To Be In Action Is Human Nature 2

Your mind is not where your body is. You are not living inside your boundary. The other side of the bank always looks greener. Something else is always calling you. Only when you experience the beauty of purposelessness will you be able to understand what Krishna says throughout Karma Yoga.

Please take a few minutes, close your eyes and look into yourself. Sincerely ask yourself whether you are doing things in totality. Let this understanding work on you. Let this idea sink into your being. Honestly ask why you are doing what you are doing, where you are going, and what you think of as your purpose. Take a few minutes and look.

Whatever you think of as your purpose, even if you achieve it, it is not going to be with you. It is not going to stay with you! The beauty of the whole of Existence is purposelessness!

Let this one idea sink into your being. Let this go deep into your inner space. Let it do this alchemy on you.

Relax! Understand this one thing. Just understanding this one single idea can transform your whole way of thinking. It can transform your whole way of working and can transform your whole way of living. When you understand there is no purpose in totality, you will start enjoying every single moment; you will start living intensely in every single inch of your body. Every moment will become meaningful.

When you think that, in life as a whole there is a purpose, every single moment will lose its meaning. If you think one month of your working time is worth a hundred thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars, you will judge the value of that one month only as being only fifty thousand dollars.

Please be very clear, your life is not just worth fifty thousand dollars. For example, you think one month of your life is worth fifty thousand dollars. If you calculate the value of your whole life, it may come to some 10 million, 20 million or even 100 million dollars.

Suddenly, if someone says, 'I will give you 100 million dollars, give me your life,' will you be able to give him your life? Logically, this is the way you are calculating and working. We are ready to sell our mind, ready to sell our moments, ready to sell our inner space, calculating the value of our lives. Logically you fix the rate for your life. Once you fix the rate, only the rate is in your mind. You forget the work itself, or living itself, which is beautiful. But you miss all that.

If you think the whole has got a purpose, then the part loses its meaning. Understand, as a whole, the whole has no purpose. The moment you realize that the whole has no purpose, the part will become meaningful. Your very living, every day itself, will become very beautiful. Everyday your life, your living, your sitting, your walking, your standing, everything will become a joyful experience.

That is why they say sat chit ānanda, which means the 'bliss of the very existence'. Your very existence is blissful. You don't have to think that in the end you will have bliss. No! Your very existence is blissful.

The moment you drop the goal, your path becomes blissful. The moment you realize the beauty of purposelessness, your very existence becomes meaningful. The meaning of existence is bliss, eternal bliss, nithya ānanda. But you need to take steps towards that bliss.

By nature, man has to work. What I mean is, by their very nature, senses have to be engaged in some action. Even if you try and control and do nothing externally, the very act of restraint is an action in itself.

The choice is really about how to work. Here, Krishna gives the answer to that. He says that we should perform work with devotion and without attachment to the results. Perform work without unnecessarily being bothered about whether or not it will fetch the results that you expect. If when we work, our thoughts are on the future, then we are not in the present moment. Am I right? Then how can we be performing to our fullest potential? How can I say that I am doing my work with full devotion if my mind is not totally merged with the task at hand? It's not possible. And then how can I get the results I want if I'm not working to full potential?

When do you get worried or afraid? It is when you have an expected result, an unwritten expectation, and an unconscious desire to achieve something as the result of an action. Krishna says, 'Drop the very desire, and drop the very expectation.'

We wonder, 'how can we function if we drop expectations?' Be very clear, I am not saying you should not plan and do something without thinking. I am saying, 'Plan, but plan chronologically; not psychologically.'

You see, there are two things: chronological planning and psychological planning.

Chronological planning is planning on a timescale. You decide you will get up at this time, finish your morning routine by a particular time, reach the office at a particular time, and finish the list of tasks you planned at the office by a certain time, and so on. This is a practical way to organize your work in such a way that it can give the best results. This is fine.

But, what do we do? We don't stop at this. We review the plan in our head over and over, thinking in different ways whether we will be able to manage it. We keep supposing, 'What if this happens? What if that happens?'

In the name of contingency planning, we just worry. A contingency plan should help to come up with alternative solutions. Then it won't sap your energy. But you are thinking how to handle something if the plan does not go as expected. If you apply your awareness to the problem in an objective way, the solution will simply stand out.

But we complicate the whole process. We get worked up about contingency situation and introduce a complex negativity in the whole thinking process. We start hoping unconsciously that such a situation does not arise. We start worrying about what the possible unknowns are that have not been accounted for in the plan and what not!

You keep analyzing your plan and get into a dull state because all your energy goes into analyzing the plan again and again.

Psychological planning boosts your ego. It makes you feel great and worthy. It helps you to stay serious. It makes you feel that you are handling things of great magnitude. It makes you feel that it is wholly in your hands to worry about it and make it happen. This is psychological planning.

Krishna says, 'Devotional work, without attachment and controlling the senses is superior to one who merely pretends to be in control of his senses and acts in renunciation.'

There are intellectual types, vedantis and advaita philosophers, well versed in all scriptures, who look down upon devotional bhakti marg practitioners. Intellectuals believe that their dry understanding of non-duality of the Self and the Divine is superior to those who fall at the feet of the Divine. Krishna firmly says, 'No.'

Krishna says that what makes the difference is your lack of expectations, the sense of purposelessness that defines your state, and not the status of renunciation. The state of renunciation is not a state of doing nothing.

You can never sit without doing anything. Even if you sit still in one place, you are sitting, you are breathing, is it not? The internal functions in your body are happening. Maintaining this very body requires that work be done.

The breath that you take in carries prana, the life energy that sustains your life. Constantly, air is going in, leaving prana inside and coming out. From the cosmos, we are taking prana through air. This is also an action being done to sustain the body. So, you cannot say you are not doing anything.

You may think that it is better not to do any work rather than analyze what work you should do, how to do it, whether it will suit you and all that. You can take this as an excuse for laziness, for your tamas. When Krishna says, 'I am not the doer, it is just the senses doing the actions according to their nature,' you say, 'Why should I even bother to do anything? '

Be very clear, by your very nature, you will act. Your body and mind, the gross body and the subtle mind, are, by nature, forced to do something.

Just try telling your mind not to do any work, not to think about anything. Try to sit with a completely blank mind, no mental activity, not thinking about anything. Just relax and try this simple exercise. You will initially try not to think about anything. You will try to be aware if any thought comes to your mind. But, after a few moments, you will find yourself having some thought, thinking about something from the past or the future. Some thought would have crept into your mind - some random thought about something.

By nature, your mind will think about something or the other. If you try to force silence into your mind, you will be forcing a dead silence, the silence of suppression. How long can you sustain that? The moment you drop your guard, mind will express its nature and start wandering.

So, neither expression nor suppression is the solution. It is better to be aware of the nature of the senses and the mind, and be engaged in work with a sense of devotion. Be aware when you are in action, it is the senses acting. Then you will not get attached to the action or its result. Then you are free; you are liberated from the bondage of action. Action binds you only when you associate yourself as the doer and have expectations about things being a certain way.

Q: Master, is it possible that meditation takes us into inaction? Even though my intention is to energize myself through meditation, I find I lose interest in things after meditation. Why?

This is an interesting and real issue.

Normally, you are in a state of action, which is the state of rajas. When you are in rajas, also described as aggression or passion, you are externally oriented. Your thoughts are focused on action of some sort or another, usually with some goal in mind. This is the state of most human beings, whether in business, academics or just looking after the household. You plan your activities and you plan to fulfill them accordingly.

When you go into meditation and practice seriously, and this happens especially when you are in an ashram kind of environment, you realize the futility of these goal-based actions. All these, all the triggers that activate you, seem to be negativities of some sort. You tend to drop these negativities.

When you drop these negativities and do not want to do anything with them, the state that you move into is tamas, or lazy inaction. Suddenly you find that you are disinterested in everything. You may just want to sleep, that is all. It is not quite depression, but a disinclination to act, because all actions seem negative.

This may last a while, a few days, but not for long. Let it happen. Let yourself go through this process. Let all the negativities work themselves out of you.

Then gradually you will move back into action with awareness, satva. You will act, since you cannot but act, as Krishna says, but now you act without a purpose. The results of your action are no longer of relevance to you. Success and failure no longer bother you.

So do not worry if you slip into what you think is laziness while practicing meditation. It is likely to happen. It is a normal process. Just continue and you will move into purposeless action.

People think that moving from rajas, aggression to satva, calmness is the natural evolution. It does not work that way. When you move out of your normal active and aggressive behavior you first fall into tamas, inactivity. This is the movement of the mind when it moves out of aggression; it moves into inaction. When this shift is caused by meditation, the inaction does not last long. The mind soon moves into a relaxed, calm state.

I have talked about this elsewhere in detail. The mind is constantly looking out through the senses. Its focus is external. It settles on the periphery. However, deep inside there is a longing for it to move inwards. It is constantly getting pulled towards the center from the periphery. It is constantly getting pulled from the material to the spiritual.

Usually it settles somewhere in the middle. That is why I say that all humans are eccentric. Their senses pull them to the periphery and their being attracts them to the center. The mind settles eccentrically in between.

Meditation aids the movement inwards. As attention shifts from the periphery to the core there is a resistance to what was experienced in the periphery. This leads to temporary inaction and detachment to peripheral experiences.

Once a glimpse of the center, the core is achieved there is no detachment or dislike. There is neither attachment nor great attraction for something or detachment or dislike for something. All experiences are viewed nonjudgmentally and with non-attachment. At the core it is always bliss. It is the state of nithyananda, eternal bliss.