Sunday, November 4, 2001		Books

Rendezvous with death: road to immortality
Review by Ram Varma

The Undiscovered Country: Exploring the Promise of Death
by Eknath Easwaran. Penguin Books, New Delhi. Pages 144. Rs 150.

DEATH is a certainty. As Krishna says in the Gita, one who is born is sure to die. Death follows life as inevitably as night follows the day. Yet we shudder at the thought of our fateful rendezvous with death. We are traumatised by its visitation in our family. We live our life dreading death. And however certain the fact of death, it never ceases to shock and surprise us when it comes. As T.S. Eliot sang: "However certain our expectation/The moment foreseen may be unexpected/When it arrives."

Eknath Easwaran, the author of this thin book, has founded a centre at Berkeley, California, where he imparts practical instruction in meditation. He has pondered deeply over the mystery of life and the enigma of death, and has drank at the perennial springs of the Hindu scriptures, particularly the Gita and the Upanishads. He is well versed in the teachings of the Buddha and Jesus Christ, as also the thoughts of the Christian and the Sufi saints. In sum, he is an enlightened man, and has become a crusader for enlightenment, as it were, a bodhisattva, wanting fellow human beings to attain enlightenment in their lifetime. Death, he believes, does not touch an enlightened soul. By attaining enlightenment, one finds the high road to immortality.

Emily Dickinson perhaps had the same thought in mind when she murmured: "Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me;/The carriage held but just ourselves/And immortality."

Easwaran confides that when a close relative or a dear friend died, "I could almost feel death’s hot breath upon my collar". Death, he says, is walking close beside us. The whole universe is a theatre of death. Everything that is created is in the process of passing away. The monsoon moth lives for but a few hours, but even the Ganga and the Himalayas and the mother earth, which in our common parlance are deemed eternal entities, are going through their cycle of life and death. The sun, to all appearance eternal, with six billion years behind it, has already entered middle age.

Time consumes all. Even the universe, with its millions of galaxies, may have had a beginning and come to an end; although our Hindu scriptures hold that in the endless cycle of creation, expansion and destruction, there have been countless universes like ours and there will be countless more hereafter. As Krishna says in the Gita: "I am time, the destroyer of all;/I have come to consume the world."

The author believes that over all this transience reigns an immutable power that governs all the natural forces of the cosmos. He takes this belief from the Upanishads which proclaim: "As the command of that power fire burns, the sun shines, stars glow, the wind blows, and death stalks about to kill." He also believes that the core of our personality is divine, and that the purpose of life is to discover this divinity for ourselves. "The Lord is not a figure in the distant galaxy, but a divine presence that abides in our hearts as our real self."

Recalling Meister Eckhart’s dictum that "thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or a bear’s, cover the soul", Easwaran says that Hindu scriptures use a similar image simplified into what are called the "five sheaths" or jackets of self. He says these jackets are (1) the body or "the jacket made of food", (2) vital energy, or "the jacket made of prana", (3) "the jacket made of mind", (4) "the jacket made of the intellect" and, finally, (5) "the garment of the ego". It is these five sheaths that have to be shed or taken off one after another, if we are to realise what we really are. It is not easy. We are not only dressed in them, we are indeed trapped in them. The world is too much with us, as Wordsworth testified.

Even conceptualisation presents problems, as Easwaran illustrates. "In my talks when I say ‘You are not the body’ I usually get appreciative nods. But when I say, ‘You are not the mind either’, people protest and say: ‘Now wait a minute!’ It is through the practice of meditation that we can best get to know the world of the mind and transcend it." He elaborates the ideas propounded in the Gita and brings his own conviction and faith to bear on their interpretation. The central theme of his thesis is that our body is part of the phenomenal world, limited in time as it is in space. As long as we identify with the body, we are subject to these same limitations.

If we start thinking of ourselves as the self, we learn to detach ourselves from the fruits of action, remain untouched by the hurly-burly of life, take on the garb of an observer, and then death would no more be a rupture in our consciousness than is taking off a coat. As Krishna says, "The deluded do not see the self when it leaves the body or when it dwells within it. They do not see the self enjoying the world or acting in it. But those who have eyes of wisdom see." It is essential to step out of the constricting hold of the mind, as also to take off the intellectual sheaf in order to "leap beyond the duality of subject and object." But the hardest to cast off is the demon of the ego. "Only the miracle of divine grace can help us get rid of it," Easwaran says, and quotes Katha Upanishad: "The supreme self cannot be known through study of scriptures,/Nor through the intellect, nor through hearing discourses about it/It can be known only by those whom the self chooses/Verily unto them does the self reveal itself."

These ideas are not new for us in India. But Easwaran has mainly the western readers in mind. Like great teachers of yore, he talks in a simple, straightforward language. He relates this ancient wisdom in stories from everyday life. It is verily gagar mein sagar (an ocean contained in a pitcher), as we say in Hindi. Which would make even an Indian prize and possess this little book.

In particular, I was charmed by the way he explains the nature of desire: "Most of our desires have nothing to do with our approval. They crowd into the mind about half a dozen at a time, each hanging on to the coattails of the next. In the movie theatre of the mind, desires do not have to queue up or buy a ticket. They barge in and sit wherever they like... Whichever is the biggest gets the best seat. A fat, selfish desire can occupy a whole box; a little desire has to sit on the floor in the back. Good thoughts often get only a corner to stand up in. Anger claims a family pew; sex often gets the whole central section. And what remains is taken up by all the poorer relatives, resentment, hostility, jealousy and the like. Sympathy, forgiveness, understanding and their friends are crowded together in a corner where umbrellas are kept."

He prescribes that one generate the force of meditation to bring order in the theatre of one’s mind.

He briefly mentions the Buddha’s theory of the momentariness of time to explain how the mind generally works and creates unnecessary tensions. The Buddha had illustrated the illusion of time with the example of a stick with its ends on fire. When this stick is swiftly rotated in dark it looks like a circle of fire. As long as it is swirling swiftly, the Buddha said, you see a circle. When the whirling stops, the circle disappears. It is because the mind is being swirled around faster and faster, we see things that are not there. In an agitated mind, imaginary hopes and fears take on the garb of reality. If the Buddha had been around today, he would have given the simile of the movie film, where "stills", when run through a projector, provide the illusion of motion and action.

He also touches upon the Buddha’s eight-fold path of right understanding and aspiration, right speech and conduct, right occupation and effort, right mindfulness and meditation to attain enlightenment. Easwaran believes, like the Buddha, that one’s next life is entirely dependent on one’s karma in this life.

Thus the road to immortality is paved with a belief in the existence of an indestructible atma that resides in oneself, and in reincarnation. And there is the rub. Clearly, enlightenment or immortality is denied to those who only believe in the universe, as it is, not in any immutable power behind it or controlling it. Some, like Khushwant Singh, believe that death is a kind of full stop, "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust". Undoubtedly, there has been some evidence of reincarnation, and some people have been experiences in seances, yet very few among non-Hindus believe in the theory of reincarnation. Christians and Muslims, who form the biggest religions in the world, in fact believe in the Day of Judgment, and bury their dead, so that they may arise at that time. All religions, though, believe in the concept of heaven and hell.

Ironically, with the spread of "enlightenment", all these old religious notions are fast losing their grip on people’s minds. Public and personal morality, which earlier received sanction from religion, is emanating more and more from secular ethics or rationality. Repression of sexuality resulting from religious canons of disciplining the senses, or the puritanical attitude of frowning upon all pleasures, have led to abnormal behaviour, causing more harm than good.

I tend to feel that man’s mind has been enslaved by religions. As Karl Marx summed up, religion is the opiate of the masses. People have been so effectively drugged they do not even know it. Enlightenment requires a sustained de-addiction programme. As it is, it is not easy to discern the face of truth. What with different sets of "revealed knowledge" being available to choose from, there is no incentive to independent thinking. Rather one runs a serious risk of earning the opprobrium of being a heretic. But it appears that a prerequisite of an enquiry into the nature of truth is to disabuse our mind of the a priori wisdom of the Gita and the Upanishads and the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran and so on.

I am not for a moment suggesting that we disregard or discard them. They are manna from the heaven for the believers and the most wonderful heritage of mankind. Just put it aside if you can, and then scan the face of truth. What you see perhaps is somewhat like what Einstein saw, or what Stephen Hawking or his ilk see: the limitless expanse of the universe waltzing to a tune only partly understood. What we do understand is that the tune is inherent in it. No one is playing it from outside. Our truth had better be in tune with this.

There is no room here for God or heaven or hell, or an indestructible soul. These were useful lullabies for mankind’s childhood, which have acted as sedatives, and have outlived their utility at least for some of us. Do we dare wake up, now that we are attaining adulthood? Is the deliverance from death attained through non-indulgence of the senses and "stilling" the mind, removing the "jackets", and withdrawing into an enchanting world of meditation, a way of awakening or going into a self induced hibernation?

I am transgressing.I suppose one is not supposed to talk back to a guru in our old tradition. But Eknath Easwaran is a guru of the West, where free feedback from pupils is prized. Penguin Books have done a good job in bringing out this handy, inexpensive and pithy book, which is bound to be a popular read.