Stephen Cope is a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, and author of The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide to Your True Calling, a book that uses the Bhagavad Gita, a piece of Hindu scripture, to explore the idea of vocation and the four pillars of right living.
00:30:21.320It's all about focus and concentration.
00:30:23.660And if you read the other scriptures of yoga, the Yoga Sutra, for example, it lays out a very
00:30:32.140clear series of steps in which the mind becomes increasingly concentrated on the object of attention.
00:30:39.960And in this case, in Corot's case, for example, painting, it can be anything.
00:30:44.280I'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.
00:31:05.720And so, the next pillar, so you go full out, the second pillar, the next pillar is let go of the fruits.
00:31:11.980And this is probably the most well-known idea from the Geet.
00:31:14.260I'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.
00:31:26.660And, you know, I use in this particular section, I use John Keats as an example.
00:31:32.660Because 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.
00:31:44.860So, 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.
00:31:55.960He was determined to, as he said, wear the laurel wreath, which is the wreath of the victor.
00:32:01.640And 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.
00:32:17.760I 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.
00:32:36.900And 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.
00:32:53.180And, 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?
00:33:09.900Well, 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.
00:33:23.480So, to aspire to something is to learn to deliberately practice it as a craft.
00:33:30.980And, of course, this is what Keats had to go through.
00:33:34.220Keats had this big competition with one of his poet friends, and they were both going to write these great, long, epic poems.
00:33:41.980And as a result of his grasping for it to be the greatest, Keats realized he was inhibiting himself.
00:33:49.120So, 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,
00:34:05.480without 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.
00:34:23.280He called it negative capability because he said, you have to let go of those grandiose ideas.
00:34:29.880You 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.
00:34:40.500And it's out of that soup that actually comes greatness.
00:34:46.500And so, once Keats got onto that, of course, he did write some of the greatest poetry in the English language.
00:34:55.340Unfortunately, he died when he was, I believe, 27 of tuberculosis.
00:34:59.580But in those short, almost 10 years of writing, he became, indeed, one of the great poets.
00:35:09.820I mean, I think it's such a powerful idea because, as you said, it is a paradox.
00:35:13.380But you see it, it's a universal idea.
00:35:15.420I mean, you see it in other faiths and other philosophies.
00:35:18.580Stoicism kind of has something similar to that.
00:35:54.840It'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.
00:36:03.260And you start grasping at not grasping.
00:36:08.180Well, 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.
00:36:16.440And 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.
00:36:38.680You have to let go of grasping for enlightenment itself.
00:36:42.680Grasping itself becomes more and more refined until you have to let go of those final stages of it.
00:36:51.180And that's when you fall into enlightenment.
00:36:55.180I mean, the Buddha himself, of course, before his enlightenment, had been practicing for six years in the forest, these amazingly difficult ascetic feats.
00:37:08.920So, he was eating half a grain of rice a day, and this was called the ascetic Buddha.
00:37:15.220And 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.
00:38:10.440Beethoven had one huge gift, which was he understood that his calling, he understood from very early in life that his calling was to music.
00:38:20.980And 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.
00:38:38.240You know, Beethoven, it wasn't until Beethoven discovered Bach that, and Bach was long dead when Beethoven discovered him.
00:38:47.400But when he heard Bach's fugues, he said, oh, my God, you can do that?
00:38:56.080It freed him to claim his own idiosyncratic genius.
00:39:01.760And he lived for that, and he lived through it, and he lived magnificently.
00:39:08.220And yes, he had a quote from the Gita under the glass of his desk.
00:39:12.220And 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.
00:39:39.260Once 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.
00:39:46.460And 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.
00:39:55.820I think that this idea of remembering who you are, that's related to that idea.
00:40:00.420Well, I mean, this is actually where, in many ways, the Gita really starts there.
00:40:06.600One of the very first things Krishna says to Arjuna is, dude, you don't have a clue who you really are.
00:40:12.620You'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.
00:40:24.920This 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.
00:40:41.860And 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.
00:41:07.860And, again, this marks it as quite different in many ways, although there are many Western theologians who write from the same place.
00:41:20.860It'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.
00:41:33.320And, 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.
00:41:48.920And a lot of it involves systematic path of moral purification.
00:41:54.580But in that particular chapter, I use both Gandhi and Harriet Tubman.
00:42:00.140And I love the Harriet Tubman story because, you know, Tubman had no formal education whatsoever.
00:42:09.180And 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.
00:42:27.220So, she was actually remarkably well-educated in a lot of the things that really count.
00:42:32.220And 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.
00:42:53.580And it was nothing less than God knocking on her door saying, Harriet, I want you to go back to the plantation and free others.
00:43:02.220And she was like, no way, not me, that was tough enough the first time.
00:43:08.860And God kept knocking, that inner voice, that divine voice kept assailing her.
00:43:16.220And 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.
00:43:37.720She'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.
00:43:54.780And then when they got to Canada, they would stop on the bridge, the whole group of them.
00:44:01.580And by the way, the people who followed her knew that she had a kind of connection with this inner voice.
00:44:08.500She called it a sixth sense that was infallible.
00:44:28.640And 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.
00:44:40.960So, 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.
00:44:53.340And I think she was an example of, you know, action requires faith, but faith also requires action.
00:45:11.340And he became sort of this embodiment of the Gita, but he didn't discover the Gita.
00:45:15.960He had to go to England and be amongst the English to finally, that's when he first discovered the Bhagavad Gita.
00:45:23.180He did, and he discovered it in English, he did not discover it in Hindi or Gujarat, I believe he was born in Gujarat province.
00:45:33.480And 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.
00:45:51.740And in so many ways had lost the spiritual self-esteem of their culture.
00:45:59.160So, 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.
00:46:14.000Then, of course, he goes to South Africa, where he puts all of the teachings of the Gita.
00:46:20.140The Gita is, as he said, his guidebook for life.
00:46:23.920And 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.
00:46:34.800So, he went to South Africa, where he understood the Gita to be talking about non-separateness.
00:46:44.060And he began working with Indians who lived in South Africa and who were hugely dominated and colonialized by their Dutch colonizers.
00:46:55.080And 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.
00:47:13.480And, I mean, the idea that you kind of, you hit with Gandhi was, you know, turning everything over to God.
00:47:19.780And he had this idea, Gandhi had this idea of, you got to take yourself to zero.
00:47:28.680Gandhi, 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.
00:47:40.620And Arjuna is, of course, terrified of being injured in this war.
00:47:46.000And 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.
00:47:57.260So, 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.
00:48:10.680Rather, look at the good of the whole.
00:48:14.060So, Gandhi was all about looking at the good of the whole, looking at the good of the whole community.
00:48:18.960He was Martin Luther King's predecessor in understanding the importance of what King called the blessed community.
00:48:28.640So, yeah, that was Gandhi, take yourself to zero.
00:49:03.840Like, 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.
00:49:13.220And 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.
00:49:24.160And 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.
00:49:33.380He was much more interested in how things are.
00:49:36.420Well, Stephen, it's been a great conversation.
00:49:38.000For those who want to explore the Gita more, is there a translation in English that you recommend for folks?
00:49:45.200There's a great translation that I prefer using.
00:49:48.140It's by a guy named Eknath Eswaran, E-A-S-W-A-R-N, who actually has studied.
00:49:58.200He's an Indian scholar who moved to the United States in the 50s and became a professor in Southern California, I believe, at Berkeley.
00:50:09.880And from there translated the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and some of Buddha's texts.
00:50:18.680And it's an extremely practical but also accurate guide to the Gita and the Upanishads.
00:50:28.280And 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.
00:50:46.540It'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.
00:50:52.440And I found Eswaran, I think partly because he understood the Western mind, because he lived here, is particularly useful.
00:51:00.800And there's a fairly new edition of it you can find on Amazon.
00:51:11.420Where can people go to learn more about your book and your work?
00:51:15.080They can log on to my website, which is www.stephencope.com.
00:51:19.440I am the Scholar Emeritus at Kripalu Center, which is the largest center in America for the study and practice of yoga in Western Massachusetts.
00:51:30.180Unfortunately, we're locked down with COVID right now, but we will open again.
00:51:50.800He's the author of the book, The Great Work of Your Life.
00:51:53.500It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:51:55.800You can find out more information about his work at his website, stephencope.com.
00:51:59.580Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash gita, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.
00:52:04.520Well, that wraps up another edition of the AMM Podcast.
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