At one point, when I developed some illness or other, the local doctor prescribed a saltless diet for a year. Three hundred and sixty-five days without salt! I cannot convey to you what a sentence that was. In a tropical country where salt figures into almost every dish ... well, my school friends said, “Why don’t you just throw yourself into the river?”

The day after the order had been given, I came to breakfast with a long, long face. “What’s the use?” I said, staring down at my plate. Everyone gave me a look of commiseration. But what could they do? They felt helpless.

But not Granny. Serving me, she said quietly, “I am going on a saltless diet for a year too.” I don’t think I have ever had a better breakfast.

My grandmother, who was not intellectually oriented, had a rather different but very vivid way of getting this point across. I remember once asking her why death should involve so much suffering. She didn’t answer directly; she just told me to go sit in a big wooden chair there in our ancestral home. “You hold on to this chair as hard as you can,” she said. “I’m going to try to pull you out.” I held on to the chair with all my might, and she began to pull. She was a strong woman, and when she started to pull I thought my arms were going to come off, but I held on for all I was worth. Finally, despite all my resistance, she wrenched me out of the chair. “That hurt, Granny,” I said. “Let’s try it again,” she replied, “but this time don’t hold on.” I didn’t, and there was no struggle, no pain; she raised me effortlessly and gracefully into her arms.

It was a very eloquent answer. Death is going to take our body anyway, no matter what we do, and the more we try to hang on to the body with all its desires and fears, the more we are going to suffer when death wrenches these things away. On the other hand, when we overcome identification with the body and ego through meditation and the repetition of the mantram, we know from direct spiritual experience that the body is not us, but only a jacket which we have been wearing all these years. Then, when the jacket has become worn and can no longer serve us, we do not cry because it has gone the way of all jackets; we simply take it off, hang it up carefully, and go home.

The summer I finished high school, living as I did as part of a large clan, I was barraged by many opinions – from uncles, aunts, brothers-in-law, everybody – about what I ought to do with the rest of my life. The only person who didn’t try to put pressure on me was my grandmother; she kept her counsel to herself.

My grandmother never heard of educational psychology – or, for that matter, of any other kind of psychology. But at the very end of summer vacation as I was taking leave of my family to go off to college, she called me over to her and whispered in my ear, “Follow your own star.”

… When I was a child, I used to wake up every morning in our spacious ancestral home to the sweet sound of her singing her mantram as she swept the courtyard with her coconut fiber broom. At that time I didn’t give the mantram much thought; it was just something I heard every morning from the lips of someone I loved very deeply.

Then I went to my grandmother, my spiritual teacher, and asked her what to do about the anxiety that gripped me whenever I had to stand and speak before an audience. She told me not to dwell on the anxiety, but just to keep repeating in my mind the words Rama, Rama, Rama. I knew this was a mantram that my granny used.

...

So I knew that Rama was used as a prayer or mantram, but I wasn’t a particularly devout young man, and my unspoken reaction to my granny’s advice was, “That’s too easy, too simple, too miraculous.” I was skeptical, but such was my love for my grandmother that I tried it anyway. “I hope it works,” I said, and the next time I sat on the platform waiting my turn to speak, I kept repeating the mantram in my mind. It seemed to help.

After that, whenever I was called upon to debate, I would silently repeat the mantram beforehand, and after a while I said, “I think it works.” I would still get a few butterflies in my stomach, but I no longer suffered from a pounding heart and irregular breathing.

Then I began to use it on any occasion that I found stressful. Today, after many years of using the mantram, I can say, on the strength of my own personal experience, “I know it works.”

Whenever I forgot to perform an errand for my grandmother, she would ask, “Have you ever forgotten your breakfast?” No, I had to confess, I hadn’t, nor had anybody else I knew. Strike a bargain with yourself– no meditation, no break fast – and you won’t forget to meditate.

My spiritual teacher – a simple, straightforward woman who didn’t mince words – used to tell me, “You can’t shut other people’s mouths.” It took me years to understand that. This unlettered lady knew that we don’t have any control over other people’s minds. You can control only your own mind. When you understand this, you know you needn’t be concerned about what people say about you: it doesn’t affect you, because your mind cannot be upset. You may feel hurt, but you will have an inner security that cannot be shaken.

And my grandmother, my spiritual teacher, was never tired of pointing out to us boys, “The Lord gave me these hands, not to strike others with, but to wipe the tears of people whom we find in mourning around us.”

But it is not enough to say that we are all children of the Lord; we have to learn to act as children of the Lord. In my ancestral home in India, when the younger girls were just learning to cook on our wood stoves, they would sometimes spill a little curry or burn a little rice, and their mothers or aunts would sometimes criticize them for being all thumbs. On such occasions, my Grandmother would always say for the benefit of both generations, “In order to learn to cook, you have to burn a little and spill a little.” But then she used to add to the girls, “But if you never do anything but burn and spill, you will never learn to cook.” It is very much the same in our lives too. I have great sympathy for people when they come and tell me of the mistakes they have committed, because I know how easy it is for all of us to make such mistakes ourselves. But where I get bewildered is when they go on committing those same mistakes without doing their best not ever to commit them again.

My grandmother had a pungent phrase for difficult people: “a lash in the eye.” We all know from experience how an eyelash in the eye can be so irritating that we just cannot think about anything else. That is exactly how difficult people affect those around them, so naturally most of us try to avoid such people.

But this lash in the eye is an opportunity for learning the skills that matter most in life: patience, forgiveness, and freedom from likes and dislikes. It is only the spiritually mature person who can go and put his arm around someone who has given him a really difficult time, and say sincerely, “Without you, how could I ever have learned to be patient? How could I have learned to forgive?”

Granny often taught me with stories, and with the kind of short, pungent sayings that villagers live by throughout the world. “Your own gums are better than someone else’s teeth,” she would say whenever anyone in the family wanted to leave some responsibility to a servant. With that self-reliance went an independent spirit rare in rural India. Utterly unlettered, untraveled, uneducated, deeply rooted in an ancient way of life, she encouraged me to rebel against orthodoxy while she herself observed every ritual, ceremony, taboo, and some times ridiculous demand of a traditional society. …

Yet we do not have to do it alone. My grandmother, who was my spiritual teacher, always used the tamarind tree to illustrate the power of ordinary people. The tamarind is a big tree, with very small, thin leaves. On a hot day, the people of my old state of Kerala like to sleep in its shade. The leaves are so numerous and are packed so close together that they protect us from the tropical sun just as if they were one large canopy. “Little Lamp, you don’t have to look for big people,” Granny would tell me. “Look for little people like yourself, then band together and work in harmony.”

So don’t be intimidated by position or power or wealth. If little people like you and me work together, we can do a great deal to transform the world. Taken together, these small daily efforts to improve our ordinary lives live up to a very powerful force that, in the years to come, can become a kind of spiritual revolution, providing a firm foundation for the kind of political, economic, and ecological improvements we need to make.

Even then, my capacity for concentration was rather good. And I loved a good book. So I must have been immersed in the adventures of Rip Van Winkle for some time before I noticed that there was nothing in my right hand and nothing was going into my mouth. I turned to look and saw that the plate was gone, the rice cakes were gone, the chutney was gone. I had just been moving an empty hand to my mouth.

I was indignant. “Who took my rice cakes away?” I demanded.

“You weren’t even tasting them,” my granny said. “You were reading. You didn’t even know I took them away. That is poor reading and poor eating.” She wouldn’t give me my breakfast until I had put the book away.

Granny possessed a great secret: she knew how to put others first. If she bothered to think about her own needs, it was only after everyone else had been taken care of. I think especially of little things that mean so much to a child. On school days, she always prepared something special for my lunch – a favorite dish, a treat – and I would run all the way home to be with her. “Here comes the Malabar Express!” she would say. Then, though it wasn’t her own lunch time, she would sit next to me and keep me company as I ate. One of the village priests called her “Big Mother” – I imagine because she nurtured and sustained us so well.

...

I said Granny possessed a great secret, but that wasn’t because she hid anything. The sad truth is that most people do not want this knowledge – chiefly, I think, because they fail to see the joy it brings, the sense of freedom.

When as a schoolboy I used to play soccer, I used to play in a position called “left out.” It always provokes laughter. It’s a very important position in soccer.

And there was a boy from my class who had elephantiasis of the leg. So he could not join us in play. He could not even run. He had to walk with great difficulty. And I felt very sad on looking at him, while we were all playing soccer with great vigor.

When I came home, my granny would always ask me, “How did the play go?” Not that she knew anything about soccer, but she was interested in everything that I was doing. And I said, “Granny, there was a boy from my class who had a terrible disease that afflicted his legs. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t jump, he couldn’t kick a ball, so he couldn’t play.”

And my wise grandmother said, “Yes, it is very sad for a young boy to be afflicted by elephantiasis of the leg” – which fortunately has disappeared in that part of the country today – but she warned me, “There is a greater disease which everybody is in danger of developing: elephantiasis of the ego.”

When that happens, you don’t see other people, you don’t care for other people. Everywhere, your needs, everywhere, your first priorities. These are the people who become a burden on the family, who become a burden on the face of the earth. In all the great traditions, spiritual traditions – Hinduism and Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism, Islam and Zoroastrianism – we are always told, over and over again, reduce your self-will, little by little, day by day, by putting your partner first, your children first, your parents first, your friends first, your boyfriend and girlfriend first.

And you will find it’s a very hard thing to do, but in the evening when you go to bed, you will find such a fountain of joy welling in your heart that you will sleep with perhaps visions of Francis appearing in your sleep.

But Granny knew how to play too. She could throw off her years and join the children at their games – and not just the girls either; she played hard with the boys at tag and ball, and usually got the better of us. During a particular annual festival, she liked to stand up on the bamboo and palm swing we had fashioned in the courtyard, single out one of the strongest boys, and say, “Push me as high as you can!” And up, up she would go in prodigious arcs, wood groaning from the strain, while the women gasped and we boys stared in admiration below.

Within the small orbit of this isolated village, hidden from the world among coconut palms and rice fields, my grand- mother passed the whole of her seventy-odd years, participating fully in all aspects of village life. She arose daily with the morning star and worked till evening – sometimes, when necessary, well into the night, long after others had gone to bed. She did everything carefully, giving each task her full attention without pressure or hurry, enjoying her work without ever being driven by it.

And she was completely fearless – another rare trait in a land where villagers live in fear of snakes, ghosts, disease, poverty, social disapproval, and countless other, nameless threats. In those days death was a familiar visitor, and in the center of our joint family home was a room called the “dark room” where the body of a person who had died was kept until it could be cremated. The candle in that room was not allowed to go out, which meant that someone had to stay with the corpse throughout the night. Most village Indians are terrified of ghosts, but for Granny, a corpse was just a tattered jacket that its wearer had discarded. On almost every occasion it was she who sat beside the body and kept the flame alive. “When Granny slept under our roof,” one of my aunts told me, “we weren’t afraid of anything.”

Sometimes my Granny used to say in front of my friends or acquaintances, “Little Lamp, you’re not going to be like anybody else.” It used to bother and embarrass me deeply. “Granny,” I complained, “you shouldn’t say things like that. Lots of boys I know do well in school.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

“Your love is making you blind,” I protested. “You don’t know me. I have lots of faults.”

“You don’t know yourself,” she corrected. “I know you have faults.”

I gulped. “You do?”

“Of course. I know faults you don’t know I know. I even know faults that you don’t know.” (I have to admit that took me aback.) “But, Little Lamp, you also don’t know what your real capabilities are. I know that too.”

I have said before that Granny wasn’t good with words, and I never could get her to explain any further. I didn’t understand, and I did not agree; I was a very ordinary boy. Only much later did I remember her words and realize that she was talking about immense capabilities which lie unsuspected in every one of us – the limitless inner resources of the Atman.

The cry of freedom has always appealed to me deeply. Even in my youngest days, Granny could always get me to change direction with just one question: “Don’t you want to be free?” So today, if someone is allergic to phrases like “spiritual living,” I say, “All right. Let’s talk about living in freedom.” Until we stop letting ourselves get knocked about by our biological conditioning, we don’t have any idea what freedom really means.

Growing up close to my grandmother, I had the blessing of hearing early in life the tremendous truth that you and I are not this finite, mortal body but an eternal, immortal force. As a child I used to run home from school every afternoon to be with my grandmother, and every afternoon I would find her standing by the front gate waiting for me. Eagerly I would tell her everything that had happened that day - what I had learned in school, what the teacher had said, what had happened on the playing field. One day, though, I came walking slowly up the road with a cloud of gloom over my face. “What’s the matter?” my Grandmother asked. “Bad news. Granny,” I said. “Today in geography our teacher told us that compared to the sun, we are just insignificant bits of dust.” She laughed. “This sun will burn out,” she replied, “but you and I will never come to an end.”

This is true of every one of us. You and I were never born; therefore we will never die. We are not limited to this physical body; our real Self is divine. Compared with this Self, our sun is just a youngster. Astronomers tell us that it was born perhaps five billion years ago, long after countless millions of similar stars had come, blazed out their lives, and passed away; and, like them, in a few more billion years it will exhaust itself and die. Everything in the created world is part of this continuous process of birth and change and death. But this will in no way affect the Self, the eternal witness within your body and mine.

And my Granny, she always wanted to hear every detail. She would always say, if I started saying, see, just when we ask, “What happened?” “Oh, nothing happened at school.” My Granny would say, “Then there must have been no school.”

And she'll say, “Start from the time you got out of the house and come back until the time you got back into the house.” So I'll usually start, “I left the house at such-and-such a time.” And she said, “I want to hear everything.”

As a teenager I was independent and inclined to question anything I found provincial. My grandmother’s world seemed bounded by our little village; my world seemed infinite. By the time I left for college, I had discovered modern civilization – modern Western civilization – and the discovery was so heady that it buried everything Granny had taught me.

The door to this intoxicating realm for me was English literature. English, of course, was the key to getting ahead in every British colony, so it was the language of instruction for all institutions of higher education. Granny didn’t pay much attention to British rule, but she must have had some idea of my future because she insisted I learn both English and Sanskrit as early as possible.

By the time I was six or seven I had learned the first verse of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and Granny was so proud that at every opportunity she would tell me, “Recite that poem.” By high school I could read well, and the doors of English literature swung open and let me in. I was dazzled. It was a world I had never imagined. In my remote village I had never seen the British soldiers and civil servants who occupied our country. My only exposure to the West was in our tiny school, where a few dedicated Indian teachers brought us the best of British civilization. There we discovered that England was not just the home of empire-builders, but also the land of Shakespeare, Milton, and Shaw.

Every morning my grandmother used to go to our ancestral temple for worship. On her return, she would stick behind my ear a flower offered to the Lord in worship and bless me with these simple words: “May you be like Markandeya!” Markandeya was a boy in the Hindu scriptures whose heart was filled even from childhood with love for God. When death came to claim him in his sixteenth year, he sat down in deep meditation on God, one of whose names in Sanskrit is Mrityunjaya, the Conqueror of Death. Realizing in the depths of his consciousness his unity with the Lord, Markandeya passed beyond the sway of death. This is a story familiar to every Hindu boy, so when I heard my grandmother tell me every morning “May you be like Markandeya,” it sank very deep into me. By this constant reminder and by taking me to those scenes of grief beside the dying, she made me aware of death and gave me the intense desire to go beyond it. More than that, she showed me that death could be transcended in this very life.

Throughout our village my grandmother was looked up to as a source of great strength; so when death was approaching, people used to send for her to sit beside them and comfort them in their last hours. Sometimes she would insist that I accompany her, even when I was still a child. As I sat by the side of the dying while my grandmother held their hand, the sorrow and the agony I witnessed used to torture me. In those days, I didn’t understand why she took me to these terrible scenes, but their impact on my consciousness was profound. The question began to haunt me, “Is this going to happen to me too? Is there no way I can go beyond death?”

When I was a young man my uncles encouraged me rather strongly to pursue an education in physics and mathematics because this would lead to a lucrative career and provide well for the family. I never openly opposed my elders, but when they discovered that my courses were loaded on the side of literature and languages, they tried to persuade Granny to apply a little discrete pressure, knowing I would do anything she wanted without her asking. The only response she would give is, “My boy is going to be the King’s Messenger.”

I was still a boy when my grandmother had cholera. Because it is a much-feared disease, my mother was almost alone in caring for her. For two or three days Granny suffered from the dread attack, unaware of any of us. When she rallied a little and observed the grieving faces around her, she whispered to my mother, “Don’t use the mango firewood.” Even when she lay dying she was thinking of the smoke from the mango tree making the eyes of the mourners smart at her cremation.

But this was not the time for Granny to leave us. I had been sent upstairs to be away from the scene. When the gravity of the illness dawned on me, I cried down to her with all the agony of my boyish heart, “Granny, don’t leave me. What will happen to me?” For a moment her face reflected a struggle and for an hour she lay inert. Then she signaled to my mother and asked for a strong cup of tea. By an enormous act of will she pulled herself back to life because there was much more she had to teach her boy.

In the center of the joint family home is the “dark room” where the corpse is laid awaiting cremation. Beside the body is an oil lamp which must be kept burning throughout the night. On almost every occasion it was my grandmother who sat beside the body to keep the lamp supplied with oil, sometimes falling asleep at her post. Most village Indians are greatly afraid of ghosts, but for her the corpse was just a tattered jacket which had been discarded. At the time of cremation, when any of us, adults and children alike, had to go outdoors at night, we would ask Granny to come stand on the verandah to give us courage. “When you love the Lord, how can you be afraid?” she would ask.

Nothing I ever did pleased Granny so much as when I scolded her severely for climbing on the rafters when she was in her sixtieth year to hang up her clothes for drying. She giggled like a girl because I loved her enough to scold her, and she bragged about it to her friends.

When I was attending university in a distant city, she would parade about in her best gold bordered cloth when I was expected home on holiday, telling everyone, “This is my wedding day. My boy is coming home.” …

But Granny could feel the pain of death even more keenly than we did when she allowed her mind to dwell on it. When her younger daughter died in Central India after a long and painful illness, my mother and I were by her side. Ignoring all custom, ceremony, and family objections, I left for my village immediately after her last breath to inform Granny in person before the cold words of the telegram could reach her. As I entered the gate in the early hours of the morning, she caught a glimpse of me, dusty and travel-weary, and gave one shattering wail: “My daughter has gone!”

I had only to say, “Please don’t, Granny. I can’t bear it,” and she pulled herself together. There was no more sign of mourning from her.

… Yet when she was ready to leave her body, and the family was gathering around her from the village and miles around, as is the custom in India, she insisted that I not be called. She knew I would grieve too much.

But grieve I must until she began to come to life in my own consciousness. It was only in the years following her passing, as I experimented for myself with the toys of life until I discovered dimly the game behind the toys and began to read the lives of Sri Ramakrishna, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Mahatma Gandhi, and others, that I found almost hidden here and there a golden thread that tied her life to theirs. She was an obscure village woman, but by her enormous love she sought to transfer to her boy the great spiritual awareness that was hers. Every morning in meditation I am lost in love and devotion as I see unfolding in my own consciousness the seeds which she planted there in my early childhood without my even being aware of it, and I marvel as I see myself growing more and more like her every day.

“I would keep a hurricane lantern on the veranda to read by. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you got to sleep, Little Lamp?’ my grandmother would ask. I would say, ‘Just one more chapter, Granny! I have to find out what’s going to happen to Sam Weller.’ She would remind me twice. Then she would just reach out and turn off the lantern.”

“She never let me get away with anything. There was one occasion when one of my more worldly cousins came to me - taking pity on my innocence, I think - and said, ‘You know, there’s going to be a performance in the next village tonight. Don’t tell your granny, but I think you’ll like it.’ Now, these were pretty racy programs – like the American vaudeville, only very down-to-earth humor. I’d heard enough about them for my curiosity to be burning high. The show was late at night, so by the time my cousin came my family was asleep. He had what I thought was a highly sophisticated idea of putting pillows in my bedding so it would look as if I were there asleep. We tiptoed out and went to the show. It was pretty bad. Afterward, I came silently back onto the veranda and slid between my blankets, pleased that I hadn’t disturbed my granny at all. Then the silence of the night was broken with just one word from her. ‘Nishachara,’ she said, and went back to sleep. I was mortified. That’s a Sanskrit word, you see. Nisha is ‘night’; chara is ‘one who creeps around’ – it’s the name of a demon! You can be sure I never did that again!”

He laughed with us, but then leaned forward slightly. “The point is, she could have just stopped me when I was first slipping away – she was well aware of what I was doing. But she wanted me to find out for myself.”

It is our duty, particularly where children are concerned, to remind others, as my spiritual teacher, my Grandmother, reminded me, that we must respect our kinship with all living creatures. This can be conveyed in simple language like my Granny’s. She used to tell me, “Squirrels have grannies, and if you hurt a squirrel, it’ll go complain to its granny.” I had never thought about animals like that, and it really opened my eyes. Likewise our children can understand the simple story that little fish have grandmas and grandpas to whom they run complaining and crying when we hurt them.

When I was a boy, growing up in a beautiful village in Kerala state, South India, my grandmother used to tell me, “Go sit on the veranda, look at the sky, and watch the clouds. Then come back and tell me what stories you see there.”

I would spend long hours observing the ever-varying shapes of the towering monsoon clouds. When I went to my granny, she would say simply, “I am not going to talk. You talk; you tell the story.” I would tell her the tales I had found in the sky. All this developed my imagination at its deepest levels and stirred an awareness of the unity of life.

And of course I believed, through the personal example of my granny, who could repeat the mantram in a most astonishing way.

She’ll be seated on the veranda, repeating our mantram, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama, Rama, and she’ll say, “Sari, where is your pottu? Where is it?” She’ll notice all this, you see.

She would never break the continuity. It used to amaze me, you know. On the surface level there was a certain verbal break, but underneath there was continuity. This is what finally comes when you repeat the mantram.

In Kerala, we have a private joke. High school boys will usually want to show the frog jumping on their muscles.

We should have frogs jumping in our mind. What would happen is – that is one of the great secrets of spiritual life – as your muscles grow stronger, greater responsibilities will come to you. As your shoulders grow stronger, greater burdens will be placed on you.

As my granny used to say, “Not one pound more than you can bear and not one pound less than you can bear.”

When I was attending my village school, some of us boys – my cousins and a few of our school mates – would sometimes rob a nearby mango tree. Of course, we were always absolutely sure that nobody would find out. But I don’t think the owner of the tree was quite in the dark, and once, rather exasperated, he went to the extent of complaining to the headmaster of our school. The headmaster became terribly angry. He called all the boys in the class together and interrogated us.

“Raman, did you rob the tree?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that true, Shankaran?”

“No, sir. I did it, sir.”

“Krishnan?”

“I’m the one, sir.”

One by one, each boy said he had stolen the mangoes. Our headmaster was quite sure who the real culprits were, but he couldn’t get any evidence. Finally, at his wits’ end, he told some of the better students, “You boys should at least give a few hints. Why do you all say that you did it?”

We said, “We are protecting the honor of the school.” He had to agree with us, and so we managed to escape.

When I got home, however, my grandmother was waiting. Word gets about quickly in a village, and the first thing she said was, “Son, did you steal those mangoes?”

I kept quiet.

“Were you in the group?”

I still kept quiet.

“Even if none of you tells anybody else,” she said, “there was somebody who saw. Someone inside you is watching everything, someone who never misses a thing.”

I used to have a flair for going after what appears pleasant in my early days, and my grandmother was a very compassionate teacher.

She used to compare spiritual joy to a fruit which is common in South India particularly. In Hindi it is known as Amla. It is a big tree and the fruit is yellow, and when you put the fruit in your mouth it is sour. You want to spit it out. If you can get over the first sourness and keep chewing for a little while though it does appear unpleasant, after a little while your eyes begin to open and a smile comes and you say, “This is good, this is sweet.”

It’s a beautiful example of what selflessness, particularly in domestic life, means. To do what makes your parents happy may not seem as pleasing as to go after what makes you happy. This is like amla. Just for a little while bear with it, put up with it. Later on your eyes will open wide and a smile will come to you, because when you give happiness to others you are making yourself happy.

All of us need joy. There is no doubt about it. And the Lord does give joy to all of us in abundance when we try to lead a selfless life.

But my spiritual teacher, my grandmother, used to say, “All of us need sorrow too, to enable us to grow up.”

And I used to get aghast and say, “You say the Lord is love? Why can’t he enable us to grow up through pleasure? That’s the kind of Lord that I would appreciate.”

And she used to say in her compassion, “Son, I wish that Krishna were a lord who could enable you to grow up through pleasure, but you will never grow up at all.”

I never try to keep it a secret from all of you that I played most of the games that all of you have played. And my teacher who has a very compassionate nature, when she saw me playing some of these foolish games, she would tell me just a little that what I was going after was pain. But, I was so certain that what I was going after was pleasure that I dared to think that she was wrong. And, it was only after a number of years – when I began to understand that the human being, if he wants to grow to his full height, to her full height, has to turn his or her back upon themselves – that I understood the enormous size of my teacher and the infinitesimally small size of poor me. It was then that I began to have the desire: that I would give anything on the face of the earth to be like my teacher, to become like my grandmother. And this is considered in the Hindu tradition to be the onset of the teacher’s grace. All my passions began to go towards her. All my desires began to be focused on her.

And I must tell you, my mother fortunately was almost part of my grandmother so there was no jealousy. There was no rivalry. In my whole village I was known always as Granny’s boy. Nobody has ever called me Mama’s boy. And even in my school, my high school class like Julia. You know, there were a lot of boisterous fellows in my class. Don’t think it is only in St. Vincent’s. We had a lot of boisterous fellows. When they would try to draw me into some escapade to show my true grit, I would say very easily to them, I don’t think my granny is going to like it. And imagine, boisterous fellows in your high school, what they would do to you if Jeff were to say, my granny wouldn’t like it. You would have to leave town. See, everybody knew my granny. When I would tell all these rough riders that my granny wouldn’t like it, they would say, “That is true.”

And in the Hindu tradition so much importance is attached to the relationship with the teacher. Not because the teacher is particularly in need of this kind of reassurance, but because this is how our desires get unified. He brings all our desires into focus. And that is how my teacher began to help in the unification of all my desires. Even though it took many years for me to understand this unification and actively, intentionally strive for it.

There was so much importance attached to the subject of hair, that I want you to know that not even the most spectacular Berkeley hairstyles can come anywhere near some of the sadhus that wander about the highways of India.

On Mondays they would come to my ancestral home. The most spectacular hairstyles. And there is a particular style that is called “matted locks,” jatta. Shiva’s hairstyle is matted locks. And some of these sadhus who would come to our doorstep on Monday when my grandmother would give alms or my mother would give alms – they expected to be taken very seriously as sadhaks because of these dramatic hairstyles.

And it shows you that even in those days – I was about Julia’s age – I had a little questioning streak in me. When my mother would come and give alms and the other girls would come and give alms, I used to ask my grandmother, why do we give alms to them? And she would say because they are taking to the spiritual life. And I used to ask her, Why? What is the evidence – just because of their special hairstyles? And this was her nobility. She said, “That’s a very good question, Little Lamp. You must be learning something at school.” This was a question that she never asked.

And I used to mention a few of my less spiritual classmates and say, supposing they grew hair like this and came to the doorstep. Would you treat them with respect? See, I was actually questioning her directly. My grandmother would be so overcome with my brilliance that she would go and tell my uncles, “You know how brilliant this boy is? He is able to question some of our spiritual assumptions.” I didn’t know that I was anticipating the Buddha.

My grandmother wasn’t good at explaining things with words, but she loved me so much that she wanted me to make the central question of my life not how to be successful, not how to make money, but how to conquer this sad fate that awaits everybody – man, woman, and child. Today after more than fifty years I remember one of her lessons. On the front page of today’s paper, there was a picture of a little boy of five being carried in the arms of a lifeguard. The boy had been swept away by the waves at the beach and could not be rescued in time, even though many tried. Just a glance at the photo sent a message deep into my heart. It was with me throughout the day, it was with me throughout the night, as I recalled a similar scene that took place in my village half a century ago when a boy I knew drowned in the river nearby. I was with my mother, who almost broke down, and my grandmother. The sorrow was too much to bear because we knew the boy; we knew the parents. When we returned home I could hardly speak.

That afternoon, my grandmother sat by my side and talked to me just as the Buddha would have talked. She didn’t try to console me. She tried to strengthen me. She knew my heart was open and she struck hard, “This is going to happen to everybody. All relationships are going to come to an end.” She specified: grandmother and grandfather, father and mother, parents and son, parents and daughter, brother and sister, friend and friend. My mother, who was the gentlest, most compassionate woman said, “I don’t want to hear,” which is the natural, human response. I didn’t have a reputation for being a brave boy, but somehow my granny’s grace came to me at that moment. I told her I wanted to hear more. I wanted to understand. “This is what I want to rescue you from,” she replied. At that time, I couldn’t understand. Only much later did I realize that she was trying to give me the courage I would need to take to the spiritual life.

I will conclude with an old, old Indian story to pay tribute to my guru, my grandmother. In the forests on the Himalayas there is a beautiful little deer called musk deer, which emits a haunting fragrance. And a little musk deer, maybe scientifically oriented, may have come in contact with some scientist, went back to her granny musk deer and said, “Hey Granny, I have a perfume that haunts my nostrils. Where does it come from?”

Granny musk deer in her wisdom said, “Why don’t you conduct an experiment on scientific lines? Go and smell all the other animals in the forest and find out where it comes from.”

And this little musk deer went to animal after animal. In India they lengthen this story for ten minutes, which everybody loves. Elephant, they said no. Tiger, they said no, Leopard, they said no. So it went on and on, and the little musk deer, tired and very, very frustrated, came back, lay down by the side of her Granny musk deer, and said, “Granny, I smelt all the animals in the forest, and the fragrance doesn’t come from any of them.”

Then granny musk deer patted little musk deer and called her baby names, Mriga, Hareena, Mere Lal. “Why don’t you smell yourself?”

It’s a simple but a very sophisticated story, which shows the genius of our sages.

The little musk deer [smells herself] – “It comes from me, it comes from me, it comes from me.”

In Kerala state, South India, where I grew up, the new year is ushered in with a ceremony many centuries old. The night before, while most of the family is asleep, a special shrine is assembled with all kinds of lustrous objects – yellow flowers, brassware, gold jewelry, ripe fruits, lighted oil lamps – arranged around a mirror draped with garlands. The next morning, each member of the family is led to the shrine with eyes closed and asked, “Would you like to see the Lord?” We open our eyes, and shining in the midst of this bright setting we see our own face in the glass. It is a beautiful reminder of the divinity in each of us – the viewer and everyone else around.

Naturally, the reminder tends to get forgotten later, as life closes in again. But in my home, whenever one of us children began to misbehave, my grandmother had only to ask, “Do you remember where you saw the Lord on New Year’s?”

When you and I look into a mirror, we see a familiar face with a distressing tendency to show fatigue or age. But that is not what the mystics see. They look at us – through us, into us – and see something transcendent, luminous, timeless, “the Face behind all faces”:

I look into the mirror and see my own beauty;
I see the truth of the universe revealing itself as me.
I rise in the sky as the morning sun, do not be surprised . . .
I am Light itself, reflected in the heart of everyone.
        – Fakhruddin Araqi

Of all the Thousand Names, the name Krishna has come to be etched most deeply on my consciousness. This is due to the blessing of having grown up at my teacher’s feet–as I would say, through her grace. I cannot take credit for my devotion to Krishna; she must have planted it in my consciousness early in my childhood.

When you go on repeating the mantram sincerely and systematically, this is the kind of devotion that the Lord helps to generate in your heart. Once it floods your mind completely, it will not leave you even in your sleep; it walks with you and works with you always. In the Hindu tradition we call this ajapa-japam, the name of the Lord repeating itself.

In my native language, Malayalam, ishta also means “friend.” So Ishta is a very good name for the Lord. He is a good friend, and the contribution a good friend can make is twofold. A friend should support us in time of trouble, but a real friend will also oppose us when we are causing trouble or about to cause trouble, whether to others or to ourselves.

My grandmother was a perfect friend. On the one hand, she was very softhearted, but on the other hand, I have never seen anybody so tough in all my life. In fact, the two toughest people I have ever known are Granny and Gandhiji. She didn’t spare her toughness when she was dealing with me, either. She was usually very tender, but sometimes she was strict to the point of seeming harsh. It took many years to understand that this was an important part of her love for me.

Don’t look upon the mystic as seated quietly in a corner counting his rosary.

Christine often reminds me that people may have an idea that my grandmother was a very quiet person, seated in a rocking chair knitting and saying, “Everybody is lovely, everybody is divine.”

She was very much in the Gandhian tradition. Never shaken in her complete faith that as long as the Lord is within us there is no danger that we cannot face, there is no challenge that we cannot accept, if we try to live instead of for ourselves, for those around us.

I really used to go to my grandmother, my spiritual teacher, with one of my common complaints. “Why should the Lord, why should He send suffering to me?”

And the answer, very simple answer she would give was, “Do you think a fellow like you will ever think about God if his body was well? If his senses were always well? If he was always in a very happy condition?” The Lord is a good physician.

Another great help I received from my teacher was, even in my high school days when some of my classmates would try to be discourteous to me, not always without reason, I used to come and complain. And I used to say, “Oh, he was discourteous to me, so I was discourteous to him.” And she would say, “Don’t you want to have some freedom?”

“Oh,” I said, “I was free. He was rude to me, I was free to be rude to him.”

“Oh no,” she said, “He’s calling the tune.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “He’s calling the tune and you’re dancing to the tune. Do you like that?”

I said, “Not at all. So what do you do?”

“Don’t react to others. Then you’ll be free to act in freedom.”

It took me many, many years to practice it, but today, on those rare occasions when somebody is discourteous to me, which is very rare, I find it very natural to be more courteous to somebody is unkind, to be more kind to somebody who is moving away, to be more supportive. This is how you find harmony. And there is nobody who does not respond, slowly, gradually, to this kind of love that can tire you out. The love that will not let you go.

The Ramayana, which is about Rama, a hero and divine incarnation known all over India, contains many lessons about the law of karma. Dasharatha, a great king, is Rama’s father, and even though Dasharatha is beloved in his kingdom for living a selfless life, he dies of a broken heart when Rama goes into the forest in exile.

When I was a young boy I used to ask my granny the kind of question all sensitive people in India ask, “Why should this happen to Rama’s father, who was a good man?”

Granny, who could not read or write, knew the Ramayana better than anyone else in our family, because almost every day she listened to our village pundit read from the scriptures and comment on them. She narrated Dasharatha’s story to me from memory. As a young prince, Dasharatha had gone hunting – grievously enough – in quest of an elephant. Perhaps the elephant had damaged the crops of the villagers, in which case perhaps Dasharatha could have told the villagers to fence the fields. But instead, early in the morning, young Dasharatha went to the river to lie in wait for the elephant that was sure to come to drink.

Soon he heard a rumbling sound, the unmistakable splash of an elephant drinking and playing in the water. Unerringly, he shot his arrow toward the sound, only to discover to his horror that it was a young boy who had been filling a big clay vessel with water. Stricken with remorse, Dasharatha rushed to the father of the dead boy, fell at his feet, and asked for pardon. The father, a sage living in the forest, said, “I give you pardon gladly. I am not capable of anger. But I cannot stop the law of karma. Just as you have broken my heart by killing my only son, your heart will be broken when your son leaves you.”

It is a hard story for a child’s ears, but that is how my granny taught me to never bring harm to others, even carelessly or unintentionally. She would always explain, “When you help people, you bring joy into your own life; when you hurt people, you bring sorrow. When you support people, you bring happiness; when you attack people, you bring grief.” Then she added that Dasharatha saw a vision of Rama as he was dying and passed away joyfully.

When I was leaving for college, my grandmother gave me sound advice. “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes,” she said. Nobody else told me that. All my uncles advised me to be a good boy, but because they hadn’t always been good boys themselves, their advice had little effect on me. My mother, who was more compassionate, said, “Try to be a good boy.” I said, “Yes, Mom, I’ll try.”

But my granny said: “You are going to make mistakes. Don’t be afraid to fail, but when you have made a blunder, don’t make excuses. Say ‘I have don’t that. I will not do it again.’”

To err is human, but we can learn from our mistakes. Some people are so afraid of a misstep that they become paralyzed; they can’t make any decision at all. It may be an important thing, it may be a small thing, but such a person cannot decide. “Shall I wear my black dress or my blue dress?” She will take out the blue dress and put it back, then take out the black dress, then the blue again. She’ll keep on changing, spending precious time. Everywhere, for the indecisive person, the question is, What shall I do? What shall I do? It is much better to make a wrong decision than to make no decision at all. When you make a wrong decision and try to achieve something, you are growing. It is much better to make a wrong choice, face the consequences and learn, and then next time make the right decision.

After I went to college, when I would commit a mistake, I had the confidence to go to my grandmother and tell her what I had done. I knew she would support me, but I also knew she would take me to task. She had only to ask me one question, “How could a bright boy like you do this?” That gave me the incentive not to repeat those mistakes.

It used to hurt me frightfully, because I loved her with all my heart and could not tolerate the thought of incurring her displeasure. I would correct myself immediately because of that. If it was a friend who had led me into trouble, I would tell him, “Whatever you say, I am not coming out with you. Whatever you tempt me with, I am not going to do it.” And I would stick to my bargain.

When she was convinced that I had corrected myself, Granny would come to me and say, “Come on, son, come sit by my side.” Without saying a word she was telling me even if I had to suffer some sorrow, her love for me was so vast that she would rather I suffer and solve the problem so I would not have to suffer the karma of that mistake again.

If the mistake was serious, my grandmother would warn me with a question that has helped me very much, “Do you want to go through all this again?” That one question would bring me to my senses. Did I want the regret, the heartbreak, the repentance that comes to all sensitive people? If we can remember that we will have to go through all this again, it will be a stalwart protection when we are about to yield to temptation.

Granny knew how to tease me too. She would say, “How could you do all these foolish things when you know how to talk like an Englishman?” She wanted to remind me that even though I was clever enough to speak English, I wasn’t clever enough never to make mistakes. That was her way of teasing me.

… My teacher, who was unflinchingly tough, used to say, “Don’t blame life. Don’t blame others.” Everyone has a learning capacity, she would say. If you can learn to be self-willed, she would add, you can learn not to be self-willed.

My grandmother could not read or write, and she was a woman of few words, but by her example, by the very power of her presence, she taught me that we are all children of God, no matter what our country, religion, race, or sex. To use the language of traditional Hinduism, she was aware of the unity of life that binds us all together, and she was able, gradually, to transmit her awareness to me.

A favorite expression of my granny’s was, “Life cannot make a selfish person happy.” It has taken me half a lifetime to under stand the profundity of her simple words, warning that happiness cannot come from possessing another person, or from any selfish attachment. But she would also always add, “Life cannot help but make a selfless person happy.” Like spiritual teachers of all the world’s religions, she taught that happiness is to be found in learning how to love others more than I love myself.

There are three words in Sanskrit that throw light on the spiritual life. One is shravanam. Second is mananam. Third is nidhidhyasanam. Christine used to tease me an awful lot in the early days when I would say twenty years ago, “We have a saying in India there are some people into whose ears the words will go in and then they will come out through this ear.” She used to say, whenever I would say, “There is a saying in India,” she used to tease me until I realized that you have that common saying here, too. And it’s not enough if the words go in here and come out here. They should go in here and then go up here [indicates through ear and then up to brain]. That’s where the block is. And the practice of directing our attention opens a pathway. And there are...even on school campuses and college campuses, we all know we say, “Oh, very good lecture. Fine speaker.” Next week you ask him, “What did he say?” “I don’t know.”

And see, when my teacher would tell me something, she would always say, “Think about what I said. Reflect about what I said.” It took me some time to understand what exactly I had to do. But later on, whenever I would hear something that would light up life, whether it was in a book or whether it was in a lecture, I’d think about it, reflect on it, which is called manana.

And therefore, when you’re criticized or somebody comes and says ... unfortunately in life, there are some people who seem to get some kind of mild satisfaction by conveying to you whatever unfavorable remarks have been made about you. This is again very much the academic world, you see. And they have added a little more. And we get so exasperated, you see.

In fact, I would like to inform you how tragic these can be because sometimes some remark is made jocularly, in all goodwill with a little bit of banter. And the tone, intonation, they are all left out.

And somebody comes and says, “Do you know what was said about you? Terrible. I cannot tell you.” You run after that person, say “Please tell me.” “Oh, no, no, no. You’d be lying awake throughout the night and I wouldn’t be a party to that.” You go back and say, “Please.” And “As you insist. This is what has been said about you.”

And even, I mean, even recently, when somebody is trying to tell me something like that, I always say very nicely, I don’t want to hear. This is something that my teacher trained me. I say, “I don’t want to hear. Please don’t tell me about it.” We can do that. And the more we are able to do this, the quieter the mind becomes.

When I was a boy, if a friend got angry with me, my spiritual teacher used to ask, “So what? What reason do you have for getting angry with him? What is the connection?” I heard this from her lips so many times that I began to apply it. Nowadays when somebody confides in me, “He’s angry with you!” I say, “So what? Let him be angry; I can forgive.” It helps me and him alike. If I can even take a few steps closer to him, our friendship will become that much surer.

… This is the human condition: to look only at the exterior, the surface of life.

But as my Grandmother used to say, “If you want the real taste of a mango, you have to get close to the pit.” The surface may taste sweet, but near the pit a mango can taste so sour that you feel like going back to the fruit stall and saying, “Here’s your pit; give me back my money.” This is common in personal relationships too.

When I was in high school, like most teenagers I occasionally had to hear my Grandmother tell me things like, “Ramaswami from the corner house doesn’t think much of you.”

I would answer, “What does it matter what Ramaswami thinks?”

“His sister says you and your cousin are not very polite.”

“What does it matter what his sister says?”

“What about yourself?” she would ask. “Don’t you want the respect of yourself?”

“Of course, Granny.”

“Well, then,” she would say, “you have to earn it.”

And I used to learn it from my teacher. See, for example, in those very immature and foolish days, when I did not understand her stature and I misunderstood the stature of all my peers at school, who will say ... I’ll come and repeat something which my granny told me and they will say the Malayalam version of “you believe all these old granny’s tales?” And I used to think they were right. After all, sixteen is an infallible age where glands are concerned.

And I’d go and contradict my Granny. Of course, I used to do it very nicely by saying, “Of course, Granny, you never went to school. How can you know this?”

And it’s only later on, when I began to meditate, that I could recall she’d just sit on her mat and laugh. And it was rarely that she laughed. When I would say things like that, “You never went to school, Granny. How can you know all these abstruse matters?” She’d just laugh and she neither defended herself nor tried to get annoyed. That’s how I began to understand that this is how most of us can avoid agitation.

The third is, which is very important for me, maybe because I have been a schoolteacher for many, many years: right speech.

In my home my grandmother was very, very emphatic about this. Not one word could we use that lacked in courtesy, that lacked in respect and as a result I’ve become almost intuitively sensitive to right speech.

I enjoy right speech. I like to listen to people who present a different point of view persuasively, with courtesy and with a touch of humor. And I can attend a very eloquent lecture on atheism, laugh at all the right places, and then come out by the same door I went in.

Even when we are older, if we have done something we later regret, if we work hard at making our subsequent actions more selfless, that karma will not develop fully. My granny used a grisly example to explain this. If you have blinded another’s eye, she would say, the karmic result would normally be that eventually you would lose your own eye. Doesn’t the Bible say “an eye for an eye”? But my grandmother would say that if you begin to help people instead of harming them, comfort people instead of hurting them, you will still receive a blow, but you will not lose your eye; perhaps you only get a bump on your forehead. It may be painful, but your karmic results are highly diminished – because the lesson has been learned.

If we can keep on making entries on the credit side, when the time of reckoning comes the credit side has been filled up. None of us need be afraid of the past if we keep on making more and more entries on the credit side.

My grandmother was born into the kshatriya caste – the caste that provided ancient India’s fiercest warriors. She often reminded me of the distinguishing mark of a kshatriya: no matter how desperate the battle, there will be no wounds on his back. She taught me that every human being is born to fight like this, with the utmost courage and endurance.

Yet she never neglected to add that when we fight others we always lose. When the smoke clears, she would say, we will have lost a potential friend and gained an enemy. But each time we fight against the forces that hold us down and keep us from loving, we draw a little closer to the rest of life.

When I was young, my Grandmother, my spiritual guide, would often tell just such a story, not only to entertain but to convey the essential truths of living. Perhaps I had asked her, as revered teachers in every religion have been asked, “What happens in the spiritual life? What are we supposed to do?”

My Granny wasn’t a theologian, so she answered these questions simply with a story like that of the elephant sculptor. She was showing that we do not need to bring our real self, our higher self, into existence. It is already there. It has always been there, yearning to be out. An incomparable spark of divinity is to be found in the heart of each human being, waiting to radiate love and wisdom everywhere, because that is its nature. Amazing! This you that sometimes feels inadequate, sometimes becomes afraid or angry or depressed, that searches on and on for fulfillment, contains within itself the very fulfillment it seeks, and to a supreme degree.

My grandmother used to say, chiding all of us around her when we used to say that our prayers are not being answered, she would make it very clear to us that we wanted our prayers to be answered on our own terms.

As my grandmother used to say, it is by committing mistakes that we learn that mistakes – particularly when prompted by self-will, by selfishness – cause more and more suffering.

And those who can learn quickly, they escape the wheel of becoming as the Buddha puts it. And those who are poor students, C-minus, they keep on suffering and suffering. But the Hindu mystics say, even they have got to learn. One day they will become tired of receiving C-minus. And even though they might not hit A, they still may go C-plus.

And it’s good for us to remember, or to remind ourselves, that the Lord loves us too much ever to condemn us to perdition.

My spiritual teacher, my grandmother, used to narrate a very homely story of a young woman getting married and on the occasion of the Hindu marriage in many parts of India, they tie what is called a mangala sutra round the neck of the bride. This is usually a black thread. And nowadays of course the black thread is encased in gold. But I still think right inside there is the black thread. And sutra means “thread,” mangala means “of joy.” And in marriage, what brings joy is remembering the joy of the partner first and last. This is the mangala sutra that symbolizes our finding our complete joy in contributing to the joy of our partner.

This managala sutra … is considered so auspicious that even in some parts of central India where there are said to be occasional holdups – fortunately we are free from it in south India – there, even in a holdup they say the robbers will refuse to take the mangala sutra because even for them it is a sacred symbol.

My grandmother would say that a young girl who had been married suddenly lost her mangala sutra and got completely panicky. She went searching all over the place, pulling out every drawer that she could find and when she was almost on the point of breaking down, her mother said, “What’s the matter? Why are you so panic-stricken?” She says, “I have lost my mangala sutra.” Her mother says, “Just look around your neck.” She went and looked in the mirror. There it was. And she said, “I’ve been looking for it all over the place.” Just as you and I, we are looking for our mangala sutra … looking to safe deposits you know.

My grandmother used to tell me when in my ignorance I used to harbor little resentments, she would say it’s like lighting a firecracker and swallowing it.

It’s a very good image. This is what people who harbor resentments do. They light the firecracker and immediately throw it into their mouth, swallow it, where it keeps on doing untold damage. So in all our relationships, however much it costs us, we can always make amends for the past.

In this context I take great delight in talking about my spiritual teacher, my grandmother, who could not read, who could not write, who did not know anything about educational psychology. Very often when living in an orthodox Hindu society, I would sometimes question some of its assumptions and try to go against them. My grandmother often would support me even though she was observing them herself.

And I had all the makings of a successful rebel, but I never got an opportunity. See this its rather frustrating you know, when you are just growing up and ready to rebel and actually know thirteen different ways of rebelling, when the person against whom you want to rebel quietly comes and says, “The capacity to rebel is part of our human wealth.” And what we have to rebel against is our own selfishness, our own self will, our own separateness. It is for this purpose that the Lord when he is making the human being he puts in a good quota of the rebellious stuff and mixes it you know.

When in my early days I used to be often grieved, and honestly believed that I was stricken with sorrow and my heart broken, I would go to my grandmother to elicit some sympathy and to shed copious tears on her shoulders. After letting me do all this, she would always say, “This is not grief. This is not a broken heart.” And I used to say, “What is it Granny?” “This is self-pity.”

And there is no more degrading and debilitating emotion than self-pity. And we can glut in it you know, bask in it, sit from morning till evening, and there is a kind of cruel satisfaction in it. “Nobody loves me.” “Nobody likes me.” And there is even some element of fierce pride you know … “nobody likes me.”

And I think sorrow in the spiritual sense is sorrow for others. Grief in the spiritual sense is grief for others. And when our selfishness is eliminated, when our “I” is vanquished, there is no time nor energy to spend in sorrowing upon ourselves. This is why the Gita says such a person goes beyond sorrow, which is to live in abiding joy.

My spiritual teacher, my grandmother, I was recalling today when I was reading Mahatma Gandhi, even in her seventies her body was so strong, her walk was like that of a teenager. And her eyes were always clear. And I thought, when I was coming back from my university for the summer vacation that her hearing was getting a little less acute. Sometimes she wouldn’t answer me. So one day I told my mother, “I think Grandma is slowing beginning to lose her hearing.” And I said, “I am going to test it.”

So she was seated in a corner and I went to the other corner and told my mother in a slight whisper, “The old lady is losing her hearing.” And she says from there, “Not quite.”

And she never needed any dental attention because she would eat only that which was good for the body. She hadn’t read any articles on nutrition at all, but she could understand the language of the body and everything about her was at its best even in old age. And when we were already beginning to have dental problems, the way she used to shame us into taking better care of our teeth was to take a hard nut called an areca nut – it’s very hard. And she would take it between her teeth, and one crack, the nut would split into two. Even the thought of that now makes my teeth ache.

So, it is in leading the spiritual life that we get all the motivation to take good care of our body. Because it is by using this body as a humble instrument that we can help to solve the problems of the day.

There is a very rare type of human creature who without the prodding of pangs of sorrow can easily turn to God. I must confess I didn’t belong to this category. I had to be pushed, prodded, and punished. And even then I’d try to go into a blind alley.

And I often used to ask my grandmother, my spiritual teacher, this very reasonable question, “If the Lord loves me so much, why doesn’t he give me freedom?” She would say, “If he gives you freedom, you will go to the devil.”

And he loves us so much, so tremendously that he is even prepared to break his heart by punishing us. I think it hurts the Lord much more than we understand when he has to push us and prod us and punish us. And he doesn’t do it willingly at all. The great mystics say that there is no other way in which we seem to be able to turn inwards.

Sorrow is a very responsible faculty member, and has a very grating voice and a very grim look. But sorrow is really one of the best teachers the world has seen.

In my grandmother’s homely language, common to the mystics in the Hindu tradition in India, she would say that there are three kinds of doctors in our villages. The first kind of doctor when you are ill, comes to you, stands at a distance, looks at you and says, “Snap out of this. Just forget that your temperature is 105 and you’ll be alright.” And he collects his fees and he walks out. My grandmother would say, it’s a very poor kind of doctor, who has just come to collect his fees. He has no interest in curing you.

The second doctor comes, sits close to you, takes your pulse, then asks you very personal questions about your diet, sleeping habits, and lack of exercise. And he writes a prescription and says you should take regular exercise, you should get to bed early, have eight hours sleep. He collects his fees and he too walks out. My grandmother would add, “He’s a slightly better doctor, but he too is not really worth being called a doctor because he doesn’t care enough for your recovery.”

And the third kind of doctor, he comes in his bullock cart, rattles to a stop in front of your house and doesn’t even give time for the oxen to be unyoked. He jumps out, pushes open the door, doesn’t ask anybody, “Can I go into the patient’s room” Storms into the room, and before you even have time to ask, “Don’t you know that I am ill?” he has landed right on your chest, sitting astride there. And he takes out from his pocket a large bottle, 24 ounces of gall and wormwood. And even without saying by your leave, pries open your mouth, takes out the cork, puts the bottle there, and sits there comfortably until every drop of this gall and wormwood has gone down. He jumps up, he says, “I don’t want any fees. My fee is: you’re cured.” And my grandmother would say, “He’s the best kind of doctor. He doesn’t mind causing you some suffering. He doesn’t mind taking liberties with your body. He doesn’t want anything except you should be healthy, strong, and fit to live for others.”

In my village, where transportation is mostly by bullock cart at three miles per hour, it takes three hours I think – two to three hours – to go from my village to the neighboring town of Palakkad.

When the bullock cart is returning to the village, usually in the evening or at night, the driver lies down on his grass mat in the bullock cart and goes to sleep. He just ties the reigns to the side of the cart and he tells his bullocks, “You know the way. Go home. I’m going to sleep.”

It’s a very edifying sight to see these bullocks going straight home, making the right turns and avoiding the ditches. No bullock cart will pass another bullock cart. This is again something that we might learn. Even in the olden days here in this country I understand that when a carriage had to pass another carriage the driver will tip his hat off. I think it’s good manners. Bullock carts, when they go home, they don’t need even a driver.

And my Granny really used to embarrass me by saying, “Even these bullocks carts know how to go home. Why don’t you boys learn from these bullocks? You’re going further and further away.” We really used to be humiliated you know. And we never liked bullocks.

I have never met any human being as fearless as my grandmother. Even Mahatma Gandhi, you may remember, had to get over all kinds of fears: ghosts, snakes, even being alone in the dark. I don’t think my granny was ever afraid of anything or anybody – not of any circumstance or any force on earth.

Whenever there was any threat in my village, everyone in our home used to come to my granny. During the days of the Muslim rebellion in Kerala, even some of my uncles came to her and said, “Come stay with us. We are brave, but we have fear in our hearts. When you are close to us, there is no fear at all.”

When I was a boy, I would often ask my granny questions and listen to her stories in the evening. I would come home after soccer deliciously exhausted and lie down on our bamboo cot with my head resting on her lap. It was heaven for me when I was a boy. Once I asked her, “Granny, how can I become fearless like you?” She said, “One day you will.”

I don’t think I believed it. Even later, when I was at the university and had overcome many childhood fears, I wouldn’t have called myself a brave man. I saw many famous people in those days, but I used to tell my granny that I had never seen anybody so completely fearless as she was. “I have seen people from Europe and America,” I would tell her, “but I have never seen anybody without a sense of fear except you.”

With all humility, today I can say I’m just like my grandmother. I don’t have any fear, not only of this life but of what is in store after death. Today I know I can go deeper than any fear, and from that depth I can pluck that fear out by the root and throw it away. That is the discovery we make in deepest meditation, and it is one of the grandest results of reaching the other shore.

My spiritual teacher, my Grandmother, did not know how to read or write, but she knew Sri Krishna, and she gave me the message of the Gita in language that all of us can remember. All life is a battlefield, she used to tell me; whether we like it or not, we are born to fight. We have no choice in this, but we do have the choice of our opponent and our weapon. If we fight other people, often our dear ones, we cannot but lose, but if we choose to fight all that is selfish and violent in us, we cannot but win. There is no such thing as defeat on the spiritual path once we join Sri Krishna, but if we try to fight against him, we shall never know victory.

My grandmother, my spiritual teacher, used this same approach to teach me how to live. You should not picture granny as a gentle old lady in a rocking chair. she was active and vibrantly alive, tough and tender at the same time, and although she used words sparingly she made each one count. Clearly but compassionately, she would tell me just what I was doing wrong. Then, largely by her personal example, she would show me how to change.

Once, I remember, I got into a senseless squabble with a classmate and came home hurt and angry. Granny took one look at my red eyes and asked, “What happened, son?”

With the simplicity of youth I replied, “Raman called me names.”

My mother would be very tender on these occasions. “Don’t worry,” she consoled me. “What does he know? You’re really a very nice boy.” But Granny just asked, “And then what?”

Well, he was rude to me, Granny, so I was rude back!”

She shook her head slowly. “What is the connection?” I had no answer, of course. Then came the words I dreaded most to hear from her lips. “You’re such a bright boy. Tell me, what does his being rude have to do with what you say or do?”

“But Granny,” I said, “he’s impossible to get along with!”

“There is only one person in the world you can hope to control,” she replied drily, “and that is yourself. Work on how you respond. Otherwise you are like a rubber ball: he throws you against the wall and you bounce back.”

Of course, just hearing this kind of advice does not necessarily help much. If my coach had merely said, “You don’t hold the racquet right,” it would not have improved my tennis game. I would have objected, “Show me how I’m holding it wrong and how to hold it right!” What made Granny a consummate teacher is that she could always show me how to solve problems: by working on my own mind.

Juggling with likes and dislikes, then, is much more than learning to be flexible about the relative merits of foods or jobs or people. The real issue is freedom. Our habitual responses in small matters reflect the way we respond to life itself: the person with rigid tastes in food is likely to have rigid tastes in other fields as well. All of these hold him hostage. He is happy so long as he gets everything the way he likes it. Otherwise– which may be ninety-nine percent of the time – he is unhappy over something. He might as well be bound hand and foot. My grandmother used to tell me, “Don’t ever beg from life.” Life has only contempt for people who say, “Please give me two things I like today: one in the morning, preferably just before lunch, and another about midway through the afternoon, when I start to get irritable … Oh, and please remember to keep everything I dislike at a convenient distance.” This is panhandling, and we usually get what we deserve: disappointment, with a capital D.

We are not beggars, Granny would say; we are princes and princesses. We can learn to say to life, “It doesn’t matter what you bring today. If you bring something pleasant, I will flourish; if you bring something unpleasant, I will still flourish.” Once we have tasted the freedom of juggling at will with our personal preferences, we can face whatever comes to us calmly and courageously, knowing we have the flexibility to weather any storm gracefully. This is living in freedom, the ultimate goal of training the mind.

Because I come from India, people used to ask me if I consider cows sacred. I used to tell them, "Of course I do – and tigers, buffaloes, beavers, and Chihuahuas, too. All animals are sacred to me." We are learning more and more about the nutritional advantages of vegetarianism, but I would say the more important point about not eating meat is that it makes for sound spiritual living, because it affirms the unity of life. In India, where we have a tradition of vegetarianism stretching back thousands of years, we have a loving, protective feeling for most of our animals. In my ancestral home, for example, my Grandmother used to give our cows beautiful Sanskrit names. When visitors came to our home and my Grandmother gave them the news, she would always include the latest about the cows, who were just like members of the family to her. “Shanti is not doing very well today,” she would say. “Shoba’s calf is eating better now.” My mother kept cows, too. One of them grew to a ripe old age and developed rheumatism, and my mother used to tell her friends with wry humor, “Both of us are rheumatic.” Once someone suggested she sell the cow. Her answer was perfect: “That’s like asking my son to sell me.” The cow had served us well, fiving us milk, yogurt, and butter for many years. Out of simple gratitude my mother wanted her to live her last years in comfort.

… Even when I was a boy, just entering my teens, she knew how to open a little window in my consciousness and tell me, “Look carefully. If you can see far enough you’ll see Yama waiting for you, just as he is waiting for us all.” I have to admit that I did not appreciate this at the time. I could not understand why I, among all the children I knew, should be singled out to be made aware of this dreadful destiny. And Granny seldom tried to explain herself; she planted the seeds of this awareness whiteout ever using words. Though all my cousins were shielded from such experiences, she loved me so passionately that she opened that window onto death for me again and again. More than anything else, she wanted me to understand that nothing is more important than remembering death – not to live in fear, but to make it our first priority to go beyond time and death here and now.

My Granny had a unique gift for standing by people when they got themselves in trouble and at the same time teaching them not to get into that trouble again. One of my cousins was much more daring than the rest of us – and who doesn’t have a cousin like that? He was always finding situations to put us into where his daring would show itself. Now, all of us used to play soccer until late in the afternoon, and after the game we like nothing better than to run to the river for a swim. But by the time we started for home it would already be dusk, and dusk is the time when all kinds of snakes love to come out and take their walks. The raised paths between the paddy fields used to be crawling with them. In the fading light it was very difficult to distinguish snake from grass from stick, and without knowing you could easily step on one of these creatures and be bitten before you had a chance to jump. Not only that, some of these snakes are poisonous. Yet this daring cousin of mine loved to lead us home at dusk along these paths, knowing full well we were frightened out of our little wits.

My Grandmother had warned me many times of the extreme danger of doing this, and she had told me repeatedly to come home before dark. Her warnings, unfortunately, fell on deaf ears; I continued to follow after the others. But one evening after our swim, just as we got to a part of the path where the snakes loved to make their home, whom should we come upon but my Granny, standing there barefoot by the side of the path just waiting for me. There was no telling how long she had been standing there, and from her expression I understood that she was prepared to wait there for me every night if necessary. She didn’t need to say a word. I was cured. I never came home after dark that way again.

With infinite tenderness, Sri Krishna is leading us in these verses to the theme of death and immortality. As long as we hold on to the passing pleasures of the physical world, we cannot avoid the suffering that overtakes the body in the course of time. In the first half of life, we have a certain margin for learning this – a certain amount of time to assess the value of physical satisfactions and weight what they promise against what they actually give. But as we grow older, if we fail to assess wisely, life is not going to ask us is we are ready to give up our attachments. It is going to take them from us, and in that taking is most of the suffering of old age and death.

Here, I think, my Granny was at her best. “Little Lamp,” she used to ask, “don’t you have a sense of self-respect? Why do you have to be forced to make choices that you can make voluntarily? Don’t let life back you into a corner and rob you. Give these things up now, when you are strong; that is the way to be free.” On the spiritual path we let go of all our selfish attachments little by little, according to our capacity – not under duress, but of our own free will – until finally we no longer need to hang on to anything else for support. To be forced to surrender is bitter. But to give up something for one we love, though at first it may seem a cup of sorrow, is found at last to be immortal wine.

Now, I have to confess that I have developed a rather personal interpretation of these verses. If you look at the text of this verse and the two that follow, it is quite explicit: “If you cannot still your mind, learn to meditate; if you can’t meditate, serve Me in those around you,” and so on. But when it comes to something as important as Self-realization, I am the kind of person who won’t leave any stone unturned. Even if it is only a little pebble, I have to turn it over. If I am going to devote so many years of my life to extinguishing the ego, I want to make sure it is extinguished once and for all. So even if Sri Krishna himself assures me that meditation, for example, is enough by itself, I will still say, “Excuse me, Lord. It may be enough for the Compassionate Buddha, but a little person like me can’t afford do take chances. I’m going to do everything I possibly can: meditate and put others first and learn to be detached from the results of action, all together.” It is a very practical attitude, which I must have absorbed from my Grandmother’s example: there is always something more that you can do.

And she has often said, “Anyone who loves my boy, I will carry that person on my head.” This is the greatness of my grandmother’s love. This is Granny’s grace. She is my guru, my spiritual teacher. She taught me that devotion to God is no different from devotion to family, only it doesn’t stop with the family. It extends beyond every horizon.

Ahimsa is usually translated as “nonviolence,” but this is misleading and falls far short of the real significance of the word. When all violence has subsided in my heart, my native state is love. I would add that even avoiding a person we dislike can be a subtle form of himsa or violence. Therefore, in everyday terms, ahimsa often means bearing with difficult people.

In Kerala we have a giant, fierce-looking plant called elephant nettle. You have only to walk by for it to stretch out and sting you. By the time you get home, you have a blister that won’t let you think about anything else. My grandmother used to say, “A self-willed person is like an elephant nettle.”

That is why the moment we see somebody who is given to saying unkind things, we make a detour. We pretend we have suddenly remembered something that takes us in another direction, but the fact is that we just don’t want to be stung. Whenever I complained of a classmate I did not like, my granny would say, “Here, you have to learn to grow. Go near him. Let yourself slowly get comfortable around him; then give him your sympathy and help take the sting out of his nettleness.”

The seed of perfection is within all of us. Meister Eckhart, in his inimitable way, tells us that as apple seeds grow into apple trees and pear seeds into pear trees, so the God-seed within us will grow into a mighty God-tree if it is watered, weeded, and protected. In India, the price of seeds goes up during the rainy season because that is the right time for planting. Because the seeds are expensive, the foolish farmer says, “I think I’ll wait until there is a fifty-percent reduction in the price of seeds. During the summer months you can pick up two packets of seed for the price of one.” But at that time, when there is not a drop of water in the ground, nothing is likely to grow. Similarly, the right time for leading the spiritual life is now. When my Grandmother used to ask me when I was going to do a certain good deed, I would say, “One of these days, Granny.” She would immediately retort in my mother tongue, “One of these days is none of these days.” Most of us have a tendency to put things off until the right moment, the auspicious day, when everything is right. There are people who throw away jobs or move to a new home just because what they have now doesn’t feel right. I would suggest a little less concern with feeling right and more with doing things now. If you want to lead the spiritual life, the time to start is immediately, and not one minute later. We have a venerable Hindu friend who says in frightening language, “Don’t postpone the spiritual life until tomorrow. How do you know you will be here tomorrow?”

And the Buddha now is saying yasse pure cha paccha.

I have committed many mistakes, usually in ignorance, you know. So, don't try to idealize my past. I was just like everybody else, committed mistakes in my ignorance. I don't think I ever tried to hurt anybody but sometimes I hurt not knowingly.

And this is why I often repeat to you my teacher's compassion. When I would come, when I was in a very difficult situation – caused by ignorance – I would say, “Hey, Granny, what would you do if you were in this situation in which I find myself?”

She will put her arm round me and say, “Little Lamp, I wouldn't get into that situation.” And now I know how wise it is.

He was always an intense boy, he recalled, with powerful passions and a deep affinity for animals. “If there was something I loved, I had to make it mine.” When a stray dog wandered into the family compound, he adopted it, the first of many dogs he would raise and love, and the very first, for that matter, to enter the family circle. He reared a pigeon that roosted, when it could, on his shoulder. Painfully sensitive to the suffering of animals, he could not resist trying to do something about their suffering, even when he knew his help would be of little use. He remembered long nights during the monsoon season when he couldn’t sleep because of the plaintive croaking of frogs being caught by snakes. He would go out into the night and move the frogs where he hoped they would be safe. His grandmother knew better, but she encouraged him anyway: “Even if it doesn’t help the frogs,” she said, “it helps you.”

Even now I marvel at the artistry of her teaching. Whenever someone died in our large ancestral family, relatives and friends would gather around a central courtyard in my ancestral home where the grim ceremonies of a funeral are performed. Most of the other boys and girls would not be present on such occasions. But my Grandmother insisted that I stand right in front and watch carefully what was taking place. The body was bathed and taken from the courtyard, and as it was carried away a heartbreaking chorus of hundreds of voices would break out in lamentation. Often it was old people crying, but when it was children my heart would almost stop beating at the sound. Then Granny would tell my uncle, “Now take him to the funeral pyre.” I didn’t know or guess that this was what great love means. All I knew was that I had to go and stand in the southern courtyard while the body was lowered onto the pyre, to watch the most harrowing scenes I have witnessed in my life.

“Wherever you go,” my Granny used to tell me, “you are going to encounter ups and downs – pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune, people who like you and people who don’t care for you at all.” The nature of life is up today and down tomorrow, and the Gita says simply, let it go up and down; you don’t have to go up and down with it.

In other words, whatever context we find ourselves in is a suitable one in which to overcome our problems and grow to our full height. We tend to look upon the other home as peaceful, the other couple as perfect, the other parent-child relationship as ideal, but this is not very likely. Whenever she heard someone talking like this, my Grandmother used to remark pungently, “The jasmine in your neighbor’s garden always smells sweeter.” Most of us, if I may say so, have nice parents, and most of us have good friends and children. Naturally they all have certain liabilities as well as assets; this is part of the human condition. If our parents were completely perfect, they would not be here; according to the theory of reincarnation, they would have passed the parent test in the school of life summa cum laude. The very fact that we have come into this life shows we have some imperfections to correct. The mystics are loving realists. They don’t say, “Let me see you angel’s wings; they remind us that we all make mistakes in life, and that without making a reasonable amount of mistakes, most of us cannot learn to improve. So none of us need be depressed about our past or present; on the path of meditation, even past mistakes can be made into powerful assets if we have learned something by making them.

When we are united with the Lord, every created thing, from the farthest star to the atoms in our bodies, is our kith and kin. Remember William Blake looking at the sun and seeing a choir of angels singing holy, holy, holy? The whole of creation is singing; if we cannot hear it, it is simply because we are asleep.

When I was growing up at the feet of my Grandmother, though I loved her passionately, I understood very little of her perspective. My attention was elsewhere, on Shakespeare and Dickens and the “Ode to a Nightingale”; I couldn’t hear what her life was proclaiming every instant – in the simple words of St. Angela, almost the same as those of the Gita, “the whole world is full of God.”

And let me also repeat what I learned from my grandfather, my father, my mother, my grandmother, that the best way to entertain children is to work with them. Not play with them but to work with them.

I was always invited to work with my granny. Planting a garden, sowing seeds, looking after the cow and the calf, and it is this activate loving participation that really satisfies them. Not pretending, playing games. And I would suggest that children be allowed to participate, encouraged to participate, wherever they can, subject to rules of safety. And often they can show amazing skills.

To throw a little light on this elusive spiritual phenomenon, we must look at what takes place in meditation. In meditation, over a long, long period of time, we learn to recall all our vital energy from the past and future. In samadhi the future vanishes, the past vanishes, and we live completely on the pinpoint of the moment. To live completely in the moment is to realize immortality, here and now. Mystics who have lived like this tell us that in the complete unification of consciousness we are released from time; we are delivered from time into eternity.

My spiritual teacher, my Grandmother, used to go every morning for many, may years to a sacred spring near our village. This spring is considered to have been sanctified by Rama. Legends say that when he and Sita were wandering through South India during their period of exile, Sita became thirsty. She told her husband, “You have great love for me, so you must be able to give me a drink of cool water.” There was no water in that place, so Rama took an arrow and, sending it deep into the earth, caused a spring of sacred Ganges water to come up. Today the spring is a place of pilgrimage. One on side, roughly hewn in black stone, are the feet of Rama. Just the feet alone are considered to be a beautiful, respectful way of representing an incarnation, and this humble image is in the best spiritual tradition. My simple Grandmother, after having her ceremonial bath, would stand looking at the rough, long, black feet in stone and repeat the mantram. She must have done this every morning for half a century, and when the time came for her to shed her body, according to my mother’s own words, the last she said was, “I have caught Rama by his feet.”

This experience at the time of death is narrated of many mystics who have attained immortality. Until we experience a unification of consciousness and are released from the bondage of time, we cannot realize that it is not going to satisfy us to live a hundred or even a thousand years. Our need is to live forever.

My grandmother demonstrated this marvelous capacity throughout her life. There was one occasion when a painful growth had developed on her back – a carbuncle, I think – and my mother called in a surgeon to remove it. The physician wanted to give Granny an anesthetic, but she insisted it wasn’t necessary. She lay down and he performed the surgery, but he was terribly distressed to see that tears were running down her cheeks. “I told you it would hurt!” he said. “Why didn’t you take the anesthetic?” Granny just shook her head. “I’m not crying because of the pain,” she said in a low voice. “I’m crying because my daughter is crying.” My aunts still tell this story because it captures Granny’s stature and her sweetness, as well as the tender bond between her and my mother.

My grandmother was fond of repeating something that it took me many years to understand: “A good friend should be like a mirror.” One side of the face, I am told, is supposed to be more attractive than the other. Imagine a mirror that showed us only the more attractive side of our face, the brighter side and not the darker side. We wouldn’t call that a mirror at all. A good friend, similarly, should show us both sides of our personality.

Even before I took to meditation I had the capacity for flaming enthusiasm. And you may all remember with what all affection I talk about the little Muslim girl, hardly 10, who used to look after me and my Muslim friend. Some of you may not have been here when I was narrating it. She used to get puzzled because I was talking in English all the time. And with the frankness of the tenth year she looked at me one day and said … “But you are keeping speaking English all the time.”

And it was she at the age of ten who discovered that I had this capacity for flaming enthusiasm. The more obstacles you put in my way, the more enthusiastic I would become. I am talking about my earlier days. And my granny used to say with great pride, “If there were an easy path and a difficult path, my boy would choose the difficult path.” She was trying to bring this out.

And this girl, one day suddenly she said – chaacha means uncle – “chaacha sar to peechhe to peechhe.” Piche means “after.” If this uncle goes after something, peechha to peechha: he will never stop going after.

This is probably the training I received from my grandmother by observing her. Her enthusiasms were always continuous. They were always sustained. She would never drop anything because of its pleasant appeal or because of its personal satisfaction, because she had this capacity – marvelous capacity – which influenced me very deeply.

And with this kind of flaming enthusiasm goes great determination.

Sometimes, when I try to untie my shoelace, I only succeed in knotting it tighter. The more I pull, the more impossible it gets. That is what we are doing when we give in to a sensory urge or self-centered desire. Meditation is the undoing of knots, and indulgence only ties them tighter.

As a boy, if I gave in to a desire when I should have said no, my grandmother would say quietly, “Have you forgotten what happened the last time? Now you have to go through that all over again.” Those words always struck a responsive chord. I didn’t want to have to go through the same situation and its consequences over and over and over. I didn’t want to tie the knot of desire any tighter than it already was.

My granny was active all her life. If there was a great feast, she didn’t just call the young girls and say, “You do the work.” She said, “Help me,” and seated together they would slice great piles of okra, eggplant, and green beans – enough for our whole joint family, which numbered about a hundred people. Slowly, one by one, the girls would say, “Granny, I’m falling asleep!” And she would smile and say, “Go to bed then.” Toward the end she might be seated there alone, chopping and slicing until daybreak. When my mother would come and ask, “Wouldn’t you like to sleep now?” Granny would reply, “Isn’t it time to go to the temple?” And that would be the beginning of another day.

Growing up in an ancient matrilineal tradition, where women have held land and legal rights for centuries, I absorbed the deeper meaning of this word sri very early. My grandmother had lofty standards of what a woman should be, and when a man in our family brought home a bride, Granny would watch her very closely to see her character. It wasn’t easy to win praise from her, but two or three times I remember her saying with deep approval, “That girl has sri in her face.” You couldn’t ask for a higher tribute.

A certain amount of suffering in life is not only inescapable but even necessary for growth. It took me a long time to understand this, though my spiritual teacher tried to teach me very early in life. When I made a mistake and suffered for it, she would not be very sympathetic. She didn’t gloat over my suffering or withdraw her support of me either; but in wordless ways, she helped me to learn not to make that mistake again. At the time I didn’t understand what seemed a strange lack of sympathy. Today I know that if someone has been behaving selfishly, it is much better for that person to suffer the consequences and learn to change than it is to remain blind and fail to grow, which just means letting problems grow instead.

“Practicing the presence of God,” as Brother Lawrence so aptly phrased it, means learning to behave with understanding and patience all the time. It is worth repeating that this does not rule out a dash of loving, nonviolent resistance. I remember how sharply my grandmother would chastise me when I did something that was not in anyone’s best interests. At that young age I used to retort, “My friends don’t talk to me that way!” Out would come her pointed answer: “I am your friend; that’s why I talk to you that way. If they don’t, then they are not real friends.”

The Sanskrit word bhakti means a state of consciousness in which you forget yourself. Bhakti yoga is the art of extending this from one relationship ultimately to all of life. There are examples of this kind of love in all the world’s great traditions; I think immediately of Francis of Assisi in the West and Meera in India. The best embodiment of the path of love in my personal experience is my own spiritual teacher, my grand mother, who showed that it is possible to learn to forget one self completely in the welfare of those around.

The great mystics of all religions are anonymous instruments. We know nothing about them. That is their glory.

But one thing we do know: they discovered who they are.

My own spiritual teacher, my grandmother, wouldn’t even answer when we tried to get her to talk about her past. It didn’t matter to her. And when I would tell her excitedly about some new luminary in my world, she would ask just one question: “Does he know who he is?”

It could be anyone. If I told her, “Granny, Nehru has become president of Congress!” she was likely to reply: “That’s nice. But does he know who he is?”

It took many years for me to grasp what she was trying to tell me: that most of us are born, go to school, take up jobs, get married, raise children, buy and sell, and pass away without ever knowing who we are.

That is the purpose of meditation: to discover who we are. Only then does our real life begin, and our previous life simply falls away...

In Sanskrit there is a pithy saying that was on the tip of my grandmother’s tongue every year when school began. At the end of the day I would run home to tell her who I had been with and what we had done that day. “You don’t have to tell me who you have been with,” she would say. “I can tell.”

“All right, Granny, who?” She would proceed to name every one of them. . . and she was always right.

“Granny,” I would ask in amazement, “how did you know?”

And she would reply, “Samsargad doshaguna bhavanti“ – which means, roughly, “We become like those we hang out with.”

Granny wasn’t one to waste words, so it was only when I learned to meditate that I began to understand what she was trying to tell me. Much more than words or behavior, she was talking about character – the influences on the mind that shape the kind of person we are becoming, for better and for worse.

According to this ancient Sanskrit saying, what is good in us and what is bad, our strong points and our weak points alike, develop because of constant association. When we associate with calm people, we become calm; when we associate with agitated people, we become agitated. When we frequent the company of people who are wise, we become wiser; when our company is otherwise, we become otherwise too. It should be no surprise, then, that an essential part of the spiritual life is joining together with those who are spiritually minded, those who want to promote our growth and who want us to promote theirs.

Let me give some simple illustrations. In the village where I grew up, the monsoon rains bring hundreds of frogs to cluster around our temple pools at night and sing their throaty chorus. And every night during the monsoon season, particularly at nightfall, snakes come out – some of them huge – and try to catch a frog or two and swallow it alive. It was ghastly to listen to, and even as a little boy I wasn’t able to sleep with those frogs crying for help and me unable to do anything. During the day, if I saw a big snake eyeing a frog and the frog looking at me with mute appeal as if to say, “Save me,” I used to leave my friends and jump in to scare the snake away. My classmates laughed at me. “It’s just going to come back again,” they’d say. “Why should you take sides like that and deprive the snake of its food?” I didn’t know how to answer, but my grandmother did: “It is a snake’s dharma to kill. Your dharma is to save.”

This is a very basic shraddha: the belief, deep below the surface level of consciousness, that we have come into life to give and not to hurt, to help and not to harm.

These are lessons that I began to see from my Granny’s life. For example, to give you one little example, of, how good she was in training me, even in my school habits, I’ll, I had always to get up very early. Not because, in a tropical country, that is about the best time of the morning, or the best time of the day, but it is a habit you cultivate throughout life.

And if you notice today, when I go to a movie, I am there first, when I go to a play, I am there first, when I attend a concert I am there first. And even at the church, you know, I get there half an hour before time, but I like people to have time to talk to one another and to get to know one another, that began by getting up early.

My Grandmother did not preach this to me, nor did my mother preach this to me, they showed it to me through their personal example. And I would say to our own parents here, get your children to get up early. And don’t delay them at night. Train them to go to bed early. These are all habits that will stand them in great stead later in life.

On one occasion when I was in college, a group of college friends and I were discussing the usual topics that young men talk about when my spiritual teacher overheard a few key words, mostly about personal pleasure, profit, and prestige. She was just coming from the cow shed, which she cleaned with her own holy hands every morning. The cows provided us with milk, butter, and yogurt, and therefore she considered it a necessary part of hospitality to make the home of the cows clean, to give them proper food, and to guard them against sickness. So, just as she was coming out of the cattle shed, she heard us all talking in this vein. She never wasted time on many words. She caught hold of one of my cousins, who was the ringleader, and told him, “You get in the cow shed. That is where you belong. We will give you plenty of hay, cotton seeds, and rice water.” Because of her great love for us, she could shock us with these strong words without hurting us at all.

It is not enough if we walk on two legs, part our hair, and go about in a new suit. That does not make us a human being. The capacity to forget our own personal pleasures, and to bless those who curse us – these are what mark a human being.

Here spiritual psychology cuts to the heart of the matter in one incisive stroke. All these habits of mind that can make life hell, the mystics say, can be traced to one central flaw of attention. To call it self-preoccupation comes close: the habit of dwelling on my needs, my desires, my plans, my fears. The more deeply ingrained this pattern of thinking is, the mystics say, the more we make ourselves a little island isolated from the rest of life, with all the unhappiness that has to follow. This is not a moral judgment; it is simply the way happiness works. Asking life to make a selfish person happy, my grandmother used to say, is like asking a banana tree to give you mangoes.

When I was a little fellow, I was afraid of certain boys in my village who were notorious bullies. My fear of fighting them was not entirely because I was nonviolent; it was partly plain old cowardice. Seeing my difficulty, my granny came to my rescue by giving me a deep insight into violence. “Remember,” she said, “violent people are cowards. Don’t be afraid of them.” It’s good to understand that angry people are frightened people. We should take precautions and understand the danger, but at the same time, as my grandmother said, we should not live in fear. People without anger, who have great love, have inner courage.

A few days ago I watched a film in which a gang fight was portrayed. These scenes are common in films: young men boasting of their courage and trying to provoke their rivals so they can overpower them with violence. But in this movie there was one young man who refused to fight in spite of every provocation. He was nonviolent, and he could not be frightened. I was so impressed I couldn’t resist following my granny’s example – she was known for expressing herself quite freely during performances – and saying out loud, “He is very brave!” I hope I didn’t disturb the people in back. If you want to see bravery, look at the man or woman who can endure, who can be patient under attack, who will not retaliate, who will suffer rather than inflict suffering on another. That requires enormous courage.

When I took up the practice of meditation, I was fortunate in having already developed a certain one-pointedness in my desires. Most of my energy and attention went into my teaching and literary activities. But as my meditation deepened, I gradually developed the desire to turn every aspect of my life into an instrument of service. I began to remember something my granny had often told me: “In your life, try to be like the coconut tree.”

Indeed, the coconut tree is a perfect symbol for the aspirations of a trustee. Every part of the tree is useful and beneficial. Coconut palms grow tall all over my native state of Kerala, and in the years of my childhood they provided us with everything from shelter to food: the branches were used for building roofs, the trunk for pillars, the roots for medicines, the water inside for drinking, the oil for cooking, the fruit for eating, the shell to make ladles and bowls, and the fiber for rope.

So, when I began to look upon my own life as a trust, I found that my passion for literature and teaching could become a very useful tool for serving life – as long as I did not use it for my own personal advancement but for sharing spiritual understanding with others. Curiously, it was when I stopped looking for a personal reward in teaching that I enjoyed it most, and taught better as well.

When there was a death in the community, which was frequent, Granny was called for; and when the death was not due to a contagious disease, she sometimes carried me with her. As soon as we would arrive by the bedside, the mourning and grief, which most Indians feel deeply and express freely, would subside, and a degree of calm would prevail. Death for Granny was literally passing from one room to another, and she wanted me, also, to begin to grasp its meaning. For many years I had an abnormal fear of death and dwelt on the subject until I, too, sought to conquer death by going beyond it, as Markandeya did.

To show you what a great teacher my granny was, on one occasion back from college, I was among my ancestral family, and my granny was always very tender towards me in front of people.

When they were all talking, I said, “When I die. ” She got up quietly and slapped my mouth, and said, “You will not.”

And I began to realize many, many times, when she had made statements like that, and they have all added to my intense training, where I didn't care what happened to my hair; what became most important is what happens to my mind.

The next verse, therefore:

Cross the river bravely.
Conquer all your passions.
Go beyond your likes and dislikes
and all fetters will fall away.

Straight from the Gita. Now I want to share with you that I never had any suspicion that likes and dislikes were compulsions and I don’t think, in our modern civilization, they would easily agree that likes and dislikes are compulsions.

It was after I began again to recall my grandmother’s life – in some ways, in very small things, almost trivial matters. In most Hindu homes in those days, dogs were not very welcome. And I was the first patron of dogs in my ancestral family. And I had my first dog when I was in my high school, I think. A couple of pups, which kept whining throughout the night. And my mother, naturally, had to get up and feed them. That’s what mothers are for. And many of my relatives used to make very unfavorable comments about this hullabaloo at night. You know, those little pups can make a lot of noise at night. They were hungry and thirsty.

And they said to my grandmother, “Why don’t you give them away? You don’t like dogs.”

“Oh,” she says, “these are my boy’s pups.” Immediate change, you know.

And in love, this is what … in real love this is what happens. If somebody whom you love – I’m not saying does anything undesirable – does something that you do not like but that’s quite healthy, that’s quite harmless, if you really love that person, you’ll be able to change your attitude immediately.

I never try to keep it a secret from all of you that I played most of the games that all of you have played. And my teacher who was a very compassionate nature, when she saw me playing some of these foolish games, she would tell me just a little that what I was going after was pain. But, I was so certain that what I was going after was pleasure that I dared to think that she was wrong. And, it was only after a number of years – when I began to understand that the human being, if he wants to grow to his full height, to her full height, has to turn his or her back upon themselves – that I understood the enormous size of my teacher and the infinitesimally small size of poor me.

It was then that I began to have the desire: that I would give anything on the face of the earth to be like my teacher, to become like my grandmother. And this is considered in the Hindu tradition to be the onset of the teacher’s grace. All my passions began to go towards her. All my desires began to be focused on her.

And I must tell you my mother fortunately was almost part of my grandmother so there was no jealousy. There was no rivalry. In my whole village I was known always as Granny’s boy. Nobody has ever called me Mama’s boy. And even in my school, in my high school class like Julia. You know, there were a lot of boisterous fellows in my class. Don’t think it is only in St. Vincent’s. We had a lot of boisterous fellows. When they would try to draw me into some escapade to show my true grit, I would say very easily to them, “I don’t think my granny is going to like it.” And imagine, boisterous fellows in your high school, what they would do to you if Jeff were to say, my granny wouldn’t like it. You would have to leave town. See, everybody knew my granny. When I would tell all these rough riders that my granny wouldn’t like it, they would say, “That is true.”

And in the Hindu tradition so much importance is attached to the relationship with the teacher. Not because the teacher is particularly in need of this kind of reassurance, but because this is how our desires get unified. He brings all our desires into focus. And that is how my teacher began to help in the unification of all my desires. Even though it took many years for me to understand this unification and actively, intentionally strive for it.

There is again a great verse in the Gita: svalpam apyasya dharmasya trayate mahato bhayat.

It again comforted me very much in my early days. I was not a brave fellow; I had many fears. The bravest, the most fearless person that my mother and I have ever seen in our life is my grandmother, who had continuing awareness of unity, who had no fear. She did not even understand what fear is.

And that is what Sri Krishna says, svalpam apyasya dharmasya, even a little of this, trayate mahato bhayat. Even a little awareness of the unity of life, even a little awareness rising above the body, even a little suspension of the ego will release us from great fears, trayate mahato bhayat.

And third, this is for me to pay a tribute to my teacher, even though there have been many other spiritual aspirants who have led blameless lives, who have taken to meditation very early, I have committed mistakes, I didn’t take very early to meditation, I have one glorious good fortune: I was born in the arms of my teacher.

And, we had a family doctor waiting on the veranda to help in bringing me into the world. My grandmother said, “Let me try first. If I run into difficulties I will come to you.” And she didn’t go to him.

“And when I have made his happiness and delight consistent in my remembrance” – I'm now thinking about Sri Krishna – “he desires me.”

As my mind is always repeating the mantram, selfish thoughts cannot come in, self-will cannot come in, idle thoughts cannot come in, foolish thoughts cannot come in, because the mind is repeating the mantram all the time. Therefore, all my desires get unified.

“He desires me and” – marvelously – “I desire him,” which is very much what my grandmother also used to say, that when you desire Sri Krishna, Sri Krishna will desire [you] too.

So, before attempting a practical commentary on these three verses, I would like to remind all of us of what all the great mystics tell us on the strength of their own personal experience – that all of us are born to die. You look at any scripture, you read any mystic, this will be a running refrain. And, the very word “mortal,” we often forget, is someone who is bound to die. And the Sanskrit word martyah – someone who cannot escape death. See, I am trying to show you how my teacher – my grandmother is my teacher. Hereafter I am going to call my mother her teaching assistant, excellent teaching assistant. So, hereafter, I will always talk about my teacher and her teaching assistant.

Her love for me was so boundless, literally so limitless, that the very thought that I was a mortal, and as a mortal I would meet my death one day, was one that her love could not tolerate, that her love could not accept. And if you go back to the Buddha, this is what happened to the Buddha. The thought that his beloved wife and his beautiful boy were also mortal, would one day grow old and die, it was something that his love could not tolerate, could not accept.

And that’s why I always refer to my teacher as a woman to whose love there was no end. I am quite aware that all mothers love their children, all grandmothers love their children, all relatives love their children, but this is the kind of love where it expresses itself in showing the beloved the disciplines that will lead to the conquest of death.

In order to discover this Self, therefore, on the one hand you have to remember all the time about your mortality, which very, very few people remember. That every day we are closer, one day closer to the great change that will come to all of us: not only old people, not only middle-aged people, not only young people – to infants.

And it is this tremendous sensitiveness which, even before I took to meditation, when I would see in my freshman class, bright, beautiful faces – all of a sudden sometimes, I would remember my granny’s words, “All these bright, beautiful faces one day will fade away.” And, this is why I say I had her blessing even before I took to meditation.

It used to release such tenderness on my side towards my students, such loving concern for their welfare, that even if they offended me, sometimes in their ignorance, even if they failed me, sometimes in their weakness, I would always remember how short life is: too short not to love, too short not to care. That’s its direct bearing on daily life.

“Up vistaed hopes I sped.” All kinds of hopes. Till now, I have never found permanent satisfaction in this, but tomorrow, on the 22nd, boy, you watch me. Everybody says, if you … I have talked to people; talked to myself, why people?

And this is where my teacher was at her best. I would tell her everything I did. And she would then say, “Did you find what you wanted?”

I would say, “Not yet, Granny. But you bet, I am going to find it one day.”

And one of her favorite equivalents in Malayalam was, “Finding it one day was finding it none day.”

Even in our advanced human society, that maxim is taking over – that the weaker goes to the wall. It is the survival of the fittest, which is what a competitive society is based on.

Perhaps because I learned this from my grandmother very early – I had a dog that had four pups, and I was at that time at my university in central India. And when I heard that our dog had given birth to a litter of four pups, I was very pleased, and my mother suggested that the puppies could be given to other branches of our family. And I remember how happy my granny was when I wrote to her, “Keep the weakest one at home for me.” It is my teacher’s legacy.

“If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home.”

It’s a very profound association that this Chinese proverb brings out. If two people are living together and are aware of the needs of the whole all the time, that will be the ideal that will be the basis of their relationship. And if they always are aware of that ideal, they will never do anything selfish, however much pleasure it may bring to them, never do anything at the expense of the whole, and they will grow in beauty, and, more important, their children will receive the legacy.

This is why I have received the greatest legacy from my grandmother that any human being can receive. This is the legacy I’m asking every person, not only here, at the church, at the retreat, the thousands of people who read our books, saying, be always aware of the needs of the whole world, not even just country. Remember that song, “We are the World”?

You’ve got to be extraordinarily sensitive in rearranging your priorities to see that your children always see that you contribute to the whole, that you will never do anything to hurt the whole. That is the greatest legacy, that leads, as this Chinese proverb says, to “harmony in the home.”

“The river of life struggles through all obstacles and conditions to reach the vast and infinite ocean of existence who is God. It knows no rest.”

That is the grace of God. There’ll be a kind of driving force behind you which will not let you rest anywhere. That’s grace. That’s my granny. She would not let me rest anywhere at all, however tempting the situation, however gratifying the context.

And, see, one of the unpleasant things they used to say, making remarks about your personal appearance – this is considered to be very offensive in Kerala. They will start with your hair. And even, unfortunately, in those days, the simile that was always used about my hair was a crow’s nest. You know, in a crow’s nest, you can see the crow. And every day, you see, I am passing by, somebody will say, “Caw, caw.” You couldn’t say anything to anybody. After all, it’s a free village. Anybody can say caw, caw.

It used to upset me. Just this very same thing. You see, “Caw, caw” wherever you go. And some people say…. And see, I didn’t know what to do. And one day, when things really went too far, both appealling to my ears as well as my eyes, you see, I came home and told my granny. I seldom used to complain to her, particularly about others. And she got terribly displeased. And, of course, she said, “There are two ways in which we can solve this problem.” She said, “You can tackle them yourself, or I can tackle them myself.” I said, “Granny, you please tackle them.” And she said something to those fellows – which Christine only knows – which nearly made them leave my village.

And she told me – see, this is what I mean by the enormous faith in her words – she said something very sweet. She said, “You’re a good-looking boy.” And just that statement. She was never in the habit of giving too much praise. And just as she wouldn’t criticize easily, she wouldn’t praise easily also. And when I went [to school] on the following day, it didn’t mean anything to me. You say, “Caw, caw.”

This is what happens when our minds can be reassured by somebody who loves us very deeply.

brahmabhūtaḥ prasannātmā
na śocati na kāṅkṣati
samaḥ sarveṣu bhūteṣu
mad-bhaktiṁ labhate parām

See, every word will take me down, deeper and deeper. Brahmabhuta: aware of God while on earth. United with the Lord while in this body. That is brahmabhuta.

That is why I want all of you to aspire to increase your concentration to such an extraordinary degree that all energy will be withdrawn from your senses. As Saint Teresa of Avila says, at this state, all the bees of attention wandering about – the shopping center, in the theater, in the hospital, on the campus, surfing, hang-gliding – they all come back. It’s a beautiful simile by Teresa. All the bees come back to the hive. That is where the honey is being made – not on the beach, not in the restaurant, not in the theater. This is what Jesus means when he says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.”

And it took me a lot of time to understand a simple truth, which my grandmother dinned to my ears and I let cheerfully out. This went on, every summer vacation she will din in here, when I go back I would let it all flow out. That joy is really in the citadel of our consciousness. Most of us cannot believe it because I did not believe it myself.

So, when all the bees of attention come back, when your concentration is complete, you will taste for yourself the limitless joy, almost the unbearable joy, which all of us are born to experience.

And there are a few suggestions: “Among the tactics to have more time, watching less TV.”

It’s put very mildly. Our children watch, I understand, five to six hours a day. And I would say, let them watch an hour, on weekdays.

Do their homework with the parents. It’s not just the teacher at school who does the homework. I did my homework with my grandmother. Just imagine – who didn’t know how to read or write. She would come and sit by my side.

And that’s how you inspire children, comfort children, ask them.