Dear James,
You don’t know me but I have been following your website and watching your videos and reading your books for about three years. In the last few months you have been talking about the character issue and its impact on society, which is a very timely topic, considering that it is only in the last 20 years that social media became a powerful social institution. Before people didn’t directly insult and attack each other in public very much, because they were not protected by the anonymity of social media. There were real world consequences. It is now possible to say hurtful things and lie without accountability, which is having a very negative impact on society. I know firsthand because I am getting more and more clients who are suffering anxiety because of untruthful attacks on social media. It is equally troubling that they have no recourse to legal remedies because they are unable to identify their attackers.
Until recently I viewed the Bhagavad Gita as an introductory text about moksa, in line with the idea that it starts with an emotional breakdown. In the shop it is classified as an intermediate text. Be that as it may, I have had an abiding interest in God more or less since childhood and somehow I always knew that there was not any difference between us or between one thing and another. When I discovered your website I was completely attracted by Vedanta because it confirmed what I already knew in some way. I am not ashamed to admit that Vedanta has become an obsession. It caused some conflict at first with my husband, but that has passed now. But as I became better informed, particularly after I watched the teachings on bhakti and the gunas, which really are advanced topics, I became aware that the Bhagavad Gita was the whole teaching from the beginning level to the most advanced. Isn’t it really the whole teaching from A-Z?
James: Yes, it is the complete teaching, the essence of the Upanishads. All five stages of the spiritual life are laid out systematically from karma yoga to upasana yoga to sravana, manana and nididyasana including the sixth “stage”, which is not a stage, non-dual bhakti.
Mary: Can you write a satsang that explores the character issue more and please and comment on my idea that while it seems as moksa is the goal, it really isn’t. I’m a psychologist and I think the transformation of an individual for the benefit of society is the actual goal of life. Thank you so much for everything that you and Sundari do. Shiningworld is an amazing gift to the world.
James: Appreciation is much appreciated, Mary. If you mean that moksa is not actually the goal since the jiva is already free, the answer is yes. The back story of the teaching, which many people only vaguely appreciate, is a period of social conflict, which is caused by the bad character of one very powerful man, Duryodhana, who is aware of something in himself that is always working against him but he doesn’t know what it is. He calls it “some powerful god seated in my heart.” It is just the rajasic/tamasic samskara that plagues everyone. It doesn’t make everyone violent and murderous, but it makes people do all sorts of things that contradict their good opinion of themselves and motivates them to disturb the social order with gratuitous demands.
Before I continue, let’s define character as the consistent application of the principle that doing one’s duty to the world supersedes the need of an individual to satisfy his or her wants. This doesn’t mean that one’s desires shouldn’t be worked out but they shouldn’t be more important than the needs of others. The Gita says they shouldn’t cause one to break dharma, meaning that the universal expectation of non-injury that is the basis of all social interactions, trumps the individual’s need to express his or her self, should that expression cause harm to others. It’s a tricky topic because where does the individual end and society begin? In general the rule is that the needs of the total trump the needs of the individual because individuals are totally dependent on others to fulfill their needs. But this is a dangerous principle if people without character rule because it leads to totalitarianism. The opposite principle—that the needs of individuals is more important than the needs of the total—is equally dangerous because if society is dominated by hedonistic self-centered individuals who are only interested in expressing their “true selves,” however the true self is defined, it will produce undemocratic totalitarian rulers too. So, for society to function harmoniously you need a majority of individuals who appreciate both arguments and can educate people by precept and example as to the nature of the these two conflicting forces. And in this regard, example trumps precept. If it doesn’t society will disintegrate because people will become cynical and distrust their rulers. So you need reasonable rulers, role models, who genuinely care about the needs of everyone, not just the needs of a particular social cohort.
Durydhodana is an example of a person who thinks his needs are more important than the needs of everyone else. He is an extrovert, eaten up by his envy of Arjuna and his brothers, who are noble principled people, much loved by everyone. He wants to destroy them because their presence causes him to be aware of his own unhappiness. He is power hungry because he is compensating for that weak troublesome unloved person within. It needs to be emphasized that he is the son of a “blind king,” meaning Self ignorance. We are all born ignorant of who we are. To put it simply, although he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had a rotten unloving childhood because he was raised by greedy selfish materialistic parents. He is very much the cowardly troll, as for many years he surreptitiously tries to assassinate the Pandavas while he presents a false smiling face to the world.
Keep in mind that all metaphors are caricatures, exaggerations. One shouldn’t think that because they are not great demons like Durydhona, that they are free from selfish negative energy. Negativity large and small, boredom and cynicism, for instance, which are commonplace nowadays, are not socially beneficial obviously. People don’t trust each other or the institutions in society, much less themselves. Fear is the disease of the times, encrypted everything. Just wait, three and four factor identification are in the offing.
The Gita, however, won’t allow Duryodhana to conceal his inner pain because you can’t hide your pain. People feel it, no matter how smarmy your smile. After he has fulfilled the conditions of his exile, Arjuna’s sense of injustice still burns brightly and eventually causes him to confront Duryodhana. With the help of an avatar, someone not born under the force of his own karma but born instead of the collective karma i.e. the need of society to purge itself of adharmic forces, he is destroyed, meaning that Self knowledge destroys that small, brittle, grievance-oriented person. On a social scale this happens when enough people are committed to dharma. But the destruction of evil is never enough. Dharma is only as good as the actions that support it.
To amplify your point, moksa is not the attainment of a goal. That goal is naish–karma siddhi, “already accomplished,” meaning freedom is the nature of the self. If this were understood there would be no need for Vedanta, no Bhagavad Gita. So Vedanta is forced to cheat a bit, adharma in the service of dharma if you will. It dangles moksa like a carrot on a string in front of suffering people because it knows that everyone wants to be happy and free of limitation. It’s not a false goal actually, because freedom is always possible because everything is existence shining as bliss’/consciousness, which is our nature and free of everything we know and experience as individuals. But this freedom is implicit knowledge, not explicit knowledge, which the Gita makes explicit and exhorts us to pursue. It needs to be uncovered, which is a rediscovery, not the discovery of something new, which a person can’t do on his or her own. The person requires the help of an impersonal means of knowledge and a dharmic teacher. This is why Arjuna surrenders to Krishna.
So how is this already accomplished fact accomplished? It is accomplished by the destruction of the adharmic parts of one’s self. You should know that in the story Duryodhana is not resurrected. He does not rise from the dead. He is smashed to bits, pulverized by Bhima’s club, never to see the light of day again. Bhima represents tamas in service of dharma. It symbolizes the dogged determination to root out every last vestige of adharma in one’s personality.
And how is this destruction accomplished? By sublimation, developing a dharmic personality. The last six chapters of the Gita says there are two basic personality profiles: the rajasic/tamasic and the sattvic. It says that the energy to transform the adharmic part into the dharmic part comes from the adharmic part itself. In other words I need to sacrifice the unhealthy parts if I want to be healthy. This makes sense, but it is not easy because most of us have normalized our adharmic parts and become comfortable with discomfort. We don’t realize that we never laugh hilariously from the gut, that our half-baked smiles hide unresolved issues. So many spiritual people love the idea of freedom from selfishness but harbor more than their fair share of it. It takes character to put your need for truth above your need to feel good.
This is why victimhood is entrenched in modern culture. As long as a person is content with the idea that he or she knows the self, however it is defined, and knows the difference between satya and mithya but still accommodates the ignoble parts (the hurt cynical whiney inner Trumpster as it were) the moksa is only notional, not actual. A free person is free of the notion that he or she has been wronged and that society is unfair because that sense of injury has motivated him or her to grow into the light, not project wrong doing on others. Everything is always perfect inwardly and outwardly for a free person because both the inner world and the transactional reality belong to Isvara. Dharma and adharma side by side make sense to them because they are established in the principle that transcends both. The Gita delivers the knowledge of why it all makes sense to them.
It is understandable that people love to pat themselves on the back and stop at moksa to smell the roses. “I’m the blissful self, I’m not the person I once was. I know the difference between the satya and the mithya person,” the mithya person says without a trace of irony. “I’m beyond that. It is only an object to me. I help people. I root for the underdog. I speak truth to power, etc.” They may not signal their virtue to others but they signal it to themselves because they are fundamentally insecure. They become complacent and small self-satisfied, all the time thinking they are the big free self. I call it stuck in sattva. Sattva is presented as a goal at the beginning of the Gita, but it may eventually become an obstacle, particularly if one is not surrendered to the teacher, who won’t let it slide. The problem with tamas is that it resembles sattva. Cynical people think they are quite smart, when they are far from it. They are not well-meaning people, although they believe they are. “Nobody is going to pull the wool over my eyes.” I know what’s really going on.” The “woke” Twitter crowd and the “deplorable” Trump crowd are just different sides of the same ignorant tamasic coin.
Having said this much, now to your point. What are we doing here in these strange meat tubes? The idea of freedom is only attractive because we think we are bound. But when you see that you aren’t bound, what are you going to do then? It would be nice if I could just drop dead once I realized who I was and avoid dealing with the zero-sum nature of life, but when I die isn’t up to me, just as when I’m born isn’t up to me and the world continues as always. When you see that you are neither free or bound you have nothing to gain for yourself and nothing to protect except the dharma, the truth. So at that point, you realize that the only option is to serve the world. But serving others is difficult if you haven’t cleaned up the past, which means justifying your biases with reference to your karma. No matter how fortunate your circumstances, you can always pawn your dissatisfaction off on the past. There is no way anyone can verify it, so it more or less works, assuming you are a sympathetic person.
Yes, you can help in small ways but your energy will not inspire and motivate people to make the difficult choices that is the hallmark of a noble character. Krishna represents the noble person. He says, “I have nothing to gain but I am tirelessly active because I am a role model, as are you Arjuna.” He could have told Arjuna that he and his army would join the Pandavas. They would have easily made mincemeat out of Duroydhona. But he doesn’t. The Gita gives his army to Duryodhana according to Durodhana’s vasana and Krishna to Arjuna, according to his innermost tendency, which is to know the truth. And it has Krishna agree to chauffer Arjuna. He could easily have caught one of the many arrows meant for Arjuna. In fact, the best way to kill a warrior is to kill his horse or his charioteer. But he was unconcerned. He had nothing to gain by living or dying. He was untouched by Maya and situated in real virtue, the “no-man’s land” between the armies. He was an embodiment of dharma, a noble soul.
We are all role models. Someone is always watching us, looking for inspiration from childhood onward. The question is, “What are we modeling?” The medium is the message. Are you a dissatisfied person cuddled up with life’s losers tucked comfortably behind a clever alias in the dark bowels of the web imagining that you are telling truth to power, when you are actually twisting the truth and spewing hate? Are you merely a woke, self-righteous censorious extroverted shamer trying to signal virtuousness to the world to allay your own insecurities? Are you big enough to take the little pin pricks and the grand reversals of fortune that life brings in stride and present a cheerful countenance to the world and channel God’s eternal goodness to everyone who presents themselves to you in whatever way their karma dictates? So the real question is not who or what am I, but what am I actually doing with the God-given power at my disposal.
We shouldn’t look down on people who don’t know what love is or what character is, because Isvara seems content to generate scores of tamasic/rajasic souls for every sattvic soul. Life is full of ankle biting pigmies. So what? So spirituality demands radical integrity. I need to be brutally honest with myself and develop a healthy ironic sense of self-contempt. Am I really doing my best or am I just resting on my laurels? Never give up; you can always become a better version of yourself. When Narada says that the freedom that is non-dual love grows and grows, he is pointing to the human heart’s inexhaustible wellspring of goodness waiting to be tapped by dedicated inquiry.
So yes, Mary, there’s more to life than moksa. The Bhagavad Gita is more than a beginning, intermediate or advanced text. It is simply the roar of God’s love, the context in which the faint prattling’s of humanity are reduced to nothing.
