The Ideal of the Peaceful Seeker
When you are walking the path, you have an affinity to peace. Most spiritual seekers, as well as people who are not walking the path but have a good heart, love peace and avoid confrontation. They will also avoid conflict. Even I did that when I was walking the path—I was always shying away from any kind of verbal conflict, fights, or standing my ground.
Because I think somewhere down the line, when you’re walking the path, you build up an image of an ideal seeker or an ideal spiritual person. That ideal image will not raise their voice and will try to solve everything through love and compassion. Of course, there is no question of getting into physical fights, and no question of killing someone. Interestingly, the Bhagavad Gita destroys this idea in the first few minutes, in the first few chapters.
The Setting of the Bhagavad Gita
I think most of you would have read the Gita a couple of times. But for those who are not very familiar, I’ll just set the stage of what the Gita is and what the philosophy is trying to convey. It has got a lot of chapters and a lot of non-dual philosophy in it, very similar to the Upanishads.
It starts when two sides are going into a war, into battle. You have to remember this is thousands of years ago when fights were pretty physical. It was not like you have a drone which drops a bomb and people die. You fight till death; you face the enemy in the eye and you fight them.
Arjuna is the warrior, and his teacher is Krishna. Before the war begins, Arjuna is pretty despondent. He says, “I cannot fight this battle because the other side whom Arjuna was fighting were all his relatives, his friends—even his teacher, his guru, was on the opposing side.” His grandfather and great-great-grandfather were on the opposing side.
Seeing all those loved ones, Arjuna says, “What’s the benefit of killing all of them? Even after killing them, if I get heaven and the kingdom of the world, what’s the point? I am not going to fight.” That moment is very human. There is this person who is staring at the cost of standing his ground and deciding that the cost is too high.
Krishna’s Unsettling Advice
Krishna, who is an enlightened being as well as his friend and teacher, actually does not comfort him. He does not hug him and say, “Everything’s going to be all right, everything is peaceful and happy, let it go.” If he had said that, the Gita would have ended in ten minutes. He didn’t do any of that.
You know what he did? He called Arjuna a coward. He says, “You are a coward for not fighting.” When I first read the Gita years back, I could not reconcile this teaching with the other parts. There are paths which are predominantly based on compassion and love and laying down your life, even if someone is trampling on you and killing you.
I had those kinds of ideals in my head from reading all the stories of so many sages and saints across the centuries. Here was Krishna saying you need to fight a war, you need to kill people. See how diametrically opposite the advice is?
What I found fascinating in the Gita is that the middle part is, of course, very similar to the Upanishads; if you read the Upanishads, it is a similar philosophy of non-duality. So that was fine; I had read that. But if you read the first part, the beginning of it, it’s a stark, unsettling philosophical conversation. I was left wondering, why fight? For a very long time, I could not reconcile these two different philosophies: one of love, kindness, and compassion, and the other of fighting, killing, and battle.
The Paradoxical Setting of Wisdom
The rest of the Gita is where Krishna gives the very famous discourse on non-duality. In different ways, he tries to show Arjuna the truth, saying, “You will never die; you are not just the body, you are the soul. These people are not just the body, they will never die.” In various ways, he tries to bring him around to fighting the war.
The amazing part is that the entire discourse is not given in an ashram or a retreat where there is soft music, lovely incense sticks, lovely smells, and classical sounds of a flute. No, this was given in the middle of a life-and-death situation where Arjuna could lose. He could lose and his entire family could be wiped out, or he could fight and kill others—and then again, a part of his family is gone. So the stakes were unbearably high.
I doubt there is any other spiritual text I have read that has such a stark, paradoxical setting in which the highest wisdom is imparted on a battlefield. Of course, at the end of the discourse, Arjuna is ready to fight.
Most spiritual belief systems, even the belief system of simply being a good person, somewhere have this ideal that you shy away from standing up for yourself, standing up for others, or getting into conflicts because our peace is very important for us. We don’t want to disturb it. Fighting means there is a cost. Standing your ground means there is a cost. Krishna looks at that entire framework and rejects it. He says refusing to fight isn’t a virtue; it’s fear.
The Two Faces of Compassion
After going through a lot of suffering, I suffered a lot because initially I had that first mindset. I thought compassion had only one face. When we think about compassion, we think about someone wiping tears from the face of a child. It’s a very compassionate act, right?
But there is another face to compassion. That face is: say someone comes to abuse the child; then you stand up aggressively to protect that child. That is another face of compassion. Compassion can have many faces, but we kind of associate compassion only with that serene Buddha face—all-forgiving, not standing up, not being firm.
Later on in my journey, I saw these two different faces of compassion. Spiritual seekers—and even I—spent years practicing the first face of compassion. Krishna asks you in the Gita to wear the second face of compassion. What does it all mean?
The Monk with the Sword
I published a book called The Monk in the Mansion. Before I published that book, I wrote a couple of pages, and the tentative title was The Monk with the Sword—a monk carrying a sword. Of course, it’s a very confronting image because monks are supposed to be meditative. But this monk carries a sword.
What I wanted to convey through that book is that sometimes in life you will have to pick up the sword. But the blade of that sword is made of wisdom, and the handle—the hilt—is made of compassion. It’s not an arbitrary sword. What Krishna did on the battlefield was not arbitrary.
If you read the entire story, he had to stop the injustice. The other side was narcissistic and aggressive, and they created suffering for a lot of people, including Arjuna and his family. That injustice had to be fought somewhere. That’s what Krishna told Arjuna: “It is your duty to stand up to this darkness. You’re not fighting for yourself. I know the cost is high, but you have to fight for the benefit of all beings.” That’s what Arjuna did in the end.
Weapons as Symbols of Protection
If you look at Indian mythology, there are a lot of gods, and most of the gods carry a weapon. Earlier, I found it so paradoxical. You have all these gods who are enlightened beings, and most of them carry a deadly weapon. Why?
Later, I started understanding that the weapon represented protection—helping those who can’t help themselves. So the sword I talk about has a blade of wisdom. You only use it when required. You only use it very wisely. You only use it as a last option.
Even before the war happened in the Gita, Krishna and others went through a lot of peace offerings to de-escalate, because they didn’t want this huge battle. Similarly, the sword is made of wisdom and the handle is made of compassion so that the wisdom does not become cold-hearted. Even if you use it, you use it with compassion to bring about order and justice.
The Zen Master and Collective Suffering
There’s a very beautiful Zen story. A student asks a Zen master, “We saw someone steal some shoes from the temple. If I see someone doing that, what should I do?” The Zen master says, “Very compassionately whack that person on his head with your stick.”
I found this story very funny, and I could not understand why a Zen master would ask someone to hit another person, because in my understanding, hitting someone was completely unspiritual. So I filed this story away as one of those paradoxical tales and never paid much attention to it.
Of course, when I understood the two faces of compassion, I understood what the Zen master was trying to achieve. I’ll introduce a concept I have referred to quite a few times in my talks: I call it the total collective suffering.
What is total collective suffering? It’s the sum total of suffering that we are all going through at this moment. If a person keeps stealing from someone else and no one stands up to it, he is increasing the total collective suffering. Similarly, if a person exploits others and no one checks or stops them, it increases the total collective suffering of the planet or humanity as a whole. If someone stops them, then that person cannot exploit others or bring suffering onto them. That would help reduce our total collective suffering. It’s a very logical thing to see. This is what Krishna was trying to do, and this is what the Zen master was pointing at.
Interconnectedness and the Duty to Act
Sometimes actions are needed not only for yourself, but for others. I’ve talked about this so many times. This journey, this evolution, is not individualistic or solitary; you are embedded within humanity. You can’t live a day without this connection.
The light in your room right now is the sum total of thousands of people working in power plants who have laid the power lines, and electricians who completed your connection. Even going back in time, it includes the people who discovered electricity and harnessed it over the years. So even the small act of switching on a light connects you to this entire human web. You are not isolated.
When you look at it from that collective view, you can see from a high level that it’s okay to take certain actions to reduce total collective suffering.
Setting Boundaries and Overcoming Spiritual “Doormat” Syndrome
I’ll come to something even more personal than the collective. Most of the time, I’ve seen spiritual people hesitate to protect themselves. One of the reasons I faced was thinking it was very egotistical to protect myself—that it was just the ego trying to protect the body and the mind, and that it’s not good to think about myself.
That’s the reason I think most good and spiritual people make excellent doormats. I was a doormat for a long time.
But you see, you lock your door every night to protect yourself. Would you sleep without locking your door, or leave your car unlocked? No, that would be stupid. Yet at other times, we get caught up in calculations: “Is it the ego? Should I do this? Is it conflicting with my spirituality?” There is another stream of thought that says, “If you have 100% faith in the universe, why do you lock your room or your car?” Thoughts can go completely in the opposite direction.
Yet when you want to draw a boundary, stand up for yourself, or stand up against exploitation—whether in relationships, with a boss, or with a client who is stepping over your boundaries—that image generally comes in: “I should not conflict. I should not stand my ground. Is it spiritual? Is it ego-driven?” All those concepts arise.
Let’s take this individual suffering and connect it with total collective suffering. Say you are getting exploited by someone and you don’t stop them. You are, in a way, adding to total collective suffering because that person learns that exploitation is fine and no one will stop them. But if you stand up, take the sword, and take a stand like Krishna said, you fight back.
It’s okay to fight back. I know this might sound a bit unspiritual, but that was the entire message of the Gita. When you fight back or stand up, that person learns that they cannot exploit everyone. They learn the consequences, and they will not exploit someone else. Hence, you are not only helping yourself; you are helping humanity.
I couldn’t initially see that larger picture—the interconnectedness of my actions, Krishna’s actions, or anyone else’s actions. J. Krishnamurti talked about this endlessly in so many ways. He was so passionate about the collective unconsciousness, society, and how society can move from violence, bitterness, and dysfunction to a better place. Of all the teachers I know of, JK was the one who spoke very openly about these conflicts in his talks again and again. Maybe that’s the reason I was drawn to him so much: it was very practical and made sense to me.
Key Takeaways and Practical Application
To recap this entire talk into a few points:
First, standing up for yourself is not unspiritual, nor is it driven by ego. Once you do that, you help humanity. Of course, remember the sword: a sword has wisdom and compassion. When you use it, keep these two things in mind. You can’t just unsheathe your sword anytime; it is only used when absolutely necessary. Before that, love, compassion, kindness, and de-escalation are the way to go.
Second, compassion can have many faces. We tend to idealize one face and reject the other, but both forms of compassion exist to protect, help, and reduce suffering for everyone.
Lastly, even after disconnecting from the Satsang today, you’ll go back to your everyday life, which will be full of challenges. The moment you disconnect, there will be hundreds of things waiting for your attention—problems to solve, challenges to meet, and battles to fight.
That’s what life is, and I think that’s what the Gita portrayed so beautifully through the setting of a battlefield. Even in the midst of the battlefield, Arjuna was able to embody wisdom and compassion in action.
Arjuna wanted to run away. Given a chance, he would have just escaped from that place. In my head, I imagine if he had a chance and Krishna wasn’t there to guide him, he would have packed his shoes and run off. We all feel that. Even when I was fighting my battles, I never wanted to fight them. The cost to my peace was too high, and on some level, I thought peace was the only thing: “Why am I bothered about any kind of confrontation?”
Krishna says no, you can’t opt out. Wherever you are placed in life, in whatever situation, you have certain duties, and certain actions are necessary. You do those actions keeping in mind the highest non-dual truth: that you are this consciousness.