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

by Stephen Cope

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.

taught me to believe in myself,” wrote Jane.

One of the lessons of Jane’s life: It only takes one person. There were not a lot of others lining up to support Jane in her decades of

Jane’s experience is what we might call the Direct Path to Dharma. It can happen. It is magnificent when it does.

“The attempt to live out someone else’s dharma brings extreme spiritual peril,” says Krishna. Extreme spiritual peril!

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.

Our work can be motivated by obligation, by hunger for the external rewards of accomplishment, or by strongly reinforced ideas about who we should be in this lifetime. But none of these motivations has the authentic energy required for mastery of a profession. So, all of these motivations lead slowly to a downward spiral that tends to crash, as it did with Brian, at midlife. 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.

describes the maturation of her sense of dharma. “Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference,” she says. She describes hearing a “still small voice” that guides her, and that she believes to be the “Voice of God.” She says, “Of course, it is usually called the voice of conscience, and if we feel more comfortable

with that definition, that’s fine. Whatever we call it, the important thing, I think, is to try to do what the voice tells us.”

As her connection to her dharma matures, she increasingly has a sense that she is not the doer of her actions, but that God is working through her. “I always have this feeling—which may not be true at all—that I am being used as a messenger.

have been able to tap into the spiritual power that is always there, providing strength and courage if only we reach out.”

Psychologists call this inner and outer poseur the “false self.” The name says it all. The false self is a collection of ideas we have in our minds about who we should be.

be. Your one and only shot at a fulfilled life is being yourself—whoever that is.

Dharma always involves, at some point, a leap off a cliff in the dark. Jane

Much of Ellen’s muddle was in her thinking about her dharma. She thought that her job, her calling, was too small. It didn’t match up to her fantasies of what a calling should be.

against two of the enemies of dharma: grandiosity, and its flip side, devaluing. (In short, the problem of size.) Grandiosity and devaluing both represent unrealistic thinking about possibility. Grandiosity motivates us to try to be bigger than we could possibly be. Devaluing makes us think of ourselves as smaller than we actually are.

“Be resolutely and faithfully what you are,” said Thoreau—not who you think you should be. Thoreau’s early struggle was to be “right-sized.” Not too big, not too small. It was his resolute embrace of a right-sized self that became for him the doorway into a full life.

“Think of the small as large,” wrote Lao Tzu, the author of the Tao te Ching. Thoreau is the great American genius of this aphorism. Think of the small as large. “See yourself as a grain of sand,” suggests Chögyam Trungpa, the Tibetan crazy-wisdom guru, “see yourself as the smallest of the small. Then you can make room for the whole world.”

Each jewel in Indra’s net represents both itself as a particular jewel, and, at the same time, the entire web. So, any change in one gem would be reflected in the whole. Indeed, the individual gem is the whole. In the words of Indologist Sir Charles Eliot, “Every object in the world is not merely itself but involves every other object and in fact IS everything else.”

“Do what you love!” he wrote exuberantly. “Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.” Know your own bone!

was comfortable enough, yes. But he was just a little uncomfortable, too. There was a stretch. Just enough of a stretch. And right in that balance, Thoreau found the correct size for his life. And his dharma exploded with energy. Right size is everything. Think of the small as large.

the intersection of The Gift and the The Times.

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.

If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. Yes. But this saving is not just for you. It is for the common good. If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world. It will rescue the times. It will save the whole people. 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.

Dharma callings are more fluid than we would like them to be. These callings can change maddeningly. Just when we settle into a satisfying moment of dharma flowering, the world upends us. Just when we think we have gotten our due reward in a stretch of good

like Whitman, that brilliant careers can turn into golden handcuffs. Used up as they may be, they’re still hard to leave behind.

The tortured clinging to an earlier expression of The Gift very often precedes the emergence of some new version. We’re aware of the dryness at the center, yes, but this aridity is usually not quite enough to propel us forward. We must first get just a whiff of the new. The surprising and intoxicating whiff of a new dharma is quite irresistible.

Careful attunement to dharma will demand that we reinvent ourselves periodically throughout life. Whitman, as it turned out, was a master at self-reinvention.

The intersection of The Gift and The Times. This new work would use Katherine’s gifts for writing and editing. Her love of organic gardening. Her devotion to nature. Her concern about the future of the planet. And it cooked them all together into an entirely new stew that Katherine found thrilling. It was small. And it was very, very large.

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.”

(ambivalence, it turns out, is an unavoidable companion in the search for a new dharma): “Well, what if it does?” she

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?

Eliot said it: “Old men ought to be explorers.”)

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.

see here the themes that will occupy the rest of the book: Selflessness. Sacrifice. Surrender. Not just responsibility to The Gift itself, but responsibility to give it in the way that is called forth. Krishna says, “Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do

your work with the welfare of others always in mind.”

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.

“Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate,” Krishna instructed Arjuna. The vacillating mind is the split mind. The vacillating mind is the doubting mind—the mind at war with itself. “The ignorant, indecisive and lacking in faith, waste their lives,” says Krishna. “They can never be happy in this world or any other.” Ouch.

Acting in unity with your purpose itself creates unification. Actions that consciously support dharma have the power to begin to gather our energy. These outward actions, step-by-step, shape us inwardly. Find your dharma and do it. And in the process of doing it, energy begins to gather itself into a laser beam of effectiveness.

Krishna quickly adds: Do not worry about the outcome. Success or failure are not your concern. It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of another. Your task is only to bring as much life force as you can muster to the execution of your dharma. In this spirit, Chinese Master Guan Yin Tzu wrote: “Don’t waste time calculating your chances of success and failure. Just fix your aim and begin.”

The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”

When you commit fully to the task at hand, the abundance of your commitment itself has magic in it. It draws your energies together. It calls up energies you didn’t know you had. As some have said, under these conditions the universe comes to your aid.

the process of unification requires saying “no” to actions that do not support dharma—saying “no” to detours, and to side channels of all kinds, even to some pretty terrific side channels. It

snipping off all manner of “other options.” The

Those who cannot commit, those who cannot say “no,” are doomed to everlasting conflict. They may sit for a lifetime at the crossroads, dithering. Krishna nails this principle: “Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to see Me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.”

Frost’s life closely, it becomes clear that this man became more and more himself through a series of small decisions that aligned him with his voice. He had a gift, of course. But his power came into focus through his commitment to this gift, and through a series of decisive actions taken in support of it.

In the cultivation of dharma, there is nothing more important than understanding what conditions are needed, and relentlessly creating them.

It is interesting to see the effects of choices as they play themselves out over the long trajectory of life.

“No man can know what power he can rightly call his own unless he presses a little,” he wrote. It was time to press. 10