The Role of Action in Life

And the wisdom of a book of Hindu scripture

The question of possibly greatest importance to us is, how a person should live their life. Since ‘live’ here is a verb, it implies that we need to find out what we should be doing with our time. In contrast to a life well-lived, we feel ourselves to be in stasis. We think that distance between ourselves and success is a matter of hard work and/or choosing better daily habits.

As opposed to thought, action is indeed more effective. It creates momentum. It is in a sense more ‘intelligent’ than thought. It uncovers new evidence about how the world works; and has a higher payoff function, destabilizing the present in order to uncover new opportunities. We are told to ‘create a bias for action’ in order to learn faster.

All of the above is factually correct when stated in its rawest form. The problem is how it will be filtered and received. Whereas one’s actions were meant to be a measure of a person’s character, people have turned it into a goal. As Goodhart’s Law shows, it cannot be both.

Almost everyone who works 70+ hours per week; pursues Malcolm Gladwell’s recommendation of 10,000 hours practice; airs grievances for the sake of Honesty; and all the other hallmarks of a ‘person of action’, is in truth engaging in cargo-cult behavior. Since these behaviors have arisen from a prescription, they become a set of mechanical movements designed to propitiate the modern gods of ‘action’.

In the famous Hindu epic ‘The Bhagavad Gita’, Krishna begins a discussion with Arjuna about Yoga. He asserts that

One should have watchful insight

into action,

watchful insight

into wrong action,

and watchful insight

into non-action.

Krishna continues that from a place of Insight,

One undertakes

all actions

steady in yoga.

In modern society the word ‘organic’ has come to mean non-mechanical, closer to natural rather than artificial processes. The artifice could be machine or chemical-based, or it could be a behavior which modern communication had allowed to govern from thousands of miles away. Krishna would not have recognized this terminology, but we can say that yoga is the practice of organic action. An organic act is not prescribed, but comes from what the person has seen into the essence of (insight).

If a father sees that his daughter is about to walk off a ledge, he does not have to wait for a prescription— he’ll rush to grab her before he’s consciously aware of what he’s doing.

After a few nights of poor sleep I’ll have awful-looking bags under my eyes. After I’ve looked in the mirror I don’t have to work hard to maintain good sleep hygiene, to avoid screens or snacks before bed and to make sure the room temperature is cool. I do it automatically when I see the consequences of not sleeping well.

The truth is that action never needs to be prescribed because action is our default state. Every cell in our body is engaged in it. Blaise Pascal wrote that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Many religions have recognized this and have set their members to praying and meditating in almost total seclusion. That this is ineffective is shown by the fact that they must continue to do so for their whole lives, never having transcended the locomotive demands of their bodies.

For most of us, action arises from need (which is the same as saying it arises from desire). We expect a particular outcome. Even things we do because we are told we ‘Should’ do them don’t arise directly from the Should but from the need that hearing the Should produces: the need to be ‘right’ or ‘good’ or successful. True insight produces fear, coming from the belief that we cannot act without a Should — that if we lost our Should we would never do anything. I submit that the only thing we’d lose is the need, i.e. ‘neediness’ in the truest sense of the word.

In the ‘Gita’, Krishna does not enjoin renunciation of action itself, merely renunciation of action without “clinging to the fruits of action.”

He tells Arjuna:

“One who is without desire

but with a self

whose thought is restrained,

and who has left off all grasping,

undertaking action

with the body alone

that one does no evil.”

In reading Krishna’s words about the “one who is without desire,” we have the same problem as I mentioned earlier: the words are true, but there is danger in their reception, in the making of ‘no desire’ into a goal to pursue. This prevents insight, which will initially require one’s desires to be pursued, in order to see the full truth about them. The individual who represses their desires merely drives them underground. Such a person will start to behave in strange ways. They will have resentments and anger they cannot understand, which will leak out in bizarre statements and stilted or erratic bodily motions.

You are best served in pursuing your desires, in order to really know where life’s boundaries are. In starting to do this it is helpful to know that most boundaries are arbitrary, invented in a society playing the competitive game of status, by people who want the way cleared for their own aims. Everyone is subject to this. Women are instructed to be unwaveringly pleasant and polite, and chaste, so that men might feel secure in their possession of them and never have to face their own inadequacies. Likewise, men are shamed for their creative and aggressive impulses by a society that would be far better off if it encouraged men to experiment with them.

The ideal of yoga is related to the Jungian concept of the ‘Shadow’. The Shadow is made up of those desires which are not socially acceptable but which cannot be eliminated. Peace of mind requires familiarity with your Shadow side, which only becomes denser when you try to suppress an urge. To undertake action “with the body alone” is for your entire personality to be expressed in unison, to be self-sufficient without advice or outside instruction. It requires you to organically relinquish the idea that an action requires a goal to justify it

“Content with

accidental gifts,

moving beyond dualities,

free from malice,

the same in fulfillment

and frustration,

even after acting,

that one is not bound.”

That which is self-contained in its purpose, done for its own sake, is what we call Art. Humans are prone to asking what Art is for. In doing so they mistake the means for the end, since the beauty of Art is what everyone in their own way is seeking. Ironically humans do not apply the same utilitarian scrutiny to the expressly utilitarian. If they did they would realize that because humans are habit-based creatures, the utilitarian is self-propagating and shuts out the beauty it was supposed to lead to.