Verses 3.30–3.32🔗

Next Kṛṣṇa makes an important point. Kṛṣṇa says: Those persons who execute their duties according to My injunctions and who follow this teaching faithfully with authenticity, without envy, become free from the bondage of actions. ye me matam idaṁ nityam anutiṣṭhanti mānavāḥ I śraddhāvanto ‘nasūyanto mucyante ‘pi karmabhiḥ II 3.31 Here you need to understand two things. He says, ‘according to My instructions, My words, ye me matam idaṁ nityam’. It means when you enter into your being, whatever your being says is Kṛṣṇa’s words. When he says My instructions, He means the instructions from the ātman, the being. When you complete and drop the goals and fall into your being, the Divine will guide you and you will become an instrument in His hands.

If you become a hollow bamboo without any blockages inside, you will become a flute in the hands of Kṛṣṇa. Dropping your purposes or dropping your root pattern is what I call becoming a hollow bamboo. If you are a solid bamboo, you will be used only to carry dead bodies. But if you drop the root pattern and fall into the being, you will become an instrument in the hands of the Divine; a divine flute. When you become a flute, the air that enters into you comes out as music. Your words become mantra, sacred words that enrich people, your actions become tantra, sacred techniques to realize the Divine, and your form becomes yantra, sacred form, you become Divine.

Here, He says, ‘Those persons who execute their responsibilities according to My injunctions, according to your inner consciousness...’ Understand, as long as you follow the goals set by society, you will be carrying a social conscience. The moment you drop social conditioning, the purposes taught to you by society, you will drop conscience and start living with consciousness. Please listen, conscience will become consciousness the moment you bring responsibility to it. Conscience means struggling with do’s and don’ts, guilt and desires. Consciousness means the pure flow of life. As long as you do not take the responsibility, you will be struggling with goals, with do’s and don’ts. If you live with goals, you will carry a social conscience in your life.

If you realize the beauty of purposelessness you will carry spiritual consciousness in your life. Śraddha, Your Peak Possibility ‘The man who lives according to his consciousness, believing in and having śraddhā towards these teachings...’ Why does Kṛṣṇa ask for śraddha here? This is the first time Kṛṣṇa says ‘śraddha. Why? Śraddhā cannot really be translated as faith. It means faith plus the courage of authenticity to execute the highest level of possibility. In English, there is no equivalent for śraddha. I will describe śraddha as authenticity, but authenticity is not all-encompassing translation of śraddha. The courage of being established in the peak of your capability, and responding to life from who you perceive to be for yourself, who you project yourself to be for others, what others expect you to be for them and what you expect them to be for you is what is called śraddhā, Authenticity.

Karma Yogaḥ Beauty Of Purposelessness 247 Here Kṛṣṇa says, ‘śraddhāvanto ‘nasūyanto,’ the man who executes the teachings with śraddhā, with the courage of authenticity to the peak of his capability. Why do we need courage of authenticity? A small story: A man born blind goes to the doctor and asks, ‘Doctor, will you help me gain my eyesight?’ The doctor says, ‘Don’t worry, I will perform an operation. You will get your vision and after that you can walk without your stick.’ Blind people always carry a stick to feel their way around. The doctor tells him that he will be able to walk without the stick. The blind man asks, ‘Doctor, I understand you will do an operation.

I understand I will have my eyesight restored. But I don’t understand how I can walk without the stick?’ By and by, the blind man had forgotten that his stick was just an aid. In the same way, just live without the mind. Just live without purpose and goals, you will be able to walk without the stick. The stick is nothing but your planning and worrying. By and by, worrying has become a part of you, an incomplete default cognition for you. When I say you can live without worrying, you will say ‘No! How can it be possible? If I don’t worry what will happen to my children, my house?

What will happen to my property, my lawsuits?’ Your life is going smoothly in spite of you, not because of you! Courage is the fragrance of authenticity. When you have the courage of authenticity, śraddha towards living these teachings and start living without purpose, only then will you realize that you don’t need the stick to walk. That is when you become authentic to your peak possibility. Once you enter into the depths of your being, you will enter into a totally different dimension. Whatever you think now as spiritual life or material life both lose their meaning and you will enter a new dimension of life. You will be established in authenticity, in the space of possibility.

For example, can you explain life to a four-year-old child? He can understand only toys. Once he becomes older, naturally he will be able to understand what life is. Automatically toys and dolls will leave him. Do you miss your toys? Do you feel you have renounced your toys? When you grow, you start experiencing a different dimension of your life and the toys simply fade away. Similarly, dropping smoking is not important, smoking dropping you is important. When you enter into your being, when you experience the purposelessness of life, the so-called material life and spiritual life both drop you and you enter what I call ‘Quantum spirituality’ or Eternal Consciousness.

You are then in eternal bliss. Only then you will understand you don’t need worries to live. You don’t need your mind. Until you reach the being, you need to have śraddha. Until you gain your vision, you must have śraddha and lie on the operating table. You need to allow the doctor to work on you as per his expectation from you. That is the reason Kṛṣṇa says, ‘śraddhāvanto anasūyanto’. The next word is a beautiful word: ‘anasūyanto,’ which means ‘without envy.’ This is important. We all think, ‘My brother has purchased two houses. My sister is getting a big new car. How can I live like this?’ The moment you get such thoughts, ‘He has that, she has this,’ what happens?

All your spirituality, all your authenticity, all your purposelessness, everything just disappears. You are again in the same rat race. If your neighbor buys a new air-conditioner, the temperature in your house shoots up. Kṛṣṇa says, ‘anasūyanto, without envy.’ Envy is the parasite pattern that puts you back in the same rut of inauthenticity. The problem with the rat race is this—even if you win, you are still a rat! Any pattern you create before the age of seven is the root pattern. Any pattern created after the age of seven is a parasite pattern. First you will have to work on completing with the parasite patterns and then completing with all the root patterns.

The moment the parasite pattern of envy or jealousy enters your being, authenticity disappears, purposelessness disappears. Again, you fall into social conditioning and you start running behind goals like a rat. Karma Yogaḥ Beauty Of Purposelessness 249 Kṛṣṇa is asking Arjuna to bring śraddha or authenticity in action to the peak possibility of what he perceives as himself and what he projects as himself, without the parasite pattern of envy, anasūyanto. When you bring yourself to your peak, there is no wastage of inner power, there are no parasite patterns that can attack you. When you waste your love, it becomes lust. When you waste your responsibility, it becomes jealouly.

The lower dimensions of you are nothing but rejected parts of your higher dimensions. When your higher dimension is not materialized, your lower dimension is empowered! The Power of Illusion There is a beautiful idea from tantra about māyā śakti (the power of illusion). Illusion makes us all dance with this one stick, jealousy. Have you seen guys who make money using monkeys in India? On the roadside, they perform a small show with monkeys. With a small stick they make the monkey dance and do whatever they want it to. In the same way, the power of illusion is making you run as it wants with just one stick called jealousy.

The moment you compare, you just jump into your lower dimensions, the same rut which I call the purposeful life. Then you become a karmi, not karma yogi. The man who lives in eternal consciousness, Nityānanda, and allows his body and mind to work according to their nature is centered in eternal consciousness. He is called a karma yogi, one who has espoused authenticity in action without attachment as the ultimate renunciation. But the man who acts out of jealousy, enters his lower dimensions of social conditioning. He is caught in the rat race, and is called a karmi, one who is focused on inauthentic action arising from patterns of greed.

A karmi is an inauthentic person who rejects his highest possibility. A karma yogi is one established in authenticity in action, empowered to live his highest possibility. The difference between a karmi and a karma yogi is this: The man who is driven by inauthenticity, his lowest possibility, jealousy is a karmi, and the man who allows authentic action, his highest possibility, the eternal consciousness to drive him is a karma yogi. One more thing: When we do things out of comparison, we do only foolish things. Our intelligence stops working and our performance falls short of our peak potential, because we now use someone else’s productivity as our measuring stick.

If you do things out of the parasite patterns of jealousy, you will end up being inauthentic in your actions. Comparison or jealousy is the root from which inauthenticity justifies itself and continues to exist in you! Do not allow it. Tell yourself very clearly, ‘Whatever others do is their responsibility and my life is my responsibility. At the end of the day, even if he is not responsible, I am responsible for his irresponsibility!’ Each one of us is unique. There is no need to compare with any other person. You are unique. The main problem is that you compare only with the nearest person, five inches above you and five inches below you.

You don’t compare yourselves with Bill Gates or Buddha, do you? Why? The problem is not failure, the problem is your worry about failure. That is why you don’t aim for unreachable goals. You aim only for reachable goals. All your joy, the very bliss of living is swallowed by this one illusion called comparison. Just like the Earth is destroyed by the ocean at the time of the final deluge, pralaya, your whole life is destroyed by comparison. Jealousy and comparison have no absolute existence, they are delusory patterns. There are two levels of reality: comparative reality and existential reality. If you build your life based on existential reality, you will never suffer.

If you build your life based on comparative reality, you will continuously suffer till death. Not only at the time of death, even after death. Life is For Realizing Your Highest Possibility When you are in conflict, you will naturally suffer. People constantly say, ‘I am in suffering because of his or her inauthenticity!’ Wherever you are in conflict, be very clear you are in conflict, even though you point at others’ inauthenticity. Karma Yogaḥ Beauty Of Purposelessness 251 If life is not continuing to happen in the seed, it is dead! If authenticity is not continuously happening in you, you are not a possibility, you are dead! Constantly make authenticity happen in you, in your work, in your thinking, in your health!

Constantly expand your thinking, constantly expand your perception! Constantly practicing authenticity brings you to the space of possibility. Śraddha or Authenticity continuously connects you with yourself and your highest possibility. Life is for realizing that possibility. Life is for realizing the Self. Life is for realizing itself. Authenticity is Life! Life is continuous expansion! Add authenticity to your thinking in every step. Constantly go on expanding! Don’t settle down with the lower perception. What you know about humans, what you know about the world, what you know about you is all imperfect perception, comparative reality. When you settle down with comparative reality, you make the most horrible mistake of your life.

Don’t build your inner space on comparative reality. Let your inner space be built on existential reality which is the space of highest possibility. If you build your life on existential reality, you will live your life blissfully in eternal consciousness, as a karma yogi. By nature, a person with a body and mind has to act in one way or the other. If you follow your nature with authenticity, you can be comfortable and flow in tune with Existence. When you are relaxed, when you are blissful, you express yourself beautifully. When you become possessed by the root pattern of greed or fear and try to be what you are not and project yourself to be what you are not, you suppress yourself and become inauthentic.

What can suppression do? You cannot suppress energy. You can only transform energy. It can never be destroyed or suppressed. Neither expression nor suppression is the solution, only completion with your inauthentic identities is the solution. The solution is to infuse śraddha, the courage of authenticity into this process. For example: your reaction of irritation has nothing to do with what the person has done. If you look a little deeper, you can see it is how you choose to react based on your root and parasite patterns that decides what you feel about the person. You choose to get irritated by what he is doing. Why should you allow yourself to get worked up about the other person’s actions?

Also, factually the person may have a completely different intention. Yet you are already biased by your own past perception about him. Authenticity is the key. If you bring authenticity to what you perceive as you, to what is happening within you and what you project yourself outside you, you will not be controlled by your unconscious patterns. You will be able to see clearly when lower emotions arise or unconscious reactions arise. The awareness of your inauthenticity will itself bring you to your peak capability. Then, you will naturally drop all your lower level emotions and live what Kṛṣṇa calls as śraddhāvanto anasūyanto, authenticity without envy, the space of possibility. Do Your Responsibility