3

Karma Yoga

I have been born many times, Arjuna, and many times hast thou been born. But I remember my past lives, and thou hast forgotten thine.” We’ve seen that Krishna’s whole first presentation to Arjuna, the first seed of what is called “the higher wisdom,” hinges on the reincarnational perspective he spells out in that quote.

Krishna has begun to lay out for Arjuna these various alternative justifications for why he should get on with it, why he should enter into the battle of Kurukshetra, which is the struggle of dharma versus adharma, of the spirit versus the worldly, and his first argument is one you would offer to a materialist, to somebody who is very worldly: Just do your dharma, and don’t worry about it. Everybody has to die sooner or later. Krishna says, “For all things born, in truth, must die, and out of death, in truth, comes life. Face to face with what must be, cease thou from sorrow.” He’s saying, Look: you’re going to die eventually, and so are all those people on the other side. Death follows birth—that’s the way the game is designed. If you don’t kill them, something else will. Their karma is merely acting itself out through you—what are you getting so upset about? It’s all inevitable, it’s all in the cards.You’re just the vehicle for its happening.

Well, that argument doesn’t do much for Arjuna; he still isn’t persuaded. So then Krishna introduces a second argument. He says, Look, you’re going to have to do something. Do you think you can escape from acting? No way! Remember that Arjuna had told Krishna that he would fight, and had thrown down his bow. Krishna’s reply is, in effect,You’re not going to get out of it that easily.You simply can’t not act. You have to do something or other, and whatever you do will have some kind of karma connected with it.

In saying that, Krishna was directly countering an idea that was popular in spiritual circles at the time, one which had emerged from the Sankhya philosophy. The Sankhya philosophy centered around a polarity, a pair of opposites called purusha and prakriti—purusha being the inactive principle, and prakriti the active one. The two forces had very little to do with one another; the inactive one was always inactive, and the active one was always active.The game, according to Sankhya philosophy, was to escape from the active into the inactive state, and so the highest goal was to do nothing—just not to act.

Krishna contradicts that philosophy; he says, “Not by refraining from action does man attain freedom from action. For not even for a moment can a man be without action. Helplessly all are driven to action by the forces born of nature. He who withdraws himself from actions but ponders on their pleasures in his heart, he is under a delusion.”

That last line really gets to the core of it: “He who withdraws himself from actions but ponders on their pleasures in his heart [emphasis added], he is under a delusion.” That’s the one where you’re busy not doing something. It’s like when you meet somebody who has “Given Up Smoking!”—and that’s totally who they are. “Who are you?” “I’m somebody who hasn’t smoked for two weeks, four hours, and thirty-two minutes.” In their thought-forms, they’re smoking at least a pack an hour!

So Krishna is saying to Arjuna,You can’t avoid acting, and trying to not act when your desires are still strong just puts you “under a delusion,” it makes you phony holy. In other words, you’re not going to get out of your predicament by just sitting around.

We can see the way Krishna is building his arguments for Arjuna. He’s said, Look—your family, your friends—they’re all going to die anyway. That’s argument number one. And, he’s said, you can’t not act—you’re going to have to do something or other. That’s argument number two. And now Krishna brings in the punch line in a way that speaks very forcefully to Arjuna, because it comes from a level that Arjuna is especially tuned to hear. Krishna says to him, “Do your duty.”

Arjuna is a kshatria, a warrior, a doer, so Krishna casts his clinching argument in the form Arjuna will best appreciate: “Think thou also of thy duty,” Krishna tells him, “and do not waver. There is no greater good for a warrior than to fight in a righteous war.There is a war that opens the door to heaven, Arjuna. Happy the warrior whose fate is to fight such a war.”

(Keep in mind that this is our war, this is the inner war that each of us faces, and hear Krishna’s comment as directed to us. “Happy [emphasis added] the warrior”—it’s our grace to fight this battle, because this is the war that “opens the door to heaven.”)

If you don’t do your duty, Krishna warns Arjuna, you watch what happens: everything will turn sour for you: “The great warriors will say that thou hast run from the battle through fear, and those who thought great things of thee will speak of thee in scorn.” (The threats, you’ll notice, are aimed at Arjuna’s kshatria pride, at his ego. Krishna is using ego as a prod to get Arjuna to do his dharma, which will move him beyond ego.) Krishna goes on, “To forego this fight for righteousness is to forego thy duty and honor.”

Krishna is raising the concept of dharma here, how you do your dharma and what happens if you don’t. “Dharma” is a very complex word; it has many different meanings. But for now let’s stick to its most traditional use in Hinduism, as meaning your duty to the higher law. Fighting this war is your dharma, Krishna says, so not to fight it is to fall into transgression, no matter what your social roles and models might seem to tell you. If you were able to grasp the whole scope of this drama, Krishna is saying, you’d understand that it’s your dharma to play out your role in this struggle. It’s what you’re here to do. He says, “Arise, therefore, Arjuna, with thy soul ready to fight.”

“Duty” is one of the highest obligations for a kshatria; it goes very deep. So when Krishna frames dharma in those terms and calls Arjuna to do his duty, it’s a powerful argument from Arjuna’s kshatria perspective. But although that’s the power of the argument for Arjuna, it’s not really where Krishna is coming from in making the argument. He’s not calling Arjuna to do his duty out of a set of social demands, but out of his responsibility to a higher law.

There are subtle relationships at play between social duty and dharma, and the ways they interact. If you’re trying to act dharmically, you don’t determine your actions out of social duty—and yet you do use the social forms in which you find yourself as your way of expressing your dharmic path. Your karma will situate you in a particular place at a particular time so you can play out a particular role. That’s why you were born a kshatria, Krishna tells Arjuna—so he can play out this part and, in doing that, fulfill his dharma.

In Hindu tradition, the castes (of which the kshatria caste was one) were divisions in society based on birth and role; therefore, your caste defined your life through one set of coordinates. Then there were the ashramas, or stages of life. There are four of those. There is the period from birth to twenty, when you’re a student, when you’re learning. Then there’s the time from twenty to forty, when you’re a householder; you make the money that supports the whole system. Next there’s the stage from forty to sixty, when you do your religious study. And then from sixty on, you become a renunciate, a sunnyas—you let go of everything worldly, and turn your attention completely toward God.

That whole Hindu system of defining you according to those two sets of coordinates is called Chaturvarnashrama-dharma, the dharma of caste and ashrama. And between caste on the one hand and ashrama on the other, your life was laid out pretty clearly, like a plot on a grid. If you were a kshatria of a certain age, there would be a well-defined Vedic prescription for just what you ought to be doing today. It was called your swadharma, and it was an absolutely clear-cut structure, defining appropriate action. Krishna is standing squarely within that system when he says to Arjuna, Do your duty. Do what is appropriate.

We have more of a problem in our culture, trying to decide what’s appropriate. We don’t have castes and ashramas to tell us what we’re supposed to be doing at any given moment—in fact, we’re at the opposite end of the spectrum. There are very few clear, cultural prescriptions that are deeply ingrained in our society to tell us what to do. So we’re faced with having to figure out for ourselves what our dharma might be, without that kind of comfortable matrix to guide us. We have to rely on ourselves; we have to listen, and hear how our individual differences will determine our appropriate duty moment by moment. All of our circumstances feed into that: If you have a certain kind of intellect, or if you have certain economic circumstances, it defines certain paths. If you have a husband or a wife, that defines certain possibilities, and it also defines certain limiting conditions.

Some people might say, “I can only do a job that is absolutely dharmic, and I would rather starve to death than earn money impurely.” Others say, “Look—I’ll do the best I can, given my circumstances.” There’s no judgment in either case; each of us has to hear what each of us has to do. If you are a sadhu, if you are single and a renunciate, then maybe you can afford to be more of a purist; no one is dependent on you. On the other hand, if you are a householder and you have a family, then you have certain responsibilities, and you’ve got to do the best you can. If you are a householder, but you are being such a purist that you don’t get enough money to feed your baby, in the long run you will have done more adharma than dharma. If you’re in that situation and you find you have to take a job that doesn’t feel entirely dharmic to you, do the best you can to bring as much consciousness as possible into the scene. That’s all you can do. You work with what you’re given.

Let’s say you’re rich—then that defines, in part, your dharma.You can’t make believe you’re not rich. Even throwing your money away doesn’t get rid of it, karmically—that’s a karmically loaded act, too. Instead, you have to begin to be responsible about your money, to figure out your duty with regard to it; money becomes your dharma at that point.

You do that with respect to each aspect of your life.Whatever your part is, you just play it, but you play it as consciously as you can.That’s the most basic form of the concept of doing your dharma: to find your little square on the grid, and then to live it out perfectly. Why you’re doing your dharma remains to be seen. At this point, Krishna is simply saying, It’s your duty—just do it.

But Arjuna, like most of us, has some trouble surrendering. He’s still holding on to a lot of preconceptions about how he thinks things “ought” to be, and inevitably that gets in the way of doing his dharma. The same thing happens to us. For instance, I came to “the spiritual trip” out of an intellectual tradition, and because I was an intellectual of sorts, I got very attached to meditation practices, because they seemed so “essence-y.” They were so clean, so neat, so pristine. My mind was just thrilled by a system like theAbhidhamma, filled with beautiful categories and intellectually so exquisite. I was certain that meditation was my spiritual path!

But then I met Maharajji—and my game just wasn’t the same anymore. It turned out that my path wasn’t what I’d thought it was going to be.

I didn’t give up easily, though. For a long time, I kept trying to make it work the way I thought a “real” spiritual trip ought to work. Like I’d say to Maharajji, “Maharajji, how do I raise my kundalini, my spiritual energy?” I figured he’d give me some secret, inner teaching, like “Meditate on this ancient mantra.”

He said, “Feed everybody.”

I said, “Feed everybody?”

“Feed everybody. Serve everybody.”

“Maharajji—to raise my kundalini??!”

He said, “The kundalini can be raised by the touch of a guru. The guru can just think about it and your kundalini will rise. Don’t worry about that—just feed people and serve people.” He was saying to me, “Do your dharma.” And my dharma wasn’t meditation.

Over time, it became clear to me that my yoga is devotion and service, and that it’s devotion and service whether I like it or not. That’s my dharma. It’s what I’m given to work with. But it took a while before I would accept that, or surrender to it.

Arjuna is in the same predicament here. He doesn’t like the dharma that’s facing him out on the battlefield. He has his own ideas about what he’d like his path to be. But gradually, we come to realize that following our own path isn’t going to get us where we want to go; we begin to acknowledge that our dharma is our route through, and so we start to surrender into it. And that’s what Krishna is advising Arjuna to do: “Thus is the wheel of law set in motion, and that man lives indeed in vain who, in a sinful life of pleasure, helps not its revolution. But the man who has found the joy of the spirit, and in the spirit has satisfaction, that man is beyond the law of action.”

That’s an interesting point: That once you’re acting purely out of dharma, you’re “beyond the law of action.” When you’ve totally surrendered yourself to your dharma, you’re no longer acting out of striving, but out of spirit. When that happens, you are no longer creating any more karma for yourself.You only act to fulfill the dharma, not out of any personal motive, so no karma accrues.

Ram Dass (peering through fence) and Teaching Assistants: The group is pictured at the rear of the Main Hall, a recycled manufacturing and warehouse building where Ram Dass taught. (The “Service Center” designation seemed appropriate for a course focused on karma yoga.) Many of the teaching assistants went on to become leading spiritual teachers in their own right; they are, from left: back row—Joseph Goldstein, Dwarkanath Bonner, Krishna Das, Deena Bandhu, Vishwanath Miller, Krishna Bush;second row —Ramdev Borglum, Ganga Dhar Gerhard, Mirabai Bush; squatting —Maruti Projanski, unidentified person.

Not only that, not only do you stop building up your karma account, but your whole relationship to your life changes. It all becomes a pageant, a play. Plotinus says, “Murders, death in all its shapes, the capture and sacking of towns—all must be considered as so much stage-show, so many shiftings of scenes, the horror and outcry of a play. For here, too, in all the changing doom of life, it is not the true man, the inner soul, that grieves or laments, but merely the phantasm of the man, the outer man, playing his part on the boards of the world.”¹

In Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, Leo says, “Naturally one can do all kinds of other things with life—make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison—but that doesn’t make it any prettier. Just what life is, when it is beautiful and happy—it’s a game.”

A game? Doesn’t that change the complexion of things? It’s all so much less fraught. When you’re acting out of dharma, a quality of equanimity comes into everything you do. Meister Eckehart wrote, “We ought to take everything God puts on us evenly, not comparing and wondering which is more important or higher or best. We ought simply to follow where God leads.”² As we come to appreciate more and more the exquisiteness of the total design, a wisdom begins to develop, which recognizes that no part is any better and no part is any worse than any other part—each part is just di ferent from every other part. The play goes well when each person plays her or his part perfectly. Not greedily, wishing they could move into somebody else’s role; just content in doing their own dharma.

In the little villages I visited in India, where living the dharma is still a real force, you don’t see so much of the kind of ambition and envy that we’re used to here.You find the sweeper totally fulfilled in being the perfect sweeper.That’s his part. He’s not even saying, “Look what a good sweeper I am!” He’s just sweeping as perfectly as he knows how. And he’s expecting the shopkeeper to be the perfect shopkeeper, and the prime minister to be the perfect prime minister. He isn’t busy wishing he were the shopkeeper or the prime minister—he knows that’s not his dharma; he’s living out his own dharma, and expecting everybody else to live out theirs.

Now to some degree, that’s just an ideal, and it only works perfectly when everybody is living in the Spirit. But the interesting thing is that when I’ve been around people who are harmoniously playing their parts that way, I’ve often felt in them a kind of contentment that isn’t very available to us here in the West, a kind of a quietness inside. Some of the desperate striving is relieved.

We can see that there are ways of inhabiting our roles without making quite so much of them. It’s really not necessary to take our lives quite so personally. “The man who knows the relation between the forces of nature and actions,” Krishna says, “sees how some forces of nature work upon other forces of nature, and he becomes not their slave.”Your body, your mind, your personality—that’s all just part of nature, it’s all just lawful stuff happening.Why are you getting uptight about it? Let it be harmonious with its lawful manifestation, and don’t struggle against it so hard. Live your life more lightly, more impersonally; don’t get so caught, so trapped in your melodrama.

We all do love our own melodramas.We each have one. Everybody thinks they’re somebody doing something, or somebody thinking something, or somebody wanting something: “I’ve gotta have sex tonight or I’ll die.” “I’m so lonely!” “I can’t meditate.” “I’m so high!” We all get so involved in our melodramas, so busy thinking we’re the actors, so busy thinking we’re doing it all—and it’s really all just this lawful stuff running off. How funny!

But in order to see that, in order to begin to appreciate the law-fulness of the unfolding, we need to develop a little perspective. It can be a nice meditation to take a seed, and put it in a bit of earth. Put it on a kitchen windowsill, and watch it grow into a plant, into a flower. Just observe it every day. Use that as your daily meditation exercise; see the way the whole process unfolds.

Then turn the lens around. Study yourself in the same way you studied the seed growing. Observe your own life, your own actions, with that same sense of detachment and curiosity, until you can see the laws of nature working in you.You’ll see what leads to anger, what leads to love, what leads to desire. Just watch it all—don’t argue with it, don’t judge it, just watch it. And as you begin to develop that perspective, you’ll find that your acts gradually come less and less out of attachment and more and more out of the simple, lawful flow of things.

Krishna’s argument about doing your dharma and playing your part is the framework for one of the major themes of the Gita: the practice of what is called karma yoga. Up to now, Krishna has been persuading Arjuna, telling him why he should fight this battle. Now he’s going to begin explaining to him the way he should go about doing it—that is, the context from which he should approach the battle. In fact, he’s going to define the technique through which we transformour actions, and bring them into harmony with our dharma.

Here are a couple of slokas to bring the theme to mind for us.

“But great is the man who, free from attachments [emphasis added], and with a mind ruling its powers in harmony, works on the path of karma yoga.”

“In liberty from the bonds of attachment [emphasis added], do thou therefore the work to be done, for the man whose work is pure attains indeed the Supreme.”

“Do your work, but do it without attachment.” That represents the first part of the formula. We’re not being told yet how to stop being attached, but we are being told that that’s the goal—to work without attachment, which means acting without worrying about the outcome. “Don’t be attached to the fruit of the action” is one of the principal instructions in karma yoga. “Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for reward, but never cease to do thy work.”

Mahatma Gandhi told us what that looks like in practice; he said, “In regard to every action, one must know the result that is expected to follow, the means thereto, and the capacity for it. He who being thus equipped is without desire for the result, and is yet wholly engrossed in the due fulfillment of the task before him, such a man is said to have renounced the fruits of his action.”³

Once we’ve really done that, renounced the fruits of the action, we’re finally free to act in whatever way we’re drawn by our dharma to act. We’re no longer being pulled and pushed in other directions by our attachments—we’re not going to get anything out of it.We’re acting solely to fulfill our dharma.

How would we know what “fruits” to ask for, anyway? How do we know what’s supposed to happen? Until we’re at the place where we can see the whole scope of the karmic pattern, we have no idea what outcome would be best for ourselves and for everybody else.

I’ll go and give a lecture, and maybe it turns out to be a disaster— everybody gets up and walks out. That’s hard on a lecturer, if you’re concerned about the fruits of your action! I will go away feeling humiliated, shaken, my ego crushed. That experience will burn into me, and slowly that humiliation and hurt will keep working on me and working on me until, after a while, I come to see it as one of Maharajji’s greatest teachings. Far out! The people in that audience were showing me how I was clinging to my own model of what a “good” outcome would be. If I’m really lousy, maybe that’s the best thing I can do for you—maybe I’m throwing you back on yourself to get the teachings. How do I know? Because of my own ego needs, I can’t stand back far enough to see what would create the optimum outcome of my own acts.

So what do I do? I do my best, but I give up the fruit of the action. If I don’t know what’s supposed to happen, it’s probably better if I don’t get too attached to one particular outcome. I listen to hear what my next step should be. I do my acts in the best way I can. And how it comes out . . . well, that’s just how it comes out. Interesting, nothing more. It’s a matter of letting go of expectations.

In the mid-1970s, a group of friends and I decided to put together an evening at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Winterland was a huge rock-and-roll emporium. It seated six thousand people— the circus used to be held there. So Bhagawan Das and Amazing Grace and I decided we were going to “do Winterland.” We were going to have music, and a light show, and it was going to run from two in the afternoon until eight the next morning. It cost us $4,500 (that was a lot of money back then!) to put together the whole operation —renting the hall, getting a sound system, advertising. But we had great expectations, and great plans for all the profits we were going to make.

The day came, and we did our thing. But unfortunately for all our expectations, there was a bus strike called for the day of the show. Public transportation was shut down, and people couldn’t get to Winterland. The following morning, when we counted up the receipts, it turned out that only about two thousand people had showed up, and not only had we not made any money, but we had lost about $1,100. All our fascinating fantasies of red Volvos and trips to Mexico, all the things we would do with the money we were going to make from this incredible gig—all down the tubes, just like that.

We sat there for a while in a state of shock. Then I said to the others, “Do you feel bad about it?” We thought about it, and not one of us could find in ourselves anything that felt bad about the experience. It was bizarre! In spite of the fact that all our expectations had been disconfirmed—Right! OK! How it is is how it is.We don’t have what we expected; instead, we have an $1,100 debt—that’s who we are now. (Of course, that was after we had all finished blaming one another.) We’d had a good time, the two thousand people all had a good time, and the outcome . . . well, it was what it was.

Such experiences are priceless. They’re rich opportunities for learning how not to cling. You set up a game, and then you play it: purely, lovingly, compassionately, with total involvement but without attachment. As pure karma yoga. Then how it comes out is how it comes out—and that becomes the next condition for the next dance in the next mind-moment.

We start to see the outlines of the way a path of karma yoga might work, and how we might bring it into our own lives. We see the possibility that we can turn whatever it is we do every day into a path to God. Krishna has given Arjuna—given us—two instructions so far for how to go about doing that. First, he said, we listen to hear what our dharma is, and we try to become harmonious with that in our actions. Next, we perform each act as purely as we can, without thinking about any rewards.

But there is one more key instruction in this practice of karma yoga, and it’s the one that flips the game out to another level. Not only do you do your dharma and act without regard to its fruits—in addition to all that, you act without thinking of yourself as being the actor. The action is happening through you, but you aren’t doing it. You have stepped out of the way.

That puts you in a whole new perspective in relation to your actions. Krishna tells Arjuna, “All actions take place in time, by the interweaving of the forces of nature [the gunas], but the man lost in selfish delusion thinks that he himself is the actor.” Krishna is saying, Look—you’re not doing anything; it’s a delusion to imagine you are. You’re not the actor. What’s happening is just the sum total of millions of laws playing themselves out through you. Once you see that, really see that, you’re home free, because your sense of an “I” acting in the world is stripped away.

So the karma yogi is the person who uses his or her life to come to God by listening for the dharmic act, acting without attachment to the outcome, all the while knowing she or he’s not the actor, anyway. That’s the whole formula for turning our lives around and making them our spiritual practice.

The warrior in the Carlos Castaneda books gives us another model of the perfect karma yogi; all the things Don Juan says about the warrior refer to the karma yogi as well: “A warrior is a hunter. He calculates everything. That’s control. But once his calculations are over, he acts, he lets go, and he survives in the best of all possible fashions.The mood of a warrior calls for control over himself, and at the same time it calls for abandoning himself.”⁴

We can hear in that a description of some of the qualities that come into our actions when we’re not attached to the outcome, and not busy being the actors.There’s a sense of equanimity, for example. Castaneda talks about it as a sense of “control, yet self-surrender.” There’s great spontaneity, and at the same time a quality of loving attention, because each act is our offering, our flower at God’s feet. If we’re acting from that place, it shows up in each thing we do, even simple things, like making a cup of tea. Gurdjieff used to say, “If you can serve a cup of tea properly, you can do anything.” That is, if you are able to perform any act in a true karma-yogic fashion, it’s because you’re acting from a place where you’re free of attachments and not busy being the actor—and being in that place will shape every act you do.

The Book of Tao says, “By letting it go, it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is then beyond the winning.”⁵ If you’re going to make a cup of tea right, you can’t be busy trying to make the cup of tea right, because while you’re busy trying, you’re not present with making the tea.You can’t be doing both.

The right way to make a cup of tea is to start by bringing together everything you need to make the tea, including the knowledge of how to do it. And then you make the tea. While you’re making the tea, you’re just making the tea—nothing else.You’re not worrying about how the tea will turn out, and you’re not wondering whether you’re good enough to make the tea correctly, and you’re not thinking about whether you should serve it with honey.You’re just right there, making the tea. Now you’re rinsing the kettle . . . now you’re filling it . . . now you’re putting it on the stove—being present with every step, and acting out of the total harmony of each moment.

The more purely we flow into our karmic circumstances, the more our acts are just happening. There’s no struggle. There’s no anxiety, because we don’t care how the act turns out. There’s no self-consciousness, because there’s no actor involved. “He who sees the inaction that is in action, and the action that is in inaction, is wise indeed. Even when he is engaged in action, he remains poised in the tranquility of the atman.”

But we can’t fake it—that’s just more attachment. We can’t pretend we’re right there making the tea when really we’re not, when really we’re lost in a thought of how well we’re making the tea. We have to start from where we’re at, right in this moment. So here we are: We’re still stuck with all our desires. Most of the things we’re doing, we’re doing because we want something out of it, and we can’t make believe we’re other than what we are. What do we do? How do we work with our actions as yoga when we know how caught we still are? And most important of all, how do we know for sure what it is we’re supposed to do?

The answer is, we don’t. The truth of it is, until you are no longer attached to your ego in any way, every act you do will have your ego present in it. There’s not a chance it won’t! Right up to the end, there are going to be mixed motives, subtle ways in which you’ll do it to yourself, again and again. That’s what’s so funny about this battle!

I’ve said before that the span of progress on the spiritual path is about one body length. We take a step, and we fall flat on our faces, because it was another impure trip. So we pull ourselves up, and we take the next step—and we fall on our faces again. That seems to be about the rate at which we go.

So when you’re listening to hear your dharma, there is very little likelihood that you’re going to hear the “pure message.” You’re just going to hear another message. But you keep tuning and tuning— through study, through meditation, through falling on your face. And slowly, slowly, as your methods start to work, your attachment to the whole business starts to get less and less. After all, the ego can only trap you as long as you think you are it; when it’s just out there doing its thing—when it’s just “ego-ing,” like eyes seeing or ears hearing—it becomes merely a functional entity. Nothing more interesting than that.

In the meantime, you do the best you can.You look at the next step you’re about to take, and you ask yourself, “What seems to be the right next thing to do?” Then you become quiet, and you listen inside for an answer.You get as quiet as you can, and you listen as clearly as you can, but you recognize that in spite of that, it’s probably not going to be a pure message from beyond the beyond. Very likely, it’ll still have plenty of your desire systems mixed in with it.

Once you’ve decided as best you can, you act, keeping in mind that you are not the actor. While you’re acting, you don’t second-guess yourself; you don’t waste your time wondering whether you made the right decision.You’re done deciding—now you’re acting: Be present with your actions. After you’ve finished, if you want to, you can sit back and reflect and say, “Was that the right choice?” That’s different. But while you’re doing it, do it fully. When you’re making tea, make tea. When you’re brushing your teeth, brush your teeth. When you’re making love, make love. Big acts, small acts, whatever it is, be fully there with it. Stop ruining things for yourself with that self-conscious, judgmental holding back.

What we’re letting go of in that process is the old, self-critical inner voice, the old superego that’s so afraid of blowing it, afraid of making a mistake, afraid of looking like a fool. That is not the same, you’ll notice, as the impersonal inner witness, the practice of noting what we’re experiencing. That’s the thing we’re trying to cultivate. Witnessing has a totally different quality to it—it’s observing, not judging. The judging superego is incompatible with acting in the moment; the impersonal witness is the essence of acting in the moment.

So karma yoga turns out to be a technique for extracting ourselves from the turmoil of life not by inaction, but by shifting perspectives on our actions. No longer are our actions a means to fulfill our desires; now they are opportunities for spiritual practice: for practice in being unattached to the outcome, and for practice in getting rid of the idea that we’re doing anything. We do what we do, all the time recognizing that it’s just the wheel of karma, the dance of God’s play, the laws lawfully unfolding through us. We see that it was only our incredible egocentricity that made us think we were doing it!

And as we begin to see ourselves that way—not as the actors, but as the vehicles through which the laws of nature are unfolding—we are approaching something which is much more interesting, and much more profound, than whatever it was we might havethought the game was about. Krishna points to it when he says, “I have no work to do in all the worlds, Arjuna, for these are mine. I have nothing to obtain, because I have it all. And yet I work.”

“And yet I work”? Isn’t that interesting. He’s saying, Look: I don’t have any karma—there’s nothing I have to do. But I act anyway. Coming from that space of no ego and no attachment, there clearly has to be a whole different motive for acting.

You see, we’ve really been talking about starting with our desires, starting with our attachments, and using them as a way of coming to union. It’s out of our desire to come to the One, out of our desire to be liberated, out of our desire to surrender, that we listen to hear our dharma, and that we do it. We do our dharma to fulfill a desire, within the desire system. There’s an attachment in there—the attachment to getting liberated—and that’s what motivates us to work. But if all that is true, then once we get liberated and have no attachments, why would we work?

Krishna is letting us in on a whole new basis for action here. Imagine a person who has absolutely no personal desire to do anything—not even to get enlightened. She’s got it! She is it! She’s not trying to develop herself—she’s already there. She has no more moral motives—she’s beyond good and evil. So what is she doing, doing anything?

Anandamayi Ma was a beautiful saint in India, someone who was living in that place, someone whose actions were totally free.Yet she set up hospitals, dispensaries, schools—what was she doing with all those ashrams and all that service? Was she doing karma yoga? Outwardly, her actions might have seemed like that, but the spirit of it, the motive from which she was acting, was completely different. The motive was different in that there was no motive. There was no intention behind her actions. She was just beingthe expression of dharma, being compassion.

With beings like that, beings like Anandamayi Ma or my guru, it’s that spirit behind their actions which is the transmission. The true guru is someone whose very life is a statement of how it all is when you’re done with it all, and any forms or acts that the guru uses are merely the vehicles for that transmission. Such a being is beyond the gunas, beyond the forces of nature—no longer attached at all to body, mind, reason, senses, but using them still. In that place, you’re no longer doing karma yoga—you’re the expression of it.

Meher Baba said, “To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance, and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the guidance and benefit of others by expressing in the world forms of truth, love, purity and beauty: this is the sole game which has any intrinsic and absolute worth. All other happenings, incidents and attainments can, in themselves, have no lasting importance.”⁶

Yoga has been called a practice for concentrating all our faculties on a single point in order to transcend the limitations of ego. But karma yoga? Who would have suspected that the road to God would lead us by way of the household and the marketplace. The world becomes the means for extricating ourselves from the strands of worldly attachment—what an ingenious flip! Instead of entangling us, suddenly our acts set us free. The Gita says, “Who in all his works sees God, in truth he goes to God.”

When we first set out to do our work as spiritual practice, we’re still operating from inside the world of attachments and desires, because the desire to get free is still a desire. But as the upaya, the method, begins to work, it leads us to a deeper understanding of the reason and wisdom that underlie the whole system. We see who we are, and what it is that’s going on, in a different light. And along with that understanding comes an increasing impersonality toward our own lives. Impersonality. Not less involvement, but less romanticizing of it all, less melodrama, less doer. We go on living our lives, and we live them as perfectly as we can, but we live them in an increasingly detached way. Less and less are we acting out of our motives or our desires—not even out of the high-minded ones like enlightenment. We’re just acting because it’s our dharma to act. That’s essence karma yoga.