In a world that demands our constant engagement—a world of professional deadlines, parental decisions, and personal dilemmas—we often operate on the assumption that “I” am the one making the choices. A recent, profound dialogue challenged this fundamental assumption, sparking an exploration that journeyed from modern anxieties to ancient wisdom, confronting one of philosophy’s most formidable thinkers along the way. It began with a simple distinction: the difference between using our God-given faculties and arriving at a state where divinity uses us.
This exploration maps that journey, tracing the arc of an idea as it is tested, refined, and ultimately resolved into a powerful and coherent worldview.
The Starting Point: A Challenge to the Spiritual Ego
Most spiritual paths of action (Karma Yoga) propose a noble formula: use your intelligence, experience, and love to make the best possible choice, and then surrender the fruits of that action to the Divine. It seems impeccable.
Yet, our dialogue began with a radical critique of this model. The very act of “I am using my faculties to serve God” contains a subtle, persistent trace of ego. It is the ego of the devout servant, the competent doer who generously offers their work to a higher power. This raised a profound question: What if a deeper state exists? A state where action flows through a person without any intermediary “I” taking credit, even the credit for being a devoted servant?
This is not a state of passivity, but one of total absorption in divine remembrance, where responses to life’s situations arise not from personal computation but from a supra-computational, intuitive source. Intelligence functions without a named intelligence, and discrimination operates without a discriminator.
The Crucible: An Existentialist Interrogation
To test the coherence of this idea, we turned to one of its most powerful philosophical opponents: Jean-Paul Sartre. If our dialogue were a trial, Sartre would be the prosecution.
His argument, in essence, is this: We are “condemned to be free.” As finite humans—mortal, embodied, and thrown into a specific situation not of our choosing (a facticity we can’t escape)—we possess an infinite freedom. This infinity lies not in power, but in the terrifying absence of a pre-written script. With no God or inherent human nature to guide us, we are solely responsible for every choice we make.
For Sartre, this is a burden. The responsibility for creating value and meaning for all of humanity rests on our shoulders alone, producing a state of anguish. From this perspective, attributing one’s actions to a divine flow would be the ultimate act of “bad faith”—a cowardly escape from the awesome responsibility of being human.
Could the idea of being a “divine instrument” withstand this searing critique?
The Rebuttal: Shifting the Entire Grounds of Being
The response that emerged from our dialogue was not a defence, but a dissolution of Sartre’s entire framework.
First, to the charge of escaping responsibility, the answer was to radically redefine it. Responsibility was no longer a horizontal burden owed to humanity for creating values, but a vertical joy in maintaining one’s alignment with the Divine Source. The central task is not to create meaning from scratch, but to perfectly reflect the meaning that already is.
Second, to the anguish rooted in time—the anxiety over future consequences—the answer was a collapse into the Present Moment. A mind firmly rooted in the “now” is liberated from the weight of what its actions might “mean” for a hypothetical future. The focus shifts from the outcome of the action to the quality of consciousness during the action.
The most potent counter, however, was a direct challenge to Sartre’s starting premise. To his atheistic humanism, the response was, “Consider yourself divine.” If the self is not a lonely, finite creature but an expression of the Divine, then aligning with that Divinity is not an act of bad faith, but the ultimate act of authenticity. The entire problem of “abdicating” responsibility to an external God vanishes when the division between self and God dissolves.
The Final Paradox: The Command in the Gita
This led us to the ultimate test, found within the Bhagavad Gita—a foundational text for this worldview. A paradox emerged: If the highest truth is to renounce the sense of doership and realize there is only “one action” (the internal surrender to the Divine), why does Krishna issue a very specific, external command to Arjuna? He doesn’t just say, “Surrender and see what happens.” He insists, “Fight!”
It is here, in resolving this apparent contradiction, that the entire philosophy crystallizes. The response from our dialogue was definitive:
The command to fight comes from the Divine. It is not Arjuna’s action.
Arjuna’s only task is the “one action” of surrendering his will and fixing his awareness on Krishna. The act of fighting is not a separate, second choice. It is the form that his total surrender takes in the context of the Kurukshetra battlefield. He is asked to become Nimitta Mātram—merely an instrument.
Conclusion: The Doer Dissolves into the Deed
Our philosophical journey, which began with a subtle distinction, reached its destination here. The tension between worldly action and spiritual surrender is resolved. The specific duties of our lives—whether as a warrior on a battlefield or, as we considered on this Wednesday morning in Pune, a parent deciding on a mobile phone—are not distractions from the spiritual path. They are the very arena in which our surrender is expressed.
When one is truly an instrument, the “one action” of divine remembrance flows out into the world as the necessary “specific action.” The fighting is what surrender looks like for a warrior. The parental response is what surrender looks like for a mother.
The question is no longer “What should I do?” but “Through me, what is being done?” Life ceases to be a series of anxious choices made by a solitary ego. It becomes a seamless flow of sacred action, emerging from a will that has been joyfully offered to the Divine. The doer has dissolved, leaving only the deed, perfect and unburdened, in its place.
Reinvent The Self! 