A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling
Episode Stats
Summary
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 to explore the idea of vocation and calling in your life.
Transcript
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Hey, it's Brett. We're taking a break. It's 4th of July or Independence Day here in the United
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States. So I'm with my family, we're eating hamburgers, shooting fireworks off. So we're
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going to rebroadcast episode number 616, a guide for the journey to your true calling.
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One of our most popular episodes last year. Hope you enjoy it. See you on Wednesday with
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a brand new episode. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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One of the most burning questions in life is what it is you're called to do with it. What's your
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life's purpose? What great work are you meant to do? Guidance on this question can come from many
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sources. And my guest today says that one of the best is the Bhagavad Gita, a text of Hindu scripture
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thousands of years old. Same as Stephen Cope. He's a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, and the author of
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The Great Work of Your Life, The Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling. Stephen and I begin
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our conversation with an introduction of the Bhagavad Gita, the significant influence it's had
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on philosophers and leaders before ages, and what it can teach us about making difficult decisions.
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We then discuss the insights the Gita offers on the four pillars of right living,
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begin with discerning your true calling or sacred duty. We unpack the three areas in your life to
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examine for clues to your life's purpose, why that purpose may be small and quiet rather than big and
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splashy. Stephen then explains the doctrine of unified action, why you have to pursue your calling
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full out, and why that pursuit should include the habit of deliberate practice. We also discuss why
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it's central to let go of the outcome of actions to focus on the work itself and the need to turn your
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efforts over to something bigger than yourself. Along the way, Stephen offers examples of how these
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pillars were embodying the lives of eminent individuals who lived out their purpose.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Gita.
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So you are the author of a book called The Great Work of Your Life, A Guide for the Journey to Your True
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Calling. And this book uses the Bhagavad Gita. It's a piece of Hindu scripture to explore this
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idea of vocation, of calling in your life. I read this book a few years ago. I was telling you off
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air. After I read that book, that's what introduced me to the Gita. And since then, I've read the Gita
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at least once a year because it's such a cool piece of literature. So I'm curious, how did you discover
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the Bhagavad Gita? Well, you know, the Bhagavad Gita is really the most well-known scripture,
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yogic scripture, in India. So if you're hanging out in Indian culture or Hindu culture or yogic
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culture, pretty much everybody knows about the Gita. There are a number of great scriptures in
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the yoga tradition, but the Gita is certainly the most well-known. It's the kind of thing that
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everybody in every little village in India knows. And there are images of Krishna and Arjuna,
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the two main characters, pretty much everywhere in temples. And so I, once I came into the yoga
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world, it's pretty much inevitable that you bump into the Gita.
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And as you said, it's a piece of Hindu scripture, but as we'll talk about in this book, a lot of
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great Western thinkers for a couple centuries now have been influenced by the Gita. I mean,
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I mean, honestly, it's remarkable. I, writing on the Gita as I have, I keep bumping into more. So
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there is probably the first major Western philosopher was Schopenhauer who wrote in the early 19th century.
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The Gita was translated into English as late as I think 1787 or 1785. But where you start really
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beginning to see its influences is with Thoreau and Emerson, the transcendentalists in Concord in the
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1820s, 30s, 40s, 50s. And Thoreau picked it up and was profoundly influenced by it. And you can kind of
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draw a direct line then between Thoreau's influence and Emerson as well. And then Tolstoy who picked it
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up. And from Tolstoy, a direct line to Gandhi, and then to Aldous Huxley who wrote a brilliant book
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called The Perennial Philosophy. And from there to Martin Luther King and to Bobby Kennedy. So there's
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this direct line back to the great American philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau.
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So let's, let's dig into the Gita. And for those who, before we get to some of the lessons and
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takeaway that you talk about in your book, can you give people who aren't familiar with the story,
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sort of a big picture overview of what's going on with it and the main characters? Yeah.
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Yeah. It's a great tale. And, you know, like most tales, it was meant to be spoken verbally,
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even though it was written down somewhere in the, probably the second century of the common era.
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The tale is about, it's, it happens on the night before a great war, the battle of Kurukshetra on the
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field of Kuru. And the two major protagonists are Arjuna and Arjuna is a warrior. He's the greatest
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warrior of the kingdom of Kuru. And his father is, was the king, now the deposed king of the kingdom
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of Kuru. And the other major character is Krishna, who's his charioteer. And Krishna, of course, is
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God in disguise. We don't find that out until the middle of the book. But the whole book is a dialogue
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between Krishna and Arjuna at the edge of the battlefield. So you can imagine there's a huge
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battle, an epic battle about to take place the next morning. And Arjuna is very conflicted about
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whether or not to fight in this battle. The backstory is that the kingship has been stolen by
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one of Arjuna's cousins. And that's what precipitated this war. And he realizes as he sits with, with
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Krishna, that he's got a dilemma that he cannot solve. And the dilemma is this. Because he's a
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warrior and he was part of a very rigid caste system, it was his duty, it was his sacred duty to fight
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in a war, to fight in a just war. And this was a just war. On the other hand, he realized that he was
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most likely going to kill his own kin because his cousins were on the other side of this battle.
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And so the very first chapter, he investigates this dilemma. He must fight in the battle because
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it's his calling, it's his sacred duty. But if he fights, he will kill kin. In either case, he will
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have to go to purgatory in the Hindu view for lifetimes. And so he's presented with this dilemma
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that he cannot solve. It's greater than his own consciousness. And he sits with Krishna through
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the night as Krishna expounds to him his way through this particular dilemma. And the way through is
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actually by completely expanding his consciousness so that he understands that the war itself is not
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really a real external war, but a battle going on within himself. So the tale is really about the
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moral dilemmas that each of us face in life and how we work our way through them.
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Now, I mean, I love the setup of the story. And that's why I think it's so relatable. I think why so
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many individuals, even in the West, are related to this with Arjuna. It's just like, I don't know
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what to do. I have no idea what to do. And that's like, that's most of life. Like, I don't know what
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Yeah. In fact, he says, Arjuna in the beginning, at the end of the first chapter falls to the floor
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of the chariot. And he says, Krishna, I cannot fight this fight. Conflicting sacred duties confound
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my mind. And of course, we run into that all the time, conflicting sacred duties. Should I do A or
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should I do B? What am I called to do? And how do I know what my calling is? So it's a great setup,
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that first chapter. And then there are 17 more chapters where Krishna describes the slow and
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deliberate process of understanding your calling.
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And that's, I mean, that's what I love about it too, that dialogue. He explains the idea of duty
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or dharma and then yoga, which, you know, in the West, we think yoga is like, you know, you downward
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dog or whatever, but yoga is, it's all about taking action. And that's what, and that's what Krishna
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tells Arjuna you have to do. You have to take action to fulfill your dharma.
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That's right. So basically Krishna teaches Arjuna what he calls the path of inaction in action,
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the path of nashkarman karman or inaction in action, which turns out to be a profound reframe
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of action. And there are four steps. First of all, Krishna says, look, don't even think about being the
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guy who doesn't take action because we all act all the time. In the contemplative traditions,
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they talk about actions of mind, speech, and body. So even your mind is, is taking action.
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So the four pillars of the, this path of inaction in action are number one, discern your dharma,
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that is discern and know your, your true calling in this lifetime. Number two, do it full out,
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bring everything you've got to the performance of your dharma, of your calling. And third,
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let go of the outcome. So Krishna says to Arjuna, whether you're winning or losing or failing is not
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your issue. Your only issue is, have you determined what your dharma is and are you doing it full out?
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He says, it's better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at someone else's dharma.
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And then finally, Krishna says to Arjuna, turn this whole thing over to me. In other words,
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over to God or over to something bigger than yourself, over to some bigger meaning than your
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ego or yourself. And so we have the four pillars, discern your dharma, do it full out. The second one
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is called the doctrine of unified action because it calls you to unify all of your action around your
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dharma. The third is let go of the fruits and then finally turn it over to God or whatever version of
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All right, let's dig into deep. So you spend the rest of your book, The Great Work Your Life,
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exploring these four pillars. And you do that by, through examples of people you've worked with
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personally in your practice, in your work, but also the lives of, you know, what we'd consider great
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individuals who may have. Some of them, you know, directly were influenced by the Gita. Others, you
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know, they just kind of, they got the idea. So that first pillar, which is know your dharma, look to
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So, I mean, let's talk about this. How do you figure out what your dharma is in the first place, your calling,
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Well, this is where most of us get stuck. The truth is that when the Bhagavad Gita was
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written in that context, everybody was born into their own sacred calling. So, there was a very
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complex caste system. And you were, Arjuna was born a warrior. It was his duty to be a warrior.
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That was called svadharma. And of course, that kind of rigid duty to the social order and to your birth,
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it no longer applies in our culture. So, now we have to dig down inside, look at our circumstances
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and our life situation and our own gifts to determine what's our dharma, what's our true
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calling. The word dharma is based on the root DHR, which means to uphold. And the view that still
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translates to us is the idea that everybody has a responsibility to their particular set of
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gifts, their particular set of capacities. And so, no longer is the duty to the dharma into which
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you were born, but now it's to, as Carol Pearson, the great Jungian psychologist says, do you have a
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responsibility to your gifts and your own idiosyncratic opportunities that you must fulfill
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That reminds me of the idea that I think Pindar, he's a Roman poet, he said, you know,
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become who you are. Like Nietzsche picked that up, you know, and that idea of becoming who you are is
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looking at your situation. It might not mean like, you know, your dharma might not be like,
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I'm going to be president of the United States. It could be even smaller than that. But if you find
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Exactly, exactly. I'd like to say, because I'll tell you the truth, a lot of the time I spend with
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people looking at this, these notions is really spent on helping people to discern their dharma.
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So, the whole process of discernment, there are three particular areas that I call useful hunting
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grounds for dharma. One is, I often ask people the question, what's lighting you up? So, the first
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question to ask yourself is, what is it out there in the world, in your life now, that's lighting you
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up, that gives you energy, that fascinates you, that draws you? That is not necessarily your dharma,
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but it's a very interesting finger pointing toward dharma. The second useful hunting ground I've found
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is very different from what lights you up. The question here is, what do you see as your sacred
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duty in this life? So, sacred duty is something different. It may not necessarily light you up,
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it may. And I like to, the whole question of duty is complex. I like to say, your duty is that thing
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which, if you do not do it, will result in a profound sense of self-betrayal on your part.
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And that definition of duty moves the locus of duty from the exterior, that is, duties that are
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foisted on us, that we don't actually own, to our own interior self, where the real locus of duty is
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found. And then the third area, so we have, what lights you up? What do you consider or know to be
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your sacred duty? And the third area is, look at challenges and difficulties in your life. Because
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very often, people find their duty or their calling or even what's lighting them up arising directly out
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of challenges. So, a divorce, an illness, a change in job. This is another important hunting ground for
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dharma. So, between those three, you have some interesting arrows pointing at your own particular
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dharma. And I highly recommend that people explore those three areas very systematically.
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The one section in this, when you talk about, look to your dharma, that really, when I first read it,
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it's, I think about it all the time. And you explore the life of Henry David Thoreau and him trying to
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figure out his dharma. And the idea that you got from Thoreau is, think of the small as big. Because I
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think a lot of people, when they confront this question of what's my calling in life, they typically think
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it's got to be big. It's got to be where I'm known.
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And that's not necessarily the case. So, tell us about Thoreau's experience with the Gita and how
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Well, this, by the way, is what I call the false notion of the romance of dharma, the idea that it
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has to be something big, the idea that you have to leave your job selling insurance and move to Paris
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and become a great painter. That's a typical romantic notion. The truth is, most people's
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dharmas are already somewhere in their lives. They've already stumbled into some aspect of their
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dharma. But Thoreau is an interesting example. Thoreau, of course, was a brilliant man. He was
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educated at Harvard. He spoke many languages. He wrote Greek and Latin. And he, of course,
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lived in Concord, surrounded by the likes of Emerson and the Alcotts and all these great
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American writers and philosophers. And he got it in his head early on that he wanted to become a
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great writer. And so, with that in mind, he moved to New York City, which is where the only great
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writers in America at that time were thought to be and weren't really all there. And he was a
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complete failure in New York City. He was a woodsman. He was way too gruff and rough. And he was not
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accepted into the salons of New York Literary Society. And finally, dejected, he dragged his butt
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back to Concord, the little town where he lived and grew up, and decided when he got back that
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this was his home. This is where he was going to put his stake in the ground. And it wasn't long
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after that that he went to Walden Pond, where he built his cabin, on some land that Emerson loaned him,
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and decided to do his great experiment. You know, he said, I have come to the woods to learn to live
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deliberately, and not to find when I come to die that I had not lived. So, Thoreau went to Walden.
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And the teeniest little life you can imagine, a little cabin in the woods by the pond. And one
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of the few books he took with him was the Bhagavad Gita. He read the Gita daily. He considered himself
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a yogi, and keep in mind, this is in the early part of the 19th century. And he realized that
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whatever you're doing, whatever action you're taking, whatever your calling is, and now he
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understood that his calling was to investigate the small life, and to keep even getting it smaller.
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Remember, he finally had to give up one of his two spoons in his second year at Walden,
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and to discover how big the small life actually is. So, I actually quote from the Tao Te Ching there,
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where it says, think of the small as large and the few as many. Thoreau discovered in the Gita the
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notion that all actions have mystic consequences. So, the smallest actions, as long as they're aligned
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with your dharma, make some kind of huge ripple in the world. So, Thoreau took on the task of
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investigating his world just as he saw it, and as he found it around his little cabin.
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And strangely enough, just as the Bhagavad Gita said, mystic actions connected with your dharma
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make big splashes in the pond. And so, of course, we now think of Thoreau writing from his little
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cabin as one of the great philosophers and writers of American life and literature. He once said,
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which quote I love, I have traveled extensively in Concord. And by that he meant his inward journey
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in Concord, to the soul of this one little town. And by focusing down into the soul of this one
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beautiful little New England town, he pretty much found the whole world there.
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You know, when Krishna was born, his nurse looked into his open mouth and saw the whole universe there.
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And that's precisely what Thoreau did at Walden.
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We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. And I mean, you make this point in the book, I mean, Thoreau's
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experiment at Walden was even smaller. I mean, he was basically in the backyard of his parents'
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house. And you note that his mom still brought him cookies and sandwiches. And sometimes people
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criticize Thoreau for that. It's like, oh, he really didn't do anything. He just basically
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backpacked in his backyard. But it's like the idea, like he went full bore into it and was able to do
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Well, and one of the great things about Thoreau was, you know, we all know the quote, you know,
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find your own distant drummer and follow it. Thoreau caught under the idea that it's our
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idiosyncratic, highly particular calling that has the juice. He said, Thoreau said, all human beings
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should constantly be on the trail of their true nature because it is in following and claiming
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their true nature that they connect with the divine. So Thoreau said, find your bone. And here's
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a great image of a dog. Find your bone, gnaw on it, bury it, dig it up again, gnaw on it more.
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So, he found his bone in his writing and in his nature study. And it was through being uniquely,
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idiosyncratically, his own true self that he broke into the field of the divine. You know,
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and in this, he was relentless. So, Emerson, as you know, his buddy was much more polished and was a
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bit of a more professional philosopher, but Thoreau was this rugged individualist.
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And it was, it was he that, that really lived out in so many ways, Emerson's own views about
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All right. So, that's, look to your dharma, discover your dharma so you can look to what lights
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you up, look what's at your sacred duty or look at problems in your life, and then realize and
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understand that your dharma, your duty might be smaller than you think it is, and that's okay.
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Yeah, exactly. In fact, I used the story there of a friend of mine who's a nurse who
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kept saying to me, Steve, I just, I have such a small dharma. And, you know, finally now,
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10 years later, her life has been turned around because she fully embraces the beautiful work that
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is her daily work as a nurse, no longer thinking of it as small. So, think of the small as large
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All right. So, once you find your dharma, you're supposed to go full out on it. That's
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So, again, that's called the doctrine of unified action. And the idea here is that once you've
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found your dharma, you bring everything you've got to it. Krishna said to Arjuna,
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this is the passion that is not contrary to the dharma. In other words, you should be living a
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passionate life built around your dharma. One of the characters I used to explore this is Susan B.
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Anthony, who, as a young girl growing up in upstate New York, realized that she was, women were in a
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kind of prison in those days. They had very few rights. And she realized that she didn't want to
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go along with that, with some of the mores of the day in relationship to women. Women couldn't
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own property or inherit property. Very often were kept in the home. So, she became a teacher.
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Her world began to broaden. The teaching was one of the few professions that women could do
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back in her day. She became a teacher. And then she became an activist. First of all,
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she got involved in temperance, which was non-drinking and the women's temperance movement.
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And finally, she realized that women were never going to be empowered in our society until they got the
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vote. And once she realized that she was onto her dharma, she realized that she was going to spend
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the rest of her life organizing and focusing on this one high goal, which was for women to be
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enfranchised. She doubted and she often said, I probably won't live to see it, but I'm going to spend my
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life doing it. And then she became an incredibly effective person in that dharma because of unification
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of action. Everything she did, her writing, her speaking, her traveling, was all organized
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systematically around her bigger goal. So, for example, she lived in upstate New York and she loved
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beautiful clothes, but she realized she had to get up on these podiums and speak to auditoriums full of
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angry, pissed off men. And she didn't want to piss them off more by wearing flowery clothing, so she wore
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black. At a certain point, she had to learn to be a great speaker because she really had to shout down
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these rooms of upset people. So, she took on a coach. She took on Elizabeth Cady Stanton to help her write
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her speeches and learn to give them. Everything she did was aimed like the narrow point of a spear
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toward her bigger goal. And so, her life became a kind of guided missile of energy. And she was a perfect
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example of this doctrine of unified action. Bring it, bring everything you've got. You know, as a writer, I do
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that. I try to do that every day. I sit down and bring it. And you'd find out as a writer that your
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life ends up becoming organized around your dharma in the sense that you have to take good care of
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yourself. You have to sleep well and eat well because when you get up at eight in the morning and arrive at
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your desk, you want to be ready. So, this doctrine of unity in action has served me and it's the second
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And then you also highlight, it also, this idea of unified action means deliberate practice,
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like learning how to fulfill your dharma the best you can. And I loved, I didn't know about this guy,
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Painter that sort of exemplified what you thought was deliberate practice in the Gita way.
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Yeah. So, Corot is a fascinating figure. He was a great French landscape painter who,
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well, he was fascinated by painting as a kid. And from the beginning, he started painting outdoors.
00:27:50.240
This is called plein air in French. And then, like most of the artists of his day, went to Italy for
00:27:56.060
his training. But he soon caught on to this idea of what we now call deliberate practice.
00:28:02.700
And what deliberate practice means is that you intend and organize all of your actions around
00:28:10.260
your dharma, around your calling, to eventuate in the mastery of that calling. So, Corot was one of the
00:28:19.960
very first painters who, when he was painting in Rome, for example, would paint the Palatine Hill.
00:28:26.220
And he'd paint it over and over and over again every day from the same viewpoint, but with different
00:28:33.340
kinds of light. And what he was doing was deliberately practicing how to capture the light,
00:28:40.900
the special light of Italy. And deliberate practice,
00:28:45.960
we now know that most of the people that we think of masters and geniuses actually are the result of
00:28:53.320
practicing their craft deliberately. And what that means is you practice with the intention of
00:29:01.800
improving. You practice in such a way that you get regular feedback. You create loops of feedback. So,
00:29:10.440
you have not only your own eyes, but someone else's eyes on your work. You immerse yourself in the
00:29:18.400
culture of that particular craft. So, Corot immersed himself in the culture of painters. You let go of
00:29:27.400
the idea of perfectionism and take risks. So, there's a whole series, and I lay these out in my book,
00:29:33.720
of things that are considered now deliberate practice. And we know that almost any kind of mastery
00:29:41.980
takes approximately 10,000 hours to master. And paradoxically, I found that this is also true of
00:29:49.740
meditation. So, those monks that you read currently and that the Dalai Lama brings with them to his big
00:29:59.860
conferences. They've practiced their meditation practices and their breathing practices for 10,000
00:30:06.660
hours, just like Corot did. And Corot, as a result, became one of the greatest masters of French landscape
00:30:16.380
painting. Monet said at a big exhibition once, he said, and all the great painters were there, he said,
00:30:22.680
there's only one master here, and that's Camille Corot.
00:30:25.820
So, it sounds like this, and from the Hindu perspective, this idea of going full out,
00:30:32.800
it's about focus. I mean, that's what you do in the contemplative practice. It's learning how to focus.
00:30:38.900
It's all about focus and concentration. And if you read the other scriptures of yoga, the Yoga Sutra,
00:30:46.980
for example, it lays out a very clear series of steps in which the mind becomes increasingly
00:30:54.640
concentrated on the object of attention. And in this case, in Corot's case, for example, painting,
00:31:01.020
it can be anything. I'm writing a chapter right now on Marianne Anderson, the great black contralto,
00:31:07.460
and looking at the way in which she's systematically promoted the mastery of her voice by becoming
00:31:16.220
increasingly concentrated on the most subtle aspects of the way in which the body produces
00:31:24.560
So, the next pillar, so you go full out, second pillar, the next pillar is let go of the fruits.
00:31:29.960
And this is probably the most well-known idea from the Geet. I'm sure people have heard some version
00:31:33.900
of it, but it's what Krishna told Arjuna was, you have a right to the work, but not to the fruits.
00:31:40.580
Exactly. This is a toughie. And, you know, I use in this particular section, I use John Keats as an
00:31:49.500
example, because Keats, by the time he was 18, Keats, who was then in medical school and was really
00:31:57.640
bad at medical school, discovered that his true calling was to poetry.
00:32:02.820
So, by the age of 18, he said, I'm spending the rest of my life dedicated to poetry, and I intend
00:32:10.940
to be the greatest poet in the English language. He was determined to, as he said, wear the laurel
00:32:17.620
wreath, which is the wreath of the victor. And his career faltered around that because it turns out
00:32:24.700
that grasping and craving and clinging to an exalted outcome is probably the worst thing you can do to
00:32:34.020
actually inhibit that outcome. I teach a lot of young musicians up here at Kripalu, and one of the
00:32:43.100
first things I notice about them is they're all tied up in knots trying to perfectly execute their
00:32:50.700
musical charge, whatever it is, piano or voice. And it turns out that grasping and craving and
00:32:58.700
clinging and holding on to outcome in that way with kind of a death grip on it actually inhibits
00:33:05.920
fluid performance, inhibits what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow states. And, of course, people are so
00:33:14.620
resistant to this idea thinking that, well, if I'm not grasping to success in business or to perfection
00:33:23.960
in my music, then how am I ever going to get anywhere? Well, it turns out that the contemplative
00:33:30.000
traditions have a completely different view of that, and that is the idea that it's not grasping that
00:33:36.380
actually eventuates in mastery. It's aspiration itself. So, to aspire to something is to learn to
00:33:45.400
deliberately practice it as a craft. And, of course, this is what Keats had to go through.
00:33:52.140
Keats had this big competition with one of his poet friends, and they were both going to write these great
00:33:57.600
long, epic poems. And as a result of his grasping for it to be the greatest, Keats realized he was
00:34:06.240
inhibiting himself. So, Keats himself came up with something that he called negative capability,
00:34:11.620
wherein he realized that the systematic, regular, non-sexy practice of practicing his craft,
00:34:23.460
without any fanfare and without getting ahead of himself in terms of wanting to be the greatest
00:34:31.840
poet in the world. Actually, that was the formula for greatness. So, it was a paradox. He called it
00:34:42.100
negative capability because he said, you have to let go of those grandiose ideas. You have to
00:34:48.380
stand on the edge of the cliff of your skill and be willing to take risks and be willing to fail
00:34:56.200
and be willing to go into the mystery. And it's out of that soup that actually comes greatness.
00:35:04.460
And so, once Keats got onto that, of course, he wrote some of the great, he did write some of the
00:35:10.580
greatest poetry in the English language. Unfortunately, he died when he was, I believe, 27 of tuberculosis.
00:35:18.380
But in those short, almost 10 years of writing, he became indeed one of the great poets.
00:35:28.080
I mean, I think it's such a powerful idea because as you said, it is a paradox. But you see it,
00:35:32.220
it's a universal idea. I mean, you see it in other faiths and other philosophies. Stoicism kind of
00:35:38.940
In Buddhism, you have the same thing. You can even say in Christianity, there's that idea. I think
00:35:43.580
grace is probably like that. You care, but you don't care about the outcomes, right?
00:35:49.640
That's classic T.S. Eliot. Let me care and not care.
00:35:53.200
Yeah. That's how I describe that idea. It's like, you got care, but not care.
00:35:57.280
And I've experienced that a few times. And when I've experienced it, it's like the most amazing
00:36:02.600
feeling in the world. And then I've just been trying to get back to that. But it's really hard
00:36:06.420
because you're, it's so easy to go fall back to like, I got to grasp for the outcome. I got to
00:36:10.440
get this. It's so hard. It's like, you just, you're like a, I don't know, it's almost like a drug where
00:36:15.940
you experience it and you just spend the rest of your life trying to, you start grasping at the,
00:36:20.080
that's kind of, it's kind of a paradox. And you start grasping at not grasping.
00:36:24.920
That's right. That's right. Well, you know, what's funny, Brett, is that grasping and craving,
00:36:30.160
of course, in Buddhism as in yoga is seen as the root of, of suffering. And yet it's so built into
00:36:37.280
our nature that there are, as you go through the stages of refinement toward enlightenment,
00:36:44.960
let's say in the Buddhist tradition, there are multiple stages at which you have to let go
00:36:50.320
of even grasping for, um, for highly refined ecstatic states. You have to let go of grasping
00:36:59.200
for enlightenment itself. Grasping itself becomes more and more refined until you have to let go of
00:37:06.800
the, those final stages of it. And that's when you, you fall into enlightenment. I mean,
00:37:13.380
the Buddha himself, of course, in, before his enlightenment was, had been practicing for six
00:37:20.720
years in the, in the forest, these amazingly difficult ascetic feats. So he was eating half a
00:37:28.560
grain of rice a day. And this was called the ascetic Buddha. And it wasn't until he let that go,
00:37:35.940
he let go of the grasping because it was grasping inherent in the way he'd set up his practice. And
00:37:43.200
finally he let it go. He sat down, he accepted that bowl of milk from Sujata, the farm girl.
00:37:53.540
And another character you explore for this idea of letting go of the fruits is Beethoven and Beethoven,
00:37:59.340
student of the Gita. And he, he faced, I mean, for the most of his life, he had a tough life. You
00:38:05.440
know, you talk about his father was basically abusive, uh, towards him since he was a boy,
00:38:10.460
he was awkward socially. And then at the height of his career, he starts going deaf.
00:38:18.940
And he basically almost, he started contemplating suicide at this point.
00:38:22.640
That's right. That's right. I mean, talk about having to let go. Beethoven had one huge gift,
00:38:31.820
which was he understood that his calling, he understood from very early in life that his calling
00:38:38.120
was to music. And he also was already onto Thoreau's idea that it was his idiosyncratic view
00:38:46.200
and understanding and insight and genius that was going to lead him to fulfill his dharma in life,
00:38:54.860
which he did wonderfully. You know, Beethoven, it wasn't until Beethoven discovered Bach that,
00:39:02.120
and Bach was long dead when Beethoven discovered him. But when he heard Bach's fugues, he said,
00:39:09.180
oh my God, you can do that? You can actually do that? It, it freed him to claim his own idiosyncratic
00:39:18.000
genius. And he lived for that and he lived through it and he lived magnificently. And yes,
00:39:26.900
he had a quote from the Gita under the glass of his desk. And that was a shocker to me because I'm a
00:39:32.620
huge Beethoven fan. And I'd never heard that until I read this little footnote in Maynard
00:39:38.860
Solomon's biography. Oh yeah. Beethoven, the Bhagavad Gita.
00:39:44.200
And he had, I mean, I think the quote was just about knowing your duty. And then once you know it,
00:39:51.340
I thought that was one of the most powerful ideas from the Gita, this idea of remembering who you
00:39:55.880
are. Once you, the reason, like Krishna says to Arjuna, like the reason why you're conflicted and
00:40:01.900
the reason why you're anxious is like, you forgot who you are. I think this leads to that final part
00:40:06.240
of the, the, the, the, the final pillar, which is turn it over to God or turn it over to something
00:40:12.660
bigger than yourself. I think that this idea of remembering who you are, that's related to that
00:40:18.540
Well, I mean, this is actually where in many ways the, the Gita really starts there. The,
00:40:24.300
one of the very first things Krishna says to Arjuna is, dude, you don't have a clue who you really
00:40:30.200
are. You're stuck in this little box, this little idea of self, this little idea of ego. And you don't
00:40:37.380
realize that in your true nature, you have the same consciousness as Brahman. This is very central to
00:40:44.840
the Hindu view and the yogic view is the idea that each individual soul or Atman is in its very
00:40:52.960
essence, one with Brahman or the divine consciousness, consciousness itself. And the idea that's very
00:41:02.880
different from a lot of Western religion is that you can actually realize this true nature, this part of
00:41:11.120
yourself that knows and sees and comprehends and understands and attains the same kind of
00:41:20.000
consciousness that, that we call in, in that tradition, Brahman or the divine. And again, this
00:41:28.720
marks it as, as quite different in many ways, although there are many Western theologians who,
00:41:36.300
who write from the same place, Eckhart, not Eckhart Tolle, but the original Eckhart back in, I think,
00:41:43.320
the 13th century, who stress that view that, that we're all made in the image and likeness of the
00:41:50.840
divine. And, you know, in, in most of the contemplative traditions, it's understood that there's a
00:41:57.560
very systematic path of claiming that consciousness and of becoming one with that consciousness.
00:42:07.660
And a lot of it involves systematic path of moral purification. But in, in that particular chapter,
00:42:14.600
I use both Gandhi and Harriet Tubman. And I, I love the Harriet Tubman story because,
00:42:21.240
you know, Tubman was, was, had no, no formal education whatsoever. And like so many, she,
00:42:29.700
she was a slave on a plantation in the South. And as so many slaves were in those days, she was educated
00:42:38.600
by listening to Bible stories at night around the, the fire or the hearth or whatever. So she was
00:42:45.800
actually remarkably well educated in a lot of the things that really count. And she, she escaped
00:42:53.980
from her plantation and, you know, followed what they call followed the drinking gourd, followed the
00:42:59.820
North Star, found her way to Philadelphia, which was a safe city. And then out of the blue experienced
00:43:09.660
this call from God and it was nothing less than God knocking on her door saying, Harriet, I want you
00:43:17.100
to go back to the plantation and free others. And she was like, no way, not, not me. Ah, that was tough
00:43:24.680
enough the first time. And God kept knocking that, that inner voice, that divine voice kept assailing her.
00:43:33.380
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
00:43:40.260
do this. I'm not trained to do this. Well, Harriet Tubman became, they called her the engineer because
00:43:47.320
she engineered so the, the freedom of so many fugitive slaves. She'd bring them back North. She'd go down
00:43:56.640
undercover back into dangerous territory and free five or 10 or 15 or 25 slaves and lead them to
00:44:08.020
safety, not just to Philadelphia, but she led them all the way to Canada. And then when they got to
00:44:14.340
Canada, they would stop on the bridge, the whole group of them. And, and by the way, the people who
00:44:21.160
followed her knew that she had a kind of connection with this, this inner voice, she called it a sixth
00:44:27.660
sense that was infallible. So if she said, stop, you stop. If she said, hide behind the tree or duck or
00:44:36.680
bury yourself under that, you know, mound of dirt, you did it because she, she was connected in that way.
00:44:44.160
She was being guided. And then when they got to the bridge in Canada, they'd all stop and they'd have
00:44:50.660
a prayer service where she would turn it back over to God and say, this was, this was not me people.
00:44:57.480
This was God. So pray to God, worship God, begin to listen to that, to your own still small voice
00:45:06.200
inside and allow yourself to be guided just as I have.
00:45:10.760
And I think she was an example of, you know, action requires faith, but faith also requires
00:45:17.220
Yeah, exactly. No, she was, I mean, she was a woman of action her whole life.
00:45:23.980
The other character you talk about is Gandhi, which interesting about Gandhi, you know, he's Indian,
00:45:29.320
And he became sort of this embodiment of the Gita, but he didn't discover the Gita. He had to go to
00:45:34.440
England and, and, and be amongst the English to finally, when that's when he first discovered the
00:45:41.840
He did. And he discovered it in English. He did not discover it in Hindi or Gujarat. I believe he
00:45:48.000
was born in, in Gujarat province. And he was immediately taken by, it's, it was like he
00:45:55.220
recognized in that scripture, the spiritual genius of his own culture, which don't forget
00:46:01.760
that in Gandhi's day, that culture had been downtrodden for, by 300 years of British colonial
00:46:09.200
rule. And in, in so many ways had lost the, the spiritual self-esteem of their culture.
00:46:17.120
So Gandhi gets to England and he's introduced to the Gita and he begins to light up with an
00:46:25.260
understanding of the spiritual genius of, of India and the subcontinent of India. Then of course,
00:46:32.560
he goes to South Africa where he puts all of the teachings of the Gita. The Gita is, as he said,
00:46:39.820
his guidebook for life. And he said, if you wish to know what a life based on the Gita looks like,
00:46:47.340
look at my life because my life has been entirely based on the Gita. So he went to South Africa
00:46:54.800
where he understood the Gita to be talking about non-separateness. And he began working with
00:47:05.240
Indians who lived in South Africa and who were hugely dominated and colonialized by their Dutch
00:47:12.300
colonizers. And so he got his first taste of helping to resist in a non-violent way in South
00:47:21.860
Africa before he came back to India, where he became a champion of non-violent resistance, what
00:47:27.900
he called Satyagraha or soul power. And I mean, the idea that you kind of, you hit with Gandhi was,
00:47:36.200
you know, turning everything over to God. And he had this idea, Gandhi had this idea of you got to
00:47:39.820
take yourself to zero. It's not about you anymore. It's about something bigger than yourself.
00:47:46.420
Exactly. Gandhi, you know, Gandhi took literally what Krishna speaks to Arjuna at the very, in that
00:47:54.120
very first chapter where he says, Arjuna, by the way, you are not your body. And Arjuna is, of course,
00:48:01.440
terrified of being injured in this war. And Gandhi took literally, you're not your body and you needn't
00:48:09.500
be terrified of being injured or even killed in the line of duty, in the line of doing your dharma.
00:48:16.240
So much of take yourself to zero for Gandhi was really take your ego out of it, take your own self-importance
00:48:25.940
and aggrandizement out of it. Rather, look at the good of the whole. So Gandhi was all about looking at the
00:48:33.900
good of the whole, looking at the good of the whole community. He was Martin Luther King's predecessor
00:48:40.280
in understanding the importance of what King called the blessed community. So yeah, that was Gandhi,
00:48:47.940
take yourself to zero. And of course, he did. He didn't count the cost to himself of so many of
00:48:55.960
his actions. He didn't count the cost of going to jail or doing a fast. He was quite willing to die.
00:49:03.820
That last fast that he did, he almost died. When the Hindus and Muslims had again begun to war on each
00:49:10.980
other, he went on a fast until it stopped. And there was take yourself to zero. Gandhi was incredibly
00:49:20.340
creative. Like he didn't see himself as living inside this little box of fear, which allowed him
00:49:28.100
to be hugely creative in the way he moved. And he was constantly frustrating and freaking out his own
00:49:35.600
supporters because he'd do stuff that nobody had ever thought of before or tried before. And it was
00:49:42.500
just because he'd been freed from what they call in the tradition, grasping to views and beliefs about how
00:49:49.980
things should be. He was much more interested in how things are.
00:49:54.400
Well, Stephen, it's been a great conversation. For those who want to explore the Gita more,
00:49:59.060
is there a translation in English that you recommend for folks?
00:50:03.120
There's a great translation that I prefer using. It's by a guy named Eknath Eswaran,
00:50:09.020
E-A-S-W-A-R-N, who actually has studied. He's an Indian scholar who moved to the United States
00:50:19.960
in the 50s and became a professor in Southern California, I believe at Berkeley. And from there,
00:50:30.300
translated the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita and some of Buddha's texts. And it's an extremely
00:50:38.480
practical but also accurate guide to the Gita and the Upanishads. And part of it is that
00:50:47.300
he accompanies his translations with an essay for each chapter that really helps you to understand,
00:50:55.220
frankly, and you know this now that you've read the Gita, you can't read it without a guide
00:50:59.940
because there's so much sophisticated philosophy thrown in. It's a little bit of a dog's dinner in
00:51:06.320
that way in the sense that you really need a guide to wade through it. And I found Eswaran,
00:51:11.640
I think partly because he understood the Western mind, because he lived here,
00:51:16.660
is particularly useful. And there's a fairly new edition of it you can find on Amazon.
00:51:23.860
Yeah, that's the translation I have. It's very, yeah, the commentary is very useful.
00:51:29.420
Where can people go to learn more about your book and your work?
00:51:32.460
They can log on to my website, which is www.stephencope.com. I am the Scholar Emeritus
00:51:39.940
at Kripalu Center, which is the largest center in America for the study and practice of yoga
00:51:45.980
in Western Massachusetts. Unfortunately, we're locked down with COVID right now, but we will
00:51:52.120
open again. And I teach a lot at Kripalu. I teach all over the country, but you can find my events on
00:51:59.440
Sure. Fantastic. Well, Stephen Cope, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:52:02.500
Total pleasure, Brett. I'm delighted to meet you and we'll talk again.
00:52:07.660
My guest today was Stephen Cope. He's the author of the book, The Great Work of Your Life. It's
00:52:11.580
available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work
00:52:15.080
at his website, stephencope.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash Gita,
00:52:19.920
where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic.
00:52:29.440
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AMM Podcast. Check out our website at
00:52:32.860
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00:52:36.460
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00:53:03.860
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