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

by Stephen Cope

This is the very hallmark of great dharma. Each of us must find the form that allows this naming, this working through, and, finally, this mastery. We may find these forms in sports, in the arts, in finance, in academia, in relationship building, in child-rearing—or, indeed, in stamp collecting. But find them we must.

“Submission, deepest submission to your fate, only this can give you the sacrifices—for this matter of service,” he wrote in his Tagebuch (his diary). What does this mean? The theme of sacrifice and submission colors many of his entries in the Tagebuch henceforward. It means that he accepts his life as a sacrifice. But now a willing sacrifice. Even an eager one. He began to understand that The Wound itself is an aspect of The Gift. They cannot be divided.

The battlefield is an absolutely central component of the Gita. Our conflicts and inner divisions—all that separates us from our true selves—must be worked out on the field of real life. On the field of relationships. Of work. Of effort. Of hobbies. Of callings. This is what dharma is. Dharma calls us not to just any old battlefield, but to the battlefield where we will suffer most fruitfully. Where our suffering will be most useful to ourselves, to our souls, and to the world.

He discussed his existential questions with a small circle of friends, through the vehicle of his “Conversation Books.” He developed a series of notebooks through which he communicated with his friends—intimates who were some of Vienna’s leading citizens, writers, philosophers, musicians, civil servants, journalists. He investigated various views of God. Above all, during these difficult years, Beethoven increased his sense of dedication to his own duty. “God sees into my innermost heart and knows that as a man I perform most conscientiously and on all occasions the duties which Humanity, God and Nature enjoin upon me …” Humanity, God, and Nature: These became Beethoven’s spiritual pillars.

“Perform thy duty! Abandon all thought of the consequence.” Beethoven had understood Krishna’s lesson: Your soul can be saved only through action in the performance of your own dharma. He had copied another pillar

diary: “Let not thy life be spent in inaction! Depend upon application!” And so, the Master launched into his final period of action. What emerged was another astonishing period of productivity.

you bring forth what is within you, it will save you.

If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world.

“Arjuna, you do not know how to act because you do not know who you are.”

He teaches that our decisions about our actions flow inexorably from our understanding of who we are. And if we do not know who we are, we will make poor choices.

“we have a Divine nature that we only faintly recognize. Our true nature is unborn, undying, unmanifest, inconceivable to the ordinary mind.”

True Self—our personality, our body, our career, our house, our stories—are not our True Self at all. Our True Self is our soul. This soul is immortal, and is not limited to present forms.

[The Self] is not born, It does not die; Having been, It will never not be; Unborn, enduring, Constant, and primordial, It is not killed When the body is killed.

our apparent self and our True Self—hoping to find the image that connects. The metaphor that I have found most helpful is the classic “wave” metaphor (which is often cited in other yogic texts, though not explicitly in the Gita).

The self (and here we mean the small “s” self, which is our current form and personality) is described as a wave. We’re all familiar with the action of the wave: The wave rises in the sea, and having arisen appears to have its own form, to be a “thing in itself.” In fact, however, the wave is always and everywhere one with the sea. It arises from and returns to the sea. It is made of the same stuff as the sea. It is the sea in every way.

Indeed, even in the fullness of its apparent individual being—its apparent individual “wave-ness”—it is n...

“We are,” he says, “what we seek.” Tat tvan asi: Thou Art That. You are already That which you seek. It is inside. It is already You. It is a done deal. Call off the search! as one great Hindu scholar has written.

we could say that we manifest from lifetime to lifetime in particular forms: particular bodies, personalities, stories. But these forms—these lifetimes—are transitory.

You do not know how to act, because you do not know who you are.

are “wanderers” moving from lifetime to lifetime. Asleep. When we die—when we leave this particular form—we momentarily wake up. We are momentarily rejoined with the Ground of Being. But when we take birth again, we forget. Wordsworth, in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, states the case with vivid images:

remembering who we really are that we are liberated. The transformation of the self is not about adding anything. It is about finding what was already there. In the epigraph of her fine commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Columbia University scholar Barbara Stoler Miller appropriately quotes T. S. Eliot’s lines on memory from The Four Quartets. This is the use of memory:

will know how to act when you know who you are.

received the great teaching: The

whole world is within each one of us.

“Your dharma is your way of staying connected with your True Nature. It is the particular way in which you can devote your life to the welfare of all beings. Your dharma is your very own way of expressing the Truth. Your dharma is the one place where you can penetrate the fleeting world of form. Where you can live as I live, fully connected with the whole world of mind and matter. Where you can live in the sure knowledge that you are not the Doer, but only a vehicle of the great Doer.”

You must walk by faith, not by the sight of your limited human vision. In order to walk by faith, you must gradually learn to trust me and my guidance. You must gradually learn to surrender your will. You cannot steer your dharma with the vehicle of self-will—the will of the small “s” self. Self-will will always steer you toward delusion, toward forgetfulness, toward separation. This self-will—driven by the grasping of small “s” self—is the greatest enemy of freedom and Oneness.”

one critical component of dharma: the issue of “guidance.” Harriet was widely believed to have been guided directly by God—called by him, and guided by him every step of the way. Within months of her near-miraculous escape from a plantation in Maryland, she had the distinct sense of a call, a voice inside that said, “Harriet Tubman, I want you to help free others.” Tubman answered back to God, “Find somebody else. Can’t do it. You kidding?”

“call” such as Harriet received are omnipresent in the spiritual and religious world: Jonah and the whale, Moses in Egypt, St. Paul on the road to Damascus. “The Call” is an archetype of the spiritual imagination. It is nothing less than the call to be absolutely yourself.

A moment-by-moment trust in Divine guidance is central to Krishna’s teaching. He teaches: “To know when to act and when to refrain from action, what is right action and what is wrong, what brings security and what brings insecurity, what brings freedom and what brings bondage: These are the signs of a pure mind.”

“When God becomes our guide he insists that we trust him without reservations and put aside all nervousness about his guidance. We are sent along the path he has chosen for us, but we cannot see it, and nothing we have read is any help to us. Were we acting on our own we should have to rely on our experience. It would be too risky to do anything else. But it is very different when God acts with us. Divine action is always new and fresh, it never retraces its steps, but always finds new routes.”

pilgrim is on an important journey. He travels only at night, and carries a lantern, but the lantern only illuminates the path just a few feet ahead of him. He knows that this slim illumination is all he needs. He does not need to see the whole path ahead. He trusts that he can make the entire journey seeing only the immediate next steps.

One of the most difficult aspects of faith is the suspension of one’s own preconceived ideas about how to proceed. The willing

“Now it is surely obvious that the only way to receive [guidance] is to put oneself quietly in the hands of God, and that none of our own efforts and mental striving can be of any use at all.”

“ask for guidance.” As it

“listen for the response.” It helps, says Bede, to “actively listen.” To turn over every stone in your search for clues to the response. These responses usually come in subtle ways—through hunches, fleeting images, intuitions. Do you think this is all hooey? That skepticism is OK, said Bede. Even healthy. But listen anyway. Allow yourself to be surprised.

“When you get a response, check it out.” Check it out with friends, with mentors. Talk

“Once you do begin to get clarity, wait to act until you have at least a kernel of inner certitude.” Wait to act. One thing I’ve learned for sure after a bunch of ham-handed decisions to act is that one almost never regrets slowing things down.

“a flavor of certitude,” says Bede, then “pray for the courage to take action.” It’s not uncommon for us to get to certitude and then realize that we don’t really want to take the action. We’re not willing. Or we don’t have the courage. Or

“Let go of the attempt to eliminate risk from these decisions and actions.” The presence of a sense of risk is only an indication that you’re at an important crossroads. Risk

“Move forward methodically.” Begin to take action in support of your choice. Taking action at this point is critical to keeping the process moving. You will continue to be guided

Gita: “Let go of the outcome.” Let go of any clinging to how this all comes out. You cannot measure your actions at this point by the conventional wisdom about success and failure.

talked about the bondage of inauthenticity—the bondage of the false self, the bondage of self-will. And he talked about the exhilaration of freedom. Those of us who have been in bondage and have made the journey to freedom are particularly touched by the suffering of others who are still in shackles. Remember Thoreau: One authentic act of freedom can knock the fetters from a million slaves.

“Soul Force” lived a century apart, but with the perspective of time they increasingly appear as brothers. Thoreau’s life and writing—especially his essay On Civil Disobedience and his masterpiece, Walden—profoundly influenced Gandhi. In many ways, we might say that Gandhi finished what Thoreau started. Satyagraha was, after all, the very embodiment of the doctrine of “truth in action” about which Thoreau had written so passionately almost a century earlier.

his discovery of, and devotion to, the principles of the Bhagavad Gita. Gandhi himself would later emphasize: It was not just that he knew the Gita, but that he actively put its precepts to work in his life. Gandhi studied

Mohandas Gandhi was a fear-obsessed little boy with big eyes, and mammoth ears that stood out almost at right angles from his body. He was terrified of the dark, and, as he said, “haunted by the fear of thieves, ghosts, and serpents.”

How important was mantra to Gandhi’s transformation? Extremely. When done systematically, mantra has a powerful effect on the brain. It gathers and focuses the energy of the mind. It teaches the mind to focus on one point, and it cultivates a steadiness that over time becomes an unshakable evenness of temper.

compared the practice of mantra to the training of an elephant. “As the elephant walks through the market,” taught Rambha, “he swings his trunk from side to side and creates havoc with it wherever he goes—knocking over fruit stands and scattering vendors, snatching bananas and coconuts wherever possible. His trunk is naturally restless, hungry, scattered, undisciplined. This is just like the mind—constantly causing trouble.” “But the wise elephant trainer,” said Rambha, “will give the elephant a stick of bamboo to hold in his trunk. The elephant likes this. He holds it fast. And as soon as the elephant wraps his trunk around the bamboo, the trunk begins to settle. Now the elephant strides through the market like a prince: calm, collected, focused, serene. Bananas and coconuts no longer distract.”

When the mind is still, says Krishna, the True Self begins to reveal its nature. In the depths of meditation, we begin to recognize again that we are One with Brahman—that we are that wave that is nonseparate from the sea. Memory is restored!

yogis: Every time we discerningly renounce a possession, we free up energy that can be channeled into the pursuit of dharma. Renunciation was never meant to be for its own sake, but for the sake of dharma.

The yogi’s chief concern is with the art of living, systematically cultivating energy and health. More than anything, he is concerned with living an optimal human life. This was becoming Gandhi’s concern, too. But for the yogi, this concern comes with a proviso: Optimal health and well being are not for their own sake, but rather to be used in the service of others. This would be Gandhi’s next discovery.