INTRODUCTION

What do you fear most in this life?

What is your biggest fear? Right now.

When I pose that question to myself, the answer is this: I’m afraid that I’ll die without having lived fully. OK, I’m also afraid of pain—and of dying a difficult death. But that’s for later. Mostly, right now, I’m afraid that I may be missing some magnificent possibility. That perhaps I have not risked enough to find it. That maybe I’ve lived too safe a life.

Thomas Merton says, “What you fear is an indication of what you seek.”

In my case I think this is certainly true. And deep in middle age, I can feel the seeker in me become just ever-so-slightly desperate.

One of the ways this desperation shows up is in my reading. I’ve always been a reader, to be sure, but lately the temperature on the dial has been inched up. Something new: I’ve become a voracious reader. I am hungry to hear other people’s answers to my questions—particularly other people who might be experts in this problem of possibilities: Thomas Merton, Garry Wills, Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Karen Armstrong, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost. These are just a few exemplars of the struggle to live fully who tumble around in my head. What can they teach me about desperation and fulfillment?

And so, I read. Usually from about 8:00 to 11:00 every night—often propped up in bed, with an unruly stack of books perched on the table next to me. I read with pen in hand, and have lively conversations with my authors. I scribble in margins; I make exclamation points and stars; I draw arrows from one page to another, tracking arguments.

Every now and then, in my quest for answers, I stumble across a sentence that stands up and shouts at me from the page. Here is a sentence I read recently in the pages of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

What?

I sat up in bed. I circled the whole sentence.

If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.

I have to admit that the second phrase of the sentence hit me the hardest. It will destroy me?

In retrospect, I realize that I felt the punch of that second phrase only because I had genuinely experienced moments of the first.

I do know the experience of bringing forth what is within me. For most of my life, these bringing-forth moments have been fleeting. But twice I’ve had the experience sustained over a period of years. Both times this happened while I was writing a book. Writing required everything I had, and then some. It flayed me alive. But I kept coming back again and again. I kept bringing forth the best that was in me. I can’t say whether the books that came forth are good or not. Some say yes and some say no. It doesn’t matter. It seems that it was the effort required to bring them forth itself that saved me. I noticed later that having written them did not really bring me squat, even though most people—including myself—thought that it should.

I have friends who are right now bringing forth what is within them. Anyone can see it in their faces. These are people who leap out of bed in the morning. They are digging down. Connecting with their own particular genius, and bringing it into the world. They are bringing forth their point of view, their idiosyncratic wisdom. They are living out their vocations. And let me tell you, they are lit up.

This way of lit-up living can happen in any sphere. Not a single one of my lit-up friends is writing a book, by the way. One of my friends, Mark, is busy building a new institution—an alternative prep school. My friend Sandy is mastering the art of nursing hospice patients. (Can you imagine leaping out of bed in the morning to confront the dying? She does. And actually, I can imagine it.) One of my friends is busy mastering Beethoven’s string quartets. Day and night she practices. My friend David is on fire—creating an entirely new genre of landscape painting. Alan is mastering the art of gardening and just, really, the art of living life as a naturalist. My sister Arlie is mastering the to-me-incomprehensible task of parenting an adolescent—but with such relish you cannot believe it.

Have you had periods in life when you leapt out of bed in the morning to embrace your day? Once this happens to you, once you live this way, even for a few hours, you will never really be satisfied with any other way of living. Everything else will seem vaguely wan and gray. Everything else will seem, as Henry David Thoreau said, like “a distraction.”

Maybe you’re saying to yourself: It’s not that black-and-white. You can’t live this way all the time. Maybe this guy (me) is just in a dry period—something like what the Christian saints called “a desert experience.” Maybe these dry periods are just as productive, really—and every bit as necessary—as the wet periods. Maybe you can’t even dream of bringing forth what is within you without a requisite amount of aridity.

This is a good point. Besides, it is impossible to tell from the outside who is and who is not “bringing forth what is within them.” And, in truth, leaping out of bed in the morning really has very little to do with it.

But still. There is a vast difference between the desert experience of the saints and watching endless reruns on TV, isn’t there?

But for now, here’s an experiment. Stop reading for a minute, and ask yourself these questions: Am I living fully right now? Am I bringing forth everything I can bring forth? Am I digging down into that ineffable inner treasure-house that I know is in there? That trove of genius? Am I living my life’s calling? Am I willing to go to any lengths to offer my genius to the world?

For me, truthfully, when I pose these questions to myself, I hear myself say (as I shuffle from one foot to the other), “Well, yes, I’m just in the process of instituting a new plan that will bring me fully alive again.” Hmm. That’s a no, isn’t it? But why is it a no for me just now? And what can I do about it? Do I have any control over these things? Is it just, well, karma?

I see my own concerns about fulfillment played out nearly every day of my professional life. I work at one of the largest holistic retreat centers in America—the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. We see more than 35,000 people a year here in our sprawling, former-Jesuit monastery perched high up in the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. Our guests come for various kinds of retreats: yoga, meditation, self-inquiry, couples’ work, healthy living. And almost every single one of them comes here in some phase of the mission to find this secret, hidden, inner possibility spoken of in the Gospel of Thomas.

A true story: Whenever I teach our program participants here at Kripalu, I begin by asking them to name what they’ve come for. Seventy-five percent say it straight out: “I want to come home to my true self.” Over and over again in almost those exact words. “To come home to my true self.” Where have these people been? The same place I’ve been, lately, I guess: Unclear. Confused. Paralyzed by doubt. Gliding. Drifting. Mesmerized by the old tried-and-true distractions. (And maybe some of us have truly been in the desert.)

Most of our guests come to a yoga retreat because they know by now that the yoga tradition is almost entirely concerned—obsessed, really—with the problem of living a fulfilled life. The yoga tradition is a virtual catalog of the various methods human beings have discovered over the past 3,000 years to function on all cylinders. This includes everything from the world’s weirdest diets to the most sublime forms of prayer and meditation—and ecstatic experience. One of the greatest archetypes of the yoga tradition is the jivan mukta—the soul awake in this lifetime. The soul awake. I like this aspect of yoga, because it means awake in this lifetime—not in some afterlife, or heavenly realm, or exalted mental state. And so these contemporary seekers come to yoga, seeking—as I did, and do—inspiration for living.

The yoga tradition is very, very interested in the idea of an inner possibility harbored within every human soul. Yogis insist that every single human being has a unique vocation. They call this dharma. Dharma is a potent Sanskrit word that is packed tight with meaning, like one of those little sponge animals that expands to six times its original size when you add water. Dharma means, variously, “path,” “teaching,” or “law.” For our purposes in this book it will mean primarily “vocation,” or “sacred duty.” It means, most of all—and in all cases—truth. Yogis believe that our greatest responsibility in life is to this inner possibility—this dharma—and they believe that every human being’s duty is to utterly, fully, and completely embody his own idiosyncratic dharma.

Most of the people I teach here at Kripalu catch on to the idea of dharma right away. They often say that they feel comforted that someone has taken the trouble to give a name to this urgent and irksome call that has flashed in and out of their brain for so long, like a lamp with a bad connection.

Not only did yogis name this hidden inner genius, but they created a detailed method for fulfilling it. In fact, the ancient treatise in which this method is spelled out is hands down the most important and well-loved scripture in the world of yoga.

I am referring, of course, to the 2,000-year-old treatise on yoga called the Bhagavad Gita, or Song of God. It is the world’s greatest scripture on dharma.

In India, every villager knows the story of the Gita. It is the story of the warrior Arjuna and his divine mentor, Krishna. Arjuna is supposedly the greatest warrior of his time, but really, he is just astonishingly like we are: neurotic as hell, and full of every doubt and fear you can imagine. The Gita tells how Krishna taught Arjuna—even Arjuna—to embrace his sacred vocation. In India, Krishna and Arjuna are pictured everywhere and their story is played out in temple carvings and icons of every variety, so even illiterate folk know the tale. For two thousand years, people have read or chanted the Gita daily, just as we read our Bible, or Torah, or Koran. The Gita is the one book Gandhi took with him to prison, and one of the few that Henry David Thoreau took to Walden Pond.

The first time I heard the story of Krishna and Arjuna was in a World Lit course in college. I read the book. I listened to all the lectures. And I probably even did well in the class. But quite honestly I never got what all the fuss was about. All that has changed. Deep in middle age, I get it. Reading a book like this is as important to me as breathing oxygen.

The Bhagavad Gita expounds an unequaled method for bringing forth dharma. At the beginning of the story, Arjuna is paralyzed by doubt. Like Hamlet, he cannot act. Arjuna has tried to live a good life up to this point—has tried to live out his warrior-dharma as best he can. But at the beginning of our story, the world has momentarily crushed him. Luckily for Arjuna, Krishna is at his side at the very moment of that crunch. The handsome Krishna is disguised as a charioteer, and he becomes Arjuna’s spiritual teacher, his psychoanalyst, his coach, his goad, his mentor. But we—the reader—know that Krishna is actually none other than God.

As the tale opens, our friend Arjuna has collapsed onto the floor of his chariot. Arjuna is undone by the doubts and conflicts he faces about his own actions—his own calling—on the field of a great battle that is about to be engaged. “What am I really called to do in this circumstance?” he asks Krishna. “Do I fight this battle, or not?” How do I act in such a way that I do not destroy my own soul and the soul of the world? How do I act in such a way that I fulfill my dharma?

The Bhagavad Gita is a brilliant teaching on the problems of doing. There is so much talk these days about being. (And for good reason.) But what a treat to discover a great scripture about doing. “All that is worthwhile,” says the great Jesuit scholar and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, “is action.” In fact, there is no being in this world without doing. Let’s get real: Most of our lives are spent in doing. From the point of view of the Gita, the most sublime kind of doing is really a perfect expression of authentic being. Does this sound a little abstract? It will become very concrete as we sort through the argument of the Gita.

Arjuna has many excellent questions for Krishna—questions to which we, too, would like answers: Who am I, for God’s sake? And how can I authentically express all that I truly am?

Over the course of eighteen enchanting chapters, Krishna and Arjuna sort through these questions. Krishna gives some awesome talks about action versus inaction, about doubt and faith, about knowledge and love. Arjuna hedges his way from chapter to chapter, until about halfway through the book, when Krishna at last has to really get stern with him. In the famous Chapter Eleven, Krishna pulls out his big guns—and one of the world’s most stunning theophanies explodes into the consciousness of a bewildered Arjuna. Now Arjuna really understands who he is messing with. From here on out tumble some of the world’s most inspiring teachings about devotion, love, work, and duty.

By the end of the book, these two friends have sorted out the Truth. We readers feel sorted out, too.

If you look around, you might notice that suddenly you’re seeing the Bhagavad Gita everywhere. Everyone still reads it in World Lit courses, naturally. But more than that. I’ve heard that it is rapidly replacing The Art of War on the bookshelves of corporate executives.

I hope this is true. It indicates that we’re finally beginning to bring spiritual practice into the center of our everyday lives—moving away from the misapprehension that spiritual life only happens in church, or on the meditation cushion, or on retreat. Or that full-time spiritual pursuits are strictly the province of those living a so-called religious life. No. Arjuna is the archetype of the spiritual man in action.

In fact, the Bhagavad Gita was written precisely to show us how to make the world of action (the marketplace, the workplace, the family) an arena for spiritual development. Indeed, it portrays the “battlefield” of life—real life, everyday life—as the most potent venue for transformation.

Reading the Gita brings into stark relief a misapprehension we have about our everyday lives—a mistaken belief about the nature of fulfillment itself. Our fantasies about fulfillment often center around dreams of wealth, power, fame, and leisure. In these fantasies, a fulfilling life is one in which we acquire so much freedom and leisure that we no longer have to work and strive. Finally, once we’ve worked most of our lives to extricate ourselves from the demands of ordinary life, we can relax by our own personally monogrammed swimming pool—with the gates of our country-club community firmly locked behind us—and there, at last, find true happiness, and real fulfillment, perhaps contemplating the clear blue sky.

The teachings of the Gita point to a much more interesting truth: People actually feel happiest and most fulfilled when meeting the challenge of their dharma in the world, when bringing highly concentrated effort to some compelling activity for which they have a true calling. For most of us this means our work in the world. And by work, of course, I do not mean only “job.” For many of us—as for Arjuna—the challenges of our vocation in the world require the development of a profound degree of mastery. Those who have had a taste of this kind of mastery have experienced moments when effort becomes effortless: joyful, gifted, and unbounded. These moments of effortless effort are so sublime that they draw us even more deeply into the possibilities of our vocations. At the end of life, most of us will find that we have felt most filled up by the challenges and successful struggles for mastery, creativity, and full expression of our dharma in the world. Fulfillment happens not in retreat from the world, but in advance—and profound engagement.

The two-thousand-year-old Bhagavad Gita brings us a series of surprising principles for living an optimal life, and for transforming skillful action into spiritual practice.

In 2005, I became director of a new institute at Kripalu, called The Institute for Extraordinary Living. Our goal was to do rigorous scientific research on fulfillment—to understand skillful living of the Gita brand and to examine the ways in which it may show up in our time. Are there some people who really do live their dharma authentically, and in a fulfilling fashion? Do we know them? Are there any characteristics that consistently mark their lives? Do these people, in fact, jump out of bed in the morning? What might Krishna and Arjuna’s teachings on dharma mean for us?

Our quest to understand these things has led me to an intensive study of so-called “great lives”—the lives of those who have obviously brought forth their genius into the world. You’ve heard briefly from a few of these characters already in this introduction—Thoreau, de Chardin, Merton—and you’ll hear much more from them and many other such “greats” throughout the course of this book. I have learned a tremendous amount from my study of these well-known exemplars of dharma, including the very reassuring fact that the whole lot of them had just as many doubts and neuroses and fears as the rest of us. Often more.

Along the way, I have looked, too, at what we might call “ordinary lives.” You and me. And what a bonfire of inspiration came from this study of ordinary lives. It turns out that among so-called ordinary lives, there are many, many great ones. Indeed, for me there is no longer really any distinction at all between great lives and ordinary lives.

I must admit that this surprised me at first. If it surprises you as well, I suggest that you look carefully about your own neighborhood. There are people all around you right now living out their vocations—strange vocations you never even imagined. It is not so easy to tell from the outside whether someone is fully engaged in his dharma. This is because dharma draws forth an ardency so deep—and sometimes so secret—that it often cannot be detected by ordinary eyes. Perhaps the neighbor who you think is profoundly strange because he stays inside and collects stamps and sometimes forgets to put out his garbage and doesn’t come to the annual block party—perhaps he is utterly involved in his sacred calling. Perhaps his single-minded efforts have lifted stamp collecting to an entirely new level of genius. Perhaps he has penetrated the mystery of stamps, or is about to do so. Inside he glows, but you cannot see it. But I tell you this: You are more likely to have X-ray eyes for such things if you are also pursuing your own dharma with the same ardency.

And this brings us to you: Do you fear that you may have missed the boat? That you’ve become unmoored from your true calling and are drifting aimlessly out to sea?

Here is another surprise that may buoy you up. Most of the ordinary people whom I have studied, when first confronted with the notion of dharma, imagined that for them to claim their dharma probably meant inventing an entirely new life. Giving up their job selling insurance and moving to Paris to paint. Quitting their job as a hospice nurse and sailing around the world solo. Not so. As it turns out, most people are already living very close to their dharma. Really. Within spitting range. What is the problem, then? These same people, close as they are to the deepest mystery of dharma, know very little about it. They don’t name it. They don’t own it. They don’t live it intentionally. Their own sacred calling is hiding in plain sight. They keep just missing it. And, as we will see, when it comes to dharma, missing by an inch is as good as missing by a mile. Aim is everything.

Come with me, then, and with my fellow students of fulfillment as we tell the story of Krishna and Arjuna, and as we tell stories of great lives that vividly reflect the principles of living as they are laid out in the Bhagavad Gita. Bring your fears and neuroses and doubts; do not leave that excellent fodder behind. Bring your desperation and your most ardent wishes for a full life. Gather ’round the fire with the rest of us ordinary human beings, as we investigate the not-so-far-fetched possibility of becoming fully alive.