Grit and Time
A love-song to The Mahabharata and what it has to say about our lives right now
Grit
Spiritual practice demands a lot of grit. A lot.
It requires courage and persistence. It requires sacrifice: the sacrifice of limited desires into the fire of the desire for real knowledge and freedom of expression. It asks us to step into a clarity that sometimes overwhelms.
The devotion we discover and come to embody is total, as is the intimacy with all beings and things.
“Oneness” and “nonduality” can sound all pleasant and white light, but there is an element of dissolution involved before we are able to host a greater intelligence, clarity of perception, and devotion without fear.
Destruction
Spiritual life is not about sitting around feeling calm and self-satisfied. It’s definitely not about the glorification of the ordinary self and spiritual “accomplishments.” It is not about hanging back and hanging onto the status quo.
Spiritual life is about destruction, not preservation. What are we destroying? The naturally-arising limitations of perception that cause us to enact stale, repetitive patterns of thought, sensation, emotions, and behavior.
I believe that humans have reached a rare moment. Destruction is unfolding on many fronts. In the process, we are being revealed to ourselves more clearly.
Knowledge is asserting itself both as opportunities for greater communion and as the greater revelation of our ignorance and the destruction of illusions about ourselves.
This is our circumstance. It’s about us, and it’s a mirror reflecting our condition.
The question isn’t whether or not to participate. We cannot help but participate, even via denial, habit, and stagnation.
The question asked of us by wisdom at this time, I believe, is: What form is our participation going to take?
What’s the Mahabharata got to do with it?
The Mahabharata is the great epic teaching tale from India. It tells the story of a cataclysmic war that ushers in the Kali Yuga with the help of Lord Krishna.1 The external war is explicitly a metaphor for the path of the individual practitioner fighting to destroy their own ignorance on the “field of dharma.”
The brilliance of The Mahabharata is a multi-faceted jewel. One of the many ways this brilliance reveals itself is in the composition of the opposing armies. They are relatives. They are students and teachers who somehow got on opposite sides. They are friends, and they are, in many cases, deeply attached to one another.
This attachment mirrors our attachments to our own karmas and habitual patterns. Even the things we dislike about ourselves are our “relatives.”
Kurukshetra, the gap
The Mahabharata’s crown jewel is a portion of the text known as the Bhagavad Gita. This part of the story takes place as the two opposing, but really inter-related armies stand on a huge open field called Kurukshetra. The field is a physical gap between the armies and the ground they will cross to meet and begin fighting.
On a more esoteric level, Kurukshetra is a sandhi, a crack in time from which great destruction makes way for great wisdom to erupt.
The word “Kurukshetra” means the field of the ancient, royal Kuru people. The Kuru people trace their origins to Soma Deva, the Moon God. The Kurus are therefore sometimes referred to as “the people of the moon.”
We are all the people of the moon because we are all reflections of the light of consciousness symbolized by the sun.2 The Mahabharata is a story about all of us. And it is for all of us.
Arjuna is us
The Bhagavad Gita is staged as a conversation between Lord Krishna and his disciple, the archer-warrior Arjuna.
Lord Krishna, posing as Arjuna’s charioteer, delivers teachings to his disciple as they sit between the two armies poised to begin fighting in the moments before the start of the great war.
Arjuna is reluctant to fight his relatives and friends on the “opposing” side, just as we are reluctant to do what needs to be done to destroy our limitations or ignorance.
At the beginning of his conversation with his Guru-charioteer, Arjuna whines and deflects and makes up all kinds of “reasonable” reasons why it would just be darn wrong to fight!
He outright refuses to participate, and he’s got lots of high-sounding explanations as to why non-participation is the spiritually and politically correct choice.
Sound familiar? This is us when our resistance and fear are kicking in.
But Lord Krishna is the soul of patience and good humor. Across many, many passages, Krishna’s reiterates his central message to Arjuna: The archer must fight because this is what he was born to do.
What does this mean?
Waking up is built in
My Guru, Anandamayi Ma, taught that our true dharma is to engage in whatever helps us to discover the real nature of existence: of ourselves and all else. Luckily for us, the desire to engage is built in.
In its most fundamental sense, this built-in dharma announces itself in two, related ways.
Longing. Longing is the universal feeling that leads us in various directions. But ultimately, we discover that longing is the “fuel” driving us to seek freedom from our limitations. Longing is the voice of God and our greatest treasure.
Journey. We humans structure everything as a narrative journey. We also experience our whole lives as a journey. This is a felt sense.
Our sense of journeying partners with our longing. Together, these cause us to tread the infinite pathways of human life. As an experiment, imagine your life without any sense of journey. . . . . weird, right?
In the end, though, our built-in longing and sense of journey are set free. Our longing becomes desire without a goal other than spontaneous self-expression. And we become the playful creators of variegated journeys rather than being subject to them.
Krishna imparts his lesson to Arjuna in both relative and absolute terms. According to the story, Arjuna is the greatest archer in the world. As such, his ordinary dharma is to fight, to be a warrior.
But if that were the only message, The Bhagavad Gita would be a boring conversation and would not be considered one of the most profound teaching stories of all time!
Arjuna’s more profound dharma is to overthrow his internal limitations and follow wisdom—a.k.a. Lord Krishna—to self-realization.
To do that, he has to get back in touch with his more primordial longing. He has to clear his doubts and fears so that he can reconnect with his true path.
This is what he eventually does with the kind help of Lord Krishna.
Our Mahabharata moment
Just as we are today, the warrior Arjuna lived under an oppressive regime headed up by a mad king.
The war at Kurukshetra was equivalent in size to what would be a global war today.
While there is no conclusive evidence that a war of the size described in The Mahabharata actually took place, archeologists working at the site have uncovered iron arrowheads and spearheads dated to around 2800 BCE. Additionally, the soil at Kurukshetra is mixed with blood and is consistent with the occurrence of a battle.
Today we are also living with the threat of global war. But the external war is not the greatest war in The Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata and many of our spiritual traditions teach us that we cannot just overthrow governments. We must overthrow ourselves.
The great war of The Mahabharata is staged by wisdom—represented by Lord Krishna—for our benefit in order to birth the Kali Yuga.
The Kali Yuga is the age of discord and destruction. It began with a great war, and it continues as multiple global cataclysms render wisdom more visible and the path clearer.
My sense is that we are in a similar era-altering situation now. The possibility for a major shift in human, and therefore planetary life, is arriving.
Likely it will take generations to complete, but I strongly feel that passivity and sitting back or “witnessing” is not what the times are calling us to do.
Warriorship
Warriorship in spiritual life means the sometimes fiercer or more decisive or effortful actions we take as an expression of compassion. Another way of talking about warriorship is as “fierce compassion.”
Especially if we are spiritual practitioners and teachers, we can take this opportunity to be a little more fiercely compassionate with ourselves and “overthrow” our received ideas about participating in life more fully.
We can examine our received ideas about inner versus outer warriorship. If we are in nondual traditions, we can recognize that these are mirrors of one another.
We can examine our fears of loss and our reluctance to come into greater, and often painfully-earned clarity.
We can feel more sensitively and fearlessly for what, in these times, the pervasive wisdom is calling us to do.
By fully participating in response to the circumstances wisdom is creating, we ultimately discover that the field of Kurukshetra is a field of play.
But we have to become warriors first in order to discover that.
with infinite love,
Shambhavi
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The moon shines because it is reflecting sunlight.
This is EXACTLY what hit me this morning, and synchronistically, I opened up my mail to read this share. I went to bed last night thinking about how these people who are acting adharmically have no choice but to face the consequences. It’s not up to me to fix them, and yet it is my duty to act dharmically and to give where I can. I think of the actions of adharmic individuals like Ravana... so many heads, so much ignorance... it isn’t until Shiva comes and cuts off his 5th head that Saraswati comes back (knowledge returns), and she becomes Gayatri. May the light of Awareness always be known as the true purpose of our lives... Thank you for always being the truth in these challenging times :)
My deepest thanks!