Karma Yogah

Life is to enjoy living in completion and acting with authenticity in action; not to chase goals. There is no real purpose to life; Life in fact is purposeless. Once we create goals to reach, we create sorrow to follow. Coming to terms with the reality of life is Completion.

The whole of Existence, the whole Universe, is purposeless. Of course, it would be very shocking to hear this. At a very young age, we are taught and socially conditioned to believe that life has some purpose. We are always made to run towards some goal, towards some purpose.

‘What is life without purpose?’ you may ask. We feel that any activity, let alone one’s entire life, has to have a purpose, a definition, and an end point. Only then does it become meaningful. That purpose is what drives us, motivates us.

You will say I am confusing you. ‘All our life we have been brought up to believe that we are here for a purpose. As children we are expected to do well at school, and later at college. Once we grow up, we are supposed to get married and bring up our children. In each phase of our life, we have specific templates that society has set up for us. How can we let them down? How can we believe that all these expectations are wrong, and that there is no purpose to life?’

The more you run towards a goal, the more you are considered a successful person. The greater the speed, the more you are respected. From birth, again and again, you are taught that life has a purpose and a goal. Life without purpose seems meaningless to us. Understand that this is only what you have been brought up to believe. This is not the truth of Existence. Life does not need a defined goal to make living worthwhile, meaningful and happy. The absence of purpose makes our life meaningful. The absence of goals in life makes living worthwhile.

The Universe, Nature has no purpose. It just is. It exists. A river runs downhill towards the ocean because it is its nature to run downhill. It is not because it has a purpose, to meet the ocean. Our life too, has no purpose. We were not born for a purpose. We were born to live, to enjoy life and to be happy. Instead, we set ourselves up for unhappiness; we set goals for ourselves, and almost always these goals are based on fantasies and not on realities. In the process, we stop enjoying life.

The more you run towards the goal, the more you miss Life itself! A person who is continuously bothered about goals will never be able to enjoy and enrich his life. He lives in the future and ignores the present. When we are complete in the present moment, the here and now, we do not need a goal to guide us.

Just the space of completion in the present moment will help us decide what needs to be done at each point in time. When the present moment is taken care of with completion, the future gets resolved on its own. As long as the path is right, whatever destination we reach will be right. We do not need to define the destination; the right path defines its own destination.

However, we constantly worry about the future, relating it with the past. We continuously postpone our happiness without enjoying the present. For example, when you are studying you think, ‘When I get a job, I will be happy.’ When you have your job you think, ‘After marriage my life will be happy.’ After marriage, you think, ‘When I have kids and my own house, I will be happy.’ After achieving that you think, ‘When the kids grow up and all my responsibilities are over, I will be happy.’ By the time your responsibilities are over, when you want to relax, your being is so conditioned to running that you can’t relax! With this default cognition, we are constantly running to stay in the same spot. Happiness is where we are, not where we think we should be. We do not understand what it is to relax.

When I tell people to relax during meditation, they say, ‘Swamiji, please give us detailed guidelines on how to relax!’ We feel we need to lose our happiness before we can start searching for it. The tension of running after something out of compulsion has become a part of our being. Resting is no longer relaxation. When we run behind goals, all that seems to matter is the achievement of that goal. Any sacrifice seems to be worth it, including those we claim we love and care for.

The more you run, the more titles you receive. You are called a ‘multidimensional personality.’ This is just another name for schizophrenics. Only a person who has deeply experienced himself, who is complete in himself, who rests in himself, who experiences inaction in action can be a multidimensional personality. Only such a person understands himself and his many personalities, and is comfortable and complete with all of them.

Only a Kṛṣṇa, a complete being can be a multidimensional personality. Only a man who completely rests in himself, who knows how to relax within himself, can be a multidimensional personality.

A person who runs to satisfy society, who is compelled to run by society, can never experience peace. Society doesn’t want you as you are. It wants you as it thinks you should be. If you are a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant, if you are useful to society in some way, then you are rewarded; otherwise you are made to feel inadequate and incomplete. You are respected just for your title, not for what you are. The more titles you have, the more respect you get.

Life is purposeless. Look into your life. Whatever you think of as the goal of your life, even if it were fulfilled, do you think you will be able to rest and feel complete? You will only look for the next goal. There is no resting point. There is no time to appreciate or celebrate what you have achieved. You are driven from one goal to another, from one desire to another. There is always a feeling of discontentment, a deep incompletion. You run not because your being wants to, but because society drives you to.

With Completion starts Life. Otherwise you are running out of compulsion. Either you run life in compulsion or in completion. With compulsion, not only don’t you have any Life, you also constantly reduce the level of your life.

A person came to me and said, ‘Earlier I used to smoke and drink. My wife used to fight with me all the time, always blaming me. She would connect everything to my smoking and drinking. If the kids did not study well, she would say, ‘You are a drunkard. You don’t care for your kids. That is why they are not studying well.’

So finally, somehow, I gave up smoking and drinking.’

I asked, ‘Oh! Is she happy now?’

He said, ‘No! Now she is unhappy that she is not able to complain about anything anymore!’

When you are inauthentic, you can have something or someone to blame, you can always put the responsibility on them and feel comfortable. When you can’t put the responsibility on someone else, you suffer. It is easy to escape the reality by putting the responsibility on someone else. Here, Arjuna is doing the same thing by asking Kṛṣṇa this question in the third chapter called Karma Yogaḥ.

Coming to terms with reality is Completion. Reality should not make you powerless. Arjuna is being inauthentic by shifting responsibility away from him, not facing his own reality. Kṛṣṇa initiates him into the science of authentic action to powerfully take responsibility for his highest reality and be a complete, blissful being.

3.1 Arjuna says: O Janārdana, Why do You urge me engage in this terrible war, If You think that knowledge is superior to action, O Keśava?

3.2 My intelligence is confused by Your conflicting words. Therefore, please tell me certainly what is most beneficial for me.

3.3 Bhagavān says, O sinless Arjuna, as I said before, in this world there are two paths of firm faith; jñānayoga, the path of Self-knowledge for the intellectual and karmayoga, the path of action of the knowing.

3.4 A person does not attain freedom from action by abstaining from work, nor does he attain fulfillment by giving up action.

In the previous chapter on Sāṅkhya Yogaḥ, Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that knowledge of the Self is the supreme path to Enlightenment. He explains the nature of the indestructible Self. Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna to shed all root patterns of fear, abandon his desires and go beyond success and failure; to practice authenticity in action, to be unattached and steady in completion of the Self, the state of Brahman.

Arjuna is still in the space of inauthenticity. He is confused as to what he should do. At one level, he understands what Kṛṣṇa says to him. However, the explanation about the spirit living on while the body dies, and the idea that all those he is about to fight and destroy have already been destroyed in the cosmic sense, does not appeal to him. Arjuna is a warrior. To him, what is seen in front of him is what exists. He sees all his elders and relatives arrayed against him in battle and he has to make a choice to kill or be killed. This is the physical reality that he faces.

Kṛṣṇa tells him not to take this reality seriously. He says all the living people in front of him are already dead, and therefore he is committing no sin by killing them again. In fact, if he does not fight them, he is being out of integrity; by running away from the battle as an inauthentic coward. He also tells Arjuna that he has the right to do his duty but no right to its results.

‘Let not the fruit of action be your motive and let not your attachment be to inaction either,’ Kṛṣṇa warns him.

Arjuna is totally confused. He tells Kṛṣṇa, ‘I do not understand what you are saying. First, you tell me to fight. Then you tell me to shed anger. You say I must kill my enemies, who are my elders and relatives, but then you say I should not worry about the end result.’ Arjuna says, ‘All I need to know is whether I should act or not. You say knowledge is superior to action and yet you say I must act. What should I do?’ he asks.

Arjuna is clearly in violence. Asking, expecting or thinking only one act can be important IS violence. Only violence asks for instruction without inspiration. A violent person cannot be inspired. He can only be instructed.

Arjuna is asking for a single instruction from Kṛṣṇa, he says, ‘Tell me clearly what is best for me?’ Arjuna’s pattern of asking for only a single best instruction is the pattern of violence. By asking for a clear instruction, he can hold Kṛṣṇa responsible for his own inauthenticity and escape the responsibility for his actions.

I want you to understand that asking for a single instruction itself is from the violence. And if the single instruction is given, that is encouraging your violence., only inspiration should be given. Before you take up any philosophy the first quality you should check for in that philosophy is this—how does it introduce yourself to you?

If any religion gives you a manual, that religion is born from violence and will continue to flourish in violence. In the Bhagavad Gītā, you will rarely see Kṛṣṇa giving Arjuna instructions. All seven hundred verses are literally nectars of inspiration uttered out of Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa’s love and compassion. They are all inspiring, empowering and enriching. Nowhere will you see instructions!

You see, in the beginning of Gītā when Arjuna says, ‘Leave me, I am going and becoming Sannyāsi.’ Bhagavān Kṛṣṇa says, ‘No!’ He asks him to fight. Later, when Arjuna is asking, ‘Why should I act? How can I fight?’ Bhagavān tells him about Sannyāsa, how to become a Sannyāsi.

Arjuna is supposed to fight, but he is being taught the knowledge of completion with Sāṅkhya Yoga! He is being taught to meditate with one full chapter for dhyāna yoga and he is being taught the different great aspects of Sannyāsa yoga! Karma-Sannyāsa Yoga! Jñānakarma-Sannyāsa Yoga!

This is the beauty of Hinduism! No single instruction can work because the root pattern of asking for a single instruction is violence. Why? Because we feel either we should be alive or the other person should be alive. The mentality of fighting and violence always excludes. The root of the problem should be solved. Anything that talks about one and only one solution is born out of survival instinct, never out of inspiration.

What Arjuna leaves unsaid is, ‘What use is knowledge if it cannot be used in action?’ Arjuna is a kṣatriya, a warrior, not a brāhmin, a scholar or a philosopher. Philosophers can keep arguing for both sides of an issue, without bothering about any logic. They are only interested in advertising their so-called knowledge. But warriors are men of action. They have no time to waste in idle talk. So Arjuna says, ‘Cut out all this superficiality; tell me the truth as it is. Tell me what I should do.’ True to his conditioning, Arjuna is uncomfortable when he is not in action; when he has no clearly defined purpose and motivated instructions before him.

Your whole life is purposeless, but again and again, you are conditioned to run towards something—whether it is in material life or spiritual life. Some goal is always put in front of you. The so-called goals in material life or spiritual life continuously make you feel you are not good enough. Just understand, whatever you think of as your purpose in life, whether it is money or relationships or name and fame, even if you have fulfillment in that dimension, you will not rest, you will not be complete!

Someone told me this, I believe a management consultant said it, ‘If you place a ladder somewhere and climb as fast as you can, you will quickly reach the top of the ladder. But unless the ladder is placed where you want, where you reach will be of no consequence!’ Climbing as fast as you can is efficiency. We all think we are very efficient. Placing the ladder where you want is effectiveness. Not all of us know where to place the ladder. So, the consultant says to focus on where to place the ladder.

But I say even he is mistaken. It does not matter where you place the ladder as long as you enjoy the climb! As long as your ‘why’ is with the right context, with completion as your root cognition, ‘what’ and ‘where’ does not matter. More than your actions, it is the space from which the actions are done, and the context and reason from which the actions are done that matter!

The trouble is that we spend the entire climb obsessed with where we will reach and what we will do there. If we spend that time enjoying and being enriched by the journey, any destination we reach will be the right destination. The destination is not important; the journey is. The goal is not important; the process, the path is.

We are always greedy for more. We continuously pursue material goals. As a result, we never relax within ourselves. That is why even when we become old we are unable to relax. Have you seen a single man above seventy relaxing? People can never sit with themselves! If they have company, they will start talking about their golden past. If they don’t have company, they will watch television or read the same old newspaper, from the first line to the last with a big magnifying glass! They just can’t sit with themselves.

A man who can’t sit with himself misses one of the major dimensions of his being. Continuously running, thinking there is some purpose to life, his whole being will be in a state of tension, conditioned to running out of compulsion, never out of completion.

Root thought pattern is nothing but this first social conditioning, this strong cognition which imbalances you from your purposeless space and gives birth to the mind, the idea that there is some purpose to life. Life has no purpose. Even if you achieve whatever you want, you can’t take it with you. You can’t carry even a single dollar when you leave. Nothing will come with you.

There is no exchange offer. If you give fifty rupees in India, you will get one dollar in USA. But no matter how much money you give in this world, you cannot get a single rupee in heaven or anywhere else. No cheque will be useful. None of your money can be carried over to the next world.

The only currency that works everywhere in existence is completion. As of now, this material world appears four-dimensional and multi-colored as you enjoy it with all your senses. The moment you leave the body, the same world will appear black and white, one dimensional. When you are dreaming, your dream looks and feels very real. When you are awake, this world around you looks like reality and the dream looks dull. But there is no scale to determine the reality and the dream.

People tell me, ‘But everyday when we enter a dream, we are not entering the same dream, Swamiji. Yet, everyday when we return to reality we are entering the same reality. So with this scale we can tell the reality apart from the dream.’

Listen, in one night’s dream you can live even 20 years of life, am I right? Don’t you sometimes have such dreams where in one night’s dream you live 20 years of life? Then why can’t your dream be reality, because of its consistency? This whole life time span, which you think is reality, may be part of the dream! There is no scale to prove reality and the dream. When you leave the body, all you see now as multi-colour will become black and white.

Nothing can be carried with you at the time of leaving the body. You can’t cash your cheques! You can’t talk to your relatives. If you speak, they will run away! Your car will not be useful to you anymore. When you are not able to take anything with you, what is the purpose of life then? The moment you accept the beauty of purposelessness, you will realize the meaning of living.

Life has no purpose, but it has meaning. Purpose means goal orientation. You always think about the goal; you keep running and one day you just drop dead! The more goal-oriented you are, the more you will miss life and the more you will be incomplete.

Purpose is different from meaning. When I say ‘meaning’, living itself becomes meaningful. Come to this present moment of completion and the path itself is life; the path itself is meaningful.

There is no such thing as, ‘in the end you will be happy.’ You always postpone joy and so you always postpone living. Life is lived in a very superficial way because you think life has a purpose.

For the man who works just for his salary, only payday will be a beautiful day. He will be happy only on that day. He sells 29 days every month for that one day of happiness. I don’t say, ‘Don’t take your salary.’ But let it not be the only goal in your life. Let it not play a major role in your consciousness. That is what Kṛṣṇa means by these words: karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana (2.47)—you can do only your duty, you have no right to its fruit. If you think of the fruit, you will lose the joy of doing, living, enriching! The meaning of living is experienced only when you understand the beauty of purposelessness. This is a beautiful verse! It is the essence of the Gītā!

Two things you need to understand from this: One, He says, let your inner space not be contaminated by the purpose of life. When I say inner space, I mean your mind and how you feel about yourself, about things and life inside you. When you close your eyes, what comes into your mind is your inner space. If your inner space is filled with the purposes of life, be very clear you are running behind something which will never give you completion. He says, ‘Let your inner space not be disturbed or filled with purposes or incompletions.’

By nature, your inner space is the space of completion, it is filled with energy; your inner space, what you refer to as ātman, spirit or soul, is filled with blissful energy. The more you empty yourself of goals or incompletions, the more the space for completion and bliss.

For example, this room is filled with space. The more furniture you put in it, the more space will leave this room. This room is not empty; no place is empty. It is filled with space. This room is filled with the energy of ether. The more furniture you bring in, the more ether will be pushed out; the lesser will be the ether energy. In the outer space, if you furnish your home, it will look very nice. But if you furnish your inner space, it will look very ugly.

Completion straightaway gives you whatever you want and takes away whatever is not. The whole problem of humanity is what you want outside is not with you and what you don’t need inside in your inner space is with you. You need to empty your inside, which is filled with unnecessary furniture. You need to have all the necessary things outside.

Creating the inner space of completion with integrity and authenticity will immediately do that job. Completion will clear out all unnecessary things from your inner space. It will get you all that you need in the outer world. Don’t furnish your inner space. Let your inner space be empty. Of course then, it will never be empty. It will be filled with completion, pūrṇatva. It will be filled with bliss! The more complete inner space you create, the more blissful your life will be. That is what Kṛṣṇa means by saying, ‘Don’t be attached to results.’

If you continuously think about the result, you will never be able to perform your action with completion. You will always be goal-oriented and you will never enjoy and enrich the path of completion. Not enjoying and enriching the path is the worst hell you can be trapped in.

Again and again Kṛṣṇa says, ‘paritrāṇāya sādhūnāṁ vināśāya ca duṣkṛtām dharma saṁsthāpanārthāya saṁbhavāmi yuge-yuge (4.8).’ It means: I come down again and again to save the integrated and authentic, the complete and innocent people, and to destroy the evil-minded incomplete people.

People ask me, ‘You say dharma (responsibility to enrich) is the only thing to be practiced with integrity and authenticity, but in our lives we see people who are not living according to dharma, yet they are living more happily; they have more property, more wealth. Why is that?’ Understand, they may have more property, they may have more things in the outer space, but never think they are happy in their inner space; never think they are blissful.

When does someone not follow dharma? When he follows his ambition! Ambition causes you to go out of integrity and authenticity. Don’t think we go to hell because we commit sins. We commit sins because we are in hell. The very ambition is hell; there is no need for a separate hell. Don’t think we will reach a separate place called ‘hell’ at the end of our life.

If you are complete and blissful, you will never disturb others. If you are unhappy, naturally you will vomit that violence on others. The very ambition is punishment enough. Just because of their ambition, they miss authenticity in action, their whole life’s possibility.

You can easily miss life’s possibility by having a purpose to Life. Unless your thinking itself becomes integrated to your positivity, unless your working itself becomes authentic to the peak of your possibility, unless your life itself becomes the responsibility to enrich yourself and others, unless that itself becomes completion and bliss, you cannot experience what Kṛṣṇa says in this verse: karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana (2.47).

Purpose can be fulfilled, but through purpose, your life can never be fulfilled. When you carry purposes in your life, you are not living; purposes are living through you, that’s all. In your childhood somebody gives you some purpose like, ‘You should become a lawyer or a doctor.’ You are given a purpose and that purpose is fulfilled through your life, but you will never feel fulfilled or complete.

Never make the mistake of thinking that you will be fulfilled when your purpose is fulfilled. Your fulfillment is completely different from the fulfillment of your purpose. If you want to experience fulfillment, the space of completion, you have to work in a totally different dimension of your life. If you want completion of your being, listen to what Kṛṣṇa says here.

Kṛṣṇa is the first and the last Master who declared the truth as it is. There are two things to understand: Always, people who are active in the outer world know the techniques to achieve success in the outer world. People who are active in the inner world know the techniques to achieve success in the inner world.

But Kṛṣṇa knows both! He is the only Master who is an enlightened man and a king as well. He knows how to achieve total success in the outer world and in the inner world. He shows you how to furnish your outer space with enriching, and how to keep your inner space empty with completion. That is life in totality.

The entire Gītā is only about this one idea: how to furnish your outer space with the ultimate luxuries and how to keep your inner space in the ultimate bliss.

Kṛṣṇa is the only one who has produced a formula for inner space and outer space together. He teaches you how to keep your inner space in eternal bliss and keep your outer space in ultimate luxury at the same time. You can’t expect this from a Buddha because Buddha gave up the outer space. He lived with just three pieces of clothing and he lived the life of a monk. So he taught us how to remain simple and blissful.

But Kṛṣṇa lived as a king. He wasn’t just like a king, he was a king. Only Kṛṣṇa can give a complete solution for practical spiritual living. Kṛṣṇa gives immediate solutions, permanent solutions, not long-term solutions. Only Kṛṣṇa’s solution is useful for people who are living a regular lifestyle.

Here He says, ‘Not merely by abstaining from work can one achieve freedom from action. Nor can fulfillment come by giving up action.’ You can’t achieve freedom from action by moving away from work.

na karmanāṅ anārambhān naiṣkarmyaṁ puruṣo ‘śnute I na ca sannyasanād eva siddhiṁ samadhigacchati II 3.4

Every step in your life, anything you try to protect by hiding only becomes more and more powerlessness and more and more suffering. You move out of your life more and more. Moving away from your spouse, business partner, family or any of the forces that exist in your life is not an intelligent decision. We always think moving away from people or actions to protect our habits and patterns is freedom. That is the biggest bondage! People who move away from life, work and people to save their pattern are in the worst bondage!

Abstaining from work or moving away from work cannot give you freedom from action. It puts you in the biggest bondage. To have freedom from action, your inner space needs to be purified. Your inner space should become empty to allow the natural space of completion in you. You need to remove the furniture of incompletions from your complete inner space. Renouncing furniture in the outer world is not going to help you. Only removing furniture from the inner world is going to enrich you.

Please understand, whether you are hiding something inside you from life or trying to hide something outside you from life, your own incompletions will destroy you. You don’t need a separate punishment.

Life is too powerful to cheat it with your logic. It functions with a simple, natural law of Existence, a natural dharma. The power of the natural law of Existence is such that nobody needs to teach you. By your very birth, if you start growing, you will get it!

The inauthentic idea that life has a purpose should be renounced. Life is a possibility, not purpose. That is why Kṛṣṇa says, ‘Just by renouncing, just by outer renunciation, authenticity in action, karma yoga can never be achieved.’

What is authenticity? Building your own identity to the peak possibility and renouncing the identity built on purpose. What do you want to become? Every one of you, deep down, has a fantasy about becoming all-powerful, all-knowing, sarvajña. So now build that peak inner image, project the peak outer image, and take the responsibility to fulfill others’ image of you.

I tell you, authenticity in action is the strategy plan for your life. The quality of cunningness may be useful for a short time—a few days, a few years, a few lives, but not for all lives! If you learn and develop the quality of authenticity in action, it is the strategy planning for life after life. Authenticity will help you identify your real enemy. Your real enemy is not the powerlessness you experience in moving away or running after a purpose; it is ignorance of your purposelessness! One more thing, if you renounce the outer world, you will think about the outer world even more.

A small story:

An Enlightened Master and his disciple were walking near a river. They were supposed to cross the river to go to their monastery (ashram). On the way, a young lady was standing near a river. She wanted to cross the river but was afraid to do so.

She asked the Master, ‘Master, can you help me cross this river?’ He said, ‘Why not? Please come.’

He just lifted her, crossed the river, left her on the other bank, and continued walking towards the ashram. The disciple was observing the whole scene. He was not able to digest what he saw. He was angry. Maybe he was jealous!

After reaching the ashram he was not able to control himself and asked his master, ‘Master, you are a Sannyāsi (monk). How can you touch a woman, that too a young woman, and carry her through the river?’

The Master turned, smiled at him and said, ‘I left her long ago. Why are you still carrying her?’

Please understand, renouncing your identity in the inner space, or emptying your inner space and creating the space of completion and creation is the real thing to be achieved. That is yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam, authenticity in action! That is what Kṛṣṇa says here. Once you have renounced in the inner space, it doesn’t matter what you do in the outer world. Nothing will touch you.

3.5 Surely, not even for a moment can anyone stand without doing something. He is always in action, despite himself, as this is his very nature.

3.6 He who restrains the sense organs, but who still thinks of the objects of the senses, is deluded and is called a hypocrite.

3.7 He who begins controlling the senses with the mind and performs selfless work through the organs of action is superior, O Arjuna.

3.8 Do your prescribed work, as doing work is better than being idle. Even your own body cannot be maintained without work. Usually people ask, ‘Swamiji, you say that life is purposeless. Then I may as well just lie down and relax. Who will give me food? Who will pay my bills?’

Let me tell you, you can never lie down forever. You may lie down for the next four or five days or for a week at the most, because you always go to the extreme, like a pendulum. After that, you will not be able to lie down. By your very nature you will start doing some work. When I say life is purposeless, I am not asking you to just lie down and relax in your house. All I am saying is, ‘Let your body and mind work without disturbing your inner space of completion. You don’t have to sell your inner space to enjoy the outer place. You don’t have to sell your inner bliss to have outer comforts.’

Here, Kṛṣṇa assures you, ‘By your very nature, your body and mind will work. If you just keep quiet, it is enough.’ Somebody asked me, ‘Swamiji, how should I train my mind to do the right thing?’ I told him, ‘Just keep quiet. Automatically your body and mind will do the right thing. If you just get out of your system, it is enough, the Divine will get in.’ All we need to do is just get out for the Divine to enter.

‘By nature,’ He says, ‘sarvaḥ prakṛti-jair-guṇaiḥ—by their very nature your body and mind know the right thing to do.’ The problem is that you never trust your body and mind. You always trust your ego and it finally dumps you! Yet you never trust your body and mind. Be very clear, your body and mind will do their work. All you need to do is keep quiet and relax from your ego. Don’t think your inner space is needed for outer work. The person who understands what nitya (eternal) is, and what anitya (ephemeral) is relaxes into Existence and is always in eternal consciousness. He always resides in nitya ānanda—eternal bliss!

Śrī Kṛṣṇa says, ‘A karma yogi, one who lives the path of authenticity in action, is a man who relaxes into nitya ānanda and does his work from the space of completion.’

Just relax into your inner space and be complete, you will automatically be guided. You always think, ‘If I relax mentally thinking life is purposeless, how will I know what is right and what is wrong? How will I finish my work on time?’

When you worry about what is right and what is wrong, you will not make small mistakes, you will commit big blunders. The person who doesn’t worry may make small mistakes. But the person who continuously worries will never make small mistakes; he will commit big blunders. And to take this leap of faith needs the courage of authenticity. Even if you make one or two mistakes, what is wrong?

Taking the risk and jumping into the space of completion, and living without worry and self-doubt is what I call courage of authenticity, the courage to enter spiritual life.

When you take the jump, you will naturally make some small mistakes. Don’t worry about them. Putting up with that mistake is what I call penance, tapas. Penance is nothing but accepting and completing with the small mistakes you make and restoring your integrity and authenticity when the conscious transition happens in your being.

When you move from worry to bliss, when you move from falsehood to truth, when you move from incompletion to completion, you will make a few mistakes. You will fall and rise just like a baby learning to walk. When babies learn to walk, they always fall the first few times. But just because of that, can you say they should never walk? Even if they make one or two small mistakes, they have to stand up and start walking. Those small mistakes of falling and trying to stand up are the penance done to learn how to walk.

In the same way, when you start trying to live with integrity and authenticity without the root patterns, initially you may commit mistakes. But don’t worry about that. That is penance. Have courage of authenticity and just enter the space of completion. Enter the space of eternal consciousness.

Decide consciously, ‘From today onwards, I will live without worry and incompletions. I complete with all my worries and incompletions.’ Life is too short to be spent worrying about your incompletions. Don’t bother about the goals—just drop them. The moment you understand the beauty of purposelessness, all the wounds you have created in your inner space will be healed. You will fall into the comfort of Eternal Bliss.

A man who keeps his senses under control but who is not able to keep his inner space under control by completing with his patterns related to senses is called a hypocrite, indriyārthān vimūḍhātmā mithyācāraḥ sa ucyate (3.6), says Kṛṣṇa.

Please listen, the quality of your life will be judged only based on the quality of your inner space, not the quality of your outer space. When you leave your body and enter your next life, nobody is going to keep a count of the car you drove, of the house you lived in or your bank balance. These details will not come with you. How you lived and the quality of your inner space is what will carry forward with you. That is why the scriptures state, ‘You are going to carry with you only the saṃskāra (root thought patterns), the karma (unfulfilled desires) and the vāsana (mindset) of your inner space—not the outer space.’

A beautiful story from Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahamsa.

A monk was living in a temple, preaching the glory of the Lord. Opposite to his dwelling lived a prostitute who was busy all day long. She was deeply devoted to the Lord. No matter what her business was, she was immersed in the silent contemplation of His glory.

Everyday, this monk would notice everyone who entered the prostitute’s house. He maintained a complete diary of who came and who left because he had no other work.

But the prostitute lived in a different way. She thought, ‘My life, my natural duty is this. This has been given to me in this life. I don’t know any other profession. But please save me, O Lord! Let my mind and heart always be at Your feet.’ She was deeply devoted to Kṛṣṇa. Her inner space was filled with Divine love and His name.

Life went on. After many years, suddenly, both the monk and the prostitute died on the same day.

Both of them reached Yama Dharma’s (Lord of death) court for judgment. First, the prostitute came in. Yama Dharma saw her list of sins and merits and said, ‘Alright! Don’t worry. You lived all your life thinking of the Divine, so you can go to heaven.’ She was sent to heaven.

It was then the turn of the monk. The moment the monk arrived, Yama Dharma said, ‘This is your list of sins and merits. Throughout your life you thought about the wrong things, so you must go to hell.’

The monk started shouting, ‘How dare you send me to hell!’ He was a professional preacher, so he knew how to shout! He started shouting, ‘I will sue you.’

Yama Dharma said, ‘Please relax. Up here in heaven we don’t bother about what you do in life; we bother about how you live. Through your body you lived a pure life. Look at planet Earth and see how your body is being honored.’

There the monk saw that his body was being honored like that of a celebrity; people were falling at the feet of his body. Big garlands and grand worship was being offered.

Yama continued, ‘Through your body you lived a pure life and your body is now getting the rewards. But through your mind you lived an impure life so you have to go to hell.’

Yama continued, ‘Similarly, she lived an impure life through the body. Look at her body.’ Because she was a prostitute, there was no one to do the last rites. The scavengers came and dragged the body and dumped it somewhere.

Yama concludes, ‘See! Through the body she lived an impure life. Her body is suffering. But through the mind she lived a pure life, a divine life. She is therefore going to the Divine.’

It is important how you live in your inner space; whether your inner space is established in completion or incompletion, only that matters.

Please be very clear, again and again Kṛṣṇa declares:

karmendriyāṇi saṁyamya ya āste manasā smaran I indriyārthān vimūḍhātmā mithyācāraḥ sa ucyate II 3.6

If you can’t create completion in your inner space, even if you control your body or your senses, you are just a hypocrite. Your life will not be a complete, blissful life. Not only will it not be a spiritual life, it will not even be life! The meaning of living is bliss, but there is no purpose. The more you think about purposes, the more worries you will create; the more will you try to squeeze the most out of life. But life is much more intelligent than you. When you try to squeeze the maximum out of life, it just slips through your fingers.

Life is like a river. If you place your hands in the river and keep them open, the river will always be there in your hands. But if you try to hold it, you will have only empty hands! If you just allow it to happen it will continuously flow through you. The moment you try to possess it, you will have only empty hands. You will not be able to have life itself.

The moment you experience, in your inner space, that nothing is going to be with you permanently, a deep healing, a breeze enters your consciousness. Your whole inner space is healed. You have so many wounds of incompletions in your inner space. Wounds created by your incomplete desires, by your failures, and by your near and dear ones. All these wounds will be healed with this one medicine. This one understanding that life is purposeless, that whatever you achieve is just nothing, and that nothing is going to be with you, is enough.

A small story:

Alexander, who committed so many murders, can never be called ‘the Great.’ Please be very clear: never teach your kids that Alexander is great. You are inspiring them to commit murders! Unconsciously, you are putting all these ideas into their heads. Of course, fortunately or unfortunately, he met an enlightened Master in India. Somehow, his teacher in Greece gave him the idea, ‘Bring one Enlightened Master and the Vedas from India, and I will change the whole society.’

So, Alexander decided he would take at least one enlightened person from India. He invited him to his country. The Master just laughed and said, ‘No, no! I don’t want to come anywhere. I am happy here.’

Alexander said, ‘No! Please come with me. I will give you a big palace and all the comforts. Here you are living like a beggar without clothes or food.’ The Master just laughed and said, ‘No. I am quite happy here, I don’t want to come.’

You know the next step a king will take. First, he tried to entice him. When it did not work out, the next step, he tried the fear factor. He simply took out his sword, pointed it at the Master and said, ‘If you are not ready to come, you will be killed.’

Faced with the naked sword, the master just laughed. Laughing now is very easy, but laughing when faced with a naked sword is very difficult, especially when the person who is holding the sword is a king— if he kills nobody will even question him.

But in front of the naked sword, the Master laughed and said, ‘Fool! You are a liar.’ He straightaway looked into the eyes of Alexander and said, ‘Fool! You are a liar.’

For the first time Alexander was shaken. He asked the Master, ‘ Are you not afraid?’

The Master replied, ‘Afraid of what? You can never kill me. You may destroy this body, but you cannot kill me.’

That is the courage of authenticity and the confidence of integrity gained by the spiritual experience of completion as we study in Sāṅkhya Yogaḥ:

nai ’naṁ chindanti śastrāṇi nai ’naṁ dahati pāvakaḥ I na cai ’naṁ kledayantyāpo na śoṣayati mārutaḥ II 2.23

It means: ātman or the soul cannot be killed or destroyed; it cannot be burned. This had become an experience for the Master. That is why he had such courage and confidence. He just laughed.

Slowly, Alexander started thinking, ‘If he can laugh in front of my naked sword, how courageous he must be!’ For the first time he was shaken, because he had never seen anybody who could laugh in front of a naked sword, in the face of death. Even he was afraid.

Listen. All the so-called great warriors are cowards. They kill others before they are killed, that’s all. They live in constant fear of death. Alexander was totally shaken and shocked to see the courage of this Master.

He asked him, ‘Please tell me something. How are you so courageous, so bold?’

The Master asked him in return, ‘Tell me, why did you come to India?’

Alexander replied, ‘To conquer India.’ The Master continued, ‘After that, what are you going to do?’ Alexander replied confidently, ‘I will conquer the next country.’ The Master again asked, ‘After that, what are you going to do?’ Alexander continued, ‘I will conquer the next country.’

The Master persisted, ‘And after that?’ Alexander replied as if the answer was obvious, ‘I will conquer the whole world.’The Master questioned further, ‘After that?’ Alexander replied, ‘I will relax and enjoy.’

The Master said, ‘Fool! Don’t you see, that is what I am doing now in front of your eyes? Why do you need to go around and conquer the whole world to relax and enjoy?’

Only a man who has understood the impermanence of life can relax and surrender totally even in the face of death. The Master gave a glimpse of the Truth to Alexander. That is why Alexander said to his ministers, ‘After my death, during the funeral procession, please let both my hands hang out of the coffin, visible to all. Let people know that even the great Alexander could not carry anything with him’.

A beautiful story! You need to understand three things. The first thing is the courage of authenticity, the space of possibility and confidence of integrity, the space of positivity radiated by an enlightened person, the one established in space of completion. The next thing is the purposelessness of our running. Why was Alexander running? To relax and enjoy, to be complete in the Self. This Master was already doing the same thing! The third thing is that we are not going to carry anything with us when we leave. Even if the whole world worships you as a king, you cannot carry that with you! You have to go empty handed.

Never think that having comforts in the outer world will give you inner completion. All developed countries are filled with depression. They have the best roads, the best infrastructure, but their people are depressed. Never think outer space will give you inner space. If you want inner space, you need to work towards creating it. You need to understand the science of completion and the creation of inner space.

Here, Kṛṣṇa is giving you the science of creating the right inner space. Let us see how we work, or how our mind moves. This graph represents your being. Material life is the horizontal line and spiritual life is the vertical line. You continuously worry about whether to choose the horizontal line or the vertical line; whether to go on this (horizontal) path, or that (vertical) path.

You are always stuck somewhere on the horizontal line or somewhere on the vertical line. You try to move but you are always caught in the dilemma of whether to go this way or that way.

Mind is nothing but dilemma. Whaever you choose, whether material life or spiritual life, you will always feel you are missing the other part. You will continously feel you are missing something. As long as you think you are the mind, as long as you live with the mind, you will have this problem of material life verses spiritual life.

Just like people have goals in material life, they have goals in spiritual life too. There are so many people who say, ‘I should meditate for seven hours daily. I should become enlightened. I should become that, I should do this.’

Please listen, goals in material life and in spiritual life; both drive you mad. If you want to become mad, continuously think of some goal. But if you can just withdraw into your being, you will just forget about the goal. And you can still work. By withdrawing into your being, you stop trying to locate a purpose somewhere all the time and running towards it.

The man who runs behind the material goals, will always feel he is missing the spiritual goal. That is why all rich communities invariably follow spiritual masters. They carry a deep guilt and fear that they are missing spirituality. The person who travels along the horizontal line feels he is missing the spiritual life and the person who travels along the vertical line feels he is missing the material life. Both are trying to fulfill each other cerebrally. The materialist fulfills the spiritualist’s ideal and the spiritualist fulfills the materialist’s ideal.

The man who realizes the purposelessness of both these goals, the purposelessness of the running, just falls back into his being. When you realize that whatever you consider the purpose or goal of your life is ultimately meaningless, the very moment you realize this and the glamour is gone, that very moment the need for perspiration is also gone; you stop running.

Mind you, it is not inspiration; it is just perspiration that you give up! The moment all respect for the purpose is gone from your life, you will simply fall into your being. One important thing: The moment you fall into your being, you explode! Not only do you start flowing in the direction of both horizontal and vertical lines, but you also explode in 360 degrees in all dimensions. Whatever you can imagine and whatever you can’t even imagine will start happening. Only then do you become a truly multi-dimensional being.

A man who has fallen into his being, one who has dropped goals, who has tasted the beauty of purposelessness of Existence, who has realized the space of completion, who has fallen into his being, explodes in 360 degrees, in all dimensions. He simply radiates completion in all directions!

The space of completion or incompletion, purposelessness or purposefulness does not work horizontally, logically. It works vertically and explodes in all dimensions. A man who is in the space of incompletion can fall vertically down. A man in the space of completion flies vertically up. He starts experiencing the ultimate bliss of spiritual life and the ultimate happiness of material life and something more! Only he enters into eternal bliss or Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Travel with completion or incompletion is not horizontal, it is vertical. Whether you fall vertically down or fly vertically up, your idea of horizontal or linear traveling is wrong!

As long as you are caught up with material goals or spiritual goals, you travel only in one horizontal direction of incompletion, because you think you are body or mind. Sometimes people tell me, ‘I don’t want spiritual life. I don’t want these four tattvas, life principles.’ It is like saying, ‘I don’t want to breathe. I don’t want blood circulation.’ You need to understand that there is no such thing as spiritual life and normal life. Life has no purpose. Life is Life!

The more you are caught up with purposes, the more you think you are the body or the mind. When you realize the purposelessness of it all, you will straightaway fall into the depths of your being. Actually, to become complete and enlightened, you don’t need the whole Gītā. This single verse is enough to make an individual enlightened. Then why am I talking about all the verses? It is only because there are so many different kinds of individuals.

If you can, just look into yourself and understand this one verse for your self. Whenever I speak, understand that I am speaking to you. Don’t prepare notes in your mind to go and repeat it to somebody else. When you do this, you are sure to miss the experience yourself!

Just allow this one idea to work on you: the truth of the purposelessness of life. You can just close your eyes and think, contemplate for two or three minutes: ‘What is really the purpose of my life? Why am I doing what I am doing? Where am I going? What is happening?’ Many times you do not even know what you want to achieve in life; what the purpose of life is. It is just because of incompletions.

See, it is like each part of your incompletion claims, ‘I am you!’ For example, if your name is Sundar, each part of the broken you claims, ‘I am Sundar!’ ‘I am Sundar!’ and who screams loudly, he thinks he is Sundar. And one of the worst things is one part of you spends so much of energy to disprove that the other part is not you. So finally, whoever wins, whoever loses, who is the loser? You! One part of you winning is not you winning. Even if one part of you wins, you are the loser! Unless your whole wins, you are a loser!

Understand, each part of you screaming that that part is you finally lands you in deep confusion. Unless you heal yourself and bring yourself to purposelessness, unless you align yourself as one being, life doesn’t start for you! Only with deep completion you even become one being. The purpose of all great spiritual practices is for you to become ONE; for you to be complete, integrated!

If your inner eye opens, if your inner space experiences the beauty of purposelessness, that is enough to experience the space of completion. You will fall into your being. As of now, you can experience neither material life nor spiritual life because when you are here, you are looking there and when you are there, you are looking here. When you don’t have integrity, the life you want to have around you will change hour by hour. In the morning you will have one idea of a certain kind of life, at noon you will have a different idea and the next morning you will have some other idea.

With lack of integrity, there is such a huge confusion. Your mind is not where your body is. You are not living inside your boundary. The grass on the other side of the river always looks greener. Something else is always calling you. Only when you align yourself to integrity, you will experience the beauty of purposelessness, only then will you be able to understand what Kṛṣṇa says throughout Karma Yoga.

When you bring integrity into your thinking, you become aware of every anxiety you go through, every fear you go through; you see how you are responsible for creating negativity in your life, and you also see how you can align yourself with yourself, and the world can just align itself with you. When you are one being, the reality you want, the reality you need and the highest Reality, all three become one and the same.

Relax! This one idea can transform your whole way of thinking with integrity, working with authenticity, and living with responsibility. When you understand there is no purpose of life, you will start enriching and 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 life as a whole has a purpose, the individual moment will lose its meaning. If you think one month of your working time is worth 50 thousand dollars, you will judge the value of that one month as being only 50 thousand dollars. Suddenly, if someone says, ‘I will give you 50 million dollars, give me your life,’ will you be able to give him your life? No! But, this is the way you are calculating and working! We are ready to sell our mind, our moments, our inner space by calculating the value of our lives. You forget the work itself or living itself.

If you think the whole has a purpose, then the part loses its meaning. When you realize that the whole has no purpose, the part will become meaningful. Your very living, every day itself, will become very beautiful. Your life every day, your living, your sitting, your walking, your standing, everything will become a joyful, complete experience.That is why they say Sat-Cit-Ānanda, which means ‘the bliss of the very Existence.’ Your very existence is blissful. You don’t have to think that at the end of your life you will have bliss. Your very Existence is blissful. The meaning of existence is bliss, eternal bliss, Nityānanda. But you need to take steps towards that bliss.

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

Kṛṣṇa says very beautifully, ‘By nature, the senses are tuned to be extrovert.’ ‘Extrovert’ is not something negative. Extrovert senses will always be alive, creative, active and contributing. All great creative persons took the responsibility for their extrovert senses. If you want to be wealthy, have the company of wealthy people, or make the people in your company wealthy! If you want to be spiritual, have the company of spiritual people, or make the people in your company spiritual. There is no other way. Intranalyze what I am saying. To experience the reality of your choice in your life, you should first work to transform and enrich the reality of others around you.

Kṛṣṇa says, your senses, by nature are programmed to go out! You are programmed to work, to go out. Going out can happen only in two ways: either to enrich or to swindle! Surely, swindling others is not going to transform you. Only enriching others is going to transform you.

The choice is really about how to work. Here, Kṛṣṇa gives the answer to that. He says that we should perform work with devotion with authenticity in our actions, only to enrich, and without attachment to the results, karmendriyaiḥ karma-yogam asaktaḥ sa viśiṣyate (3.7). Work without unnecessarily being bothered about whether or not it will fetch the results that you expect.

When we work, our thoughts are on the future, we are not in the present moment. Am I right? Then how can we perform 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. When do you get worried or afraid? It is when you have an expected result, when there is an unwritten expectation, an unconscious desire to achieve something as the result of an action.

Kṛṣṇa says, ‘Drop the very desire and drop the very expectation.’ We wonder, ‘How can we function if we drop expectations?’ I am not saying you should not plan and or you should 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 to get up at a particular time, 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 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 again, thinking in different ways, internally preparing for eventualities, expecting results from our plan even before the action. We keep supposing, ‘What if this happens? What if that happens?’ Psychological planning boosts your ego, your root pattern. It makes you feel great and worthy. It makes you stay serious and feel that you are handling great things.

It is very unfortunate, but we carry a strong pattern that we should be ready to accept failure, because failure is a part of life. Then you are constantly giving a commitment to you that there is going to be failure. You always internally prepare yourself for failure. When you prepare, you usually remind yourself of the worst possibilities and then prepare tools and weapons to handle it. In the name of contingency planning, we just worry and give a commitment to failure. Instead, if we apply our awareness to the problem with integrity in thinking and authenticity in action, the solution will be visible. But we complicate the whole process. We get worked up about contingency situations and introduce a complex negativity in the whole thinking process.

It is the power of completion that empowers you to face the worst eventualities. Preparation for the worst eventualities mentally strengthens your belief in failure. Are you successful in handling any eventualities by preparation? So, from today, decide, you will not mentally prepare yourself for the worst eventualities. You will spend all your energy removing the weed of the worst eventuality from your inner space. Now have awareness inside. You have never handled the worst possibilities because of preparation. You always handled the worst possibilities because of your completion! If you are in the space of completion, you face the worst possibilities in completion and win!

Kṛṣṇa says, ‘One who does devotional work with authenticity, without attachment, and controlling the senses—yas tv indriyāṇi manasā niyamyārabhate arjuna, is superior to one who merely pretends to be in control of his senses and acts in renunciation, karmendriyaiḥ karmayogam asaktaḥ sa viśiṣyate (3.7).’

There are intellectual type of people, the philosophers, well versed in the scriptures, who look down upon the devotional and emotional practitioners! Intellectuals believe that their dry understanding of the non-duality of the Self is superior to that of those who fall at the feet of the Divine. Kṛṣṇa firmly says, ‘No, it is not so!’ Kṛṣṇa says that what makes the difference is your space of completion that brings lack of expectations of either failure or success, the sense of purposelessness that defines your state.

Listen, listen! The senses are extrovert, flowing naturally. By nature, they function towards achieving, purposelessly. It means that you are programmed by nature to be successful. The natural programming is for you to be successful. Lack of integrity allows the poison of preparing for failure, for the worst eventualities to grow in your system. The first thing a human being needs to do is weed out all worst possibilities.

Sannyāsa, renunciation, is a state, not a label. 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 prāna, the life energy that sustains you. So, you cannot say you are not doing anything.

You may think it is better not to do any work rather than to analyze what work you should do, how to do it, whether it will suit you etc. You can take this as an excuse for laziness, for your tamas. Tamas means laziness, lethargy. When Kṛṣṇa says, ‘I am not the doer, it is just the senses performing 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 are by nature, forced and programmed to do something. Just try to sit with a completely blank mind, with no mental activity. Just relax and try this simple exercise. You will initially try not to think about anything and try to be aware if any thought comes to your mind. But, after a few moments, you will find yourself having some random thoughts, about something from the past or the future. By nature, your mind will think about something or the other. If you try to force silence upon 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, your mind will express its nature and start wandering.

So, neither expression nor suppression is the solution. Only completion is the solution. It is better to—complete with yourself to bring integrity to the nature of the senses and the mind, and be engaged with authenticity in action, with a sense of devotion to enrich others and yourself. Be aware that 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 consider yourself ‘the doer’ and have expectations about things being a certain way.