Meditative Reading On Love, Ego, Family, And Freedom

Welcome to the reading of the Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living by Eknath S.

Warren.

I'm Rachel Peeples,

And today I'm sharing with you the wisdoms and benefits of meditation,

What happens when we meditate,

And the further challenges and agitations that allow us to continue to grow in our capacity to quiet our minds,

Even out our emotions,

And deepen our practice.

You may want to use this track as a meditation,

Or as a study tool to learn about meditation.

If you'd like to use it as a study,

I recommend grabbing your journal and a pen or pencil,

And pausing the track as needed to jot down pieces that resonate with you,

Or that trigger an emotional reaction for your further reflection.

You may instead want to find a comfortable position to sit or lie down,

Closing your eyes if you are in a safe space to do so,

And simply listen to the words and let them sink into your consciousness.

Let's take a few deep breaths to prepare the mind to receive.

Inhale and exhale.

Inhale,

Count to four.

Exhale,

Count to four.

Last one,

Inhale,

And exhale.

Chapter 4 Wisdom in Action Verse 23 Those without attachment to the ego are free.

Their minds are purified by the knowledge that all life is one.

They perform all work freely,

In the spirit of service.

Here Shri Krishna gives us the word,

Dattasandha,

He who is free from attachment to his own ego.

All of us have immense resources of love,

Most of which swirl around our own ego.

As long as we are in love with our own ego,

Dwelling upon ourselves,

Dreaming about ourselves,

It will not be possible for us to love our family or our community.

In meditation,

We gradually release this swirling whirlpool into channels of fruitful service which flow towards others.

The more we think about ourselves,

The less we can love others.

The less we think about ourselves,

The more we are able to love others.

When the great day comes when I forget the most monotonous subject in the world,

Myself,

On that day,

I am free to love everybody.

We all can enter into this state of abiding love by working at it every day,

Particularly in our domestic relationships,

Where we have the greatest opportunities for forgetting ourselves.

It is absurd to talk about leading the spiritual life when we do not try to put the welfare of our family first.

This is the training ground.

And though the training is not easy at all,

It can be accomplished by all of us with the repetition of the mantra.

When irritations or conflicts occur,

As they are bound to occur between two people who are brought up differently,

Who are conditioned differently,

Who have been exposed to different cultural influences in their early days,

Do not try to move further away.

Do not say,

I'm not going to talk to you,

I don't want to see you.

That is the time to say,

I am going to get closer to you and I'm going to try to put your welfare first.

This is the challenge of friction.

Removing friction can have spiritual value.

The Bhagavad Gita throws a flood of light on how the unfavorable circumstances in our life can be utilized.

If we do not utilize them,

We are failing to take advantage of the great opportunities that come to us for removing friction,

For banishing conflict,

And for moving closer to the Lord and everyone around us.

The next word is one of Shri Krishna's favorites,

Muktasya.

Mukta means free.

Shri Krishna asks,

Don't you want to live in freedom?

When somebody is angry at you and you are angry at that person,

You are not living in freedom,

You are living in bondage.

You are only doing what the other person is making you do.

I used to get amazed at my granny,

My spiritual teacher,

When she would tell me that when I retaliate,

When I move away from people,

When I get estranged,

I am only dancing to a tune anybody can play.

I was a little puppet,

She said,

Whose wires were being pulled by some of my high school classmates whom I disliked.

If I want to be free,

All that I have to do,

Whatever others may do,

Is try to stand calm move closer,

And give them greater love and greater respect.

In my own small personal experience,

When people get angry and cause trouble in personal relationships,

I have found they are often crying out,

Help me to move closer to you.

We all have such experiences,

All of us can do something in our own homes,

In our own lives to apply these precious words of the Lord to enable us to live in freedom.

We should remember that freedom here implies not only my own freedom,

But also the freedom of all around me,

In which I find my freedom.

According to the Gita,

It is not possible to find freedom by one's own self.

It is not possible for X,

Y,

Or Z alone to become free and lead a free life.

Freedom is indivisible,

And in order for me to be free,

I have to help others to be free.

When we use the word freedom,

What we usually mean is that,

As long as I am free,

It does not matter whether or not you are free.

What does matter is that I should be free,

My community should be free,

My country should be free.

The Gita implies that this concept is preposterous.

All life is one,

And it is only in this total freedom that I can enjoy freedom.

The most challenging effort of freeing ourselves by helping those around us to become free begins,

As usual,

In the family.

I have been reading a good deal lately about the family becoming obsolete.

This is the fantasy of those who do not understand the value of the family in training us to learn to find our freedom by living for the freedom of all those around us.

The family is really a free university.

We are now familiar with free universities.

We find them in Palo Alto and Berkeley.

Everywhere now people are trying to establish free universities.

I would say this is carrying coal to Newcastle.

We all have a free university at home,

Where we really get our finest education in freedom.

If we do not learn that the freedom of the family is the freedom of the individual members of the family,

We are likely to be misfits in life for a long,

Long time.

I would have no hesitation in saying a good son or daughter makes a good husband or wife,

A good father or mother,

And a good citizen.

We can all start acting on this concept of freedom right in our own family,

Which does not mean Papa,

Mama,

Junior,

And Janie,

But all the members,

Including grandparents,

Uncles,

And aunts,

And country cousins.

The family can include our dearest friends and those who participate closely in all our endeavors.

To begin the spiritual life,

Which will enable us to become free,

We need not play a part on a gigantic scale.

Mogul art,

One of the great periods of artistic achievement in India,

Often is in miniature.

The artist concentrated on very small areas,

On little things,

And worked with such tenderness and precision that only somebody who understands art will be able to see all of the love and labor that has gone into it.

Family living is like mogul art,

Worked in miniature.

The canvas is so small,

And the skill required is so great,

That most of us really do not evaluate the vast potentialities of family life which can enable us all to find our freedom.

My wife and I can draw a little parallel from our own life at Ramajiri with my mother and the children.

We usually keep one day in the week for outings,

And last Sunday,

A beautiful balmy day,

We took them to Santa Rosa.

On the way,

I was seated with Mira on one side and Geetha on the other,

And they were asking me all kinds of questions,

To which it is very easy to say,

Keep quiet.

From an adult viewpoint,

Most of their questions were juvenile,

But that is exactly what children are,

Juvenile people who are asking me juvenile questions that are just right for them.

In fact,

If they had asked me some adult question,

I would have said,

Keep quiet.

All the time,

I was trying to remember what most of us older people forget,

That every child has a point of view.

They have their outlook on the world,

Their way of looking at life,

Which makes them ask these questions,

And for them,

These are matters of vital importance.

They wanted to know,

For example,

Why Texaco and Mexico should be spelled differently,

Why Texaco should be spelled with an A,

And Mexico with an I.

To this,

You just do not say,

They're not the same.

I had my arms around both of them,

They had those high rain boots on,

So every now and then I would get a kick from both sides,

And it hurt.

They are children,

Active and lively,

And they sometimes kick.

They do not intend to kick others,

But my legs happened to be in the way,

So they got hit.

In all these little details,

We have to remind ourselves.

These children are not really kicking me,

They are kicking their heels in the air,

And my legs happened to be in the way.

I had to repeat the mantra,

Rama Rama,

To keep smiling.

It is in these little things that we learn how to be loving.

In order to love,

To find our freedom,

We do not have to go to the Himalayas or the Sierras.

We just go to Santa Rosa in one of those little VW bugs where we're so constricted that every kick is amplified.

When we got to Santa Rosa,

We had to walk slowly because my mother is nearing her 80th year,

But the children wanted to run.

We were in a crowded shopping center where it's not proper for a sedate professor to be running about,

But they were saying,

Uncle,

We want you to run,

To run is fun.

I did not say that a pompous professor like me should not be running,

It would take away from my pomp.

Instead,

I said,

I don't care what people say,

I'll run with you,

And I started to make a good dash for it.

I thought I was going to meet with appreciation,

But little Geetha came up to me and said,

You are not supposed to step on the lines.

There was no thank you,

There was no well done,

So I had to do it all over again.

This is the way you shall laugh for children.

We usually conclude our visit to Santa Rosa by dropping in at an ice cream parlor.

Little Geetha had just learned to read,

And she was looking at the big board and asking,

What are all those flavors?

I said,

There are many there.

She tried to read a few,

And then she said,

What is that long word I can't read?

I said,

Pistachio.

That's my flavor.

So she got that double dip and Mira got butterprickle.

They wanted to nurse their ice cream cones all the way back to Ramajiri.

I was in the back seat again,

With both of them on either side,

And such is their love for each other that every now and then they would exchange licks across my lap.

It was dripping all around.

I do not like suits being spoiled by pistachio and butterprickle drips,

And my first impulse was to say,

Stop dripping all over me.

Instead,

I again tried to look at the situation from their point of view.

For them,

It is not clothes that are important,

It is their ice cream.

I could see they were cone conscious,

And so I let them drip all the way.

My mother,

Watching all this,

Was very happy that I still have not forgotten how to be tender to my own family.

I learned how to be tender from my mother and from my grandmother,

Because they were able to show great tenderness to me.

It is in this way that we find our freedom,

By being tender and unselfish,

And putting up with innumerable discomforts for the sake of adding to the joy of the members of our family,

And then gradually extending our love to include our friends,

Our community,

Our country,

And our world.

Finally,

We come to Yana Vasits Asetas,

The person whose mind has been purified by the knowledge that all life is one.

When we begin to realize the unity of life in all our personal relationships,

Our mind becomes purified.

Take a few moments to reflect on this passage.

What resonated with you?

What parts made you uncomfortable?

What small discomforts can we put up with to be tender and unselfish,

To forget our own ego in order to show the greatest love to others?

What small thing can you do to add joy to someone in your family today?

As always,

Thank you so much for listening,

And I look forward to the next reading with you.