by Stephen Cope
This very principle was often invoked by the German philosopher Goethe, and it was vividly articulated by the English explorer W. A. Murray when he was writing about his own dharma choices—particularly his decision to undertake an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. He wrote: “Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.”
Murray continues: “Concerning all acts of initiative, and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s concepts: ‘Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, Begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.’ ”
Boldness has magic in it. Frost understood this principle. He saw that his decision to take the leap, to move to England, to fully commit to poetry, had given birth to some entirely new energy and creativity in himself. Most likely everyone who has committed himself to dharma has independently discovered this same phenomenon.
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Several years ago, I was in New York raising money for our Institute. Thomas, one of my board members, a prominent doctor, asked me to join him briefly at a cocktail party before we headed off for a business dinner. I arrived at a stunning penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And I was completely unaware, until I saw the sign on the door, that I had just arrived at the New York apartment of my long-absent friend Ethan. I could barely breathe as we entered the foyer.
I hadn’t seen Ethan in fifteen years. But there he was. I saw him immediately from across the room, and he looked remarkably the same as he had the last time I’d seen him. Handsome. Tanned. And holding forth loudly to a group of suited men and women. He seemed angry. I quickly had the sinking feeling that something was off here. Was Ethan drunk? He was publicly berating one of the younger men in the group, who turned out to be one of his young associates. Everyone was embarrassed. Where was Betts, I wondered? What in the world was going on?
Ethan didn’t recognize me at first. Twenty years had made a difference in my appearance. I realized that if I did not introduce myself, Ethan would never know I was there. I wondered for a moment if I wanted to “meet” him again, especially under these awkward circumstances.
I did introduce myself. Ethan was stiff in response, and made an awkward joke to the group. I was stunned. There was no warmth. He quickly made a comment about getting together, but I doubted that I would hear from him.
I was shaking—with trauma or with anger, I don’t know which. Thomas took me aside and told me the story: Ethan had not practiced medicine for many years—relying instead on the considerable fortune that Betts had inherited from her father, and dedicating his life to golf and to making the rounds of New York society. Now the couple was involved in a very public and very nasty divorce. But all of that aside, confessed Thomas, Ethan had long ago become a boor—a trait apparently fueled by too much alcohol. And we had caught him well into his cups that night.
As I said good-bye to Ethan, I was barely breathing. Just for a moment, he seemed to crack. Did I see some trace of embarrassment? There was something in his eyes, certainly.
I felt as though I had just been part of a scene from a bad movie. How ever had Ethan ended up like this? My board member friend and I went out for a couple of drinks, and then on to dinner. We talked late into the night, examining the trajectory of our lives. I told him of the Ethan I had known in college. Of the decisions I had been witness to—decisions that in retrospect may have led Ethan away from his authentic calling.
A life is built on a series of small course corrections—small choices that add up to something mammoth. What string of fateful decisions had landed Ethan so very far from home?
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Robert Frost’s archetypal poems are often about a journey: A lone wanderer is lost in a swamp, untethered from his inner moorings. How shall he decide which direction to go? How will he find his way out of the swamp? A hiker is caught on the side of a mountain in a storm. Should he continue on to the summit or turn back? In these poetic treks through the inner wilderness, almost every moment is a crossroads. The hiker must pay close attention—must listen, must look, must feel. The choices made at each crossroads are cumulative—and irreversible.
Looking back at his life with the perspective of old age, Robert Frost saw with some satisfaction the series of decisions that led to his fulfillment as a poet. I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. He saw clearly how each decision marked a deeper commitment of his time, energy, and life force to the project of his poetry. With each step he cut off other options. Where did he find the courage?
Frost’s genius—like Thoreau’s, like Goodall’s, like Whitman’s—was at least in part his willingness to create the right conditions for his dharma to issue forth. His dharma required a farm—and so he bought one. His dharma required him to give up teaching—and so he relinquished it. His dharma required a period of intense work in England—and so he went.
Like Frost’s, our job is to make choices that create the right conditions for dharma to flourish. The Gift is indestructible. It is a seed. We are not required to be God. We are not required to create the seed. Only to plant it wisely and well.
SIX
Susan B. Anthony: Unify!
In the last chapter we examined the ways in which life choices give birth to dharma. We saw how Robert Frost—through the cumulative effect of small but critical life decisions—became the midwife of his own dharma. Now we observe a bold progression: Having first named and claimed our dharma, we next begin to systematically organize all of our life’s energies around our calling. The dharma gradually becomes a point of radiance that focuses and unites our life force. Our lives begin to move into orbit around our vocation.
The unification of life’s energies around dharma is a central pillar of Krishna’s teaching to Arjuna. Krishna teaches that one must attain “singleness of purpose.” “For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless,” he exhorts Arjuna (as you will recall). For the mind that is “disunited,” he says, life is full of suffering. Indeed, under such conditions of disunity, it becomes impossible to bring forth dharma at all. Rather, says Krishna, “The wise [must] unify their consciousness.” In this chapter we will explore the stunning possibilities of the unified mind.
Certain components of this “unified mind” have been exhaustively commented upon in the literature of optimal living. Many teachers have chosen to use the word “focus”—as I have at times in this book—and have noted that this selfsame focus is a universal quality of successful lives. Steven Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, cites focus as an essential condition of life mastery. “Winners focus,” says author Sydney Harris, “losers spray.”
But the Bhagavad Gita gives us a new piece of this puzzle. Not just any old focus will do. Life’s energies are most fruitfully focused around dharma. Krishna is concerned with the unification of thoughts, words, and actions in alignment with our soul’s highest calling.
To organize life’s energies around anything less sublime than our true nature is to still be split—separated from Self. No matter how much focus we may bring to any task, if the task is not our real vocation we will still be haunted by the suffering of doubt, and the internal agony of division. (There it is again: We cannot be anyone we want to be.)
If you have had the experience of Unity of Action, even briefly, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Perhaps once in your life, for just a few months, or weeks, or days, you knew what you were really about. You knew what you had to do, and you did it with passion—with every
thing you had. You discovered the magic of aim! Somehow, you managed to organize everything in your life to support your aim. Your life, just briefly, was a guided missile of dharma. Have you had this experience?
I once had an experience of this “unified mind” off and on over the course of about four years. It was the most exhilarating four years of my life. I was writing my first book. The Kripalu Center had gone into breakdown. We had fired our spiritual director in the midst of the seemingly inevitable scandal, and everything fell apart around us. The halls were empty of guests. The immense brick building on the hill was a ghost town. Overnight, I had acquired the leisure of Robert Frost on his Derry farm. And I knew what I had to do. I had to write.
For four years, after this surprising bolt of certitude, my life was organized around writing. I rented a quiet office off campus so that I wouldn’t be distracted. There was no phone in the office. No Internet on the computer. I did my best to sleep well, to wake early, and to eat simply so that my head would be clear each morning when I arrived at the office. Every morning, from 8 to 11:30, I wrote.
The focus was exhilarating. For the first time in my life, everything was lined up around a clear dharma assignment. And I discovered a secret: Bringing forth what is within you is mostly about creating the right conditions. These conditions themselves give birth to dharma. The farmer tills the soil, waters, fertilizes, and weeds. The plant, mystically, does its own growing. I had a motto: Suit up and show up. That’s all I had to do! Show up every morning in the best possible shape for writing. I was an Olympic athlete in training. I had for once in my life become that guy who jumps out of bed in the morning.
Once you’ve had a taste of Unity in Action, nothing else seems quite like living fully.
If you look closely, you will see that the process of “unification of action” is exemplified in every life we have looked at so far. It is there in Goodall, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost. But we are going to add a new life here that exemplifies it in stunning fashion. This is the surprising life of Susan B. Anthony. Here is a story of the way in which a unified life changes not only the person living it, but the whole world.
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No great character in American history has been more ill-served by stereotyping, lame biographies, and stuffy hagiography than Susan B. Anthony, the great nineteenth-century champion of women’s rights. This magnificent woman is generally seen as a wizened, tight-lipped old do-gooder who probably hated men, sex, and most of the normal pleasures of life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anthony was a charming, eloquent, and commanding woman who routinely faced down halls of boorish, rude, and obstinate men—and who almost single-handedly created the national strategy that led to the enfranchisement of women. She loved passionately, she worked single-mindedly, and she savored the pleasures of life.
At her funeral in 1906, during a raging blizzard in upstate New York, over 10,000 mourners passed by her flag-draped coffin to pay their respects. Telegrams came in from great world leaders. She was pronounced “the American Moses” from pulpits around the country. Newspapers called her “the American Joan of Arc.”
How do we account for such a life? Anthony began life as a shy Quaker girl—given to melancholy, “fragility,” and extreme self-doubt. She spent her early years under the care of a clinically depressed mother. As a child, Susan practiced “piety” and “humility”—being seen but not heard, as befitted the prevailing view of the well-brought-up American girl. She was clearly shy. She was probably depressed. How, then, did she become transformed into one of the most powerful women in American history? How did she become—as many in her day called her—The Napoleon of the Women’s Rights Movement?
I’m sure you’ve guessed the answer: She found her dharma and did it on purpose.
Susan B. Anthony began to sniff out her life’s vocation in her late teens. From that point on, hers is a story of the power of vocation itself to transform personality—of dharma pulling toward its own realization. It is the story of a woman who understood her call and surrendered to it. Watch closely as I tell the story, and you will see Anthony’s understanding of her own dharma come into focus—like a telescope at first only hazily focused on a distant star—and then in a series of consecutive corrections become sharper and clearer. Eventually the star—the dharma—comes in vividly, brilliantly, nuanced, alive.
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In order to appreciate Susan B. Anthony’s dharma story, we must first come to grips with the social and legal position of women in mid-nineteenth-century America. This is not going to be fun. The extent of women’s disempowerment during that era—their almost total subjugation to men—is hard for us to wrap our heads around. Women living in America in the mid-1800s were the legal property of their husbands. A married woman had no right to property, no right to buy and sell real estate in her own name, no right to bequeath any property whatsoever to an heir. A married woman of the time had no right even to her own children. And, needless to say, she had no right to the vote.
As a result of her impoverished legal standing, a woman of that time lived in almost complete economic dependence upon her husband—or if she were “unfortunate” enough not to have a husband, upon her family. There were few roles for women outside the home. There was no social sphere in which women could come together to think and plan and dream on their own behalf. Indeed, outside the home women had very little independent existence whatsoever.
A telling story: Many women’s gravestones at this time were etched with a revealing epitaph: “Here lies Mary Jones, relict of the late Josiah Jones.” Relict? A relict is, of course, the term used to refer to the surviving remnant of a natural phenomenon—or a surviving shard of an artifact. It is simply what is left over when the primary object is gone.
Women were in bondage of the most insidious sort—and there were no ready escape hatches from this social and political imprisonment. They had only two choices: marriage (which still amounted to legal serfdom), or spinsterhood (and the shame, loss of social esteem, and potential impoverishment that came with that “degrading station.”)
Into such a world was Susan B. Anthony born.
Susan, however, was more fortunate than most. She was born a Quaker. As such, she found herself in a vastly different social milieu than other American girls—a world with at least a window open to other possibilities. Her family believed in absolute equality of the sexes. Her father was a staunch abolitionist, fighting for the emancipation of slaves in the decades just before the Civil War. And Susan was surrounded in her Quaker world by independent-thinking women. Independent-thinking women, and I hasten to say a certain brand of independent-thinking women—to wit: schoolteachers.
Schoolteachers were the role models for freedom-craving women of the day. There were very few roles in which a woman could claim social and economic independence, but teaching was one of them. Young Susan B. Anthony was impressed with the intelligence, education, and relative social autonomy of the teachers with whom she came into contact. From a young age, she knew only that she wanted to be like these women. And so, she became a teacher.
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As young Susan B. Anthony educated herself about the world around her, she became aware of a paradox. She was living smack in the center of a culture shaped by Jacksonian democracy—a culture in which the self-made man was the national ideal. Everywhere there was talk of Emerson’s spirit of self-reliance. People were reading Thoreau’s new ideas about self-realization—many of them taken directly from the Bhagavad Gita. “Man” was endowed with inalienable natural rights, it was believed, and it was his right to grow toward his unlimited potential. Anyone could grow up to be president!
Anyone, of course, except a woman. Susan became aware of the radical extent to which women were left out of this world of possibility. Man was made for himself—it was often said—and woman for man! “I was not made for man,” Anthony would later declare flatly. “I was made for God. And I was made for myself.”
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By the time she reached young adulthood, Susan B. Anthony was aware that she had two choices: She could marry. Or she could be an old maid. Anthony would have neither. She was determined to reject the choice as society had defined it. Indeed she would stand the choices on their head. She would not marry, and she would make of the position of old maid something creative and new. Even in her midtwenties, Anthony had the spirit to declare: “These old Bachelors are nothing but a nuisance to a society but an Old Maid is the cleverest creature I ever saw.”
By the age of twenty-five, Susan B. Anthony had made a conscious choice to remain single. “When I am crowned with all the rights, privileges, and immunities of a citizen,” she declared, “I may give some consideration to this social institution [marriage]; but until then I must concentrate all of my energies on the enfranchisement of my own sex.”
This was Susan B. Anthony’s first dharma declaration. By her late twenties she had fully declared herself. I must concentrate all of my energies on the enfranchisement of my own sex! She had named and claimed her calling. Here is concentration of purpose. This declaration, as we shall see, unified her energy in extraordinary ways.
Naming her dharma allowed Susan to connect her life energy with an idea that was already very much in the atmosphere. It was the fantastic idea of the New True Woman. This idea was being written about in England, particularly in novels by Charlotte Brontë, and in poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Their riveting characters, Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh, were New True Women of the type Susan had already imagined. Charlotte Brontë, dreaming of a powerful, but “plain and true” woman, had promised her sister Emily, “I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.” And voilà!: Jane Eyre!—the diminutive heroine who would be an inspiration to Anthony and millions of other men and women. Susan B. Anthony placed pictures of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning over her bureau, and they would remain there for the rest of her life. At her request, these same pictures would hang on the wall above her coffin at her wake.