study guide for

The Supreme Ambition

How to Use This Course

This video is part of an ongoing monthly series in the teachings of Sri Eknath Easwaran. The talks on this tape, like all of Easwaran’s talks, are rich and deep in content. They shed light on many aspects of life, but their true value emerges as we try to apply their teachings in our daily lives. The Guide is meant to be used in conjunction with a daily practice of Sri Easwaran’s Eight Point Program, based on passage meditation. We do not recommend following the Practical Exercises if you are not practicing this program according to the instructions given in Easwaran’s book Meditation, which can be found on our Web site, www.nilgiri.org. A brief list of those points can be found at the back of this Guide.

The Practical Exercises are suggestions for you to explore as they seem appropriate in your life. If you are already familiar with Sri Easwaran’s books, you will have seen some of these exercises before. But we suggest that you take this opportunity to really put them into practice, and discover their great power to deepen your spiritual life. Try them in moderation, exercising your common sense and not taking them to extreme lengths. Sri Easwaran always emphasized the importance of the middle path.

Before or after watching each talk, we suggest that you read through the notes and the Practical Exercise. Then, after watching the talk, try to put the exercise into action in your life. A week or so later, you may find it interesting to watch the talk again, with the experience of the exercise fresh in your mind. You may want to note the results in a journal.

A week-by-week curriculum for studying this tape, in coordination with readings from Sri Easwaran’s books, is available for use by Blue Mountain Center Satsangs and interested individuals. If you would like to receive this curriculum via email, just let us know and we will gladly send it to you. A full listing of our Satsang groups is available on our Web site. For more information about this series, other publications of Sri Easwaran and Nilgiri Press, and a schedule of retreats based on the Eight Point Program, please contact

Blue Mountain Center of Meditation
Post Office Box 256
Tomales, California, 94971
800 475 2369
www.nilgiri.org

Climbing the Peaks of the Spirit

Introduction

At various times in the spiritual traditions of both East and West, desire and passion have been portrayed as obstacles to spiritual development. Ascetic traditions in various religions have counseled the denial of all desire and passion as the surest path to God.

Sri Easwaran offers a fresh approach to the problem of desire: he sees desire as the raw fuel of all human drives, including our spiritual yearnings. Rather than deny or negate our desire, he instead counsels us to harness all our desires, over time, into one great driving desire for God- Realization.

In this talk, given to a retreat audience in 1986, Sri Easwaran uses the metaphor of extreme mountaineering to present this vision which accepts our evolutionary legacy of will and desire, while showing us how to transform that legacy to fulfill our true destiny.

Outline of the Talk

In the first part of the talk, Sri Easwaran lays down the conditions for transforming personal desire into spiritual yearning. He begins by comparing the serious spiritual seeker to the great mountaineers of the past, like Sir Edmund Hillary.

He presents the contemporary example of Reinhold Messner, whose quest to achieve the “grand slam” of mountaineering required an overwhelming desire to achieve his goal and the willingness to “discard everything” in order to achieve it.

We don’t start out with the capacity to simplify, or to become one-pointed on our goal: we develop these capacities and skills through spiritual disciplines, just as Messner gradually developed the “high-altitude lungs” required to function above 25,000 feet without oxygen.

For Sri Easwaran, the problem of “private, petty satisfactions” is not that they are evil, but boring. And, worse, conditioned desires are compulsive. They not only leave us unsatisfied and bored, but they take away our freedom. To be without the freedom to choose what we desire is like being asleep, dreaming that we are awake. Sri Easwaran describes the disciplines that will wake us up:

First, we train our attention through the practice of meditation. When concentration is complete, we go beyond body consciousness and find freedom to live and act without compulsive desires.

Secondly, as our meditation deepens, we learn to train the will and slow down the thinking process so that we can see thoughts clearly. We take off the conditioned Halloween masks of anger, fear, and greed. Then, when we have learned to train and unify our desires, we can start to “truly love.”

At the conclusion he returns to the earlier theme that we do not have to be specially gifted to follow the spiritual path. What it requires is toughness, “true grit.” “Every human being has the innate capacity to learn to love . . . even to achieve the grand meditation slam.”

Practical Exercise: Traveling Light

A key theme of this talk is traveling light – trying not to burden oneself with unnecessary possessions and activities in order to give more time to the spiritual life. As Sri Easwaran says, “In every walk of life, those who travel light go far. Those who travel light climb high. And our modern civilization, in spite of all its triumphs, has conditioned us to accumulate more and more baggage.”

This week, reflect on what it means to travel light, and experiment in some small way to make your life “lighter” through the Eight Points. Here are some suggestions in a variety of different areas. Choose just one to start with, or come up with your own variation.

When you want to buy something tempting but unnecessary, reflect on whether it will be a burden later on. [Training the Senses]

Find a way to simplify your entertainment, having a nice meal with friends rather than an elaborate night out, or read a story with your family rather than go to a movie. [Slowing Down]

You may want to give away one unneeded thing – a piece of clothing or furniture that is not necessary to you but might be helpful to someone else. [Putting Others First]

With regard to your emotions and thoughts, you might want to try holding your opinions more lightly, listening more closely to what others think. [One-Pointed Attention]

Or you may try to cling less to others for your own security, choosing to repeat the mantram rather than worry about what they may think of you. [The Mantram]

In any of these ways, try to travel light, and observe the effect on your meditation.

Recommended Reading

Eknath Easwaran, “Climbing the Blue Mountain” in Climbing the Blue Mountain.

Passages for Meditation

“Radiant Is the World Soul” and “The Path to Your Dwelling” from God Makes the Rivers to Flow.

Trusteeship of Ourselves & the Earth

Introduction

The Upanishads form one of the earliest sources of mystical truths in the world. The sages of the Upanishads looked within themselves for answers to questions about the meaning of human existence. In the depths of their meditation, they made profound discoveries which became the basis of the Indian mystical tradition and still reverberate, thousands of years later, throughout Eastern and much of Western spiritual thought.

In this 1987 talk, which Sri Easwaran was invited to give to a church in Marin County, California, he comments upon several key discoveries in the Upanishads, drawing from his own personal favorite, the Katha, and Gandhi’s favorite, the Isha, which, though barely a page long, represents “the summit of human wisdom.” Through his commentary, Sri Easwaran sheds light on its wisdom, and especially how it offers a way of life that takes us closer to the central truth of our being while, at the same time, brings us into harmony with the environment and our own bodies.

Outline of the Talk

Sri Easwaran recounts a personal visit to Gandhi’s ashram, seeking answers to profound questions about human existence: “Is the human being just a physical organism that spends seventy or eighty years on earth and is snuffed out?” Or is there something more: “something in the human being that demands a higher mode of living . . . which neither decay nor death can touch?”

That “higher mode of living” is what Sri Easwaran calls trusteeship, based on the central insight of the Isha Upanishad: “The Lord is enshrined in the hearts of all . . . All belongs to the Lord.” The earth and its abundance do not belong to us to use for profit or pleasure. On the contrary, we inhabit the planet as tenants or trustees. This is not simply “poetry.” It is law. When we injure the earth we injure ourselves.

Sri Easwaran extends the notion of trusteeship to our bodies. “My body doesn’t belong to me; it was given to me by the Lord of Love . . . to serve those around me.”

The next section begins with another fundamental insight in the Upanishads: “All life is one.” More than an insight, it too represents a fundamental law of life, which Sri Easwaran insists, “is verifiable, just as the law of relativity is verifiable.”

Meditation and the allied disciplines, which bring stillness to the mind by reducing self-will and improving concentration, enable us to verify the law of unity: “As your self-will grows smaller . . . when the mind is still, you will see the Lord everywhere.”

In the final portion of the talk, Sri Easwaran recalls the final and most profound spiritual insight of India’s sages: Though our bodies will eventually die, we will not. Speaking for all of us, Sri Easwaran shares his own discovery of this truth: “My real personality is immortal. It will never change. It will never die.”

Practical Exercise: Trusteeship

In Sri Easwaran’s book The Compassionate Universe, he lists several suggestions for living an “evolutionary” trustee lifestyle and providing an example of what E. F. Schumacher called “a viable future visible in the present.” During the coming two weeks, try one of the following experiments in harmony with the earth:

_* Reduce the amount of garbage you produce by one quarter, by recycling and by refraining from buying unnecessary packaging and disposable items.

_* Plant a tree, or make plans to plant one in the Spring.

_* Move toward a vegetarian diet based, as far as possible, on organically grown produce.

Notice the effect on your state of mind. Beneath the surface challenge of changing habits, can you detect a sense of deeper security and increased harmony?