The Art of Manliness - #616： A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.280 One of the most burning questions in life is what it is you're called to do with it.

00:00:15.020 What's your life's purpose?

00:00:16.240 What great work are you meant to do?

00:00:18.040 Guidance on this question can come from many sources, and my guest today says that one

00:00:21.420 of the best is the Bhagavad Gita, a text of Hindu scripture thousands of years old.

00:00:25.320 His name is Stephen Cope.

00:00:26.080 He's a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, and the author of The Great Work of Your Life,

00:00:29.540 The Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling.

00:00:31.760 Stephen and I begin our conversation with an introduction of the Bhagavad Gita, the significant

00:00:34.820 influence it's had on philosophers and leaders before ages, and what it can teach us about

00:00:38.500 making difficult decisions.

00:00:39.980 We then discuss the insights the Gita offers on the four pillars of right living, begin

00:00:43.560 with discerning your true calling or sacred duty.

00:00:45.900 We unpack the three areas in your life to examine for clues to your life's purpose, and why that

00:00:49.840 purpose may be small and quiet rather than big and splashy.

00:00:52.700 Stephen then explains the doctrine of unified action, why you have to pursue your calling

00:00:56.260 full out, and why that pursuit should include the habit of deliberate practice.

00:00:59.480 We also discuss why it's central to let go of the outcome of actions to focus on the

00:01:02.720 work itself, and the need to turn your efforts over to something bigger than yourself.

00:01:06.320 Along the way, Stephen offers examples of how these pillars were embodying the lives of

00:01:09.620 eminent individuals who lived out their purpose.

00:01:11.820 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Gita.

00:01:14.920 All right, Stephen Cope, welcome to the show.

00:01:26.840 Thank you, Brett.

00:01:27.860 I'm glad to be here.

00:01:29.080 So, you are the author of a book called The Great Work of Your Life, A Guide for the Journey

00:01:33.440 to Your True Calling.

00:01:35.000 And this book uses the Bhagavad Gita, a piece of Hindu scripture, to explore this idea of vocation,

00:01:42.040 of calling in your life.

00:01:43.080 I read this book a few years ago, I was telling you off air, after I read that book, that's

00:01:48.480 what introduced me to the Gita, and since then, I've read the Gita, you know, at least

00:01:51.920 once a year, because it's such a cool piece of literature.

00:01:55.500 So, I'm curious, how did you discover the Bhagavad Gita?

00:01:58.840 Well, you know, the Bhagavad Gita is really the most well-known scripture, yogic scripture

00:02:05.800 in India.

00:02:07.180 So, if you're hanging out in Indian culture or Hindu culture or yogic culture, pretty much

00:02:15.200 everybody knows about the Gita.

00:02:17.600 There are a number of great scriptures in the yoga tradition, but the Gita is certainly

00:02:22.960 the most well-known.

00:02:24.540 And it's the kind of thing that everybody in every little village in India knows.

00:02:30.940 And there are images of Krishna and Arjuna, the two main characters, pretty much everywhere

00:02:38.820 in temples.

00:02:40.100 And so, once I came into the yoga world, it's pretty much inevitable that you bump into the

00:02:46.520 Gita.

00:02:46.800 So, as you said, it's a piece of Hindu scripture, but as we'll talk about in this book, a lot

00:02:51.640 of great Western thinkers for a couple centuries now have been influenced by the Gita.

00:02:57.500 I mean, who are some of these individuals?

00:02:59.780 I mean, honestly, it's remarkable.

00:03:02.400 Writing on the Gita, as I have, I keep bumping into more.

00:03:05.900 So, there is probably the first major Western philosopher was Schopenhauer, who wrote in the

00:03:12.620 early 19th century.

00:03:13.720 The Gita was translated into English as late as, I think, 1787 or 1785.

00:03:21.640 But where you start really beginning to see its influences is with Thoreau and Emerson,

00:03:27.820 the transcendentalists in Concord in the 1820s, 30s, 40s, 50s.

00:03:34.780 And Thoreau picked it up and was profoundly influenced by it.

00:03:39.240 And you can kind of draw a direct line then between Thoreau's influence and Emerson as

00:03:45.120 well.

00:03:46.120 And then Tolstoy, who picked it up.

00:03:49.100 And from Tolstoy, a direct line to Gandhi, and then to Aldous Huxley, who wrote a brilliant

00:03:55.140 book called The Perennial Philosophy.

00:03:57.860 And from there to Martin Luther King and to Bobby Kennedy.

00:04:01.860 So, there's this direct line back to the great American philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau.

00:04:10.000 So, let's dig into the Gita.

00:04:11.620 And for those who, before we get to some of the lessons and takeaway that you talk about

00:04:15.700 in your book, can you give people who aren't familiar with the story sort of a big picture

00:04:19.780 overview of what's going on with it and the main characters?

00:04:23.380 Yeah, it's a great tale.

00:04:26.000 And, you know, like most tales, it was meant to be spoken verbally, even though it was written

00:04:31.040 down somewhere in the, probably the second century of the Common Era.

00:04:34.800 The tale is about, it happens on the night before a great war, the Battle of Kurukshetra

00:04:40.620 on the field of Kuru.

00:04:43.160 And the two major protagonists are Arjuna.

00:04:47.400 And Arjuna is a warrior.

00:04:48.980 He's the greatest warrior of the kingdom of Kuru.

00:04:53.880 And his father is, was the king, now the deposed king of the kingdom of Kuru.

00:05:00.620 And the other major character is Krishna, who's his charioteer.

00:05:05.360 And Krishna, of course, is God in disguise.

00:05:08.880 We don't find that out until the middle of the book.

00:05:12.160 But the whole book is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna at the edge of the battlefield.

00:05:18.980 So, you can imagine there's a huge battle, an epic battle about to take place the next

00:05:24.840 morning.

00:05:26.460 And Arjuna is very conflicted about whether or not to fight in this battle.

00:05:32.920 The backstory is that the kingship has been stolen by one of Arjuna's cousins.

00:05:38.560 And that's what precipitated this war.

00:05:40.660 And he realizes, as he sits with Krishna, that he's got a dilemma that he cannot solve.

00:05:50.120 And the dilemma is this.

00:05:51.940 Because he's a warrior and he was part of a very rigid caste system, it was his duty, it

00:05:57.980 was his sacred duty to fight in a war, to fight in a just war.

00:06:03.240 And this was a just war.

00:06:04.460 On the other hand, he realized that he was most likely going to kill his own kin because

00:06:10.480 his cousins were on the other side of this battle.

00:06:14.960 And so, the very first chapter, he investigates this dilemma.

00:06:20.400 He must fight in the battle because it's his calling, it's his sacred duty.

00:06:25.600 But if he fights, he will kill kin.

00:06:28.080 In either case, he will have to go to purgatory, in the Hindu view, for lifetimes. 0.91

00:06:36.720 And so, he's presented with this dilemma that he cannot solve.

00:06:41.060 It's greater than his own consciousness.

00:06:43.620 And he sits with Krishna through the night as Krishna expounds to him his way through this

00:06:51.760 particular dilemma.

00:06:52.760 And the way through is actually by completely expanding his consciousness so that he understands

00:07:00.200 that the war itself is not really a real external war, but a battle going on within himself.

00:07:07.420 So, the tale is really about the moral dilemmas that each of us face in life and how we work

00:07:14.820 our way through them.

00:07:16.560 Now, I mean, I love the setup of the story.

00:07:18.700 And that's why I think it's so relatable.

00:07:20.280 I think why so many individuals, even in the West, have related to this with Arjuna.

00:07:25.740 You know, it's just like, I don't know what to do.

00:07:28.440 I have no idea what to do.

00:07:30.440 And that's like, that's most of life.

00:07:31.720 Like, I don't know what to do.

00:07:33.920 Yeah.

00:07:34.400 In fact, he says, Arjuna, in the beginning, at the end of the first chapter, falls to the

00:07:40.660 floor of the chariot.

00:07:41.940 And he says, Krishna, I cannot fight this fight.

00:07:46.720 Conflicting sacred duties confound my mind.

00:07:50.320 And of course, we run into that all the time, conflicting sacred duties.

00:07:54.320 Should I do A or should I do B?

00:07:57.220 What am I called to do?

00:07:58.520 And how do I know what my calling is?

00:08:01.940 So, it's a great setup, that first chapter.

00:08:04.540 And then there are 17 more chapters where Krishna describes the slow and deliberate process of

00:08:13.180 understanding your calling.

00:08:15.280 And that's, I mean, that's what I love about it, too.

00:08:17.500 That dialogue, he explains the idea of duty or dharma.

00:08:20.980 And then yoga, which, you know, in the West, we think yoga is like, you know, you downward

00:08:25.820 dog or whatever.

00:08:26.480 But yoga, it's all about taking action.

00:08:29.240 And that's what Krishna tells Arjuna you have to do.

00:08:32.760 You have to take action to fulfill your dharma.

00:08:35.040 That's right.

00:08:36.260 So, basically, Krishna teaches Arjuna what he calls the path of inaction in action, the

00:08:44.760 path of neshkarman karman or inaction in action, which turns out to be a profound reframe of

00:08:51.320 action.

00:08:52.540 And there are four steps.

00:08:54.220 First of all, Krishna says, look, don't even think about being the guy who doesn't take

00:08:59.300 action because we all act all the time.

00:09:02.360 In the contemplative traditions, they talk about actions of mind, speech, and body.

00:09:07.100 So, even your mind is taking action.

00:09:11.420 So, the four pillars of this path of inaction in action are, number one, discern your dharma,

00:09:20.840 that is, discern and know your true calling in this lifetime.

00:09:26.440 Number two, do it full out.

00:09:28.780 Bring everything you've got to the performance of your dharma, of your calling.

00:09:35.700 And third, let go of the outcome.

00:09:38.700 So, Krishna says to Arjuna, whether you're winning or losing or failing is not your issue.

00:09:45.780 Your only issue is, have you determined what your dharma is and are you doing it full out?

00:09:51.680 He says, it's better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at someone else's dharma.

00:09:58.100 And then finally, Krishna says to Arjuna, turn this whole thing over to me, in other words,

00:10:04.440 over to God or over to something bigger than yourself, over to some bigger meaning than your

00:10:12.180 ego or yourself.

00:10:14.400 And so, we have the four pillars.

00:10:16.340 Discern your dharma.

00:10:17.920 Do it full out.

00:10:19.620 The second one is called the doctrine of unified action because it calls you to unify all of

00:10:25.320 your action around your dharma.

00:10:28.300 The third is, let go of the fruits.

00:10:30.160 And then finally, turn it over to God or whatever version of God you have.

00:10:36.100 All right, let's dig into deep.

00:10:37.160 So, you spend the rest of your book, The Great Work of Your Life, exploring these four pillars.

00:10:40.820 And you do that by, through examples of people you've worked with personally in your practice,

00:10:46.940 in your work, but also the lives of what we'd consider great individuals who may have.

00:10:52.300 Some of them directly were influenced by the Gita.

00:10:54.580 Others, you know, they just kind of, they got the idea.

00:10:57.680 So, that first pillar, which is know your dharma, look to your dharma.

00:11:02.420 So, I mean, let's talk about this.

00:11:03.500 How do you figure out what your dharma is in the first place, your calling, your sacred

00:11:07.460 duty in life?

00:11:08.420 Well, this is where most of us get stuck.

00:11:11.260 The truth is that when the Bhagavad Gita was written, in that context, everybody was born

00:11:17.200 into their own sacred calling.

00:11:18.820 So, there was a very complex caste system.

00:11:22.380 And you were, Arjuna was born a warrior.

00:11:24.600 It was his duty to be a warrior.

00:11:26.500 That was called svadharma.

00:11:28.540 And of course, that kind of rigid duty to the social order and to your birth, it no longer

00:11:35.440 applies in our culture.

00:11:37.340 So, now we have to dig down inside, look at our circumstances and our life situation and

00:11:47.240 our own gifts to determine what's our dharma, what's our true calling.

00:11:53.400 The word dharma is based on the root D-H-R, which means to uphold.

00:11:59.520 And the view that still translates to us is the idea that everybody has a responsibility

00:12:07.620 to their particular set of gifts, their particular set of capacities.

00:12:15.280 And so, no longer is the duty to the dharma into which you were born, but now it's to, as 0.87

00:12:23.200 Carol Pearson, the great Jungian psychologist, says, do you have a responsibility to your

00:12:29.200 gifts and your own idiosyncratic opportunities that you must fulfill in this lifetime?

00:12:35.720 That reminds me of the idea that I think Pindar, he's a Roman poet, he said, you know,

00:12:39.760 become who you are.

00:12:40.900 Like, Nietzsche picked that up, you know?

00:12:42.280 And that idea of becoming who you are is looking at your situation.

00:12:47.000 It might not mean, like, you know, your dharma might not be, like, I'm going to be

00:12:50.040 president of the United States.

00:12:51.120 It could be even smaller than that, but if you find that, you're supposed to go full

00:12:55.020 out with it.

00:12:57.060 Exactly, exactly.

00:12:58.780 I'd like to say, because I'll tell you the truth, a lot of the time I spend with people

00:13:04.100 looking at these notions is really spent on helping people to discern their dharma.

00:13:11.840 So, the whole process of discernment, there are three particular areas that I call useful

00:13:18.960 hunting grounds for dharma.

00:13:21.120 One is, I often ask people the question, what's lighting you up?

00:13:27.020 So, the first question to ask yourself is, what is it out there in the world, in your

00:13:32.920 life now, that's lighting you up, that gives you energy, that fascinates you, that draws

00:13:39.120 you?

00:13:39.420 That is not necessarily your dharma, but it's a very interesting finger pointing toward dharma.

00:13:47.200 The second useful hunting ground I've found is very different from what lights you up.

00:13:52.780 The question here is, what do you see as your sacred duty in this life?

00:13:58.800 So, sacred duty is something different.

00:14:00.760 It may not necessarily light you up.

00:14:03.240 It may.

00:14:04.860 And I like to, the whole question of duty is complex.

00:14:09.040 I like to say, your duty is that thing which, if you do not do it, will result in a profound

00:14:16.560 sense of self-betrayal on your part.

00:14:18.960 And that definition of duty moves the locus of duty from the exterior, that is, duties

00:14:26.640 that are foisted on us that we don't actually own, to our own interior self, where the real

00:14:33.680 locus of duty is found.

00:14:35.740 And then the third area, so, we have what lights you up, what do you consider or know to be your

00:14:42.900 sacred duty?

00:14:44.080 And the third area is, look at challenges and difficulties in your life.

00:14:51.220 Because very often, people find their duty or their calling or even what's lighting them up

00:14:58.440 arising directly out of challenges.

00:15:02.320 So, a divorce, an illness, a change in job, this is another important hunting ground for

00:15:13.060 dharma.

00:15:13.520 So, between those three, you have some interesting arrows pointing at your own particular dharma.

00:15:21.320 And I highly recommend that people explore those three areas very systematically.

00:15:27.920 The one section in this, when you talk about, look to your dharma, that really, when I first

00:15:31.580 read it, it's, I've been, I think about it all the time.

00:15:33.940 And you explore the life of Henry David Thoreau and him trying to figure out his dharma.

00:15:39.800 And the idea that you got from Thoreau is, think of the small as big.

00:15:44.940 Because I think a lot of people, when they confront this question of what's my calling in life,

00:15:48.740 they typically think it's got to be big.

00:15:50.260 It's got to be where I'm known.

00:15:52.220 That's right.

00:15:52.860 And that's not necessarily the case.

00:15:54.460 So, tell us about Thoreau's experience with the Gita and how it helped him find his dharma.

00:16:00.580 Well, this, by the way, is what I call the false notion of the romance of dharma.

00:16:05.180 The idea that it has to be something big.

00:16:07.040 The idea that you have to leave your job selling insurance and move to Paris and become a great

00:16:13.160 painter.

00:16:14.060 That's a typical romantic notion.

00:16:17.240 The truth is, most people's dharmas are already somewhere in their lives.

00:16:22.020 They've already stumbled into some aspect of their dharma.

00:16:26.080 But Thoreau is an interesting example.

00:16:28.340 Thoreau, of course, was a brilliant man.

00:16:30.760 He was educated at Harvard.

00:16:32.360 He spoke many languages.

00:16:34.000 He wrote Greek and Latin.

00:16:37.000 And he, of course, lived in Concord, surrounded by the likes of Emerson and the Alcotts and

00:16:43.620 all these great American writers and philosophers.

00:16:46.940 And he got it in his head early on that he wanted to become a great writer.

00:16:54.040 And so, with that in mind, he moved to New York City, which is where the only great writers

00:17:00.380 in America at that time were thought to be and weren't really all there.

00:17:04.540 And he was a complete failure in New York City.

00:17:08.940 He was a woodsman.

00:17:10.800 He was way too gruff and rough.

00:17:13.060 And he was not accepted into the salons of New York Literary Society. 0.84

00:17:19.700 And finally, dejected, he dragged his butt back to Concord, the little town where he lived

00:17:28.160 and grew up, and decided when he got back that this was his home, this is where he was going 0.97

00:17:35.580 to put his stake in the ground.

00:17:38.160 And it wasn't long after that that he went to Walden Pond, where he built his cabin on

00:17:43.900 some land that Emerson loaned him, and decided to do his great experiment.

00:17:50.440 You know, he said, I have come to the woods to learn to live deliberately and not to find

00:17:55.560 when I come to die that I had not lived.

00:17:58.980 So, Thoreau went to Walden, the teeniest little life you can imagine, a little cabin in the

00:18:08.060 woods by the pond, and one of the few books he took with him was the Bhagavad Gita.

00:18:13.560 He read the Gita daily.

00:18:15.920 He considered himself a yogi, and keep in mind, this is in the early part of the 19th century.

00:18:20.980 And he realized that whatever you're doing, whatever action you're taking, whatever your

00:18:30.020 calling is, and now he understood that his calling was to investigate the small life and

00:18:37.560 to keep even getting it smaller.

00:18:39.720 Remember, he finally had to give up one of his two spoons in his second year at Walden,

00:18:44.060 and to discover how big the small life actually is.

00:18:50.180 So, I actually quote from the Dada Ching there, where it says, think of the small as large and

00:18:56.360 the few as many.

00:18:59.320 Thoreau discovered in the Gita the notion that all actions have mystic consequences.

00:19:05.600 So, the smallest actions, as long as they're aligned with your dharma, make some kind of

00:19:12.860 huge ripple in the world.

00:19:15.380 So, Thoreau took on the task of investigating his world just as he saw it and as he found

00:19:22.200 it around his little cabin.

00:19:24.800 And strangely enough, just as the Bhagavad Gita said, mystic actions connected with your dharma

00:19:32.280 make big splashes in the pond.

00:19:35.420 And so, of course, we now think of Thoreau writing from his little cabin as one of the

00:19:42.040 great philosophers and writers of American life and literature.

00:19:49.020 He once said, which quote I love, I have traveled extensively in Concord.

00:19:54.600 And by that, he meant his inward journey in Concord to the soul of this one little town.

00:20:03.940 And by focusing down into the soul of this one beautiful little New England town, he pretty

00:20:10.920 much found the whole world there.

00:20:13.900 You know, when Krishna was born, his nurse looked into his open mouth and saw the whole

00:20:19.880 universe there.

00:20:21.320 And that's precisely what Thoreau did at Walden.

00:20:25.580 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:20:29.860 And now back to the show.

00:20:32.260 And I mean, you make this point in the book.

00:20:34.320 I mean, Thoreau's experiment at Walden was even smaller.

00:20:36.720 I mean, he was basically in the backyard of his parents' house.

00:20:39.880 And you note that his mom still brought him cookies and sandwiches.

00:20:43.060 And sometimes people will criticize Thoreau for that.

00:20:44.740 It's like, oh, he really didn't do anything.

00:20:46.140 He just basically backpacked in his backyard.

00:20:48.020 But it's like the idea, like he went full bore into it and was able to do some amazing

00:20:53.540 work by doing that.

00:20:56.240 Well, and one of the great things about Thoreau was, you know, we all know the quote, you

00:21:00.440 know, find your own distant drummer and follow it.

00:21:03.980 Thoreau caught under the idea that it's our idiosyncratic, highly particular calling that

00:21:12.460 has the juice.

00:21:13.400 He said, Thoreau said, all human beings should constantly be on the trail of their true nature

00:21:20.200 because it is in following and claiming their true nature that they connect with the divine.

00:21:28.360 So Thoreau said, find your bone.

00:21:31.780 And here's a great image of a dog.

00:21:33.940 Find your bone.

00:21:35.400 Gnaw on it. 0.99

00:21:37.020 Bury it.

00:21:37.760 Dig it up again.

00:21:38.780 Gnaw on it more.

00:21:39.600 So, he found his bone in his writing and in his nature study, and it was through being

00:21:49.860 uniquely, idiosyncratically, his own true self that he broke into the field of the divine.

00:21:59.180 You know, and in this, he was relentless.

00:22:01.500 So, Emerson, as you know, his buddy was much more polished and was a bit of a more professional

00:22:09.860 philosopher, but Thoreau was this rugged individualist.

00:22:14.480 And it was he that really lived out, in so many ways, Emerson's own views about living

00:22:23.920 your idiosyncratic truth.

00:22:25.600 All right, so that's, look to your dharma, discover your dharma so you can look to what

00:22:30.480 lights you up, look what's at your sacred duty, or look at problems in your life, and

00:22:34.500 then realize and understand that your dharma, your duty, might be smaller than you think

00:22:39.460 it is, and that's okay.

00:22:40.640 Yeah, exactly.

00:22:41.640 In fact, I used the story there of a friend of mine who's a nurse who kept saying to me,

00:22:46.220 Steve, I just, I have such a small dharma, and, you know, finally now, 10 years later,

00:22:56.100 her life has been turned around because she fully embraces the beautiful work that is her

00:23:02.780 daily work as a nurse, no longer thinking of it as small.

00:23:06.720 So, think of the small as large and the few as many.

00:23:10.520 All right, so once you find your dharma, you're supposed to go full out on it.

00:23:13.520 That's the second pillar.

00:23:14.420 What does that look like?

00:23:16.220 So, again, that's called the doctrine of unified action, and the idea here is that once you've

00:23:22.280 found your dharma, you bring everything you've got to it.

00:23:25.840 Krishna said to Arjuna, this is the passion that is not contrary to the dharma.

00:23:31.340 In other words, you should be living a passionate life built around your dharma.

00:23:37.080 One of the characters I used to explore this is Susan B. Anthony, who, as a young girl growing

00:23:44.960 up in upstate New York, realized that she was, women were in a kind of prison in those days. 1.00

00:23:51.180 They had very few rights.

00:23:53.620 And she realized that she didn't want to go along with that, with some of the mores of the day in

00:24:03.220 relationship to women.

00:24:05.360 Women couldn't own property or inherit property, very often were kept in the home. 1.00

00:24:11.880 So, she became a teacher.

00:24:15.340 Her world began to broaden.

00:24:17.500 The teaching was one of the few professions that women could do back in her day. 1.00

00:24:22.460 She became a teacher, and then she became an activist.

00:24:28.220 First of all, she got involved in temperance, which was non-drinking, and the women's temperance

00:24:35.120 movement.

00:24:36.460 And finally, she realized that women were never going to be empowered in our society until 1.00

00:24:42.540 they got the vote.

00:24:43.420 And once she realized that, she was onto her dharma.

00:24:47.740 She realized that she was going to spend the rest of her life organizing and focusing

00:24:53.600 on this one high goal, which was for women to be enfranchised.

00:24:59.880 She doubted, and she often said, I probably won't live to see it, but I'm going to spend

00:25:05.980 my life doing it.

00:25:07.060 And then she became an incredibly effective person in that dharma because of unification

00:25:14.200 of action.

00:25:15.600 Everything she did, her writing, her speaking, her traveling, was all organized systematically

00:25:23.260 around her bigger goal.

00:25:26.480 So, for example, she lived in upstate New York, and she loved beautiful clothes, but she realized

00:25:33.020 she had to get up on these podiums and speak to auditoriums full of angry, pissed-off men.

00:25:39.560 And she didn't want to piss them off more by wearing flowery clothing, so she wore black.

00:25:45.940 At a certain point, she had to learn to be a great speaker because she really had to shout

00:25:51.560 down these rooms of upset people.

00:25:54.660 So, she took on a coach.

00:25:56.160 She took on Elizabeth Cady Stanton to help her write her speeches and learn to give them. 0.95

00:26:00.840 Everything she did was aimed like the narrow point of a spear toward her bigger goal.

00:26:09.500 And so, her life became a kind of guided missile of energy, and she was a perfect example of

00:26:17.740 this doctrine of unified action.

00:26:20.840 Bring it.

00:26:21.500 Bring everything you've got.

00:26:23.520 You know, as a writer, I do that.

00:26:25.080 I try to do that every day.

00:26:26.540 I sit down and bring it, and you'd find out as a writer that your life ends up becoming

00:26:34.600 organized around your dharma in the sense that you have to take good care of yourself.

00:26:40.460 You have to sleep well and eat well, because when you get up at eight in the morning and

00:26:45.520 arrive at your desk, you want to be ready.

00:26:47.980 So, this doctrine of unity in action has served me, and it's the second important pillar of

00:26:56.120 Krishna's approach.

00:26:58.040 And then you also highlight, it also, this idea of unified action means deliberate practice,

00:27:02.980 like learning how to fulfill your dharma the best you can.

00:27:07.280 And I loved, I didn't know about this guy, but Camille Corot.

00:27:10.800 Camille Corot, yeah.

00:27:12.320 He's a painter that sort of exemplified what you thought was deliberate practice in the

00:27:15.760 Gita way.

00:27:16.560 Yeah, so Corot is a fascinating figure.

00:27:19.720 He was a great French landscape painter who, well, he was fascinated by painting as a kid.

00:27:28.560 And from the beginning, he started painting outdoors.

00:27:32.300 This is called plein air in French.

00:27:34.900 And then, like most of the artists of his day, went to Italy for his training.

00:27:39.580 But he soon caught on to this idea of what we now call deliberate practice.

00:27:44.120 And what deliberate practice means is that you intend and organize all of your actions around

00:27:52.280 your dharma, around your calling, to eventuate in the mastery of that calling.

00:27:58.820 So, Corot was one of the very first painters who, when he was painting in Rome, for example,

00:28:05.980 would paint the Palatine Hill.

00:28:07.920 And he'd paint it over and over and over again every day from the same viewpoint,

00:28:14.600 but with different kinds of light.

00:28:16.360 And what he was doing was deliberately practicing how to capture the light, the special light of

00:28:24.340 Italy.

00:28:26.480 And deliberate practice, we now know that most of the people that we think of masters and

00:28:32.560 geniuses actually are the result of practicing their craft deliberately.

00:28:38.080 And what that means is you practice with the intention of improving.

00:28:45.060 You practice in such a way that you get regular feedback.

00:28:50.520 You create loops of feedback.

00:28:52.100 So, you have not only your own eyes, but someone else's eyes on your work.

00:28:58.000 You immerse yourself in the culture of that particular craft.

00:29:02.340 So, Corot immersed himself in the culture of painters.

00:29:07.920 You let go of the idea of perfectionism and take risks.

00:29:13.120 So, there's a whole series, and I lay these out in my book, of things that are considered

00:29:18.840 now deliberate practice.

00:29:20.180 And we know that almost any kind of mastery takes approximately 10,000 hours to master.

00:29:28.180 And paradoxically, I found that this is also true of meditation.

00:29:32.660 So, those monks that you read currently and that the Dalai Lama brings with them to his

00:29:41.620 big conferences, they've practiced their meditation practices and their breathing practices for

00:29:48.000 10,000 hours, just like Corot did.

00:29:50.840 And Corot, as a result, became one of the greatest masters of French landscape painting.

00:29:59.240 Monet said at a big exhibition once, he said, and all the great painters were there.

00:30:04.480 He said, there's only one master here, and that's Camille Corot. 0.53

00:30:08.840 So, it sounds like this, from the Hindu perspective, this idea of going full out, it's about focus.

00:30:15.720 I mean, that's what you do in the contemplative practice.

00:30:18.720 Exactly.

00:30:18.820 It's learning how to focus.

00:30:21.320 It's all about focus and concentration.

00:30:23.660 And if you read the other scriptures of yoga, the Yoga Sutra, for example, it lays out a very

00:30:32.140 clear series of steps in which the mind becomes increasingly concentrated on the object of attention.

00:30:39.960 And in this case, in Corot's case, for example, painting, it can be anything.

00:30:44.280 I'm writing a chapter right now on Marianne Anderson, the great black contralto, and looking at the way in which she's systematically promoted the mastery of her voice by becoming increasingly concentrated on the most subtle aspects of the way in which the body produces sound.

00:31:05.720 And so, the next pillar, so you go full out, the second pillar, the next pillar is let go of the fruits.

00:31:11.980 And this is probably the most well-known idea from the Geet.

00:31:14.260 I'm sure people have heard some version of it, but it's what Krishna told Arjuna was, you have a right to the work, but not to the fruits.

00:31:21.540 Hmm, exactly.

00:31:24.240 This is a toughie.

00:31:26.660 And, you know, I use in this particular section, I use John Keats as an example.

00:31:32.660 Because Keats, by the time he was 18, Keats, who was then in medical school and was really bad at medical school, discovered that his true calling was to poetry.

00:31:44.860 So, by the age of 18, he said, I'm spending the rest of my life dedicated to poetry, and I intend to be the greatest poet in the English language.

00:31:55.960 He was determined to, as he said, wear the laurel wreath, which is the wreath of the victor.

00:32:01.640 And his career faltered around that because it turns out that grasping and craving and clinging to an exalted outcome is probably the worst thing you can do to actually inhibit that outcome.

00:32:17.760 I teach a lot of young musicians up here at Kripalu, and one of the first things I notice about them is they're all tied up in knots trying to perfectly execute their musical charge, whatever it is, piano or voice.

00:32:36.900 And it turns out that grasping and craving and clinging and holding on to outcome in that way with kind of a death grip on it actually inhibits fluid performance, inhibits what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow states.

00:32:53.180 And, of course, people are so resistant to this idea, thinking that if I'm not grasping to success in business or to perfection in my music, then how am I ever going to get anywhere?

00:33:09.900 Well, it turns out that the contemplative traditions have a completely different view of that, and that is the idea that it's not grasping that actually eventuates in mastery.

00:33:20.260 It's aspiration itself.

00:33:23.480 So, to aspire to something is to learn to deliberately practice it as a craft.

00:33:30.980 And, of course, this is what Keats had to go through.

00:33:34.220 Keats had this big competition with one of his poet friends, and they were both going to write these great, long, epic poems.

00:33:41.980 And as a result of his grasping for it to be the greatest, Keats realized he was inhibiting himself.

00:33:49.120 So, Keats himself came up with something that he called negative capability, wherein he realized that the systematic, regular, non-sexy practice of practicing his craft,

00:34:05.480 without any fanfare and without getting ahead of himself in terms of wanting to be the greatest poet in the world, actually, that was the formula for greatness.

00:34:22.360 So, it was a paradox.

00:34:23.280 He called it negative capability because he said, you have to let go of those grandiose ideas.

00:34:29.880 You have to stand on the edge of the cliff of your skill and be willing to take risks and be willing to fail and be willing to go into the mystery.

00:34:40.500 And it's out of that soup that actually comes greatness.

00:34:46.500 And so, once Keats got onto that, of course, he did write some of the greatest poetry in the English language.

00:34:55.340 Unfortunately, he died when he was, I believe, 27 of tuberculosis.

00:34:59.580 But in those short, almost 10 years of writing, he became, indeed, one of the great poets.

00:35:09.820 I mean, I think it's such a powerful idea because, as you said, it is a paradox.

00:35:13.380 But you see it, it's a universal idea.

00:35:15.420 I mean, you see it in other faiths and other philosophies.

00:35:18.580 Stoicism kind of has something similar to that.

00:35:20.480 That's right.

00:35:20.980 In Buddhism, you have the same thing.

00:35:22.320 You can even say in Christianity, there's that idea.

00:35:25.440 I mean, grace is probably like that. 1.00

00:35:26.740 You care, but you don't care about the outcomes, right?

00:35:31.660 That's classic T.S. Eliot.

00:35:33.880 Let me care and not care.

00:35:35.240 Yeah.

00:35:35.760 That's how I describe that idea.

00:35:37.140 It's like, care but not care.

00:35:39.340 And I've experienced that a few times.

00:35:42.300 And when I've experienced it, it's like the most amazing feeling in the world.

00:35:46.260 And then I've just been trying to get back to that.

00:35:47.780 But it's really hard because it's so easy to go fall back to like, I got to grasp for the outcome.

00:35:52.080 I got to get this.

00:35:53.480 Exactly.

00:35:54.060 It's so hard.

00:35:54.480 Exactly.

00:35:54.840 It's like you're like, I don't know, it's almost like a drug where you experience it and you just spend the rest of your life trying to, you start grasping at the, it's kind of a paradox.

00:36:03.260 And you start grasping at not grasping.

00:36:06.940 That's right.

00:36:07.600 That's right.

00:36:08.180 Well, you know what's funny, Brett, is that grasping and craving, of course, in Buddhism, as in yoga, is seen as the root of suffering.

00:36:16.440 And yet, it's so built into our nature that there are, as you go through the stages of refinement toward enlightenment, say, in the Buddhist tradition, there are multiple stages at which you have to let go of even grasping for highly refined ecstatic states.

00:36:38.680 You have to let go of grasping for enlightenment itself.

00:36:42.680 Grasping itself becomes more and more refined until you have to let go of those final stages of it.

00:36:51.180 And that's when you fall into enlightenment.

00:36:55.180 I mean, the Buddha himself, of course, before his enlightenment, had been practicing for six years in the forest, these amazingly difficult ascetic feats.

00:37:08.920 So, he was eating half a grain of rice a day, and this was called the ascetic Buddha.

00:37:15.220 And it wasn't until he let that go, he let go of the grasping because it was grasping inherent in the way he'd set up his practice.

00:37:25.120 And finally, he let it go.

00:37:27.640 He sat down, he accepted that bowl of milk from Sujata, the farm girl, and that was when he became enlightened.

00:37:34.460 And another character you explore for this idea of letting go of the fruits is Beethoven.

00:37:39.820 And Beethoven, a student of the Gita.

00:37:43.220 And he faced, I mean, for the most of his life, he had a tough life.

00:37:47.460 You know, you talk about his father was basically abusive towards him since he was a boy.

00:37:52.720 He was awkward socially.

00:37:55.380 And then, at the height of his career, he starts going deaf.

00:38:00.200 Right.

00:38:00.800 And he basically almost, I mean, he started contemplating suicide at this point.

00:38:04.660 That's right.

00:38:05.240 That's right.

00:38:05.700 I mean, talk about having to let go.

00:38:10.440 Beethoven had one huge gift, which was he understood that his calling, he understood from very early in life that his calling was to music.

00:38:20.980 And he also was already on to Thoreau's idea that it was his idiosyncratic view and understanding and insight and genius that was going to lead him to fulfill his dharma in life, which he did wonderfully.

00:38:38.240 You know, Beethoven, it wasn't until Beethoven discovered Bach that, and Bach was long dead when Beethoven discovered him.

00:38:47.400 But when he heard Bach's fugues, he said, oh, my God, you can do that?

00:38:54.380 You can actually do that?

00:38:56.080 It freed him to claim his own idiosyncratic genius.

00:39:01.760 And he lived for that, and he lived through it, and he lived magnificently.

00:39:08.220 And yes, he had a quote from the Gita under the glass of his desk.

00:39:12.220 And that was a shocker to me, because I'm a huge Beethoven fan, and I'd never heard that until I read this little footnote in Maynard Solomon's biography.

00:39:22.440 Oh, yeah.

00:39:23.220 Beethoven, the Bhagavad Gita.

00:39:25.160 And he had, I mean, I think the quote was just about knowing your duty, and then once you know it, you know what to do.

00:39:31.500 Do it.

00:39:31.860 Yeah.

00:39:32.200 Do it full out, exactly.

00:39:33.400 I mean, I thought that was one of the most powerful ideas from the Gita, this idea of remembering who you are.

00:39:38.860 Yeah.

00:39:39.260 Once you, the reason, like Krishna says to Arjuna, like the reason why you're conflicted and the reason why you're anxious is like you forgot who you are.

00:39:46.460 And I think this leads to that final part of the final pillar, which is turn it over to God, or turn it over to something bigger than yourself.

00:39:55.820 I think that this idea of remembering who you are, that's related to that idea.

00:40:00.420 Well, I mean, this is actually where, in many ways, the Gita really starts there.

00:40:06.600 One of the very first things Krishna says to Arjuna is, dude, you don't have a clue who you really are.

00:40:12.620 You're stuck in this little box, this little idea of self, this little idea of ego, and you don't realize that in your true nature, you have the same consciousness as Brahman. 0.95

00:40:24.920 This is very central to the Hindu view and the yogic view, is the idea that each individual soul, or Atman, is, in its very essence, one with Brahman, or the divine consciousness, consciousness itself.

00:40:41.860 And the idea that's very different from a lot of Western religion is that you can actually realize this true nature, this part of yourself that knows and sees and comprehends and understands and attains the same kind of consciousness that we call in that tradition Brahman, or the divine.

00:41:07.860 And, again, this marks it as quite different in many ways, although there are many Western theologians who write from the same place.

00:41:20.860 It's Eckhart, not Eckhart Tolle, but the original Eckhart, back in, I think, the 13th century, who stressed that view that we're all made in the image and likeness of the divine.

00:41:33.320 And, you know, in most of the contemplative traditions, it's understood that there's a very systematic path of claiming that consciousness and of becoming one with that consciousness.

00:41:48.920 And a lot of it involves systematic path of moral purification.

00:41:54.580 But in that particular chapter, I use both Gandhi and Harriet Tubman.

00:42:00.140 And I love the Harriet Tubman story because, you know, Tubman had no formal education whatsoever.

00:42:09.180 And like so many, she was a slave on a plantation in the South, and as so many slaves were in those days, she was educated by listening to Bible stories at night around the fire or the hearth or whatever.

00:42:27.220 So, she was actually remarkably well-educated in a lot of the things that really count.

00:42:32.220 And she escaped from her plantation and, you know, followed what they call followed the drinking gourd, followed the North Star, found her way to Philadelphia, which was a safe city, and then out of the blue experienced this call from God.

00:42:53.580 And it was nothing less than God knocking on her door saying, Harriet, I want you to go back to the plantation and free others. 0.97

00:43:02.220 And she was like, no way, not me, that was tough enough the first time.

00:43:08.860 And God kept knocking, that inner voice, that divine voice kept assailing her.

00:43:16.220 And finally, she said, okay, I will do it, but you're going to have to lead me because I do not know how to do this.

00:43:23.300 I'm not trained to do this.

00:43:24.780 Well, Harriet Tubman became, they called her the engineer because she engineered the freedom of so many fugitive slaves. 0.96

00:43:35.700 She'd bring them back north. 0.99

00:43:37.720 She'd go down undercover, back into dangerous territory, and free 5 or 10 or 15 or 25 slaves and lead them to safety, not just to Philadelphia, but she led them all the way to Canada. 0.98

00:43:54.780 And then when they got to Canada, they would stop on the bridge, the whole group of them. 0.97

00:44:01.580 And by the way, the people who followed her knew that she had a kind of connection with this inner voice.

00:44:08.500 She called it a sixth sense that was infallible.

00:44:13.100 So, if she said, stop, you stop.

00:44:16.260 If she said, hide behind the tree or duck or bury yourself under that mound of dirt, you did it because she was connected in that way.

00:44:26.260 She was being guided.

00:44:28.640 And then when they got to the bridge in Canada, they'd all stop and they'd have a prayer service where she would turn it back over to God and say, this was not me, people.

00:44:39.240 This was God.

00:44:40.960 So, pray to God, worship God, begin to listen to that to your own still small voice inside, and allow yourself to be guided just as I have.

00:44:53.340 And I think she was an example of, you know, action requires faith, but faith also requires action.

00:44:59.200 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:00.120 No, she was, I mean, she was a woman of action her whole life.

00:45:06.280 The other character you talk about is Gandhi, which is interesting about Gandhi, you know, he's Indian, he's Hindu.

00:45:10.760 Right.

00:45:11.340 And he became sort of this embodiment of the Gita, but he didn't discover the Gita.

00:45:15.960 He had to go to England and be amongst the English to finally, that's when he first discovered the Bhagavad Gita.

00:45:23.180 He did, and he discovered it in English, he did not discover it in Hindi or Gujarat, I believe he was born in Gujarat province.

00:45:33.480 And he was immediately taken by, it was like he recognized in that scripture, the spiritual genius of his own culture, which don't forget, in Gandhi's day, that culture had been downtrodden by 300 years of British colonial rule.

00:45:51.740 And in so many ways had lost the spiritual self-esteem of their culture.

00:45:59.160 So, Gandhi gets to England, and he's introduced to the Gita, and he begins to light up with an understanding of the spiritual genius of India and the subcontinent of India.

00:46:14.000 Then, of course, he goes to South Africa, where he puts all of the teachings of the Gita.

00:46:20.140 The Gita is, as he said, his guidebook for life.

00:46:23.920 And he said, if you wish to know what a life based on the Gita looks like, look at my life, because my life has been entirely based on the Gita.

00:46:34.800 So, he went to South Africa, where he understood the Gita to be talking about non-separateness.

00:46:44.060 And he began working with Indians who lived in South Africa and who were hugely dominated and colonialized by their Dutch colonizers.

00:46:55.080 And so, he got his first taste of helping to resist in a non-violent way in South Africa before he came back to India, where he became the champion of non-violent resistance, what he called Satyagraha, or soul power.

00:47:13.480 And, I mean, the idea that you kind of, you hit with Gandhi was, you know, turning everything over to God.

00:47:19.780 And he had this idea, Gandhi had this idea of, you got to take yourself to zero.

00:47:23.560 Yes.

00:47:23.880 It's not about you anymore.

00:47:25.500 It's about something bigger than yourself.

00:47:28.100 Exactly.

00:47:28.680 Gandhi, you know, Gandhi took literally what Krishna speaks to Arjuna at the very, in that very first chapter where he says, Arjuna, by the way, you are not your body.

00:47:40.620 And Arjuna is, of course, terrified of being injured in this war.

00:47:46.000 And Gandhi took literally, you're not your body, and you needn't be terrified of being injured or even killed in the line of duty, in the line of doing your dharma.

00:47:57.260 So, much of take yourself to zero for Gandhi was really take your ego out of it, take your own self-importance and aggrandizement out of it.

00:48:10.680 Rather, look at the good of the whole.

00:48:14.060 So, Gandhi was all about looking at the good of the whole, looking at the good of the whole community.

00:48:18.960 He was Martin Luther King's predecessor in understanding the importance of what King called the blessed community.

00:48:28.640 So, yeah, that was Gandhi, take yourself to zero.

00:48:31.120 And, of course, he did.

00:48:33.160 He didn't count the cost to himself of so many of his actions.

00:48:38.800 He didn't count the cost of going to jail or doing a fast.

00:48:43.560 He was quite willing to die.

00:48:45.260 That last fast that he did, he almost died when the Hindus and Muslims had again begun to war on each other. 1.00

00:48:53.740 He went on a fast until it stopped, and there was take yourself to zero.

00:48:59.720 Gandhi was incredibly creative.

00:49:03.840 Like, he didn't see himself as living inside this little box of fear, which allowed him to be hugely creative in the way he moved.

00:49:13.220 And he was constantly frustrating and freaking out his own supporters because he'd do stuff that nobody had ever thought of before or tried before.

00:49:24.160 And it was just because he'd been freed from what they call in the tradition grasping to views and beliefs about how things should be.

00:49:33.380 He was much more interested in how things are.

00:49:36.420 Well, Stephen, it's been a great conversation.

00:49:38.000 For those who want to explore the Gita more, is there a translation in English that you recommend for folks?

00:49:45.200 There's a great translation that I prefer using.

00:49:48.140 It's by a guy named Eknath Eswaran, E-A-S-W-A-R-N, who actually has studied.

00:49:58.200 He's an Indian scholar who moved to the United States in the 50s and became a professor in Southern California, I believe, at Berkeley.

00:50:09.880 And from there translated the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and some of Buddha's texts.

00:50:18.680 And it's an extremely practical but also accurate guide to the Gita and the Upanishads.

00:50:28.280 And part of it is that he accompanies his translations with an essay for each chapter that really helps you to understand, frankly, and you know this now that you've read the Gita, you can't read it without a guide because there's so much sophisticated philosophy thrown in.

00:50:46.540 It's a little bit of a dog's dinner in that way in the sense that you really need a guide to wade through it.

00:50:52.440 And I found Eswaran, I think partly because he understood the Western mind, because he lived here, is particularly useful.

00:51:00.800 And there's a fairly new edition of it you can find on Amazon.

00:51:05.880 Yeah, that's the translation I have.

00:51:07.680 That's right.

00:51:08.380 Yeah, the commentary is very useful.

00:51:10.480 So useful.

00:51:11.420 Where can people go to learn more about your book and your work?

00:51:15.080 They can log on to my website, which is www.stephencope.com.

00:51:19.440 I am the Scholar Emeritus at Kripalu Center, which is the largest center in America for the study and practice of yoga in Western Massachusetts.

00:51:30.180 Unfortunately, we're locked down with COVID right now, but we will open again.

00:51:35.180 And I teach a lot at Kripalu.

00:51:37.120 I teach all over the country, but you can find my events on my website there.

00:51:41.960 Fantastic.

00:51:42.300 Well, Stephen Cope, thanks for your time.

00:51:43.460 It's been a pleasure.

00:51:44.500 Total pleasure, Brett.

00:51:45.480 I'm delighted to meet you and we'll talk again.

00:51:49.700 My guest day was Stephen Cope.

00:51:50.800 He's the author of the book, The Great Work of Your Life.

00:51:53.500 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:51:55.800 You can find out more information about his work at his website, stephencope.com.

00:51:59.580 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash gita, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

00:52:04.520 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AMM Podcast.

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00:52:45.300 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

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The Art of Manliness - June 03, 2020

#616： A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

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