfortable for us when our Teacher apparently advises us to do something which they have already taught us would be wrong. We have to pause and think about it carefully and decide if what they are asking us to do actually is wrong. If it is, then we can actually use the moment not to entertain doubts about our Teacher but to begin seeing them on a higher level. That is—like Arjuna in the chariot with Lord Krishna—we can begin asking ourselves *why* our Teacher would, for example, instruct us to think of them constantly and then *fight.* It won’t take us long to begin questioning if the fighting they want us to do isn’t something deeper: maybe they want me to fight against my tendency to argue with my supervisor at work. Looking for a deeper meaning behind apparently mundane statements by our Teacher is an extremely healthy practice which in time we will be applying to what everyone around us ever has to say. That is, the contradiction between what our Teacher has taught us before and what they are asking us to do now forces us to entertain the possibility that they can for example read our mind and know that we need to fight now against our habit of arguing with our supervisor. In a way then, the exercise of interpreting that our Teacher has to say to us becomes a practice in seeing the entire world as divine—an entire world of events and people which we need to reinterpret, to a higher vision. **4) In the eighth chapter of the Gita, Lord Krishna says that when the day dawns, then all which is not yet manifest becomes manifest; and that when the night falls, then that which had been manifest slides back into being unmanifest. How can we relate this statement to what we’ve learned so far about what makes a true action, and to mental seeds?** We can think of Lord Krishna here as referring to the effects of actions, in a continuation of his description of what makes an action “true.” We have learned for example that the real “self” or nature of an aspirin is that it doesn’t contain *within* it anything which cures a headache. Any nature that an aspirin does possess of curing a headache is coming, rather, from us: from the fact that we helped someone in pain earlier on. How does this help explain how an aspirin starts to work on our headache, stops it, and then fades away—how does its power become manifest after having been unmanifest, and now return to being unmanifest after having been manifest? Again, as with the action itself, we look to explaining the repercussions of an action only in terms of the seeds within our own mind. Think of how seeds in the plant world work. We plant a seed for a wildflower in our garden, and after a week or two we begin to see a tiny sprout popping up out of the ground. At this point we can picture the seed below as being half split open; the sprout is coming up out of the crack in the seed. As the sprout grows in size, the material of the seed is devoured: the birth of the sprout, in effect, begins to destroy the seed. In Krishnian terms, the more of the result which becomes manifest, the more of the seed becomes unmanifest. And so we come to the principle that the opening and growing of seeds—including mental seeds—is what actually destroys these seeds. We can plant a seed for a relationship in our mind by serving an elderly person who is lonely; and this seed will grow within our mind, and ripen as us meeting a partner to enjoy companionship with. It’s important to realize though that every moment that we do enjoy this companionship with our new partner is using up the power of the seed that we planted by being with the elderly person. Left to itself then, this seed will in time be “worn out” simply by the work of producing its result, our partner. And then it loses the last of its power, and it is inevitable that our relationship begins to flounder. This is in fact why so many relationships go sour in time. The power which created them is used up simply by the length of time that the relationship grows, and then the relationship must end, in the same way that a wildflower planted in the garden must die at the end of the summer season. It passes back into the unmanifest. There’s something though that we can do about this process; it is not inevitable. The idea is to “reinvest” the results of the seeds that we have planted. In the case of a partner, for example, suppose that after we do succeed in birthing a relationship by serving a lonely person: we and our newfound (new-created) partner make it a habit to go together, to visit the same elderly person. This plants new seeds in our mind for continued companionship with our partner. If we keep this up indefinitely, then we have a steady supply of seeds creating a companionable partner. That is, the manifest remains manifest, and no longer slides back into the unmanifest. The golden light of day continues, without the night. **5) Lord Krishna tells Arjuna that “the ultimate being is reached only by devotion.” If we take the “ultimate being” here to be the ultimate nature of things manifested in a single being, how it that we could reach them only through this kind of devotion?** We have just seen that the “ultimate being” mentioned by Lord Krishna is actually simply the fact that things possess no nature of their own, and what nature they do exhibit is in truth coming from ourselves. It would seem that reaching this type of being would involve careful study and analysis, and not so much devotion. Remember though that coming to an understanding of the ultimate “self,” and especially seeing it directly, is extremely difficult and extremely rare—so rare that if it happened to only a single person in this world, for no more than 20 minutes or so, then that would change the course of history for the entire planet, pushing it quickly towards evolution into an enlightened realm. Reaching this realization then requires unprecedented seeds of greater power than any other seed we have ever held in our mind. The only way to plant such seeds is with an object of extraordinary power, and that means our Lama. If we understand why this statement is true, then we will be more ready to go about the task of planting these seeds. We live in a world inhabited by about six billion other human beings, and countless other forms of sentient life. Each one of these beings spends their entire day—whether strategizing in a corporate office, or just scraping fungus off the bottom of the ocean floor—trying to find food, shelter, and happiness. But we have already seen that each and every one of the actions which these billions of creatures undertakes in the search for happiness is mistaken: we can take just the one example that almost all humans on this planet believe that the one way to become rich is to make as much money as possible and accumulate and protect this money, by “investing” it. This is the exact opposite of the action which would in truth make us rich, which is to immediately share what money comes to us. And so we are left with the vision of an entire planetful of people, milling around aimlessly, undertaking all the actions that would thwart their own goals in life. Now imagine a single person who comes to this world to show these billions of suffering and confused people a simple path that would save them all this pain. This person is our Lama. They are, literally, more precious than a single small bottle of some new vaccine that can take away AIDS. And so if we wanted to reach the ultimate being, and wanted to plant seeds strong enough to do so, one way—and perhaps well the only way, says Lord Krishna—would be simply to entertain constant thoughts of devotion for our own Heart Teacher. **6) What does Lord Krishna describe as the “highest of secrets,” and why is it kept a secret?** Lord Krishna says that the highest of all secrets is the fact that—if we are able to “join wisdom and mind”—then we shall be “released from all bad deeds.” Normally we think of bad deeds as being those deeds which hurt other people; but now that we understand what it is that makes an action true, we can revise our opinion. That is, once we understand that all the results of all the actions we ever tried to undertake could have been easily achieved if we had understood the principles of mental seeds, then taking an action without this understanding is no longer simply misinformed—rather, it becomes criminal. That is, once we have some taste of how a true action is performed—by providing for others, first, those things which we ourselves hope to achieve—then any further time wasted on actions which are not true becomes a disservice to the rest of humanity. The number of people who possess the extraordinary mental seeds to be able to learn the principles of a true act is extremely small. Once they do learn these principles, then they become extraordinarily valuable to all life in this world—in Tibetan in fact they are called “rare supremes” (*konchok*). For people such as ourselves, who have learned something of the profound meaning of the Bhagavad Gita, to engage in even one more ignorant act inflicts powerful damage on the people around us, who from habit and from observation of how we act are going to be sucked one more time into a way of acting which cannot serve them at all. And what is the barometer that allows us to know if we *are* engaging in an ignorant act? It is simply our own level of unhappiness, of anxiety or anger. If we say or do anything that evokes a reaction in someone else, and if this reaction then upsets us in any way at all—causes even the slightest disturbance in our mind—then this is a sign that we have misunderstood our world and our action: a sign that our action is not true. The way in which we perform an action inevitably “leaks” into the world community at large: if people observe us giving away money to make money, or being kind to elderly people in order to sustain our marriage, then on a very deep, subconscious level they wonder what we are doing, and observe us to see if this kind of action is going to be successful. One true act done by a single person ripples out among everyone in the world. But the opposite is also true. If people see us acting the same old way—returning anger with anger, for example—then the unspoken message is that we, after all of our training and study, consider this to be a useful way of acting. And then we drag down all of those around us: *Any deed but a true deed, for those with understanding, is a bad deed*. Once we have a glimpse of freedom, we have to follow it as a way of life, and thus be released from this kind of bad deed. All of this is a secret to the world not because those who understand it wish to hold it back from their fellows. Rather, it is extremely difficult to find a person whose heart is ready to hear, for example, that the “true” way to make money is to give what money we have away to others. These are secrets that keep themselves, and to reveal them to others we need first to soften their hearts, to inspire them to do small goodnesses which will plant the seeds for first hearing. *Coffeeshop assignment:* Please meet with one other member of the class (preferably someone you didn’t know before the course started) to talk a bit about this class, before the next one—and to collaborate on filling out your homework. *Meditation assignment:* 15 minutes per day, an examination of some of the decisions or choices that you are faced with in your life right now, trying to see how we could cut them off immediately by undertaking true deeds, where we plant seeds for what we want by helping others first. *Meditation times and dates* (homework without this section completed will not be accepted):