The Practice of Surrender: When Work Becomes Art in The Bhagavad Gita
The Story Behind the Story
Though it remains one of the most widely-read and influential texts in the world, The Bhagavad Gita remains a mysterious and somewhat misunderstood book in the West (especially America). This is understandable because it really isn’t a work unto itself, but rather a small chapter, or side-story, from the even larger Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, an ancient story which manages to be The Lord of the Rings, The Old Testament, The Iliad, and Marvel Comics in one fell swoop (and in several thousand pages). The epic follows the dramatic conflict between the sons of two brothers, Pandu and Dhrita-Rashta, who find themselves engaged in an endless game of one-upmanship and revenge. Pandu’s children are half-divine, as after a curse is placed on him by a sacred deer (a long story!), his two wives use a mantra (spell/blessing) to invoke the gods to sleep with them and bear five children. These children grow up to be the greatest heroes in the land, one of whom, Arjuna, becomes the protagonist of The Bhagavad Gita.
Meanwhile, Pandu dies and leaves the kingdom to his blind brother, Dhrita-Rashta, who has 100 (!) children, the most important of which, Duryodhana, is bitterly jealous of their acclaim and convinces his father to plot their demise. This goes on for thousands of pages, until the brothers finally return from a thirteen-year exile to have their revenge on their cousins in an epic winner-take-all conflict. Before the battle begins, Arjuna, in charge of a great battalion of warriors, sees his relatives and friends on the opposing side and loses heart. Ready to withdraw from the battle entirely, he is stopped by his charioteer, the great king Krishna, who is actually (as many people are in this epic) an incarnation of Vishnu, one of the three aspects of the eternal Brahman. Krishna urges him to reconsider his actions, since it is his duty to follow his dharma (duty) as a prince/warrior and fulfill the karma (fate) of the many warriors on the battlefield who have been marked for death and transfiguration.
The Bhagavad Gita probably takes place in the space of a few minutes, yet it’s a sweeping philosophical dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, covering every conceivable perspective about good and evil, heaven and hell, duty and justice, and life and death. Far from being a dry discourse on Hindu theology, the work reads more like an enlightened self-help manual, full of advice and poetry in equal measure.
Though repetitive in the way of most oral literature, the repetitions continually widen and deepen as the work continues, so that an idea that at first seems clever suddenly becomes cryptic, then contradictory. Even Arjuna often questions the wisdom given to him by God, and Krishna is always happy to explain it again, and again, and again, varying his approach with each iteration. Whether or not you read the book as a primer on Hinduism, or merely a philosophical exercise, it has something for everyone, and never fails to ask difficult questions that challenge and expand your faith.
Practicing Surrender
One of the most interesting passages occurs in the twelfth of the eighteen sections of the work, when Krishna is discussing the nature of the Yogi, or enlightened sage. Such people are few and far between, since surrendering to an omnipotent, invisible force requires a healthy dose of faith and imagination. Instead, most people contemplate the divine through a pantheon of gods, or through acts of love, or prayers and religious austerities. In other words, they find a medium that they can see and touch to translate the immanent (and unknowable) reality. Krishna says he loves anyone who seeks the truth, in whatever form; however, only those who can finally contemplate the ultimate truth, without need of intermediaries, can truly find liberation. As he explains,
“Set thy heart on me alone, and give to me thy understanding: thou shalt in truth live in me hereafter. But if thou art unable to rest thy mind on me, then seek to reach me by the practice of Yoga concentration. If thou art not able to practice concentration, consecrate all thy work to me. By merely doing actions in my service thou shalt attain perfection. And if even this thou art not able to do, then take refuge in devotion to me and surrender to me the fruit of all thy work — with the selfless devotion of a humble heart. (translated by Juan Mascaro).
In essence, Krishna seems to be saying if you can’t love the mere idea of me, find me through practicing yoga (not just the exercise, but any kind of selfless act). And if that doesn’t work, then at least live your life humbly and refuse all rewards in the name of God. In short, any work done with a pure heart and without the desire to look good, or gain wealth, or prestige, will glorify God and lead to salvation. But then he adds that though all forms of worship are good and useful, the one that stands supreme is surrender. Or, as Krishna says,
“for concentration is better than mere practice, and meditation is better than concentration; but higher than meditation is surrender in love of the fruit of one’s actions, for on surrender follows peace.”
It’s a clever progression of ideas, and one that doesn’t just relate to religious practice or spiritual enlightenment. Think about it: Practice (step 1); Concentration (step 2); Meditation (step 3); Surrender (step 4). Whenever you undertake any type of work, service, or vocation in life, there is a steep learning curve involved. Very few people are instantly ‘good’ at an activity, or at least not so good that they can’t stand to get better through practice and long experience. In the West, we generally assume that you practice something over and over until it becomes second nature. At that point, you develop a specific skill set, which makes you either a talented amateur or, with even more practice, a seasoned professional. It’s a two-step process that can be endlessly repeated as your skills need development and fine-tuning.
But what if we have it wrong? What if the process isn’t about sequential ‘steps’ as much as a discursive process of going from practice to surrender and back again? This isn’t wildly different than how we experience proficiency in the West, but it’s a different and perhaps more useful way of envisioning it. And through this process, we might better avoid the greatest danger of the proficient: falling into routine and losing passion for the activity when it becomes too ‘easy.’
When Practice Isn’t Enough
Take teaching, for example: there are great teachers who have a long and distinguished career behind them, but who appear less than motivated in the classroom. I once had a professor who was renowned as the greatest professor in the department. Yet she seemed profoundly bored by her students, and would often glide into class, sit at the seminar table, and after setting her books down beside her, announce, “Talk.” And would then wait for conversation to magically commence. Not surprisingly, most of us were stunned into an awed silence, not knowing what to spontaneously talk about. After 4–5 minutes, she would repeat her command, and if we continued to stare back at her in silence, she would pack up her books and say, “See you next week. Please be prepared.”
While some might commend her for pulling no punches and taking no shit, I wondered then and I still wonder now. Wasn’t she just practicing at being a professor? Not that she couldn’t run a compelling classroom (I had actually seen her do it before), but on this day, her engagement with her work never rose above the routine. In fact, we didn’t need to be in the class at all. She wasn’t trying to engage with us, or have a true conversation (or concentration) with us: she was just numbly rehearsing what she had done and see done a thousand times before, and giving up when we didn’t magically produce the shadows of her former lives.
I’m sure she was disappointed in us, and probably told her colleagues that students today just didn’t care like they used to. As if the nature of understanding, or education, had really transformed so much in her half century of experience. Did my generation really stop believing in the push-and-pull of academic conversation? Or were we the only ones who really showed up to have a conversation that day?
So many people show up to work, or to their careers, or even to their lives, only ready to practice. Now practice is good and useful, and necessary to learn to do anything with some degree of proficiency. But it can’t be the final plateau of accomplishment, nor can it be a place to rest on your laurels. Krishna says practice is good enough if you aren’t ready for concentration of meditation; but it should, with sufficient experience, lead you to the next stage of the process. One day, you should have practiced enough to feel sufficiently confident and ready to concentrate.
What would that mean as a teacher, to concentrate instead of practice? In terms of the scenario above, it would mean thinking about the goal of a specific lesson; various strategies to get that lesson across; even how to engage a diverse and sometimes disengaged body of students. Most teachers call his pedagogy, and it’s an important part of being a teacher at any level. Concentration uses the daily practice and experience of your job as a springboard to various stages of application. In essence, it imagines how you might take your skill set and apply it to the variables of an audience, which demands that you respond to situations as much (or more so) than create them. As a teacher, most of what you do involves shaping the class according to student understanding and engagement. Knowing the material inside and out is important, but it doesn’t alone make a successful class.
In college, I once had a teacher who pulled out laminated, yellowed note cards to read from during his lectures. These were his lectures from twenty or so years past, and they continued to serve him well into the present day. And to emphasize that, they continued to serve him, though not necessarily the students. We listened politely, patiently, but often curiously, wondering what role we had in the classroom, and why this needed to be a live performance. Not that lectures can’t be riveting and fulfilling for students, but even a good lecture has a level of concentration (pedagogy) that responds to the people in the classroom.
As Krishna explains to Arjuna, “concentration is better than mere practice,” since practice is good for one person, while concentration leads to a performance more suited for others. It’s also a step towards a selfless act, since the performer is no longer solely thinking of pleasing or playing for themselves (like a musician performing in private); they want to communicate with their audience and entertain, or educate the audience (and perhaps, do both).
The Yoga of Meditation
Yet it’s surprising how many people in their daily lives and jobs never go beyond practice. They can do something well, and that’s as far as it goes. Blind competence and ignorant performance. ‘Concentration’ forces you to look beyond yourself and see how your acts affect others, and add to the conversation of daily life. Anyone who takes their job/career or art/interests seriously can understand this step from performance to concentration, and many do it instinctively.
So what about the third step, meditation? What would the difference between concentration and meditation be, since, as Krishna says, “meditation is better than concentration.” This seems contradictory in terms of performance, since concentration considers how to share your work with others; meditation again seems private, like practice itself. In a sense this is true, since meditation suggests burrowing deep within, finding a silence that eludes performance or publicity of any kind.
In The Bhagavad Gita, Krishna often speaks of Yoga, which isn’t merely the discipline of bending yourself into pretzel shapes while focusing on breathing correctly. Rather, it’s the discipline of finding the balance within you that destroys the ‘self’ and quiets the mind. Yoga comes from the Sanskrit word “yuj,” which means to unite, and the idea is clear: uniting body and soul without the distracting commentary of the mind. As Krishna explains, “Day after day, let the Yogi practice the harmony of soul: in a secret place, in deep solitude, master of his mind, hoping for nothing, desiring nothing.” When we start out trying to master a job or skill, we initially want to be good at it, and more importantly, recognized for being good (so true for the artist and the musician!). Later, when we get good enough to impress people, other considerations come into play, such as communicating specific ideas and displaying various techniques.
For some, that’s as far as it goes, and for many, that’s enough. However, the third quality of meditation is an important evolution for anyone trying to practice their work/art, because it silences the ego and lets you do the thing without hope of reward. Not that you should give away your art for free or refuse a paycheck, of course. In terms of the performance, it’s the idea that performing an act should be an almost spiritual communion which is no longer concerned with right/wrong, good/bad, popular/unpopular. It’s acting as a means to reach something bigger than yourself, and by extension, to feel something larger than yourself and a single audience.
Many jazz musicians often say there are no wrong notes; every ‘wrong’ note is a possibility, and each one can be used to find new perspectives in a song or an instrument. In other disciplines, we call this “happy accidents.” Sometimes, the accidents come when your mind is too preoccupied with the task at hand, so you can’t let go and simply play the way you’ve practiced. But often, reaching a meditative state of ‘flow’ allows you to instinctively reach towards possibilities that were never possible in practice. A musician might find a new riff or modulation; a runner might find a deeper well of endurance to propel them forward; and a teacher might encounter a completely new way of teaching a work they’ve taught a dozen times before.
Meditation makes this possible because you’re no longer thinking in terms of how, why, when, etc. By silencing a mind that has already been shaped by months and years of practice, you allow your body to take over, trusting that it knows what to do, and your mind to sleep, quietly observing the proceedings from the sidelines (in essence, it’s when an artist becomes a member of the audience).
Meditation sounds abstract and forbidding to most people, who can only imagine someone sitting in lotus position with incense burning in all corners. And if that helps you, go for it. However, meditation doesn’t have to be ‘yoga’ or any type of traditional form of exercise or physical privation. It could simply be a deep state of trusting in the process, accepting mistakes, and being open to new opportunities and inspirations.
A related book, the Chinese Tao te Ching says that “difficulties are opportunities,” a concept that is hard to accept if we lead with practice or concentration. We then see difficulty as, well, difficult — something to overcome and get away from. What if instead we could embrace the difficulty and make it part of our own work and performance? Through meditation, that becomes possible, since we stop looking at anything as right or wrong, and indeed, are less concerned with how something is supposed to unfold.
Accepting Surrender
Which brings us to the final word of advice from Krishna when it comes to the yoga of work: “but higher than meditation is surrender in love of the fruit of one’s actions, for on surrender follows peace.” If surrender and meditation seem like close cousins, or even siblings, perhaps that’s exactly the point. Because ultimately, meditation is a form of practice, the deepest form of practice, since you’re trying to train your mind to assume the role of student rather than teacher. Surrendering in the Bhagavad Gita is the way we come to love God, and the truest form of worship. It has no beginning or end, no rewards or results, and just lives in an infinite, timeless present. Some people have called this “runner’s high,” when the world seems to stop and you feel transcendent, no longer a single person, lost in the moment and totally disconnected to your brain (or your fears and desires).
It’s a very difficult state to achieve, and impossible without moving through the necessary steps of practice, concentration, and meditation. But we often seen the great musicians and actors of our time experience this for our entertainment, making it look so natural and easy. It’s certainly not, even though it should be; after all, nothing is easier then realizing that love and work are the same thing, and that a single life is only part of a much larger and greater whole.
Of course, it’s one thing to think that, and another thing to truly, vigorously, accept it. We have to get lost in the moment of meditation, to slowly sever the link between desire and action, and simply perform. That’s why Krishna says that work is necessary, and all work is a form of sacrifice. You are giving yourself to others when you work, since someone besides yourself benefits from the energy or thing created. However, through work you can also sacrifice your very sense of self and become one in the dance of creation. It’s beautiful and awe-inspiring (and occasionally, frightening) to lose yourself in the creative act, even if the act is only reading or casually playing the guitar.
Yet everything is sacred, and everything is yoga; you can reach God with the simplest means and the purest heart. But you can’t do it all at once, and you can’t do it on command. Inevitably, these moments of transcendence fall back on themselves, and like a dream that ends too soon, you find yourself in bed again, face-to-face with the alarm clock.
As Krishna explains, “Among thousands of men perhaps one strives for perfection; and among thousands of those who strive perhaps one knows me in truth.” In other words, only a few guitarists — okay, one — can ever be Eddie Van Halen (and even he had some off nights!). None of us can rest in that divine moment of perfection, even though we can glimpse it, like the moon suddenly visible through patchy clouds. The process begins over and over again, from practice to concentration to meditation and, if we’re lucky, to a fleeting moment of surrender. But contrary to popular belief, getting there once doesn’t make it easier to get there again. The mind is always working against us, raising doubts and fears, or simply becoming lazy.
That’s where practice comes in, reminding us that every journey starts with the first step, even the interminable journey of inspiration. And even if we never make it to perfection, or surrender, or even a rewarding career, it’s worth trying to make our work sacred. Good work renews the world and renews ourselves. It gives us something to live for, to strive for, and it reminds us that we are always in a state of becoming; we are never there. At least, not in this life…but perhaps in the next one?
