As I open to the love in my heart for my fellow beings—including the earth—and to my own interdependence and, indeed, identity with all beings, the yearning to become an instrument for the relief of all suffering grows stronger. Over time, the link between my spiritual growth and the possibility of becoming such an instrument has become clearer to me. As a result of my inner work, barriers have fallen away, allowing me access to sources of deeper compassion in myself. And out of this deeper compassion have come actions that are more effective in relieving suffering.
What exactly is my inner work? It involves a process of awakening through unlearning overhabituated and underexamined thought patterns. Some of these thought patterns are barely conscious, even unconscious. Others are so familiar in my thought terrain that I no longer even notice them. Slowly, though, through my spiritual practices, I relinquish these habits of thought that have kept me locked into my separateness, and I begin to remember and reawaken to the way in which I am part of all things—the unity of love that lies behind diversity. Now I finally appreciate that the goal of these practices is not to deny my uniqueness as a separate entity but rather to balance it by simultaneously acknowledging the unity.
Over the years, I have drawn from a wide variety of spiritual or consciousness practices that have helped me to regain my balance. Because I delight in reason, I find useful practices in almost all religious traditions that call into play my intellectual faculties. But so too do I love the power and play of my emotions, so I find myself attracted to specific devotional practices that work with the heart. Similarly I find practices that work with my sensual, reflective, and energetic natures. I have, at one time or another, been drawn to and grown from all of these practices.
For those of us, however, who find ourselves drawn toward the relief of suffering in others, there is a unique practice: the path of action. This spiritual path uses as its vehicle for transformation our actions themselves; that is, we gain internal freedom through external action. Actions ranging from the most mundane to the most extraordinary can be used. While all actions are potentially useful on the path of action, often the actions most readily associated with the path are acts of service. There is an elegance in the use of our acts of service for our spiritual work. It lies in the fact that the very acts that we perform to relieve the suffering of another being, be they through offering a glass of water, holding a hand, building a road, or protesting against injustice, can also serve as grist for the mill of our own spiritual growth, which, in turn, improves the effectiveness of our caring acts. It’s like a self-sharpening appliance that improves with use.
Realizing that an enlightened being would be the most skillful in relieving suffering, I was for a time tempted to refrain from serving others until I had attained spiritual freedom. But whether that state would be reached in this life or many lives down the road was uncertain. Furthermore, I had to admit that it is really impossible to stop acting. As long as we are incarnates, we must act, and our actions will always affect others. Recognizing this, we can, as best as we are able, act for the benefit of all beings, knowing full well that our actions, not being those of a fully enlightened being, are a mixed blessing for others.
Because karma yoga, or the “path of action,” is such a significant component of my spiritual practice, I wanted to understand it better—to clarify my own work as well as to help others gain clarity about theirs. As I have reviewed the literature, I have found that there is still a need to articulate this path in a way that makes it available to those of us with Western minds. Although the path of action represents different things to different people, there are common components that I have been able to identify. These are appropriateness, an awakening context, our relationship to the goal of the act, our relationship to the act itself, and the proficiency with which we perform the act. Beyond and intertwined with these are meditative and devotional components, which also play key roles. Let’s examine all of these, and consider the way in which they unfold.
On the path of action we need to act from our deepest intuitive appreciation of what is appropriate in the moment. To be able to do this, we must ask ourselves whether each act
It isn’t easy to take all these things into consideration for each action, or even the most important acts in our lives. Fortunately, however, we can call into play our intuitive mind, with its capacity to understand the gestalt, or total picture. We can intuit from moment to moment whether an act is fitting or appropriate for us. Of course, while any such choice may be right for the present moment, the intuitive listening cannot stop, because conditions keep changing, and what is appropriate one moment may not be so the next. We must be willing to correct our course of action again and again, never sacrificing truth for consistency.
In the West, the word that best describes the result of the process of intuitive listening for the course of our actions is vocation, which is defined as “a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action.” In a religious context, this means “a divine calling to the religious life.”
In the East, these appropriate actions are called dharma. And in the Bhagavad Gita, the basic Hindu text on the path of action, we are enjoined to perform our own dharma. It is better to perform our own dharma imperfectly than to perform the dharma of another. At the time and place that the Gita was composed, there were precise external criteria that were used for determining vocation or dharma, that is, what was an appropriate action at a certain stage of life. Family lineage and age both played a part in this determination. In Western society, which so cherishes external freedom, we are not rigidly constrained by these external considerations. Thus, in the absence of such a simple road map, we must rely far more heavily upon our intuition to discover the appropriateness of our actions.
I find it necessary to listen freshly again and again to my inner voice. But to hear that “still small voice within” requires a quiet mind, not one weighed down with the baggage of distorting desires and unexamined habits of thought. To achieve this quietness requires meditation practice and some patience. The Chinese book of wisdom the Tao Te Ching asks,
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
For me, continuing meditative practice over twenty years has proved invaluable in the moment-to-moment quieting of my mind so that I could discern the appropriate action.
The context in which an action occurs is critical in determining whether the act is indeed a part of the path of action. I may act simply to gratify a personal desire or I may perform the same act as a member of my family, my country, or a group sharing an ideological belief system. Acts performed for any of these reasons may be good or righteous, and as a result I may grow spiritually whether I realize it or not. But, for an act to be part of a “path,” we must have the intention to grow or awaken. We perform the act because we believe liberation is possible and that this particular act may help us become liberated.
For example, there may be many reasons why I am sitting at the bedside of a dying person. I may be attached to that person, I may be a relative or a hospital volunteer, or an attendant or minister earning my living by sitting there. But whatever the reason I am sitting there, the path of action requires that I consider the act one that I will use for inner growth or awakening.
G. I. Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic and teacher, said that we need to recognize that we are in prison if we are to use what is available in the situation to escape. Obviously if we don’t think that we are in prison, we won’t make any attempt to escape. Similarly, if we think that material existence as we know it through our senses and our thoughts is all there is, then we will not be motivated to explore those aspects of ourselves that are not part of the material world. Once we start to realize that there is more to life than meets the eye, we can use all our actions to help us plumb the mystery of what else there might be. This is the path of action.
There are many ways to characterize what we are awakening from and what we are awakening to. For example, we may be awakening from an illusion into reality. We may be finding our “center” or a vantage point of spacious awareness. Or we may be escaping from a conditioned reality into an unconditioned state. We may be beginning to get a taste for the deeper truth that lies behind appearances. We may be reestablishing a balance between unity and diversity by working to reawaken our identity with the unity that lies within and beyond the diversity of all things. Any of these characterizations of the spiritual journey will suffice to provide an awakening context.
In addition to these ways of understanding the journey, there are devotional ways. The intention to remember and celebrate God is an act of devotion. We may consider God as our beloved and see each act as an offering or service or demonstration of our love. For me, the beloved appears in the form of my guru, Neem Karoli Baba. Thus I see my acts in relationship to him, as an offering of flowers, which I place at his feet.
Mother Teresa, the Nobel Prize-winning nun who has served the poor in the streets of Calcutta, speaks of her ministrations to the lepers she finds in the streets, befouled with vomit, excrement, flies, and filth, as “caring for my beloved Christ in his more distressing disguises.” She is responding to the injunction in Matthew 25, where Christ says, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.… Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” And undoubtedly also to Isaiah 58:6–9.
Is not this what I require of you as a fast to loose the fetters of injustice, to untie the knots of the yoke, to snap every yoke and set free those who have been crushed? Is it not sharing your food with the hungry, taking the homeless poor into your house, clothing the naked when you meet them and never evading a duty to your kinsfolk? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn and soon you will grow healthy like a wound newly healed, your own righteousness shall be your vanguard and the glory of the Lord your rearguard. Then, if you call, the Lord will answer, if you cry to him, he will say, “Here I am.”
And also probably to Ecclesiastes 7: “Be not wanting in comforting them that weep and walk with them that mourn. Be not slow to visit the sick for by these things thou shalt be confirmed in love.”
I use all of these contexts to frame my actions. Sometimes I feel devotional and at other times I don’t. I seem to slip in and out of these contexts naturally and without effort. But, for an act to serve as a vehicle for awakening, at least one of these contexts must be present.
How do these awakening contexts for our actions fit with our immediate motivation for performing an act? For example, if I do something for someone, I’d like that person to be happy as a consequence. If I am giving a lecture, I’d like the audience to be enriched by what I say. If I am protesting against injustice, I’d like the protest to be heard and the injustice remedied.
Consider, for example, campaigning for an ecological issue. The immediate goal may be to gain media attention. That goal is instrumental in realizing a further objective of changing legislation, awakening the public conscience, or influencing the economic policies of the business community. In this situation, there are many factors beyond our control that determine whether our actions will realize their objective. A world figure may die just as a major article we have worked long and hard upon is about to appear in the newspaper, and our story may be dropped. We did what we could, but we were unable to control the rest of the news. Of course, it’s a disappointment not to achieve our ends. However, we adjust our course, make corrections, listen afresh, modify those aspects of the system that are malfunctioning, and get on with it. After all, what else is there to do?
This capacity to work with failure as well as success in terms of immediate goals is enhanced immeasurably when we have, in addition, the overriding goal of awakening. Because both success and failure with regard to the immediate goal serve the spiritual practice, there is a balance in our perspective. That balance provides the conditions for equanimity in us, because we appreciate that while our act may not lead to the expected fruits in the short term, ultimately the act will have served to relieve suffering. If we are now able to remain calm, and not be burdened with agitation, anger, or frustration over the failure of our efforts, we are in the best position to hear what to do next.
Of course, being human—as most of us still are—when we fail in our efforts, we feel some degree of discouragement, frustration, depression, loss of confidence, flagging interest, anger, horror at our inability to relieve another person’s suffering, betrayal, naiveté, stupidity, guilt, and a wide range of other reactions. By contrast, if we succeed, in addition to the happiness of realizing our objective and perhaps truly helping another being, we may feel inordinate pride, self-satisfaction, arrogance, a sense that we know it all, and a host of other interesting psychological hangers-on. I myself am certainly familiar with all of these.
I have learned that, in dealing with the effects of both success and failure, it is useful to have a vantage point or perspective sufficiently removed so that it can help me avoid becoming lost in any specific reaction. The vantage point allows me to see the larger processes at work, the ones made up of myriad successes and failures.
In the Bhagavad Gita we are enjoined to “be not attached to the fruits of the action.” After all, if we are performing the action appropriate for us at this moment, doing it as skillfully as we are able, and attempting to use it as a means of awakening, then we have done what we can to realize the immediate fruits of the action. Being attached to realizing the goals will not make us any more effective. I have found that a strong identification with a desire for a specific goal can engender anxiety. The goal itself can assume fearful and sometimes debilitating proportions. I am amused when I remember that I did my doctoral dissertation on just this kind of achievement anxiety, typing it with hands swollen by anxietyprovoked dermatitis.
Our goals, of course, are direct reflections of our desires. The stronger our identity with any desire, the more we become attached to the goal. When our desires are strong, and we are identified with them, we often come to perceive the world in terms of objects to be manipulated in order to bring about our goals. This relationship to our environment is alienating, exploitative, and not good for our hearts. Realizing this, we can seek to free ourselves from identifying with our desires. We will continue to have desires, of course, but we learn to separate our awareness or identity from them. For me, such awareness is like the sky, and my desires are like clouds or planes, coming and going through the sky.
In order to break the identification with specific desires, I cultivate another desire—the desire to awaken through resting in spacious awareness—and use that desire as an overriding motive. As I am more established in that spacious awareness, the other motives lose some of their power because, from the viewpoint of awakening, whether I succeed or fail in any specific act does not matter. I come to see that appreciation by others, fame and shame, loss and gain, and even pleasure and pain are all teachings that help me with my inner growth. At a later stage still, I come to realize that I must forgo even my identification with the desire to awaken, for ultimately the identification with any desire keeps us separate from the truth. Here I face the paradox that I can only realize truth by not desiring it.
On the path of action, we are like a bookkeeper in a large company. The bookkeeper does the accounts, but whether there is a profit or loss is not her or his concern. We do what we do each day, we do it as impeccably as possible, and then we are at peace, realizing that the results are out of our hands.
People on the path of action may seem goal-oriented, but they also have a peacefulness that comes from nonattachment. The Bhagavad Gita says that as we progress on the path of action we come to “work as one who is ambitious, respect individual life as one who desires it, and are happy as those who live for happiness.” But through it all we are, as the Tao Te Ching suggests, travelers who are enjoying the journey because we are not intent upon arriving.
That is all well and good, but when we are trying to relieve someone’s suffering and our actions do not bring about that end, our hearts are often heavy. The risk of standing back is that we will not become fully engaged in each situation, that we will stand back in order to avoid this heaviness of heart, that we will not act “compassionately” (with passion). But it is possible, when we have developed a sense of balance, to engage in actions with passion while still perceiving from a more remote vantage point. Christ speaks of it as being “in the world, but not of it.”
So we entertain the possibility that a part of us can be deeply involved in what we are doing while another part watches our moment-to-moment successes and failures with disinterest. The more remote part is motivated by a different set of purposes, no less admirable. It wants us to grow in wisdom and spiritual awareness. And from its vantage point it sees a way to use both our successes and our failures to this end. This greater aspiration also includes the relief of suffering, as, for example, in the case of the bodhisattva in Tibetan Buddhism, who seeks liberation for the benefit of all beings.
“One does nothing and nothing is left undone.” This mystical injunction points to one of the key components of the path of action: nonidentification with being the actor. I had always assumed that I had to identify with a role while performing in order to do it well. But each of us performs hundreds of acts each day—walking, blinking, driving, or knitting—to which we pay little, if any, conscious attention, yet we usually perform them quite well. It is now clear to me that very complex and creative acts often take place without our experiencing ourselves as actors. I think once again of the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna, who represents higher wisdom, reminds the seeker after freedom not to be caught up in thinking of himself as the doer. He says, “Only the fool whose mind is deluded by egoism considers himself to be the doer.”
Many actors, musicians, artists, and teachers report entering a space during a performance or at work in which connection of the self to the act disappears. At precious moments, I have had experiences in which the act seems to be occurring by itself as a result of its connections with everything else. It sometimes happens when I am lecturing. Under these circumstances I have experienced myself as disappearing entirely or being a dispassionate observer from a distance. Certainly at those moments there is no actor.
The Japanese master Hakuin said, “Your coming and going is nowhere but where you are.” This statement points to where you stand in the midst of action, even that arising from you. You stand in the quiet center, in the present moment, at peace.
The path of action calls upon us to perform each action with discriminating wisdom and skillful means. That is, whatever the task, be it washing a dish or creating a masterpiece, we bring to the situation our full attention, our appreciation of the situation, and our skill in the performance of the action. A concentrated mind is of great importance in carrying out an act with proficiency. Similarly, a stance of mindfulness, in which we witness just what is, helps us determine not only the appropriateness of an action but the skillful means with which to carry it out. Once again we see the role that meditation plays in the path of action.
The effort to perform the act perfectly is further enhanced by devotion. In serving the beloved, how could we act in any other way than by giving our best? It is also enhanced by nonidentification with the actor and nonattachment to the fruits of the action. With the quietness of mind that these conditions bring us, we are able to hear the moment because we are fully in it. Under these circumstances, the moment takes on a rich immediacy that imbues it with a living spirit in which our acts truly approach perfection.
In pursuing the path of action, I have begun to see recognizable stages in the transformative process. At first I saw myself as a separate entity full of needs and desires. My identity with these desires left me very attached to the fruits of my actions and thus willing to manipulate things and people, as if they were objects, to realize my goals. Then, with just a little awakening, I saw that the desires were unending and even the gratification of them was leaving me in an unsatisfactory alienated state. I saw that I would always be dissatisfied as long as I was caught up in my desires, and that under these conditions my actions could not express the highest level of compassion.
As I understood my predicament more clearly, the desire for liberation started to supplant other desires. This was the beginning of the path of action. Through mindfulness training I began to cultivate the part of me that was not identified with the desires. Desires arose and passed by with little clinging on my part to them. During this period my aversions and attractions, born of desires that remained, became painfully apparent. At first I was hard on myself for being so caught in the desire mind. With time, however, compassion toward myself began to develop, and I was able simply to note the arising of these various feelings of attraction and aversion. I found myself less affected by the success and failure of my efforts in each task. The ability to witness my reactions to these results increased. A quality of equanimity began to arise. I also noticed that each time an action was carried out even partially selflessly, it strengthened an identity with some force greater than myself and helped to free me from thinking of myself as separate.
Now I notice two things developing simultaneously. The first is an impersonality in my actions, almost as if someone else were performing them. There is a sense of my being an instrument of some compassionate force or mind deeper or higher than my own separate mind. It is difficult to describe. Sri Aurobindo, a great Indian holy person, spelled out in precise detail just how our minds surrender into and are supplanted by the higher, more universal mind. One way of describing what I experience is that it is as though I am a node in a large network of compassion. The biblical expression “Not my will but thine” reflects this moment-to-moment experience.
The other emerging quality is an intensification of the love that permeates actions. The universe of forms has become increasingly imbued with a radiance, an awesome, often bittersweet beauty, that makes each of my actions in the world feel like an act of devotion. Because it is new to me, I am often surprised by the feeling of love for other people, animals, and the earth that arises, often when I least expect it.
This feeling of treasuring other beings and serving them as the beloved makes me want to perform my acts even more skillfully, making each act an offering of beauty. The act of love draws me closer to whoever or whatever is before me, and with this closeness comes an intensification of empathy with joys and sufferings. Out of this arises a desire to alleviate suffering in the best possible way. Whether I am at the checkout counter in the supermarket, sharing a moment with a person facing a terminal illness, protesting in a political action, or dealing with a policeman who has stopped me on the highway, it is all a dialogue with the beloved, our interaction being a vehicle through which we meet and are together. This love grows until, as mystic poets have suggested, it could “start to equal the love that a mother has for her baby, that a miser has for her or his money, that a person has for her or his lover.”
Seeing the world as the many faces of the beloved, and experiencing myself as an instrument of some higher compassionate force or mind, feels at times as though the beloved is serving the beloved. Where am I in this process? In the beginning, I felt that I was doing it. Then I felt that I was observing it. And now I sometimes find myself absent and the compassionate action just occurring, rising out of the momentary conditions of the situation, having little to do with me at all. Reflecting upon these moments, I have a better understanding of the mystical adage “Out of emptiness arises compassion.”
In this process, what has happened to the desire for liberation? At the beginning, the desire to awaken for the benefit of all beings was my overriding motive. This served to shift my perspective and guide my behavior. But as a great karma yogi, Swami Vivekananda, pointed out, “This desire too must be relinquished, for finally, to identify with any desire keeps me separate from God.” At this point, as the Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen described it, “Striving ceases, and rest in true faith is possible.”
Although I can recognize the advanced stages of the path from momentary experiences, in my humanness, I still get caught in a number of desire systems that I am just barely able to watch. The desire for power is an example. It is not so much a conscious desire to have power over other people as a fascination with the nature of power, with worldly empires and their leaders, that can still catch me. Then there is the issue of righteousness. There is still in me something of the little boy who desires to do “good,” so that he can be seen by himself and by others as good. And also there is still the desire to achieve and to accomplish, a desire that seems independent of what is being achieved or accomplished. As a psychologist, I suspect that all of these desires stem from a sense of inadequacy.
These areas of attachment are still present and often seem precariously close to ruling my life and overriding the desire for liberation. I find that staying at the edge of this danger zone provides the hottest fire for the needed transmutation, and thus the edge is the best place for practicing the path of action. Like watching a sailboat out on the ocean waves, now you see it, now you don’t. Often just as I appear to be losing the deeper spiritual truth of my existence, the feeling of being caught awakens me and I bounce back. As a result of coming through each of these crises, I find myself stronger in my faith, and ever closer to being a true yogi, the being who dwells at the end of the path.
Just what is a true yogi like? Although I am still a long way from being one, I have been blessed to know one. For me, my guru, Neem Karoli Baba, is the frame of reference for what is possible. Such a being acts out of a fearless freedom, his compassion expressed in breathtakingly unpredictable ways, at one moment miraculous and at the next quite mundane. Even in the midst of the strong passions of the moment, there is a deep inner calm and peacefulness, an indifference to the polarities of fame and shame, loss and gain, pleasure and pain, and even life and death. Such a being works not from a sense of duty or for a transformation of being but because her or his compassionate heart finds expression spontaneously in action. Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, says, “I have no duty to perform, nor is there anything in the three worlds unattained which is to be attained; still I am engaged in action.” And, finally, in each action of a true karma yogi, there is love—unconditional love—expressed in the myriad ways that only a true lover can know.
Once we begin to understand the path of action, we still have many practical steps to take in finding our way into appropriate service. We have to begin somewhere. And often the beginnings are confusing or difficult. This section is a guide into the world of service, a little help on the path, some suggestions to ease the entry, a handbook for compassion in action.