Act, Don't Worry About The Result🔗

The entire teaching of Bhagavad Gita can be summarized in the above two verses. The sheer brilliance of the wisdom of the universal master is reflected in these verses. Whenever I get a chance I refer to these verses to explain how one should lead one's life.

Krishna says many, many things in these few words. He says, 'You have the right and responsibility to work. You have no responsibility or right to the results of that work. Do not focus on the result and make it either an object of greed to chase or fear to stay away from. Do what you have to do with a centered mind without worrying about whether you will succeed or fail.'

Nothing more can be said or ever needs to be said about why and how one should perform.

Many people miscommunicate these verses and misunderstand these verses. There are people who stay away from work that they fear may end in adverse results. As long as the results can be positive either to themselves or others, they will carry out what they are assigned sincerely. But when they think that something bad may happen, they will stop doing whatever they are doing.

There are others who feel that doing nothing and disengaging from all action is the best solution, since all actions result in reactions and they accumulate karma.

Of course, almost all of us go on blindly doing whatever we are told to do when we see money or material rewards in front of us.

Krishna says, ‘Stop! Who do you think you are? You are here to do My work. You have no right to take the results that are Mine.’ His position is similar to that of a landowner who has sharecroppers working on the land. The sharecroppers have no right to anything but their sustenance wages. They need not worry about whether the land will yield well or not. All that they need to do is meet their own responsibilities in caring for the land. The landlord is the owner and ultimate beneficiary.

Awareness of what Krishna says here is the solution to almost all our day-to-day problems. Do what you have to do, without worrying about the results.

Do not act with hopes of a certain reward. Do not stop doing what you need to do because you are afraid of what may lie ahead.

Many of us in corporate life are focused on results. We will do something only if we think that it will be effective. We get caught in the result even before we start. So how do we define what is effective? For whom should it be effective?

Ninety percent of the time effectiveness is interpreted as something that benefits our self interest. Even if it benefits the organization, we do it because our performance will be recognized and we will be rewarded.

We learn this lesson early in life. Our parents and elders teach us this rule from infancy. ‘Do this and we shall reward you; do that and we will punish you.’ We are all brought up with the conditioning of what is good for us and what is bad for us, what will be successful or what will be a failure. Both success and failure are based on anticipated rewards or punishments.

Society operates on this principle of greed and fear to prevent us from doing actions that it does not want us to do. Religions do the same. Society threatens you with legal punishment here and now; religion threatens you with punishment in the hereafter, in hell. What is hell or heaven? Do they exist? No, they do not. Be very clear, they exist only in the minds of temple priests and preachers, so that they can download these images into you and control you. In fact, it is these people who are creating circumstances of hell for themselves by misleading people in these ways.

You are not true to yourself, your spirit, your energy, when you say one thing and do another. You do not walk your talk. The word ācārya in Sanskrit is the word for a true teacher. It means one who walks with the student, one who walks his talk, one who is true to his word. When I ordain teachers of my practices and mission, I tell them only one thing: Walk your talk.

When you walk your talk and your talk is true, then you do not have a problem, but if the talk itself is untrue, then your walk and your actions will also be untrue. Ultimately it is all about the truth, your awareness, and being in the present moment. If what you preach comes from awareness and the truth of your own experience, and you act in accordance with that truth and awareness, then there is no differentiation between thoughts, words and actions. All will be true.

In the Bible there is the beautiful parable of the prodigal son.

A man has two sons. He splits his wealth between the two of them. One of them goes away with the money and spends it foolishly. The other stays with the father, takes care of the wealth and the father. Years later the son who went away comes back penniless. The father greets him warmly and throws a party to welcome him, and kills the ‘fatted calf’ on this special occasion. The other son is very annoyed and expresses his displeasure. The father says, ‘You are always with me and you can count on my love; this boy, this prodigal son, needs my attention.’

If you look deeply into this parable, you will understand that the father is acting on the truth of his experience and the son is acting out of expectation.

The son feels he has been good, so he needs to be rewarded, and the prodigal son has been bad and needs to be punished.

We are all prodigal sons in this world. If the universal energy, which we call God, were to treat us based on what we may seem to deserve, then none of us have any hope! All of us will end in hell as the preachers promise.

What Krishna says here is the law of Nature. Nature just is. Nature just acts. Nature does not think about end results, successes or failures. Nature does not look for rewards, nor is it concerned about punishments.

People ask me, ‘Swamiji, why is nature so cruel? Why are there natural disasters? Why do young children die?’ The answer is what Krishna gives. Nature goes about its job without any thought about what the end result will be. What happens will happen. It is bound to happen. Nature follows its dharma, its path of righteousness. The problem is that we do not understand the laws of nature; we measure natural actions by our yardstick of logic.

You will then ask me, ‘How do we know what to do? How do we know what is the path of righteousness? How do we know what our dharma is? Do we decide we are a kṣatriya, therefore we should fight and kill and not worry about who dies, or, we decide we are a vaiśya, a businessman, in which case our dharma is to make money without worrying about how we make money?’

No, Krishna is not talking about acting in selfishness; the universal master is talking about acting in awareness. He says, ‘Be centered in yoga and drop all attachment to results; do what you have to do.’

What beautiful wisdom!

Yoga is union, union of man and divine. It is your realization of your own Self, your realization that you are divine. It is the state of awareness, the state of truth, the state of the present, when all that you do will be in righteous consciousness. When you perform with this awareness, and with no expectations, you will do what is right and just.

Our thoughts are unconnected, illogical and unpredictable. It is only when we link thoughts together that problems start and suffering happens. We remember a few out of hundreds of events and try to create a link between these few. Ninety percent of what we observe and experience is never recorded by our conscious memory; it just slips into our unconscious. So what we remember is ten percent of what we experience. Within that, what stays in our memory is always that which falls outside the pattern. If it is part of a normal pattern we will almost always ignore and forget the event.

Just think... when you drive to work, if you see a beggar every day at a street corner, after a while his presence is no longer noteworthy, am i right? It is only if he is absent that you will say to yourself, ‘Hey, that beggar is not there today!’ If your spouse is always in a grumpy mood, it is no surprise if he or she is in a grumpy mood today too. But if your spouse is specially caring and loving today, then that would be a miracle and noteworthy!

The trouble is that our mind picks up these exceptions, because that is what it remembers and uses to form a pattern. It forgets all other evidence and remembers only the exceptions. It then expects that exception to happen again. When it does not happen we are unhappy; if it does, we are happy till the next time when it does not happen.

So, do not link thoughts and create a shaft of thoughts. Unclutch from your thoughts, and automatically the mind will drop. This is the way to stay in the

present. Some of you misunderstand the word unclutched as ‘not to do anything.’ You think that to drop the mind is to be passive, inactive, doing nothing. No, not at all!

You can be doing nothing and yet occupy your mind fully. That is what they mean by saying that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. When you have nothing to do, what you end up doing is creating fantasies.

Inaction is not what is advised. Understand: When your mind drops, when thoughts cease, and your energy level is high, you cannot be inactive. You will act spontaneously out of sheer necessity. Physical and mental idleness are never produced by a no-thought mind. One must not link idleness with calmness. One with a no-thought mind dwells in peace, calmness and harmony, but is always alert to act spontaneously in the way that would best suit each situation and every moment.

With a no-thought mind comes great awareness and energy; idleness or lethargy is far from it. A confused and furiously overworked mind is constantly occupied with chatter and fantasies that can result in apathy and idleness.

When you are in a state of an unclutched mind, you are in awareness and you are in the present moment. Whatever you do in such a state of awareness would be the right thing to do. When you are in the present moment, regrets of your past and expectations of the future are absent from your mind. You are not influenced either by fear or greed regarding the outcome. You do what you have to do.

That is why Krishna says that you must act in the present moment. He says, ‘Do not get attached to the results of your action, nor get attached to inaction, thinking that it could be an easy way out of this problem.’