We are always living the life we want to live.

I cannot tell you what dharma is and I cannot tell you my dharma. Dharma is a complex topic which scholars have struggled to fully translate. Dharma is dharma. Similarly, my personal dharma is incommunicable. My dharma lives somewhere between my complex neural connections and the simple truth of what is. However, I can do my best to express what I know about dharma.

Dharma is a concept which has, in its various uses, described the following: an individual’s spiritual purpose, the universal moral code which we all must follow, the laws of physics, the justification for the Indian caste system, and a methodology to deal with one’s karma (Widgery, 1930). The idea is used in several religions and each tradition uses it in a slightly different way. Were this a research paper I would try and synthesize the different concepts or perhaps find areas where the concepts are incompatible, or maybe I would write about dharma, the caste system, and how many Americans hold certain stereotypes around how India is structured. Instead I will say that dharma captures bits and pieces of all those things and point to one common theme across several of those uses: dharma is a set of spiritually associated principles which are meant to guide the actions of conscious beings. Understanding these principles and acting with that knowledge is a common theme in the daily lives of many practitioners of Hinduism.

I learned of the concept six years ago when I first read the Bhagavad Gita. I had been exploring the religions of the world through a Jungian lens. C.G. Jung was a psychologist active in the early to mid-twentieth century. While he is often associated with Sigmund Freud, who is dismissed by the modern psychological establishment, though Jung’s spiritual edge keeps him relevant today. The Jungian idea I was exploring at the time, and have been exploring since, was the concept that connection with the Self (Jung’s analogous concept for God, Truth, Ultimate Reality, etc.) can be built by living a life a meaning. Jung believed that modern man’s search for a soul was the primary arc which guided us through life. I approached the Gita from this lens: how do I live a life with purpose? Dharma seemed key to the answer.

However, there is a big difference between thinking, “I need to live a life of meaning,” and, “I should live by my dharma,” and actually living a spiritually fulfilled life. First of all, there are Hindus who would look at that first sentence and ask, “What do you even mean by ‘should?’” Second of all, what even is my dharma? The answers given in Hinduism are either strict moral codes, some of which have been used to uphold a destructive class system, and high level spiritual truths which I struggled to grasp. I made sub-optimal choices left and right as I tried to figure out the idea. Sometimes I would get too theoretical, diving deep into texts and theories without making any changes in my life. Sometimes I would experiment with myself to see who I “really was,” such as trying to become a business student, and realize I had gone down the wrong path. Sometimes I would act in cruel and thoughtless ways and not even think of, or worse even feel justified by, my “dharma.” I found that Hinduism wasn’t working for me as a spiritual practice and I left it behind for other attempts at finding “my path.”

This all culminated thirteen months ago when I made two major decisions: I left a job that I deeply cared about for a job that offered more money and I bitterly ended a relationship with someone I really loved. Just like I cannot fully express dharma I cannot fully express the despair and stupidity which drove me towards those choices; I thought I was doing what was “right,” but I fell into a deep depression and long introspection in the months afterward. I felt a deeper need than ever to know something about how to make choices in life.

I returned to the Gita and to the concept of dharma. I was sure that I had something more to learn from them. Three things happened:

1) I woke up at three in the morning from a dreamless sleep. I, without thinking, grabbed my color pencils and wrote, “We Are Always Living the Life We Want to Live,” on the wall on the bedroom. I had a vague sense of its meaning: every choice we make, even the ones that we are responding to negatively, are an expression of something in our minds or souls. Our choices hold meaning, and the choices we don’t make also hold meaning.

“The wise see that there is action in the midst of inaction and inaction in the midst of action. Their consciousness is unified, and every act is done with complete awareness (Easwaran, 2009, 118).”

2) I personally felt like the specific moral codes and social roles which were pitched by the Gita and other Hindu texts were seeped in cultural norms that didn’t resonate with me. My instincts told me, though, the dharmic conceptualization of Self would help me in my growth from the Jungian framework. I wanted to come up with a technique to develop my own dharmic values. I sat down one day, wrote down scores of what my values were as a kid (“Connecting to God,” “Taking care of my family”) in my current life (“Making enough money for school,” “Keeping myself emotionally safe”), and what my absolute ideals are (“Helping people work through their cognitive dissonance,” “Building a family legacy”). I synthesized the entire list by looking for commonalities across my three selves and then expressed them poetically into a sacred set of lyrical heuristics for how to live my life. I make choices based on them on a consistent basis.

“The word dharma means many things, but its underlying sense is “that which supports,” from the root dhri, to support, hold up, or bear. Generally, dharma implies support from within: the essence of a thing, its virtue, that which makes it what it is (Easwaran, 2009, 266).”

3) The bitter end to the relationship was resolved. When she came to my apartment, she saw the words on the wall and they resonated deeply with her. I showed her my dharmic values technique and it helped her work through some of the darkness that was impacting her. We rekindled our romance, we are now engaged to be married, and every day we work to support each other in our dharmas and to follow a dharmic code we developed for our relationship specifically.

“The Gita begins with the way of selfless action, passes into the way of Self-knowledge, and ends with the way of love (Easwaran, 2009, 49).”

Overintellectualizing dharma when I first encountered it six years ago made it impossible to fully engage with. Ironically, it wasn’t until I took the idea on in a spiritual, artistic, and abstract manner that I was able to turn my studies into something real and lived. While I am not a Hindu I will always be grateful to the Hindu thinkers who developed the practice and to the Hindus who first exposed me to the Gita in the first place.

Dharma is a concept which can describe the following: which ice cream flavor I chose to eat when I first went to a Baskin-Robbins, the color of literally everyone’s shirt, the sound my refrigerator makes when it is sitting open, the cool lightning storm that happened last night, and every expense report my boss has ever written. I cannot tell you what dharma is and I cannot tell you my personal dharma. However, I can point to the universe and I can point to myself and I can show you exactly what it is.

Citations

Easwaran Ed., Eknath. (2009). The Bhagavad Gita (Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality) (p. 118). Nilgiri Press. Kindle Edition.

Widgery, A. (1930). The Principles of Hindu Ethics. International Journal of Ethics, 40(2), 232-245. Retrieved September 15, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2377977