The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope Flashcards
(429 cards)
1
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Thomas Merton says, “What you fear is an indication of what you seek.”
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hungry to hear other people’s answers to my questions—particularly other people who might be experts in this problem of possibilities:
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Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
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4
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It seems that it was the effort required to bring them forth itself that saved me. I noticed later that having written them did not really bring me squat,
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5
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Have you had periods in life when you leapt out of bed in the morning to embrace your day? Once this happens to you, once you live this way, even for a few hours, you will never really be satisfied with any other way of living.
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ask yourself these questions: Am I living fully right now? Am I bringing forth everything I can bring forth? Am I digging down into that ineffable inner treasure-house that I know is in there? That trove of genius? Am I living my life’s calling? Am I willing to go to any lengths to offer my genius to the world?
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I begin by asking them to name what they’ve come for. Seventy-five percent say it straight out: “I want to come home to my true self.”
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8
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The yoga tradition is very, very interested in the idea of an inner possibility harbored within every human soul.
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9
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Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation. They call this dharma.
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Yogis believe that our greatest responsibility in life is to this inner possibility—this dharma—and they believe that every human being’s duty is to utterly, fully, and completely embody his own idiosyncratic dharma.
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11
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The Gita is the one book Gandhi took with him to prison, and one of the few that Henry David Thoreau took to Walden Pond.
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12
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The Bhagavad Gita is a brilliant teaching on the problems of doing. There is so much talk these days about being. (And for good reason.) But what a treat to discover a great scripture about doing.
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The teachings of the Gita point to a much more interesting truth: People actually feel happiest and most fulfilled when meeting the challenge of their dharma in the world, when bringing highly concentrated effort to some compelling activity for which they have a true calling. For most of us this means our work in the world. And by work, of course, I do not mean only “job.”
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full expression of our dharma in the world. Fulfillment happens not in retreat from the world, but in advance—and profound engagement.
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15
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The two-thousand-year-old Bhagavad Gita brings us a series of surprising principles for living an optimal life, and for transforming skillful action into spiritual practice.
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16
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It turns out that among so-called ordinary lives, there are many, many great ones. Indeed, for me there is no longer really any distinction at all between great lives and ordinary lives.
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17
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As it turns out, most people are already living very close to their dharma.
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18
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These same people, close as they are to the deepest mystery of dharma, know very little about it. They don’t name it. They don’t own it. They don’t live it intentionally. Their own sacred calling is hiding in plain sight. They keep just missing it. And, as we will see, when it comes to dharma, missing by an inch is as good as missing by a mile. Aim is everything.
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19
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The battle of Kurukshetra is the definitive struggle of its age. It marks the end of one great mythic era (yuga, or world age) and the beginning of another. The battle of Kurukshetra ushers in the Dark Age—the Kali-yuga—the last of the four great eras foreseen by the Seers of ancient India.
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20
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Krishna, the charioteer, is dark-skinned and handsome. He is steady. Regal. Unwavering. We’ll find out later, of course, that he is God in one of his many disguises. Arjuna, our bold warrior, too, is handsome. But not so steady as Krishna. He is young and brash and immature.
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21
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lust for power, land, and fortune. The forces of greed, hatred, and delusion are the destroyers of the world order and purveyors of suffering.
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22
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From the very beginning of the Bhagavad Gita we can see that it is going to be a teaching about dharma—about sacred duty.
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23
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it’s clear to us that Arjuna is not really so much afraid as he is immobilized in a web of doubt.
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24
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“Doubt afflicts the person who lacks faith and can ultimately destroy him.”
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what the Gita means. Doubt, as understood here, really means “stuck”—not skeptical. Doubt in this tradition is sometimes defined as “a thought that touches both sides of a dilemma at the same time.”
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doubt is an issue for Catholics as well as Hindus: “Doubt,” it reads, “[is a] state in which the mind is suspended between two contradictory propositions and unable to assent to either of them.”
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Certitude: “the adhesion of the mind to a proposition without misgiving as to its truth.”
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yoga tradition has called doubt “the invisible affliction.” It is slippery. Hidden. Sneaky.
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We do not suspect the ways in which doubt keeps us paralyzed. Plastered to the bottom of our various chariots. Unable to assent.
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There are many ways to be quietly paralyzed by doubt. We might call Katherine’s version Fear of Closing the Door.
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Fear of Closing the Door is one version of dharma paralysis. But there are many others—countless others, really.
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Denial of Dharma.
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she was “just a regular old worker bee—not one of those people with a high calling.”
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For Ellen, her life is her dharma. It is not just about her job, or even her career, though in her case, that career, too, is part of her dharma. Ellen is squarely in the middle of her dharma. But she has not named it, and therefore is not, in a strange sense, doing it on purpose. All that is left is for her to embrace her dharma. To name it. To claim it. To own it.
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Denial of Dharma, and I see it all the time. It is a sly version of doubt.
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The Problem of Aim.
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Brian lives in close proximity to his dharma—to his passion. But not in the passionate center of it. It has taken him quite a few years to realize this.
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It’s a curious thing about dharma. It’s almost all about aim. It appears that we will not hit the target of dharma unless we are aiming at it.
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the only way to get to certitude is to look more and more deeply into our doubt—to shine a light into the dark corners of our self-division.
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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.
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This apparent path of inaction is full of action. Says Krishna, “No one exists for even an instant without performing action.”
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the most revolutionary teaching of the Bhagavad Gita: the Path of Inaction-in-Action.
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the Path of Inaction-in-Action—or Naishkarmya-karman.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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“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.”
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We might say that every person’s dharma is like an internal fingerprint. It is the subtle interior blueprint of a soul.
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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Said Krisha to Arjuna, “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.”
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Krishna teaches Arjuna that our gifts are sva dharma—literally, “one’s own dharma.” Yoga sages later went on to teach that sva dharma, your own dharma, is equivalent to sva bhava, your own being. These gifts are somehow close to the very center of who we are.
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I say almost knew it, because we only knew it energetically—in the secret and ineffable places kids know these things. But this energetic knowing, this connection to the aliveness of the gift, is a very tender plant, as fragile as any unrooted sprout.
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It’s important to remember that The Gift is not itself dharma. It is only, as the old saying goes, a finger pointing to the dharma.
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the Tao te Ching: “The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”)
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chimpanzees’ DNA differs from human DNA by a mere one percent?
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As a child, her gifts were named, celebrated, cherished, and nurtured.
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Children cannot understand the full import of The Gift. They can only feel their spirit leap up toward their object of interest—can only feel the delightful energy of fascination and enthusiasm (from the root en theos, literally, “the God within”).
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So, early on, these gifts must be seen and reflected by an intelligence that has such perspective. Trust in The Gift must be nurtured by parents, teachers, friends. The moment must not pass by unnoticed. We must be encouraged to identify with our gifts. We rely on others to see our shining eyes. Without this mirroring, we cannot understand the meaning or import of our fascination.
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Vanne not only felt compelled to reflect Jane’s gift to her. She felt a responsibility to The Gift.
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Taught me to believe in myself. One of the lessons of Jane’s life: It only takes one person.
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Jane’s experience is what we might call the Direct Path to Dharma. It can happen. It is magnificent when it does.
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the silent tragedy of self-betrayal.
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Krishna’s teaching: We cannot be anyone we want to be. We can only authentically be who we are. “The attempt to live out someone else’s dharma brings extreme spiritual peril,” says Krishna. Extreme spiritual peril! If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not, it will destroy you.
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And what, precisely, is destroyed? Energy is destroyed first. Those shining eyes. And then faith. And then hope. And then life itself.
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Our work can be motivated by obligation, by hunger for the external rewards of accomplishment, or by strongly reinforced ideas about who we should be in this lifetime.
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Without the balm of real fulfillment there is a growing emptiness inside.
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she describes an increasing sense of knowing her dharma. “More and more often,” she says, “I found myself thinking, ‘This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.’
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she believes to be the “Voice of God.” She says, “Of course, it is usually called the voice of conscience, and if we feel more comfortable with that definition, that’s fine. Whatever we call it, the important thing, I think, is to try to do what the voice tells us.”
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Henry David Thoreau said, “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”
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Psychologists call this inner and outer poseur the “false self.” The name says it all. The false self is a collection of ideas we have in our minds about who we should be.
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But there is something resilient about gifts: Their light is never fully extinguished. Our gifts are so close to the core of our being that they can never really be entirely destroyed, no matter how deadening the life.
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Furthermore, at a certain age it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s dream and eschewed our own: No one really cares except us.
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Learning to embrace The Gift at midlife is complicated. Because naming The Gift and celebrating it also mean grieving for lost opportunities. They mean facing squarely the suffering of self-betrayal.
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Dharma always involves, at some point, a leap off a cliff in the dark.
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What is most inspiring about Goodall’s life is the way in which she developed a faith in the leap itself.
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“Be resolutely and faithfully what you are,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “Be humbly what you aspire to be … man’s noblest gift to man is his sincerity, for it embraces his integrity also.”
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Like every good yogi, Thoreau saw his entire life as a kind of trek toward dharma.
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I had secretly felt like something of a loser myself, especially during the tormented social maneuvering of high school. But I had no idea there would be power in embracing this position on the social chessboard.
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life—one attempt to be who he thought he should be rather than who he was.
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Finally, the unhappy writer—floundering, separated from himself—had to go home, tail between his legs. He returned to Concord—to his woods, to his pond, to his father’s pencil factory, and to Emerson’s house. “Be humbly who you are,” he wrote upon arriving home.
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Thoreau’s failure in New York was a life lesson. Be who you are. Do what you love. Follow your own distant drummer.
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Failure is a part of all great dharma stories. And great dharma failures do not just happen early in life. They routinely happen throughout life. We only know who we are by trying on various versions of ourselves. We try various dharmas on to see if they fit.
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In any quest for dharma there will inevitably be lots of trying on of outfits.
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Thoreau’s failure is particularly instructive, because it emerged from a dharma error most of us have made at one point or another in our lives: the attempt to be big. The attempt to be, in fact, bigger than we are. A confusion about the right size of a life of dharma.
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She thought that her job, her calling, was too small. It didn’t match up to her fantasies of what a calling should be.
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two of the enemies of dharma: grandiosity, and its flip side, devaluing. (In short, the problem of size.) Grandiosity and devaluing both represent unrealistic thinking about possibility. Grandiosity motivates us to try to be bigger than we could possibly be. Devaluing makes us think of ourselves as smaller than we actually are.
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The bigness, must, in fact, come through the smallness.
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“Be resolutely and faithfully what you are,” said Thoreau—not who you think you should be. Thoreau’s early struggle was to be “right-sized.” Not too big, not too small. It was his resolute embrace of a right-sized self that became for him the doorway into a full life.
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“Think of the small as large,” wrote Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao te Ching.
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Transcendentalist view that “human nature in general is revealed to each person through his own nature in particular.”
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he saw clearly the relationship between his own freedom and the freedom of the world.
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story of Indra’s Net—a tale Thoreau and Emerson almost certainly knew. It is the most pointed ancient investigation of the relationship between the small and the large.
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Mount Meru—the most sacred mountain of the Hindu tradition. Meru is considered the center of the world in Vedic cosmology, what Joseph Campbell sometimes referred to as the axis mundi, or “the immoveable spot.” Just the place for a great god to reside.
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Each jewel in Indra’s net represents both itself as a particular jewel, and, at the same time, the entire web. So, any change in one gem would be reflected in the whole. Indeed, the individual gem is the whole. In the words of Indologist Sir Charles Eliot, “Every object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact IS everything else.”
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It is, therefore, the sacred duty of every individual human soul to be utterly and completely itself—to be that jewel at that time and in that place, and to be that jewel utterly. It is in this way—merely by being itself—that one jewel holds together its own particular corner of Space and Time. The action of each individual soul holds together the entire net. Small and large at the same time.
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“Do what you love!” he wrote exuberantly. “Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.” Know your own bone!
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This is why we all have to have different dharmas. Every base is covered somehow, but only if everyone acts on their authentic calling. Only if everyone holds together her part of the net.
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Ellen continues to wrestle with the process of naming and claiming her dharma. What is my life really about? Does my little dharma really matter? These doubts, when their tracks have been laid down early, become remarkably intractable. And they create suffering.
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Each one of us has, at some point, been caught like Ellen between the twin perils of grandiosity and devaluing. On the one hand, we secretly daydream about being famous, being glamorous, being renowned for some great work. On the other hand, we fear that our small lives—such as they are—don’t amount to a hill of beans. So there they are: the devil—grandiosity. And the deep blue sea—devaluing. They are both unhappy ways to live.
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In New York, Thoreau was reaching too high. He had an idea of greatness. But it became a rigidly held concept that disconnected him from his true greatness, which was both smaller and larger than he thought.
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Right size is everything. Think of the small as large.
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the most complex—hallmark of dharma-discernment: the intersection of The Gift and the The Times.
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we cannot look at The Gift only for its own sake. The Gift cannot reach maturity until it is used in the service of a greater good. In order to ignite the full ardency of dharma, The Gift must be put in the service of The Times.
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If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. Yes. But this saving is not just for you. It is for the common good. If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world. It will rescue the times. It will save the whole people.
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Likewise: If you do not bring forth what is within you it will destroy you. But not just you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy the whole people.
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Leaves of Grass was more than a book of poetry. It was a declaration of the possibilities of American democracy, and the spirit of the individual that democracy sustains.
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Dharma callings are more fluid than we would like them to be. These callings can change maddeningly. Just when we settle into a satisfying moment of dharma flowering, the world upends us. Just when we think we have gotten our due reward in a stretch of good dharma road, the car skids off into a ditch.
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The tortured clinging to an earlier expression of The Gift very often precedes the emergence of some new version. We’re aware of the dryness at the center, yes, but this aridity is usually not quite enough to propel us forward. We must first get just a whiff of the new. The surprising and intoxicating whiff of a new dharma is quite irresistible.
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Careful attunement to dharma will demand that we reinvent ourselves periodically throughout life.
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As it turned out—and as is so often the case in these matters—his whole life had been a preparation for this dharma. It was a calling that used all of him—itinerant
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“I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.”
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ambivalence (ambivalence, it turns out, is an unavoidable companion in the search for a new dharma):
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As we age it seems harder and harder to let our authentic dharma reinvent us.
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The fear of leaping is, of course, the fear of death. It is precisely the fear of being used up. And dharma does use us up, to be sure. But why not be used up giving everything we’ve got to the world? This is precisely what Krishna teaches Arjuna: You cannot hold on to your life. You don’t need to. You are immortal.
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“Our bodies are known to end, but the embodied self is enduring, indestructible, and immeasurable; therefore, Arjuna, fight the battle!” The Gift is not for its own sake. It is for the common good. It is for The Times.
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themes that will occupy the rest of the book: Selflessness. Sacrifice. Surrender.
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Not just responsibility to The Gift itself, but responsibility to give it in the way that is called forth. Krishna says, “Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.”
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Dharma is a response to the urgent—though often hidden—need of the moment.
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This little corner of the world is ours to transform. This little corner of the world is ours to save.
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More than anything, I was intrigued by the quality of Hokusai’s passion for his work. He helped me see that a life devoted to dharma can be a deeply ardent life.
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We have spoken so far of what we might call the discernment phase of dharma—the process of sniffing out dharma at every turn. Now comes a new phase: Having found your dharma, embrace it fully and passionately. Bring everything you’ve got to it. Do it full out!
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“Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate,” Krishna instructed Arjuna. The vacillating mind is the split mind. The vacillating mind is the doubting mind—the mind at war with itself. “The ignorant, indecisive and lacking in faith, waste their lives,” says Krishna. “They can never be happy in this world or any other.” Ouch.
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Acting in unity with your purpose itself creates unification. Actions that consciously support dharma have the power to begin to gather our energy. These outward actions, step-by-step, shape us inwardly. Find your dharma and do it. And in the process of doing it, energy begins to gather itself into a laser beam of effectiveness.
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Do not worry about the outcome. Success or failure are not your concern. It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of another. Your task is only to bring as much life force as you can muster to the execution of your dharma. In this spirit, Chinese Master Guan Yin Tzu wrote: “Don’t waste time calculating your chances of success and failure. Just fix your aim and begin.”
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The Doctrine of Unified Action is a pillar of the yoga tradition. The word yoga, in all its various iterations, always and everywhere means “to yoke.” In the case of the yoga of action, it means to yoke all of one’s being to dharma. To bring every action into alignment with your highest purpose. To bring everything you’ve got to the task.
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it turns out that the process of unification requires saying “no” to actions that do not support dharma—saying “no” to detours, and to side channels of all kinds, even to some pretty terrific side channels. It requires snipping off all manner of “other options.” The root of the word “decide” means, literally, “to cut off.” To decide for something means at times to decide against something else.
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Cutting off options is hard work. And it is risky. But the alternative is even riskier. Those who cannot commit, those who cannot say “no,” are doomed to everlasting conflict. They may sit for a lifetime at the crossroads, dithering. Krishna nails this principle: “Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to see Me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.”
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“The disunited mind is far from wise,” he nudges. The mind “must overcome the confusion of duality.”
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Elbert Hubbard’s hefty jab for unification: “The difference in men does not lie in the size of their hands, nor in the perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of concentration: to throw the weight in one blow, to live eternity in an hour.”
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We derive the greatest pleasure and fulfillment when all our faculties are drawn together into our life’s work. In this state of absorption, we experience extraordinary satisfaction. We human beings are attracted to the experience of intense involvement.
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the Second Pillar of Dharma, “Do It Full Out!” And we’ll look at three principles of the Doctrine of Unified Action. 1. Find out who you are and do it on purpose. 2. Unify! 3. Practice deliberately.
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
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Strangely, Frost describes his own process of making poetry in a very similar fashion—as a kind of homecoming to a lost part of himself. “For me,” he says, “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” In a new poem, he wrote, he “meets himself coming home.”
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When one examines Frost’s life closely, it becomes clear that this man became more and more himself through a series of small decisions that aligned him with his voice. He had a gift, of course. But his power came into focus through his commitment to this gift, and through a series of decisive actions taken in support of it. Each one of these acts was, for him, like jumping off a cliff. He jumped not entirely blind—but not entirely seeing, either. And each of Frost’s leaps ignited more of his power. In retrospect, it is clear that each one of Frost’s difficult decisions helped create the perfect conditions for the full flowering of his genius. He chose relentlessly over and over again—in small ways and in large—for his dharma. His remarkable career was the fruit of these decisions.
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Frost’s early years were spent finding out who he was. But his later years were spent increasingly being who he was on purpose.
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They would not find me changed from him they knew— Only more sure of all I thought was true.
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“I liked to try myself out in a job,”
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I have often heard artists describe this “cutting along a nerve.” Sculptor Anne Truitt said, “The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”
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he made explicit the connection between the sounds of poetry and the sounds of ordinary speech.
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Dolly Parton declare a stunning bit of truth: “Find out who you are,” she said, “and then do it on purpose.”
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Frost discovered that his vocation was to artfully bring the sounds of everyday speech into poetry. He wanted to catch the humanness of speech in his poetic net.
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In the cultivation of dharma, there is nothing more important than understanding what conditions are needed, and relentlessly creating them.
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He would have to take the leap. He would have to declare himself a poet—both to the world and to himself. He would have to explicitly commit his life to poetry—to give everything he had.
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He named his great poem “The Road Not Taken,” precisely because of his awareness of the possibilities lost when one chooses. Frost was properly fascinated with the process of choice. If one looks closely at “The Road Not Taken,” one discovers the many ambiguities written there about choice. The “two roads” are, after all, not that very different. “Both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black,” he writes. The signs were vague, indistinct. How to choose? What Frost makes clear in his poem is that the act of choosing is the most important thing. The act of moving forward is what matters. He might have chosen either teaching or poetry. But he had to choose one or the other. He looked long down each path. He understood the loss involved—the cutting off of possibilities. He saw clearly that options once discarded are usually gone forever. Way leads on to way. But Krishsna writes: Concerning one’s dharma, one should not vacillate!
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The choice itself had unleashed something altogether new. Actions taken in support of dharma change the self. The act of commitment itself calls forth an unseen dharma power.
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“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.” Murray continues: “Concerning all acts of initiative, and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would come his way.
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I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s concepts: ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, Begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.’
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A life is built on a series of small course corrections—small choices that add up to something mammoth.
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I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. He saw clearly how each decision marked a deeper commitment of his time, energy, and life force to the project of his poetry. With each step he cut off other options.
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Frost’s genius—like Thoreau’s, like Goodall’s, like Whitman’s—was at least in part his willingness to create the right conditions for his dharma to issue forth. His dharma required a farm—and so he bought one. His dharma required him to give up teaching—and so he relinquished it. His dharma required a period of intense work in England—and so he went.
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Like Frost’s, our job is to make choices that create the right conditions for dharma to flourish. The Gift is indestructible. It is a seed. We are not required to be God. We are not required to create the seed. Only to plant it wisely and well.
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Having first named and claimed our dharma, we next begin to systematically organize all of our life’s energies around our calling. The dharma gradually becomes a point of radiance that focuses and unites our life force. Our lives begin to move into orbit around our vocation.
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The unification of life’s energies around dharma is a central pillar of Krishna’s teaching to Arjuna. Krishna teaches that one must attain “singleness of purpose.” “For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless,”
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“Winners focus,” says author Sydney Harris, “losers spray.”
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Not just any old focus will do. Life’s energies are most fruitfully focused around dharma. Krishna is concerned with the unification of thoughts, words, and actions in alignment with our soul’s highest calling.
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No matter how much focus we may bring to any task, if the task is not our real vocation we will still be haunted by the suffering of doubt, and the internal agony of division.
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Bringing forth what is within you is mostly about creating the right conditions. These conditions themselves give birth to dharma.
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Susan B. Anthony began to sniff out her life’s vocation in her late teens.
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Women living in America in the mid-1800s were the legal property of their husbands. A married woman had no right to property, no right to buy and sell real estate in her own name, no right to bequeath any property whatsoever to an heir. A married woman of the time had no right even to her own children. And, needless to say, she had no right to the vote.
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This was Susan B. Anthony’s first dharma declaration. By her late twenties she had fully declared herself. I must concentrate all of my energies on the enfranchisement of my own sex! She had named and claimed her calling.
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This was her first spontaneous protest action. Something inside had been liberated, and she would never be the same.
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Stanton’s coaching turned out to be phenomenal. She suggested that Susan “dress loose, take a great deal of exercise, and be particular about your diet and sleep sound enough, the body has a great effect on the mind.” Cady might as well have been a yoga teacher, so much emphasis did she place on the body.
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She had early on learned not to take any of these public excoriations personally. She understood that they were not about her in any personal sense, but about social and economic issues far larger than herself.
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Susan began to believe, as she often said, that in order to be effective, “The important thing is to forget self.” Forget self.
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“Forgetting self” would become one of her principal mantras. She knew that “the work” had energy and a power of its own, and was only undermined by any hint of self-aggrandizement.
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The Tao te Ching says, “[The Master] doesn’t glitter like a jewel … [but is] as rugged and common as a stone.” This is a predictable characteristic of those who have matured into their dharma.
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As the inner life of the practitioner of dharma becomes more complex, the outer life becomes simpler.
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Complete devotion inexorably brings its own fulfillment. “When a person is devoted to something with complete faith,” said Krishna to Arjuna, “I unify his faith in that form … Then, when his faith is completely unified, he gains the object of his devotion. In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me.”
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Susan saw that a great work can only be accomplished through a series of small acts. She called these small acts “subsoil plowing”—a wonderfully agricultural image from the daughter of a farmer.
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This gave her life enormous power. But she understood that it was not her power. It was the power of the dharma.
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In its most mature form, dharma inevitably puts the energies of self in the service of others—in the service of something bigger than self.
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a central fact of dharma: It always involves the surrender of self to Self. In this surrender, action and awareness merge, time disappears, and the work is no longer “my” work, but “the work.” The work becomes the path to God—the way of knowing the Divine essence.
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“Do you pray?” she responded, “I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.”
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Perhaps the most demanding practice in a life of dharma is the ongoing practice of unification—a process that Susan B. Anthony had mastered.
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Unification means simply that everything in your life must line up around the spine of your dharma. Eventually, everything that is not dharma must fall away—as it did in the life of Susan B. Anthony. Any life of dharma will demonstrate this principle.
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the book has a spine. A dharma. But you don’t know what its dharma is until you begin to write it. Forget about all the things you said to yourself about your book at the beginning of the project—or what you told your editor, or what you wrote in your brilliant book proposal. No.
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The book has its own dharma, which will slowly reveal itself to you. And then you have a choice. You can choose the book’s dharma. Or you can choose your idea of what the book should be. If you choose the latter, of course, the book will be a lousy book. It will have no power. If you choose the former—your book’s authentic dharma—well, then you are really in deep trouble. Because you will have to bring absolutely everything you’ve got to the effort to manifest this book’s true calling.
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You’ll hear the faint call of the book’s dharma at first. And then you will have to practice listening very, very hard, day in and day out. You’ll go down roads that you think are the dharma, and find them to be dead ends. You’ll have to retrace your steps. You’ll write wonderful chapters full of what you imagine to be wisdom and elegant sentences. And then you’ll discover that they do not align with the book’s dharma at all, and you will have to throw them on the floor of your writing room. You’ll have to be relentless. Because the book will not fulfill its calling unless everything is lined up along the spine of the book’s calling. Everything extra must go.
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A life of dharma is exactly like a great yoga posture. Everything must be aligned around the spine. The dharma is a strict taskmaster. It will require you to reach—to work at your maximum potential. In order to do this, you will have to learn to take better care of yourself. You will have to sleep and eat properly.
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one day you’ll realize you’re in training like an Olympic athlete. But not any old training—a particular kind of training, the particular kind of training that will support your dharma and no one else’s. The dharma itself will prescribe this training, and you will know it when you stumble onto it through trial and error. You’ll know it by its results, because in moments when you’re in proper training, you will feel yourself
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For brief moments during the writing, you will actually surrender to the book. In these moments of surrender, there is only the book. There is no you.
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You know that if you don’t go into training and suit up and show up every morning at your writing desk, these wonderful moments will in fact never happen. So you train as religiously as you can. Now you are hooked by dharma—by the magic of inaction in action.
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Unification is the very soul of dharma. We see it in every life we’ve studied during this entire project. Thoreau streamlined his life in order to free his inner mystic. Frost became a farmer who farmed poetry. Goodall organized her life around her chimps. The degree of unification that you accomplish is the degree to which you’re doing your dharma. “How we spend our days,” says author Annie Dillard, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
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As long as you are living your dharma fully—unified!—you cannot fail. Indeed, you have already succeeded.
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In India it is claimed that certain adept yogis cannot be photographed. The power of their body’s energy is too subtle.
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the sphere of mastery. One knows when one is in its presence. One can simply feel it. The master may be utterly like the rest of us in every other way, but in his own domain he sees more deeply. He perceives aspects of reality that are entirely outside our perceptual range.
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Mastery is almost never the result of mere talent. It is, rather, the blending of The Gift with a certain quality of sustained and intensive effort—a quality of effort that has now come to be called “deliberate practice.”
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Why did Corot stand out from the crowd of his painter friends? Was it inborn talent? Genius? No. It was the quality of his practice. He was engaging in what some contemporary students of optimal performance now call “deliberate practice.”
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Deliberate practice is not just a laborious repetition of the tasks of artistry. It is, rather, a kind of sustained engagement in the work that is aimed specifically at understanding and improving the work. It is an intentional breaking down of the tasks of any domain into smaller and smaller components to see precisely how they work.
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while neurobiology sees consciousness as a by-product of neural functioning, Chinese medicine considers the entire material universe to be an outward manifestation of consciousness.
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factors for expert practice • Sustained and intensive practice of a skill for several hours a day
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factors for expert practice • Practice with the specific intention of improving, not just repeating
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factors for expert practice • Practice that is sustained in this manner for a matter of years—in most cases as many as ten years
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factors for expert practice • Practice that includes a particular mechanism by which the results of practice can be evaluated and improved upon in future sessions
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factors for expert practice • The intentional development of sophisticated feedback loops—teachers and colleagues commenting on progress; other pairs of expert eyes on the work
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factors for expert practice • Appropriate care paid to the essential ingredient of “recovery time” so that there is energy to engage in the same intense practice again the next day
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factors for expert practice • A considerable amount of time spent within the so-called “domain of the task.” For Corot, for example, this meant hanging out with other painters—talking about his art, talking about trends in art, getting support for the lifestyle of the artist.
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deliberate practice is really about the training of attention. It involves learning to sustain attention on a complex task, and to come back to that task over and over again; to stay with it just a little bit longer each time.
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Deliberate practice is really a kind of sophisticated attentional training. It bears fruit when attention begins to penetrate the object of its interest in an entirely new way. With sustained practice, the master’s perception of the object becomes refined. Aspects of the object that had previously been out of perceptual range begin to come into perceptual range.
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Experts gradually learn to see their object of study with something more than ordinary vision. They see the object, as it were, “fresh.” In contemplative practice, this is sometimes called “beginner’s mind.” This fresh seeing involves two related components:
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First, a master sees the parts of the object in enormous detail—in much more detail than normal. But at the same time—and most important—he sees these parts in their relationship to the whole. He sees both the parts and the whole at the same time
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expert meditators develop the capacity to see life in slow motion, observing objects (including their own thoughts) in minute detail, as if seeing every individual frame of a movie. It turns out that masters in every field develop the same capacity.
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The great Japanese-American conductor Seiji Ozawa almost always conducts great symphonies without a score. He knows each individual moment in the score in great detail, of course. But he also sees that individual moment in the context of the whole symphony. So, in each moment, he holds both the part and the whole in his mind.
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Even when working on details, the master writer always holds in mind the entire scope of her argument. She sees the parts in relationship to the whole.
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to know the world is the chiefest delight in life. I do not mean to know it cognitively. I do not mean to “have knowledge about it.” It is not that kind of knowledge that frees. Rather, it is direct knowledge of the world—penetrating underneath the appearance of things to their essence, to their soul. For when one penetrates to the soul of any object, one also penetrates one’s own soul.
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This is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita, and one that Krishna teaches over and over again: The whole world is inside each person, each being, each object. To know any part of the world deeply, intimately, is to know the whole.
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Each of us, then, must find our own particular domain—that little corner of the world in which we can drill for gold.
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Krishna teaches Arjuna, when you come to know the world, you also come to love it. It’s simple: You love what you know deeply.
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two primary teachings: First—look to your dharma. Then—do it full out! Now he presents Arjuna with a third and most puzzling lesson: “Let go of the fruits of your actions.”
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“You have the right to work,” says Krishna to his bewildered student, “but never to the fruit of work.”
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“You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself—without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat.”
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the power of nonattachment. Give yourself entirely to your work, yes. But let go of the outcome. Be alike in success and defeat. Krishna is emphatic on this point: You cannot devote yourself fully and passionately to your dharma without engaging this principle.
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The mind that is constantly evaluating—“How am I doing?” or “How am I measuring up?” or “Am I winning or losing?”—is the divided mind.
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“Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action,” he teaches, “are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”
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grasping has three pernicious effects on the mind. They are: first, disturbance; then, obscuration; and finally, separation.
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First, grasping “disturbs” the mind. Anyone can see this simply by observing the mind and body when caught up in a state of craving.
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Second, grasping in any form is said to “obscure” the mind. What does this mean? Simply that when the mind is caught up in grasping it does not see clearly. It is obscured.
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And third, the mind caught up in a state of grasping is said to be “separate.” What could this mean? Simply that the experience of craving intensifies the split between subject and object (between “me” and “the ice cream”), so that it appears that without the object of my grasping I am unwhole. Without the object of my desire I am bereft. Empty. Unfulfilled.
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Grasping amplifies the sense of separation from the object. Indeed, grasping splits the world between subject and object—heightening the intensity of wanting so that it proliferates into an ever-increasing cycle of wanting and getting and then wanting again—and more. In this state, the mind can never feel whole. It is damned to an eternal sense of separation and emptiness. So: Disturbed. Obscured. Separate.
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What is the antidote? Krishna counsels “detachment.” “Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment,” he teaches, “and you will amass the wealth of spiritual awareness.” But here is an important proviso: not detachment from the passionate involvement in the task at hand; not detachment from one’s dharma. Detachment from the outcome.
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Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad.”
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desire is actually a compound state. It is made up, in part, of grasping and craving, which always and everywhere lead to the experience of suffering. But there are other components of desire as well.
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There are salutary aspects to desire. They discovered an energy at the heart of desire that is full of aspiration for the most noble qualities of the human being. They discovered, too, that allied with these aspirations are profound energies of “resolve” and “strong determination” to achieve the good and the noble. There were components of this state of desire that seemed to come from the highest nature of a human being.
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They called these salutary components of desire “aspiration.” Aspiration does not have the coloring of afflicted states. There is no disturbance in aspiration; rather there is a state of inner calm abiding, and quiet determination. There is no obscuration in aspiration; rather what arises is a capacity to see clearly.
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There is no separation in states of aspiration; rather, what emerges are profound states of union with all beings. Aspiration, as it turns out, is full of energy. Full of resolve. Full of a deep ardency for the realization of the Self. It is this very aspiration that leads us to search for truth. For beauty. For our full humanity.
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The practitioner can, in fact, tease grasping apart from aspiration, by harnessing desire to dharma. And so, we have Krishna’s first three teachings: Find your dharma. Do it full out! Let go of the outcome. This frees the natural passion of the human being to be put in the service of dharma. This is the way to live a passionate life without being caught in the fetters of grasping. Do your work passionately. Then let go. Now you are free.
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three important principles: 1. Let desire give birth to aspiration. 2. When difficulties arise, see them as your dharma. 3. Turn the wound into light.
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Stubborn ambition and hard work.
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how to live life fully without holding on to it. How to have it without possessing it. “Kiss the joy as it flies,” says William Blake.
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The first encounter with dharma is very often described as falling in love. When we see our dharma—smell it, feel it—we recognize it. It is chemical. Undeniable.
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This is what we do in the early stages of finding our dharma. We try it on. As W. H. Auden noted, “human beings are by nature actors who cannot become something until they have first pretended to be it.”
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Every one of us who takes his dharma seriously will search for exemplars. On fire with our own dharma, we sniff out others who are working in the same dharma gold mine as we.
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What role do these exemplars play? We see in them the full expression of a kindred dharma. We see in them the full flower of what we know exists as a seed within our own self. These exemplars become essential doorways for us into our own dharma. They become transitional objects. We read them, study them, take them apart and put them back together again, just as Keats did with Shakespeare. We ingest them. And eventually, through them, we are awakened to our own idiosyncratic genius,
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We cannot really understand another human being without understanding his dharma story. And we cannot understand his dharma story without grasping the importance of his dharma mentors.
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He slowly began to see how his own longing and craving for success may have been undermining the quality of his work. Certainly, he saw how his craving for fame and “laurels” created a kind of anxiety that infected his work. (“Those who are motivated only by the fruits of action,” teaches Krishna, “are miserable!” Miserable! “They are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”)
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he realized that real fulfillment was not about the approbation of critics, but rather came naturally through the experience of bringing forth the best that was in him. It was not the poem’s success or failure in the eyes of others that created fulfillment for the poet.
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And it was not, as I have said, an outward success. But it was an inward success. He realized that his having written it mattered more than what he had written. It was the process of bringing everything he had to the table that transformed him.
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He realized (just as Krishna taught Arjuna) that he was not the Doer. That which is creative must create itself. Mastery of his art required humility and a capacity for surrender—a receptivity to experience, and to sorrow as well as joy.
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throwing oneself passionately into work brings a changed relationship with time. This was true immortality.
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it allowed him access to the innermost character of a person or thing. He saw that poetry was merely a vehicle—a way to know the world.
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Grasping for an object actually interferes with knowing it. The discovery that holding on too tightly disturbs the mind, and finally interferes with the mind’s capacity to know.
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Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This Negative Capability also seems to require the capacity for surrender, and the capacity, as Keats said, to “annul the self.”
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fame comes only to the man who has learned to be indifferent to it. In the second, he calls fame “a fierce miscreed” of salvation,
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Keats declared that he would henceforth write “not for Fame and Laurel, but from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful even if my night’s labours should be burnt every morning and no eye ever shine upon them.”
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Ward captures the moment perfectly: “Being a poet, he now realized, was no glorious thing in itself but merely a fact of his own nature. What alone mattered was the activity of writing, the kingdom of his own creation which he entered every time he sat down to work. Beside this solitary delight the world’s applause or contempt meant nothing.”
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Mark had thought of himself as a vehicle for his work. He found his calling, and dived in utterly. I think, too, that at some point he had really let go of the outcome. He understood that he was not the Doer. Can there be a more exciting life?
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When difficulties arise, see them as dharma. Your dharma is the work that is called forth from you at this moment. And like everything in this impermanent world, the work of the moment can change on a dime. Alzheimer’s was Dad’s new dharma.
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Most of us do not much like change. We get our mitts around the dharma of the moment, and don’t want to let go.
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And what was her dharma? She was a wife and a mother. She was also a poet and a writer. But more than anything, her dharma was to love Dad and to support his career and his life.
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Instead of declaring war on Alzheimer’s, embrace it. Take the whole bloody mess as your dharma. Take it as your new calling. Name it. Claim it. Live the experience of Alzheimer’s consciously, fully. Talk about it. Investigate it. Look high and low for the meaning in it. Experience it. Open to the possibility—yes, even to the slim possibility—that this ordeal could be some kind of crazy initiation into wisdom.
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The Tao te Ching says, “If you stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.”
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grasping has a flip side. It is called aversion. Aversion is also known by its many other names, almost all of which Krishna uses at one point or another in his discourse with Arjuna. They are: hatred, disdain, anger, fear, revulsion, judgment.
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grasping and aversion are twins: They are mirror images of each other. They both involve a rejection of how it is in this moment. The grasping mind says, “I long for that experience over there. That experience looks very pleasant. Let’s go there.” The aversive mind, on the other hand, says, “I hate the way it is right now. This is very, very unpleasant. Get me out of here!” The aversive mind pushes away the unpleasant.
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First, aversion disturbs the mind. Anyone can see this. Then, aversion obscures our capacity to see clearly. This, too, is obvious. When we’re hating something, we do not tend to see it clearly. We see the object of our hatred as all bad—not a mixture of bad and good and neutral as it really is.
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And finally, and probably most painfully, aversive states separate us from ourselves and from others. “I hate this moment. Get me out of this moment. I do not want it to be like this.” Aversion is a seat in hell. It separates us from now. When the mind is colored by aversion, we can never be at ease—can never have a moment’s peace.
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Avoiding the unpleasant: What could be more human? But this simple impulse to move away from the unpleasant can snowball. Krishna details the inevitable movement of aversive states: The impulse to eschew the unpleasant leads to avoidance; avoidance leads to aversion; aversion leads to fear; fear leads to hatred; hatred leads to aggression.
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Unwittingly, the oh-so-natural instinct to avoid the unpleasant becomes the root of hatred. It leads to war: war within, war without. Entertaining aversion is a slippery slope.
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The great Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this experience of aversion to the aversion “the pain of pain.” Pain is inevitable, of course. And aversion is a natural response to it. But aversion to the aversion? This is not inevitable, as it turns out. This part is optional. And the kicker: The aversion to the aversion is where the real suffering lies. As my friend the American Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein says so often: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
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Go into the desire. Feel it. Explore it. Discover what exactly is in that stew of craving, of wanting. Maybe even find magnificent things in it, like aspiration. OK:
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It’s exactly the same teaching with aversion. Go into it. Go into your anger, your fear. Feel it in the body. Get to know it. Find the energy at its heart. Find the secret gift at its center. Don’t be afraid. Let it wash over you. Know it.
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When difficulties arise, give yourself to them. When difficulties arise, see them as dharma. This does not come naturally to us. Our instinct is to avoid discomfort at every turn.
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And we live in a culture that helps us to distract ourselves from discomfort’s every manifestation. No! counsels Krishna. Do not try to distract yourself! Try it just the other way ’round. Rather, go into the heart of the difficulty. Experience it. Investigate it. Take yourself into the center of the conflict. Learn to tolerate its discomfort without acting or reacting.
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And what do you find at the heart of fear, dread, loathing, anger, hatred? You find a surprise. You find a gift.
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Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then you will endure forever.
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Marion Woodman is, as I have said, one of the world’s best-known Jungian analysts. She is a widely admired author of important books on feminine psychology and on the relationship between the psyche and the body, including such influential works as Addiction to Perfection, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, and Leaving My Father’s House.
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“When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone.”
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In Bone, Marion describes how she saw her illness as “Destiny.” (Her view of Destiny is really very similar to our notion of dharma.) “Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life.” All of life. In another journal entry, she writes: “These are strange days, knowing that I have moved into Destiny, knowing I am in exactly the right place, agonizing as it is.” No war here whatsoever.
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She was paring away everything that was not her new dharma. Frost pared his life down to “poet.” Susan B. Anthony became a guided missile for the vote. Whitman became a Soldier’s Missionary. And Woodman opened her life to the possibilities of cancer.
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and made the journey into the parts of herself that had been exiled to the basement and the attic of her body and soul.
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The “night sea journey” is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness. It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts—trapped in what Marion would call “the shadow.” The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.
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in the process of the night sea journey we expose the shadow. “The shadow is anything we are sure we are not; it is part of us we do not know, sometimes do not want to know, most times do not want to know. We can hardly bear to look,” says Marion. “Well,” suggests Marion, “do look!!” It will be startling. (“Ourself behind ourself, concealed—should startle most,” wrote Emily Dickinson, Woodman’s muse.)
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“The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived,” writes Marion. “Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.” Marion discovered, of course, that Jung’s technique for discovering our exiled parts centered primarily around the analysis of dreams, which Jung called “the royal road to the unconscious.”
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the heart of the unconscious mind there is a panoramic intelligence that is deeply connected with fundamental human consciousness. She came to believe that this was the only true guide for her soul.
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Marion told me that she would spend hours each morning in bed with her dreams. “A dream not understood is like a letter unopened,”
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Life and Death. Could she embrace both life and death at the same time?
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“You see Life and Death as opposites,” he says to a befuddled Arjuna, “as if you had to choose one over the other. And of course you choose life. But don’t you get it? You have to choose both. Life and Death are not enemies. They are not opposites at all. They are inextricably bound to one another. You cannot really choose life without also choosing death.”
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“Death is inevitable for the living,” teaches Krishna. “Birth is inevitable for the dead. Since these are inevitable, you should not sorrow.” All of the Eastern contemplative traditions finally see a full-hearted embrace of death as the very bridge to full life. Stand at the center and embrace death with your whole heart. Then your work will last forever.
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Difficulties—even death—are not an enemy from the beyond. They are not an alien force. They are part of the Self. Therefore, what appear to be difficulties are really invitations. They are doorways into a deeper union with split-off parts of the Self. They are opportunities. But in order to make full use of these opportunities, one must be willing to undergo what Marion calls “the initiation.”
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Always through illness God picked me up, dropped me on the new road, and said, ‘Walk!’
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• The invitation into the unknown • The placing of trust in the situation and in one who initiates • The loss of “the known” and the entry into “the unknown” • The loss of personal identity • The fear of the initiation • Facing the fear • Active surrender • The epiphany • The restoration of personal identity • The return to the “known world,” with more understanding and lived knowledge • The long integration of the experience into ordinary life
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They destroy us to re-create us.
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One must hold both sides of a paradox at the same time, he teaches, without choosing one or the other. Exiling neither. Privileging neither. In this way, we can gradually learn to tolerate living in the tension of opposites.
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if we held the tension between the two opposing forces, there would emerge a third way, which would unite and transcend the two. Indeed, he believed that this transcendent force was crucial to individuation. Whatever the third way is, it usually comes as a surprise, because it has not penetrated our defenses until now.
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A hasty move to resolve tension can abort growth of the new. If we can hold conflict in psychic utero long enough we can give birth to something new in ourselves.”
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Hold conflict in psychic utero. This is a skill that can be learned. But it requires a host of collateral skills that most of us in the West have not nurtured: the capacity to stand in mystery; the capacity to tolerate the unknown; the courage to live in the wilderness for a while; the love of the dark and the night and the moon; the wisdom of the circle, not the line.
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we are destined to split the world: Experience becomes either acceptable or unacceptable, good or bad, Life or Death. The initiation fails.
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Dad never went to war with this illness. There was some very large capacity in him to face reality.
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William Butler Yeats, one of Marion’s favorite poets. An aged man is but a paltry thing, A wretched coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress,
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There is a way to live beyond the pairs of opposites—beyond gain and loss, hope and fear, praise and blame, fame and ill-repute. And the Soul already knows the way. We must follow. The sage who lives like this, says Krishna—the sage who lives beyond the pairs of opposites—“awakens to the light in the night of all creatures.”
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It took me on a journey into some untamed part of myself.
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Work performed in the thrall of dharma has a life of its own. It has an existence strangely independent of its author.
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as Beethoven lay on his deathbed he was a fulfilled man. Not a happy man, mind you. But a fulfilled man—certainly. (There can be a world of difference between happiness and fulfillment.
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Beethoven was deeply inspired by his reading of the Bhagavad Gita.
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He scribbled the following quote from the Bhagavad Gita into his personal diary: “Blessed is the man who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the event … Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward. Perform thy duty, abandon all thought of the consequence, and make the event equal, whether it terminate in good or evil; for such an equality is called yoga.”
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bloody—pursuit of his dharma gave light to the world. It saved him. But it also saved the world.
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It gave him an increasing experience of self-efficacy and self-esteem, and provided him with an experience of fun. Finally, it came to provide him with a profound sense of purpose, accomplishment, and meaning. It turns out that these qualities of dharma can rescue even a life in peril.
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Beethoven clung heroically to his life’s work. There is absolutely no question that he understood that music would be his only path to wholeness. He understood the meaning of his gift. And he felt a profound responsibility to it. He knew that he could not live as other people lived. “Live only in your art,” he wrote in his diary, “for you are so limited by your senses. This is nevertheless the only existence for you.”
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Beethoven understood that if he were to survive, he would have to privilege his art—his dharma—above all other activities in life. He would, in fact, have to pare away everything that was not his art.
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“neurosis.” Neurosis is simply conflict between parts of the self—conflict,
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We have said that deliberate practice leads to heightened pattern recognition. There is no greater example of this heightened pattern recognition than Beethoven, who found astonishing new patterns within the structure of Western music.
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Beethoven had faced death. And he had decided to live. As a result of this ordeal, he was less afraid of either death or suffering. The experience of utter despair profoundly changed him. “Stay in the center and embrace death with your whole heart,” says the Tao te Ching,
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“In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer,” wrote Albert Camus, in the midst of a similar period of despair. An invincible summer.
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Beethoven came to see that complete surrender to his situation in life—to his deafness, to his various neuroses—was absolutely essential for his own spiritual development and for the development of his art. He accepted the apparent mystery that his art and his suffering were inextricably linked.
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He understood that his gift was not personal. That he was not the Doer. That his responsibility was not to create The Gift—that was a done deal—but only to sustain it, to husband it, to nurture it in every way possible. This newfound faith in The Gift had a paradoxical effect: It relaxed him and energized him at one and the same time.
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This is what dharma is. Dharma calls us not to just any old battlefield, but to the battlefield where we will suffer most fruitfully. Where our suffering will be most useful to ourselves, to our souls, and to the world.
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The ongoing argument in Bhagavad Gita scholarship about whether the battlefield at Kurukshetra is symbolic or real is a red herring. The battlefield is both entirely symbolic and entirely real.
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He copied into his diary a number of Krishna’s teachings about dharma: “Perform thy duty! Abandon all thought of the consequence.” Beethoven had understood Krishna’s lesson: Your soul can be saved only through action in the performance of your own dharma. He had copied another pillar of Krishna’s teachings into his diary: “Let not thy life be spent in inaction! Depend upon application!”
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“My motto is always: nulla dies sine linea [no day without a line]
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Every time I play his sonata, I touch a part of myself that nothing else can reach. And afterward, I have the distinct feeling of having been sorted out. Beethoven, in working through his own suffering with integrity, has carried some kind of load for me. This is the mystical effect of dharma. It is this very effect that we see shining forth from the lives we have examined in this book so far.
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It shines forth from Marion. From Keats. From Thoreau. From Anthony. Each one of them was able to discover the secret of turning his own particular wound into light—and a light that illumined not only their own lives, but the life of the world.
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Toward the close of his life, a fantastic transformation took place in Beethoven. The more Beethoven became vulnerable to the deterioration of age—both psychologically and physically—the more his Soul clapped its hands … and louder sang.
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Ludwig van Beethoven has become for me one of the greatest exemplars of dharma. His courageous struggle with his vocation shows us the precise relationship between the salvation of the individual soul and the salvation of the world.
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If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. Now we can add a codicil: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world.
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“Arjuna, you do not know how to act because you do not know who you are.” You do not know who you are.
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our decisions about our actions flow inexorably from our understanding of who we are. And if we do not know who we are, we will make poor choices.
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those aspects of our lives that we take to be our True Self—our personality, our body, our career, our house, our stories—are not our True Self at all. Our True Self is our soul. This soul is immortal, and is not limited to present forms. Our present bodies and personalities are only temporary shelters, fleetingly inhabited by our souls. These ephemeral forms are, alas, short-lived. The True Self, however, is immortal.
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[The Self] is not born, It does not die; Having been, It will never not be; Unborn, enduring, Constant, and primordial, It is not killed When the body is killed.
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the difference between our apparent self and our True Self—hoping to find the image that connects. The metaphor that I have found most helpful is the classic “wave” metaphor (which is often cited in other yogic texts, though not explicitly in the Gita).
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The self (and here we mean the small “s” self, which is our current form and personality) is described as a wave. We’re all familiar with the action of the wave: The wave rises in the sea, and having arisen appears to have its own form, to be a “thing in itself.” In fact, however, the wave is always and everywhere one with the sea. It arises from and returns to the sea. It is made of the same stuff as the sea. It is the sea in every way. Indeed, even in the fullness of its apparent individual being—its apparent individual “wave-ness”—it is never really other than the sea.
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Human beings throughout the ages have spent their lives seeking. But seeking what? Seeking God? Seeking consciousness? Seeking the Truth? Krishna’s teaching cuts through this seeking: “We are,” he says, “what we seek.” Tat tvan asi: Thou Art That. You are already That which you seek. It is inside. It is already You. It is a done deal. Call off the search! as one great Hindu scholar has written.
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Krishna continues his teaching: “Creatures are unmanifest in origin, manifest in the midst of life, and unmanifest again in the end.” Another series of obscure phrases from our friend Krishna. To put them in ordinary words, we could say that we manifest from lifetime to lifetime in particular forms: particular bodies, personalities, stories. But these forms—these lifetimes—are transitory.
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each of us has intimations of our True Nature from time to time throughout our lives—moments when we know utterly that we are One with all of life.
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When we are living in these brief realizations—even for a few moments—they change how we act. They change how we behave. They change the choices we make. Just for these few minutes we’re different. We’re better. We’re our best selves—our True Selves.
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Have you had an experience like this? In these moments of Oneness, we often feel as if we had dropped in from outer space, and just for a moment are inhabiting our real lives. These are moments of waking up from the dream of separation in which we ordinarily live.
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If you’ve had such an experience, you know for a fact that these little awakenings change the way we act. And they highlight the troubling fact that most of the time we live in exile from our True Selves. You do not know how to act, because you do not know who you are.
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Krishna tells Arjuna that his most perilous problem is that he has forgotten who he is.
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This is a central view of the dilemma of the human being in the yoga tradition: We are “wanderers” moving from lifetime to lifetime. Asleep. When we die—when we leave this particular form—we momentarily wake up.
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remembering who we really are that we are liberated. The transformation of the self is not about adding anything. It is about finding what was already there.
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In remembering who we really are, we are liberated from our striving to be somewhere else, to be someone else. Knowing who we really are liberates us from both the past—our overidentification with past experiences of form—and from the future, our hopes and fears about future forms.
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Krishna’s divine form, says Sanjaya, “appeared with an infinite number of faces, ornamented by heavenly jewels, displaying unending miracles and the countless weapons of his power. Clothed in celestial garments and covered with garlands, sweet-smelling with heavenly fragrances, he showed himself as the infinite Lord, the source of all wonders, whose face is everywhere.” Sanjaya continues: “If a thousand suns were to rise in the heavens at the same time, the blaze of their light would resemble the splendor of that supreme spirit. There within the body of the God of gods, Arjuna saw all the manifold forms of the universe united as one. Filled with amazement, his hair standing on end in ecstasy, he bowed before the Lord with joined palms …”
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He has received the great teaching: The whole world is within each one of us.
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“the explosion of energy and consciousness you have just beheld is also within you. Coiled and ready. Thou Art That. If only you would connect with it. You saw all beings in me. All beings are also in you.” Krishna continues, and says, in effect: “Now seeing the whole picture, you have the information you need in order to make your decisions about how to act in this world. You now know, incontrovertibly, that the whole world is in every being. You have now seen that you are One with it all. You have seen that the whole world is one family. There is no true separation between beings. This is the Truth.”
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“Your dharma is your way of staying connected with your True Nature. It is the particular way in which you can devote your life to the welfare of all beings. Your dharma is your very own way of expressing the Truth.
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Know your dharma. Do it with all your passion. Let go of the fruits. And now he adds a fourth and final teaching: And turn it over to me. Surrender the whole process to me. Surrender your life’s work to God—to the divine within you, and to the divine within all beings.
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“In this mortal life you must walk by faith. You must walk by faith, not by the sight of your limited human vision. In order to walk by faith, you must gradually learn to trust me and my guidance. You must gradually learn to surrender your will. You cannot steer your dharma with the vehicle of self-will—the will of the small “s” self. Self-will will always steer you toward delusion, toward forgetfulness, toward separation. This self-will—driven by the grasping of small “s” self—is the greatest enemy of freedom and Oneness.”
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the real task he must master in this lifetime is learning to walk by faith. And he realizes that enacting his dharma is, in itself, the greatest act of faith.
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1. Walk by faith. 2. Take yourself to zero.
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“The Call” is an archetype of the spiritual imagination. It is nothing less than the call to be absolutely yourself.
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“If you’ve called me to this, Lord, then you’ll damn sure have to do it, ’cause I can’t.”
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To know when to act, and when not to act.
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Harriet Tubman’s dharma story allows us to examine the question of guidance. How does Divine guidance actually work? Is there really such a thing? Is it from God, or is it from an ineffable Inner Self? Is it available even to us?
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The success of her first rescue lit Harriet’s dharma fire. She now felt her calling intensely.
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Tubman came to believe that she would be guided by God at every step along the way. The images she used in talking about her “journeys” were saturated with spiritual archetypes.
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Harriet Tubman was widely believed to be protected by angels. Over the years, an air of mystery and awe began to grow up around her. Said fellow abductor Thomas Garrett, “Harriet seems to have a special angel to guard her on her journey of mercy … and confidence that God will preserve her from harm in all her perilous journeys.”
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How, precisely, does this experience of guidance work? The great seventeenth-century Jesuit writer, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, speaks directly to this question in his spiritual classic Abandonment to Divine Providence: “When God becomes our guide he insists that we trust him without reservations and put aside all nervousness about his guidance. We are sent along the path he has chosen for us, but we cannot see it, and nothing we have read is any help to us. Were we acting on our own we should have to rely on our experience. It would be too risky to do anything else. But it is very different when God acts with us. Divine action is always new and fresh, it never retraces its steps, but always finds new routes.”
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Divine action is always new and fresh. This is a startlingly accurate insight by de Caussade. Responding to the “freshness” of divine guidance requires a certain docility of the will, flexibility, and a kind of radical trust. This trust is particularly required, because, as de Caussade says frequently, when we are led by the spirit, the guidance we receive is often shrouded in darkness. Krishna grasped this same point. He says to Arjuna: “These actions are enveloped in smoke.”
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a pilgrim is on an important journey. He travels only at night, and carries a lantern, but the lantern only illuminates the path just a few feet ahead of him. He knows that this slim illumination is all he needs. He does not need to see the whole path ahead. He trusts that he can make the entire journey seeing only the immediate next steps.
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De Caussade picks up the theme: “When we are led by this action, we have no idea where we are going, for the paths we tread cannot be discovered from books or by any of our thoughts. But these paths are always opened in front of us and we are impelled along them. Imagine we are in a strange district at night and are crossing fields unmarked by any path, but we have a guide. He asks no advice nor tells us of his plans. So what can we do except trust him? It is no use trying to see where we are, look at maps or question passersby. That would not be tolerated by a guide who wants us to rely on him. He will get satisfaction from overcoming our fears and doubts, and will insist that we have complete trust in him.”
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One of the most difficult aspects of faith is the suspension of one’s own preconceived ideas about how to proceed. The willing suspension of preconceived plans and schemes is absolutely required,
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Brian had lived with a quiet sense of self-betrayal for twenty years. As he reached his forty-fifth year, he could begin to see that his life would at some point end. And he wondered more and more frequently: Is there still time for me to be who I really am?
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When you are enveloped in doubt, it is sometimes best just to stop. When in doubt don’t! Instead of moving forward in a daze, can you allow yourself to stop and experience the pain of the doubt? Can you investigate the doubt itself?
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Sometimes just stopping can be the act that allows the solution to emerge.
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“Now it is surely obvious that the only way to receive [guidance] is to put oneself quietly in the hands of God, and that none of our own efforts and mental striving can be of any use at all.”
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De Caussade nails this point: “This work in our souls cannot be accomplished by cleverness, intelligence, or any subtlety of mind, but only by completely abandoning ourselves to the divine action, becoming like metal poured into a mold, or a canvas waiting for the brush, or marble under the sculptor’s hands.” Brian had to surrender his will. He had to be willing to do what he was called to do. And he had to put everything on the table. Nothing held back.
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(Notice once again what a pivotal role mentors play in dharma decisions.)
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Brian began to loosen his grip on the outcome.
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How do you know the will of God? And when you do think you know it, how can you be certain that it’s not just your own will in disguise? During lunch that day, Brian and I put together a list of how the process seems to work.
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(know the will god) 1. First of all, “ask for guidance.” As it turns out, this is remarkably important, and it’s something most of us almost always forget to do. It seems that there is something about actually asking that jump-starts a process. And sometimes asking repeatedly is required. Even begging.
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(know the will god) 2. Then (something else we usually forget) “listen for the response.” It helps, says Bede, to “actively listen.” To turn over every stone in your search for clues to the response. These responses usually come in subtle ways—through hunches, fleeting images, intuitions. Do you think this is all hooey? That skepticism is OK, said Bede. Even healthy. But listen anyway. Allow yourself to be surprised.
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(know the will god) 3. Next (another good principle from Bede), “When you get a response, check it out.” Check it out with friends, with mentors. Talk about it. This, says Bede, is a classic principle of guidance: Test the guidance. Real guidance will stand up to sustained testing. False guidance—which is usually just our own will trying to have its way—will not stand up to ongoing scrutiny.
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(know the will god) 4. Next comes a principle that I’ve discovered in my own life: “Once you do begin to get clarity, wait to act until you have at least a kernel of inner certitude.” Wait to act. One thing I’ve learned for sure after a bunch of ham-handed decisions to act is that one almost never regrets slowing things down. We often do, however, regret speeding things up. Important decisions very often cannot be hurried. This is wonderfully exemplified by Arjuna, whose chief courage in the pages of the Gita is shown through his willingness to slow down the action and investigate deliberately and relentlessly. Note: Arjuna, the quintessential man of action, spends the entire Gita on his butt.
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(know the will god) 5. Once there is “a flavor of certitude,” says Bede, then “pray for the courage to take action.” It’s not uncommon for us to get to certitude and then realize that we don’t really want to take the action. We’re not willing. Or we don’t have the courage. Or it’s too inconvenient. Here’s an important Bede tip: You can pray for the willingness. You can pray for the courage. You can pray for absolutely everything you need along the way.
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(know the will god) 6. Bede suggests a corollary to #5, and this is a suggestion that both Brian and I really liked: “Let go of the attempt to eliminate risk from these decisions and actions.” The presence of a sense of risk is only an indication that you’re at an important crossroads. Risk cannot be eliminated, and the attempt to eliminate it will only lead you back to paralysis. In important dharma decisions, we never get to 100 percent certitude.
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(know the will god) 7. Next, we agreed: “Move forward methodically.” Begin to take action in support of your choice. Taking action at this point is critical to keeping the process moving. You will continue to be guided as you take action. Be aware that you are led by faith and not by sight, and that the whole process may be shrouded in darkness. Learn to feel your way along.
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(know the will god) 8. And finally, of course, the very central teaching of the Gita: “Let go of the outcome.” Let go of any clinging to how this all comes out. You cannot measure your actions at this point by the conventional wisdom about success and failure.
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combination of faith and action. These two qualities reinforce each other. Together they are fire and gasoline.
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Discerning action strengthens faith.
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Brian had made his decision. (“Actually,” he would correct me, “the decision made me.”)
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The hardest work comes in getting to the decision. Once the decision is made, it is as if the decision itself lays down some kind of invisible tracks—and the cart of dharma just rolls forward, sometimes at shocking speed.
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He brings parish music directors (his authentic tribe)
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Those of us who have been in bondage and have made the journey to freedom are particularly touched by the suffering of others who are still in shackles. Remember Thoreau: One authentic act of freedom can knock the fetters from a million slaves.
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Tubman struggled to make ends meet until the end of her life. She was never compensated for her war service (an American scandal that has never been repaired).
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her refrain on the Underground Railroad: “If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.”
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Tubman’s co-abductor Thomas Garrett said something telling about Harriet: “The strangest thing about this woman is, she does not know, or appears not to know, that she has done anything worth notice.” This quality is an outward and visible sign of true dharma. One does not seek credit. The credit goes to God—the real Doer.
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Tubman viewed herself as an instrument of God. She trusted in the power of prayer, and in the individual’s ability to seize her own destiny. She believed that any person who sought to could be guided by God’s hand—just
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Civil disobedience, based on the principles of satyagraha, would become a staple of Gandhi’s tool kit for the rest of his life, and would be the central pillar of his strategy to end British colonial rule in India. This satyagraha—this “clinging to truth”—was an entirely new method of fighting injustice. Instead of fanning hatred with hatred, Gandhi insisted upon returning love for hatred and respect for contempt.
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Mohandas K. Gandhi began his adult life as a shy, tongue-tied Indian barrister who failed at most everything he tried. He was plagued by fears and doubts. He was socially inept.
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How important was mantra to Gandhi’s transformation? Extremely. When done systematically, mantra has a powerful effect on the brain. It gathers and focuses the energy of the mind. It teaches the mind to focus on one point, and it cultivates a steadiness that over time becomes an unshakable evenness of temper. The cultivation of this quality of “evenness” is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita. It is called samatva in Sanskrit, and it is a central pillar of Krishna’s practice. When the mind develops steadiness, teaches Krishna, it is not shaken by fear or greed.
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Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She compared the practice of mantra to the training of an elephant. “As the elephant walks through the market,” taught Rambha, “he swings his trunk from side to side and creates havoc with it wherever he goes—knocking over fruit stands and scattering vendors, snatching bananas and coconuts wherever possible. His trunk is naturally restless, hungry, scattered, undisciplined. This is just like the mind—constantly causing trouble.” “But the wise elephant trainer,” said Rambha, “will give the elephant a stick of bamboo to hold in his trunk. The elephant likes this. He holds it fast. And as soon as the elephant wraps his trunk around the bamboo, the trunk begins to settle. Now the elephant strides through the market like a prince: calm, collected, focused, serene. Bananas and coconuts no longer distract.” So too with the mind.
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As soon as the mind grabs hold of the mantra, it begins to settle. The mind holds the mantra gently, and it becomes focused, calm, centered. Gradually this mind becomes extremely concentrated. This is the beginning stage of meditation. All meditation traditions prescribe some beginning practice of gathering, focusing, and concentration—and in the yoga tradition this is most often achieved precisely through mantra.
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The whole of Chapter Six in the Bhagavad Gita is devoted to Krishna’s teachings on this practice: “Whenever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self,” instructs Krishna. “When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.”
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When the mind is still, says Krishna, the True Self begins to reveal its nature. In the depths of meditation, we begin to recognize again that we are One with Brahman—that we are that wave that is nonseparate from the sea. Memory is restored!
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He was acutely aware that his life had no unifying principle.
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He would never forget his first reading of the Gita. “It went straight to my heart,” he declared.
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“but to me the Gita became an infallible guide of conduct. It became my dictionary of daily reference. Just as I turned to the English dictionary for the meanings of English words that I did not understand, I turned to this dictionary of conduct for a ready solution of all my troubles and trials.”
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By his midtwenties, two of the pillars of Gandhi’s transformation were in place: his mantra and his spiritual reference book. With these two, Gandhi began to throw off what he later called the “sluggishness” and “drowsiness” of his mind and body. He would soon discover the third pillar of his transformation: the systematic cultivation of energy.
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He gave up eating as a recreation and took it up as a spiritual practice. No more living to eat. Now, it was eating to live. Gandhi found that he felt most energetic when he ate sparsely. Eventually he would settle on goat’s milk and vegetables as the diet that gave him the most vitality.
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Gandhi was an inveterate experimenter, and he would tinker with his diet for the rest of his life.
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Every time we discerningly renounce a possession, we free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of dharma.
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To unite parties riven asunder! Gandhi had had the first taste of his dharma. His calling would be to heal separation wherever he found it—separation
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He saw that his energies and intelligence and training did not belong to him. They belonged to the world. He came to believe that a human being is really just a trustee of all that he has—that his gifts are entrusted to him for the good of the world.
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“He who devotes himself to service with a clear conscience, will day by day grasp the necessity for it in greater measure, and will continually grow richer in faith … If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make not only for our own happiness but that of the world at large.”
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“He will take only what he strictly needs and leave the rest. One must not possess anything which one does not really need.
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If you don’t find your work in the world and throw yourself wholeheartedly into it, you will inevitably make your self your work. There’s no way around it: You will take your self as your primary project. You will, in the very best case, dedicate your life to the perfection of your self. To the perfection of your health, intelligence, beauty, home, or even spiritual prowess. And the problem is simply this: This self-dedication is too small a work. It inevitably becomes a prison.
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Tao te Ching. “Hope and fear,” it teaches, “are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don’t see the self as self, what do we have to fear?” Then, the author of the Tao te Ching, Lao-Tzu, makes a stunning prescription for living a fulfilled life: See the world as your self. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as your self; Then you can care for all things.
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See the world as your self. Then you can care for all things! As we age, we will always be losing the “How am I doing?” game—the “How am I measuring up?” game. Old age, illness, and death heighten our awareness of the inevitable failure of the self project. It is all going down to the grave.
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But when we throw ourselves into our work for the world, the project of self—with all its disappointments—disappears. When we lavish our love on the world, it doesn’t matter whether we succeed or fail. It’s inherently fulfilling.
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You only have to love your little corner of the world. But you have to do it intentionally. And full out. And you have to get yourself out of the way. Then you can care for all things.
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Gandhi came to believe that any power he might have to affect the world only emerged when he got himself out of the way, and let God do the work. He came to call this “reducing yourself to zero.” “There comes a time,” he wrote in the peak of his maturity, “when an individual becomes irresistible and his action becomes all-pervasive in its effects. This comes when he reduces himself to zero.” It’s a wonderful phrase. Gandhi’s meaning was simple: Only the human being who acts in a way that is empty of self can be the instrument of Soul Force. And it is only Soul Force that can establish a harmonious world. Human beings alone are helpless to resolve conflicts without it.
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Eknath Easwaran wrote about this phenomenon: “Gandhi was the most bewildering opponent any nation ever faced. Every move he made was spontaneous; every year that passed found him more youthful, more radical, more experimental. British administrators were baffled and exasperated by this little man who withdrew when they would have attacked, attacked when they would have withdrawn, and seemed to be getting stronger day by day. No one knew what he was going to do next, for his actions were prompted not by calculations of what seemed politically expedient, but by a deep intuition which often came to him only at the eleventh hour.”
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action aligned with truth that had true power, true Soul Force.
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Soul Force means holding to Truth no matter how fierce the storm.
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ahimsa, or “nonviolence.” But ahimsa is more than just the absence of violence: It is the presence of justice and of love. Gandhi always made it perfectly clear that “the satyagrahi’s object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrongdoer.”
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Krishna taught Arjuna that the origin of all fearlessness is the facing of death.
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For Mahatma Gandhi, all of his courage, all of his trust in God, all of his capacity to love the world as himself issued from the pages of the Bhagavad Gita. No human being living in the twentieth century has lived the precepts of this great text with more fidelity and passion than Gandhi.
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“Select your purpose,” he challenged, “selfless, without any thought of personal pleasure or personal profit, and then use selfless means to attain your goal.” “Do not resort to violence,” Gandhi wrote, “even if it seems at first to promise success; it can only contradict your purpose. Use the means of love and respect even if the result seems far off or uncertain. Then throw yourself heart and soul into the campaign, counting no price too high for working for the welfare of those around you, and every reverse, every defeat, will send you deeper into your own deepest resources. Violence can never bring an end to violence; all it can do is provoke more violence. But if we can adhere to complete nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, India’s freedom is assured.”
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Dharma is very much like Gandhi’s mantra. Rama, Rama, Rama. Eventually it takes on a life of its own. It does things spontaneously that you had no reason to expect. It begins to drill down into the deepest parts of your mind. Soon you begin to see that this dharma is not just any old stick of bamboo. It is a magic wand. A wish-fulfilling wand. It is a way to know—to interact with, to be in relationship with—the deepest parts of yourself. It is a vehicle to know the world. Eventually your dharma takes you into a new land, as Gandhi’s did. A land where you can rely only upon God. You cross a bridge, and you are suspended in the air. Only God is holding you up now. “Abandon all supports,” says Krishna to Arjuna in one of his great final teachings. “Cast off your dependency on everything external, Arjuna, and rely on the Self alone.”
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We work first because we have to work. Then because we want to work. Then because we love to work. Then the work simply does us. Difficult at the beginning. Inevitable at the end.
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Remember that from its very opening sentences, the Bhagavad Gita has been a treatise on action. When you know who you are, you will know how to act.
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Arjuna is no longer paralyzed by doubt. He is ready to move back into action. But it will now be action with a difference: It will be action guided by the voice of the Inner Divine.
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Dharma saves us not by ending but rather by redeeming our suffering. It gives meaning to our suffering. It enables us to bear our suffering. And, most important, it enables our suffering to bear fruit for the world.
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I have come to believe that dharma gives us the one thing we need to be fully human: Each of us must have one domain, one small place on the globe where we can fully meet life—where we can meet it with every gift we have. One small place where, through testing ourselves, we can know the nature of life, and ultimately know ourselves. This domain, this one place that is uniquely ours, is our work in the world. Our work in the world is for each of us the axis mundi, the immovable spot—the one place where we really have the opportunity to wake up.
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Dharma provides us with the perfect vehicle through which we can fruitfully die to our smaller self and be reborn to Self. And make no mistake: This mystic death—this death that our egos abhor—this taking ourselves to zero—is absolutely required in order to be fully human.
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Your dharma is your tomb where you die and arise to new life. You only get yourself when you lose yourself to some great work. And whatever your authentic work is—I believe it is great. It is the great work of your life.
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I see now that I had been confused about dharma because I had both too high an opinion of it and too low an opinion of it all at the same time. I thought that life should always be high art. I thought, indeed, that I should always be jumping out of bed in the morning, ripping open the curtain to meet the day. When we study the lives of truly fulfilled exemplars of dharma, we discover that, alas, it is just not like that, even for the most accomplished among them. I have come to see that dharma is more like craft than high art. Those of us struggling to live our dharmas awake every morning like everyone else—to the sound of the alarm. We roll over. We take a deep breath.
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No matter. It is not really about us anyway. It is about the cathedral.
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The great twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton encountered precisely the same spiritual exhaustion partway through his life. The chief source of this exhaustion, he writes, “is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a sparkling success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men.” His vision of the possibility of relief from this burden occurred to me as brilliant: “We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do.”
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Merton says it is: “We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us—whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.”
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a truth that may free me from the obviously false hope that I can have everything—indeed, from the view that I must have everything in order to have a fulfilling life.
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Authentic dharma frees us from this false hope. Merton sees deeply into the nature of this freedom: “… the fulfillment of every individual vocation demands not only the renouncement of what is evil in itself, but also of all the precise goods that are not willed for us by God.” We are not called to everything. We are just called to what we’re called to. It is inevitable that authentically good parts of ourselves will not be fulfilled. What a relief.
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“We can do no great things,” wrote the nineteenth-century French saint, Teresa, “only small things with great love.”
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“… we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.”
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Do your daily duty, and let the rest go.
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In monasteries of old, the monk’s dharma, his purpose in life, was said to be this: to support the choir. In Latin, propter chorum. Literally, his life was lived “in support of the choir.” He was not a soloist. He was not a diva. He was part of a magnificent whole.
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