Karma Yoga and Excellence

               
Being a quality assurance professional; this topic is very dear to my heart. This topic is also one of the very important concepts in Indian spirituality and also a pathway for excellence. As far as I know, this topic was first coined in Bhagvadgeeta. Bhagvadgeeta is a conversation between lord Krishna and his disciple Arjuna in the middle of the battlefield.

               One of the recent spiritual leaders and professor of philosophy Gurudev Ranade said, “Excellence is the mark of spirituality” and I think this is a very good scale to measure spirituality rather than anything else. Modern psychologists have been trying to model excellence as many people can excel using the model and psychologists have been getting some success in modelling excellence.

               When we discuss excellence or quality of karma; mastery on the topic and required skills are very important. This is important in the context of spirituality because Indian spirituality gives immense importance to the duty and to fulfill your duties you need to master the required skills.

               You may wonder why spirituality would focus on this topic and here is the reason. Indian spirituality believes that to focus on anything; you need to be free from everything else and especially your duties. To be free from duties you need to be a master of the skills required to fulfill your duties because unless you do your duties in the best possible manner; you can’t be free from it.

               The next question you may have is what is meant by getting free from duties. If a duty is not done properly a guilt about it remains in the mind and feeling of incompleteness is something that keeps you engaged. Even modern psychology has now proven that dissatisfaction and stress come from the feeling of incompleteness.

               Richard Bandler a co-inventor of NLP once said Indians knew hypnosis may be for 30 thousand years and hypnosis being a topic of psychology; Indians were also aware of many concepts in psychology for at least 30 thousand years. In my opinion, ancient Indians knew much more psychology than modern science know today.

               There are some duties that you do and they may not need much skill or you might have already mastered needed skills. In such cases you may or may not feel proud about the activity or duty and if you don’t feel proud, it is a good mental state to be in, as your mind doesn’t remain connected with the duty or activity or the outcome of the activity. In my mind, this state is very much useful for creativity or learning.

               The other thing that keeps you engaged is the outcome of an activity or a duty. Many a times any activity has a purpose and an outcome; that we aim for and this is very natural. It so happens that, sometimes, we don’t get expected outcomes due to various external factors even though we have mastered skills needed to do the activity. This where freedom of mind is lost as you get attached to unexpected outcome which is also sometimes called as failure. J Indian spirituality warns you to stay away from the attachment to failure to make faster progress and better growth.

               Many times you get the expected result or success and your mind may be stuck to it so much that it is not interested in moving forward or away from the expected result. Indian spirituality also warns you against this as this can also be a barrier in your progress. Both these states are not good for creativity and learning.

According to Indian spirituality there are two things that can stop or retard your progress.

• Being so proud of your duties that you are stuck with it.
•  Being attached to the outcome weather good or bad.

Indian spirituality also suggests solutions to both activities that come in between your progress.

• Solution of the first issue is to master skills needed to fulfill duties so much that you can do your duty with ease.
• Solution to second issue is to be aware of this attachment to the outcome since the beginning of the activity or duty.

               Both things mentioned above are mandatory for consistent success, progress, creativity and learning. Some of the outcomes that you may get in this process are happiness, freedom from the feeling of incompleteness and proud feeling. There are catalysts in growth and can help you to achieve your goal.