Here are two questions from Sujatha who lives in Andhra Pradesh, India.
First, she asks, "How can we work without expecting any results, as karma yoga teaches
us?
We act to achieve desired ends.
Without desire, why would we act in the first place?"
That's a really good question, but there's a small problem with language here.
Many scriptures and spiritual teachers tell us to act without desiring the results of
our deeds, but they don't say we should act without expecting any results.
Suppose your car had a dead battery.
Would you try to drive it anyway, without expecting it to work?
No one acts without expecting results.
To act without desiring results of your deeds is part of the practice of karma yoga.
To act without desire is called nishkama karma in Sanskrit.
Nishkama means the absence of kama, desire.
But as Sujatha said, "Without desire, why would we act in the first place?"
To understand this, we first have to recognize that desire is the main obstacle to contentment
in life.
Why do you do whatever you do each day?
Psychologists say that you want to minimize physical and emotional discomfort and maximize
the pleasure you experience.
From a spiritual point of view, we could say that you seek inner peace and perfect contentment.
Contentment is defined as a state of satisfaction, like when your hunger is satisfied, or when
you finally get the salary increase you've been asking for.
As long as you're hungry or waiting for your pay raise, you experience desire, and to some
extent, that desire robs you of contentment.
Perfect contentment can be enjoyed only in the complete absence of unfulfilled desires.
Even a single unfulfilled desire, like not getting your usual cup of tea or coffee in
the morning, it's enough to spoil your contentment or even make you miserable.
The problem is, new desires arise each and every day.
After eating a wonderful meal at your favorite restaurant, you feel hungry again in only
a few hours.
After getting a substantial pay raise, when your household expenses increase, you'll want
an even higher salary.
After satisfying one desire, you feel content for a while, but it's only a matter of time
until new desires arise and your contentment fades away.
Trying to fulfill all your desires is like chasing a horizon that keeps receding from
you.
When will the day come when you're completely free from all desires and you can finally
rest in peace?
According to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita and other Vedantic scriptures, perfect
peace and contentment are gained, not by fulfilling desires, but by discovering your true nature,
the inner self, atma, which is innately full and complete, perfect, divine.
The discovery of your true, inner divinity culminates in enlightenment, a state of total
contentment.
Based on this, any attempt to gain total contentment simply by fulfilling desires is futile, doomed
to failure.
And, when you recognize the utter futility of fulfilling desires, your focus in life
will shift dramatically.
Instead of striving only to fulfill desires, you'll begin to strive for spiritual growth
and enlightenment.
Imagine how this dramatic shift could change your attitude towards day to day activities.
Instead of being focused only on fulfilling desires, you'll be drawn towards spiritual
practices that can help you gain enlightenment.
But that doesn't mean you'll abandon all your usual activities and take up an austere life
of full-time prayer, meditation, and scriptural study.
You know very well that if you fail to follow dharma and fulfill your duties, the consequences
will be terrible.
And those consequences would ultimately make your pursuit of enlightenment much more difficult.
Instead, you'll continue to carry out your duties, but with a radical shift of attitude.
You'll fulfill your duties because it's essential for your spiritual growth.
Fulfilling your duties is actually part of your spiritual practice, the practice of karma
yoga.
We'll discuss how this practice works shortly.
Back to Sujatha's question.
To act without desire means to act, not to fulfill desires, but to fulfill your duties,
to follow dharma, as part of your spiritual practice.
This is the radical shift of attitude we discussed before.
Here, you might object that even after this shift of attitude, you'll still be driven
by desire, by the desire for enlightenment.
That's absolutely true.
You'll be driven by desire because without desire, you won't act at all.
But this desire, the desire for enlightenment, is utterly unlike worldly desires.
The fulfillment of worldly desires simply leads to more and more desires, but a firm
desire for enlightenment can engage you in a life of spiritual practice that ultimately
leads beyond all desires to a state of perfect contentment.
Sujatha begins her second question with an observation.
"Nowadays, worldly activities consume most of our time.
If a spiritual path requires practices like meditation, not much time is available."
Few people would disagree with her.
Modern life is hectic and demanding.
Yet, if your ultimate goal is enlightenment, you'd probably want to devote as much time
and effort to it as possible.
And, you might try to minimize the time you spend fulfilling your duties so that you have
more time for meditation and other practices.
That might seem like reasonable approach, but it creates a serious conflict, a conflict
between worldly activities and spiritual practice.
Whatever time you devote to fulfilling your duties is not available for spiritual practice,
and vice versa.
Yet both are crucial.
I struggled a lot with this conflict in my late twenties, when I was a still working
as an engineer.
Back then, I would get up early in the morning and devote a full two hours to my daily routine
of prayer, meditation, and scriptural study.
I was proud of myself for being so dedicated, and my spiritual pride was certainly a problem.
In fact, my efforts were actually misdirected.
Each day, I spent my first two hours engaged in spiritual activities, then I spent the
next fourteen or more hours engaged in non-spiritual activities, mostly in work and visiting friends.
Which of those activities, do you think, had a greater effect on me?
It's a matter of arithmetic.
I had failed to understand a basic principle of karma yoga.
A karma yogi is one who erases the boundary between worldly and spiritual life and learns
to use worldly activities for the sake of spiritual growth.
Obviously, I wasn't a skillful karma yogi at that time.
Sujatha seems to understand karma yoga much better than I did back then, because she goes
on to ask, "How can we make our day to day activities themselves contribute to our spiritual
progress?"
Excellent question.
One answer found in the Bhagavad Gita is simply this: do your duty, follow dharma, and live
a righteous life.
A dharmic lifestyle helps in two ways.
First, it helps accumulate good karma and avoid the bad ones.
The doctrine of karma shows how bad karmas can obstruct your efforts in every aspect
of life, including spiritual practice.
Good karmas, on the other hand, can help remove such obstacles.
The second way a dharmic lifestyle contributes to spiritual progress is this.
Desires have the power to distract, to entice you with a multitude of worldly pleasures
and draw you away from being focused on spiritual growth.
This power of desire can be greatly diminished by consistently choosing to fulfill your duties
instead of choosing to fulfill your desires.
Each time you deliberately choose to follow dharma instead of pursuing worldly desires,
you increase the strength of your will and weaken the grip of those desires.
Then, without being troubled by worldly desires, you can pursue enlightenment.
In addition to living a dharmic life, the Bhagavad Gita also stresses the need to cultivate
a prayerful attitude towards everything you do each day.
This devotional attitude is another important aspect of karma yoga, but we'll save that
topic for another time.
A final comment.
The level of effort required to reach any goal depends on the goal.
A small goal, like to prepare dinner, requires a small effort, and a big goal, like getting
a college degree, requires a big effort.
But enlightenment isn't just a big goal, it's immense, off the charts, so to speak.
To reach such a goal, what level of effort is required?
Clearly, anything short of a full-time effort won't be enough.
Fortunately, full-time spiritual practice isn't limited to those who renounce worldly
life and live in secluded ashrams.
Full-time spiritual practice is possible for any karma yogi, anyone who uses their day
to day activities for the sake of spiritual growth.
For those karma yogis, life itself is a spiritual practice.
This is the seventh video in a series that answers questions submitted by viewers.
If you have a question that would serve as a good topic for a video like this one, please
email me at this address, and be sure to indicate "video question" as the subject of the email.
I'll try to address your question in a future video.