The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

by Stephen Cope

One additional proviso: The book that you are about to read is an examination of dharma in the light of the teachings of the two-thousand-year-old Bhagavad Gita. But this book in no way purports to be a scholarly or technical exegesis of the Gita.

What do you fear most in this life? What is your biggest fear? Right now. When I pose that question to myself, the answer is this: I’m afraid that I’ll die without having lived fully. OK, I’m also afraid of pain—and of dying a difficult death. But that’s for later. Mostly, right now, I’m afraid that I may be missing some magnificent possibility. That perhaps I have not risked enough to find it.

And so, I read. Usually from about 8:00 to 11:00 every night—often propped up in bed, with an unruly stack of books perched on the table next to me. I read with pen in hand, and have lively conversations with my authors. I scribble in margins; I make exclamation points and

Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Have you had periods in life when you leapt out of bed in the morning to embrace your day? Once this happens to you, once you live this way, even for a few hours, you will never really be satisfied with any other way of living.

But for now, here’s an experiment. Stop reading for a minute, and ask yourself these questions: Am I living fully right now? Am I bringing forth everything I can bring forth? Am I digging down into that ineffable inner treasure-house that I know is in there? That trove of genius? Am I living my life’s calling? Am I willing to go to any lengths to offer my genius to the world?

A true story: Whenever I teach our program participants here at Kripalu, I begin by asking them to name what they’ve come for. Seventy-five percent say it straight out: “I want to come home to my true self.” Over and over again in almost those exact words. “To come home to my true self.” Where have these people been? The same place I’ve been, lately, I guess: Unclear. Confused. Paralyzed by doubt. Gliding. Drifting. Mesmerized by the old tried-and-true distractions. (And maybe some of us have truly been in the desert.)

Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation. They call this dharma.

Dharma means, variously, “path,” “teaching,” or “law.” For our purposes in this book it will mean primarily “vocation,” or “sacred duty.” It means, most of all—and in all cases—truth.

am referring, of course, to the 2,000-year-old treatise on yoga called the Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God. It is the world’s greatest scripture on dharma.

The Bhagavad Gita expounds an unequaled method for bringing forth dharma. At the beginning of the story, Arjuna is paralyzed by doubt. Like Hamlet, he cannot act. Arjuna has tried to live a good life up to this point—has tried to live out his warrior-dharma as best he can. But at the beginning of our story, the world has momentarily crushed him.

The handsome Krishna is disguised as a charioteer, and he becomes Arjuna’s spiritual teacher, his psychoanalyst, his coach, his goad, his mentor. But we—the reader—know that Krishna is actually none other than God.

The Bhagavad Gita is a brilliant teaching on the problems of doing. There is so much talk these days about being.

paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, “is action.” In fact, there is no being in this world without doing. Let’s get real: Most of our lives are spent in doing.

If you look around, you might notice that suddenly you’re seeing the Bhagavad Gita everywhere. Everyone still reads it in World Lit courses, naturally. But more than that. I’ve heard that it is rapidly replacing The Art of War on the bookshelves of corporate executives. I hope this is true. It indicates that we’re finally beginning to bring spiritual practice into the center of our everyday lives—moving away from the misapprehension that spiritual life only happens in church, or on the meditation cushion, or on retreat.

Our fantasies about fulfillment often center around dreams of wealth, power, fame, and leisure. In these fantasies, a fulfilling life is one in which we acquire so much freedom and leisure that we no longer have to work and strive.

People actually feel happiest and most fulfilled when meeting the challenge of their dharma in the world, when bringing highly concentrated effort to some compelling activity for which they have a true calling.

Fulfillment happens not in retreat from the world, but in advance—and profound engagement.

turns out that among so-called ordinary lives, there are many, many great ones. Indeed, for me there is no longer really any distinction at all between great lives and ordinary lives.

And this brings us to you: Do you fear that you may have missed the boat? That you’ve become unmoored from your true calling and are drifting aimlessly out to sea?

it turns out, most people are already living very close to their dharma. Really. Within spitting range. What is the problem, then? These same people, close as they are to the deepest mystery of dharma, know very little about it. They don’t name it. They don’t own it. They don’t live it intentionally. Their own sacred calling is hiding in plain sight. They keep just missing it. And, as we will see, when it comes to dharma, missing by an inch is as good as missing by a mile. Aim is everything.

“Dharma” can be variously, but incompletely, translated as “religious and moral law,” “right conduct,” “sacred duty,” “path of righteousness,” “true nature,” and “divine order.”

“Dharma,” he says, “is the essential nature of a being, comprising the sum of its particular qualities or characteristics, and determining, by virtue of the tendencies or dispositions it implies, the manner in which this being will conduct itself, either in a general way or in relation to each particular circumstance.” The word dharma in this teaching, then, refers to the peculiar and idiosyncratic qualities of each being—those very essential and particular qualities that make it somehow itself.

Arjuna was born into the warrior class. So, he was destined to be a warrior. It was his sacred duty to fight a just war. He never had any choice in the matter, nor was his dharma based on any particular personal qualities. Indeed, in the traditional culture in which Arjuna lived there was no such thing as a personal self. The self was a “socially embedded self.” So there was no notion of personal dharma.

We live in a different kind of culture, of course, in which there is most emphatically a personal self, and therefore a personal dharma.

Actually, you can only expect a fulfilling life if you dedicate yourself to finding out who you are. To finding the ineffable, idiosyncratic seeds of possibility already planted inside.

Thomas Merton came to precisely this conclusion after decades of spiritual practice. He wrote: “Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.”

1. Trust in the gift. 2. Think of the small as large. 3. Listen for the call of the times.

Said Krishna to Arjuna, “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.” Better to fail at your own dharma? Better to fail at the pursuit of one’s own puny inner genius than to succeed in any other, however exalted? Better to find your own inner fingerprint, no matter what the outcome? Really that important?

The Gift is not itself dharma. It is only, as the old saying goes, a finger pointing to the dharma.

Are there roads not taken that occasionally light you up? Do you ever fantasize about what might have been had it all gone differently? Let’s look at the question from another perspective: Do you know anyone whose gifts were seen, mirrored, prized? Who took the obvious road early? And thrived?

“The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”)

Goodall was the first scientist to document chimpanzees making tools. Not just using tools, but actually making tools. Until this discovery, tool making had been seen as the quintessentially human behavior: man the toolmaker. Goodall changed all that. She also documented chimpanzees’ exhibition of what we think of as the exclusively human traits of altruism and compassion.

Did you know that chimpanzees’ DNA differs from human DNA by a mere one percent? This has been hard for some people to accept.

The answers to these question are, of course, complex. But there is one dramatic fact of Goodall’s early life that we must examine in depth here: As a child, her gifts were named, celebrated, cherished, and nurtured.

What comes next is important. Jane had been missing for over four hours. The household had taken to search-and-rescue mode. Excited, Jane rushed out of the henhouse, eager to tell her story. When her mother, Vanne, saw Jane, she rushed to her. … despite her worry, when Vanne [Jane’s mother] saw the excited little girl rushing toward the house, she did not scold me. She noticed my shining eyes and sat down to listen to the story of how a hen lays an egg: the wonder of that moment when the egg finally fell to the ground. Where in the world did this mother come from? Where was the spanking I would have received—and would have thought perfectly justified?

Vanne not only felt compelled to reflect Jane’s gift to her. She felt a responsibility to The Gift. I suspect that Vanne had not read the Bhagavad Gita, but there she would have found this very teaching. We have a responsibility to The Gift. The Gift is God in disguise. In Jane Goodall we have a fairly uncommon example of a life in which just about everything was working to support dharma. But isn’t it good to know that these things can happen? “I had a mother who not only tolerated but also encouraged my passion for nature and animals and who, even more important, taught me to believe in myself,” wrote Jane. Taught me to believe in myself.

Quite honestly, as I read Goodall’s autobiography, I thought: Well, where was the struggle? Where was the doubt? I wanted to know what she left out. Those would have been the good parts, I thought. I really had trouble believing her story could be that good. But then I realized: This is what a life of certitude looks like. Rather than conflict and drama, all of Goodall’s energy went into her creativity, until finally she ignited into that bonfire of contribution to the world. Jane’s experience is what we might call the Direct Path to Dharma. It can happen. It is magnificent when it does.

But my observation leads me to believe that Goodall’s story is the exception rather than the rule. As

Brian surrendered to the call heard not by himself, but by his parents and teachers. What resulted was much more serious than anyone could have imagined. It was the silent tragedy of self-betrayal.

If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not, it will destroy you. And what, precisely, is destroyed?

Energy is destroyed first. Those shining eyes. And then faith. And then hope. And then life itself.

Without the balm of real fulfillment there is a growing emptiness inside. Finally, it requires a heroic effort to simply go on with life in the face of this emptiness. The light in the eyes goes out.

True mastery, authentic dharma, is not possible without the kernel of The Gift at the center.

The false self is a collection of ideas we have in our minds about who we should be. Sometimes these ideas—most often planted in childhood—can be so strong that they override our capacity to see who we actually are, or at least to fully embrace it. They become a kind of learning disability. Our capacity to see the world clearly is thwarted.

Brian is an exemplar of the quiet suffering of the false self: There develops a stilted relationship to work: mediocrity, lack of interest, lack of enthusiasm, lack of soul-connection to work. This eventually begins to invade even the sphere of play, for as Thoreau said, famously, “Play comes after work.” But there is something resilient about gifts: Their light is never fully extinguished. Our gifts are so close to the core of our being that they can never really be entirely destroyed, no matter how deadening the life. My brother still has two motorcycles that he rides in

We discover the truth taught by Krishna: You cannot be anyone you want to be. Your one and only shot at a fulfilled life is being yourself—whoever that is. Furthermore, at a certain age it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s dream and eschewed our own: No one really cares except us. When you scratch the surface, you finally discover that it doesn’t really matter a whit who else you disappoint if you’re disappointing yourself. The only question that makes sense to ask is: Is your life working for you?

He was so unhappy with his life as a priest that he had been on antidepressants for almost five years. Finally, out of desperation, he got into psychotherapy. There, he allowed himself to face his suffering—and finally, to name The Gift.

The Gift and the The Times.

Whitman himself was—like Thoreau—seen as a loafer, a failure, and a ne’er-do-well. And worse, in Whitman’s case, a “sexual invert.” “Guilty,” said one reviewer of Leaves of Grass, “of that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.”