Do Your Duty

3.33 Even the wise person tries to act according to the modes of his own nature, for all living beings go through their nature. What can restraint of senses do?

3.34 Attachment and repulsion of the senses for sense objects should be put under control.

One should never come under their control as they certainly are the stumbling blocks on the path of selfrealization.

3.35 It is better to do one's own duty, even if it is in a faulty manner, than to do someone else's duty perfectly.

Death in the course of performing one's own duty is better than doing another's duty, as this can be dangerous.

3.36 Arjuna said, 'O descendant of Vrshni, then, by what is man forced to sinful acts, even without desiring, as if engaged by force?'

3.37 The Lord said, 'It is lust and anger born of the attribute of passion, all-devouring and sinful, which is one's greatest enemy in this world.'

Here, it is important to understand what duty means. If I have to do my duty, I need to know how to identify what my duty is.

The idea of duty is different for different people, different countries, different cultures, and different religions. Hence the term 'duty' is impossible to clearly define. We have always been trained by society, by conscience, to consider certain acts as duty: some as good and others as bad. When something happens before us, we have a trained or programmed impulse to react in a certain way.

We are brought up with certain ideas of duty. For example, it is our duty to help elderly people. It is our

duty to follow principles of truth, non-violence, nonstealing and such tenets. We are brought up with these concepts of morality but how many of us have experienced the beauty of implementing them?

Then there are certain principles that get handed down depending on the religion you follow. For example, a starving person who finds a piece of meat has no problem eating it if he is a non-vegetarian. On the other hand, a vegetarian would feel it is his duty not to touch beef even if it means losing his life. In some religions, you can marry only once but in some other religions, you can marry multiple times. These are all socially defined duties.

One thing we should remember is that we should always try to see the duty of others from their eyes and not judge the customs of other people by our standards. No one standard is the standard for the universe. There is no universal scale by which you can measure people and their actions.

What Krishna talks about here is not socially defined duty or about conscience. He is talking about consciousness.

Vivekananda talks about a sage, a yogi in Bharat. He was a peculiar man; he would not teach anyone. If you asked him a question, he would not answer. However, if you asked him a question and waited for some days, in the course of conversation, he would bring up the subject and throw wonderful light on it.

He once told Vivekananda the secret of work. 'Let the end and the means be joined into one.'

When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond that. Do it as worship, as the highest worship and devote your whole life to it for that time. Give it your full attention. The right performance of duty at any point in life, without attachment to the results, leads us to the highest realization.

The worker who is attached to the results is the one who grumbles about the nature of the duty. To the unattached worker, all duties are equally good. He welcomes what he has to do, irrespective of the external nature of the job. He approaches every act with the same enthusiasm and liveliness and becomes completely involved in the task at hand.

In the great epic, Mahabharata, there are actually three versions of Gita: the Bhagavad Gita and the Anugita, both by Sri Krishna; the third and more important one is called Vyadha Gita, the song of a butcher.

A butcher delivered this Vyadha Gita; a man who is considered a sinner or a chandala (low caste person) delivered this great scripture.

There lived a great yogi, a person with special powers but who was not yet enlightened, so he was in the state between the normal and enlightened state; highly egoistic. He was meditating under a tree in a forest. A bird sitting on the tree relieved itself and the droppings fell on him.

He was disturbed and angry and he opened his eyes and looked at the bird. The bird was killed by the power of his gaze. The yogi was feeling very proud of what he had done.

He then went on his daily round of begging for alms. He came to a house and begged for food. The lady of the house called out from inside the house and asked him to wait as she was serving her husband. The yogi was upset. He thought to himself, 'Foolish woman! She is serving her husband, an ordinary man and she is making a great yogi like me wait!'

He was only thinking these thoughts when he heard the lady's voice again as if in answer, 'I am not like the bird in the forest to be killed so easily. Your powers may be used against birds but not against me, so relax!'

The yogi was simply shocked! The lady actually knew not only what he was thinking, but even about what had happened in the forest. The yogi apologized to the lady when she came out to give him food.

He asked her, 'Mother, how did you know what I was thinking? And how did you know about what happened in the forest? Please teach me how I can also achieve this.'

She replied, 'You have attained shakti (power) but not buddhi (intelligence). Go to the butcher who is down the road and he will teach you.' Now, the yogi was even more surprised. He thought, 'How can an ordinary butcher teach me anything about buddhi?'

But what the lady had done was too much for him. So he quietly took the lady's counsel and went down the road to the butcher's shop.

When he reached the butcher's shop, he saw that the butcher was busy cutting the meat of the dead animals that he had just slaughtered. He still could not imagine how he could learn anything from the butcher. But he wanted to have buddhi so he approached the butcher and asked, 'I was told by the lady nearby to ask you about buddhi. Can you explain to me how to attain buddhi?'

The butcher explained how he himself had achieved buddhi, the ultimate experience.

He did his job with complete awareness and was totally involved in his work. He did his job with complete intensity and used the money that he earned to take care of his aged parents, which he did with equal devotion and involvement.

Just the very doing of his duty had liberated him. The nature of his work, the act of cutting animals, was not important. The attitude with which he did it, the sincerity, was what mattered.

You may be doing the best of acts of social service and in the eyes of society you may be a great man. But if the attitude, the energy behind the act is not positive, the action is just hypocritical and insincere.

Each of us is unique in our capabilities and interests. Accordingly, our duties are also different. If you try to

imitate others, thinking that their duty appears more attractive, you will be making the mistake of following somebody else's path, which is not natural for you.

A small story:

A king once went to a Master to attain some magical powers, so that he could become more powerful than his neighboring kings. He sat in front of the Master and started telling him the purpose of his visit.

The Master listened patiently to the king. Then the Master told him to go into his garden, where a rose bush and a citrus plant were growing side by side. He told the king, 'These are your teachers. They can teach you what you need to learn.'

The king went into the garden, saw the two plants and could not understand what he was meant to learn from them. He came back to the Master and asked, 'Master, I am not able to understand how I can learn to be more powerful from the two plants. What exactly do you mean?'

The Master took him to the plants and explained, 'This citrus plant has been next to the rose plant for many years. Never has it aspired to become a rose plant. Similarly, the rose plant has never ever aspired to become a citrus plant. They just attended to their own duties of growing and blossoming everyday.'

The Master continued, 'If a man had been in the place of the citrus plant, he would have compared himself with the rose plant and felt jealous of the attention that the rose plant was getting from people. Or if he was in the place of the rose plant, he would have looked at the citrus and envied it, thinking how peaceful it was that it did not have to bother about people plucking its flowers.'

You see, the two plants prospered because they used all their energy in their own growth. Not even a bit of their energy was wasted on analyzing the other's growth. One hundred percent of the energy that they had was used for their own growth.

This is what is meant by just doing one's own duty according to one's nature and not being bothered about comparing one's duty with somebody else's and without expecting the certain results from our actions.

These verses by Krishna have been misused by some to defend the caste or varna system in the Hindu religion. They say that what Krishna means is that one should not swerve from one's varna dharma, the duty of one's caste. They do not understand the origin of the caste system.

In Vedic culture, a child was taken into a gurukulam school (ancient system of learning at the feet of the Master), at a very early age, much before the age of seven. The Master then took care of the child until the child reached adulthood. He taught the child based on its abilities. Sometimes Vedic horoscopes were used to determine aptitude and potential. If the child seemed to have the aptitude to become a scholar he was trained in scriptures, and became a brahmin. If the child was aggressive and courageous, he was trained in martial arts, and became a kshatriya.

Varna or caste classification was based on one's natural abilities and not by birth. It was a state, not a status. Over time, this practice was corrupted to mean a classification based on heredity, with no attention paid to natural aptitude.

It is in the context of how education was imparted in the Vedic times that one needs to understand Krishna's injunction in these verses.

Arjuna then asks Krishna why even a centered person is led to commit sinful acts, as if forced by unknown powers. Arjuna's question is the eternal dilemma of expression or suppression.

For example, if you see a beautiful woman and you feel attracted to her, you feel this is not correct according to what society has taught you and you try to suppress your feelings. Can this work? If you try to suppress something, it will surface again with more intensity.

We are always conditioned by society, which teaches us that anyone with passion is a lower human. Anyone with lust is a lower person. Understand, there is no lower or higher person. Only a transformation of energy needs to happen.

The people who pretend to be moralists are either afraid to express their lust or they feel guilty to express it. So they go about preaching to others that being lustful means you are a lower person.

The moment you think you are a lower human, you start fighting with that feeling. Then it becomes very difficult to get out of that and for the transformation to happen. Anything that you resist persists. What you need to do is to bring in awareness and allow the transformation to happen.

What needs to be done is to have understanding and awareness, and the base energy of lust can be transformed to the higher energy of love. It is an alchemy process. Alchemy is the process of changing any base metal to a higher metal. Similarly, changing our base emotion, lust, to the highest emotion we are capable of, love, is an alchemical process. It is the ultimate alchemy.

In alchemy, first the impurity is removed from the base metal. Then something is added to it, and finally, the base metal undergoes a process and it gets transformed to the higher metal.

First, impurity should be removed from lust. We all have lust, which is an animal emotion. One more thing: at least animals have pure lust. When they are in a relationship, they forget about the world and are purely in the relationship. But for us, even our lust is not pure. It is contaminated by all kinds of imagination and fantasies that we have picked up from the media.

Because of your fantasy and imagination, you live with a solid cerebral layer with all the imagination collected from all that you have seen on the television, the internet, in books and so on. Even when you are in a relationship, you are relating with this layer. You are not relating with the actual wife or husband. The actual wife or husband becomes a poor substitute for the images in your mind.

Your lust is contaminated by feelings of guilt and desire. Either our conditioning from our past makes us feel guilty and makes us withdraw, or the intense desire to continue makes us indulge more, only to feel guilty again. It is a vicious cycle of pulling and pushing as a result of which lust is simply contaminated.

Always, if you notice, the moment you fulfill your imagination, you are engulfed by guilt. That is why sex makes you feel guilty. Family instills the first sense of guilt in you when you are a child. Then you master the art of creating guilt for yourself!

Understand, anyone who wants to have control over you, first instills guilt in you. They make you feel you are inferior in some fashion. Then, automatically, you follow what they are saying.

Man knows to control only through guilt. I tell you, rules are good for children. It is good to start with rules. But it is important that you grow and be led by your own intelligence.

When you indulge in desires and become prone to guilt, you are caught in a vicious cycle. That is why you don't go deep into your desires for fulfillment and come out of it liberated, but keep coming back with more and more craving. If you go deep into it, you will flower out of it!

In earlier times, people were able to drop their lust at the age of 40. They never had such complicated images in them. They related directly with their husband or wife. They were able to move deeper into lust and come out of it. Lust simply dropped from them and they did not have to drop it.

In Hindu marriages, there is a beautiful verse which priests make the couples recite, 'In the eleventh year of marriage, let the wife become the mother, and the husband the son.' This may sound strange as to how the wife can become a mother to the husband. What it means is let the relationship reach the ultimate fulfillment.

The ultimate fulfillment for a woman is when she expresses the motherliness in her, the creative energy in her. The ultimate fulfillment for the man is when he comes back to the innocence of the child. So, in the eleventh year, let the relation mature to such an extent that both the husband and wife attain the ultimate fulfillment.

First, impurity in lust needs to be removed like impurity in the base metal needs to be removed in alchemy. Then the component of friendship needs to be added. A deep friendship, a relationship at the being level and not just at physical or mental level needs to happen.

When you feel deeply connected to a person, there will be no need for physical proximity to that person. You will feel happy and satisfied with just the feeling of connection with him or her. This connection will not suffer separation or anything else.

Finally, the process needed for final transformation of lust to love needs to go through the process of patience and perseverance. You need to be patient for the other person to accept the transformation you are going through. You need to give time for the other to understand that this is indeed a real change that you are going through and not just a superficial, temporary change. Then he or she will automatically be transformed as well. The energy of your transformation is sure to touch the other person.

Here Krishna refers to lust and anger both born out of passion. Anger is also an emotion that is born out of lust. When the other person rejects your lust, it turns into anger against that person. Anger is again a tremendous energy that we misuse because we do not understand and respect it.

Greed, anger, and lust are all rajasic qualities that arise from passion and aggression. They arise from the blocked muladhara chakra, the root center. These are instinctive emotions that we inherit from our animal ancestors. The muladhara chakra is common to animals and humans; it is the highest of animal energy centers and lowest of human energy centers.

Indulging in these base emotions keeps a human being in bondage to one's sensual and instinctive nature. This is the reason Krishna classifies these as the root causes of sin. A human being is endowed with consciousness that rises above these instincts. The meaning of a human life is not mere survival; it is the realization of one's super conscious nature.

Anything that stands in the way of Self-realization is a sin.