The world of duality: relevance to our work

Abstract

Every one of us constantly engage in work 24x7. Nobody escapes this universal rule. Even the 8 hours of sleeping that we do on a daily basis is also an important and useful work. We seem to be subjected to another universal rule pertaining to work. This is judging the results and through that making our own assessment of how we have done the work and whether the results are commensurate to our efforts. Let us return to this simple example of sleep. Let us start by setting a “target” that we must get 8 hours of sound sleep. In simple terms sound sleep refers to a condition in which any considerable amount of sound made around the sleeping person will not disturb his/her sleep. Once we get up from sleep, the first thing we may notice is that we did or did not sleep for the targeted 8 hours. This can, for example, potentially bother us and make us feel that despite our best efforts to get a good sleep for 8 hours we slept for only 6 hours. For those who get too much into such a thought process, it is almost certain that they may not get 8 hours sleep tomorrow or the day after. They will burn some midnight oil “worrying” about how to get longer hours of sleep, which will further induce some more sleeplessness. For such people, even sleeping pills cannot solve the problem at hand. If this is what can happen to a simple act of sleeping, imagine our plight with a host of work that we do on a daily basis. Therefore it is hardly surprising that our levels of happiness, satisfaction etc. are all related to the work we do, the outcomes we get from the work and our own assessment of these outcomes. Some feel that work is not rewarding enough. Despite putting efforts the results are not commensurate enough. This dampens the spirit of doing work and leads one into a vicious cycle. The interconnection between work, outcomes and assessment needs to be well understood otherwise, we may end up in a situation that work can be a boring activity and an act of drudgery. Many in the modern society already feel this way and they escape from the clutches of work through a ritual called “weekend getaway”. Lord Krishna offers some insights to Arjuna pertaining to the interconnection between work, outcomes and assessment. Further He provides some advice on how we need to handle these aspects. We shall take a look at this in some detail.........................