Easwaran’s students renovating the chapel that became the meditation hall at Ramagiri, Shanti.
Thank you again for your insightful comments on Easwaran’s message about work as an opportunity for spiritual growth in the Spring 2019 Blue Mountain Journal “The Purpose of Work”. It is so meaningful to reflect as a community on these readings together.
This week, we’re starting a new article on work and sadhana, in which Easwaran emphasizes the importance of selfless work. He places before us the promise of learning to work hard without any ego involvement at all. He reminds us that a quieter ego means a stiller mind.
As we read Part 1 of the new article below, let’s absorb Easwaran’s encouragement together by sharing in the comments section below.
Type a line or two that really stood out to you.
Share an overall message from Easwaran that resonates with you in some way, or a practical step you might be inspired to take this week.
Write any thoughts or questions that come up for you as you read Easwaran’s words.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this timely conversation. Your contributions are very inspiring!
This is Part 1 of Easwaran’s article “The Secret of Selfless Action” from the Spring 2019 Blue Mountain Journal.
Recently a friend asked me a good question: “How can work help to slow down the mind?” On the one hand, Sri Krishna tells us in the Bhagavad Gita that the very purpose of work is to undo karma and still the mind. But on the other hand, as everyone with some self-knowledge knows, the usual effect of work is to get us speeded up and personally entangled in how the work turns out.
The key is simple to understand but difficult to practice: Sri Krishna is talking about selfless work. In this sense, the purpose of work is to learn to work hard without any ego involvement at all. Stilling the mind is simply another way of expressing this, for nothing stirs up the mind except the ego.
“Stilling the mind” is a very abstract concept, and “renouncing the ego” is worse. It may be impossible to understand these things until a person has some way of practicing them. That is one function of work in sadhana: to bring abstract ideals down to earth.
Many of the disciplines in my eight-point program are ways to still the mind through work. When you are working with one-pointed attention, for example, that in itself helps to slow the mind. When you do not gauge what you do by what you like or dislike, you are turning your back on the ego, which will make it easier to steady your mind.
When people tell me they would like a job that is more interesting or more intellectually challenging, they sometimes mean only that they want more personal recognition, perhaps even a little more power: not much, you know; just one step higher on the ladder, two or three more employees to supervise, a position a little closer to the boss’s ear.
These are very human foibles, but indulging them is the opposite of work’s real purpose. Instead of weakening the ego, this strengthens it. Whatever you are doing, don’t think in terms of prestige or personal power or profit, all of which can be terribly insidious. Working only for ourselves tightens the ties of our conditioning, but learning to work without selfish attachment gradually elevates our consciousness and purifies it of selfish motives.
The best work is prompted by love
For almost half a century I have had people tell me, “You don’t know human nature. Without a personal motive, human beings will never give their best.”
That debases human nature. Everywhere, the best work is prompted not by the profit motive but by love. We have only to consider the lives of people like Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa to see that they offer us a vision of human nature vastly higher than what the world expects. They show us our real human stature, which reaches beyond biological conditioning to a level that approaches the divine. This is our glory as human beings.
In fact, the world’s mystics would say, learning to live for others is the very purpose of our existence. Life is a trust, and each of us is a trustee whose job is to use the assets entrusted to us for the greatest benefit to all. We are sent into life for one task: to enrich the lives of others, and anybody who takes from life without giving, the Bhagavad Gita says baldly, is a thief: stolen time, stolen energy, stolen education, stolen talent.
This goes against conventional thinking, but it is an orientation that can be learned. We can gradually teach ourselves to think first of what contributes to the welfare of all — by regularly giving part of our time, energy, and resources for supporting selfless causes without any thought of remuneration, reward, or recognition. There are so many opportunities: neighbors, schools, clinics, and shelters for the hungry and homeless are just a few.
I think children should also be trained from their early days to give some of their time and talents to selfless work.
Give without thought of return
Wherever work is done for a higher good, there will always be good, thoughtful, selfless people to support it. This is true in every country on the face of the earth.
But we ourselves set the example. Selfless service attracts selfless help. If I may illustrate from my small example, I work three hundred and sixty-five days of the year all the day through. I never take a vacation because I am always on vacation. That was my grandmother’s example, which I caught from Gandhi too — and it is highly infectious. Many of the young people meditating with me when we were building our ashram worked seven days a week: five days at a paying job or at the university and then two days more for the Blue Mountain Center. Even during the evening, they often found time to make some contribution.
That example is standing refutation of the claim that people will not give their best without self-interest. Selfless service brings out what is best in all of us. Below all the conditioned strata of the desire for profit and pleasure flows a deep river of love, a deep desire to give without thought of return.
Balance the books
This kind of hard, conscientious, selfless work is a valuable aid to meditation.
On the one hand, the discipline it requires helps in mastering the mind. On the other hand, it helps to work out the debt to life we have accumulated by living for ourselves.
This debt is not a figure of speech. If, as all the world’s religions teach, the purpose of life is to give, it follows that when we’re not giving, we’re borrowing — running up bills, which have to be paid sooner or later. As I said earlier, the Gita actually calls this theft. I use more temperate language, but the meaning is the same.
Every one of us has a lot of red ink in our life’s ledger, and to make progress on the spiritual path, it’s necessary to start balancing the books. In other words, all of us have committed mistakes — including myself — and one of the ways of counteracting these mistakes is by giving more and more time to selfless service.
Spiritual awareness cannot come to us in any great measure until we have wiped out our backlog of these debts. That is why the Buddha, in very matter-of-fact language, urges us to keep on doing good if for no other reason than to get our accounts clear.
The secret of selfless action
But it’s not enough just to give generously. We also have to work selflessly, trying to give without a trace of egoism or personal motives. We have to work together harmoniously without trying to see who is going to be the leader or get the attention or to bend others to our will and ways.
To imagine that we are going to learn the secret of selfless action in a few months, or even years, is being a little optimistic. Even sincere philanthropists, who do a lot of good for the world, are sometimes motivated by personal drives.
I, for one, do not think it possible for anyone to become completely selfless in action without the practice of meditation. It is rather easy to think that we are living for others and contributing to their welfare, but very often we may not even know what the needs of others are.
In order to become aware of the needs of those around us, to become sensitive to the difficulties they face, we must minimize our obsession with ourselves. This requires the discipline of meditation, which enables us gradually to reduce self-will and preoccupation with our private needs.
We all begin the spiritual life with action that is partly egoistic, partly egoless, and none of us need be discouraged when we find in the early days that there is some motive of enlightened self-interest driving us on to action. Without this motive in the beginning, action may be difficult. It is good to accept this from the first. It takes quite a while for most of us to become fully aware that our welfare is included in the welfare of all and to realize that when we are working for everybody, we are also ensuring our own wellbeing.
What matters is the effort — the mental state behind our action. I, too, started my teaching work with some private motives. Although I was devoted to my students, there was a measure of personal motivation also.
But I went on giving my very best to my meditation and my students, and gradually, through a lot of effort, I found that my personal motives were dissolving in the overwhelming desire to be of service.
Spiritual dynamics
I can try to explain the dynamics of this in two ways. The more selfless work you do without thought of profit or pleasure, without even a thank you, the smaller the ego becomes. The more profit-seeking, pleasure-oriented work you do, the bigger the ego becomes. So selfless work itself is an attempt to reduce the size of our ego — which is, practically speaking, the only barrier between us and the unity of life, between us and the Lord within.
Second, when you work like this, instead of continuing to overdraw your account with self-centered activity, you have a certain positive balance at the end of the day, which you can deposit in your security bank inside. Every day you save, say, two units, and at the end of the year you get a very welcome statement from the internal auditor: not only is your debt no longer compounding, you have managed to reduce it dramatically.
In practical terms, this means that regrets begin to fall away. Instead of dwelling upon the debit side, you will be dwelling on the credit side. Eventually the great day will come when the account is balanced completely. After that, whatever you do goes as a bonus to those around you.