The Bhagavad Gita’s Approach to Performance Improvement

Own Scientist

One thing has gone wrong: they can depend on knowledge. They need not become knowers, they can depend on knowledge. They have found a secondhand way. The firsthand way needs courage. The firsthand way, knowing, only few people can afford – the adventurers, people who go beyond the ordinary path where crowds move, people who take small footpaths into the jungle of the unknowable. The danger is they may get lost. The risk is high.

When you can get second-hand knowledge, why bother? You can just sit in your chair. You can go to the library or to the university, you can collect information. You can make a big pile of information and sit on top of it. Through knowledge your memory becomes bigger and bigger, but your intelligence does not become bigger. Sometimes it happens when you don’t know much, when you are not very knowledgeable, that you will have to be intelligent in some moments.

Krishna is saying to Arjuna to come out of your desire, lust you need to be knower and not knowledgeable. He does not refuse the knowledge but he refuses to stick with the knowledge and not allowing you to become knower from the knowledge. Remember that we all have to pass through the knowledge but from that knowledge if we experiment and create our own understanding then desire cannot cover the intelligence. Like scientists take all the objects as resources and for them the outcome is also their resources, as individuals we all have to work on our subjective world, as a watcher of our own self 24X7. Then we become our own scientist of subjectivity, and by a watcher of our subjectivity we find anger, desire, hyperness, etc will just disappear from our life. This is a blissful state of ours. In this state we don’t become bewildered.

Be Ordinary

Life has no beginning and no end. It is eternity, and that is God’s gift. God has given himself in the gift, because life is God. All that is needed is a certain awakening in your heart so you can see it, feel it, taste it, touch it. The gift has been waiting and waiting for you for thousands of years, but you have been asleep, as everybody has been.

One has to become an awakening. One h…as to be nothing but a great effort to wake yourself up. Nobody else can do it for you. If you don’t cooperate there is no possibility. Somebody can shake you but you can go on sleeping, you can turn over. Somebody can shake you but you can start dreaming that somebody is shaking you.

Unless you want to wake up, unless an intense longing to wake up arises in you, no possible help can be given from the outside. But if you want to be awakened then all possible help is available. It cannot be imposed on you; your freedom cannot be interfered with. With your cooperation the thing is very simple… so simple that I say: Snap your fingers, slap your face, and wake up!

Just as an experiment, let us try and move our hand with awareness. We will immediately realise that the particular moment was full of grace. The unawareness or sleep is gone, we are now fully awake, and this aware state is what the Buddha called ‘wakefulness’, and it is this wakefulness that is the way to living life.