The Myth of Hard Work

The Myth of Hard Work

[00:45] Reclassifying Success

Thank you for listening to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. My name is Thom Knoles. Today, I’d like to explode a myth: that success is proportional to the effort you expend. This is the idea that success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. The fact is, success itself needs to be reclassified.

What is it that comprises success? Success should be thought of as the transition between the attainment of a particular step in a thing and the succession to the next right thing. Success should mean succession; it should mean that there’s a pivot point that has been reached where yet another advancement in life should go on.

Whereas, success is touted to us as some kind of endpoint: you work, and you work, and then you’re going to get the S-word: success. And what is success supposed to mean? It’s supposed to mean you can’t think of anything else to do because you’ve done everything.

You’ve succeeded. And so, what do you do when you’ve succeeded? Well, you don’t have any desires after that. You’re just floating around in this big smiley state, saying, “Boy, that hard work was really worth it.” This kind of mythos about hard work and success needs to be knocked a little bit with the golden hammer of Vedic knowledge.

This is a kind of defeatist mentality that’s applied when we don’t use our full creative intelligence. Hard work is supposed to mean you won’t like it, you’re not going to enjoy the sensations of it, but if you engage anyway, the reward of doing things you don’t like is some sort of supreme, final condition where you won’t ever have to think about anything anymore—because you will have succeeded.

[03:39] Suffering is a Mistake

In fact, there’s no succession in this. The whole idea that we can explain away suffering by saying it was worthwhile because you succeed if you suffer is antithetical to the Vedic worldview.

The Vedic worldview is that suffering is a mistake. Anytime we find ourselves suffering, whether we know that we’re doing so or we don’t, it’s due to inadvertent or perhaps conscious violations of the laws of Nature—mostly inadvertent.

No one ever says, “I want to be happy, so I’m going to violate all these laws of Nature and see if I can get myself happy.” No one sets out to make themselves unhappy. People are all striving for happiness, but they’re striving in ignorance. If someone buys a dozen glazed doughnuts, goes home, turns on a particularly riveting TV series, and while watching, gorges themselves with one and two and six and ten and eleven and twelve doughnuts, the whole time, all they wanted to do was be happy.

There was never a moment when the aspirant to happiness was thinking, “This is going to make me so unhappy.” But then, at the end of the 12th doughnut, there’s gross unhappiness, pain, suffering, nausea, constipation—all kinds of problems. “But I was only trying to make myself happy,” says the aspirant.

Yes, you were trying to make yourself happy with the knowledge you had, which, relative to the knowledge you will have later, is ignorance. So, when our ignorance leads us to believe that something unsustainable is possibly sustainable, we engage in the unsustainable. At the end of it all, we might say, “My hard work really brought me to success.” Actually, hard work is a very interesting concept.

[06:24] Kriya – Frictionless Flow of Activity

All of you know there have been occasions when you were living your life dharmically. Dharma is a Sanskrit word meaning your personal role in the evolution of things.

When you are living dharma, you experience a kind of frictionless flow of activity. This has another Sanskrit word associated with it: Kriya (K-R-I-Y-A). The Cosmos, your big Self deep inside you, has a particular need for something to get done, and your individuality is the ideal means whereby that thing can get done.

You are the pivot point between Cosmic and individual outlet, and when that happens, others might look and say, “Wow, you’re doing hard work,” but from your perspective, it’s not hard work at all. It’s just frictionless flow; it is kriya. You’re living the dharma.

Others might call it hard work, but you don’t experience it as hard work. Others might say you’re doing hours and hours, but those hours to you feel insufficient in the day because you’re enjoying it so much.

[08:09] Michelangelo Liberating the Captives

I think of a story told to me in an art class at university about the great painter-sculptor Michelangelo. It was said that he would gaze at a massive block of marble, hour after hour, doing nothing, and then suddenly, lifting his ten-pound roughing-out hammer, he would begin attacking the marble with vigor.

With singular blows, ten- and fifteen-pound chunks of marble would fly away from this giant block of stone. People would sometimes say to him, “You’re in such a fit of fury.” He’d be covered in sweat, swinging that hammer before he began his fine work. People would say, “You haven’t stopped for hours; what are you doing?”

He’d smile and reply, “I’m liberating the captives. There are captives in the stone, and I’m liberating them.” Meaning, the shapes of the people he could see in the stone itself needed liberation. He didn’t consider it hard work; it would have been hard work to sit in the chair and not do that when the time was right.

So, hard work—what does it mean? When someone says, “Work hard, you’ll succeed,” are they saying, “You’ll get lots of things wrong, violate lots of laws of Nature, and suffer a lot, but if you keep at it, eventually, hit or miss, you might get what you want”?

And what you want might only satisfy you for a few minutes or a few hours because the mind always wants to move on to the next thing: succession, succession.

[10:23] Stop Being Merely an Individual

So, what is the Vedic worldview? We want to stop being merely an individual who, using only our individual sense of history, defines ourselves by past events—where you grew up, the choices you made, or what you’re doing now. That’s maybe a who you are, but it’s not what you are.

What you actually are is Cosmic Intelligence seeking storyline. And evidently, storyline was found—from one place to another, storyline was found. As you meditate twice every day, your individuality is regularly greeted by its own inner Universality. Universality adopts individuality, and adopts the storyline.

When Universality decides to put individuality into effective action, bringing about progressive change, it causes a desire to bubble up inside the consciousness of the individuality. A desire meaning: “I find the concept of doing a thing very charming.” That meditator will lean into that charm, and although it may be consuming in terms of time, it doesn’t feel like work—it feels like frictionless flow.

[12:37] Hard Work Insinuates Suffering

We can’t say it’s effortless. Only in meditation do we have effortlessness. Outside of meditation, the corollary of effortlessness is frictionless-ness. It may not be effortless, but it doesn’t feel like work; it feels like play. This is kriya, the spontaneous right action coming from Universal Intelligence.

Kriya causes you to live your dharma, your personal role in the evolution of things. Your dharma, or how that role expresses itself, may change from year to year. What is it that, by doing that, you’re realizing your highest and best use?

Kriya, dharma, and frictionless flow. As we continue our practice, we may feel as though we haven’t done anything. Someone might say, “Wow, that’s amazing success,” and you’ll look back and say, “I don’t feel like I did anything. I just responded to the call.”

Hard work implies suffering. I didn’t feel like it was suffering; it just felt like play. Yes, I was engaged, but it felt like play.

[14:52] You Are Nature

When we reach that state, we have frictionless flow. Big Self informs small self about what is evolutionary to be doing, and we experience one succession after another. Completion of a phase of a giant project leads to conceptualization of another possibility, another succession.

The whole thing is success because it’s succession after succession after succession. There is no stopping point; everything grows and grows and grows. And that growth to infinity is well within our human capability.

So, “hard work yields success” and “suffering equals arriving at a state where you can flop about and not have concerns in the world”—this is a complete fallacy. We want to find ways of doing less, working intelligently, and accomplishing more.

We want to do the least and accomplish the most. When we become proficient in realizing our full capability, with a mere impulse of intention, all the laws of Nature come to your aid. Things get done because you are Nature. You’re no longer merely being supported by Nature; you have become one with Nature.

When you’re one with Nature, then nothing can make itself an obstacle to you. Nothing.

Jai Guru Deva.