In this third episode in our series on the 4 pillars of Planet Dharma’s approach to working with students, we will hear about Karma Yoga, also known as ‘the path of service’, or ‘meditation in action’. In this excerpt from their online course, Beyond the Cushion, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei explore the many facets of karma yoga, and explain why it is such a good fit for many modern practitioners.
The path of karma yoga is a powerful approach that readily lends itself to supporting a 21st-century awakening. If this path of meditation-in-action appeals to you, we think your best bet is the 3-Month Intensive Karma Yoga program at Clear Sky Center. The program brings spiritual awakening into the modern context – by integrating karma yoga, meditation, psychology, environment, career, and community. To learn more, visit our 3-Month Intensive Program page.
Podcast Transcription:
Welcome to Dharma If You Dare. In this third episode in our series on the Four Pillars of Planet Dharma’s approach to working with students, we will hear about karma yoga, also known as the path of service or meditation in action. In this excerpt from their online course Beyond the Cushion, Doug Qapel Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat Sensei explore the many facets of Karma Yoga and explain why it is such a good fit for many modern practitioners. While two of the Planet Dharma pillars, Study and Meditation, can be practiced to a certain extent on your own, the other two pillars, Karma Yoga and Integrating the Shadow require a skilled and experienced guide to be done safely and fruitfully, and to really unlock the power of these practices requires trust, trust that can only really be built on a relationship that develops over time.
If these talks speak to you, and Sensei and Qapel seem like the sort of teachers you would like to work with, we encourage you to check out our How We Work page on our website, visit PlanetDharma.com, and click on the First Time Here button. And now here’s today’s recording:
Catherine Sensei: “So tonight we’re talking about our third pillar, the pillar of Karma Yoga, sometimes known as service. It’s actually a Hindi tradition – before it was Buddhist, it was Hindi – and it’s still Hindi. It’s really about serving the Transcendental. As some of you are familiar with, there are six different yogic paths and there are different versions and this is just one version.
Qapel: So Hatha yoga, you all know. Raja Yoga, sometimes called Dhyana Yoga is meditation, and Bhakti Yoga is devotion. Bhakti Yoga is not so popular these days particularly, but if you think about the amount of time you spend in the mirror, combing your hair or getting your clothes right or your earrings or making sure you’re dressing for work, that’s a kind of Bhakti Yoga. Jhana Yoga is scholarship and Tantra Yoga, which has curiously become a kind of sexual tantra yoga in the West – a lot of the schools of Tantra Yoga are actually celibate. It’s about meditating or watching the nature of the energies moving through the system rather than sex per se. But it does also include sexual yoga, sexual energy.
CS: Anyhow, number five, service or action: So the principle of Karma Yoga is that whatever we’re experiencing today is shaped by our actions in the past. That’s the karma part.
Q: And becoming aware of this in our present efforts becomes a way of consciously creating a future that frees us from being bound by the actions rooted in unwholesome conditioning of primitive views or conflicting emotions of the past. So, the path of Karma Yoga is to help you free yourself from negative associations with actions and emotions built into the structure of how you lived in the past. Karma yoga gets you as it were into the present.
CS: And we could say that the study of karma is one of the Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind, right? The study of karma is, in a sense, you could say, the elimination of choices.
Q: That’s a very interesting idea. In a sense, they say Buddha Karma is no choice, it’s doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason. It doesn’t mean that the actions always turn out right. But what it means is that the Buddha mind is always working from a position of wisdom and compassion and therefore there is no choice in the decision because at any given moment of time that decision dictated by compassion will step forward.
CS: And ironically this leads to, ultimately, Buddha Karma, which is no choices. You don’t need to make any choices because the way forward is just clear as the way forward.
Q: So this gets a bit complicated and we won’t spend too much time on it but basically, they say that a Bodhisattva isn’t really a person as such. They’re no longer functioning from a personal point of view or agenda, but they’re moving from a place of this Sunyata – emptiness, compassion – aspect and they act as best they can under the conditions in the situations that they find themselves under in the relative world. So the actions themselves may be imperfect, but supposedly the state is untarnished by imperfections.
CS: That’s right. So we undertake Karma Yoga as a way to turn our lives into a path of selfless service, a service to the Transcendental and it sounds kind of abstract that way – while we’re serving the transcendental, we’re also serving all beings or other people, and it’s nice to have a person that we’re serving, because a person who’s more experienced than us can help us to purify our motivation – and we’ll talk about that more later in the class.
Q: On the previous subject for a moment, I once asked my teacher how Lama consciousness makes decisions, and his response was that it doesn’t make decisions. It acts from this place. So the funny thing about eliminating all choices which is the purpose of karma yoga is to eliminate personal choice in a way – is that opens the door to infinite choice, and we’re going to leave that with you as a meditation. How do you get from eliminating choices to having infinite choice? But just as a footnote on the subject, Krishnamurti talked about choiceless awareness, and Namgyal Rinpoche talked about choiceful awareness. So how do we marry these two – karma yoga curiously, is the path to the perfection of choiceless wisdom. Beautiful concept.
CS: So when we’re doing service we really need to be serving all beings or any particular beings. The point here is it helps us to overcome preference-minds. So we’re not serving the people we like or the people that we want to serve and how we want to serve it.
Q: We do Karma Yoga to get over preferences, like we said, because the ego loves to be in control. And even if the ego gives up control, it’s deciding when to give up control, who to, when and how, and for how long – the ego’s job is to sort of be in control, that’s its function. So fair enough. But you don’t need that control when you don’t need that control, and a good part of the time, you don’t need the control to do the job that you’re doing a lot of the time. It’s kind of rote or it’s repetitive. And even if it’s imaginative, your ego is really not in that process. When you’re being imaginative or creative, your egos are kind of on the side. It’s back when we started thinking about how I sit in the matrix of the event that the ego starts to stand up and make noise. And that’s when we get caught up in the associated conflicted emotions and kind of primitive use that get in the way.
CS: That’s right. And having these states arise is actually the point of Karma Yoga when we talk about it. We want these emotions and states to arise so that we can examine them and learn how to transcend them.
Q: And in the process, we see how much of our identity is rooted in the illusion of our independence. How much of your identity is rooted in the illusion that you’re an independent person doing your own thing? And you’ll probably find that while you act independently in moment-to-moment decisions, all your moment-to-moment decisions are conditioned by everything and everybody around you. So you’re not as independent as you think you are. So we maintain this idea of being independent by insisting that the pizza does not have corn on it but only has squid on it. This is how I prove I’m an individual. Unless, of course, you like both, in which case you have a different kind of identity to deal with.
CS: Let’s talk about some of the things that Karma Yoga helps us with specifically. It helps us overcome the unnecessary need for control. It helps us see others as oneself. It helps us see through nonduality.
Q: Golden Rule, really.
CS: That’s a good way to put it. It helps us really examine the nature of our preferences. Our preferences. They seem to like these really nice things, these things that I like. It seems kind of lovely, the things I like but that can really become a jail right? If I only want to do the things that I like. That circumscribes my life. That makes for a pretty small life.
Q: And while you’re working, you’re and you’re making money you’re creating an income or a career or relationship with that, there’s a lot of associated fear and worry about success and failure and all that. But with Karma Yoga, it isn’t about whether you do it right or wrong particularly. It’s about observing and witnessing the emotions in the state you go through while you’re doing it, which is far more important than whatever the task is. So it might be a high-end task like washing the dishes or it might be a very low-end task like resolving the financial problems of an organization. The purpose of Karma Yoga is to not get caught up in the fear and anxiety that surrounds those different kinds of functions.
CS: So when we talk about karma yoga, we’re talking about something rather specific which is doing service for another person who has more experience than we do and we call this dharma training or that person would be a dharma trainer. And this is why we came up with the Planet Dharma principle to serve people more experienced than you. We learn something when we serve people more experienced than we are.
Q: Another way to put this is you want to be listening to the clearest voice in the room at the time. And if our society is indicated by anything with politics is that politicians are definitely not the clearest voice in the room at the time, ever. And that’s indicating how we’re conditioned to be programmed to be seduced by power or control or by influence rather than developing our wisdom mind, which is to see, What is the clearest voice in the room at this moment? It may be coming from the plumber or in the case of the Six Patriarch, the kitchen help, who wasn’t even allowed to go to the classes in China because he was illiterate, but he was the clearest voice in the room. So you have to be careful.
Alright, so we really worked quite hard to see ourselves as independent and hold on to that illusion. When that illusion is challenged, that’s when we get conflicting emotions and when we feel that our identity is under threat, we also come up with incredibly weird views in order to hold our identity together. Anything that gives us that idea of some sort of separate independent reality and you can use anything.
CS: That’s right. So we work really hard to stay in this illusion that we’re independent and unique and you’ve heard us speak before about the nature of this illusion and how totally dependent we are on everybody else. Just that in our modern lives, most of those people are really working behind the scenes, so we don’t see who is delivering our food to the market or certainly who’s growing that food or picking that food. We don’t see who puts the money in the ATM Machine.
Q: So all these pieces of our independent illusion of the self come together in our mandala of how we function and interact in the world and we hold that very precious. So when we do Karma Yoga and we’re serving somebody or someone or something else and we give that up, we are immediately threatened in our identity. But the curious thing about it is that the greatest freedom often comes when you make the greatest surrender. So when you surrender that argument in the process of Karma Yoga, you actually feel more powerful and you feel you have more control and more power and more effectiveness because you’re no longer bound by your fears and insecurities, because you’ve learned that you haven’t really lost anything in the process of doing Karma Yoga, you’ve really actually only gained. And what you’ve gained fundamentally is the ability to do anything, more or less, and be in a good state about it. You don’t have to be in a bad state about politics or the or the government or whoever. You’re just cleaning the street, or washing the dishes.
CS: It’s sort of like how celibacy helps us have healthier sexuality because it allows us to watch all the energies that are arising and doing strange things in the dance that goes around sexuality. So in the same way with Karma Yoga, we give up control in order to study the nature of the patterns that arise when we feel like we don’t have control. And as Sensei is describing, this helps us to feel like – in a sense – if we don’t need to have control, then we’re more in control because we can just relax and go with the flow, and not expend a lot of energy trying to maintain control.
Q: And the other aspect of this is that when you allow yourself to be controlled by others or a slave to others, you understand that regardless of what you’re doing, nobody has any control whatsoever over your mind state or your emotions other than you. It’s your power. And so, in a sense, you don’t really discover that until you give up the idea that I have to hang on to my identity and emotions, that you realize if I don’t hang on to it, you haven’t really lost anything They’re still within your ability to manage. And so the other aspect of Karma Yoga is that while you’re doing Karma Yoga, a lot of the Karma Yoga you do isn’t very complicated, so that you can do the task, watch the arising state, do your practice or your mantras, your visualizations, or whatever to bring the being back into a sense of stability regardless of what the task is.
CS: Okay, as Senseo said it’s in the surrendering that we discover how powerful we are because our state is our own. And as Sensei is saying, nobody else gets to determine what our state is. Nobody except us.
Q: And nobody is responsible by the way for your state either. Nobody, ever, under any conditions, for any reason, is responsible for your state.
CS: Right. That’s all self-generated.
Q: They may be treating you bad. But it’s up to you whether you feel bad. They may be treating you bad…
CS: It’s a Blues song! It’s hard to understand this unless someone has gone through this process and it is quite a long process as we’ll discuss in a moment.
Traditionally Karma Yoga is described as action without attachment to results. So this is really about doing the action for the sake of doing the action for the practice.
Q: I just want to throw in something contextual here, which is the nature of the awakening process is a training and if you were from the East, you would be trained in a monastery or if you’re a Christian, you’d be trained in a monastery and most awakened beings in either tradition managed to accomplish that through monastic training. So we’re suggesting a monastic training that is much more inclusive or integrative to our normal lives and still attain the same result. So this is the reason for the Karma yoga, the meditation to study, and next week the shadow work, just to put it in context training.
CS: So meditation is really great at helping us learn to cultivate ever better states of bliss and clarity. So with meditation, we can really get good at maintaining a clear state and that is absolutely essential for awakening. That’s awesome. Now, Karma Yoga helps us work on our stage. So we want to distinguish here between states and stages and this is from Integral Spirituality a la Ken Wilber. So it’s really important to distinguish between states and stages that they’re different. We can have a wonderful state cultivated through meditation but have a low stage or we can live in a high stage, be very open minded for example, but be in a crummy state and what we really like to do is cultivate both – a very good state and a very high stage.
Q: So I think we need to recognize this is a spiritual revolution that changed so Freud and psychology changed dharma forever. That now basically psychology, starting with Freud introduced a whole new level of learning and understanding that one has to incorporate in the awakening process to have a 20th century, 21st-century awakening. So you can have 19th century awakening and it looks very 19th century or you can have a 21st-century awakening. So in order to have a 21st-century awakening, you also have to have a good understanding of psychology, which is why so many Buddhist practitioners have gone out and got PhDs in psychology, but even more so in the 21st century is you’re going have to now integrate a whole new level, not only the psychology, you’re gonna have to integrate the stages. And so the stage is a whole new turning of the wheel for the awakening of a fully awakened being in the 21st century, integrating the stages of how we function and appear in the world with the states, how we experience ourselves.
Now, the understanding that goes along with this is that if you want to be awakened, if you want to get awakened you need a path. And then at the beginning of this talk, we mentioned six traditional paths, but one way or the other, you got to walk one of the paths and we figured for westerners, Karma Yoga is probably the most easily accessible and most understandable path because we’re a bunch of doers, we just doing shit all the time. We do do do do do do. So this doesn’t replace meditation. In fact, we find meditation to be… you can’t do without it. It’s fundamentally necessary to do a fair bit of meditation. But for a path that we’re walking principally in our day-to-day lives, we think karma yoga is probably much more accessible for westerners than the meditative path because fundamentally you guys just have a hard time sitting still.
CS: It’s a kind of shortcut for “how do we make our spiritual path 24/7, 365?” As somebody said, it’s easier with others. That’s one of Clear Sky’s Five Principles. And so Karma Yoga is a way to help us do that, to help us work on our path and on our livelihood and on our Triple Gem at the same time.
Q: And it helps us overcome one of these great capitalist diseases called ownership. So the idea of Karma Yoga is that you’re not taking ownership for the deed, you’re not taking ownership of the event, You’re just participating as a clear manifestation of action and that’s what karma means anyway, action. So Buddha Karma is an action where there is no doer and nothing being done. And in order to get to that place, you need to get past the idea of the self and the self agenda that’s attached to the activity.
CS: Because we know for sure we are never, never never, ever, ever, ever going to get it all our own way. Never. So Karma Yoga helps us practice that.
Q: Are you Sure?
CS: I am quite sure. Experience has shown…
Q: If I keep trying can I get my own way? How about if I eliminate all the people who disagree with me? I know, I’ll live alone and close the door and not let anybody in and then I’ll get my own way, except the TV went on the blink.
CS: Yeah… so Karma Yoga and dharma training is a way to help us practice so that when we don’t get our own way, which is as we know quite a lot of the time we are fine, we just sail through that.
Q: Yeah, absolutely. One of the reasons we feel lonely as individuals and according to recent research, three out of five Americans feel lonely most of the time. And one of the reasons we’re so alone is because we’ve lost our ability to work in a community that we feel is integrative and supportive and healthy and wholesome etc. and in order for a community to do that, it has to embrace these four bottom lines. Usually, the nonprofits, not-for-profit organizations have a triple bottom line – Economic, Environmental and Social. And we’ve introduced, of course, the fourth one, Spirituality. And so we figured that this is a way of creating a society that people can live in or people would want to live in that is financially healthy, and so on. And if we can create such an organization as a genesis point or as a starting point or as a seed for our sister organizations, brother organizations to start functioning in the same way, then we can pull humanity back from this brink of species destruction, overpopulation, environment, that degradation, political malfeasance, by setting up an alternative. But in order to get to the alternative, all of us who are brought up or built or live in that system need to find doors or accesses to enter into a different system that can work for us and help support others. So we’re hoping that we are kind of a seed in that direction, the first model to create an alternative society that brings power back to the people and takes it away from the organizations or corporations who don’t have a soul, fundamentally. So that’s our idea about that in terms of the parami for the world through the quadruple bottom line – to match equally the work of the shadow, study, meditation, and training – Karma Yoga to integrate those two aspects of the circle.
CS: Yeah, I’d like to emphasize what Sensei is saying that when we talk about the socially generative bottom line that living and working and practicing in the community involves a lot of skills that Clear Sky really helped us realize that we didn’t have the skills that are needed to live and work and practice together. And I don’t know when we lost those skills. I was completely – it wasn’t like I could say, oh yeah, that’s what they taught me in grade school and I just never picked it up. I had never really been exposed to those skills and didn’t know where to get them really. So that’s been a really important part of our journey together. Communication skills, for example – one day we’re going to create a comedy of all the challenges we faced. So how did we get in this – I’d say now we have really great teamwork and actually enjoy living and working and practicing together. And in the early years it was, you know, kind of – it was primitive right? It was “Stop bugging me”. The Clear Sky really exists – well, gosh, we could say probably a lot of dharma centers around the world – but Clear Sky for sure we know exists thanks to dana and Karma Yoga. So homage to all the beings that have helped co-create this beautiful mandala. It really has taken a lot of people and a lot of commitment. As many of you have heard us say we call Karma Yoga ‘Meditation in Action’ and it helps us take our meditation off the cushion and into the world. And we like to call Clear Sky our 310-acre meditation cushion. And this path – what we’re trying to do is to design this path so that it resolves some contemporary challenges that we all struggle with… It might be kind of like a necessary struggle that we can often feel that our spiritual practice and our careers and our relationships are competing with one another. And so we try to design our Karma Yoga so that we get them all pulling in the same direction all working together – and it helps us learn how to do that. So then our spiritual practices help us be more successful in our careers and our careers are really feeding our spiritual practice. Yeah. And this is super important because it’s helpful to remember that Asia and Asian practitioners, they’ve had thousands of years to develop this. It kind of works better for them because they’ve got thousands of years of history of people who figured all this out and the dana and the karma yoga. It’s helpful to remember that those are very, very new concepts and phenomena in the west.
Q: It’s the last thing anybody really wants when you admit it is training, you don’t mind getting training if you pay for it because if you pay for the training then you can ignore what they tell you to do because you paid for it –
CS: Or you get a degree..
Q: And then you get something and then you don’t really care about the training, You just want the paper so you can make more money. When I took golf lessons I went to the golf pro and he was showing me how to improve my game. And after 20 minutes he said, “Wow, you’re amazing!” And I said, “What do you mean I’m amazing?” He said, “Well, you listen to what I’m saying.” And I said, “Well, I’m paying you a dollar a minute. I’m gonna listen to what you say.” He said, “Well, you’d be surprised, 90% of people come, and… they want to be told their game is good enough and to make it better without changing anything.”
So when it comes to training at a personal psychological level, we want to just figure we can make the change without having actually to change anything so that we remain basically in an untrained position. So this is the challenge that you’re up against in terms of transformational change to change the society that you live in. Because if you can’t change you, you’re not changing society. That’s for sure. And so the change that we’re talking about here is not a surrender of your independence or surrender of your self will, I suppose. What it is, is changing how you see yourself will and how you see your independence manifesting as a separate isolated capitalist-nuclear-family kind of cut-off-from-everything in order to keep the system going or Power to the People. I vote for Power to the People.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please rate and review Dharma If You Dare on your favorite podcast app to help more people find and benefit from these teachings and don’t forget to subscribe to get episodes and bonus content sent directly to your device. The path of Karma Yoga is a powerful approach that readily lends itself to supporting a 21st-century Awakening. If this path of meditation in action appeals to you we think your best bet is a three-month intensive Karma Yoga program at Clear Sky Center.
The program brings spiritual awakening into the modern context by integrating karma yoga, meditation, psychology, environment, career, and community to learn more visit Planetdharma.com/kyprogram. See you next time and may all our efforts benefit all beings.
