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

by Stephen Cope

found that desire is actually a compound state. It is made up, in part, of grasping and craving, which always and everywhere lead to the experience of suffering.

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 discovered, too, that allied with these aspirations are profound energies of “resolve” and “strong determination” to achieve the good and the noble. There were components of this state of desire that seemed to come from the highest nature of a human being.

“aspiration.” Aspiration does not have the coloring of afflicted states. There is no disturbance in aspiration; rather there is a state of inner calm abiding, and quiet determination. There is no obscuration in aspiration; rather what arises is a capacity to see clearly. There is no sep...

Aspiration, as it turns out, is full of energy. Full of resolve. Full of a deep ardency for the realization of the Self. It is this very aspiration that leads us to searc...

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.

three important principles: 1. Let desire give birth to aspiration. 2. When difficulties arise, see them as your dharma. 3. Turn the wound into light.

The Doctrine of Inaction in Action. He was letting himself be used by his dharma. He had stumbled onto the secret of “not the Doer” (a central principle of dharma that we will explore

Stubborn ambition and hard work. Just like the rest of us. Not a genius. A product, rather, of deliberate practice. Keats’s story is one

Keats had to grapple with the realities of impermanence—the realities so often emphasized by Krishna in his long talks with Arjuna. Keats discovered early on that he could hold on to nothing. And so his koan—the central question of his life—became how to live life fully without holding on to it. How to have it without possessing it. “Kiss the joy as it flies,” says William Blake. In order to become a great poet, Keats would have to work through the problem of grasping. The evidence that he finally did learn to live in the stream of impermanence is written—at his instruction—on his very tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

The first encounter with dharma is very often described as falling in love. When we see our dharma—smell it, feel it—we recognize it. It is chemical. Undeniable. Keats was smitten. At the beginning,

Keats was, like most of us—like Arjuna—full of doubt about the viability of his dharma.

Keats was posing as a poet. This is what we do in the early stages of finding our dharma. We try it on. As W. H. Auden noted, “human beings are by nature actors who cannot become something until they have first pretended to be it.”

Every one of us who takes his dharma seriously will search for exemplars. On fire with our own dharma, we sniff out others who are working in the same dharma gold mine as we.

exemplars play? We see in them the full expression of a kindred dharma. We see in them the full flower of what we know exists as a seed within our own self. These exemplars become essential doorways for us into our own dharma. They become transitional objects. We read them, study them, take them apart and put them back together again, just as Keats did

We cannot really understand another human being without understanding his dharma story. And we cannot understand his dharma story without grasping the importance of his dharma mentors. The more I dug into Keats, the more I discovered that one cannot understand Keats without understanding Shakespeare. Mark apparently discovered the same thing. His second major play would be about Shakespeare.

dove headlong into the phase of mastery that we have called deliberate practice. His early writing was mediocre. But he discovered that if he persevered, every now and then some truly fine poetry would emerge. It did not

This was a key moment, because Keats showed that he was willing to risk failure. He was willing to let his dreams of glory die, and actually take on the work—to succeed, or as he said, to be exposed as a fraud.

realized that real fulfillment was not about the approbation of critics, but rather came naturally through the experience of bringing forth the best that was in him. It was not the poem’s success or failure in the eyes of others that created fulfillment for the poet.

access to the innermost character of a person or thing. He saw that poetry was merely a vehicle—a way to know the world. A way to know the soul of a person, a landscape, or any object of beauty. He realized that he did not need to possess any of it. He only needed to know it. And this knowing was what brought not just happiness, but bliss, rapture, and authentic fulfillment.

Wherein lies happiness?”—now had its best answer. “A fellowship with essence!!!” he would exclaim. With this insight, Keats had solved the central riddle of his life: how to have a full experience of life without possessing it—without owning it, without grasping it, without holding on to it.

Grasping for an object actually interferes with knowing it. The discovery that holding on too tightly disturbs the mind, and finally interferes with the mind’s capacity to know. This is, of cou...

his theory of Negative Capability.

Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This Negative Capability also seems to require the capacity for surrender, and the capacity, as Keats said, to “annul the self.”

“disinterestedness.” “To bear all naked truths, and to envisage circumstance, all calm,” he

“many a verse from so strange an influence / That we must ever wonder how, and whence It came.”

When difficulties arise, see them as dharma. Your

The grasping mind says, “I long for that experience over there. That experience looks very pleasant. Let’s go there.” The aversive mind, on the other hand, says, “I hate the way it is right now. This is very, very unpleasant. Get me out of here!” The aversive mind pushes away the unpleasant.

impulse to eschew the unpleasant leads to avoidance; avoidance leads to aversion; aversion leads to fear; fear leads to hatred; hatred leads to aggression. Unwittingly, the oh-so-natural instinct to avoid the unpleasant becomes the root of hatred. It leads to war: war within, war without. Entertaining aversion is a slippery slope.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Krishna’s brilliant approach to working with desire? Go into the desire. Feel it. Explore it. Discover what exactly is in that stew of craving, of wanting. Maybe even find magnificent things in it, like aspiration.

Marion did the unusual. She decided to take cancer as her new dharma. She walked the razor’s edge: She did not declare war on it. She invited it in to see what she could make of it, and to see what it would make of her. She opened to the possibility that this experience could transform her in salutary ways. Marion lived with her

Marion Woodman is, as I have said, one of the world’s best-known Jungian analysts. She is a widely admired author of important books on feminine psychology and on the relationship between the psyche and the body, including such influential works as Addiction to Perfection, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, and Leaving My Father’s House.

“When [God] is moving you toward a new consciousness, you need to recognize the winds of change at once, move with them instead of clinging to what is already gone.” Wow. Not much holding on there. It was an instinctive move: Recognize the winds of change at once. Move with them.

In Bone, Marion describes how she saw her illness as “Destiny.” (Her view of Destiny is really very similar to our notion of dharma.) “Destiny is recognizing the radiance of the soul that, even when faced with human impossibility, loves all of life.” All of life. In another journal entry, she writes: “These are strange days, knowing that I have moved into Destiny, knowing I am in exactly the right

place, agonizing as it is.” No war here whatsoever.

“night sea journey” is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness.

“The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived,” writes Marion. “Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.” Marion discovered, of course, that Jung’s technique for discovering our exiled parts centered primarily around the analysis of dreams, which Jung called “the royal road to the unconscious.”

Marion discovered an underlying theme in her clients’ dreams. She discovered that her addicted clients lived divided lives—lives split between body and soul, between perfection and imperfection, between light and dark. Healing came about through integrating these “pairs of opposites.” She came into an understanding of the way in which longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings.

“You see Life and Death as opposites,” he says to a befuddled Arjuna, “as if you had to choose one over the other. And of course you choose life. But don’t you get it? You have to choose both. Life and Death are not enemies. They are not opposites at all.

They are inextricably bound to one another. You cannot really choose life without also choosing death.”

Difficulties—even death—are not an enemy from the beyond. They are not an alien force. They are part of the Self. Therefore, what appear to be difficulties are really invitations. They are doorways into a deeper union with split-off parts of the Self. They are opportunities. But in order to make full use of these opportunities, one must be willing to undergo what Marion calls “the initiation.”

with cancer all the stages of initiation that she had taught for so many years. She describes these stages in Bone. Together they make up a stunning reframe of difficulty itself—making

Initiations are opportunities for us to grow larger. They are death channels. And they are birth channels. They allow us the opportunity to integrate more of our self—more possibility, more reality, more sensation, more feeling. They require everything we’ve got. They destroy us to re-create us.

The gift of cancer is the gift of NOW.… Through failures, symptoms, problems, we are prodded to renounce attachments, redundant now. With the breakdown of what has gone before, the possibility of rebirth comes.”

little of Thoreau’s description of his discovery of “the Wild” after he climbed Mount Katahdin in Maine. This contact with “the Wild” changed Thoreau and his view of nature forever. He discovered nature to be rough, untamed, dangerous, relentlessly itself, and shockingly disdainful of human

as Beethoven lay on his deathbed he was a fulfilled man. Not a happy man, mind you. But a fulfilled man—certainly. (There can be a world of difference between happiness and fulfillment. Even as he lay dying, Beethoven purportedly raised a fist to heaven.) Beethoven was a man who had found his dharma, and had brought everything he had to it. “I have run the race,” said St. Paul toward the end of his long career as an Apostle. “I have kept the faith.” Beethoven might have made the

“I must leave behind me what the Eternal Spirit has infused into my soul and bids me complete …”

And now a surprise: Beethoven was deeply inspired by his reading of the Bhagavad Gita.

Perform thy duty, abandon all thought of the consequence, and make the event equal, whether it terminate in good or evil; for such an equality is called yoga.” And, as we will see, in his quest to make meaning of his suffering, Beethoven enacted in his life virtually all the pillars of Krishna’s teaching.

“Beethoven turned all of his defeats into victories.” This would be a good thing for each of us to learn. We each have wounds. Can a full performance of our dharma turn our wounds into light?