Karmanyeva

 

Life runs mostly in meeting the ends rather than in the means to the ends.  Our happiness is determined by a series of events in our lives and we go on in the wait for completion of the set of tasks.  Education, marriage, children, job, promotion, buying a house, a car or any material comforts, doing a business etc. All these acts as goal posts in our lives and we live from one goal post to another. Within these broad goal posts, we have a series of end points.  Our all-time focus is on these goal posts and the attainment of the them.  We look forward for each of these events to happen successfully.  In the process, our energies get focused on the outcomes.   We are happy if we attain it and disturbed when we fail to attain.   So, our mind always lives in the future, dreaming of completion of the next goal post or our mind dwells in thinking about the past as to why we could not achieve something.  The whole point is our focus is only on these outcomes.  What is living if we are always worried either about the past and future?  Can we have a peaceful life? Just doing the action means living in the present.  Our real existence is in the present. It is in the journey.  But the focus on the goal post makes us live either in the past or in the future.  The thought of future or the past come in the way of living a life in that moment.  This is the whole philosophy of ‘Here and Now’.  How can we be 100% engaged in a given moment?  The undisturbed mind can enable us to achieve this.  An undisturbed mind is the one which neither in the past nor in the future.  We all live in moments that has already happened and passed with the time or we live in the moments which we are not even aware of.  These are not in the time and space we are in.

Being in present is to feel the moment at that time and space we are in. Only this can help us to live an inspired life.  Life just goes with the flow and there is no need for us to do deliberate thinking.  Thoughts come on its own. There is no need for planned action on this plane.  We need to just keep accepting realities as they come.

This leads us to a question if the whole planning processes a waste.  In reality life is full of uncertainties.  Take the case of Covid 19.  Several predictions were made regarding the spread of the disease, its containment and its impact.  Most of these have reversed.  But on the other hand, the question is were predictions not needed.  If predictions were not made, would we have been able to come out with the vaccines against the disease.   This brings to a need for us to understand the two planes we live in.  One is in the physical plane (bhouthika or sthoola) and the other in the spiritual plane (daivika or sookshma). We may call it as reality and the spirit.    Action is what we do in the physical plane. Planning and operationalizing is in the physical plane, performance is in the physical plane,  but in the plane above this (spirit) we just let go everything. We just live in the present, we are not tagging ourselves to either the outcomes of planning or what went wrong with our plans. The outcomes of plan rests in the future, a time and space that we are not in and what went wrong in our plans is the past, again a time and space that we are not in right now. 

But what happens to us in reality.  We continue to engage in thought. We get looped in the thought regarding the failure of our plans and failure to attain results as expected. We start losing hope.  This puts us in a situation of self-doubt, self-blame and also blaming others and situations for not working in the way desired.  Our thoughts are also influenced by others, who say ‘that’s not possible’ ‘this is not the way to do’, ‘your action was not in the right direction’.  These words will dissuade us from being on the plane of spirit. We get disturbed further. Instead of letting go we hold on to it. Every time we act we become more cautious and more worried of the results. 

The simplest way is to look at the child writing an examination.  A child of standard 1 has no idea of what an examination is.  If we never tell the child and do the assessment just as another class, the child just performs without inhibitions.  But what our system does? The Teachers start pushing the child towards the exam and keep telling that you have to perform in the examination.  They call the parents and also tell them that it is important to achieve in the examination. Now the child which was just to write the exam starts getting the fear about performing and meeting the expectations of teachers and parents.  This goes on as a loop. Every time there is an examination It becomes a conditioned response. The stress starts building.  The focus is more on the outcomes than on the performance.   We operate only with reality and forget to deal with the spirit.  I mean that we just start living in a different time and space mentally and hence forget to live in the present. This was just an example.  The family, society and  the formal education system and sometimes our religious practices all bind us in the same manner. It never allows us to come out of the physical plane and make us overthink of the past and future, thereby leaving us less option to be in present all the time.

Krishna’s words to arjuna in the 47^th verse of chapter 2 in Bhagawad Gita where he says ‘You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but not to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to what you do’. This brings to the fore the physical plane and the spirit. In the physical plane (bhouthika) we perform but the outcome is in a plane of spirit (daivika)

The entire life of ours is filled with actions and for every action there is an expected outcome. Krishna says just perform and do not think about the results.  The very thought about the results is likely to disturb the entire process of action.  One cannot perform mindfully if the attachment is towards the results.  The focus on results disturbs the whole path of action. There is a need to delink our thoughts as regards to performance and results. If the focus is on results, action gets disturbed and hence we lose control of our performance.