The question concerning Karma and Sannyāsa, responsibility and renunciation, has been asked from time immemorial, and each time it has been answered. Yet this question remains.

Somebody asked me, ‘Why is the Gītā still relevant today?’

I said, ‘Because we never learned it.’ Although Gītā was uttered at least 5,000 years ago it is still relevant today. Why? It is simply because man has not listened and he has not learnt his lesson yet! History repeats itself.

The unconscious process never comes to the conscious energy. Man as such is governed to a large extent by the unconscious. He is not even aware of what he is going after. He thinks he wants something and runs after it. But by the time he gets his hands on it, he wants something else. So there is a constant restlessness, powerlessness within. This puts man in constant incompletion, dissatisfaction and depression.

Listen! By merely flooding completion into this depression you can get out of it. I always tell people, if you just allow a single instance of depression, powerlessness to work on you and you face it consciously with the process of completion, in the process you will become enlightened. Nothing else is necessary. A single instance of depression is enough. It will completely burn you and you will become enlightened. But we never allow anything to work on us completely. We are scared to confront our own selves. We just allow the unconscious space of powerlessness to overpower us instead of boldly facing it with power and joy, and seeing it through its completion. Look into every moment you feel powerless in your life even now. Don’t try to escape from those moments! You can never escape!

Life is the greatest Master, it continuously teaches us. But we never learn from it. We never mark the spot where we stopped our journey in this birth. That spot where we stopped life’s journey is the root pattern. When we stop our journey, if we at least mark the spot in this life saying, ‘I covered this distance, I learnt all these things. In the next birth I will continue from where I left last,’ it is enough.

Please listen. The moment your root pattern is born, your life is destroyed! Your growth is stopped! Only when you find your root pattern and complete with it, you come back to life again. When I say birth, I do not mean just the totality of our life. I am referring to each day and night. Each day and night is a birth. It is a life cycle. We die and are reborn every day.

Everyday at least for forty-two minutes, consciously decide to do the self-completion process, svapūrṇatva kriya. Decide consciously to be complete: ‘Let me sit and face my powerlessness and complete with my patterns. Let me restore my space of completion today.’ Tell yourself, ‘I will allow the cognition of completion to enter into my consciousness this week. I will solve all my problems only with this complete cognition. I create the space of completion.’ If you had completed with all your patterns before sleeping every night and allowed the cognition of completion to enter your consciousness every week, you would have been enlightened by now. Your life would have been blissful. But the problem is we do not take the responsibility for our possibility. Instead, we always mark the spots of our life’s journey in the wrong places—in our patterns.

We mark our patterns, not our possibilities. We never mark where we should in the bigger picture of our lives. We are so caught up with marking our small desires and goals fueled by our incompletions. We never mark the spot of our peak possibilities. These markings of desires and worldly goals continuously get washed away and new markings are made. They update themselves based on inputs from the world around us, based on what society has to say. We forget that these markings are temporary and do not reflect the space of possibility within, which comes only from completion.

What truly matters is inner transformation, which we never bother to think about. We never allow any understanding of completion to work on us. If we are consciously aware of our root patterns, why we are doing what we are doing and what our pitfalls are, we can start to complete with them and grow to be powerful, complete individuals. But again and again we make the same mistakes. The scale may differ but the mistakes are the same!

A leader is one who commits mistakes on a large scale and hides them, whereas a follower is one who commits the same mistakes on a smaller scale and justifies them. That is the difference between a leader and a follower. To be honest, we are not intelligent enough to create new patterns. We are not creative and innovative enough to make new mistakes. Even if you merely decide not to make the same mistake out of the same pattern once more, your life will be transformed. But again and again, we make the same kind of mistakes because our mind works in the same route. That route is only called saṁskāra: a recorded route, an engraved bio-memory or a root pattern. If we take up the life of either karma or sannyāsa based on an incomplete recorded bio-memory, we will never achieve completion, bliss.

surrender to experIence KarMa-sannyāsa as one

Let us deeply analyze these paths of Karma and Sannyāsa. Karma is normally out of greed and desires. Sannyāsa is always invariably out of fear, bhaya. There is a fear of life. When you are not ready to take the risk, you renounce everything. The fear of getting hurt is the first reason for Sannyāsa. Sannyāsa is a way of escapism, turning away from the responsibilities that life presents. When a person is bogged down by responsibilities of life, he takes Sannyāsa as an easy escape route. In the name of renunciation, he covers his deep fears. This is not true Sannyāsa.

Then we have people running after material wealth in the name of karma. On one side are the people who are running away from fear. On the other side are those who are running towards their greed. Both categories of people are not going to achieve eternal bliss or consciousness. Both are not on the right track of completion.

In the entire world, only three types of human beings exist:

• One who has surrendered to greed,
• one who has surrendered to fear and
• the one who has surrendered to the supreme intelligence, divine consciousness.

The person who has surrendered to greed gets lost. Such a person runs after many things in life to possess them, which in turn leads to more greed. He literally becomes a slave to greed.

There is a beautiful story in Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad:

There are two birds on the same tree.

One bird, a completely satisfied and fulfilled being, is sitting calmly, enjoying the silence of its own inner space. Another bird is sitting a little below, busily pecking at the fruits. It keeps flitting from place to place, trying to eat the fruits. When the fruit is tasty, it enjoys. When the fruit is not tasty, it suffers. It continuously oscillates between enjoyment and suffering. Suddenly, this bird looks up and sees the bird that is sitting silently and thinks, ‘How is this bird so calm and beautiful? Let me go closer and see. Let me talk to this bird.’ Slowly, the small bird moves towards the peaceful bird. As it goes closer to the other bird, it continues to taste more fruits and suffers because the fruits are sour. Suddenly, when it is close enough to the other bird, it realizes that the other bird is nothing but its own self, which is sitting silently and beautifully watching the small bird getting distracted in its path, suffering with sour fruits! The small bird simply becomes one with the other bird.

This is a beautiful story!

In the same way, as long as you are a jīvātman, an ordinary soul, you struggle between fear and greed. You go from one extreme to another. The moment you realize there is something inside your being that is untouched by your greed and fear, you start traveling towards it. When you get closer to it, you realize you are that Consciousness.

Here, Kṛṣṇa explains the same thing, we are caught between fear and greed. Either we constantly surrender ourselves to fear or we surrender ourselves to greed. Very rare individuals surrender to intelligence, to Divine Consciousness.

Arjuna asks here, ‘Which is more beneficial for me?’ Keeping track of accounts is good in business but not in life. People come and ask me, ‘Why should I surrender to the Divine? If I surrender, what will I get?’

If you don’t surrender to the Divine, you will be surrendering to your fear or greed. I am not asking you to surrender to the Divine just to get something out of it. When it comes to life, profit and loss doesn’t work. Life is beyond calculation. The moment we ask, ‘What will I get by surrendering to the Divine?’, we miss the whole idea of surrender.

Venkaṭeśvara (incarnation of Lord Viṣṇu) holds the chakra (discus) in one hand, and this represents fear. In the other hand, He has the śankha (conch), which represents success. The conch is blown when you achieve success or victory. This represents greed because man is constantly seeking success in everything and is never satisfied. If you don’t surrender to Venkaṭeśvara’s pāda (feet) and His pāduka (sandals), you will surrender to His conch and discus. In other words, you will surrender to fear or greed. Those who constantly approach God for fulfillment of their desires or for refuge for their problems are actually surrendering to greed and fear. Only very few surrender to the feet of Venkaṭeśvara, which is the ultimate surrender.

Our whole life is spent running behind greed or fear. The path of Karma Yoga, seeking liberation through action or responsibility, happens because of greed. The path of sannyāsa yoga, seeking liberation through renunciation, happens because of fear. Neither the path of karma (action) nor the path of sannyāsa (renunciation) will enrich us unless we complete with our greed and fear and transform our very space into the space of completion. If we change the incomplete space to that of completion, karma or sannyāsa or anything can enrich us. All we need to know is this—it doesn’t matter if we are a karma yogi or a sannyāsa yogi. It is the attitude, the space from which we approach and live life that is most important. Let your inner space be the space of completion.

Listen! When you are in incompletion, you constantly feel powerless and anything you do comes out of powerlessness. Anything done out of incompletion, be it Karma Yoga or Sannyāsa yoga, leads you to more and more incompletion. Anything done out of completion, leads you to more and more completion.

I am defining Sannyāsa.

Sannyāsa is you living in the space of completion and constantly enriching everyone to be in the space of completion.

Again and again, Kṛṣṇa is placing the emphasis on the space of completion, on the being. If we don’t know the root cause of our actions, why we are living with karma or why we pick up Sannyāsa, we will not be able to solve our problems. Our suffering is neither because of karma nor because of Sannyāsa. Suffering is because of our wrong attitude of incompletion. And with this wrong attitude of incompletion, be it karma or sannyāsa, the path will feel only like a punishment. With the right space of completion, any path will feel like a true blessing for you and for others.

With the wrong space of incompletion, if you take the path of karma or sannyāsa, you will struggle and suffer, and make others suffer as well. If you decide to enter karma, drop the goal. Just enjoy doing the karma and don’t worry about the goal. Living itself is beautiful. Realize that life itself is beautiful. On the other hand, if we decide to take up Sannyāsa, again drop the goal. The goal of a Sannyāsi (monk), which is renunciation, is also a goal and it must be dropped. The karma yogi runs towards the goal, the Sannyāsi runs away from the goal.

Kṛṣṇa says—sāṅkhya yogou pṛthagbālāḥ pravadanti na paṇḍitaḥ (5.4). Indirectly He tells Arjuna that he has yet to learn, that he is still ignorant. Only the ignorant man says that karma yoga is different from sāṅkhya yoga, the Sannyāsa. Here, the words karma and sannyāsa are equated to Karma Yoga and Sāṅkhya Yoga.

The experienced say that both karma and sannyāsa lead to the same truth. Through both these paths, one achieves the results of both. If we complete with the pattern of greed in karma yoga and complete with the pattern of fear in Sannyāsa Yoga, we will drop into eternal consciousness. Through both, we will achieve when we create the right space—the space of completion.

So Kṛṣṇa says here, ‘Only the ignorant person says that one is superior to the other or that they are two different paths. Both the paths are one and the same.’ A person who can travel alone, who is courageous enough to live in the space of completion and decides to enrich others with completion takes the life of Sannyāsa. A person who decides to live in the space of completion and who wants to enrich others by sharing his life takes the life of karma. It is up to us. Both the paths are one and the same.

What is important is having the right reason and the right space, not what we are doing. What we are doing is not important, who we are being is important. These three words should be understood: being, doing and having. If we are continuously doing only for having, we will never have it. Even when we are having, we will be doing. The man who is doing just for having will never be able to experience or enjoy life because even when he is having, he will be doing. The man who is established in his being will enjoy both doing and having at the same time. By just being, he will enjoy doing and having. All we need is a simple technique. The whole idea is now reduced to a one-line message.

Let all our feelings, let all our mental thoughts, let all our physical deeds be directed towards gratitude to the Divine.

Don’t work out of fear or greed, because no matter how much we achieve out of greed, we will not be fulfilled. It is like pouring ghee (clarified butter) into the fire. Can we quench fire by pouring ghee into it? Never! All our actions that are done out of greed will only create more desire and make our senses weak, tired and incomplete. In the same way, all our laziness born out of fear will only make our mind restless and incomplete. We may not be doing things physically, but our mind will be worrying.

If we have become a karma yogi out of greed, our senses will be weakened. How much can we run? If we become a Sannyāsi out of fear, again, we may not do anything physically but the whole day we will be worrying.

A simple truth: When a man doesn’t have money, the problem is money. When he gets money, the problem is sex. When he gets sex, the problem is comforts. When he gets comforts and everything is going well, he starts worrying about death. Some incompletion or the other will always make his mind powerless.

Don’t think that all the Sannyasis sitting in the Himalayas are in bliss. No! Unless they create the space of completion, they cannot experience power and joy. Unless the very space changes, they cannot experience bliss. Bliss is directly related to our inner space. Our whole life will be spent in doing and having if we are caught in fear and greed. If we surrender ourselves to being, doing and having both will happen to us with tremendous ecstasy.

Never work out of greed because whatever we achieve is going to be taken away at the time of death. Never become silent and inactive out of fear because there is really nothing to lose. Whether we are afraid or not, everything is going to be taken away at the time of death. So why be afraid? In either case, why not be blissful?

One important thing: Working without motivation is completely unheard of today. All psychologists, psychiatrists and scientists always emphasize that we cannot work without motivation. That is why there are so many motivational Gurus today. These people have come to the conclusion that ‘work without motivation is not possible’ after analysis on diseased patients, not on enlightened beings. They never had a specimen of a Buddha! They never encountered an enlightened person. That is why they say that work without motivation is impossible.

I tell you, work without motivation is the only real work. It will never make us tired! Every moment we will be working out of bliss.

source: Bhagavadgita Decoded