Class Two: Seven Billion Mistakes **1) Lord Krishna says that our “mind is poor” if we “see a doer (XVIII.16).” How does this relate to the daily activities of 7 billion people on this planet?** Pretend sometimes that you are standing above the earth, outside the atmosphere, looking down upon the world. You watch as the line that separates night from dawn slowly stretches across the earth, and in its wake, 7 billion people wake up to begin their day. These 7 billion each step out of bed, and get up to do something. They go to work to make money, they search for a partner and other things that will make them happy. They try. And each one of them is doing things to get what they want that have nothing to do with what they want; no more than banging on a table every night makes the sun come up the next morning, although it always does come up. This grand mistake upon our planet is caused because people, as Lord Krishna puts it, “see a doer.” That is, they believe that they will make more money by getting this or that job, or by making this or that investment. They believe that they will get a partner by going to this club or to that yoga class, or by wearing this red lipstick or that pink lipstick. They believe that they are *doing:* that they are *getting* money or *getting* a partner. And in reality they are not. Whatever seeds they have planted in the past, almost unknowingly, by taking care of others or by hurting others are ripening *coincidentally* just after they have made a certain investment or bought a certain lipstick. They are not *doers,* the seeds they have planted before are doing everything, whatever they do. **2) Lord Krishna says, “Some people hate me in their own and others’ bodies (XVI.18).” How does this hatred degenerate into a downward cycle, known as a sansara in Sanskrit (commonly mispronounced as samsara)?** In reality, we can only get anything that we ever want by planting a seed with another person. This planting is most successful and powerful if we understand that—on this level—we and the other person are a single person. Suppose I like donuts. According to the idea of a path of karma, I can only get donuts if I have seeds in my mind that open into seeing donuts available around me. And I can only plant these seeds there if I offer donuts to other people first. Visually, other people are separate from me. Functionally, we are one person. Because I cannot get a donut going into my mouth unless I assure that one goes into your mouth first. Our mouths are one mouth, and we are one being; it’s not just that we’re connected or interrelated, but still separate. Rather, we are in a very real sense one being. The bodies are different, separated visually—but as Lord Krishna says we dwell in each other, in a divine form. Understanding this makes it a lot easier to take care of other people, neither then hating or ignoring them. If though we fail to understand, then we will be selfish, and take care of only a fragment of our complete self. We will for example go to great lengths to get the kind of donut that we like, and forget to buy for our friends the donut that they like. We then have fewer seeds for donuts and we become even more stingy with the donuts that we do get. This kicks off a downward cycle of increasing need and want. This is what the Sanskrit word *sansara* refers to. **3) Lord Krishna tells Arjuna that he may as well kill the warriors of the other army, since “I have already killed them (XI.34).” What does this mean, and what does it not mean? What clue do we get in the verse itself?** There’s a clue in the wording of this verse that helps us decide what the verse does mean, and what it doesn’t. At the end of the verse, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna that if he does fight, then he will “defeat these foes in the great struggle.” The Sanskrit word for “great struggle” here is *rana.* The ancient Tibetan translators recognized it as having two very different meanings: a wild military battle (*yul* in Tibetan), and the noise and confusion within our own minds when we have negative emotions (*nyon-mongpa).* Lord Krishna is *not* of course saying that—because they are going to die eventually anyway—it is alright for Arjuna to go ahead and kill the other warriors now. This would be tantamount to saying that it was alright to crash our friend’s new car, since it will fall apart on its own eventually anyway. Rather, there are two lessons here. First of all, the negative emotions which plague (another meaning of *nyon-mongpa*) us all every hour of the day are actually sometimes even called *enemies* in the ancient literature of India (as in the word *arhat,* which means “enemy slayer,” referring to someone who has stopped all their negative emotions permanently, and thus reached nirvana). Lord Krishna then is on one level telling Arjuna to slay these emotions within his own mind. The *way* to slay them is the second lesson here. The warriors that Arjuna is confused about killing—the fighters on the other side—*have always been dead anyway.* That is, the warriors that he thinks he sees were never there in the first place. Arjuna sees himself *as a doer* who is going to kill some people who have wronged his family. In reality though, there is no one outside of himself who has wronged his family. We have learned that—if Arjuna does see someone injure his family—then this is because he had a seed in his mind to perceive violence in the world. If he didn’t have such a seed—if he had renounced violence perfectly himself, in the past—then he never would have seen such a thing: as the Yoga Sutra itself states, “If you make it a way of life never to hurt others, then in your presence all conflict comes to an end (II.35).” Arjuna thinks that he is being asked to kill friends, relatives, and even gurus who are approaching him on the field of battle; but actually they are flowing from his own mind. People that we meet who are approaching us from the outside are people who never existed in the first place—they have been “dead” forever. If we realize this, then it will never even occur to us to hurt someone else who threatens us. Quite the opposite. And then we kill our true enemies. **4) Are we really supposed to—as Lord Krishna says—give up being happy or sad? Must we abandon “both good and evil (XII.15)”?** These two advices from Lord Krishna—to give up being happy or sad, and to abandon both good and evil deeds—are very delicate; they have been widely misunderstood by some people over the centuries, with disastrous consequences. There is of course nothing wrong with wanting to be happy, and not wanting to be sad. They are not at all the same thing; our heart and our brain both tell us so. And it is true that doing good things for others is the only way to be happy, and that hurting others—doing evil—is the only way to be sad. It’s just that when we go out to do our good deeds in order to gain happiness, we have to do it with the right understanding. If we don’t, then it will just end up making us sad again. Some of us are nice to others out of habit, or because we were told by someone—our parents, our school, our church or synagogue—that this is what we are supposed to do. This kind of being nice breaks down when we are under pressure: when we are really tired, or when we really want or need something. This kind of being nice says that in general we should be nice to others, but there may be situations when we have to go ahead and take the things we want for ourselves. This viewpoint doesn’t realize that we *never* get anything that we want if we don’t supply it to someone else *first.* For a person who understands this Law of the Universe, being good is not a luxury, it’s essential. When Lord Krishna tells us to give up being good or bad, and to give up the happiness and sadness that always follow separately from each, he is referring only to doing good or bad without understanding how it works. If for example our husband is often angry with us, we pose two bad choices to ourselves in deciding how to respond. One is that we should stand up and be tough, and yell back at him. The other is that we should be quiet and not say anything: maybe it will get better if I don’t stir things up. The first would seem to be a “bad” or “evil” deed; the second would seem to be a “good” deed. But in reality both are being done with the same lack of complete understanding. I’m not being good because I know that this will plant the seeds that will make my husband (who is coming from me) change. I’m not being good because I am sure that this *will always fix* a problem with my husband—I don’t know how that works, and so I can’t use that to change him with certainty. I just keep making a selection between two bad choices and hoping for the best. **5) How on earth could Lord Krishna criticize Arjuna for choosing not to fight (in verse XVIII.59)?** The crucial word in this verse is the Sanskrit *ahankara,* which is here translated as “the inner voice that tells you that things are themselves.” The ancient Tibetan translators often rendered the word as *dag ku dzinpa* {BDAG TU ‘DZIN PA,}, which literally means “holding that things are themselves.” In the Sanskrit the *ahan* comes of course from *aham,* meaning *self* or *me;* while the *kara* means *to make:* to “make an itself” where there is none. This is again the same story, of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. When Arjuna imagines himself refusing to fight, he is thinking of himself as a doer: I will refuse to fight, because I love these other people and I don’t want to see them get hurt. I won’t hurt them. This is all based on thinking that these people are themselves: that they are coming from themselves, that they make decisions, that they do things. Whether or not anyone in the battle gets hurt will depend on whether they have hurt someone in the past. And if Arjuna doesn’t want to see people get hurt he has to refuse to fight because he doesn’t want to plant seeds in his own mind to see violence around him. He can stop the whole war *because it’s coming from him,* and not from itself, from its own side. He needs to rip out any and all seeds of violence, from his own mind. Lord Krishna is telling Arjuna that it’s a completely “useless struggle” to refuse to fight in any other way. He speaks of Arjuna’s “inner nature,” and how it will “bring him back.” We can take this two ways. Our own nature, for time with no beginning, is to believe that people who threaten us are coming from their own side—and then we will always return to fighting (or not fighting) with them, for the wrong reasons. But we have a deeper nature, which is our ability to learn—to learn to understand where things are really coming from. In the end this ability will always prevail, because it is based upon seeing things the way they really are: as coming from us. And then we will come back to our own pure and innocent nature. *Coffeeshop assignment:* Please meet with at least one other member of the class (preferably someone that you didn’t know before the course started) to talk a bit about this class, before the next one. *Meditation assignment:* 15 minutes per day before the next class, pull out the piece of paper with your current life goal written on it. Then go into a meditation on some *wrong* options that you used to think of to reach this goal (yell at husband, stay quiet; buy red lipstick, buy pink). Reflect on how the *only* way to achieve a goal is to plant seeds for it, by helping someone else achieve it for themselves. *Meditation times and dates* (homework without this section completed will not be accepted):