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

00:00:00.000 Hey, it's Brett. We're taking a break. It's 4th of July or Independence Day here in the United

00:00:03.660 States. So I'm with my family, we're eating hamburgers, shooting fireworks off. So we're

00:00:07.500 going to rebroadcast episode number 616, a guide for the journey to your true calling.

00:00:12.520 One of our most popular episodes last year. Hope you enjoy it. See you on Wednesday with

00:00:16.600 a brand new episode. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:28.920 One of the most burning questions in life is what it is you're called to do with it. What's your

00:00:33.240 life's purpose? What great work are you meant to do? Guidance on this question can come from many

00:00:37.680 sources. And my guest today says that one of the best is the Bhagavad Gita, a text of Hindu scripture

00:00:41.900 thousands of years old. Same as Stephen Cope. He's a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, and the author of

00:00:46.280 The Great Work of Your Life, The Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling. Stephen and I begin

00:00:50.180 our conversation with an introduction of the Bhagavad Gita, the significant influence it's had

00:00:53.640 on philosophers and leaders before ages, and what it can teach us about making difficult decisions.

00:00:57.660 We then discuss the insights the Gita offers on the four pillars of right living,

00:01:01.360 begin with discerning your true calling or sacred duty. We unpack the three areas in your life to

00:01:05.460 examine for clues to your life's purpose, why that purpose may be small and quiet rather than big and

00:01:10.200 splashy. Stephen then explains the doctrine of unified action, why you have to pursue your calling

00:01:14.220 full out, and why that pursuit should include the habit of deliberate practice. We also discuss why

00:01:18.140 it's central to let go of the outcome of actions to focus on the work itself and the need to turn your

00:01:22.260 efforts over to something bigger than yourself. Along the way, Stephen offers examples of how these

00:01:26.380 pillars were embodying the lives of eminent individuals who lived out their purpose.

00:01:29.880 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Gita.

00:01:41.560 All right, Stephen Cope, welcome to the show.

00:01:45.100 Thank you, Brett. I'm glad to be here.

00:01:47.060 So you are the author of a book called The Great Work of Your Life, A Guide for the Journey to Your True

00:01:52.000 Calling. And this book uses the Bhagavad Gita. It's a piece of Hindu scripture to explore this

00:01:58.720 idea of vocation, of calling in your life. I read this book a few years ago. I was telling you off

00:02:04.120 air. After I read that book, that's what introduced me to the Gita. And since then, I've read the Gita

00:02:08.860 at least once a year because it's such a cool piece of literature. So I'm curious, how did you discover

00:02:14.780 the Bhagavad Gita? Well, you know, the Bhagavad Gita is really the most well-known scripture,

00:02:23.020 yogic scripture, in India. So if you're hanging out in Indian culture or Hindu culture or yogic

00:02:31.140 culture, pretty much everybody knows about the Gita. There are a number of great scriptures in

00:02:38.420 the yoga tradition, but the Gita is certainly the most well-known. It's the kind of thing that

00:02:44.780 everybody in every little village in India knows. And there are images of Krishna and Arjuna,

00:02:53.300 the two main characters, pretty much everywhere in temples. And so I, once I came into the yoga

00:03:01.880 world, it's pretty much inevitable that you bump into the Gita. 0.99

00:03:06.000 And as you said, it's a piece of Hindu scripture, but as we'll talk about in this book, a lot of

00:03:09.940 great Western thinkers for a couple centuries now have been influenced by the Gita. I mean,

00:03:15.580 who are some of these individuals?

00:03:17.900 I mean, honestly, it's remarkable. I, writing on the Gita as I have, I keep bumping into more. So

00:03:24.300 there is probably the first major Western philosopher was Schopenhauer who wrote in the early 19th century.

00:03:31.700 The Gita was translated into English as late as I think 1787 or 1785. But where you start really

00:03:41.380 beginning to see its influences is with Thoreau and Emerson, the transcendentalists in Concord in the

00:03:48.900 1820s, 30s, 40s, 50s. And Thoreau picked it up and was profoundly influenced by it. And you can kind of

00:03:58.260 draw a direct line then between Thoreau's influence and Emerson as well. And then Tolstoy who picked it

00:04:06.180 up. And from Tolstoy, a direct line to Gandhi, and then to Aldous Huxley who wrote a brilliant book

00:04:13.540 called The Perennial Philosophy. And from there to Martin Luther King and to Bobby Kennedy. So there's

00:04:20.440 this direct line back to the great American philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau.

00:04:27.980 So let's, let's dig into the Gita. And for those who, before we get to some of the lessons and

00:04:32.180 takeaway that you talk about in your book, can you give people who aren't familiar with the story,

00:04:36.860 sort of a big picture overview of what's going on with it and the main characters? Yeah.

00:04:42.220 Yeah. It's a great tale. And, you know, like most tales, it was meant to be spoken verbally,

00:04:47.760 even though it was written down somewhere in the, probably the second century of the common era.

00:04:52.780 The tale is about, it's, it happens on the night before a great war, the battle of Kurukshetra on the

00:04:59.100 field of Kuru. And the two major protagonists are Arjuna and Arjuna is a warrior. He's the greatest

00:05:08.740 warrior of the kingdom of Kuru. And his father is, was the king, now the deposed king of the kingdom

00:05:17.380 of Kuru. And the other major character is Krishna, who's his charioteer. And Krishna, of course, is

00:05:25.080 God in disguise. We don't find that out until the middle of the book. But the whole book is a dialogue

00:05:32.760 between Krishna and Arjuna at the edge of the battlefield. So you can imagine there's a huge

00:05:39.640 battle, an epic battle about to take place the next morning. And Arjuna is very conflicted about

00:05:48.380 whether or not to fight in this battle. The backstory is that the kingship has been stolen by

00:05:54.640 one of Arjuna's cousins. And that's what precipitated this war. And he realizes as he sits with, with

00:06:02.700 Krishna, that he's got a dilemma that he cannot solve. And the dilemma is this. Because he's a

00:06:10.680 warrior and he was part of a very rigid caste system, it was his duty, it was his sacred duty to fight

00:06:17.980 in a war, to fight in a just war. And this was a just war. On the other hand, he realized that he was

00:06:25.960 most likely going to kill his own kin because his cousins were on the other side of this battle.

00:06:32.980 And so the very first chapter, he investigates this dilemma. He must fight in the battle because

00:06:40.940 it's his calling, it's his sacred duty. But if he fights, he will kill kin. In either case, he will

00:06:48.220 have to go to purgatory in the Hindu view for lifetimes. And so he's presented with this dilemma

00:06:56.700 that he cannot solve. It's greater than his own consciousness. And he sits with Krishna through

00:07:04.160 the night as Krishna expounds to him his way through this particular dilemma. And the way through is

00:07:13.280 actually by completely expanding his consciousness so that he understands that the war itself is not

00:07:20.360 really a real external war, but a battle going on within himself. So the tale is really about the

00:07:28.500 moral dilemmas that each of us face in life and how we work our way through them.

00:07:34.540 Now, I mean, I love the setup of the story. And that's why I think it's so relatable. I think why so

00:07:39.000 many individuals, even in the West, are related to this with Arjuna. It's just like, I don't know

00:07:45.440 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

00:07:50.440 to do.

00:07:51.880 Yeah. In fact, he says, Arjuna in the beginning, at the end of the first chapter falls to the floor

00:07:58.840 of the chariot. And he says, Krishna, I cannot fight this fight. Conflicting sacred duties confound

00:08:06.720 my mind. And of course, we run into that all the time, conflicting sacred duties. Should I do A or

00:08:13.600 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,

00:08:21.560 that first chapter. And then there are 17 more chapters where Krishna describes the slow and

00:08:29.660 deliberate process of understanding your calling.

00:08:32.280 And that's, I mean, that's what I love about it too, that dialogue. He explains the idea of duty

00:08:38.040 or dharma and then yoga, which, you know, in the West, we think yoga is like, you know, you downward

00:08:43.800 dog or whatever, but yoga is, it's all about taking action. And that's what, and that's what Krishna

00:08:48.900 tells Arjuna you have to do. You have to take action to fulfill your dharma.

00:08:53.020 That's right. So basically Krishna teaches Arjuna what he calls the path of inaction in action,

00:09:02.620 the path of nashkarman karman or inaction in action, which turns out to be a profound reframe

00:09:09.120 of action. And there are four steps. First of all, Krishna says, look, don't even think about being the

00:09:16.180 guy who doesn't take action because we all act all the time. In the contemplative traditions,

00:09:21.580 they talk about actions of mind, speech, and body. So even your mind is, is taking action.

00:09:29.920 So the four pillars of the, this path of inaction in action are number one, discern your dharma,

00:09:38.800 that is discern and know your, your true calling in this lifetime. Number two, do it full out,

00:09:46.600 bring everything you've got to the performance of your dharma, of your calling. And third,

00:09:55.120 let go of the outcome. So Krishna says to Arjuna, whether you're winning or losing or failing is not

00:10:02.760 your issue. Your only issue is, have you determined what your dharma is and are you doing it full out?

00:10:09.440 He says, it's better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at someone else's dharma.

00:10:15.040 And then finally, Krishna says to Arjuna, turn this whole thing over to me. In other words,

00:10:22.480 over to God or over to something bigger than yourself, over to some bigger meaning than your

00:10:30.160 ego or yourself. And so we have the four pillars, discern your dharma, do it full out. The second one

00:10:38.200 is called the doctrine of unified action because it calls you to unify all of your action around your

00:10:45.340 dharma. The third is let go of the fruits and then finally turn it over to God or whatever version of

00:10:52.600 God you have.

00:10:54.080 All right, let's dig into deep. So you spend the rest of your book, The Great Work Your Life,

00:10:57.360 exploring these four pillars. And you do that by, through examples of people you've worked with

00:11:03.100 personally in your practice, in your work, but also the lives of, you know, what we'd consider great

00:11:08.100 individuals who may have. Some of them, you know, directly were influenced by the Gita. Others, you

00:11:13.660 know, they just kind of, they got the idea. So that first pillar, which is know your dharma, look to

00:11:19.080 your dharma.

00:11:20.220 Right.

00:11:20.400 So, I mean, let's talk about this. How do you figure out what your dharma is in the first place, your calling,

00:11:25.080 your sacred duty in life?

00:11:26.160 Well, this is where most of us get stuck. The truth is that when the Bhagavad Gita was

00:11:31.900 written in that context, everybody was born into their own sacred calling. So, there was a very

00:11:38.300 complex caste system. And you were, Arjuna was born a warrior. It was his duty to be a warrior.

00:11:44.680 That was called svadharma. And of course, that kind of rigid duty to the social order and to your birth,

00:11:52.480 it no longer applies in our culture. So, now we have to dig down inside, look at our circumstances

00:12:02.160 and our life situation and our own gifts to determine what's our dharma, what's our true

00:12:10.160 calling. The word dharma is based on the root DHR, which means to uphold. And the view that still

00:12:20.180 translates to us is the idea that everybody has a responsibility to their particular set of

00:12:28.820 gifts, their particular set of capacities. And so, no longer is the duty to the dharma into which

00:12:38.180 you were born, but now it's to, as Carol Pearson, the great Jungian psychologist says, do you have a

00:12:44.680 responsibility to your gifts and your own idiosyncratic opportunities that you must fulfill

00:12:52.020 in this lifetime?

00:12:54.060 That reminds me of the idea that I think Pindar, he's a Roman poet, he said, you know,

00:12:57.740 become who you are. Like Nietzsche picked that up, you know, and that idea of becoming who you are is

00:13:01.680 looking at your situation. It might not mean like, you know, your dharma might not be like,

00:13:07.640 I'm going to be president of the United States. It could be even smaller than that. But if you find

00:13:11.620 that, you're supposed to go full out with it.

00:13:15.020 Exactly, exactly. I'd like to say, because I'll tell you the truth, a lot of the time I spend with

00:13:21.680 people looking at this, these notions is really spent on helping people to discern their dharma.

00:13:29.600 So, the whole process of discernment, there are three particular areas that I call useful hunting

00:13:37.360 grounds for dharma. One is, I often ask people the question, what's lighting you up? So, the first

00:13:46.380 question to ask yourself is, what is it out there in the world, in your life now, that's lighting you

00:13:53.360 up, that gives you energy, that fascinates you, that draws you? That is not necessarily your dharma,

00:14:00.800 but it's a very interesting finger pointing toward dharma. The second useful hunting ground I've found

00:14:07.740 is very different from what lights you up. The question here is, what do you see as your sacred

00:14:14.580 duty in this life? So, sacred duty is something different. It may not necessarily light you up,

00:14:21.160 it may. And I like to, the whole question of duty is complex. I like to say, your duty is that thing

00:14:30.580 which, if you do not do it, will result in a profound sense of self-betrayal on your part.

00:14:37.940 And that definition of duty moves the locus of duty from the exterior, that is, duties that are

00:14:44.920 foisted on us, that we don't actually own, to our own interior self, where the real locus of duty is

00:14:53.280 found. And then the third area, so we have, what lights you up? What do you consider or know to be

00:15:00.520 your sacred duty? And the third area is, look at challenges and difficulties in your life. Because

00:15:09.840 very often, people find their duty or their calling or even what's lighting them up arising directly out

00:15:18.900 of challenges. So, a divorce, an illness, a change in job. This is another important hunting ground for

00:15:31.040 dharma. So, between those three, you have some interesting arrows pointing at your own particular

00:15:38.780 dharma. And I highly recommend that people explore those three areas very systematically.

00:15:45.880 The one section in this, when you talk about, look to your dharma, that really, when I first read it,

00:15:49.920 it's, I think about it all the time. And you explore the life of Henry David Thoreau and him trying to

00:15:55.980 figure out his dharma. And the idea that you got from Thoreau is, think of the small as big. Because I

00:16:03.200 think a lot of people, when they confront this question of what's my calling in life, they typically think

00:16:07.260 it's got to be big. It's got to be where I'm known.

00:16:09.660 Right. That's right.

00:16:10.860 And that's not necessarily the case. So, tell us about Thoreau's experience with the Gita and how

00:16:15.800 it helped him find his dharma.

00:16:18.280 Well, this, by the way, is what I call the false notion of the romance of dharma, the idea that it

00:16:23.820 has to be something big, the idea that you have to leave your job selling insurance and move to Paris

00:16:30.300 and become a great painter. That's a typical romantic notion. The truth is, most people's

00:16:37.300 dharmas are already somewhere in their lives. They've already stumbled into some aspect of their 1.00

00:16:42.640 dharma. But Thoreau is an interesting example. Thoreau, of course, was a brilliant man. He was

00:16:49.000 educated at Harvard. He spoke many languages. He wrote Greek and Latin. And he, of course,

00:16:57.180 lived in Concord, surrounded by the likes of Emerson and the Alcotts and all these great

00:17:02.460 American writers and philosophers. And he got it in his head early on that he wanted to become a

00:17:10.780 great writer. And so, with that in mind, he moved to New York City, which is where the only great

00:17:17.940 writers in America at that time were thought to be and weren't really all there. And he was a

00:17:24.420 complete failure in New York City. He was a woodsman. He was way too gruff and rough. And he was not

00:17:32.360 accepted into the salons of New York Literary Society. And finally, dejected, he dragged his butt 0.99

00:17:43.100 back to Concord, the little town where he lived and grew up, and decided when he got back that 0.94

00:17:50.980 this was his home. This is where he was going to put his stake in the ground. And it wasn't long

00:17:57.140 after that that he went to Walden Pond, where he built his cabin, on some land that Emerson loaned him,

00:18:04.700 and decided to do his great experiment. You know, he said, I have come to the woods to learn to live

00:18:11.160 deliberately, and not to find when I come to die that I had not lived. So, Thoreau went to Walden.

00:18:19.860 And the teeniest little life you can imagine, a little cabin in the woods by the pond. And one

00:18:28.160 of the few books he took with him was the Bhagavad Gita. He read the Gita daily. He considered himself

00:18:35.200 a yogi, and keep in mind, this is in the early part of the 19th century. And he realized that

00:18:43.500 whatever you're doing, whatever action you're taking, whatever your calling is, and now he

00:18:49.660 understood that his calling was to investigate the small life, and to keep even getting it smaller.

00:18:57.680 Remember, he finally had to give up one of his two spoons in his second year at Walden,

00:19:02.020 and to discover how big the small life actually is. So, I actually quote from the Tao Te Ching there,

00:19:11.140 where it says, think of the small as large and the few as many. Thoreau discovered in the Gita the

00:19:19.400 notion that all actions have mystic consequences. So, the smallest actions, as long as they're aligned

00:19:28.320 with your dharma, make some kind of huge ripple in the world. So, Thoreau took on the task of

00:19:36.580 investigating his world just as he saw it, and as he found it around his little cabin.

00:19:42.720 And strangely enough, just as the Bhagavad Gita said, mystic actions connected with your dharma

00:19:50.240 make big splashes in the pond. And so, of course, we now think of Thoreau writing from his little

00:19:58.720 cabin as one of the great philosophers and writers of American life and literature. He once said,

00:20:09.220 which quote I love, I have traveled extensively in Concord. And by that he meant his inward journey

00:20:17.840 in Concord, to the soul of this one little town. And by focusing down into the soul of this one

00:20:25.400 beautiful little New England town, he pretty much found the whole world there.

00:20:31.860 You know, when Krishna was born, his nurse looked into his open mouth and saw the whole universe there.

00:20:39.300 And that's precisely what Thoreau did at Walden.

00:20:43.480 We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:20:47.840 And now back to the show. And I mean, you make this point in the book, I mean, Thoreau's

00:20:52.940 experiment at Walden was even smaller. I mean, he was basically in the backyard of his parents'

00:20:57.380 house. And you note that his mom still brought him cookies and sandwiches. And sometimes people

00:21:01.620 criticize Thoreau for that. It's like, oh, he really didn't do anything. He just basically

00:21:04.620 backpacked in his backyard. But it's like the idea, like he went full bore into it and was able to do

00:21:10.900 some amazing work by doing that.

00:21:13.260 Well, and one of the great things about Thoreau was, you know, we all know the quote, you know,

00:21:18.620 find your own distant drummer and follow it. Thoreau caught under the idea that it's our

00:21:24.980 idiosyncratic, highly particular calling that has the juice. He said, Thoreau said, all human beings

00:21:34.920 should constantly be on the trail of their true nature because it is in following and claiming

00:21:42.380 their true nature that they connect with the divine. So Thoreau said, find your bone. And here's

00:21:50.460 a great image of a dog. Find your bone, gnaw on it, bury it, dig it up again, gnaw on it more.

00:21:57.580 So, he found his bone in his writing and in his nature study. And it was through being uniquely,

00:22:09.020 idiosyncratically, his own true self that he broke into the field of the divine. You know,

00:22:17.500 and in this, he was relentless. So, Emerson, as you know, his buddy was much more polished and was a

00:22:25.900 bit of a more professional philosopher, but Thoreau was this rugged individualist.

00:22:32.440 And it was, it was he that, that really lived out in so many ways, Emerson's own views about

00:22:41.240 living your idiosyncratic truth.

00:22:44.520 All right. So, that's, look to your dharma, discover your dharma so you can look to what lights

00:22:48.740 you up, look what's at your sacred duty or look at problems in your life, and then realize and

00:22:53.940 understand that your dharma, your duty might be smaller than you think it is, and that's okay.

00:22:58.280 Yeah, exactly. In fact, I used the story there of a friend of mine who's a nurse who

00:23:02.820 kept saying to me, Steve, I just, I have such a small dharma. And, you know, finally now,

00:23:12.580 10 years later, her life has been turned around because she fully embraces the beautiful work that

00:23:20.240 is her daily work as a nurse, no longer thinking of it as small. So, think of the small as large

00:23:26.600 and the few as many.

00:23:28.520 All right. So, once you find your dharma, you're supposed to go full out on it. That's

00:23:31.660 the second pillar. What does that look like?

00:23:34.080 So, again, that's called the doctrine of unified action. And the idea here is that once you've

00:23:40.260 found your dharma, you bring everything you've got to it. Krishna said to Arjuna,

00:23:45.000 this is the passion that is not contrary to the dharma. In other words, you should be living a

00:23:51.960 passionate life built around your dharma. One of the characters I used to explore this is Susan B.

00:23:58.700 Anthony, who, as a young girl growing up in upstate New York, realized that she was, women were in a 0.94

00:24:07.620 kind of prison in those days. They had very few rights. And she realized that she didn't want to

00:24:15.100 go along with that, with some of the mores of the day in relationship to women. Women couldn't 1.00

00:24:24.140 own property or inherit property. Very often were kept in the home. So, she became a teacher.

00:24:33.320 Her world began to broaden. The teaching was one of the few professions that women could do

00:24:38.760 back in her day. She became a teacher. And then she became an activist. First of all,

00:24:47.000 she got involved in temperance, which was non-drinking and the women's temperance movement.

00:24:54.320 And finally, she realized that women were never going to be empowered in our society until they got the 1.00

00:25:01.160 vote. And once she realized that she was onto her dharma, she realized that she was going to spend

00:25:08.220 the rest of her life organizing and focusing on this one high goal, which was for women to be 0.84

00:25:16.100 enfranchised. She doubted and she often said, I probably won't live to see it, but I'm going to spend my

00:25:24.180 life doing it. And then she became an incredibly effective person in that dharma because of unification

00:25:32.180 of action. Everything she did, her writing, her speaking, her traveling, was all organized

00:25:40.320 systematically around her bigger goal. So, for example, she lived in upstate New York and she loved

00:25:48.780 beautiful clothes, but she realized she had to get up on these podiums and speak to auditoriums full of

00:25:55.280 angry, pissed off men. And she didn't want to piss them off more by wearing flowery clothing, so she wore

00:26:02.940 black. At a certain point, she had to learn to be a great speaker because she really had to shout down 1.00

00:26:09.940 these rooms of upset people. So, she took on a coach. She took on Elizabeth Cady Stanton to help her write 0.99

00:26:16.720 her speeches and learn to give them. Everything she did was aimed like the narrow point of a spear 0.98

00:26:24.360 toward her bigger goal. And so, her life became a kind of guided missile of energy. And she was a perfect

00:26:34.740 example of this doctrine of unified action. Bring it, bring everything you've got. You know, as a writer, I do

00:26:42.720 that. I try to do that every day. I sit down and bring it. And you'd find out as a writer that your

00:26:51.180 life ends up becoming organized around your dharma in the sense that you have to take good care of

00:26:57.840 yourself. You have to sleep well and eat well because when you get up at eight in the morning and arrive at

00:27:04.040 your desk, you want to be ready. So, this doctrine of unity in action has served me and it's the second

00:27:12.320 important pillar of Krishna's approach.

00:27:16.000 And then you also highlight, it also, this idea of unified action means deliberate practice,

00:27:20.960 like learning how to fulfill your dharma the best you can. And I loved, I didn't know about this guy,

00:27:27.480 but Camille Corot.

00:27:28.780 Camille Corot, yeah.

00:27:30.100 Painter that sort of exemplified what you thought was deliberate practice in the Gita way.

00:27:35.200 Yeah. So, Corot is a fascinating figure. He was a great French landscape painter who,

00:27:42.740 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

00:31:22.580 sound.

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

00:35:37.220 have something similar to that.

00:35:38.460 That's right.

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.

00:37:50.520 And that was when he became enlightened.

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. 0.77

00:38:18.440 Right.

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,

00:39:48.400 you know what to do.

00:39:49.480 Do it.

00:39:49.840 Yeah.

00:39:50.180 Do it full out. Exactly.

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

00:40:17.200 idea.

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 0.99

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

00:45:16.120 action.

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,

00:45:27.900 he's Hindu.

00:45:28.740 Right.

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

00:45:40.600 Bhagavad Gita.

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 0.89

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 0.72

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 1.00

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 0.93

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.

00:51:28.460 So 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

00:51:58.580 my website there.

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

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00:53:03.860 this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only listen to the AMM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - July 05, 2021

A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

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