Read The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling Online
Authors: Stephen Cope
The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (6 page)
In desperation, Arjuna has chosen the path of
inaction
. He has put down his folding chair in the middle of the intersection. “If I can’t figure out how to act, I’ll do nothing at all,” he has said to Krishna. But he does not feel good about this decision. This is familiar territory for most of us.
Krishna immediately points out the problem with this “do-nothing” strategy. This apparent path of
inaction
is full of
action
. Says Krishna, “
No one exists for even an instant without performing action.” Arjuna’s inaction—our inaction—on the floor of the chariot, the center of the intersection, is action motivated by confusion, paralysis, disorder. It is full of action
and the consequences of action
.
Arjuna does not want to hear this. He turns away from Krishna, takes a deep breath, and lets out a sigh. He stretches out his legs, and then slowly hauls himself to the side of the chariot, where he dismounts. He dusts himself off, and walks around the chariot to once again survey the field of the coming battle.
Finally, Arjuna walks back to the large wooden vehicle, and sits down on the driver’s intricately adorned bench, motioning to Krishna to join him there.
“OK,” he says, with resignation. “
So I cannot
not
act. I guess I see that. But then how do I act? How do I know
how
to act? What is the right thing to do?”
Krishna sits down next to his young charge. He is quiet for a while. Finally, he speaks.
“Arjuna,” he begins his wonderful opening speech, “
look to your dharma.”
And with this, Krishna launches into the first of many speeches about the most revolutionary teaching of the Bhagavad Gita: the Path of Inaction-in-Action.
“
There is a certain kind of action that leads to freedom and fulfillment,” Krishna begins. “A certain kind of action that is always aligned with our true nature.” This is the
action that is motivated by dharma
. This is the action taken in the service of our sacred calling, our duty, our vocation.
In dharma, it is possible to take passionate action without creating suffering. It is possible to find authentic fulfillment of all human possibilities.
Krishna—slowly, over the course of their long dialogue—will reveal the broad outlines of an exciting program, a path through the maze of the active life that will come to be called the Path of Inaction-in-Action—or
Naishkarmya-karman
. Krishna will show Arjuna a path to the authentic self through
action in the world
. Not through renunciation and withdrawal. Not through retreat—or theologizing. And not, especially, through inaction.
Here are the central pillars of the path of action—the path of karma yoga—as expounded by Krishna. Here are the keys to Inaction-in-Action:
1.
Look to your dharma.
2. Do it full out!
3. Let go of the fruits.
4. Turn it over to God.
First: Discern your dharma
. “Look to your own duty,” says Krishna in Chapter Two. “Do not tremble before it.” Discern, name, and then embrace your own dharma.
Then: Do it full out!
Knowing your dharma, do it with every fiber of your being. Bring everything you’ve got to it. Commit yourself utterly. In this way you can live an authentically passionate life, and you can transform desire itself into a bonfire of light.
Next: Let go of the outcome
. “
Relinquish the fruits of your actions,” says Krishna. Success and failure in the eyes of the world are not your concern. “
It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else,” he says.
Finally: Turn your actions over to God
. “
Dedicate your actions to me,” says Krishna. All true vocation arises in the stream of love that flows between the individual soul and the divine soul. All true dharma is a movement of the soul back to its Ground.
Over the course of the next seventeen chapters of the Gita, Krishna carefully expounds this doctrine.
When he hears of it, Arjuna perks up. Perhaps there is a way out of this quagmire. He sits facing Krishna. And they begin to talk. From these positions, our two protagonists begin the “wondrous and holy dialogue” that will comprise the remainder of the Bhagavad Gita. The impending battle of Kurukshetra quickly recedes from view, and the narrator shines his light exclusively on the vivid conversation between these two friends.
Throughout the remaining 700 stanzas, Krishna sings his song of love, sacrifice, duty, fulfillment, and enlightened action. And Arjuna sings back—most often a song of fear, confusion, doubt, ambivalence and delusion. And we, sitting on the sidelines, and overhearing their conversation through the grace of Sanjaya, the narrator, are at times enthralled, bored, puzzled, furious, uncomprehending—but finally, enlightened.
Krishna’s first practical teaching to Arjuna is simple and direct: “Arjuna, look to your dharma.”
Look to your dharma!
And what is this dharma that can save Arjuna?
The Sanskrit word “dharma,” as used in the Bhagavad Gita, is so full of meaning that it is impossible to grasp its full scope through any single English translation. “Dharma” can be variously, but incompletely, translated as “religious and moral law,” “right conduct,” “sacred duty,” “path of righteousness,” “true nature,” and “divine order.”
René Guénon, in his classic
Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines
, comes as close as any author to the meaning of dharma as we will use it here. “Dharma,” he says, “
is the essential nature of a being, comprising the sum of its particular qualities or characteristics, and determining, by virtue of the tendencies or dispositions it implies, the manner in which this being will conduct itself, either in a general way or in relation to each particular circumstance.” The word dharma in this teaching, then, refers to the
peculiar and idiosyncratic qualities of each being
—those very essential and particular qualities that make it somehow
itself
.
Scientists now tell us that every brain is like a fingerprint—utterly unique. So, too, every nervous system has its own complex idiosyncrasy, every human mind, every human body, every spirit. We might say that
every person’s dharma is like an internal fingerprint. It is the subtle interior blueprint of a soul.
And how precisely do we discern this dharma hidden in our being as a kind of seed? How do we manifest this unique dharma DNA?
In many cases, perhaps even in most cases, the discernment of dharma is a difficult, even agonizing process. It is only born out of our wrestling matches with doubt, with conflict, and with despair. And so, the authors of the Gita have placed their protagonist—the exemplar of the seeker of dharma—on a field of battle. The stakes are high. The decisions are complex. There are countless moral gray areas. And yet, there is no escape from choice and action.
Will Arjuna’s story help us extract ourselves from our own particular quagmire of dharma? At the beginning of our encounter with the Gita, it may not be perfectly clear how much we can identify with Arjuna. We almost immediately face a small speed bump. In an outward sense, indeed, Arjuna’s dilemmas around dharma seem quite different from ours. Arjuna’s dharma was, of course, prescribed for him. In the caste system of ancient India, roles and dharmas were prescribed at birth. Arjuna was born into the warrior class. So, he was destined to be a warrior. It was his sacred duty to fight a just war. He never had any choice in the matter, nor was his dharma based on any particular personal qualities. Indeed, in the traditional culture in which Arjuna lived there was no such thing as a personal self. The self was a “socially embedded self.” So there was no notion of
personal
dharma.
We live in a different kind of culture, of course, in which there
is
most emphatically a personal self, and therefore a personal dharma. Strangely, however, when we drill down into this issue, we discover that our dharmas, too, are in many ways not personal. They are not, in the ways that really count, our own choice—not based on our own ideas, wishes, or concepts. They are based, as Arjuna’s was, on what is already mysteriously within us at birth: our fingerprint.
Krishna, in his teaching to Arjuna, points to a truth that also holds true for us.
You cannot be anyone you want to be
.
You cannot be anyone you want to be?
Really?
The notion that we can be anyone we want to be is a slippery half-truth that saturates contemporary culture—reinforced by several generations of self-help literature. How many times have we heard it: “You can do anything you set your mind to.”
Krishna would say, “Well, not exactly.” Yes, our inner possibilities are fantastic beyond imagining. But no, these possibilities are not nearly as subject to our ego’s manipulation as we might like to think. Actually, you can only expect a fulfilling life if you dedicate yourself to finding out who you
are
. To finding the ineffable, idiosyncratic seeds of possibility already planted inside. There is some surrender required here.
Thomas Merton came to precisely this conclusion after decades of spiritual practice. He wrote: “Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.” This quote is enshrined as the Epigraph to this book—and for a good reason. Its wisdom is at the very heart of dharma.
So how
do
we discern our dharma? How do we discover the magnificent inner blueprint?
In the next section of the book, we will turn our attention to these very questions—to the discernment of dharma—and in particular to three important principles that can be found deep in the center of Krishna’s teaching for discerning the hidden and at times inscrutable dharma within:
1. Trust in the gift.
2. Think of the small as large.
3. Listen for the call of the times.
In our narrative we will examine six stories in the light of these principles: three “great” lives, and three (so-called) “ordinary” lives. We will look at the stories of Dame Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most distinguished primatologists and conservationists; we’ll examine the life of Henry David Thoreau, perhaps America’s most important philosopher and naturalist—himself a devotee of the Bhagavad Gita; and finally, we will take a close look at the dharma-struggles of Walt Whitman, one of America’s first thoroughly American poets. Each of these human beings
struggled hard with the questions of identifying and bringing forth
what was within
in ways that might illumine our own struggles. We will look, too, at three ordinary lives. We will follow the progress of our friends Katherine, Brian, and Ellen in the light of Krishna’s teaching. How do they work out the realization of their true selves—the discovery of their own particular dharma?
TWO
Jane Goodall: Trust in the GiftAs a kid I was puzzled by my older brother Randy. We were only two years apart in age, we grew up with the same parents, in the same house, in the same town—and yet he seemed to inhabit an entirely different world than I. Randy loved machines. In fact, he was a genius of the technical realm. This marked him as a bewildering anomaly in our family of hopeless technophobes. Where had he come from?