The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  “OK,” he says, with resignation. “So I cannot not act. I guess I see that. But then how do I act? How do I know how to act? What is the right thing to do?”

  Krishna sits down next to his young charge. He is quiet for a while. Finally, he speaks.

  “Arjuna,” he begins his wonderful opening speech, “look to your dharma.”

  And with this, Krishna launches into the first of many speeches about the most revolutionary teaching of the Bhagavad Gita: the Path of Inaction-in-Action.

  “There is a certain kind of action that leads to freedom and fulfillment,” Krishna begins. “A certain kind of action that is always aligned with our true nature.” This is the action that is motivated by dharma. This is the action taken in the service of our sacred calling, our duty, our vocation. In dharma, it is possible to take passionate action without creating suffering. It is possible to find authentic fulfillment of all human possibilities.

  Krishna—slowly, over the course of their long dialogue—will reveal the broad outlines of an exciting program, a path through the maze of the active life that will come to be called the Path of Inaction-in-Action—or Naishkarmya-karman. Krishna will show Arjuna a path to the authentic self through action in the world. Not through renunciation and withdrawal. Not through retreat—or theologizing. And not, especially, through inaction.

  Here are the central pillars of the path of action—the path of karma yoga—as expounded by Krishna. Here are the keys to Inaction-in-Action:

  1. Look to your dharma.

  2. Do it full out!

  3. Let go of the fruits.

  4. Turn it over to God.

  First: Discern your dharma. “Look to your own duty,” says Krishna in Chapter Two. “Do not tremble before it.” Discern, name, and then embrace your own dharma.

  Then: Do it full out! Knowing your dharma, do it with every fiber of your being. Bring everything you’ve got to it. Commit yourself utterly. In this way you can live an authentically passionate life, and you can transform desire itself into a bonfire of light.

  Next: Let go of the outcome. “Relinquish the fruits of your actions,” says Krishna. Success and failure in the eyes of the world are not your concern. “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else,” he says.

  Finally: Turn your actions over to God. “Dedicate your actions to me,” says Krishna. All true vocation arises in the stream of love that flows between the individual soul and the divine soul. All true dharma is a movement of the soul back to its Ground.

  Over the course of the next seventeen chapters of the Gita, Krishna carefully expounds this doctrine.

  When he hears of it, Arjuna perks up. Perhaps there is a way out of this quagmire. He sits facing Krishna. And they begin to talk. From these positions, our two protagonists begin the “wondrous and holy dialogue” that will comprise the remainder of the Bhagavad Gita. The impending battle of Kurukshetra quickly recedes from view, and the narrator shines his light exclusively on the vivid conversation between these two friends.

  Throughout the remaining 700 stanzas, Krishna sings his song of love, sacrifice, duty, fulfillment, and enlightened action. And Arjuna sings back—most often a song of fear, confusion, doubt, ambivalence and delusion. And we, sitting on the sidelines, and overhearing their conversation through the grace of Sanjaya, the narrator, are at times enthralled, bored, puzzled, furious, uncomprehending—but finally, enlightened.

  Krishna’s first practical teaching to Arjuna is simple and direct: “Arjuna, look to your dharma.”

  Look to your dharma!

  And what is this dharma that can save Arjuna?

  The Sanskrit word “dharma,” as used in the Bhagavad Gita, is so full of meaning that it is impossible to grasp its full scope through any single English translation. “Dharma” can be variously, but incompletely, translated as “religious and moral law,” “right conduct,” “sacred duty,” “path of righteousness,” “true nature,” and “divine order.”

  René Guénon, in his classic Introduction to the Study of Hindu Doctrines, comes as close as any author to the meaning of dharma as we will use it here. “Dharma,” he says, “is the essential nature of a being, comprising the sum of its particular qualities or characteristics, and determining, by virtue of the tendencies or dispositions it implies, the manner in which this being will conduct itself, either in a general way or in relation to each particular circumstance.” The word dharma in this teaching, then, refers to the peculiar and idiosyncratic qualities of each being—those very essential and particular qualities that make it somehow itself.

  Scientists now tell us that every brain is like a fingerprint—utterly unique. So, too, every nervous system has its own complex idiosyncrasy, every human mind, every human body, every spirit. We might say that every person’s dharma is like an internal fingerprint. It is the subtle interior blueprint of a soul.

  And how precisely do we discern this dharma hidden in our being as a kind of seed? How do we manifest this unique dharma DNA?

  In many cases, perhaps even in most cases, the discernment of dharma is a difficult, even agonizing process. It is only born out of our wrestling matches with doubt, with conflict, and with despair. And so, the authors of the Gita have placed their protagonist—the exemplar of the seeker of dharma—on a field of battle. The stakes are high. The decisions are complex. There are countless moral gray areas. And yet, there is no escape from choice and action.

  Will Arjuna’s story help us extract ourselves from our own particular quagmire of dharma? At the beginning of our encounter with the Gita, it may not be perfectly clear how much we can identify with Arjuna. We almost immediately face a small speed bump. In an outward sense, indeed, Arjuna’s dilemmas around dharma seem quite different from ours. Arjuna’s dharma was, of course, prescribed for him. In the caste system of ancient India, roles and dharmas were prescribed at birth. Arjuna was born into the warrior class. So, he was destined to be a warrior. It was his sacred duty to fight a just war. He never had any choice in the matter, nor was his dharma based on any particular personal qualities. Indeed, in the traditional culture in which Arjuna lived there was no such thing as a personal self. The self was a “socially embedded self.” So there was no notion of personal dharma.

  We live in a different kind of culture, of course, in which there is most emphatically a personal self, and therefore a personal dharma. Strangely, however, when we drill down into this issue, we discover that our dharmas, too, are in many ways not personal. They are not, in the ways that really count, our own choice—not based on our own ideas, wishes, or concepts. They are based, as Arjuna’s was, on what is already mysteriously within us at birth: our fingerprint.

  Krishna, in his teaching to Arjuna, points to a truth that also holds true for us.

  You cannot be anyone you want to be.

  You cannot be anyone you want to be?

  Really?

  The notion that we can be anyone we want to be is a slippery half-truth that saturates contemporary culture—reinforced by several generations of self-help literature. How many times have we heard it: “You can do anything you set your mind to.”

  Krishna would say, “Well, not exactly.” Yes, our inner possibilities are fantastic beyond imagining. But no, these possibilities are not nearly as subject to our ego’s manipulation as we might like to think. Actually, you can only expect a fulfilling life if you dedicate yourself to finding out who you are. To finding the ineffable, idiosyncratic seeds of possibility already planted inside. There is some surrender required here.

  Thomas Merton came to precisely this conclusion after decades of spiritual practice. He wrote: “Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.” This quote is enshrined as the Epigraph to this book—and for a good reason. Its wisdom is at the very heart o
f dharma.

  So how do we discern our dharma? How do we discover the magnificent inner blueprint?

  In the next section of the book, we will turn our attention to these very questions—to the discernment of dharma—and in particular to three important principles that can be found deep in the center of Krishna’s teaching for discerning the hidden and at times inscrutable dharma within:

  1. Trust in the gift.

  2. Think of the small as large.

  3. Listen for the call of the times.

  In our narrative we will examine six stories in the light of these principles: three “great” lives, and three (so-called) “ordinary” lives. We will look at the stories of Dame Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most distinguished primatologists and conservationists; we’ll examine the life of Henry David Thoreau, perhaps America’s most important philosopher and naturalist—himself a devotee of the Bhagavad Gita; and finally, we will take a close look at the dharma-struggles of Walt Whitman, one of America’s first thoroughly American poets. Each of these human beings struggled hard with the questions of identifying and bringing forth what was within in ways that might illumine our own struggles. We will look, too, at three ordinary lives. We will follow the progress of our friends Katherine, Brian, and Ellen in the light of Krishna’s teaching. How do they work out the realization of their true selves—the discovery of their own particular dharma?

  TWO

  Jane Goodall: Trust in the Gift

  As a kid I was puzzled by my older brother Randy. We were only two years apart in age, we grew up with the same parents, in the same house, in the same town—and yet he seemed to inhabit an entirely different world than I. Randy loved machines. In fact, he was a genius of the technical realm. This marked him as a bewildering anomaly in our family of hopeless technophobes. Where had he come from?

  When Randy was fourteen, he built his own go-cart out of scraps that were just hanging around the garage, and a discarded engine he bought at a junkyard. Randy worked on his exotic contraption intently—seriously—for hours at a time, and then roared off in a cloud of dust down the long gravel road behind our house in small-town Ohio. Jeesh. Where did this love of machines come from? Neither of my parents knew which end of a spark plug was up. Nor did any of our extended family. All clueless. Was he adopted?

  Randy also had a hydroplane, an awkward homemade affair that he—with measured tinkering—made go faster than any other boat on the lake where we spent our summers. And when my uncle bought an old European sports car, Randy knew how to drive it without prior instruction. He would glide smoothly through the gears with the precision of a test pilot. Huh? How on earth did he know how to do that? Sitting confidently at the steering wheel, he would turn to me with passion in his eyes: “Wanna drive it?” I looked back blankly.

  With the perspective of adulthood, I have at last found words to describe what had been happening: Randy had a gift. A freely given, mysterious aptitude for the world of the machine.

  Well, I had gifts, too, and Randy, I learned later, was just as puzzled by my gifts as I was by his. Apparently he was especially awed by my gift for music. Even at six, I was able to sit down at my grandfather’s old upright piano and pick out a tune. Later, with no training at all, I began to add harmonies, and eventually could spin out most any song I heard, playing, as my parents called it, “by ear.” In all honesty, I myself sometimes marveled at this.

  Gifts. Each of us has them. There is no point trying to account for them. Their source is as much a mystery as anything else in life. Nonetheless they’re real—and remarkably easy to identify, even from a young age. If asked, any of us could easily name the gifts of most anyone we’re close to.

  Strangely, as kids, no one helped either Randy or me to understand the nature of our gifts. They were commented upon, of course. Some small attention was paid. I was given piano lessons (in a manner of speaking) with old Mrs. Croft across the street. Randy got a lame box of tools (“a boy’s first tool kit”) for Christmas. But no one ever suggested how important our gifts really were. No one suggested that I might want to be a pianist. Or my brother a race-car driver. My parents, and the rest of the world, seemed to have other plans for us—plans that had little to do with our idiosyncratic fascinations. We assumed that that was the way life was. No one suggested that a go-cart or an old baby grand piano were for us among the few authentic doorways into the possibility of a fulfilling and useful life. Or into the very nature of life itself. Or into our connection with God.

  This may be one reason I today find the Bhagavad Gita so compelling. Here is an ancient treatise whose primary intent is to make an explicit connection between gifts and fulfillment. Between the go-cart and God.

  Said Krishna to Arjuna, “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.”

  Better to fail at your own dharma? Better to fail at the pursuit of one’s own puny inner genius than to succeed in any other, however exalted? Better to find your own inner fingerprint, no matter what the outcome? Really that important?

  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.

  As kids, Randy and I almost knew this. The go-cart and the piano were doorways into our own true natures. Full of infinite potential. They were possibility itself.

  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.

  Don’t get me wrong: The Gift itself is indestructible. “Fire cannot burn it,” Krishna teaches. But the connection to the gift? The trust in the gift? The faith in the gift? This trust is, at least early on, exquisitely fragile. It is vulnerable to all manner of disruption. And here, very early, is precisely where doubt enters in. Doubt: The paralyzing affliction.

  Randy and I were typical kids growing up in America in the fifties and sixties. We were sons of an ordinary middle-class family. There was very little money—but there was lots of education. And yet there was precious little faith in, or acknowledgment of, these mysteries. So our trust in The Gift was not nurtured. Indeed, at times it was run roughshod over—unknowingly.

  Like most everyone else in our culture, Randy’s life, and my own, would then become one long pilgrimage to regain any thin wisp of trust—to reclaim our trust in The Gift and even to turn this wily filament into a small oak of faith. We would search for a way to reestablish faith in the way things are.

  Randy did not become a race-car driver. And I did not become a concert pianist. Would we have been happier, more fulfilled, if we had? Who knows. There are no easy formulas for these things. 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.

  On the other hand, Randy does work for a large trucking company—still living close to the almighty engine (though he works as a manager in the human resources department). And I’ve schlepped a piano around with me from house to house my entire adult life. I still play Beethoven and Bach and Cole Porter songs in the evening, and sometimes when no one is home I accompany myself as I sing Puccini arias (very badly) to myself.

  I’ve had moments when I felt that I was living perfectly aligned with my dharma. When the spine of life has seemed absolutely aligned. Nonetheless, I still wonder about this at times. What would my life have looked like today if my musical gift had been named, valued, nurtured, prized—really seen for what it was? In my work with young musicians at Kripalu, I have occasionally sat down at the piano to accompany a singer, or play some chamber music with a group of students. After one of these sessions—when a group of us was playing the achingly beautiful songs of R
ichard Strauss—one of the young violinists turned to me and said, with obvious surprise, “That was really impressive.” I almost hate to admit it to myself, but that declaration—and that evening—remains a high point. Was it because I stepped for a moment back onto the road not taken?

  Are there roads not taken that occasionally light you up? Do you ever fantasize about what might have been had it all gone differently?

  Let’s look at the question from another perspective: Do you know anyone whose gifts were seen, mirrored, prized? Who took the obvious road early? And thrived?

  It does happen. There are people all around us who have been the recipient of this grace.

  2

  Dame Jane Goodall is a svelte, girlish-looking woman with beautiful eyes, a soft smile, and a quietly aristocratic bearing. She is one of the world’s leading primatologists. Motivated by her love of animals (recognized, I hasten to say, when she was practically still a baby), Goodall spent decades observing the behavior of chimpanzees in Tanzania. Her remarkable fifty-year trek in the jungles of East Africa transformed our view of the primate world.

  I have been fascinated by this woman for years. When I first heard her speak, I couldn’t get over the fact that this sweet, velvet woman challenged the entire scientific establishment and won. (I thought of the teaching from the Tao te Ching: “The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”) Goodall did not play by the rules: She named her chimps, for goodness’ sake—the subjects of her study. She fell in love with them. And as a result, she was probably the first human being to be admitted into a roaming, in-the-jungle chimp society.

  Goodall was the first scientist to document chimpanzees making tools. Not just using tools, but actually making tools. Until this discovery, tool making had been seen as the quintessentially human behavior: man the toolmaker. Goodall changed all that. She also documented chimpanzees’ exhibition of what we think of as the exclusively human traits of altruism and compassion. As it turns out, chimps appear to love and care for one another. Her observations revolutionized our view of the animal world, and challenged the scientific community to reconsider well-accepted definitions of “being human.” Did you know that chimpanzees’ DNA differs from human DNA by a mere one percent? This has been hard for some people to accept.