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by
Stephen Cope
Read between
January 6 - January 13, 2021
truest calling, as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. Between 1862 and the end of the war, he visited thousands of sick, wounded, lonely, and dying young men in the hospitals of the Union Army. He brought them fruit, candy, cigarettes, writing paper. But mostly he brought them himself. His tender spirit. His generous nature. His broken heart. And by the conclusion of the war, he understood that these suffering men and boys had called forth something within him more precious than even his gift for poetry.
His story shows us why it is that we cannot look at The Gift only for its own sake. The Gift cannot reach maturity until it is used in the service of a greater good. In order to ignite the full ardency of dharma, The Gift must be put in the service of The Times.
Likewise: If you do not bring forth what is within you it will destroy you. But not just you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy the whole people.
publication of Leaves of Grass, the nation spiraled toward civil war, and Whitman himself—even after his initial triumph—was caught in a personal slough of despond. He spent his nights carousing and cruising with his fellow Bohemians in New York’s Greenwich Village, and drinking at the notorious Pfaff’s beer cellar. He frequented the New York Free Love league in his spare time. He hung out with (and probably slept with) tough young men from the docks and coach houses.
She discovered, like Whitman, that brilliant careers can turn into golden handcuffs. Used up as they may be, they’re still hard to leave behind.
Whitman gave no indication in his journal that he had studied the Bhagavad Gita. But in his poetry he declared over and over again the very same truth that Krishna taught to Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra: “Our bodies are known to end, but the embodied self is enduring, indestructible, and immeasurable … Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, waters do not wet it … it is enduring, all-pervasive, fixed, immovable, and timeless.”
We in twenty-first-century America have strange dreams and fantasies about retirement. We imagine a life of leisure. The Golden Years. But what is this leisure in the service of? When we reach sixty-two, as Katherine had, we are likely to interpret feelings of exhaustion and boredom as the signal to retire. But couldn’t they just as easily be the call to reinvent ourselves? As we age it seems harder and harder to let our authentic dharma reinvent us. We imagine somehow that the risks are greater. We tend to think that leaping off cliffs is for the young. But no. Actually—when better to leap
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The fear of leaping is, of course, the fear of death. It is precisely the fear of being used up. And dharma does use us up, to be sure. But why not be used up giving everything we’ve got to the world? This is precisely what Krishna teaches Arjuna: You cannot hold on to your life. You don’t need to. You are immortal. “Our bodies are known to end, but the embodied self is enduring, indestructible, and immeasurable; therefore, Arjuna, fight the battle!” The Gift is not for its own sake. It is for the common good. It is for The Times.
Whitman’s poetic genius could not be for himself alone. His deeper gifts revealed themselves when put in the service of the times and of the greatest need. Having been put in the service of humanity, his gift was ennobled, transformed. His words helped turn the dark wound of the Civil War into a kind of transcendent light. Whitman had developed an expansive consciousness that saw into the meaning of things. This is, after all, what a poet does. He had infused his poetic spirit into his “missionary” work in the hospitals. He had turned his life into a poem—a work of art—in the most unlikely of
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Dharma is born mysteriously out of the intersection between The Gift and The Times. Dharma is a response to the urgent—though often hidden—need of the moment. Each of us feels some aspect of the world’s suffering acutely. It tears at our hearts. Others don’t see it or don’t care. But we feel it. And we must pay attention. We must act. This little corner of the world is ours to transform. This little corner of the world is ours to save.
The unification of life’s energies around dharma is a central pillar of Krishna’s teaching to Arjuna. Krishna teaches that one must attain “singleness of purpose.” “For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless,” he exhorts Arjuna (as you will recall).
Steven Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, cites focus as an essential condition of life mastery. “Winners focus,” says author Sydney Harris, “losers spray.”
If you have had the experience of Unity of Action, even briefly, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Perhaps once in your life, for just a few months, or weeks, or days, you knew what you were really about. You knew what you had to do, and you did it with passion—with everything you had. You discovered the magic of aim! Somehow, you managed to organize everything in your life to support your aim. Your life, just briefly, was a guided missile of dharma.
been more ill-served by stereotyping, lame biographies, and stuffy hagiography than Susan B. Anthony, the great nineteenth-century champion of women’s rights. This magnificent woman is generally seen as a wizened, tight-lipped old do-gooder who probably hated men, sex, and most of the normal pleasures of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anthony was a charming, eloquent, and commanding woman who routinely faced down halls of boorish, rude, and obstinate men—and who almost single-handedly created the national strategy that led to the enfranchisement of women.
From that point on, hers is a story of the power of vocation itself to transform personality—of dharma pulling toward its own realization.
Women living in America in the mid-1800s were the legal property of their husbands. A married woman had no right to property, no right to buy and sell real estate in her own name, no right to bequeath any property whatsoever to an heir. A married woman of the time had no right even to her own children. And, needless to say, she had no right to the vote.
Women were in bondage of the most insidious sort—and there were no ready escape hatches from this social and political imprisonment. They had only two choices: marriage (which still amounted to legal serfdom), or spinsterhood (and the shame, loss of social esteem, and potential impoverishment that came with that “degrading station.”) Into such a world was Susan B. Anthony born.
And Susan was surrounded in her Quaker world by independent-thinking women. Independent-thinking women, and I hasten to say a certain brand of independent-thinking women—to wit: schoolteachers.
Man was made for himself—it was often said—and woman for man! “I was not made for man,” Anthony would later declare flatly. “I was made for God. And I was made for myself.”
The routine wife beatings she observed in her small community—most of them associated with male drunkenness—infuriated her. She spoke out. She became involved in the Women’s Temperance Movement. And “Temperance” would be her first schooling in public action.
And so, Susan B. Anthony’s first organization, The Women’s State Temperance Society, was born. Anthony did not stop there. She was on a roll: She immediately called a national Women’s Temperance convention.
Susan B. Anthony decided that she would not be content to be a “good enough” public speaker. She must be great. Nothing else would fulfill her dharma. She became boldly single-minded in her practice. And she took on a coach: her closest friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—a masterful writer and speaker in various reform movements. Stanton’s coaching turned out to be phenomenal. She suggested that Susan “dress loose, take a great deal of exercise, and be particular about your diet and sleep sound enough, the body has a great effect on the mind.”
The more successful she was, the more she had to face men’s rage, and this routinely brought to her doorstep withering moments of public excoriation and every form of low personal attack.
As part of her dharma training, Susan learned to toughen herself to these outbursts. She became famous for standing her ground with equanimity. There are dozens of fantastic stories of her facing down apoplectic men in public situations—usually winning the day with her calm, her sense of humor, and her impressive composure under impossible circumstances. Angry
The Tao te Ching says, “[The Master] doesn’t glitter like a jewel … [but is] as rugged and common as a stone.” This is a predictable characteristic of those who have matured into their dharma. We see it in every other character we’ve examined: Goodall, Thoreau, Whitman, and Frost. Rugged and common as a stone. As the inner life of the practitioner of dharma becomes more complex, the outer life becomes simpler.
Susan B. Anthony understood a central teaching of the Bhagavad Gita: Complete devotion inexorably brings its own fulfillment. “When a person is devoted to something with complete faith,” said Krishna to Arjuna, “I unify his faith in that form … Then, when his faith is completely unified, he gains the object of his devotion. In this way, every desire is fulfilled by me.”
Unification means simply that everything in your life must line up around the spine of your dharma. Eventually, everything that is not dharma must fall away—as it did in the life of Susan B. Anthony. Any life of dharma will demonstrate this principle.
The dharma is a strict taskmaster. It will require you to reach—to work at your maximum potential. In order to do this, you will have to learn to take better care of yourself. You will have to sleep and eat properly. (In the case of a writer, you will have to stop abusing your mind with poorly written books.) You will probably have to create a regular schedule. And one day you’ll realize you’re in training like an Olympic athlete. But not any old training—a particular kind of training, the particular kind of training that will support your dharma and no one else’s. The dharma itself will
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You realize partway through (as Susan B. Anthony did in her life of dharma) that half measures will not work. You realize that a 70 percent investment of energy does not bring about a 70 percent book. It brings about a mediocre book. And then, really, what is the point? Does the world really need another half-assed book? So you see that you have to bring yourself 100 percent to the task.
Unification is the very soul of dharma. We see it in every life we’ve studied during this entire project. Thoreau streamlined his life in order to free his inner mystic. Frost became a farmer who farmed poetry. Goodall organized her life around her chimps. The degree of unification that you accomplish is the degree to which you’re doing your dharma. “How we spend our days,” says author Annie Dillard, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Once the mature Susan B. Anthony had fully organized her life around her dharma, she declared, as I have said, “Failure is impossible.” She had grasped the
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Krishna, as we have seen, has begun the “sacred dialogue” with two primary teachings: First—look to your dharma. Then—do it full out! Now he presents Arjuna with a third and most puzzling lesson: “Let go of the fruits of your actions.” To which Arjuna replies, essentially, “Huh?” “You have the right to work,” says Krishna to his bewildered student, “but never to the fruit of work.”
In this third lesson, Krishna is transmitting to Arjuna one of the most brilliant discoveries of the ancient yoga tradition: the power of nonattachment. Give yourself entirely to your work, yes. But let go of the outcome. Be alike in success and defeat. Krishna is emphatic on this point: You cannot devote yourself fully and passionately to your dharma without engaging this principle.
Clinging (or grasping) of any kind disturbs the mind. And this disturbed mind, then, is not really fully present to the task at hand. It is forever leaning forward into the next moment—grabbing. And, not being present for the moment, it cannot fully devote its powers to the job at hand.
Grasping, it turns out, is just another form of doubt. Grasping, or craving, or clinging to a particular outcome splits the mind from the present moment. The mind that is constantly evaluating—“How am I doing?” or “How am I measuring up?” or “Am I winning or losing?”—is the divided mind. Krishna speaks about this with vivid psychological insight: “Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action,” he teaches, “are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”
found that grasping has three pernicious effects on the mind. They are: first, disturbance; then, obscuration; and finally, separation.
Try this: Sit down to meditate when you’re caught up in a moment of craving for food or sex. Notice the quality of the mind. Crazy!
Second, grasping in any form is said to “obscure” the mind. What does this mean? Simply that when the mind is caught up in grasping it does not see clearly.
The mind caught up in craving does not make discerning choices. In these moments we are said to be obscured.
And third, the mind caught up in a state of grasping is said to be “separate.” What could this mean? Simply that the experience of craving intensifies the split between subject and object (between “me” and “the ice cream”), so that it appears that without the object of my grasping I am unwhole.
So: Disturbed. Obscured. Separate. Krishna has captured these very insights in his teaching to Arjuna: “When you keep thinking about sense objects,” he says, “attachment comes.
What is not so easy to see are the ways in which grasping colors our motivation toward more subtle objects of desire—in our work, in our play, even in our spiritual life. We can just as easily get caught up in craving while we’re sitting in meditation, or doing yoga. We can crave exalted states. Enlightenment.
What is the antidote? Krishna counsels “detachment.” “Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment,” he teaches, “and you will amass the wealth of spiritual awareness.” But here is an important proviso: not detachment from the passionate involvement in the task at hand; not detachment from one’s dharma. Detachment from the outcome.
When there is no obsessive concern with outcome, with gain of any kind, we are able to become completely absorbed in what we’re doing—our actions and thoughts undivided by worry. All of our energy can become concentrated on the task at hand. “When consciousness is unified,” says Krishna, “all vain anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill.”
All vain anxiety is left behind! These are moments of peace, and possibility. “When you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment, and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self.”
In the early centuries of the yoga tradition, practitioners investigated extreme forms of asceticism as an antidote to grasping. Kill all desire. Root it out. This caveman strategy had a serious flaw. Along with grasping, it also tended to kill all that was good in the practitioner—and not infrequently it actually killed the practitioner himself. Yogis had to go back to the drawing
There are salutary aspects to desire. They discovered an energy at the heart of desire that is full of aspiration for the most noble qualities of the human being. They
There is no obscuration in aspiration; rather what arises is a capacity to see clearly. There is no separation in states of aspiration; rather, what emerges are profound states of union with all beings. Aspiration, as it turns out, is full of energy. Full of resolve. Full of a deep ardency for the realization of the Self.
The practitioner can, in fact, tease grasping apart from aspiration, by harnessing desire to dharma. And so, we have Krishna’s first three teachings: Find your dharma. Do it full out! Let go of the outcome. This frees the natural passion of the human being to be put in the service of dharma. This is the way to live a passionate life without being caught in the fetters of grasping. Do your work passionately. Then let go. Now you are free.
1. Let desire give birth to aspiration. 2. When difficulties arise, see them as your dharma. 3. Turn the wound into light.
“And to put it all into perspective.” Acknowledge, experience, and bear reality. And put it into perspective. Much of the developmental work of middle and old age is precisely about putting experience into perspective—about understanding perhaps for the first time what one’s life really means.
