To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.
——Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You must lose the self, as Jesus said, to find it.I Or, to put it in the terminology we’ve used here, you must rise above the “somebody self” in order to gain some kind of access to the joyful unselfconsciousness of being nobody.
The empathetic expansion of identity to encompass others in our lives is one of the principal methods provided by our spiritual traditions to overcome the confines of mere individuality. But there is another spiritual technique designed to help us drop the self-consciousness and self-centeredness that are the ultimate sources of our unhappiness.
The method we’ll explore in this chapter is designed to help us lose the self in action of all sorts—not only in our relationships with others, but in each and every one of our everyday activities, alone or in company.
We use various colloquialisms to speak of being engrossed in action. When we’re “really into it,” or when we’re in “the zone” or “the pocket” or “the groove,” or when we’re “going with the flow,” we’re describing what it’s like to be nobody because the “somebody self” has been wholly absorbed in an endeavor.
We all know what it feels like to be really consumed in an activity. When we say a book was a “real page-turner” or a movie was “riveting,” we are referring to this experience. When the concert was “mind-blowing” or the football match kept us on the “edge of our seat,” it’s this sensation we’re pointing to.
We are attracted to our hobbies, recreational activities, and games because they tend to launch us into this special state of mind. We’re captivated by puzzles, and we love challenges at work for their capacity to bring us there. The rush we get while engaged in stimulating activities, especially those with a hint of danger (for me, it’s riding my motorcycle), or when we’re in the midst of an emergency—these too can evoke this feeling. And, of course, it is this state of self-forgetfulness and ecstasy (derived from the word exstasis, “standing outside of the self”) that lies behind the powerful attraction of heightened sexual experiences.
It’s the feeling of not being there, or, we could also say, of totally being there—of dropping the mental narrative and fully integrating with the experience itself. The inner play-by-play commentary on life ceases. Instead of the usual voice-over we superimpose on unfolding events, we are fully engrossed in the activity itself. The mind’s monologue is silenced as unmediated awareness takes over.
We’re all familiar with this unselfconscious state of consciousness that arises when we fully inhabit the here and now. It’s the joy of being fully integrated into life itself. It’s the exhilaration and elation we feel when we are deeply engaged in what we’re doing. And it’s another way we gain access in our everyday lives to the rapture of being nobody.
• • •
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has observed that we’re happiest when we’re in this condition of pure awareness. He has famously labeled it “flow,” defining it as the state “in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”1
“Really getting into it” is the opposite of being “out of it,” of just spacing out and living life on cruise control. The flow state is characterized by extraordinary concentration on a task one finds captivating. “Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems,” writes Csikszentmihalyi.2 When we are fully in the moment, completely occupied with the task at hand, we are unable to be simultaneously preoccupied with what comes next or “post-occupied” with what has already happened.
The flow state is the thorough engagement with the present, the utter embrace of reality as it’s happening. It’s like this now—entirely accepted and embodied.
Most importantly for our theme, this state of heightened awareness—full absorption in what one is doing—is also characterized by the loss of a sense of self-consciousness. “Happiness,” notes spiritual teacher Krishnamurti, “is not something that you can seek; it is a result, a by-product,” of self-abandonment:
If you pursue happiness for itself, it will have no meaning. Happiness comes uninvited; and the moment you are conscious that you are happy, you are no longer happy. . . . Being self-consciously happy, or pursuing happiness, is the very ending of happiness. There is happiness only when the self and its demands are put aside.3
The “somebody self” disappears when we are truly happy; the inner voice shuts up. In fact, it is precisely the degree to which one loses the self in the activity that defines how deep the flow really goes.II Such “peak experiences,” as Abraham Maslow designated them, are moments of self-transcendence and contentment: “Perception in the peak-experience can be relatively ego-transcending, self-forgetful, egoless, unselfish. It can come closer to being unmotivated, impersonal, desireless, detached, not needing or wishing.”4
These optimal, self-transcending states of mind are the bread and butter of religious mysticism. The “oceanic feeling” occurs when the individual feels herself or himself subsumed within some greater whole: “God,” “ultimate reality,” “the Ground of All Being,” one’s “Buddha nature,” or whatever one wishes to call the nameless.
In the Eastern religious traditions, we are given a method designed to bring some version of this exalted state of mind into all our actions. In Taoism and Confucianism, the practice is called wu wei, or “effortless action,” and in Buddhism it’s spoken of in terms of “awareness” and “mindfulness” in each and every one of our pursuits. In the Hindu tradition the phrase describing this spiritual technique for getting into the zone is particularly apt: karma yoga, or “disciplined action.”
These spiritual traditions posit that even in the ordinary activities of our daily lives we can enter the flow state. We don’t need to wait for some extraordinary gift of grace to get a taste of the bliss, or sequester ourselves in a cave somewhere in order to bring about a mystical trip. And we don’t have to continually and desperately search for exceptionally titillating “peak experiences” before we can get into the groove.
Every experience in life has the potential to be “peak”; every moment and every activity has the latent capacity to be “optimal” if we learn to let go of the “somebody self” and live in a more integrated and less self-conscious way.
There is, however, a difference between being mindlessly absorbed in an activity—passively watching television or a movie or staring at the computer, for example—and what we might call mindful unselfconsciousness in our actions. Karma yoga assumes both the disciplined “mindfulness” and the joyful “unselfconsciousness” that comprise “being in the zone” as opposed to just “zoning out.”
There’s also a difference between hoping that some activity or another will seem captivating enough to push us into the flow, and the learned ability to put ourselves there. We all know and desire the joy of being completely engaged in what we’re doing. But in between such “optimal experiences,” few of us stop to reflect on why and how they happen, and how we could potentially enter into any activity with this same intensity and attention.
Washing the dishes offers the same potential for getting into the zone as motorcycling or rock climbing do. There’s nothing in any Himalayan cave that’s missing from the office when it comes to getting into the flow. Any action done with mindful unselfconsciousness can take us there.
• • •
The unexamined life, it has been said, is not worth living—and that’s true enough. It’s important to be self-aware, in part because it is through self-awareness that one can come to realize that it is too much self-awareness that blocks us from the source of our greatest happiness. For the over-examined life can perpetually defer the actual living of it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” wrote J. S. Mill, echoing the Krishnamurti quotation cited above, “and you cease to be so.”5
Our deepest joy arises only when we cease taking our own temperature and, like the old Nike slogan says, just do it. Life does not run best when it’s in neutral—stalled out in continual self-analysis—but when it’s fully engaged.
Yeah, but I’m already “fully engaged,” and it’s totally stressing me out! I’ve got a million things to do—so many responsibilities! I’m just so busy!
Nowadays most of us do indeed often feel the tension that accompanies having a lot to do. We have homework to complete, exams to pass, diplomas to acquire, and paying jobs to land. There are tasks at the office to accomplish, business problems to solve, and professional promotions to earn. The bills must be paid, forms must be filled out, and taxes must be filed.
The housework needs attention, the kids have to be driven to their soccer game, and there are birthday parties to be organized. There are home repairs that await us, meals to be prepared, and dishes, clothes, cars, and bodies to be washed. And there are, for some of us, book manuscripts to complete in order to meet the publisher’s deadline.
Our social lives can also sometimes seem a bit overwhelming, what with all the appointments, meetings, engagements, rendezvous, dinner parties, and lunch dates there are to juggle. We even fill our leisure time with plans, projects, schedules, and itineraries so as to not run the risk of—gasp!—boredom, the characteristically modern abhorrence of not having enough things to do.
And the younger you are, the more likely that you’re freaking out about all of this. A survey done on behalf of the American Psychological Association found that half of all “millennials” say their angst keeps them awake at night, and 39 percent of them said that their stress levels had increased in the past year.6
We’ve done a good job of passing on this kind of anxiousness about life’s tasks to our kids. When I was a teenager, I looked forward to sleeping in on Saturday morning (and we all know the amazing talent most teenagers have for sleeping in—especially, I guess, if they’ve been kept awake the night before by stress!). But invariably my dreams were literally shattered as my father woke me at some ungodly hour (like maybe around 10:00 am) with the “to do list”—the chores I was expected to get through that day.
Idleness, I was told, was the devil’s playground, and there would be no such demonic tomfoolery in this house! Let’s get to work, son!
And so most of us have internalized the idea that our self-worth consists at least in part in how busy we keep ourselves, with all the pressures and strains that come from such an attitude. Now more than ever before, we feel it’s crucial to keep ourselves constantly occupied—or at least thinking about all the things we have to do—in order to be a real somebody.
Even though such perpetual worry and frenetic activity is wearing us out and down, we nevertheless revel in what has become a cult of busyness.
Our communications these days are often just to let each other know how much we’ve all got going on. Have you ever phoned up a friend and asked them how they’re doing, only to sit there on the other end of the line, listening to them talk for fifteen minutes about how busy they are? Maybe you’ve found yourself doing the same when someone else asks after you. Our catch-up conversations turn into contests to see who’s busier.
And what’s the unspoken message behind such tedious sharing and cataloging of our many activities?
I’m really, really busy—so see how important and valuable my life is?
In an article published in the New Statesman, Ed Smith writes that busy people “are not rushing to arrive somewhere, still less to achieve anything. They are rushing because rushing is how they display how hard they work.” The cult of busyness has become “a cultural malaise.” We’re all trying to convince ourselves and others that our lives are significant because we are so busy working:
In every area of public life, we demand not only that people work harder, but, crucially, that they be seen to work ever harder. This is the age of professional martyrdom.7
One of my spiritual teachers once pointed out that super-busy people are actually the very ones—talented, energetic, and intelligent people—who, if they paused their nonstop spinning long enough, would realize how relatively insignificant much of what they’re busy doing actually is.
Busyness for its own sake can keep us unaware of and unfocused on the more consequential things we have to do in life. And the busyness stresses us out, which often enough triggers major mental-affliction attacks. Anxiety about how many things there are to do does not help us do them better or more efficiently, let alone more wisely and calmly.
Instead of putting us in the flow, busyness just sweeps us away in the current. Instead of the mindful unselfconsciousness that characterizes being in the zone, the cult of busyness instills a self-conscious mindlessness that keeps us stewing about how much we have to do instead of concentrating on what we are actually doing.
• • •
Staying busy for the sake of busyness is not a spiritual technique for self-transcendence, happiness, or contentment. It is, rather, a recipe for agitation and turmoil, in addition to often being just another ploy to accentuate one’s self-importance.
The spiritual methods for self-forgetfulness in action are quite different than this kind of hectic, chicken-with-its-head-cut-off urge to just keep busy all the time. And it’s not mere inactivity that serves as the real antidote. Another cause of stress derives from worrying about all the things we should be doing that for one reason or another we are unable or unwilling to do.
The opposite of busyness is not paralysis. It’s remaining active and engaged in life, but in a calm and relaxed manner. We must do what there is to do, but most of us need to get way more unbusy as we’re doing it.
Getting unbusy can mean cutting back on nonessential or meaningless activity in order to create a more uncluttered schedule. Reprioritizing what is really important puts what is not so essential in its proper place.
It can also mean taking more time off or simply enjoying the free time we already have without diluting it with obsessive worry, nonstop checking of email and text messages, and treating our days off and holidays as if they were just another opportunity to stay busy. We don’t need to bring our work into our leisure time, and we don’t need to turn our leisure time into work.8
Getting unbusy can also include introducing a relaxation or meditation practice into the daily schedule—a time where you just sit and do nothing (except grabbing some peace of mind!), which is perhaps one reason why so many of us resist it. To the busyness fanatic, meditating seems so . . . unproductive.
But the main thing about getting unbusy is a change in one’s attitude. Our duties in life, no matter how many or even how onerous, will not seem so overwhelming if we are not overwhelmed.
Stress does not arise in reaction to some quantifiable number of things one has to do. There are plenty of people—I’ve personally known several—who remain constantly occupied all day long without evincing much or any anxiety. And then there are folks who have, like, two things to do in the day and get themselves all balled up:
Oh, I’m so busy! I have a doctor’s appointment at 9:30, and then this afternoon, I have this other thing to do!
There’s a difference between staying active—physically doing what needs to be done in the here and now—and the mental feeling of being too busy. It’s not that there aren’t things in our lives that need attending to. There certainly are. What’s being suggested here is definitely not that we ignore our jobs, our family obligations, or any of our other responsibilities. But these duties need not be a perpetual source of unhappiness by being regarded as drudgery instead of as opportunities for getting into the flow.
Assuming an unbusy mindset allows for relaxed action instead of frenzied movement. Bhagwan Rajneesh (“Osho”) has drawn a distinction between “activity” and “action.” “Action is not activity,” Rajneesh argues, and “activity is not action.”
Action is when the situation demands it, you act, you respond. Activity is when the situation doesn’t matter, it is not a response; you are so restless within that the situation is just an excuse to be active. Action comes out of a silent mind—it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Activity comes out of a restless mind—it is the ugliest.9
When the situation demands it, we act—it’s like this now, so we do what needs to be done. The opposite of busyness is not simple indolence or immobility, and it is certainly not shirking our obligations. But the agitation and restlessness—the chronic impulse to just do something, anything!—that accompanies what Rajneesh labels “activity” is the source of tension and anxiety.
Indian deities and Tibetan Buddhist enlightened beings are often depicted with multiple arms to indicate the many beneficial ways they act in the world. They are portrayed as industrious—it’s a big job keeping the universe going and all! But none of them is pictured with brows all furrowed in angst. They’re all totally Botoxed!
Actively and skillfully engaged, but not crazy busy—this is the model for action in our own lives. Getting unbusy entails doing what there is to do efficiently and happily but without the incessant demands for frenetic activity associated with a stressed-out lifestyle that accompanies the cult of busyness.
True freedom, as we’ve been emphasizing, does not consist of just doing anything our untrained impulses suggest. Such an understanding of “freedom” keeps us locked in a prison of our own making. The happiness associated with spiritual goals depicted as “liberation,” “deliverance,” or “release,” requires first and foremost the end of this sort of bondage to our unrestrained mental afflictions, not the unconstrained expression of them.
So if you really must be busy, maybe it’s best to get busy subduing these negative emotions that are the source of all our unhappiness. We feel more or less constantly a compelling need to change the way things presently are.
But living freely also mandates that we shake ourselves loose from the obsessive need to constantly accomplish, fix, or improve things through manic activity. We are enslaved not only by our mental afflictions but by our continuous attempts to direct future outcomes instead of fully concentrating on what we are doing in the here and now.
And so the controlling, Captain Kirk self makes yet another appearance! Reinforced by the misguided idea that we need to keep busy in order to be of value, we feel compelled to be perpetually working to alter and change things. Motivated by stressful discontentment, the good old Captain turns out to be a full-blown neurotic!
This obsession with work and achievement is another way we try to scratch the perpetual itch of dissatisfaction—in this case, the itch of always feeling like we have to do something in order to be somebody. It is the antithesis of the Great Itchless State.
The opposite of freedom, contentment, and perfect happiness is what the Eastern religions call samsara, the cyclical reproduction of suffering in our lives. And while there are many dimensions to what constitutes and causes this recurrent unhappiness, one definition of samsara found in the ancient texts is particularly striking for our present subject.
“Samsara,” it is said in the Ashtavakra Gita, “is nothing other than having something that needs to be done.”10
The crucial Sanskrit word in the verse, kartavya (“having something that needs to be done”) refers to the compulsion to act, the niggling dissatisfaction that instigates panicky activity. The statement is rather radical and adamant, that this feeling of being compelled to act, and nothing other, keeps us from contentment.
At first blush, such an assertion might seem rather extreme—But there are things I need to do! If I don’t feed the kids, who will? If I don’t go to work, how will I pay the bills? There are, of course, responsibilities that we all have to fulfill. But we’ll complete them a lot more efficiently and happily if we lose the feeling that we are doing so under duress. It’s not the obligation to act that’s the problem. It’s the neediness that spurs activity that causes us stress.
The idea that we are unhappy owing to a compulsion to act actually does pretty accurately sum up our unrest. We more or less constantly feel a compelling need to change the way things presently are. We are kept dissatisfied by our perpetual itchiness—the desire for what we don’t already possess and the yearning to rid ourselves of something we do have in our lives. These are the two forms of discontentment, and it is the cessation of both that brings us tranquility and peace.
It is the wish that things were not like this now that defines our unhappy state—what we’ve called the “if only” syndrome. And in response to this discontentment, we feel the compulsion to get busy and start scratching all those nagging itches in the hopes of getting what we want and getting rid of what we don’t.
Jesus, among many other great spiritual teachers, advised us long ago to just relax already. “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.” Constant fretting and stressing out about the future just ruins the present and, in general, spoils the limited time we have here on earth:
Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?”11
This famous passage from the Bible—its message can be put succinctly: Don’t worry, be happy!—concludes with the following useful summary: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
We’ve got enough to take care of in the here and now without polluting our lives with anxiety and fear about future difficulties. There will be “worries” and “troubles” tomorrow—let’s rename them “challenges,” shall we?—and when they arrive we’ll need to deal with them. But the best way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate on today, for it is in the present that we are creating the causes that will govern our relative ability to deal with the events of the future.
There’s another potential teaching on this subject that may be floating, so to speak, in your head somewhere.
Row, row, row your boat, goes the song. We have things to do and responsibilities to fulfill, so keep rowing! The converse of keeping busy in compulsive activity is not slothful inactivity. But row your boat gently down the stream (and also merrily, merrily, merrily!) for life is but a dream—and one day it will end.
Flailing about with the oars in a frenzy of compulsive activity, worrying about what might be around the next bend, we forego the opportunity to leisurely enjoy the boat ride and do what we need to do in the present—gently, merrily, and in a way that doesn’t take the “dream” so very, very seriously.
It is important to do what we can to ensure a pleasant future. But such preparations are best accomplished through mindful attention to the present. The future will fall into place if we create the appropriate karmic causes in the here and now. And the most effective means for doing so is neither through harried busyness nor the compulsion to fix and change things that distracts us from what there is to do right now.
The compulsion to act is motivated by a perceived need to effect an “improved” situation in the future. It’s just another instance of the “if only” syndrome. We ignore the present and the opportunities it affords when we obsess too much about the future. We feel compelled to get busy and start scratching in the hopes that we’ll later obtain something better than what’s going on now.
It was John Lennon who famously said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”12 We become oblivious to the possibilities inherent in each moment of our lives when we’re preoccupied with what will happen instead of centering on what is actually happening.
There is a spiritual technique to help us concentrate mindfully on what we’re doing now. It is to act, not to gain some future reward, but simply because the task is there to do. This is the essence of what in the Bhagavad Gita is called karma yoga, the “discipline” (for this is what “yoga” really means) of action.
To do this sort of yoga there’s no need to get a high-performance mat or buy expensive attire made of free-range organic cotton. A practitioner of karma yoga is defined as “one who does what needs to be done while remaining unattached to the results of this action.”13
Most of our actions, most of the time, are carried out as a means to achieve a desired end, expedients for reaching a desired goal. To be sure, every action will achieve some result—there’s a beginning, middle, and end to everything. But being “in the flow” puts our full attention on the action as it’s happening—on the middle bit, in “real time”—and not on trying to arrive at an outcome as quickly as possible.
Losing oneself in the activity at hand is by definition not “goal-oriented.” This is not to suggest that there isn’t an end to be reached or a result to be eventuated. But in karma yoga, the means and the ends collapse so that the focus is on the action in and of itself.
This attention on the task at hand rather than on some projected result we hope to bring about is what we might call action done for its own sake.
“Action done for its own sake”—it’s the very definition of being “in the flow.”III And while we are all happiest when we’re mindfully unselfconscious and in the zone, the compulsion to act in order to attain a future objective tends to rule nearly every aspect of our everyday lives.
It’s the inner angel and devil locking horns once again. We long to submerge ourselves in an activity and go with the flow, but at the same time we tell ourselves that such action for its own sake is somehow irresponsible. Given our desire to improve our own lives and the lives of those we love, we may think that losing ourselves in our present is somehow reneging on our obligation to try to create a better future.
Here’s another way to put this apparent quandary: There may seem to be a contradiction between action for its own sake and what we’ve talked about above in terms of “karmic management.” Can we simultaneously be fully and unselfconsciously absorbed in an activity while at the same time be working to create a better life for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the world as a whole?
We observed in chapter 5 that according to the laws of karma every action will definitely have a corresponding reaction—good acts bring pleasant consequences for our sense of self and happiness, while bad acts bring unpleasant results. The self-improvement enterprise—which we’ve also argued is the best and really the only method for helping others (summed up in the formula change you, change the world)—depends on wisely manipulating the karmic system.
But laboring to create the karmic causes for a better future might seem to be inherently goal-oriented; indeed, the whole concept of “self-improvement” might seem so. And neither would appear to mesh very well with a vision of “action for its own sake.”
To resolve this apparent contradiction, we’ll need to review a few things about karma and then introduce some new observations pertaining to how the system really operates. And perhaps we will see that effective karmic management and action for its own sake turn out to be two sides of the very same coin.
We’ve already encountered one reason why there is actually no real conflict between creating new good karma—acting in the present in order to create a better future—and karma yoga, acting without attention to the fruits. The “good” acts we do are “good” to the degree that they are motivated by a selfless intention. The more we are motivated by self-interest, the less “good” that act is, and therefore the less pleasant will be the result.
To really work the karmic system, we must silence the demonic inner voice that always asks, What’s in it for me? It is only a seeming paradox that the more selfless the intention behind any particular action the more beneficial that action will be to oneself. It’s actually the very principle for generating good karma. It is intrinsic to the most effective management of karma that one loses oneself in action.
Perhaps the easiest way to take the selfishness out of any activity is, as we’ve seen, to do it for someone else. Compassionate and empathetically inspired action—What can I do for you?—is a very effective surgical instrument for performing the ego-ectomy, extracting the self-interest out of the act.
When we take our self-centered motivations out of the equation, we are able to concentrate more fully on the action itself instead of diluting it with futuristic projections of what we hope to personally gain from it. So from this angle we can see that karmic management—directed by altruism and empathy—entails the self-forgetting necessary for action done for its own sake. We can act unselfconsciously because our attention is focused on another.
• • •
But there’s another dimension of why action for its own sake is built into the very system of karma. It is not the perpetual dissatisfaction with the present—“I’ll do x so that I’ll later obtain y”—that lies at the heart of the karmic enterprise. Creating the karma for a better future actually necessitates an opposite assumption.
The most effective karmic management assumes some version of contentment, and with contentment we have the possibility for pure action—action done truly for its own sake.
What goes around, comes around—this is Karma 101. But for “it” to come around, “it” must go around first—and herein lies an important secret when it comes to karma. We have to have some kind of sense that we already have “it” sufficiently before we become comfortable enough to give “it” away.
Let’s take one example. The feeling of prosperity or abundance—for it is indeed a “feeling” and not a quantifiable commodity—is the karmic result of generosity. Give and you shall receive, right? We may not always believe it, but we’ve heard the maxim plenty of times, from plenty of sources.
The example is a salient one, for generosity is one way of describing the whole karmic program. It is the willingness to give to others—not just money and things, but also time and energy, love and compassion, respect and protection—that lies at the very core of the care and maintenance of one’s karma.
Karmic management assumes some awareness of present fulfillment. Before we can even think about giving to others, we must believe we have enough to give—enough material things, enough time, enough emotional gratification. We know that there will be future rewards—that it will “come around”—but even in the present there must be a certain sense of sufficiency, even excess, for us to first let it “go around.”
Even the most self-interested, naïve, and mechanistic understanding of karma has some degree of this sensibility that I have enough already. Even karma simplistically regarded as a kind of investment scheme—“I’ll give this so that I’ll get that in the future”—has some element of the notion that I have something I can afford to give right now.
And a more informed understanding of how karma really works will bear an even deeper appreciation of this underlying secret: It is the feeling of plenitude and abundance, not the constant craving for more, that makes for truly efficacious karmic management.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Because I believe I have adequate material prosperity, I feel free to donate my money or things. Because I think I have enough time, I share my surfeit with others. If I feel a basic contentment within myself, I then feel able to give others the love and compassion that might help them feel more contentment too.
Such a recognition of self-sufficiency also helps us restrain ourselves from generating bad karma—do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. If I feel safe and secure, I have no interest in harming others. When I am content with what I possess, I do not think of stealing. Because I feel enough love within, I am not tempted to infringe on others’ relationships. And when I am satisfied with my own life I am not inclined to be envious or resentful of what others have.
Karma yoga, in one sense, simply means disciplining one’s actions in order to do good instead of bad, to be kind instead of cruel, to be other-oriented instead of egotistical. But we’ve also noticed that this method presupposes the latent assumption behind all karmically beneficial and unselfish activity. It is encapsulated in our contentment mantra:
Om, I have enough, ah hum.
Action done without expectation of personal reward presumes the recognition that one has been rewarded enough already. According to the Bhagavad Gita, “No one becomes a yogi” or true practitioner of karma yoga “who has not renounced expectation of selfish advantage.”14
Because we don’t need or expect recompense, we complete the action with the purest intention and the fullest attention on the act itself—which, as we’ve repeatedly underscored, is the most powerful way to ensure that the act will have a positive karmic result.
• • •
There is no contradiction between karmic management and action done for its own sake. In fact, we do the former best when we are doing the latter. But, needless to say, we have a resistance to engaging in either.
The mental afflictions—all of them revolving around egoistical self-cherishing—militate against relying on the self-sacrificing principles of karma in our actions. The Big Smackdown, the Rage in the Cage, recurs over and over again as we fight our selfish inclinations in our attempts to live more wisely and joyously.
And because of this same clinging to the self we resist, even while we yearn for, the experience of losing ourselves in an activity. Who would I be if I weren’t somebody?—a question we’ll actually attempt to answer in chapter 7. But some part of us fears the very unselfconsciousness that brings us the euphoria of being in the flow—of doing what needs to be done selflessly, efficiently, and with attention to the act itself and not to the fruits.
Karma yoga as a discipline requires repeated practice. Our battles with the inner demon of egoistic self-centeredness are ongoing and arduous. And so in our quest to lose the self-consciousness and get into the flow of things when it comes to our everyday actions, we’ll need to recall, over and over again, the benefits of doing so in order to strengthen the inner angel.
To reinforce our desire to act without selfish intention, we must remind ourselves how much pleasure there is in being in the zone, in the bliss of mindful unselfconsciousness, the exuberance of acting as nobody.
Karma yoga, or action done for its own sake, is a revolutionary method for living one’s life. It is a radical procedure for removing the self-interest from our daily activities and becoming more attentive to what we’re doing while we’re doing it.
One of the principal ways of practicing karma is to replace the drone of What’s in for me? with What can I do for you? Already this inverts our usual self-centered motivation and begins the revolution in our thinking about our everyday acts.
Understanding the deeper principles of karma, we tune in to our own sense of self-sufficiency in order to give to others. Willfully suspending and foregoing any future personal rewards of action, we do what there is to do to the best of our ability, but for its own sake—just because it’s given to us to do.
And there is another way of describing karma yoga that further highlights its revolutionary implications: Action done for its own sake is purposeless action.
Every action comes to an end and serves as the cause for a future effect. But action done for its own sake is focused not on the result but on the action itself. When the means and ends collapse, there is no particular purpose for doing something, other than that’s what there is to do. The activity is enough in and of itself, not for what it achieves or brings about.
Purposeless action does not imply that the activity is meaningless, and it certainly does not suggest that it need not be done at all or without giving it our full attention. If you’re like me, you’re accustomed to associate “purposelessness” with indifference and apathy. If you say there’s no purpose, well, I guess there’s no point.
Action done for its own sake is purposeless but not pointless. To better understand this aspect of karma yoga, let’s turn to two familiar examples of purposeless action: play and artistic expression.
• • •
“This is the real secret of life,” declares Alan Watts—“to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”15
Watts is by no means the first or only person to recommend that we concentrate fully on the task at hand; and he’s also not alone in advising us to conceptualize all our activities in life as “play” rather than “work.” We naturally and easily do the first—engage thoroughly with what we’re doing in the here and now—when we do the second, dropping the stress and compulsion to act and adopting instead a relaxed, playful attitude toward our daily tasks.
When we are at play, it is not because we need to do something, but because we really want to do it. As opposed to the onerous demands associated with the idea of “work,” we play simply because it’s fun. In play, we continue to row our boats—and we do so quite assiduously and even strenuously—but we also row merrily, because it’s fun to play.
One of the reasons so many spiritual teachers, theologians, and secular scholars have taken play quite seriously is that when we are at play we don’t take things so seriously. We relax (without losing focus) and shed the stressful anxiety that comes when we obsess about the outcome rather than really getting into the process.
It’s been said that we should lighten up on our way to enlightenment, and thinking about all our activities in terms of “play” rather than “work” can help us to do this.
Johan Huizinga, the author of the classic scholarly study on this subject, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, refers to the irreducible “fun element” lying at the heart of play: “Now this element, the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation. As a concept, it cannot be reduced to any other mental category.”16 The essential purpose of play is that it has no purpose, which makes it both “fun” and quite different from our usual compulsive need to act. Play, Huizinga writes, “stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites.”17
The importance of the concept of play has been recognized for millennia in the world’s spiritual traditions. In one branch of the religions of India, the concept of “play,” or “sport,” is known by the Sanskrit term lila, and it was originally introduced as a stratagem for solving a perennial theological question: Why did God create the universe? Did God—who lacks for nothing and is complete in Him- or Herself—nevertheless have some need to create, some purpose behind bringing the world into existence?
In response to the accusation that God can’t be the creator of the world, since God, being God and all, has no motive or reason to act, it was countered that God did create the world—but “merely in play.”IV As William Sax writes in his aptly titled The Gods at Play, “The idea is that God’s creation of the world is motivated not by any desire or lack, since these would be incompatible with his or her self-fulfilled and complete nature, but rather by a free and spontaneous creativity.”18
In the Bhagavad Gita, we are explicitly advised to imitate the divine in our own actions, in the ongoing creation of our own lives. Krishna tells Arjuna, his student and friend, to act—to do what needs to be done—but to act like God does, not out of a compulsive need for self-aggrandizement, but totally and selflessly unattached to the results:
Arjuna, throughout the three worlds there is nothing whatsoever that I need to do. There is nothing unattained that I need to attain, and yet I still engage in action. . . . While those who are ignorant perform actions out of attachment, the wise one, unattached, acts in order to maintain the world.19
Lila describes action done out of freedom rather than necessity, out of a sense of prior and ongoing contentment rather than the neediness of the “if only” syndrome. It is the paradigm for action done for its own sake, the blueprint for karma yoga.
The purity of play has been seriously diluted in our modern, grown-up versions of “games” and “sports” and must be distinguished from them. The overweening emphasis on winning as the purpose, especially in professional sports, where fame and fortune depend on victory, have compromised the “action for its own sake” nature of play in its essential form.
The quaint old aphorism “It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game” has largely been forgotten and replaced by football coach Vince Lombardi’s famous dictum: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”20
This preoccupation with victory is thoroughly tied up in the culture of narcissism we spoke of in the introduction. We’re encouraged to think we’re not “somebody enough” unless we’re a real “winner.” And winners require losers. We often believe that we’ll be a real somebody only if somebody else is less of one.
I once met a professional speed skater who was very, very good at what he did—so good, in fact, that he was sent to the Olympics, where he did very, very well. He came home with a silver medal. He was the second best skater in the world in his event.
And guess what? He was disappointed, because he was only second best.
Play in its uncorrupted sense isn’t about trying to be better than others. But it also does not preclude healthy competition. Action done for its own sake, whether done alone (competing against ourselves) or in the company of others (competing against competitors), can bring out the best in all of us.
What the Tao Te Ching calls the “virtue of non-competition” is not about no competition, as the text makes clear. It is rather doing one’s best—and wanting others to do their best too—all in the “spirit of play”:
The best athlete
wants his opponent at his best . . .
the virtue of non-competition.
Not that they don’t love to compete,
but they do it in the spirit of play.
In this they are like children
and in harmony with the Tao.21
And so it is that to act in the “spirit of play” we are pointed to the example of children. Children, before they are taught that the point is to “win,” exemplify the pure version of playful activity. If you’ve been around small children (or if you remember being one), you know that kids get totally and tirelessly absorbed in what is, after all, purposeless action.
Imagine going to a playground and asking kids why they’re doing what they’re doing—that is, asking what the purpose of the activity is. “Why are you sliding down the slide, little girl? What is the purpose of all this swinging back and forth? Why the teetering, then the tottering? What is your objective in going around and around in circles on the merry-go-round? And what exactly is the reason for climbing up and down that jungle gym?”
The kid would probably run away screaming to her mom or dad, terrorized and confused by such stupid questions coming from such a crazy grown-up!
The point of play is found not in the completion but in the process. As always, there’s a beginning, middle, and end to the activity. You climb up the stairs of the slide and slide down, thus getting to the ground. Sliding ends when one reaches the bottom, but it’s not in order to reach the bottom that one slides. In play, it’s all about the sliding, not the having slid.
The kids got it right when it comes to action for its own sake. Play is not puerile or childish in the sense of being fatuous or foolish. But it is childlike to the degree that it embodies the simple, unencumbered sense of wonderment and joy involved in acting mindfully and unselfconsciously in purposeless action.
It is this simplicity in behavior, purity in action, and humility rather than self-promotion—not believing that “winning is the only thing”—that led Jesus to answer the way he did when asked by his disciples, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”22
As an Indian text asserts, the wise spiritual practitioner “does whatever comes to him to do, no matter if it’s pleasant or unpleasant.”23 The adult version of childlike simplicity entails facing every responsibility—“pleasant” or “unpleasant”—with the same playful and lighthearted attitude. And so, the text continues, she “who is without desire in all undertakings behaves in a childlike fashion. Acts done by a pure one like this are without stain.”24
One final note about play. A serious person might, once again, object that using this analogy of “life as play” is immature and irresponsible. But as the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus observed, “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”25
For all those good-hearted but perhaps overly earnest people out there, remember what’s been said above about the relationship between karmic management and action for its own sake: There’s no contradiction between working to improve oneself and the world, on the one hand, and selflessly losing oneself in action—making work into play—on the other. As we’ve seen, the former is actually done best when the latter occurs.
Acting as if it were all “just a game” (“life is but a dream”) is neither irresponsible nor uncompassionate, and we can once again return to the theology of lila to understand why. The “sportive” activity of God’s play does not preclude the “supportive” or compassionate element of God’s grace, as Norvin Hein has cleverly put it. They are reconciled in that they both are defined by the same absence of “calculation of any selfish gain”:
God’s sportive acts and his supportive acts are one because both are done without calculation of any selfish gain that might be made through them. Both are therefore desireless . . . and between God’s lila and his grace there is no inconsistency.26
• • •
Many forms of artistic expression also exemplify the purposelessness of action done for its own sake. It’s not usually to fulfill some practical function that one paints, dances, sings, writes poetry, plays an instrument, or sculpts—although professional artists need to make a living too!
While the artistic endeavor often results in a product—a picture is painted, a form is sculpted, a dance has been danced—even the finished “work of art” is aesthetic, not utilitarian. Andy Warhol once remarked, “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”27
And the process of artistic creation is arguably more important than the product. “The object isn’t to make art,” observed painter Robert Henri. “It’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”28 The purpose of artistic creation is to get into the flow of artistic creation. Like play, artistic activity in its pure form has no purpose other than itself.
In some instances, art is clearly created as ephemeral and transitory in order to highlight the importance of the creative process over the created product. Tibetan Buddhist monks labor for days, even weeks, painstakingly pouring colored sand to construct a mandala, an elaborate geometrical representation of the cosmos—and then completely destroy it upon its completion. In a similar fashion, Andy Goldsworthy assembles equally intricate designs over the course of many hours, with icicles that melt in the sun, twigs that are blown away by a gust of wind, or rock structures that are swallowed by the sea when the tide comes in.
Graffiti art (aka “street art”) is also often quite detailed and time-consuming to create, but usually with the expectation that sooner or later the civic authorities will scrub it off or paint over it. And performance art of all sorts is by definition, well, performed—it’s the activity itself that’s essential; not something else that is brought about by the activity.
Music and dance are particularly salient examples of artistic expression done purely for its own sake. There’s no real purpose to either playing or listening to a piece of music other than the pleasure of aesthetic expression and appreciation. And we dance or watch others dance not because doing so produces some result or attains some goal, but simply because it’s enjoyable to do or watch.
The meaning and purpose are in the music and the dance themselves. As Isadora Duncan memorably quipped, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.”29
“A strong relaxation and calm comes over me,” reports another dancer. “I have no worries of failure.”30 Like with pure play, there’s no winning or losing, success or failure, involved in pure artistic expression. While others might judge the dance or the poem to be “good” or “bad” according to some criterion or another, the creative experience of dancing or writing poetry is rewarding in and of itself.
As one nonprofessional dancer elegantly observed, when we give ourselves over to the dance, our mental afflictions temporarily evaporate, our sense of individual isolation dissolves, and we feel fully integrated with our surroundings:
While I dance, I cannot judge. I cannot hate. I cannot separate myself from life. I can only be joyful and whole. That is why I dance.31
Art imitates life, it is said; and it’s also said that life imitates art. From the point of view of karma yoga, we might also put forward the idea that life should imitate art, just as “work” should best be regarded as “play.”
“Art,” declared philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “is the proper task of life.”32 And to fully engage in life as art, the artist loses him- or herself in the ongoing process of creation.
Any activity can be made much more enjoyable and rewarding if it’s done for its own sake. Any act undertaken calmly and unbusily, free from the compulsion to act; any chore that’s reconceptualized as play; any pursuit that’s reconstituted as a kind of performance art—in sum, any endeavor we do with mindful unselfconsciousness, can get us into the flow.
I wish I could tell you that I knew of some quick and easy tricks for getting into the zone—especially when the activity does not seem that intrinsically magnetizing. It’s relatively easy for me to get into the flow when riding my motorcycle or playing in the waves at a beautiful beach. I too would be stoked to learn of some magic that would effortlessly launch me into action when it came to taking out the garbage, mowing the lawn, or doing my taxes.
But karma yoga, as we’ve mentioned before, is a form of “yoga” or “discipline,” and the main feature of this yoga is not physical. Karma yoga is a method that depends on mindfulness and awareness. The essence of this technique is continuously remembering our simple but always relevant formula:
Om. It’s like this now. Ah hum.
The only “trick” to karma yoga is to constantly recall this mantra. “This is what’s happening now; this is the task I have to do at present.” There’s no point in starting up the “if only” whine again. It’s like this now, so let’s just do it!
It is the complete acceptance of whatever the next scene is in the ever-changing drama of life that serves as the precondition for losing oneself in the play. Karma yoga is the discipline of integrating the “somebody self” into what we are doing in the here and now, and thereby assuming the guise of the “nobody self” when acting.
So among the other descriptors that characterize action for its own sake, the most important of them is egolessness:
Whether he is seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, walking, sleeping, or breathing, the disciplined one, who knows how things really are, would think, “I’m not doing anything at all.”33
It’s just the “seeing, hearing, touching, and so forth” that’s happening. The “I” that’s doing the “seeing, hearing, touching” is subsumed in the activity itself. “I’m not doing anything at all” because the self-consciousness required for awareness of the conceptualized “I” has been lost in complete engagement with what one is actually doing. The separation between the self and the world evaporates, and we become one with the life we are living.
• • •
Before concluding this discussion on “losing oneself in action,” it’s important to emphasize that the kind of “action for its own sake” we’re speaking of here is not a morally neutral exercise. There are better and worse ways to be “in the zone.” It’s totally conceivable, to take one grisly example, that an ax murderer could really get into the activity of chopping up his victims.
While our secular psychologists have extolled the “flow state” for the pleasant and rewarding feelings that naturally attend it, our spiritual teachers have always emphasized that it matters not only how we do what we do, but also what we do and why we do it.
The discipline of karma yoga assumes that we understand the “karma” part. It presupposes wisdom about how karma really works and the direction such wisdom moves us when determining what we will do with our lives. Most importantly, karma yoga assumes that we are clear about the why—the intention or motivation behind any activity. The more aware we are that it is the selfless motivation that creates a happier life, the happier our lives will be—in both the present and the future.
The ancient Stoic philosopher Seneca remarked, “The real compensation of a right action is inherent in having performed it.”34 Virtue, in other words, is its own reward.
But virtue is virtue only if it is its own reward. Virtuous actions pay off only to the extent that we forego the explicit and conscious expectation of future personal benefit and concentrate on doing what needs to be done—to the best of our ability and out of the best of intentions.
There is pleasure to be found in any activity that puts us in the flow. But the rewards of virtuous action done for its own sake are doubled. Selfless action creates the karmic causes for future happiness: what goes around will come around. But action guided by karma yoga also entails contentment with our present situation and the opportunities it provides for acting wisely and happily in the here and now.
“The one who abandons attachment to the results of action,” it says in the Bhagavad Gita, and “who is always satisfied and independent, does nothing at all, even when he is engaged in action.”35 Once again, with the loss of the “I,” it’s nobody who’s doing anything when action is done for its own sake.
When we practice going with the flow, guided by karma yoga, we obtain relief from incessant self-consciousness, the inner chatter of the “somebody self.” We are also at least temporarily liberated from the itchiness of the “if only” syndrome. And we are propelled for the length of our mindful unselfconsciousness into an experience of the Great Itchless State, the place where the “somebody self” stops cogitating and scheming (“I’m not doing anything at all”) and allows the “nobody self” to take over and play.
Action Plan: Who’s There When You’re in the Flow?
Make a list of the activities you engage in that bring you the most pleasure—gardening, going to the beach, playing with your children, dancing at the club, getting absorbed in a challenging and enjoyable task at work, or whatever yours might be. When you are fully engaged in these happiness-producing activities, are you self-consciously monitoring yourself, or are “you” not really there at all?
Then pay attention to the experience of doing what you truly enjoy next time you have the opportunity to do it. Check to see whether it is precisely the degree to which you can “lose yourself” in the activity that produces the joy and satisfaction you attribute to it.
I. “If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.” Matthew 10:39.
II. “In flow, a person is challenged to do her best and must constantly improve her skills. At the time, she doesn’t have the opportunity to reflect on what this means in terms of the self—if she did allow herself to become self-conscious, the experience could not have been very deep.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 65–66.
III. Compare Csikszentmihalyi’s fancier label for this same idea: “The term ‘autotelic’ derives from two Greek words, auto meaning ‘self’ and telos meaning ‘goal.’ It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.” Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 67.
IV. The earliest example of this argument in Sanskrit literature is found in Badarayana’s Vedantasutras, 2.1.32–33. The author answers the objection that God can’t be the creator of the world since God has no motive or reason to act (na prayojanavattvat, 2.13.2) by saying God does so “merely in play” (lokavattu lilakaivalyam).