How to submit one's actions to God? || Acharya Prashant, on Bhagvad Gita (2017)

Acharya Prashant

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Transcript

00:00 The questioner says, "One way to live life is to stay alert, alert in each and every

00:18 moment, and the other way is of bhakti-yoga, talked of in texts like the Bhagavatam. And

00:35 this way says that all actions are to be submitted to God, which means remembering God in each

00:49 action. Are these two different paths? Do they converge? That's the question. First

01:03 path that you have mentioned is about staying alert. The second path says, submit all actions

01:19 to God. What does that mean? It's quite straightforward. When we usually act, our actions are for our

01:37 own sake. I would request everybody to sit in a way where I may have a look at their

01:47 faces. I am able to…yes, that helps us connect better. Maybe you could come up this side.

01:59 You are being blocked by the screen. You are still blocked. You may come a little in the

02:18 way. Not there, surely. Fine, stay there. Right.

02:38 So, we are talking about the bhakti-yoga. Bhakti-yoga says submit all actions to God.

03:01 We are trying to see what that means. In general, whenever we act, our actions are for our own

03:15 sake. Our actions are therefore submitted to ourselves. We have a small personal domain

03:27 and that is what we take our universe to be. That domain is our universe. If you look at

03:36 what your mind has been thinking of, it is not really much. A few friends, a few family

03:48 members, your job, your future, your little set of memories, your narrow domain of hopes

03:59 and expectations and dreams from the future and nothing beyond that. There is so much

04:02 happening in the universe. It never flashes in our mind. We have no space for it. It doesn't

04:11 occur to us. It does not exist for us. So, our personal universes are as small as our

04:23 personal selves and all our actions are dedicated to these personal selves. These personal selves

04:37 are small and therefore insecure. They are limited and therefore defenseless. We feel

04:48 threatened and vulnerable all the time. So, all our actions are towards our imagined betterment.

05:03 I am vulnerable, I am threatened, I need to do something for my upkeep, for my security.

05:12 If you are not alright, obviously you will act only to help yourself, to protect yourself,

05:23 to improve yourself and that's what the life of the ordinary so-called normal human

05:31 being is. Dedicated to his own service. What do you work for? I work for myself. It may

05:41 appear that I work for my family but the fact is I work for these people because they are

05:46 related to me. Hence I am working for myself. It may appear that I work for an organization

05:53 but I work for that organization because it pays me. The day it stops paying me, I won't

05:58 work for it. Hence I really work only for myself. Our actions are always dedicated to

06:08 ourselves. It is rare, almost impossible to find even one action that has not gone into

06:22 that infinite sink which is self-service. We keep on serving ourselves yet the service

06:33 is never complete. The self is so vulnerable, so much inexhaustible and yet so limited that

06:46 it keeps absorbing all that you offer it and yet is always hungry, empty, crying for more.

06:58 You may give yourselves all that you can imagine and yet you will find that the little personal

07:06 self is still calling out for more. Give yourself the best of your dreams and fulfill them.

07:18 Give yourselves the best that the world can offer and yet you will find that you haven't

07:24 come to a full stop. Self-service is an endless road. All our actions are spent down that

07:37 road. Now it must be already clear to you what does it mean to submit all actions to

07:46 God. It means do not work for your little personal self. It means do not work for your

07:58 little personal self. But to not to work for your little personal self, you must be in

08:10 touch with something beyond you. That is an act of courage. The little self is so terrified

08:24 and at the same time so sure of itself that the moment it comes across something, somebody

08:31 bigger than itself, beyond itself in another dimension, it closes its eyes. It acts as

08:41 if it has seen nothing. Because if you have seen beyond yourself, you will know that it

08:50 is not wise to keep acting for your own sake. It is not wise to invest all your efforts,

09:01 all your life, all your time in the few directions that you are accustomed to. One needs to have

09:19 a certain courage and one needs to have a certain desire and one needs to have a certain

09:25 frustration in order to accept the great, the immense as existent. There are two mistakes

09:42 that the personal self makes. One that most people make is to pretend that the beyond

09:51 does not exist. Nothing beyond me exists. Life means my house, my family, my occupation,

10:06 my little ups and downs, my pains, my pleasures, my desires, my disappointments. That is what

10:13 life and universe are all about. This is the first mistake. To act as if nothing beyond

10:21 you is material or important and the second mistake is to come across the important, to

10:33 come across somebody from the beyond and then try to possess him. This is a more severe

10:47 mistake and this is a more tragic mistake. This is more tragic mistake because it is

10:54 a case of so near yet so far. You come across a Jesus, a Krishna Buddha and instead of submitting

11:07 to him, you try to bring him home. This is the more severe mistake of the two. You try

11:17 to own him, you try to bring him down to your own dimension, you try to co-opt him, you

11:24 try to make him a part of your existing system, of your existing network, of your existing

11:31 universe. To submit your actions to God means to come across God and to bow down and to

11:42 realize that there does exist an aloofness, a beyondness. It is humbling. It is a realization

11:57 of one's smallness. It hurts. One does not want to easily admit that. But if you can

12:10 admit that, then you will know what is right action. If you have really seen something

12:21 that is not beset with the problems, the frailties that characterize our life, then why not dedicate

12:35 ourselves to that? That will be the right action. To find something that is so very

12:53 immense that neither does it exist in your personal universe nor can it be adjusted in

13:04 your personal universe. Neither does it exist in your home nor is it adjustable in your

13:16 home. And by home, I mean the place that you feel comfortable in. Not only the physical

13:28 place but the mental place. Not only this immense that you have come across is beyond

13:39 your current place, it is also so large that it cannot be contained in your current place.

13:48 So any efforts to bring that home are futile. Hence the only way out for you if you want

13:58 the company of the immeasurable is that you go to Him. That is what is meant by dedicating

14:11 your actions to God. I am not working for myself anymore. The fruit of my actions will

14:18 not benefit me. My actions are really for something beyond me. My personal world is

14:30 not going to benefit from my actions. Because if your personal world is going to benefit

14:37 from your actions, you are only strengthening the false. You are only strengthening the

14:43 person. You are only strengthening your own disease. You are only fattening your enemy.

14:55 So what do you work for? I don't know. Whom do you work for? I don't know. What do you

15:10 get out of this work? I don't bother. I don't bother. If I am someone who is desirous of

15:23 fruits from my work, then that surely means that I am working from a point of incompleteness

15:32 and if I am starting from a point of incompleteness, if that is what I take myself to be, an incomplete

15:39 one, then the work will have all the characteristics of incompleteness and such work will obviously

15:47 not take me to completeness. If I act as the sick one, my actions too will have the imprint

15:57 of sickness and sick action will not take me to health. Right action is when one is

16:15 not acting for herself or himself. Right action is when the fruit of the action will

16:26 dissolve you rather than continue you or strengthen you. Is it similar to the path of knowledge,

16:53 the path of alertness? Of course. As the questioner has mentioned, the path of knowledge entails

16:59 staying alert, being watchful of oneself. Only when you are watchful of yourself, do

17:06 you come to know that you are acting only for your own petty interests. You may claim

17:15 that you are acting in love, you may claim that you are acting in charity, but there

17:24 is always self-interest behind all love, all charity. No altruism is possible for the ego.

17:36 The ego is so little and so afraid that it cannot help anybody but itself. When you are

17:43 shivering with fear, the interests of others, the welfare of others does not matter to you.

17:55 A terrified mind will first and foremost be bothered about its own security. That's what

18:04 one needs to be alert of. Otherwise it is easy to be deluded by one's own intentions,

18:14 self-proclaimed intentions. You may say, you see I did nothing for myself and all my life

18:22 I have been serving you kids. Have you been serving the kids of the neighbor? Have you

18:29 been serving the kids from the slum society nearby? But look at the bold assertion, I

18:47 have dedicated my life to my family. You don't even see the incongruity contained in the

18:51 very statement, my family. You did it because there was ownership. If you are washing and

19:06 servicing your car, are you doing somebody a favor? If you are charging your mobile phone,

19:16 is it social service? And there are so many people who feed their kids just as one charges

19:29 the mobile phone for use. Why do you charge the mobile phone? And if you are really alert

19:39 and you look at the world around, is it not so that we feed our relationships because

19:45 later on or immediately we want to be fed by them? Do you maintain relationships that

19:52 are really of no use to you? Neither physical nor material, not even mental. Do you really

19:59 maintain any such relationship? Either the relationship offers you something or promises

20:05 to offer you something or at least stands for something. We are very purposeful people.

20:14 If there is no purpose contained in anything, we drop it and we delude ourselves in order

20:25 to maintain a morally correct self-image. What do we proclaim? Oh, we are serving. This

20:35 is love. And then there comes a point when you cry out, I did so much for you in pure

20:48 love and this is what you are offering me in return? Had it been pure love, would it

20:59 have come to this statement? Does pure love care for returns? But see how hurt you are

21:13 when the one you have loved does not fulfill your expectations. A stranger has very little

21:19 power to hurt you. But the beloved, the loved one has so much power to hurt you. What does

21:26 that immediately prove? That you were not just loving, your love was full of expectations.

21:34 It was hardly love. It was a business deal. I will do this for you and I expect that this

21:40 is what you will give me and when you do not get what you want, then you are so hurt. The

21:47 hurt is the proof of the falseness of our impersonal love, unconditional love. Had it

21:59 really been unconditional? Had it really been true and genuine? From where would the hurt

22:12 have arisen? Alertness helps, alertness helps you see your real motives.

22:34 Lying to others and continuously lying to others, there comes a point when we start

22:48 believing in our own propaganda. 400 times you have told someone I love you and now you

22:59 yourselves feel that you are indeed in love. You have heard that story, right? There has

23:13 been a funny Sufi fellow called Mullah Nasruddin. His entire life is a joke book. You must read

23:26 one of the books dedicated to him. This was his way to tell, to teach via self-mockery.

23:44 He would turn himself into a joke and thus teach people. So he would be dressed in a

23:56 very bizarre way and kids and animals are attracted to things bizarre. So one day he

24:04 was walking in his usual way and kids got attracted to the funny sight and they all

24:13 came to him and started bothering him. Somebody started tugging at his shirt, somebody started

24:19 pulling his sleeves. The ways of kids as kids are. When they had pestered him enough, he

24:38 devised a trick. He said, "Hey listen all of you little ones, somebody there in the

24:45 market is distributing really good sweets. All of you must rush." The kids didn't believe.

24:54 They said, "No, no, it doesn't happen. Even though it is happening, you believe me."

25:02 And with all kinds of tricks and arguments, he somehow convinced them and the kids went

25:10 away towards the market. So the Mullah kept watching them for a while as they disappeared

25:21 and then started running after them. Somebody was watching the entire show. He stopped the

25:30 Mullah and said, "Half an hour you invested in somehow getting rid of them and now you

25:36 are running after them in the same direction. What are you doing?" He said, "Who knows?

25:45 Maybe actually somebody is distributing sweets." Who knows? After all if so many of them could

25:55 believe in this, it might just be true. That's the story of our life. We have lied so much

26:08 that we have come to believe in our own lies. Alertness therefore helps. When you look at

26:16 your life, then the bare fact of your mind is revealed. Words can deceive, intentions

26:26 can deceive, actions don't deceive. When you look at your actions, then you come to see

26:33 your real stuff. When you can see who you are, then you know what you are working for.

26:55 The one you are working for is not worth working for. Having seen his real face, oh it resembles

27:05 so much another face that we know of, our own. Having seen the face of our employer,

27:14 we no more want to work with him. One then really enters the service of the one who is

27:32 worth serving. And that is called dedicating your actions to the Lord. That is Bhakti.

27:47 That is Karma Yoga.

27:48 [Music]

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