Effortless Action – In Gita Verse 5.14 The embodied spirit, master of the city of his body, does not create activities, nor does he induce people to act, nor does he create the fruits of action. All this is enacted by the modes of material nature.
Krishna in this verse says – If you become part of the whole, there is no suffering. Suddenly you start floating with the stream. Your action has no desire in it. There is no effort in your action. Your action will be effortless.
You are no longer moving upstream. You are no longer even swimming because then there is effort. You are just floating with the stream and wherever it leads, there is the goal. You have dropped private goals, you have accepted the destiny of the whole. You live easily, you die easily. There is no resistance.
Resistance is suffering. And you cannot win against the whole. So every moment you resist, you fail, you suffer. It is the frustration of failure. You become helpless and hopeless and you feel it everywhere. There is a saying, “Man proposes and God disposes.” You cannot find a more stupid saying anywhere else.
God never disposes, but the moment you propose, you have created trouble for yourself because all propositions are private. That means that the Ganges does not want to fall in the Bay of Bengal, but in the Arabian Sea. It will have to fall into the Bay of Bengal because that is how the whole has proposed it already. Now the Ganges proposes, “I would like to fall into the Arabian Sea.” And when it is not succeeding to move toward the west and it goes on feeling that all efforts are futile and she is moving toward the east, the idea arises in the mind that man proposes and God disposes. Why should God bother to dispose? God has never disposed – anything, but the moment you propose, you have created the possibility to be disposed of.
Try to live without a goal and then see. Suffering disappears. Try to live without your ego and there is no more suffering. Suffering is an attitude, it is not an actuality. You fall ill. You immediately start fighting with the illness and suffering arises. If you accept it, suffering disappears. Then you know that God wills this, there must be some point in it. It must be needed for your growth.
Life is a blissful cosmic play, then why… Why is there suffering? There is suffering because you are still not part of the cosmic play. You have your own small drama and you want to play it. You are not part of the whole, you are trying to create a small world of your own. Every ego creates its own world, that’s the problem.
Float with the whole and suffering disappears. Suffering is symptomatic. It shows you must be fighting the whole, that’s all. You are not suffering for your sins committed in the past, you are suffering for the sin that you are continuing right now, committing right now. The sin is simple: to fight, not to accept.
The word sin is beautiful. It comes from a root which means “to separate.” The word sin itself comes from a root which means to separate. You are separate, that is the only sin. Once you are joined the sin disappears. The whole of Christianity depends on the concept of sin – that man is separated from God, then he is a sinner. The concept of Patanjali is just the opposite – opposite, but complementary. He insists on yoga – to be joined together. Sin and Yoga. Sin means to be separate; Yoga means to be joined together again. If you are joined together again with the whole, there is no suffering. The more you go far away from the whole, the more you suffer. The more you are, the more you will suffer.
Krishna says go inside of you and you will meet me, you will become whole. All the suffering is because you are going outside and not alert towards yourself. Living into the world is no issue but becoming unconscious towards yourself creates suffering, goal oriented etc. Krishna guides us not to renounce the work but renounce the ego and you will start floating with the stream. You have no goal to act but you will respond in this moment.
Tags: Effortless Action
