So much of our stress begins long before anything happens. We carry a picture of how life should go, what our work should bring, and what effort should guarantee. Then when life moves another way, we call it failure. In this teaching on Bhagavad Gita 2:47, Gurudev brings us back to a deeper truth: we have a role in action, but not in results. When we loosen our grip on outcomes, we begin to meet life with more clarity, steadiness, and peace.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna expresses that while we have choice over our actions, we do not have choice over the results at any time. He directs that we are not the author of the results of action. Neither are we to be attached to the results of inaction.
Some people may say, “I will not do anything that way. I will not be caught in the results of my actions.” However, according to Krishna, you cannot prevent yourself from action if, when you are acting, it is driven by what you desire at the end of your journey in time. This journey happens through the medium of the mind. Everything that you do through the medium of the ego mind is done for the fulfillment of a desire.
When the seeker in you obtains what it is seeking in the future, the seeker and the sought, the subject and the object, the perceiver and the perceived merge together in that moment. This experience of the moment is temporary—and the temporary solution is an ongoing problem. When the average person engages with a guru or spiritual master, his or her journey is managed by the ego-mind. The ego-mind lives in perpetual conflict with what is present.
Whenever you are in conflict with who or what is present, you are either attracted or afraid. This means that your goal-oriented journey is necessarily conducted by the ego-mind that lives in perpetual conflict. The ego is preprogrammed by the past to be in continuous conflict-creating interaction with the Presence within.
Therefore, whenever someone or something in the present moment triggers your painful memories of the past through association, they resurface as reaction. This means that whenever your actions are driven by the ego-mind, they will invariably focus on the goal sought in the end. The ego-mind feeds upon the prana from the present moment for its sustenance and survival. Thus, the ego uses the energy of the divine presence that I AM as a means to an end.
In other words, the seductive ego uses the goal as its bait. It captures its own attention with the promise of successful fulfillment upon attaining the desired goal. It drives its own attention to be focused with the hope that the goal will be fulfilled in time, which is just a false promise.
However, that hope is interrupted with self-doubt and fear all along the way. The ego often attempts to cope with these through hard work and impatience, and by blaming anyone or anything that prevents it from ‘getting there.’
In this way, the ego-mind baits itself with false promises and hopes that keeps its attention on how to get what it wants in the end. For the ego, fulfillment comes from achieving and attaining the material objects it seeks in future. In the process of pursuing a successful journey in the dimension of time, the ego self exists in perpetual conflict with the timeless presence within. Every time it reacts to who or what is present along the way, it reinforces and bolsters itself with the parasympathetic energy of the sympathetic presence that I AM within.
The ego-mind that has separated itself from the timeless presence within lives in perpetual conflict, or continuous fight-or-flight reaction to who or what is present all along the way. Every time you identify with your reactive thoughts, you internally affirm, “What I think about myself is who I AM.” “What I think about people is who they are, and what I think of the world is what the world is.” Everything that you think about yourself, others, and the world is your own creation through the medium of your mind.
You no longer live in the world of reality; you live in a world that is individually created through the lens of your past. If you are having a hard time with yourself, others, or the world, it has no real existence. You made it up in your mind! You reactively perceived yourself rather than the reality presence that you are—and rather than who or what is present in the reality of Here and Now.
Every one of your experiences that you have had in your love life, family life, work life or social life is a reactively perceived and personally processed experience of reality that you faced in the moment. All of the reactively processed experiences you have ever had in the present as a result of your past have taken you farther away from the reality presence that you are.
Every time you react, you are hijacking the pranic energy of the parasympathetic nervous system from the presence of sympathetic choiceless awareness—and you are using it to animate the dead memory of the past. Your autonomic subconscious body functions through the sympathetic male presence that I AM. It animates the body through its female other half; we call it the parasympathetic nervous system.
In science this is called the autonomic nervous system. Yogis see it as the direct manifestation of the Oneness being Presence that I AM. It provides the life-giving impulses that are turned into life-giving functions through the parasympathetic energy as its medium.
However, the moment you identify yourself with “I AM my thoughts,” you instantly replace the I AM presence acting through the sympathetic nervous system with your thoughts as the doer and achiever—the ego self that functions in the dimension of time. This means that your body that was working in the dimension of the timeless Presence within the timebound body is now replaced by the timebound dimension—the only dimension in which the ego self exists.
Now your body that was functioning in a natural rhythm of polarity, where birth and death are in co-creative cosmic rhythm, is turned into a battleground of conflict-creating, stress-producing interactions that create hankering for love and fear of death. This is unique to human beings; it doesn’t exist anywhere else in materialized creation.
You might say that animals experience the fear of death. Although this is true, they do not have the psychological, ego-based fear of death that we humans have. They have an instinctive fear of death, rather than a personally created concept. Again, this is why Krishna says that you have a choice over your actions—but not over the results. If you are functioning through the medium of the mind in the dimension of time, driven by the ego- mind, you are constantly violating the divine presence that is working harmoniously within your body. As a result of this violation, the entire journey of the ego-mind becomes a perpetual body-mind conflict.
The body lives in the natural rhythm of the cosmic body of creation, where evolution happens through birth and death, and where birth and death function as a polarity. When you work exclusively for the end result, your mind is operating through fear of failure and continuously feeding it through strategic movement towards success in the future. Of course, the hope for success in the future is invariably accompanied by fear of failure.
Humans have evolved from subconscious, instinctive polarity to enjoy the self-conscious ego-mind that has the freedom to create in the future. In its early stage of evolution, the ego explores its creativity and human potential. Thus, this journey through the medium of the mind affords extraordinary progress in the objective, material world of creation. We call this science, technology, medicine, biology, and so forth.
The more you use the energy of the subconscious sympathetic presence through reactive interaction with the presence within, however, the more you introduce conflict and stress in the body. This certainly applies to the reactive ego-mind that acts through self-destructive mental and emotional attitudes in every aspect of life. In contrast, scientists use their minds to discover the secrets of the objective world of creation. Either way, such use of the divine energy ultimately moves you away from the undivided, omnipresent presence that you are within.
In scientific research, the ego can still be engaged in success at the end, but it must let go of its personal choice for or against what is happening from moment to moment. This turns scientific research into a co-creative polarity, where subject and object are in co-creative interaction. In contrast, when you are reactively interacting with the outer world, you are unable to accept the person or object as it is. Instead, you need or expect the object to be to your liking in order to accept it. If it is not to your pre-programmed liking, you will be resistant to it and afraid of it. In this way, your past is in perpetual conflict with who or what is present and the inner presence at the same time.
This teaching invites us to keep showing up fully without making our peace depend on what comes next. The more we release the need to control the result, the more present we become with the life that is already here. In that presence, effort becomes cleaner, the mind becomes quieter, and what once felt like failure begins to lose its hold.