On the difference between using divine faculties and letting divinity use you
A mother sits across from her ten-year-old child who asks, for the hundredth time, “Can I have a mobile phone? All my friends have one.” In this moment, she faces what seems like a modern parenting dilemma requiring careful consideration of screen time research, social dynamics, and developmental psychology. But what if this moment offers something far more profound—an opportunity to understand the deepest nature of action itself?
The Conventional Spiritual Approach
Most spiritual traditions, including conventional interpretations of Karma Yoga, would advise the mother to use her God-given faculties—intelligence, discrimination, experience—to make the best decision. She might:
- Consider the child’s maturity level
- Reflect on family values around technology
- Weigh potential benefits against risks
- Make a thoughtful decision from a place of love
- Surrender the results to the divine
This approach seems impeccable. It combines practical wisdom with spiritual surrender. Yet, as one practitioner recently shared with me, this contains “a subtle manifestation of ego”—the ego of being one who possesses and deploys divine faculties.
The Radical Alternative
What if, instead of using our faculties to navigate life, we could arrive at a state where faculties operate through us without any sense of being the user? This isn’t about abandoning intelligence or discrimination. Rather, it’s about such complete absorption in Krishna consciousness that action emerges directly from divine remembrance without the intermediary of a deciding self.
The practitioner explained: “When I constantly think of Him all the time, what I am going to ‘feel’ at that particular time is totally independent of my faculties which only know how to compute.”
This points to something extraordinary. The faculties—our ability to think, analyze, discriminate—operate in the realm of computation. They process information, weigh options, project outcomes. But consciousness saturated with divine remembrance operates from a different source entirely. It’s not anti-computational but supra-computational.
Understanding the Difference
Consider the distinction through these examples:
Conventional Spiritual Action:
- “Let me use my intelligence to serve God”
- “I’ll apply my discrimination to make the right choice”
- “I’ll employ my experience to guide this decision”
Action from Complete Absorption:
- Intelligence operates without “me” using it
- Discrimination functions without a discriminator
- Experience informs without an experiencer
The difference is subtle but revolutionary. In the first case, there remains a subtle ego—the spiritual ego of being a devoted servant using faculties for divine work. In the second, even this last whisper of separation dissolves.
The Bhagavad Gita’s Deepest Teaching
This understanding illuminates Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna in a new light. When Krishna says “You have the right to action alone, never to the fruits,” he’s pointing beyond mere detachment from results. The deepest level of this teaching involves the dissolution of the actor itself.
As explored in previous reflections on the Gita, when Arjuna chose Krishna-consciousness over ego-consciousness, he didn’t become a better decision-maker. He became a channel through which divine intelligence could operate without obstruction. The chariot still moved, the arrows still flew, but there was no Arjuna saying “I am using my warrior skills for Krishna.”
The Parent’s Dilemma Revisited
Returning to our mother facing her child’s request for a mobile phone. From the state of complete Krishna consciousness, she doesn’t think “What should I do?” or even “What would Krishna want me to do?” There’s simply awareness, presence, and from that fullness, response arises.
Perhaps she says yes. Perhaps she says no. Perhaps she suggests an alternative. But whatever emerges doesn’t come from a process of deliberation—it emerges from the same source that makes the sun rise and flowers bloom. The intelligence operates, experience informs, love expresses, but there’s no “I” orchestrating these faculties.
This isn’t negligence or thoughtlessness. Paradoxically, action arising from this state often displays greater wisdom than carefully calculated decisions. Why? Because it’s not filtered through the limitations of personal perspective, fear, or agenda.
The Challenge of Language
Describing this state pushes against the very structure of language. We say “I think,” “I decide,” “I use my intelligence”—our grammar assumes a doer. But what’s being pointed to here exists prior to the subject-object split embedded in language.
It’s like trying to describe the experience of deep sleep to someone who has never slept. The words point toward something that can only be known through direct experience. Yet the attempt must be made, if only to inspire others to discover this possibility for themselves.
Computational Irreducibility and Divine Action
Modern insights into computational irreducibility add another dimension to this understanding. Complex systems like human relationships and child development cannot be predicted—their outcomes can only be discovered by living through them. No amount of analysis can capture the full complexity of how a child will relate to technology over time.
This irreducibility isn’t a problem to be solved but a pointer toward truth. If reality itself is computationally irreducible, then only the consciousness that computes reality into being—divine consciousness—can navigate it perfectly. Our surrender to Krishna consciousness is thus a surrender to the only intelligence capable of authentic response.
The Practical Reality
Someone might ask: “This sounds beautiful philosophically, but how does it work in daily life?” The answer is both simple and radical: you discover it by living it.
Start with small moments. When you need to respond to an email, instead of thinking “What should I write?” allow yourself to become still, remember the divine, and notice how words arise. When choosing what to cook for dinner, instead of deliberating, rest in presence and see what emerges.
This isn’t about becoming passive or abandoning responsibility. Actions still occur, decisions still get made, life still unfolds. But the locus of action shifts from the personal will to something far vaster and wiser.
Beyond Spiritual Bypassing
It’s crucial to understand that this teaching has nothing to do with spiritual bypassing or avoiding the complexities of life. The mother who responds to her child from Krishna consciousness isn’t avoiding the difficulty of the decision. She’s meeting it from the deepest possible place—prior to the anxiety of needing to get it right, prior to the fear of making mistakes, prior even to the identity of being a parent who must decide.
From this place, she might research phone effects on children, discuss boundaries, or implement gradual introduction to technology. But these actions emerge from fullness rather than from worry. They arise from love rather than from control.
The Ultimate Freedom
What’s being described here is the ultimate freedom—not freedom from action but freedom in action. When the faculties operate without a sense of being the operator, when responses arise without a responder, when life lives itself through this body-mind without the constant commentary of personal doership, what remains is pure flow.
This is what the practitioner meant by experiencing “trance-sion” rather than transition—a continuous flow of divine consciousness where each moment emerges from the eternal present of remembrance. Anxiety might initially arise when facing a decision, but it dissolves into the continuity of divine presence.
A Living Teaching
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this understanding is that it’s not a philosophical position but a lived reality. There are those who make parenting decisions, navigate relationships, and engage with the world’s complexity from this state of dissolved doership. They’re not special or different—they’ve simply discovered what’s available to all of us when the last traces of spiritual ego dissolve.
The invitation is not to believe this or debate it but to explore it. What happens when you act without the subtle sense of being the actor? What emerges when the divine faculties operate without “you” operating them? What becomes possible when Krishna consciousness isn’t something you maintain but simply what you are?
The answer cannot be given in words. It can only be discovered in the living. And perhaps that’s the most honest response to any parenting dilemma: to meet it so completely with our whole being that the division between human wisdom and divine will dissolves, leaving only the perfect response emerging from silence itself.
In that emergence, whether a child receives a phone or doesn’t becomes secondary to the profound teaching they receive by witnessing action arising from the sourceless source—a teaching more valuable than any device or restriction could ever be.
Reinvent The Self! 