A MEDITATION ON THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND ON THE LIFE ONE IS BORN TO LIVE

Stephen Cope, The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (New York: Bantam, 2012) ("One of the greatest archetypes of the yoga tradition is the jivan mukta--the soul awake in this lifetime." Id. at xx. "The yoga tradition is ver, very interested in the idea of an inner possibility harbored within every human soul. Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation. They call this dharma... For our purposes in this book it will mean primarily 'vocation,' or 'sacred duty.' It means, most of all--and in all cases--truth. Yogis believe that our greatest responsibility in life is to this inner possibility--this dharma--and they believe that every human being's duty is to utterly, fully, and completely embody his own idiosyncratic dharma." Id. at xx-xxi. "We do no suspect the ways in which doubt keeps us paralyzed. Plastered to the bottom of our various chariots. Unable to assent." Id. at 9. "It appears that we will not hit the target of dharma unless we are aiming at it." Id. at 14. "Here are the central pillars of the path of action--the path of karma yoga--as expounded by Krishna. Here are the keys to Inaction-in-Action: 1. Look to your dharma. 2. Do it full out! 3. Let go of the fruits. 4. Turn it over to God." Id. at 16. "Krishna, in his teaching to Arjuna, points to a truth that also holds true for us. You cannot be anyone you want to be." Id. at 22. "Said Krishna to Arjuna, 'It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.'" Id. at 26. "We cannot be anyone we want to be. We can only authentically be who we are. 'The attempt to live out someone else's dharma brings extreme spiritual peril,' say Krishna. Extreme spiritual peril" Id. at 34. "here is a sentence I read recently in the pages of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. 'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.'" Id. at xviii. "Having found your dharma, embrace it fully and passionately. Bring everything you've got to it. Do it full out!" Id. at 68. "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.'" Id. at 69. "Cutting off options is hard work. And it is risky. But the alternative is even riskier. Those who cannot commit, those who cannot say 'no,' are doomed to everlasting conflict. They may sit for a lifetime at the crossroads, dithering." Id. at 70. "[T]hree principles of the Doctrine of Unified Action: 1. Find out who you are and do it on purpose. 2. Unify! 3. Practice deliberately." Id. at 71. "A life is built on a series of small course corrections--small choices that add up to something mammoth." Id. at 87. "[O]ur job is to make choices that create the right conditions for dharma to flourish." Id. at 88. Keats "realized that the most precious fruit of his art would be the way it allowed him 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." "The question he had been asking--'Wherein lies happiness?'--now had it best answer. 'A fellowship with essence!!!' he would exclaim...." "Hard upon the heels of this discovery came another: 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 course, the very insight that Krishna teaches to Arjuna." Id. at 147-148. "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 [Woodman] 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." Id. at 168. "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.'" Id. at 216. Harriet Tubman's "motto was always, 'Just keep going.'" Id. at 228. "Gandhi came to believe that any power he might have to affect the world only emerged when he got himself out of the way, and let God do the work. He came to call this 'reducing yourself to zero.' 'There comes a time' he wrote in the peak of his maturity,'when an individual becomes irresistible and his action becomes all-pervasive in its effects. This comes when he reduces himself to zero.'" "Gandhi's meaning was simple: Only the human being who acts in a way that is empty of self can be the instrument of Soul Force. And it only Soul Force that can establish a harmonious world. Human beings alone are helpless to resolve conflicts without it. With it, however, Gandhi came to believe that harmony is inevitable. Because harmony, Oneness with all beings, is our true nature." Id. at 245.).