Thursday, June 5, 2025
The Bhagavad Gita has an oft quoted line, “We have the right to work, but we don’t have the rights of the fruits of our labor. The joy is in the work itself.” That means, that once it’s produced, you can’t lord over it or expect anything from it. What gives life is giving or expressiveness itself. It’s an active thing, and in its own domain, creative work is joyful. If you seek to get something from the fruits of your labor, you’ll not experience the same sustenance, nourishment, or fulfillment from the act itself.
But if we have no rights to what we produce, then we have no rights to that which produces or causes. Fruits are effects. What causes? Same as the effect. I claim neither. What causes the cause then?
There is something about getting out of the way. I become an empty vessel through which cause and effect transpire together. Realization is freeing, and it seems I do nothing, as Jesus said of the lilies that do nothing and are provided for and clothed in bedazzlement (See “The Sermon on the Mount”). If I do nothing, I must be nothing on a level of individuality.
When cause and effect are unblocked by the notion of the individual self, something happens. You, the individual, vanish, leaving an unresistant channel of peace and openness through which Mother Creation billows. You serve as a conduit, a gap where cause and effect flow freely as one. Your life becomes conducive which means, in my brand of thinking, “making possibility flow with ease.” Technically, conducive means “making a certain situation or outcome likely or possible.”
The wonders of getting out of the way will clothe you in radiance, like the lilies, who simply are themselves. Yielding to who you are – the effortlessness that creates freely, but never takes credit for it.