Root thought pattern is nothing but this first social conditioning, this strong cognition which imbalances you from your purposeless space and gives birth to the mind, the idea that there is some purpose to life. Life has no purpose. Even if you achieve whatever you want, you can’t take it with you. You can’t carry even a single dollar when you leave. Nothing will come with you.

There is no exchange offer. If you give fifty rupees in India, you will get one dollar in USA. But no matter how much money you give in this world, you cannot get a single rupee in heaven or anywhere else. No cheque will be useful. None of your money can be carried over to the next world.

The only currency that works everywhere in existence is completion. As of now, this material world appears four-dimensional and multi-colored as you enjoy it with all your senses. The moment you leave the body, the same world will appear black and white, one dimensional. When you are dreaming, your dream looks and feels very real. When you are awake, this world around you looks like reality and the dream looks dull. But there is no scale to determine the reality and the dream.

People tell me, ‘But everyday when we enter a dream, we are not entering the same dream, Swamiji. Yet, everyday when we return to reality we are entering the same reality. So with this scale we can tell the reality apart from the dream.’

Listen, in one night’s dream you can live even 20 years of life, am I right? Don’t you sometimes have such dreams where in one night’s dream you live 20 years of life? Then why can’t your dream be reality, because of its consistency? This whole life time span, which you think is reality, may be part of the dream! There is no scale to prove reality and the dream. When you leave the body, all you see now as multi-colour will become black and white.

Nothing can be carried with you at the time of leaving the body. You can’t cash your cheques! You can’t talk to your relatives. If you speak, they will run away! Your car will not be useful to you anymore. When you are
not able to take anything with you, what is the purpose of life then?

The moment you accept the beauty of purposelessness, you will realize the meaning of living.

Life has no purpose, but it has meaning. Purpose means goal orientation. You always think about the goal; you keep running and one day you just drop dead! The more goal-oriented you are, the more you will miss life and the more you will be incomplete.

Purpose is different from meaning. When I say ‘meaning’, living itself becomes meaningful. Come to this present moment of completion and the path itself is life; the path itself is meaningful. There is no such thing as, ‘in the end you will be happy.’ You always postpone joy and so you always postpone living. Life is lived in a very superficial way because you think life has a purpose.

For the man who works just for his salary, only payday will be a beautiful day. He will be happy only on that day. He sells 29 days every month for that one day of happiness. I don’t say, ‘Don’t take your salary.’ But let it not be the only goal in your life. Let it not play a major role in your consciousness. That is what Kṛṣṇa means by these words: karmaṇyevādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana (2.47)—you can do only your duty, you have no right to its fruit. If you think of the fruit, you will lose the joy of doing, living, enriching! The meaning of living is experienced only when you understand the beauty of purposelessness. This is a beautiful verse! It is the essence of the Gītā!

Two things you need to understand from this: One, He says, let your inner space not be contaminated by the purpose of life. When I say inner space, I mean your mind and how you feel about yourself, about things and life inside you. When you close your eyes, what comes into your mind is your inner space. If your inner space is filled with the purposes of life, be very clear you are running behind something which will never give you completion. He says, ‘Let your inner space not be disturbed or filled with purposes or incompletions.’

By nature, your inner space is the space of completion, it is filled with energy; your inner space, what you refer to as ātman, spirit or soul, is filled with blissful energy. The more you empty yourself of goals or incompletions, the more the space for completion and bliss.

For example, this room is filled with space. The more furniture you put in it, the more space will leave this room. This room is not empty; no place is empty. It is filled with space. This room is filled with the energy of ether. The more furniture you bring in, the more ether will be pushed out; the lesser will be the ether energy. In the outer space, if you furnish your home, it will look very nice. But if you furnish your inner space, it will look very ugly.

Completion straightaway gives you whatever you want and takes away whatever is not. The whole problem of humanity is what you want outside is not with you and what you don’t need inside in your inner space is with you. You need to empty your inside, which is filled with unnecessary furniture. You need to have all the necessary things outside. Creating the inner space of completion with integrity and authenticity will immediately do that job.

Completion will clear out all unnecessary things from your inner space. It will get you all that you need in the outer world. Don’t furnish your inner space. Let your inner space be empty. Of course then, it will never be empty. It will be filled with completion, pūrṇatva. It will be filled with bliss! The more complete inner space you create, the more blissful your life will be. That is what Kṛṣṇa means by saying, ‘Don’t be attached to results.’

If you continuously think about the result, you will never be able to perform your action with completion. You will always be goal-oriented and you will never enjoy and enrich the path of completion. Not enjoying and enriching the path is the worst hell you can be trapped in.

Again and again Kṛṣṇa says, ‘paritrāṇāya sādhūnāṁ vināśāya ca duṣkṛtām dharma saṁsthāpanārthāya saṁbhavāmi yuge-yuge (4.8).’ It means: I come down again and again to save the integrated and authentic, the complete and innocent people, and to destroy the evil-minded incomplete people.

People ask me, ‘You say dharma (responsibility to enrich) is the only thing to be practiced with integrity and authenticity, but in our lives we see people who are not living according to dharma, yet they are living more happily; they have more property, more wealth. Why is that?’ Understand, they may have more property, they may have more things in the outer space, but never think they are happy in their inner space; never think they are blissful.

When does someone not follow dharma? When he follows his ambition! Ambition causes you to go out of integrity and authenticity. Don’t think we go to hell because we commit sins. We commit sins because we are in hell. The very ambition is hell; there is no need for a separate hell. Don’t think we will reach a separate place called ‘hell’ at the end of our life. If you are complete and blissful, you will never disturb others. If you are unhappy, naturally you will vomit that violence on others. The very ambition is punishment enough. Just because of their ambition, they miss authenticity in action, their whole life’s possibility.

You can easily miss life’s possibility by having a purpose to Life. Unless your thinking itself becomes integrated to your positivity, unless your working itself becomes authentic to the peak of your possibility, unless your life itself becomes the responsibility to enrich yourself and others, unless that itself becomes completion and bliss, you cannot experience what Kṛṣṇa says in this verse: karmaṇyevādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana (2.47).

Purpose can be fulfilled, but through purpose, your life can never be fulfilled. When you carry purposes in your life, you are not living; purposes are living through you, that’s all. In your childhood somebody gives you some purpose like, ‘You should become a lawyer or a doctor.’ You are given a purpose and that purpose is fulfilled through your life, but you will never feel fulfilled or complete.

source: chapter 2, Bhagavadgita Decoded verses, 3.1 – 3.4