The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  Both Lonny’s and Corot’s stories help us make sense of mastery as heightened pattern recognition. The process of pattern recognition continues to deepen throughout the career of a master, until the more obvious surface patterns dissolve to reveal even more subtle patterns underneath. Later in his life, Thoreau saw so deeply into summer’s shades and movements that he began to perceive the beginnings of autumn in the middle of the summer. He could tell you the precise day in midsummer when autumn began.

  An understanding of this process is important because it helps us appreciate the profound pleasure of mastery, and why it leads to a sense of fulfillment in life. The pleasures of mastery are not what we usually assume them to be. They do not center around the control of one’s particular domain—an inference one might understandably take from the word “master” itself. They center, rather, around knowing. It is the profound pleasure in knowing the world more deeply that creates authentic fulfillment. This is what dharma is all about. Neither Lonny nor Corot is motivated by control—or by other extrinsic factors like money and fame. There is a much, much deeper pleasure: the pleasure in knowing the world.

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  Corot returned from Italy a changed man. He had seen the light—both literally and figuratively—and this seeing gave rise to the famous dharma declaration he made from Italy in August 1826. He wrote home to his parents: “All I really want to do in life, and without deviation, is to paint landscapes.” Here was the declaration of an artist who had had an early taste of the pleasures of knowing his object. He would spend the rest of his life pursuing this experience.

  When Corot returned to France after his Italian tour, he began to develop the schedule that he would follow for the rest of his life. Every morning he climbed the four flights of stairs to his studio on the rue Paradis-Poissonnière. (Throughout his over fifty years of working life, he boasted that he reached his studio every morning at three minutes before eight.)

  Corot’s vision continued to deepen throughout his mature years, and he painted constantly until the end of his life. He was a famously happy man. And he describes the key to his happiness thus: “Ceaseless work, either executing or observing,” he wrote in one of his sketchbooks. And he added: “An invulnerable conscience.” Corot was a fulfilled man if ever there was one.

  Mastery gave Corot everything he wanted in life. He was filled up with beauty—and with a deep knowledge of nature. And out of this fulfillment, he became a wonderfully generous man—indeed, a person of positively fabled generosity. Throughout his life, Corot was personally frugal. He famously said, “I could be gay on a loaf of bread.” But he loved to give to others. Indeed, as he grew older, his greatest pleasure was to give. Late in life, when he became a wealthy man as a result of the success of his art, he gave away much of his fortune. In 1871, he gave 10,000 francs to the poor of Paris. He bought a cottage for fellow painter Honoré Daumier, who had not been as successful as he. He also regularly supported the widow of his great friend, the painter Jean-François Millet.

  Great masters of any domain (even our stamp collector) inevitably discover the truth that to know the world is the chiefest delight in life. I do not mean to know it cognitively. I do not mean to “have knowledge about it.” It is not that kind of knowledge that frees. Rather, it is direct knowledge of the world—penetrating underneath the appearance of things to their essence, to their soul. For when one penetrates to the soul of any object, one also penetrates one’s own soul. This is a central principle of the Bhagavad Gita, and one that Krishna teaches over and over again: The whole world is inside each person, each being, each object. To know any part of the world deeply, intimately, is to know the whole.

  Each of us, then, must find our own particular domain—that little corner of the world in which we can drill for gold. For the acupuncturist it is knowing the body through the language of Chinese medicine. For the painter, it is knowing the world through paint and the canvas. For the writer, it is knowing the world through words. (“When you write, you lay out a line of words,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Annie Dillard. “The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.”)

  We each pick our own path. Thoreau does it through knowing nature. Goodall, through the contemplation of chimps. Whitman saw it in the faces of his soldiers. Susan B. Anthony said her work was her worship—her way of knowing. Her way of getting close to the beating heart of the world. A taste of this knowledge—the knowledge of the sacred, the numinous—pulls us on—and this taste contains within it more satisfaction than all the honors the world has to give.

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  Finally, as Krishna teaches Arjuna, when you come to know the world, you also come to love it. It’s simple: You love what you know deeply. This was obviously true for Corot. The act of painting became an act of joy for him throughout his long life. He never tired of it. For Corot, painting was a part of his love affair with nature. When he was seventy-one years old he wrote: “All must be governed by your love of nature. By what you feel, by what you experience in nature. When in July, I bury my nose in a hazelbush, I shall be fifteen years old.”

  Eventually Camille Corot painted not just nature, but his love of nature. This is what I had experienced at the exposition at the National Gallery. The paintings are not representations of nature, but are nature itself—are, as Emerson suggested, not a reference to something else but are “things in themselves”—with living souls. This is why they cannot be accurately reproduced in a photograph.

  At the age of seventy-seven, before he died, Corot said, “You have no idea of the things I could paint now. I see what I have never seen before. New tints, new skies, new horizons.” He concluded: “I go on hoping that there will be painting in heaven.”

  After his death, 5,000 art students wore black crêpe on their arms for a year “in memory of Papa Corot.”

  Camille Corot, in following his dharma, had truly brought the “heaven” of painting down to earth.

  Krishna and Arjuna are now deep into their conversation about dharma. Krishna, as we have seen, has begun the “sacred dialogue” with two primary teachings: First—look to your dharma. Then—do it full out! Now he presents Arjuna with a third and most puzzling lesson: “Let go of the fruits of your actions.”

  To which Arjuna replies, essentially, “Huh?”

  “You have the right to work,” says Krishna to his bewildered student, “but never to the fruit of work.”

  Arjuna will struggle with this teaching more than with any other. Indeed, this lesson is so slippery that Krishna will have to reiterate it over and over again to Arjuna throughout the dialogue: “You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a man established within himself—without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat.”

  In this third lesson, Krishna is transmitting to Arjuna one of the most brilliant discoveries of the ancient yoga tradition: the power of nonattachment. Give yourself entirely to your work, yes. But let go of the outcome. Be alike in success and defeat. Krishna is emphatic on this point: You cannot devote yourself fully and passionately to your dharma without engaging this principle.

  Why? Over the course of hundreds of years of practice, yogis had discovered that clinging to outcome has a pernicious effect on performance. Clinging (or grasping) of any kind disturbs the mind. And this disturbed mind, then, is not really fully present to the task at hand. It is forever leaning forward into the next moment—grabbing. And, not being present for the moment, it cannot fully devote its powers to the job at hand.

  We find ourselves, at this point, right back to our old friend, doubt. Grasping, it turns out, is just another form of doubt. Grasping, or craving, or clinging to a particular outcome splits the mind from the present moment. The mind that is constantly evaluating—“
How am I doing?” or “How am I measuring up?” or “Am I winning or losing?”—is the divided mind.

  Krishna speaks about this with vivid psychological insight: “Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action,” he teaches, “are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.” The yoga tradition systematically investigated this anxiety about outcome. It found that grasping has three pernicious effects on the mind. They are: first, disturbance; then, obscuration; and finally, separation.

  This analysis is really one of the most useful discoveries of the yoga tradition. Let’s look at it more closely.

  First, grasping “disturbs” the mind. Anyone can see this simply by observing the mind and body when caught up in a state of craving. Try this: Sit down to meditate when you’re caught up in a moment of craving for food or sex. Notice the quality of the mind. Crazy! One can see that the mind is stirred up, restless—or, as yogis would say, “overheated.”

  Second, grasping in any form is said to “obscure” the mind. What does this mean? Simply that when the mind is caught up in grasping it does not see clearly. It is obscured. This, too, is easy to observe in everyday life. When the mind is craving a particular object or outcome, that object looks “all good” to the mind. When the mind is craving, say, a bowl of chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, the ice cream seems all good. In that moment of grasping, we do not see that there are perhaps pros and cons to this bowl of ice cream. (Perhaps we’re committed to a diet, or we’re not eating sugar, or we are kept awake by chocolate, or we are in serious trouble with our cholesterol.) In a moment of grasping, the mind does not see the gray areas. No! It adopts a kind of tunnel vision toward the object. Ice cream! All good! I want it! The mind caught up in craving does not make discerning choices. In these moments we are said to be obscured.

  And third, the mind caught up in a state of grasping is said to be “separate.” What could this mean? Simply that the experience of craving intensifies the split between subject and object (between “me” and “the ice cream”), so that it appears that without the object of my grasping I am unwhole. Without the object of my desire I am bereft. Empty. Unfulfilled. Grasping amplifies the sense of separation from the object. Indeed, grasping splits the world between subject and object—heightening the intensity of wanting so that it proliferates into an ever-increasing cycle of wanting and getting and then wanting again—and more. In this state, the mind can never feel whole. It is damned to an eternal sense of separation and emptiness.

  So: Disturbed. Obscured. Separate.

  Krishna has captured these very insights in his teaching to Arjuna: “When you keep thinking about sense objects,” he says, “attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession that burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgment; you can no longer learn from past mistakes. Lost is the power to choose between what is wise and what is unwise, and your life is utter waste.”

  Lost is the power to choose between what is wise and what is unwise.

  These states of craving for what we might call “gross objects of desire” are easy to see everywhere in our daily life. Simply pay attention. You’ll see them hour by hour in your own life as they manifest in grasping for food, for sex, for pleasure, for comfort. What is not so easy to see are the ways in which grasping colors our motivation toward more subtle objects of desire—in our work, in our play, even in our spiritual life. We can just as easily get caught up in craving while we’re sitting in meditation, or doing yoga. We can crave exalted states. Enlightenment. We can crave exalted performance even in our most sublime dharma work. Grasping exerts its pernicious effects even in the most refined areas of human endeavor. And wherever it shows up, yogis rightly found that it creates suffering, and that it has a disabling effect on performance.

  What is the antidote? Krishna counsels “detachment.” “Seek refuge in the attitude of detachment,” he teaches, “and you will amass the wealth of spiritual awareness.” But here is an important proviso: not detachment from the passionate involvement in the task at hand; not detachment from one’s dharma. Detachment from the outcome.

  “Neither agitated by grief nor hankering after pleasure, [the yogis] live free from lust and fear and anger … Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are neither elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad.”

  Krishna makes here an important link. When the mind is not colored by grasping it is free—free of disturbance, obscuration, and separation. The mind is at ease. It is seeing clearly. And it is in union with all beings. Nonseparate! And when the mind is in this excellent and most refined state we are free to truly absorb ourselves in dharma. When there is no obsessive concern with outcome, with gain of any kind, we are able to become completely absorbed in what we’re doing—our actions and thoughts undivided by worry. All of our energy can become concentrated on the task at hand.

  “When consciousness is unified,” says Krishna, “all vain anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill.”

  All vain anxiety is left behind! These are moments of peace, and possibility. “When you move amidst the world of sense, free from attachment, and aversion alike, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Self.”

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  This all sounds wonderful. Heaven on earth. But how in God’s name do we accomplish this feat? How do we rid ourselves of desire? For desire seems woven into the very fabric of human life.

  Arjuna—rightly distrustful of this teaching—will ask the very questions we want to ask: Isn’t it precisely desire that motivates action? Isn’t it our very desire for success and for achievement—and even, indeed, for dharma—that pushes us forward toward the noble things in life? Isn’t desire, in fact, a central aspect of our very humanity?

  This is where the rubber meets the road. We cannot make any forward movement in our practice of detachment until we understand Krishna’s response to this central question. Krishna does not disappoint: He makes a brilliant response, and one that is backed up by centuries of yogic investigation into the pitfalls and possibilities of desire. Krishna’s response to these concerns is certainly the most innovative and revolutionary aspect of the Bhagavad Gita. In order to fully appreciate the revolutionary quality of his response, we need a little background.

  Even the earliest yogis—going back at least to the ninth century BCE—had begun to understand the pernicious effects of grasping. And they wrestled with a number of strategies to attenuate its power. The first strategy they used was a caveman strategy for dealing with the problem. Eradicate desire. Kill it! Wipe it out. Club it to death. In the early centuries of the yoga tradition, practitioners investigated extreme forms of asceticism as an antidote to grasping. Kill all desire. Root it out. This caveman strategy had a serious flaw. Along with grasping, it also tended to kill all that was good in the practitioner—and not infrequently it actually killed the practitioner himself.

  Yogis had to go back to the drawing board on this one. They investigated the problem more deeply. In deep states of meditation, they investigated these very states of desire. Of what were these states composed? As a result of this skillful meditative practice, they began to see more deeply into desire. They found that desire is actually a compound state. It is made up, in part, of grasping and craving, which always and everywhere lead to the experience of suffering. But there are other components of desire as well. There are salutary aspects to desire. They discovered an energy at the heart of desire that is full of aspiration for the most noble qualities of the human being. They discovered, too, that allied with these aspirations are profound energies of “resolve” and “strong determination” to achieve the good and the noble. There were components of this state of desire that seemed to come from the highest nature of a human being.

  They called these salutary components of desire “aspiration.” Aspiration does not have the coloring of afflicte
d states. There is no disturbance in aspiration; rather there is a state of inner calm abiding, and quiet determination. There is no obscuration in aspiration; rather what arises is a capacity to see clearly. There is no separation in states of aspiration; rather, what emerges are profound states of union with all beings. Aspiration, as it turns out, is full of energy. Full of resolve. Full of a deep ardency for the realization of the Self. It is this very aspiration that leads us to search for truth. For beauty. For our full humanity.

  Would it be possible, then, to harness these deeper, more ardent aspects of desire—and at the same time to skillfully pare away its afflicted aspects? Could these different components of desire—grasping and aspiration—actually be teased apart?

  This teasing apart is at the very heart of the genius of the Bhagavad Gita. The authors of the Gita presented an entirely new strategy. The practitioner can, in fact, tease grasping apart from aspiration, by harnessing desire to dharma. And so, we have Krishna’s first three teachings: Find your dharma. Do it full out! Let go of the outcome. This frees the natural passion of the human being to be put in the service of dharma. This is the way to live a passionate life without being caught in the fetters of grasping. Do your work passionately. Then let go. Now you are free.

  My experience is that the teasing apart of grasping and aspiration is the work of a lifetime. It is slippery. Grasping can often masquerade as aspiration. Aspiration itself can be confused for grasping. The stories that follow in Part IV will explore the ways in which this complex process shows up in real lives—and they will help us investigate three important principles:

  1. Let desire give birth to aspiration.

  2. When difficulties arise, see them as your dharma.

  3. Turn the wound into light.

  In Chapter Eight, we will look at the brief but fantastic life of John Keats—one of the greatest poets in the English language, whose life was a bonfire of desire for dharma. We can see in his life the precise ways in which desire, when treated skillfully, inexorably does give birth to aspiration. In Chapter Nine, we will examine a chapter in the life of the great Jungian analyst Marion Woodman—a prolific writer and teacher, author of more than twenty books on Jungian analysis. We will look particularly at the problems that arise when aspiration founders on the shoals of difficulty. And we will see how difficulty itself can be a profound healer. And finally, we’ll look at the very, very afflicted life of Ludwig van Beethoven, who skillfully used his burning desire for his dharma to light up not only his own life of suffering, but the life of the whole world.