Verses 5.10–5.13🔗

Time and again Kṛṣṇa talks about detachment. This is the whole essence of the Gītā. This detachment is renunciation. Renunciation of attachment is true renunciation. You can give up all material possessions and move into a forest or an ashram, but if the mind still hankers for those possessions, renunciation has not happened. One can still be very much in the material world, busy with wheeling and dealing, and yet be totally detached about the outcome. Kṛṣṇa says here, ‘saṅgaṁ tyaktvā karoti yaḥ (5.10)—Action without attachment is renunciation.’ It is only this renunciation that leads to liberation. If you see the lotus flower, it grows in a dirty pond; its stalk is completely inside the dirty water.

The flower is so beautifully above the water and the dirt around it is hardly noticed! Similarly, when you are neck-deep in the activities of the world and yet unaffected by what goes on, when your core is undisturbed, you have reached the goal of renunciation. A small story: A Master was walking with his disciple when they came to a river. The disciple asked, ‘Master, are we going to cross this river now?’ The Master calmly replied, ‘Yes, we are. And be careful not to wet your feet.’ The Master was trying to tell him that spirituality is all about crossing the ocean of life without getting your feet wet.

Spirituality is not about running away from worldly things. Be very clear about this. A beautiful history about Swāmi Brahmānanda, a direct disciple of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahamsa: One day Swāmi Brahmānanda was meditating in Briṇdāvan. A devotee came and placed a costly blanket before him as an offering. Swāmi said nothing. He just silently observed what was going on. A couple of hours later, a thief came by, spotted the blanket, and took away the blanket. Still, the Swami watched in the same way, silently, with no reaction. Some of the junior disciples were very perturbed that a costly blanket had been stolen. However, it made no difference to Brahmānanda.

These realized souls were so centered in themselves that the outer world incidents happening in the periphery did not affect their core in any way. When we can become like this, we won’t identify with outer world incidents. We will not get caught in the sway of emotions. Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 377 The basic truth behind creating this space of centeredness and completion is really this: Existence is a loving Mother caring for us every moment, providing all that we need. When this understanding happens, we surrender to Existence. The wave drops into the ocean, blissfully aware that it is a part of the ocean. It no longer feels it is a separate entity trying to fight Existence, thinking that the ocean, the Whole, is its enemy.

Surrender needs to happen out of a deep understanding, not out of a superficial acceptance of the inevitable. If it happens out of acceptance, it will be just a compromise out of fear. There is no point in saying, ‘Oh, it is destiny. It is written on my forehead and it is foretold by the stars.’ This is not true. We have free will and we can do what we want. We neither have to accept nor reject, but surrender to the flow of life with the true understanding that we are being taken care of. When this completion happens out of deep understanding, it is beautiful, total and it is true.

Listen. One more important truth. To whom or to what we surrender is not important. What is important is the surrender itself. Swāmi Vivekānanda says that all our prayers to God do only one thing: they awaken our own inner potential energy. When we pray intensely, our own inner potential energy is awakened and it showers its blessings on us in the form that we believe as God, irrespective of what form we worship. Having the wisdom or buddhi to understand that Existence cares for us, and surrendering to Existence is the ultimate intelligence. Realizing that Existence is not just a brute force or power but that it is intelligent energy is the key to a life of bliss.

Witness and Be Complete Again and again, Kṛṣṇa is repeating a single point in various ways: action without attachment—saṅgaṁ tyaktvā karoti yaḥ (5.10). He emphasizes that life happens only when we live as a witness to everything that happens, when we do not identify and attach with external incidents. We just have to watch what is happening in and around us without letting what happens outside affect our inner space. The moment we catch this thread and start living life in the space of completion, we will find that all our incompletions simply disappear. It is not that anything outside has changed. It is just that what we wish to see has changed.

Of course, the way in which we live automatically creates an effect, a transformation in others as well. We attract incidents that fall in tune with our desires and thoughts. When we are blissful inside, whatever happens outside will also be blissful. This is because what we see outside is just a projection of what is inside us. It has been scientifically proven that the results of experiments conducted by different researchers under identical conditions vary depending on the mood of the scientists. In one study of elementary particles such as quarks, scientists were amazed that the behavior of these particles varies with different observers. What we see is our reality.

If we see without wishing to change anything, we are in completion with reality. Even the same situation will be seen in a completely different way when we witness it with completion. Automatically, no emotion can sway us because now we are just witnessing, we no longer have any vested interest or incompletion in the situation. Our state is in no way affected by what others say or do. Then, we are Masters unto ourselves. We are never totally involved in anything that we do. The person who is aware, who is complete, who is in the present, is completely involved every moment. He feels the hunger completely through every cell of the body when hunger happens.

He lives the hunger totally. When the food is before him, he enjoys every morsel of the food completely. Just like having the sense of taste is very natural when we eat with awareness, so it is with all the senses. Just being totally involved in whatever we do is meditation. Just living in the space of completion, enjoying the present moment is meditation. You must have experienced in your own life, when you are intensely involved in something, you forget yourself. It can be as simple as painting or reading or anything. When you go deep into it, you Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 379 forget yourself. When we go deeply into any emotion, only that emotion remains and we cease to exist.

This is what we mean by ‘totality.’ This moment of ‘you’ disappearing, you may experience for just a few seconds in your current lifestyle. But if you work on being intense and total in everything, this experience of ‘you’ disappearing will happen more often to you and for longer periods. Soon, you master the art of doing work intensely, and just being absent. We become independent of the work that goes on outside. Here, Kṛṣṇa gives us a technique to realize who we are. By giving up attachment to the sense objects, by dropping all false identifications with the body, senses and mind, we can live life with intelligence and this leads us to self-purification, self-completion.

Kṛṣṇa tells us that our job is only to do the work, not to be concerned about the results. He beautifully says, ‘brahmaṇy ādhāya karmāṇi (5.10)—do the work surrendering to the eternal consciousness.’ We need to keep doing things because we have so much loving energy inside us. We can just exude energy without any reason or any expectation. When we are like this, we are not bothered about the results. When I say we are not bothered about the results, I don’t mean that out of a frustrated or cynical conclusion. What I mean is that we don’t even know to expect results because we are continuously moving and expressing our blissful inner energy, that’s all.

We are just living in the space of completion and doing whatever that comes in our way to do. We are just flowing joyfully, that’s all. We flow with the Universal energy. This flowing energy is real love. When we identify ourselves with our body, mind and ego, we alienate ourselves from the rest of Existence. Instead of playing our role in the divine drama as an actor, we start thinking that we are the actor and we actually go through all the emotional turmoil that we were just supposed to enact. When we become entangle and we miss the whole joy of the divine drama, and feel that life is a big trauma!

In the same way, when we just do what we have at hand, without being bothered about the result, we are always happy. Once we start thinking about the result of our actions, we lose the joy of doing what we are doing at this moment. When we are established in ourselves, we are automatically in peace irrespective of anything that exists or does not exist around us. We are not bothered about the result because we have given our best, to our peak possibility. Once a man went to Ramaṇa Mahaṛṣi, and said, ‘Bhagavān, I want peace!’ Ramaṇa replied, ‘From your own statement, just remove the word ‘I,’ remove the word ‘want’ and what remains is peace!’

All our want for peace is all a want. We don’t know how to be satisfied as we are. Just think, how can we want something like peace, that by its very nature has the absence of want as the criterion to be able to exist? When we start to want peace, we create desires in us. That desire drives us to do various things for getting peace and we once again start to worry about the results of those actions. These worries take us away from peace and then again we want peace. So this becomes a vicious circle. We wanted peace in the first place; so we do something to fulfill that want.

Doing something creates worry and then once again we want to be free from these worries and be peaceful. This is a vicious circle because we want peace. When we drop the idea of wanting peace, when we can just be and let Existence take care, peace automatically happens. So, absence of want is the criterion to be peaceful. Some people say that they want to be left peaceful without worries. The peace they are talking about is not a living peace; it is a dead peace because life is too much for them to handle. Real peace is something that is in us all the time irrespective of what is going on outside.

Our peace is in no way related to or dependent on the people and situations around us. Real peace is nothing but the bliss that we feel inside ourselves. When peace is born out of bliss, it keeps us as well as others in a peaceful state. When we are satisfied and complete with ourselves, we do not depend on anything external to be peaceful. Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 381 We don’t understand that every tomorrow comes only as today. When the tomorrow comes as today, we simply miss it because we are now looking at tomorrow once again! When we work without unnecessarily thinking about the result, all our energies will be used towards realizing the goal.

The energy will not be dissipated in imagining the results. The power of desire, icchā śakti, will be converted to the power of action, kriya śakti. The desire may initially be a goal, but what is important is the path and not the end result. The goal is merely a byproduct. Suppose a child is playing with some small toy and you bring him a new big toy. If you take away the small toy from its hands, what will the child do? It will start yelling and crying. Even if you explain you have a much better, bigger toy, will it listen? No! Just give it the new toy and suddenly, it will forget the old one and start enjoying the new one.

In the same way, Existence also tries to give us a big toy. Just imagine the kind of toy that Existence has given us—the whole of Itself! Enjoy it to the fullest. Celebrate it and express your gratitude! Your mind will always tell you that the small toy, your little dreams, your ego, is the most important thing and you need it to survive. For a few days, decide to drop your expectations, your fears, and your protection of the ego. Just live life in a simple way. Be complete every moment, enjoying the splendor of nature. Enjoy every thing that Existence has created. Start witnessing simple yet wonderful things like the sunrise in the morning; listen to the chirping of the birds.

Look deeply into a flower and you will find God. Just these few moments will show us a whole new dimension of our Being. They will show us what it is to enjoy life without a reason, without running behind or away from something. They will teach us how to relax into the welcoming, embracing arms of Existence. The City of Nine Gates In these verses, Kṛṣṇa refers to the body, which has nine gates to the external world: the two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, mouth and the two organs of evacuation. It may seem strange and absurd that we can just be neither doing nor causing anything to be done.

Here, Kṛṣṇa does not refer to not doing anything out of laziness and indulgence. Actually, if we can become intensely lazy, we can be in meditation! Here, the laziness is a deep mental laziness where the mind has been stilled. It has stopped all activity but the body moves according to the will of the divine. We are in the midst of intense activity and yet are not doing anything. The mind separates the doer from the action. It is the mind that defines who the doer is and what the action is. In the conventional sense, when we say lazy, we are referring to the body. The body is lazing around but the mind is completely active.

It is carrying on its work of creating and linking unrelated thoughts. When the mind becomes lazy, instead of the body, we drop the mind also. That is when we stop identifying the action as being separate from ourselves. Kṛṣṇa is talking of being so completely involved in something that we become the very action itself. First, we become the witness to the action, only then we can become completely involved in it. When we start distancing ourselves and become a witness, only then we can be completely involved in the action and then the doer and the action merge into each other. It is not the action that gives us the joy but the conscious experience of the bliss within us through the action that actually gives us happiness and bliss.

A small story: A dog found a piece of bone and was very happy. It started chewing on the bone but the piece was very dry. It chewed and chewed and after some time, its own gums started bleeding from rubbing against the dry, hard bone. The dog was very happy to finally taste blood. It licked the bone even more, making more blood ooze from its own mouth. Little did the dog realize that the blood it was enjoying was its very own! The bone had nothing to do with the taste of the blood! When we realize through experience or understanding that the bliss Sannyāsa Yogaḥ Live All Your Possibilities 383 in life is completely within us, we will get over our wrong cognition that external pleasures are what give us joy.

When we really cognize that we are already all that we can imagine we want to be and much more than that, we have reached the ultimate goal. We will relax into the loving arms of Existence and just flow with it beautifully. Until then it will be a struggle to achieve what we already are. You see, when we leave the ownership to someone else, we are free. The burden is not on us. That is when we can be peaceful and blissful. As long as we think we are the owners, we always have to face the worry that comes with ownership. Why do you want to carry that worry? Let the Universe take care and you carry on with your work! Cleansing Ignorance With Knowledge