The Great Work of Your Life Quotes

“It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts—trapped in what Marion would call “the shadow.” The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“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.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“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. The cultivation of this quality of “evenness” is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita. It is called samatva in Sanskrit, and it is a central pillar of Krishna’s practice. When the mind develops steadiness, teaches Krishna, it is not shaken by fear or greed. So, in his early twenties, Gandhi had already begun to develop a still-point at the center of his consciousness—a still-point that could not be shaken. This little seed of inner stillness would grow into a mighty oak. Gandhi would become an immovable object. Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She 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.” So too with the mind. As soon as the mind grabs hold of the mantra, it begins to settle. The mind holds the mantra gently, and it becomes focused, calm, centered. Gradually this mind becomes extremely concentrated. This is the beginning stage of meditation. All meditation traditions prescribe some beginning practice of gathering, focusing, and concentration—and in the yoga tradition this is most often achieved precisely through mantra. The whole of Chapter Six in the Bhagavad Gita is devoted to Krishna’s teachings on this practice: “Whenever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the Self,” instructs Krishna. “When meditation is mastered, the mind is unwavering like the flame of a lamp in a windless place.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not, it will destroy you.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“As W. H. Auden noted, “human beings are by nature actors who cannot become something until they have first pretended to be it.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“8. And finally, of course, the very central teaching of the 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.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“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 central principle: As long as you are living your dharma fully—unified!—you cannot fail. Indeed, you have already succeeded.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“Susan never denied the existence of God. But her beliefs were secularized and lodged in the world around her. When she was once asked, “Do you pray?” she responded, “I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“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.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“And now a surprise: Beethoven was deeply inspired by his reading of the Bhagavad Gita.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“how to focus—how to, as we might say these days, “bring it.” Like Hokusai, their lives begin to look like guided missiles. How exactly do they accomplish this? How do you get from where most of us live—the run-of-the-mill split mind—to the gathered mind of a Hokusai? Krishna articulates the principle succinctly: 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.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“We derive the greatest pleasure and fulfillment when all our faculties are drawn together into our life’s work. In this state of absorption, we experience extraordinary satisfaction. We human beings are attracted to the experience of intense involvement. The outcome of this involvement, says Hokusai, is sublime. “By ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.” Hokusai’s lesson, finally, is that a life of passion for dharma is a fulfilled”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“Rambha had given Gandhi an enchanting image to describe the power of mantra. She 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.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“If you are tired, keep going; if you are scared, keep going; if you are hungry, keep going; if you want to taste freedom, keep going.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. Now we can add a codicil: If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“What Frost makes clear in his poem is that the act of choosing is the most important thing. The act of moving forward is what matters. He might have chosen either teaching or poetry. But he had to choose one or the other. He looked long down each path. He understood the loss involved—the cutting off of possibilities. He saw clearly that options once discarded are usually gone forever. Way leads on to way. But Krishsna writes: Concerning one’s dharma, one should not vacillate!”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“His life is, then, naturally, a treasure trove of stories about dharma. But to my mind, the most interesting story is the series of courageous early choices Frost made in support of his dharma. When one examines 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. Each one of these acts was, for him, like jumping off a cliff. He jumped not entirely blind—but not entirely seeing, either. And each of Frost’s leaps ignited more of his power. In retrospect, it is clear that each one of Frost’s difficult decisions helped create the perfect conditions for the full flowering of his genius.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“For me,” he says, “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” In a new poem, he wrote, he “meets himself coming home.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“I sat down on the bench in front of the print and made some notes. “Katsushika Hokusai. 1760–1849. Japanese printmaker. Leading Japanese expert on Chinese painting. Master of the Ukiyo-e form. Nichiren Buddhist.” Later, at home, I Googled Hokusai. He died at eighty-nine, and sure enough, on his deathbed—still looking to penetrate deeper into his art—he had exclaimed, “If only heaven will give me just another ten years!… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.” Hokusai was a man who saw his work as a means to “penetrate to the essential nature” of things. And he appears to have succeeded. His work, a hundred and fifty years after his death, could reach right off a gallery wall and grab me in the gut. More than anything, I was intrigued by the quality of Hokusai’s passion for his work. He helped me see that a life devoted to dharma can be a deeply ardent life.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“First: Discern your dharma. “Look to your own duty,” says Krishna in Chapter Two. “Do not tremble before it.” Discern, name, and then embrace your own dharma. Then: Do it full out! Knowing your dharma, do it with every fiber of your being. Bring everything you’ve got to it. Commit yourself utterly. In this way you can live an authentically passionate life, and you can transform desire itself into a bonfire of light. Next: Let go of the outcome. “Relinquish the fruits of your actions,” says Krishna. Success and failure in the eyes of the world are not your concern. “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else,” he says. Finally: Turn your actions over to God. “Dedicate your actions to me,” says Krishna. All true vocation arises in the stream of love that flows between the individual soul and the divine soul. All true dharma is a movement of the soul back to its Ground.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“The “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. It is the night sea journey that allows us to free the energy trapped in these cast-off parts—trapped in what Marion would call “the shadow.” The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“Thoreau’s failure is particularly instructive, because it emerged from a dharma error most of us have made at one point or another in our lives: the attempt to be big.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“If you don’t find your work in the world and throw yourself wholeheartedly into it, you will inevitably make your self your work. There’s no way around it: You will take your self as your primary project. You will, in the very best case, dedicate your life to the perfection of your self. To the perfection of your health, intelligence, beauty, home, or even spiritual prowess. And the problem is simply this: This self-dedication is too small a work. It inevitably becomes a prison.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“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.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“Gandhi insisted upon returning love for hatred and respect for contempt.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“2. Then (something else we usually forget) “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”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“1. First of all, “ask for guidance.” As it turns out, this is remarkably important, and it’s something most of us almost always forget to do. It seems that there is something about actually asking that jump-starts a process. And sometimes asking repeatedly is required. Even begging.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“In effect, then, Beethoven became a musical seer. Like the mystical rishis of ancient India, he perceived aspects of reality that were beyond the perceptual range of ordinary people. Very few of his contemporaries could understand the musical leaps he had made. And of course, not seeing the genius of his refined perception, his critics called him “mad.”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling

“behind ourself, concealed—should startle most,” wrote Emily Dickinson,”
― Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling