Duties? Really?!

Big thanks to Volodia Timofeev who responded to my previous blog Elephant Inside by sending me pictures of Kopeikin’s paintings with elephants. One of my readers told me that the animal inside is independent only as long as the task at hand is not aligned with our main purpose in life. Because, as soon as it does, we – including the animal inside – are motivated  by the same purpose but on a different level. And there are two factors that help us to align – the religious belief and the sense of duties.

I was surprised at first, because I was talking about routine chores, while the suggested alignment brings the game to a much higher level. But, after thinking about it, I realized that we actually can see our daily life in a bigger context, and such prospective helps to overcome the elephant’s inertia and even inspire him to perform the heroic deeds. In such a state we feel creative and authentic self.

In fact, this state was described by psychologist Maslow, who coined the term for that “Peak experience“, while Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi called it “flow“. But, whatever the name, we all know this feeling of unity of all our abilities, aligned on achieving the only goal at hand. I think “divine inspiration” and “my muse visiting” also falls under the same category.

Religious faith proved to be able to inspire this way. I do not think we need to elaborate too much around that. But duties… It did not resonate with me initially. After my world view was shattered during the USSR demise, the notion of duties appeared high on my list of suspects. While living in the USSR, we worked hard to realize ourselves in achieving the goal of building a new kind of society, only to learn later that our efforts were misdirected and misused. So, I do not like to talk about duties or belong to any high-minded-duty-oriented organization anymore.

However, after thinking about it, I found the way to see duties differently. First, I remembered that Bhagavad Gita – one of the oldest and still very respected by many collection of life wisdom – treats duties as one of the pillars of its philosophy. Professor Jay Garfield elaborated on it in his course Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World’s Great Intellectual Traditions. And here what Swami Krishnananda says about Gita’s treatment of duties: “Let anyone think for himself, or herself. Do you derive any benefit from social relations, from other human beings than yourself? If you are sure and honestly convinced that benefit accrues from outer society for your existence and continuance in this world, you have also to pay back the dues expected from you by society in return for the benefit that has been received by you from society… The other aspect is that we are an individual in a bodily encasement and we have a duty towards ourselves, also. We cannot kill ourselves in the name of society, nor can we kill society for our own personal advantage.”

We also, Swami continues, have families, we work in a company or otherwise produce value for the society. All these multiple duties define our place in the universe. Understanding and respecting them as our primary responsibility. Otherwise, society falls apart in an unrestrained chaos, and we lose our life as we know it too.

Also, Kant’s categorical imperative states: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” If we want others to act as we expect – to perform their duties – we need to attend to our duties too.

But the biggest impression on me, in respect to duties, made Viktor Frankl – a psychiatrist, a Holocaust survivor, the author of one of the most influential books of the last century “Man’s Search for Meaning“, founder of the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. He wanted a new structure to be built on the West Coast of the United States – the Statue of Responsibility. He wrote: “Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” According to Frankl, we often not able to control our circumstances, but we can and must control our perception of them – that is our responsibility.

For me, such a vision liberates and brightens the life. In a similar way our understanding of the law of gravity made our life better, because we do not jump down from a height and do not hurt ourselves unnecessarily. Even the elephant understands it and avoids the pitfall without his rider’s advice.

Thank you for the exchange.

I assume full responsibility for my decisions, except the ones that turned out to be wrong because of someone else’s fault.