Everyone loves the badass hero with the big fucking sword. Yet, most people would lose their balance just by trying to lift such a mighty weapon from the ground. Everyone would like to be the hero, but few care to do the hard work to necessary just to begin wielding the sword with relative ease.
I'm having a lot of revelations on this day, a lot of connecting the dots of what Life has been trying to communicate to me for a long time, yet I have not been able to understand because I was so obsessed with ideas like "happiness" and "enjoyment" that I just couldn't pull my head out of my ass and see the other side of things.
Imagen de MATT ROGERS en Pixabay
Despite having criticized the Bhagavad Gita in a previous post, I've been going back to it and receiving different layers of information from it. If you have no idea what that is, in short it's one of the primal texts of Hinduism, sometimes referred to as the "Hindu Bible" by the west.
On this narration, Krishna, who is an embodiment of God, offers his friend and disciple, Arjuna, an extensive speech on the path of yoga. This yoga, however, is nothing like what you might be used to seeing, with happy peaceful people wearing colorful leggings doing difficult poses at sunset. They are at the verge of a war, and Krishna is saying that fighting the war is the path of yoga.
"The Gita is set in a narrative framework of dialogue between Pandava prince Arjuna and his guide and charioteer Krishna. At the start of the dharma yuddha (or the "righteous war") between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, Arjuna is preoccupied by a moral and emotional dilemma and despairs about the violence and death the war will cause in the battle against his kin. Wondering if he should renounce the war, he seeks Krishna's counsel, whose answers and discourse constitute the Gita. Krishna counsels Arjuna to "fulfil his Kshatriya (warrior) duty to uphold the dharma" through Karma ("selfless action"). The Krishna–Arjuna dialogues cover a broad range of spiritual topics, touching upon ethical dilemmas and philosophical issues that go far beyond the war that Arjuna faces." - Wikipedia
What??!! Isn't Krishna supposed to be a benevolent being and his followers are the most peaceful people? Well, this is supposed to be understood from the perspective of our inner being, not as an invitation to solve things through warfare. There's plenty of explanation out there if you're interested but I want to go towards the point of my post.
The thing that has reached out to me the most during these last listens (there's audiobooks on YouTube, worth a check) is that Krishna points out that those who give up the fruit of their labor and think only of God when carrying it out will find fulfillment. In other words it's the actions that truly reward you. If you go through life acting in search for specific prizes, you will always find yourself unsatisfied and living a meaningless existence.
This rings true to me, however, it's necessary to point out that this requires a lot of willpower and concentration. We're usually acting like a donkey with a carrot hanging in front of our eyes. We chase and chase the carrot, not having a clue where we're really going, or even stopping to observe that there might be a ton of other things to eat around us, that we don't need the carrot.
Upon this, the metaphor of willpower being a huge powerful sword came to my mind. Like those of videogames with lightning and everything. God has given us that power, but left it to us to learn to use it. That is what free will is really about. Not good and evil, but rather whether you learn to wield the mighty weapon you were given or not.
So I've been practicing with that weapon in different fronts of my daily activity. I take rests of course, I'm not a masochist. But only now I've been realizing how heavy and hard to handle it is. It's not that I didn't have willpower before, but I think the potential rewards of pleasure and happiness were the main drivers of my vehicle. It's a whole different matter to move around and get things done through sheer will and not dreaming about what you will get out of it.
That takes me to Jung's famous quote:
"Who looks outside, dreams;
who looks inside, awakes"
Even the juiciest of rewards can bring your demise if your actions and thoughts are in the wrong place. Many who've reached the peak of fame and wealth have ended taking their lives away. It's not that fame and wealth are bad things, it's that they when they finally got the carrot, they felt just as empty as before and you can imagine how frustrating that must of been.
Anyways, as usual, I leave this around to whomever it may serve. Have a great evening 🌿