The Secret of Success: Attention to the Means
One of the greatest lessons I have learnt in my life is to
pay as much attention to the means of work as to its end. He was a great man
from whom I learnt it, and his own life was a practical demonstration of this
great principle. I have been always learning great lessons from that one
principle, and it appears to be that all the secret of success is there; to pay
as much attention to the means as to the end.
Our great defect in life is that we are so much drawn to the ideal, the goal is
so much more enchanting, so much more alluring, so much bigger in our mental
horizon, that we lose sight of the details altogether.
But whenever failure comes, if we analyse it critically, in ninety-nine per
cent of cases we shall find that it was because we did not pay attention to the
means. Proper attention to the finishing, strengthening, of the means is what
we need. With the means all right, the end must come. We forget that it is the
cause that produces the effect; the effect cannot come of itself; and unless
the causes are exact, proper, and powerful, the effect will not be produced.
Once the ideal is chosen and the means determined, we may almost let go the
ideal, because we are sure it will be there, when the means are perfected. When
the cause is there, there is no more difficulty about the effect, the effect is
bound to come. If we take care of the cause, the effect will take care of
itself. The realization of the ideal is the effect. The means are the cause:
attention to the means, therefore, is the great secret of life. We also read
this in the Gita and learn that we have to work, constantly work with all our
power; to put our whole mind in the work, whatever it be, that we are doing. At
the same time, we must not be attached. That is to say, we must not be drawn
away from work by anything else; still, we must be able to quit the work
whenever we like.
The Secret of Misery: Expecting Returns
If we examine our own lives, we find that the greatest cause of
sorrow is this: we take up something, and put our whole energy on it–perhaps it
is a failure and yet we cannot give it up. We know that it is hurting us, that
any further clinging to it is simply bringing misery on us; still, we cannot
tear ourselves away from it. The bee came to sip the honey, but its feet stuck
to the honey-pot and it could not get away. Again and again, we are finding
ourselves in that state. That is the whole secret of existence. Why are we
here? We came here to sip the honey, and we find our hands and feet sticking to
it. We are caught, though we came to catch. We came to enjoy; we are being
enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being
worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our
life. We are being worked upon by other minds, and we are always struggling to
work on other minds. We want to enjoy the pleasures of life; and they eat into
our vitals. We want to get everything from nature, but we find in the long run
that nature takes everything from us–depletes us, and casts us aside.
Had it not been for this, life would have been all sunshine. Never
mind! With all its failures and successes, with all its joys and sorrows, it
can be one succession of sunshine, if only we are not caught.
That is the one cause of misery: we are attached, we are being
caught. Therefore says the Gita: Work constantly; work, but be not attached; be
not caught. Reserve unto yourself the power of detaching yourself from
everything, however beloved, however much the soul might yearn for it, however
great the pangs of misery you feel if you were going to leave it; still,
reserve the power of leaving it whenever you want. The weak have no place here,
in this life or in any other life. Weakness leads to slavery. Weakness leads to
all kinds of misery, physical and mental. Weakness is death. There are hundreds
of thousands of microbes surrounding us, but they cannot harm us unless we
become weak, until the body is ready and predisposed to receive them. There may
be a million microbes of misery, floating about us. Never mind! They dare not
approach us, they have no power to get a hold on us, until the mind is
weakened. This is the great fact: strength is life, weakness is death. Strength
is felicity, life eternal, immortal; weakness is constant strain and misery:
weakness is death.
Attachment is the source of all our pleasures now. We are attached
to our friends, to our relatives; we are attached to our intellectual and
spiritual works; we are attached to external objects, so that we get pleasure
from them. What, again, brings misery but this very attachment? We have to
detach ourselves to earn joy. If only we had power to detach ourselves at will,
there would not be any misery. That man alone will be able to get the best of nature,
who, having the power of attaching himself to a thing with all his energy, has
also the power to detach himself when he should do so. The difficulty is that
there must be as much power of attachment as that of detachment. There are men
who are never attracted by anything. They can never love, they are hard-hearted
and apathetic; they escape most of the miseries of life. But the wall never
feels misery, the wall never loves, is never hurt; but it is the wall, after
all. Surely it is better to be attached and caught, than to be a wall.
Therefore the man who never loves who is hard and stony, escaping most of the
miseries of life, escapes also its joys. We do not want that. That is weakness,
that is death. That soul has not been awakened that never feels weakness, never
feels misery. That is a callous state. We do not want that.
At the same time, we not only want this mighty power of love, this
mighty power of attachment, the power of throwing our whole soul upon a single
object, losing ourselves and letting ourselves be annihilated, as it were, for
other souls–which is the power of the gods–but we want to be higher even than
the gods. The perfect man can put his whole soul upon that one point of love,
yet he is unattached. How comes this? There is another secret to learn.
The beggar is never happy. The beggar only gets a dole with pity
and scorn behind it, at least with the thought behind that the beggar is a low
object. He never really enjoys what he gets.
We are all beggars. Whatever we do, we want a return. We are all
traders. We are traders in life, we are traders in virtue, we are traders in
religion. And alas! we are also traders in love.
If you come to trade, if it is a question of give-and-take, if it
is a question of buy-and-sell, abide by the laws of buying and selling. There
is a bad time and there is a good time; there is a rise and a fall in prices:
always you expect the blow to come. It is like looking at the mirror. Your face
is reflected: you make a grimace–there is one in the mirror; if you laugh, the
mirror laughs. This is buying and selling, giving and taking.
We get caught. How? Not by what we give, but by what we expect. We
get misery in return for our love; not from the fact that we love, but from the
fact that we want love in return. There is no misery where there is no want.
Desire, want, is the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of
success and failure. Desires must bring misery.
The Law of Give and Take
The great secret of true success, of true happiness, then,
is this: the man who asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish man, is the
most successful. It seems to be a paradox. Do we not know that every man who is
unselfish in life gets cheated, gets hurt? Apparently, yes. "Christ was
unselfish, and yet he was crucified." True, but we know that his
unselfishness is the reason, the cause of a great victory–the crowning of
millions upon millions of lives with the blessings of true success.
Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come
back to you–but do not think of that now, it will come back multiplied a
thousandfold–but the attention must not be on that. Yet have the power to give:
give, and there it ends. Learn that the whole of life is giving, that nature
will force you to give. So, give willingly. Sooner or later you will have to
give up. You come into life to accumulate. With clenched hands, you want to
take. But nature puts a hand on your throat and makes your hands open. Whether
you will it or not, you have to give. The moment you say, "I will
not", the blow comes; you are hurt. None is there but will be compelled,
in the long run, to give up everything. And the more one struggles against this
law, the more miserable one feels. It is because we dare not give, because we are
not resigned enough to accede to this grand demand of nature, that we are
miserable. The forest is gone, but we get heat in return. The sun is taking up
water from the ocean, to return it in showers. You are a machine for taking and
giving: you take, in order to give. Ask, therefore, nothing in return; but the
more you give, the more will come to you. The quicker you can empty the air out
of this room, the quicker it will be filled up by the external air; and if you
close all the doors and every aperture, that which is within will remain, but
that which is outside will never come in, and that which is within will
stagnate, degenerate, and become poisoned. A river is continually emptying
itself into the ocean and is continually filling up again. Bar not the exit into
the ocean. The moment you do that, death seizes you.
The Most Difficult Task: being in control
Be, therefore, not a beggar; be unattached. This is the most
terrible task of life! You do not calculate the dangers on the path. Even by
intellectually recognising the difficulties, we really do not know them until
we feel them. From a distance we may get a general view of a park: well, what
of that? We feel and really know it when we are in it. Even if our every
attempt is a failure, and we bleed and are torn asunder, yet, through all this,
we have to preserve our heart–we must assert our God-head in the midst of all
these difficulties. Nature wants us to react, to return blow for blow, cheating
for cheating, lie for lie, to hit back with all our might. Then it requires a
superdivine power not to hit back, to keep control, to be unattached.
Every day we renew our determination to be unattached. We cast our
eyes back and look at the past objects of our love and attachment, and feel how
every one of them made us miserable. We went down into the depths of dependency
because of our "love"! We found ourselves mere slaves in the hands of
others, we were dragged down and down! And we make a fresh determination:
"Henceforth, I will be master of myself; henceforth, I will have control
over myself." But the time comes, and the same story once more! Again the
soul is caught and cannot get out. The bird is in a net, struggling and
fluttering. This is our life.
I know the difficulties. Tremendous they are, and ninety per cent of
us become discouraged and lose heart, and in our turn, often become pessimists
and cease to believe in sincerity, love, and all that is grand and noble. So,
we find men who in the freshness of their lives have been forgiving, kind,
simple, and guileless, become in old age lying masks of men. Their minds are a
mass of intricacy. There may be a good deal of external policy, possibly. They
are not hot-headed, they do not speak, but it would be better for them to do
so; their hearts are dead and, therefore, they do not speak. They do not curse,
not become angry; but it would be better for them to be able to be angry; a
thousand times better, to be able to curse. They cannot. There is death in the
heart, for cold hands have seized upon it, and it can no more act, even to
utter a curse, even to use a harsh word.
All this we have to avoid: therefore I
say, we require super divine power. Superhuman power is not strong enough.
Super divine strength is the only way, the one way out. By it alone we can pass
through all these intricacies, through these showers of miseries, unscathed. We
may be cut to pieces, torn asunder, yet our hearts must grow nobler and nobler
all the time.
Doing Our Part to Avoid Difficulties
It is very difficult, but we can overcome the difficulty by
constant practice. We must learn that nothing can happen to us, unless we make
ourselves susceptible to it. I have just said, no disease can come to me until
the body is ready; it does not depend alone on the germs, but upon a certain
predisposition which is already in the body. We get only that for which we are
fitted. Let us give up our pride and understand this, that never is misery
undeserved. There never has been a blow undeserved: there never has been an
evil for which I did not pave the way with my own hands. We ought to know that.
Analyse yourselves and you will find that every blow you have received, came to
you because you prepared yourselves for it. You did half, and the external
world did the other half: that is how the blow came. That will sober us down.
At the same time, from this very analysis will come a note of hope, and the
note of hope is: "I have no control of the external world, but that which
is in me and nearer unto me, my own world, is in my control. If the two
together are required to make a failure, if the two together are necessary to
give me a blow, I will not contribute the one which is in my keeping; and how
then can the blows come? If I get real control of myself, the blow will never
come."
We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame
upon something outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other
people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is
a devil’s world." We curse others and say, "What infatuated
fools!" But why should we be in such a world, if we really are so good? If
this is a devil’s world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here?
"Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!" True enough; but why
should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just think of that.
We only get what we deserve. It is a lie when we say, the world is
bad and we are good. It can never be so. It is a terrible lie we tell
ourselves.
This is the first lesson to learn: be determined not to curse
anything outside, not to lay the blame upon any one outside, but be a man,
stand up, lay the blame on yourself. You will find, that is always true. Get
hold of yourself.
Is it not a shame that at one moment we talk so much of our
manhood, of our being gods–that we know everything, we can do everything, we
are blameless, spotless, the most unselfish people in the world; and at the
next moment, a little stone hurts us, a little anger from a little Jack wounds
us–any fool in the street makes "these gods" miserable! Should this
be so if we are such gods? Is it true that the world is to blame? Could God,
who is the purest and noblest of souls, be made miserable by any of our tricks?
If you are so unselfish, you are like God. What world can hurt you? You would
go through the seventh hell unscathed, untouched. But the very fact that you
complain and want to lay blame upon the external world shows that you feel the
external world–the very fact that you feel shows that you are not what you
claim to be. You only make your offence greater by heaping misery upon misery,
by imagining that the external world is hurting you, and crying out, "Oh,
this devil’s world! This man hurts me; that man hurts me!" and so forth.
It is adding lies to misery.
We are to take care of ourselves–that
much we can do–and give up attending to others for a time. Let us perfect the
means; the end will take care of itself. For the world can be good and pure,
only if our lives are good and pure. It is an effect, and we are the means.
Therefore, let us purify ourselves. Let us make ourselves perfect.