Karma is sometimes considered punitive, a matter of getting one’s just desserts. This is accurate enough, but it is much more illuminating to consider karma an educative force whose purpose is to teach the individual to act in harmony with dharma – not to pursue selfish interests at the expense of others, but to contribute to life and consider the welfare of the whole. In this sense life is like a school; one can learn, one can graduate, one can skip a grade or stay behind. As long as a debt of karma remains, however, a person has to keep coming back for further education. That is the basis of samsara, the cycle of birth and death.
A good many wrong and misleading words have been written on this subject, largely because of the fascination it seems to hold in the West. Rightly understood, however, reincarnation is not exotic but quite natural. If personality consists of several sheaths, the body being only the outermost, there is no reason why personality should die when the body is shed. The sages of the Upanishads saw personality as a field of forces. Packets of karma to them are forces that have to work themselves out; if the process is interrupted by death, those forces remain until conditions allow them to work again in a new context.
Again, sleep can illustrate the dynamics of this idea. In sleep a person passes in and out of two stages, dreaming and dreamless sleep. In the first, consciousness is withdrawn from the body and senses but still engaged in the mind. In dreamless sleep, however, consciousness is withdrawn from the mind as well. Then the thinking process – even the sense of “I” – is temporarily suspended, and consciousness is said to rest in the Self. In this state a person ceases to be a separate creature, a separate personality. In dreamless sleep, the Upanishads say, a king is not a king nor a pauper poor; no one is old or young, male or female, educated or ignorant. When consciousness returns to the mind, however, the thinking process starts up again, and personality returns to the body.
According to this analysis, the ego dies every night. Every morning we pick up our desires where we left off: the same person, yet a little different too. The Upanishads describe dying as a very similar process.
Consciousness is withdrawn from the body into the senses, from the senses into the mind, and finally consolidated in the ego; when the body is finally wrenched away, the ego remains, a potent package of desires and karma. And as our last waking thoughts shape our dreams, the contents of the unconscious at the time of death – the residue of all that we have thought and desired and lived for in the past – determine the context of our next life. We take a body again, the sages say, to come back to just the conditions where our desires and karma can be fulfilled. The Self-realized person, however, has no karma to work out, no personal desires; at the time of death he or she is absorbed into the Lord:
But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion, these I will swiftly rescue from the fragment’s cycle of birth and death, for their consciousness has entered into me. (12:6–7)
Such a person, the Upanishads stress, can actually shed the body voluntarily when the hour of death arrives, by withdrawing consciousness step by step in full awareness. Some of the Gita’s most fascinating verses, for those who can interpret them, are Krishna’s instructions on how to die (8:12–13).
YOGA PSYCHOLOGY
In trying to describe their discoveries, the Upanishadic seers developed a specialized vocabulary. Their terms were later elaborated by mystics who were also brilliant philosophers – Kapila, Shankara, and others, the ancient Indian counterparts of authorities like Augustine and Aquinas in the West. The most useful part of this vocabulary comes from Sankhya, the philosophical system whose practical counterpart is the school of meditation called Yoga. Both are traditionally traced to one towering authority, Kapila, and have much in common with Buddhist philosophy. An ancient saying celebrates their practicality: “There is no theory like
Sankhya, no practice like Yoga.”
The Gita does not belong to the Sankhya school or to any other; it is as comprehensive as the Upanishads. But Sankhya provides a precise vocabulary for describing the workings of the mind, and the Gita draws on that vocabulary freely.
Sankhya philosophy posits two separate categories: Purusha, spirit, and prakriti, everything else. This is not the Western mind-matter distinction. Prakriti is the field of what can be known objectively, the field of phenomena, the world of whatever has “name and form”: that is, not only of matter and energy but also of the mind. As physics postulates a unified field from which all phenomena can be derived, Sankhya describes a field that includes mental phenomena as well. Mind, energy, and matter all belong to a field of forces. Purusha, pure spirit, is the knower of this field of phenomena, and belongs to a wholly different order of reality. Only Purusha is conscious – or, rather, Purusha is consciousness itself. What we call “mind” is only an internal instrument that Purusha uses, just as the body is its external instrument. For practical purposes – at least as far as the Gita is concerned – Purusha may be regarded as a synonym for Atman. Purusha is the Self, beyond all change, the same in every creature.
Matter and Mind
Perhaps I should confess at this point that the paragraphs that follow in this short section are somewhat technical and not necessary for understanding the Gita. They can be skipped by anyone who finds them dry. I include them simply because Sankhya’s explanation of mind and matter, when properly understood, makes sense of many subjects in the Gita that might otherwise seem arbitrary: maya, the survival of personality after death, the way karma works through the mind. It accommodates modern physics perfectly and offers promising explanations of mind-body relationships in health and disease. However, Sankhya’s way of looking at the mind is very different from our usual physical orientation, and therefore impossible to absorb without reflection.
Sankhya’s hallmark is a list (sankhya means counting or listing) of twenty-four principles or tattvas (“suchnesses”) which trace the steps by which unitary, primordial prakriti becomes manifested as the countless forms of mind, matter, and energy that make up the world we live in. The tattvas are listed in the Gita:
The field, Arjuna, is made up of the following: the five areas of sense perception; the five elements; the five sense organs and the five organs of action; the three components of the mind: manas, buddhi, and ahamkara; and the undifferentiated energy [prakriti] from which all these evolved. (13:5)
I know of no English words to use for most of these twenty-four constituents. Manas corresponds roughly to mind the way that word is commonly used; buddhi is the discriminative faculty, the discriminating intellect; ahamkara, literally “I-maker,” is the sense of ego. I have used such rough labels in the translation which follows, but really they are technical terms with precise definitions, each associated with a specific function and level of consciousness. Approximations are misleading because they bring in associations from Western philosophy, which has a wholly different orientation. Behind all these categories lies a powerful, practical assumption: Sankhya is not trying to describe physical reality; it is analyzing consciousness, knowledge, for the sole purpose of unraveling the human being’s true identity. So it does not begin with the material universe as something different and separate from the mind that perceives it. It does not talk about sense objects outside us and senses within and then try to get the two together. It begins with one world of experience. Sense objects and senses are not separate; they are two aspects of the same event. Mind, energy, and matter are a continuum, and the universe is not described as it might be in itself, but as it presents itself to the human mind. As they say in the “new physics,” it is not just an observable universe but a participatory universe.
Let me illustrate. This morning I had a fresh mango for breakfast: a large, beautiful, fragrant one which had been allowed to ripen until just the right moment, when the skin was luminous with reds and oranges. You can see from that kind of description that I like mangoes. I must have eaten thousands of them when I was growing up, and I probably know most varieties intimately by their color, shape, flavor, fragrance, and feel.
Sankhya would say that this mango I appreciated so much does not exist in the world outside – at least, not with the qualities I ascribed to it. The mango-in-itself, for example, is not red and orange; these are categories of a nervous system that can deal only with a narrow range of radiant energy. My dog Bogart would not see a luscious red and orange mango. He would see some gray mass with no distinguishing features, much less interesting to him than a piece of buttered toast. But my mind takes in messages from five senses and fits them into a precise mango-form in consciousness, and that form – nothing outside – is what I
