II: 70

[Krishna Jaya]

Chapter 2, Verse 70

 

“Even as all waters flow into the ocean,

But the ocean never overflows,

Even so the sage experiences desire,

But is ever one in infinite peace.”

 

Paramahansa Yogananda:

 

“Krishna does not mean that one needs to abandon healthy aspirations, such as helping others to know God.  By noble desires, one does not lose peace, which gathers reinforcement through distribution.”

 

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi:

 

“Krishna is saying that lasting peace is never achieved by those who are not complete in themselves and still crave worldly things.  However, this does not mean that in order to attain peace in life people should cease to aspire.  It is the aspirations that lead people to greater fulfillment, and not the killing of desires which has been widely advocated through the ages.

 

This verse is often misinterpreted, with a consequent increase in dullness and inefficiency, particularly in the lives of young people in India.  The undue stress laid on fatalism has proven disastrous for their physical well-being and for the progress of society.  Thinking that to aspire will not lead to peace, people begin to abstain from enterprise.  This represents a misunderstanding of Krishna’s teaching.”

 

[On the subject of aspiration:  After a backpacking adventure in Grand Canyon in 2003, I put together a picture book of the experience and quoted from a book by Colin Fletcher called The Man Who Walked Through Time (1967).  I wanted to use the following quote but because the attacks of nine one one were still fresh; I felt the quote might hit a nerve… “There will come a time when treason will have become a meaningless word and patriotism will be judged a crime.”  Over forty years ago, Fletcher understood how the world had become a global village and how nationalistic fervor is often counter-productive to world peace and solidarity. I wondered how I might express the point in a less inflammatory way (the horrors of Nine Eleven were still fresh: how could “patriotism be judged a crime”?  The result was a different kind of “pledge of allegiance”…

 

I pledge allegiance to a dream

of humanity at peace

with itself and the land

to unity in diversity

for which it stands

nearly seven billion rays

streamin forth from the Sun

indivisible

with liberty and justice

for every last one

 

Parker Palmer finishes his book, “The Active Life" with a discussion of “resurrection.”  His words resonate with me deeply in light of our putting a decade to bed (this was written near the end of 2009) and embarking upon a new one. The timing is also good in the way his words show me how to make more real in a personal way my pledge-of-allegiance dream...

“A basic fact of physics is that nothing in the universe is ever lost. This is poetry at its best, constantly illustrated, though rarely appreciated, in everyday life. When a log burns in the fireplace it does not disappear, but only changes form. Its basic particles change from seemingly solid matter to invisible waves of energy; they leave one constellation of manifestation only to be woven into another.

As the burning log lives on in the form of energy, so also do those who die for truth and justice live on. The question is whether we, the living, can understand that transformation and gather round the fire, allowing it to warm and energize our lives so that we can participate in resurrection and in the new life it brings.

Resurrection is not the arising of the individual from the dead as we, in our individualism, have so often imagined it to be. Resurrection involves an entire people arising as one and becoming a community in which injustice is no more. If we do our grieving deeply and well, we become participants in a communal uprising, a resurrection in which the dead live on through the commitment of the survivors. Through the bonds of community, death is transformed into energy for life. Ultimately our losses are overcome.

Each of us is resurrected only as we enter the network of relationships called community, a network that embraces not only living persons but people who have died, and nonhuman creatures as well. Resurrection has personal significance when we understand the person as a communal being. Resurrection is a social and political event, an event in which love and truth and justice come to fruition.

Bone-deep knowledge of resurrection would take away the fear that provides motivation for our cautious, self-protective living. Death-dealing fear would be replaced by life-giving faith, and we would be called to do God-knows-what for God-knows-who. Perhaps we would be compelled to take in a homeless person; to go to prison in protest of nuclear madness; to leave jobs that contribute to violence; to ‘speak truth to power’ in a hundred risky ways. In the process, we might lose much that we have, perhaps even our lives. This, then, is the threat of resurrection.

The threat of resurrection to people like me is clear. It is a threat aimed at those of us who have some measure of power by virtue of the simple facts that we are alive, that we have food and clothing and housing, and that we are therefore capable of acting on behalf of the millions of people who are unjustly deprived of these blessings. If we…people like me and perhaps you…really believe in resurrection, believe it not just in theory but in our bones, we will have no choice but to risk all that we have by taking action for justice.

I remember an occasion…a university near my home invites a colonel in the Army of the Philippines to speak on campus. After the invitation is extended, it becomes known that Amnesty International has evidence that this colonel frequently participated in the torture of civilians during the Marcos regime. Several of us decide to conduct a nonviolent protest at the site of the lecture, so we stand silently at the back of the hall with posters naming this man’s crimes against humanity. In the process, we draw the attention of the media to the issue and to ourselves.

I was on my turf, not his; I was in an American academic hall, not the interrogation shack of a Filipino army post; I was protected by the Bill of Rights, not subject to the whims of the colonel’s cruelty. But still I was afraid. It was frightening to hear this man blithely deny torture one moment, then say that ‘it sometimes happens,’ then admit that his unit had ‘borrowed’ a woman activist for a day of ‘questioning,’ then brush off a question about electric shock torture with the mumbled aside, ‘I have more sophisticated methods than that.’ I was well-protected from him, and yet I felt from him the threat of resurrection. How much more threatening resurrection would have been if I had been vulnerable to his malicious power.

Death is our constant companion. We live while dying. Every minute of life brings us a minute closer to death. Our encounter with this truth is painful at first. There is much in us that seeks to evade the pain by denying death as long as we can.

When we live in illusion, denying reality, resisting the inevitable, we live in a tension that drains us of energy without our even knowing it. So if we try to gain life by denying death, the paradoxical result is that we become lifeless. This is why ‘disillusionment’ is so important, for by losing our illusions, we can access the energy of the reality that lies beyond them.

Sooner or later, all that we have will be taken from us by death. But if we can live with the threat of resurrection in our bones, then we will live truly and well. By accepting death, we can know true life. Or, to put it into words that cannot be improved upon, when we lose our lives, we will find them.

When Jesus spoke these words, he was not exhorting people towards something they ‘ought’ to do. He was articulating a basic truth of life. As long as we cling to life as it is ordinarily understood, we cling to a pinched and deadly image of things, an image heavily conditioned by ego, social programming, and an extremely limited understanding of options. But when we are willing to let go of life as we want it to be and allow the larger reality to live in and through us instead, then, in our dying we become alive.

For many of us, the life we need to lose is life lived in the image of the so-called autonomous self, and the life we shall then find is that of the self embedded in community…a community that connects us not only to other people but to the natural world as well. No wonder resurrection is so threatening; it forces us to abandon any illusion we may have that we are in charge of our own lives, able to do whatever we want, accountable to no one but ourselves, and free of responsibility to others. Resurrection requires that we replace that illusion with the reality that we rise and fall together, that we have no choice but to live in and with and for the entire community of creation.

Paradoxically, as we enter more deeply into the true community of our lives, we are relieved of those fears that keep us from becoming the authentic people we were born to be. Community and individuality are not an either/or choice, any more than life and death are. Instead, they are poles of a whole.

In the active life of work, creativity, and caring we are provided with endless opportunities to lose ourselves so that we may find ourselves, to join with others in the great community so that, freed from the fear of isolation, we may become who we are. By joyfully embracing the threat of resurrection we can work, create, and care in ways that take us not towards the futility of death but towards the fullness of new life for ourselves and for the whole of creation.”

(Parker Palmer, “The Active Life,” pp. 149-157)

 

Dr. Martin Luther King:

 

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.  I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character…With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

 

This will be the day when all God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.  Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’  And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.  So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.  Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.  Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!  Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!  Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!  But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!  Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!  Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi.  From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

 

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

 

(In front of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C., 1963)