Bhagavad Gita Book Three: Unending responsibilities
Now here we are in book three. Heart is beginning to swim along, one stroke at a time. Like the karate kid, waxing on and off, he’s doing the thing but can’t help asking: what does this have to do with actual fighting? When do I get to the real thing?
Life is unending responsibilities. Life is hard.
That isn’t a harsh teaching. It’s a liberating one. Other spiritualities have said it in other ways, and psychology has a plethora of variants, but the fact is life is hard. First off, we are mortal. Secondly, we are social. And finally, we are complicated individuals with sometimes conflicting needs.
Krishna reminds Arjuna of this in book three, and cautions him not to make life any harder than it has to be. The old saw about there always being some pain, but we do not have to contribute suffering into the deal. Without mortality, other people, and individuality there could be no love. No freedom. No hope.
If we feel life should be other than it is, we’re creating our own suffering. If we want to bend life or other people to our will, we’re authoring hell. If we simply roll over and feel victimized by it all, we’re making the biggest suffering yet: denying the soul and abandoning hope.
Life isn’t ONLY suffering. Love is real, too. Given these two truths, our actions matter. Our orientation makes a difference. We’re either helping or we’re not.
This is largely the teaching of book three. With several philosophically dense forays into psychology and a smattering of poetic stunners.
Karma, SPIRITUALITY, and Dharma: This Sacred Life
In book one, we are given a visceral telling of the suffering heart. We either take too much responsibility, in an enmeshed way, or deny our responsibility in a disengaged way. Either way, we set up an inner conflict and banish our better nature to the wilds. This causes a physical upset and churning. Eventually, the churning confuses our minds and leaves us with delusion. (Ragas (desire) leads to shoka (grief) ends in moha (deluded intellect), in which we confuse right and wrong. Then we are spiritually lost.
In Book Two, thankfully, our delusion recognizes itself and asks for help. And god smiles.
Then basic yoga philosophy/spirituality/psychology is laid down. (Only our most superficial layer is mind, under that a tangled and turbulent ocean of stories and habits, archetypes and beliefs. These are constantly framing our every thought and perception though we’re unaware of this happening. We don’t see what we’re doing but blame outsides. Under even that there is enlightened awareness, and under even that you have a soul. To navigate your way out of worldly suffering, then, you actually have to pause and about face. Rather than staying in the superficial, realize what you are doing to yourself. Go even further and realize you have a soul and this is all a spiritual question.)
Good. But what are we actually supposed to DO? The wave is coming! The world is on fire! I am sad and confused!
Ah, says the teacher. Philosophy by itself is nothing. What you really need is not so much philosophy as yoga. Yoga is philosophy in action. Specifically, skillful action. Not flailing, not giving in, but following some well designed according to human anatomy and perennially proven steps: swimming is one kick and alternate arm stroking, then the other, over and over again. There is a world of difference between pity and compassion. This is obvious if you compare self pity and self compassion. Yoga is the skillful move from futile pity to real and active compassion.
Now here we are in book three. Heart is beginning to swim along, one stroke at a time. Like the karate kid, waxing on and off, he’s doing the thing but can’t help asking: what does this have to do with actual fighting? When do I get to the real thing?
Transmission and Translation
Us modern western folk stumble across yoga and pick it up. Oh! What a pretty thing, we think, holding it like a shiny rock. I want this, we think.
“āchāryāt pādamādatte, pādam śişyah swamedhayā | pādam sabrahmachāribhyah, pādam kālakrameṇa ca”
Much of my mentorship with Michael Stone boiled down to talking about transmission and translation. Us modern yogis wouldn’t realize these are important things unless we were explicitly told so: after all, this pretty gee-gaw was right here in front of us. It’s human nature to want it for our own. It’s natural to assume, having read a word, that we understood the meaning. Some of us even learn Sanskrit, and then think for sure we know. Others of us ritualize forms to an acuteness, thinking we’re doing the same thing the ancients did.
Transmission is how spiritual teaching and philosophy are done. Yoga, Buddhism, and Vedanta all have a rich lexicon and lineage here, but transmission is part of all spiritualities and philosophies. It’s the socratic method. It’s students and teachers. It’s curricula, time, and pedagogy. It’s sacred texts but also the cultural practices surrounding the texts. It is exegesis of sacred texts, and a community of people who have more information and experience than you do. We can also see the idea of transmission in things like therapy, twelve step programs, and craft or apprenticeship.
Transmission suggests that there is a vastness behind the words and provides access to the vastness. There is an unspoken (but assumed) difference between karma kanda - the bare on the page things - and jñāna kanda, the unexplicit, subtle, symbolic and personally relevant meaning of things.
The synthesis of karma kanda and jñāna kanda unfolds in the context of teachers, having a personal practice that is guided or mentored by those teachers, and ongoing community and experiences that provide us with the good of sangha, mirrors, examples, and support. The unspoken reality of transmission is the fact that no ‘thing’ is actually being handed on at all: this process evokes direct personal insight in the student, rather than handing on a secret wisdom that has been unchanged for millennia and is available only through initiation. The understood consequence is an actual regard for handed on technologies, artifacts, symbols and cultural wealth.
All this is assumed in the context of transmission. But since we are reading in translation, not only across cultures but across time, these things need to be made explicit.
If then, we’re starting to play with transmission, we next have to realize we are dealing with translation. Often, in translation, literalness kills the meaning. We need to develop a dialectical approach, an exploratory and inquisitive open earring. But we also need to understand that translation works in two directions: to merely look for meaning quickly leads to spiritual consumerism and escapism (aka cultural appropriation) or unexamined false equivalency and reductive thought: saying something like the Gita is Vedanta’s ‘bible’, or that śāntiḥ means ‘inner peace’. Coming to understand, through translations, has to do with examining our own projections as it much as it does grasping something outside our current referents.
"Selfless Service”
In all the English translations of the Gita, book three is titled 'karma yoga’ or ‘selfless service’. This is where translation and transmission are important. It isn’t that this translation is wrong, but “selfless service” requires teaching, practice, and self realization to hold up. Without these, it is prone to valorizing meekness. As meekness and self abnegation have been used against people for centuries, this is a real danger.
Karma yoga means much more than selfless service.
Karma means action, and refers to the underlying or background (implicit, not explicit, transmitted not read) philosophy of sankhya. In Sankhya, ‘things’ are not fixed; existence itself is constant change. We too are constantly changing. Life is a verb. Hope is a verb. Suffering is a verb. Self is a verb. Love is a verb. As modern prophet Octavia Butler says, “god is change”.
Change means possibility. Change is not pure chaos. It isn’t moral relativity. Change unfolds according to natural laws. We can influence, but not control. We can participate, but we are not god and cannot save the world. We are not totally free, but we are never absolute victims.
How change unfolds evokes the gunas: rajas is frantic, tamas is thick and clingy or resistant, sattva is a goldilocks just right.
Karma means more than Sankhya-n change, though. Also referent here is the background vision of the Veda and the revelation of the Upanisads.
Both take the bare fact of life and render it sacred. They posit an understanding of religion or spirituality that is ultimate and personal. This is it. Bless. Both the Veda and the Upanisads suggest that a practice of seeing ordinary, often painful life as sacred transforms suffering and liberates the individual. But this requires effort. There are thousands of mantras and teachings here, and it takes a body ten thousand attempts, but the basic idea is that life can become a spiritual journey, the body mind itself can be seen as a temple, ordinary human spirit can overcome all conceivable obstacles.
Given all of that, karma does not mean self-abnegation or saccharine charity. We cannot ever fully believe nor live in any ethos that requires one’s own diminishment.
The vision of the Veda and the unfoldment of the Upanisads posit: every moment as sacred, the mundane as potentially holy, the smallest actions as being the only true path.
Dharma
If we look at the world, or into our hearts, we see: change is real and constant but so too are connections. Every action has consequences.
Trying to control or feeling helpless have consequences.
Doing your best also has consequences.
Dharma - in this context - means recognizing all of that as true and putting your feet on the ground, your shoulder to the dharma wheel, and prayer on your lips. A slight variance between being alive and living our lives: to love what is mortal, to engage with humanity, and to believe in oneself. Dharma also means recognizing we’ll have to keep doing this, over and over again. Every day. For the rest of our lives. It means renouncing fantasy while adhering to hope, realizing this isn’t a contradiction. Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water, goes the saying: after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
There is something to human mind (sankhya, the Veda, and the Upanishads all have their gems to give narrative and reveal what it is, but I’ll just say that it is) that balks against reality. We aren’t good at it. Dharma is, in a sense, highly unnatural.
Each of us has a life to live, a role to play, and we shimmer all the way into the galaxy. This is one of the ways I was taught dharma is: every individual has both rights and responsibilities/dharma to self, to society, and to the cosmos. These are not opposite pulls. There is only one gravity. None of that, if sincerely done, is a contradiction.
We heal ourselves and the world through small, intimate, personal actions. This can seem impossible or contradictory, but isn’t. Unfortunately it is the grasping or understanding this that stands in the way of experiencing it. This is one step at a time philosophy, or one day at a time or just for today understanding of our human capacities. It baffles, but it also works.
It works because the karmic truth of world suffering is that it happened one moment, one action, one person at a time. Trauma happens relationally, so healing must also be relational. Ideas are not the same as being. We can talk, hope, wish, pray, or debate what needs to be done endlessly, but everything begins with a single immediate step. We do not have to have all the answers or be perfect; we only have to be ourselves and answer the moment best we can.
Two Objections
In good practice, objections are vital. They are wonderful. They are food and safety and lead us somewhere. Let’s consider two big ones.
1) Living my own life and meeting my personal responsibilities isn’t enough (because of suffering in the world).
True. You will never save the world. But it is an underestimation of the world to think you could or should save it. There is no contradiction between your own fulfillment and contributing to the welfare of humanity. Not so long as you see your own fulfillment as inclusive of love.
2) “unending responsibilities” sounds exhausting! Productivity culture is killing us and is oppressive.
True. But conflating karmic responsibilities with some kind of marxist capitalism is the confusion here. Dehumanizing ourselves isn’t the point of karmic responsibilities. This objection isn’t a mistake or a problem; it gives us something to start working with. Everybody’s got some serious prior patterning and unexamined potentials as regards “responsibility”. Unraveling the pattern and realizing the potential - personally - is the way. This ends being an enrichment and truth discovery, rather than a goad over the head.
In the Beginning/In conclusion
Book Three suggests that we challenge the separation between spiritual life and ordinary life. Dharma isn’t something you have to seek; it’s who you already are and the life you have been given.
Our heartfelt and bodied responses to this teaching are not a problem; they are clues. Do you object with number one, “this isn’t enough!” or number two, “it’s all too much!”?
The very first thing Krishna says in this book is that understanding is hard, but doing one right thing is easy. He appears to be contrasting understanding (jñāna) and action (karma). That apparent contradiction will be taken up later. For now, I just say he isn’t contradicting: understanding is not separate from doing, it simply takes a long time and direct experience. Knowing comes from doing, not vice versa.
Two śastras come up in discussion:
Venerable Samu Sunim “The Dharma is intimate, immediate, spontaneous, and obvious”
and poet Mary Oliver’s
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
Truth or Consequences
Yoga was, in fact, discovered. I assert that Yoga could no more be invented or owned than electricity, gravity or respiration. - Leslie Kaminoff I sell mirrors to the blind. - Kabir
When Iyengar died, I felt an absence in the world. Absence came, as blood clusters to bruise or rain appears in the sky. Absence formed and was felt. It hadn't been there, before. Ghosts appear out of nowhere.
I started to look for a teacher.
I wasn't looking for another certification. And I wasn't looking for a different slant on the yoga tradition, as if the one prior had somehow not been right for me or I'd matured past it; I'd done all of that before. I'd done enough to know floating from teacher to teacher, relationship to relationship, day to day, is more likely avoiding the path than walking it.
That's not what I mean.
I mean I started looking for a guru.
I warn you: this is probably not a sentence you ever really want to say out loud. I'm not sure it's something you should ever lay money on. And yet there I was, all in, a suitcase and a maxed out credit card. I ended up in Truth or Consequences, new Mexico. The Or hooked me. The fulcrum, the unanswered question. Either this is real, or it isn't. I'd begun to suspect the hinge comes down to teachers.
I know this: If you're looking for a teacher, or a teaching, or a tool to hang up pictures or chop vegetables with, you'll come across both charlatans and craftsmen. Most promise a version of happiness. They promise power, a miraculous life, the life you most want to live. All that you desire appearing. Like a ghost, but backwards.
Meanwhile, a few will offer you truth. This doesn't sound as nice. In fact this sounds downright threatening. You aren't sure you want it. You'll catch yourself wondering if you really need to hang up pictures or chop vegetables, after all.
If you don't go for truth, though, there will eventually be some suffering. There will be some, if even only a little, hell to pay.
When I was a little girl, the neighbors had horses. One was a palomino named sugar. The girl who rode the horses used to stand at the gate and call: shuugeeeer, shuger shuger shuger. The mare would come with long, heavy steps. In the yoga tradition, we call it sukkha. Sweetness. Promise. Easy Freedom. Out of the sanskrit comes our indo-european: refined and bagged and hawked.
Too much sukkha, goes a quip, causes truth decay. All stability falls out and the path dissolves, sugar into water. And all you're left with is a high, a self absorbed and immature high. And after that, you're left with nothing at all.
Truth is slippery and evasive. It is not a thing. Not in the way table or plant is. And it isn't quite god. Maybe it's a pull. A force. Like gravity.
Whatever it is, it is somehow related to men like Iyengar. And Jois and Desikachar. It's probably the thing that made Jesus what he was. St. Francis for all I know.
I'm saying this as a woman who never met Iyengar.
But when he died, I realized I was standing alone amidst the bullshit. The forefathers are gone and all we've got are stepchildren and bastards. Although they are related to the practice, they are not the practice. Not quite.
So this is how it happened. I flailed about, taking up this word, guru. And I ended up buck naked in southern New Mexico.
The sky could kill you in New Mexico. The Rio Grande is the smallest, reddest little river I've ever seen. I come from the land of the northern Mississippi, where water is power and fat and black at the bottom. The Rio isn't impressive in itself, but surprisingly tawdry. What awes is the swath it cuts, miles deep, through stone, the hardness of the stone is the proof, the visible track, of thirst. Sky did that. But I was the one who felt it.
The desert on my skin was real enough. Windchimes thread the breeze in New Mexico, a glittering sound that is gone before you've really heard it and back again so often you forget it's there.
Still and all, soul is something like the desert. Pilgrims have always wandered off there. Soul is to desert as voice is to wind. We can doubt soul. We can lose our voices. But you can't much deny an atmosphere with so little humanity in it. You can see time on the mountains. You can feel what heat is, and night. Things fade in the rarefied light and yet other things survive centuries, leaving churches and cave dwellings and cowboy ghost stories trailing in the wind. Chiming it with tinny stories. Landmarks slip. The only animals around are the scrappy ones. Plants have the fibrous quality of thirsty vein. Stone and dust are so clearly the same thing you know ashes are ashes and dust is dust. You could die in New Mexico. Or go mad. Therefore, you know humanity.
If you've ever really prodded soul, or god, or the infinite, you know already that it comes down to emptiness. Emptiness and silence. My body, itself, reeled. I swear my bones began to feel sunburnt, my blood got dry, my lungs first struggled and then met the thinness by peeling. Everything inside dialated. It was something of a gutting. The whites of my eyes burned and now I've got a scar on the whites of my eyes. That's not even a metaphor. I came home from the desert with a mark on my iris that makes it look not quite whole. The word pilgrammage started popping up in all of my notebooks. The windchimes stopped bothering me after a day or two. People need to tag the invisible, I figured. They need to put glass beads or tin on it, I figured, in order stave off the madness. The sound drifts and wavers, is only half conscious, audible imposition on all that vastness. The sound mitigates the space between the selfishness of kitsch and the authenticity of looking into the world, reverently.
The consequences of untruth aren't lies, but anxiety. Lostness. Relativity that will go straight down into nihilism. It's godawful lonely. The consequences of illusion are complete pettiness and the loss of reverence, the loss of meaning.
Reverence doesn't negate the awkward, god and the devil help me. It's hard to call Truth or Consequences a town. It's a street, a bizarre little street, hugging the banks of the river and slid between the spines of mountain. It's an American town just shy of being Mexico, which in itself is all kinds of brutal truths and falsehoods. Truth or Consequences is a bunch of trailer homes parked on the ridges, a few upscale spas proprietorially constructed around the hot springs. The town, if that's what we're calling it - it had a post office so I won't argue - wasn't called anything more than Hot Springs until 1950, that weird cultural decade of manliness and subterfuged revolt. Ralph Edwards, host of the NBC radio quiz show Truth or Consequences, announced he would air the program from the first town that renamed itself after the show; someone in Hot Springs called up. Edwards visited each and every spring for the next 50 years.
The question is this: how do we translate something historically passed from guru to student to a world such as ours? What is it we are trying to translate? What happens when you're all in, naked and looking for soul, smack in the raw surface of the blanched earth of the American Southwest? Is it even possible to sit there, a toe in the water, a rock in your back, sun in your eye and take yourself seriously? Can we be fully aware of the consequences and of truth at the very same time?
We can't say that there is a true yoga. Yoga has no founder, no dogma, no word of god. From the beginning, yoga was many yogas. There are no yogic popes, there was never a reformation, there are no creeds or dogmas and there are very scattered ashrams and monasteries. The line between Buddhism and yoga is sketchy. The line between this yoga and that is gray, nuanced only by trademark. There was never an attempt to impose uniformity of doctrine so much as there was an injunction to seek. But that injunction is so quiet, so fleeting, that it's hard to hear.
Yoga is a vocation, rather than doctrine. A listening and responding. Something calls. We can listen. This is yoga.
And yet I was sick of it. I was sick of the selfishness, the flimsiness, the way listening becomes an excuse to hear what you want to hear. In an odd and completely unnoticed slight of hand, 'listening' became 'singing your own song'. As the years went on, that droning cacophony swelled and now it sounds exactly like wider culture. All of the stuff that is wrong with the world. All of the alienation. The cultured unfairness. The denial. I stumbled. I took pause. We're not listening. Not to nuance. We're listening to trademark and hawking and sugar, sugar, sugar until we're stupid with our own childish energy.
Absence arrived. I got scared. I started looking. I would have gone to India, but in spite of being a very well trained and fairly successful professional in the yoga industry - I make my entire if feeble living at this, which most don't - I would have no idea where to start on that teeming subcontinent. I am absolutely and resolutely lost. So I went to New Mexico.
I can't exactly tell you what happened there. Taos, Sante Fe, Sedona and enviorns have a particular spiritual eerieness. The beauty that stuns makes it desirable. The ghosts of seers left a lore in the atmosphere, like wood smoke. It's beauty means people who can afford it lay claim to the most delicious spots. They set down ski resorts and fine dining. They wear couture sun-glasses and buy up the turquoise. They just drive through any actual Indian reservations.
I sat there in a room full of white and wealthy people practicing yoga. I had a moment of actual rage as they talked of going to the spa and then an expensive restaurant after the day ended. I had no money to go to a spa. My motel room reeked in exactly the same way motel rooms used to reek when I frequented them for tawdry, Hunter S. Thompson kind of reasons. Which would be poignant if it wasn't just honest. Honestly, it made me wonder about trajectory; if in time anything ever changes or matters in the least.
Motel rooms don't change, we do.
I got hot and bothered, sure. That's what I do. But I was also there with a kind of willingness that wouldn't let me walk away. During the day, we practiced, we sat. Mist evaporated out of the arroyos. We did the things you do in yoga. And the master teacher, was.
He saw things in me, strange wordless things that aren't muscle and aren't bone and aren't pose. A teacher, of course, sees things that we can't. He got me to feel them. He moved them. He held the meditating and I fell into it. I wept. He saw things in me, personality flaw and personal strength and hanging question, wise, that I knew damn well were there but hadn't done anything about. And he says them, invites me to face them. And where my own gumption and all my friends and doctors and family telling me so for years had not done a damned thing, when the teacher said so I said yes. okay. I will. without batting an eye. And I began.
They all went to the spa. I drove for miles and miles and miles. I pulled over and walked through cemeteries. I climbed under barbed wire fences and lay on my back on the red earth. I drove north, and south, and I ended up in Truth or Consequences, paying a few bucks for a few hours in a sulpher laced spring.
And I thought this: The teacher student relationship has always been there, always has been part of the yogic path even though now it's blown apart like a cat with a firecracker up it's ass. Vows, commitment, thread the narrative like windchimes thread air. This is a spiritual practice that isn't attached to a god, and the vows you take aren't like the catholic ones that end you in a cloister or the marriage ones that end you a legally different person. Although the vows might be that, they don't have to be. In this tradition, the vows are not about the outcome of the vows, but about the making of them. A distillery of intention. Which, when done honesty, humbles you.
It isn't what you expect. That's the point. Nothing is what you expected. But it turns out, you aren't what you expected, either. And this is the only possible way to make any difference. This is the only possible way we can change. Ourselves, or the world. We need the commitment of a spiritual practice not because of god, but because of our own mad nature. We need the commitments of a moment to moment, real and flesh bound practice because rage, fear, shame, and anger are hard and hot and heavy and fast. So fast. We need something to slow us down. We need commitment because even though we love our loved ones, sometimes we don't. We sometimes hate and resent and would strangle them if we could. Or we'd quit. Think we're better off, all alone. Vows and commitments keep us more than we keep them.
We need a teacher not because the teacher is enlightened, but because he knows we could be. Any honest transformation is a relational one. One that leaves us changed in our most intimate, most political, most human ways. Left alone, we are so drawn to our own navel that we're blind.
Once, a very long time ago, a first teacher sat behind a great big desk in Greece while I stood meek and busted for some indiscretion in the middle of the room. Both cowed and defiant. My dear girl, this man said, you're a brilliant young woman, fast on your way to mediocrity. I'm not young any more. Just recently I realized that teacher had died. I went on right head on into mediocrity but I swear his presence made me dig, try, scrabble for what little brilliance I've been able to mete out. His ghost now makes me commit to more. More gutting. More digging. More, unmediocre.
In New Mexico, my teacher gave me a metaphorical mirror. It was only having a mirror that could show me, honestly, how goddamned blind I can be. Truly, truly, this is awkward. Seeing your blindness is a kind of vision, see, but it's as awkward as laying in the desert in the mid afternoon, soaking your bones that don't have cancer or psoriasis or any of the other things silver and sulpher are said to cure. Your ailment is subtle. Your bones float in mystery.
Nothing changed in New Mexico. But I came home without what I thought I knew. Teaching is the best thing I've ever done in my life. I don't say this because I'm particularly gifted as a teacher, but because other aspects of my life are decidedly unskillful. But the truth of my being a teacher is I have to have a teacher. If I don't, I become the charlatan.
I'm going to go ahead and say this. I don't exactly know what made Iyengar Iyengar. Or Jesus, Jesus. I don't think it's what we'd expect. But I do think it was something. Something rare, and precious in that rarity, but absolutely true and as real life as a motel room if you're willing to be in one. And I think there are such teachers, now. Leslie Kaminoff's one. Tias Little is another. Michael Stone listens to me being ridiculous until I myself can hear it. Teachers are there. But most of what is passed of as 'teaching' is just not. And that's okay. If you try, you'll find the rare souls pretty easily. There are 7.3 billion of us here. One in a million is actually quite sufficient.
Listen when you're called; you come out moved. Scarred, humbled, marked and bitten by the forces of nature. Which is a better thing, a far more sthira thing, than is culture. It's a more humane thing, held and supported by another, than is the blind attempt to do it your own way.
Mostly, Santa Fe feels like this. But you have to apply your own sarcasm. A photo posted by Karin L Burke (@coalfury) on