Dharma chameleon: what you can't betray

There is this strange (well, I certainly think so) notion in the wellness movement and psychology that says we need to “find our purpose”. “Be true to ourselves”. “Be on the right road”. It’s as if there is a beautiful mountain road we should be walking down, lined with cherry blossoms and roses, leading us to a mythical garden of delight with mandalas and morning tea, beauty, connection and love. We just need to find it.

I’m not convinced this is the case. As Jim Morrison sang, “Streets are uneven when you’re down”. Perception is everything.

I think the idea that we have a singular purpose, one truth to uphold, is limiting at best, and dangerous at worst. It makes us second-guess the good we do and sends us searching for the one pure thing that will define us.

It reminds me of the fantastic quote attributed to Oscar Wilde that seems to come up often around the dinner table here: “If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

There is a lot of philosophical lifting being done here, expressed with such flair that one would think Wilde wanted to be a writer. Wilde is saying something much deeper than simply “keep your options open”. What I like most is Wilde’s clear understanding of human nature. That inconsistency that pulls us and pushes us and makes us do both remarkably idiotic and stunningly beautiful things, sometimes in the same hour. Those dancing desires that allow us to waltz into a room and tango out of it. That make us paint love and burn effigies.

This uncertainty, “the dynamic life”, this ever-changing, evolving, transforming artistry, this is our journey. This is our purpose, our truth. Our reward. There is no singular path that we should be dogmatically walking down. We can walk our dog down whichever path feels right at the time.

Well, yes and no. The “feels right at the time” part is not as arbitrary as I may be suggesting, and this is where yoga and the Vedas enter with the extremely important idea of dharma.

Dharma is often seen very much in the light that Wilde was arguing against: it’s our destiny that we should discover and follow. A cosmic career plan that is waiting for us to recognise and embrace. It’s our purpose with a capital P. It’s Arjuna knowing that he cannot escape his warrior nature. And because it has been explained to us like this, we all want to know how to find our dharma and how we know we are actually living it.

But this is not really a clear understanding of what dharma is.

Dharma isn’t a fixed object we discover once and possess; a gem in a flowing stream. It’s not waking up one day and saying, “I am a painter”, and clinging to this identity. It’s not an underlying constant, certainly not in the sense that we should “BE” a certain kind of person. A father’s dharma, for example, is different when his children are born to when they are grown up and left the house. A teacher’s dharma shifts when the student surpasses them. What was right alignment at forty may be a comfortable evasion at fifty-five. What dharma asks of us changes.

The question isn’t “what is my dharma?” as though the answer is fixed. It’s more like: “given who I am and where I am in my life right now, what does genuine alignment look like?”

Dharma is less like a destination than a compass. A true north toward which we continually orient ourselves. It’s the quality of alignment between our action and our deepest nature, given our actual position, right now. So, we largely don’t know our dharma, we practice it and it reveals itself through the texture of what we can’t betray.

What part of you can you simply not betray? That you can’t walk away from? That you can’t discard or abandon?  And when you try to, you feel a wrongness that you can’t entirely explain? It’s not guilt, but a misalignment you can feel in the body, a kind of hollowness that accumulates. That’s your dharma, right now.

Personally, I have stopped trying to identify myself as a magical avatar that the universe created me to be and instead, I concentrate hard on reacting to those unmistakable signals that tell me I am moving away from what I am, or who I want to be in that moment. I have stopped trying to figure out my dharma and instead, I keep doing, keep paying attention to what feels like self-betrayal versus what feels like probity under pressure. Of course, this is often as clear as Eddie Vedder (presumably) singing: “On a weekend I wanna wish it all away, yeah. And they called and I said that ‘I want what I said’ and then I call out again.”

The Gītā is realistic on this muddiness. Krishna doesn’t promise Arjuna clarity. He tells him to act regardless. We just have to use our best discernment, without certainty, without the comfort of knowing the outcome. Anything else would just be ego.

The concept of dharma is not exclusive to the Vedas. Many traditions recognise that human beings have a way of living that is more deeply aligned with who they are and their place in the world. The Lakota tradition, for example, contains a remarkably similar idea, speaking of walking a good path: a way of life that is genuinely one’s own, but revealed partly through vision, partly through lived experience, and partly through the guidance of the community. The idea that one can be on or off one’s path bears a striking resemblance to dharma. But the Lakota approach strikes me as more epistemically humble than most modern appropriations of dharma, which lean toward self-referential discernment. Especially in the West, where we tend to privatise our spirituality. We see going inward as intensely personal. It is “MY” dharma, which “I” determine through my own inner experience, my own intuition, my own feeling of resonance. There is a fierce individualism that cannot be easily broken down with spiritual insight. In fact, it is often sold as spiritual insight.

But when we rely on the self, the ego, we are really screaming into a void and the echo that is coming back is deafening. It’s all we have to listen to, and it too often tells us convincing stories to mask pain, to hide from our fears and to avoid that which we really need to do. This is a form of spiritual isolationism that the Lakota, and other traditions, address by taking your vision, your sense of calling, your felt dharma, to someone outside yourself. The elder interprets the vision and reflects back what they see. The community helps confirm, or challenge, the role you’re coming to inhabit. This isn’t because your inner experience is untrustworthy. It’s because it’s insufficient on its own. The tradition assumes you need a mirror that isn’t made of your own mind.

I guess you could argue that this is the role of the therapist, but therapy is too often centred on persuading you that you are not actually betraying yourself instead of helping you confront the betrayal. Of looking not at the forces beneath your choices that underlie your decisions, but at the results of your actions.

I don’t believe we need cosmic, or metaphysical reassurance of our deeds.

We don’t need a single, defining purpose; a tarmacked highway on which to drive our pristine egos. We need to cultivate the better angels of our nature, understand the forces that drive us, and practise, again and again, in every situation, around every bend, over every bump, through every collision, learning slowly to distinguish the voice of fear from the voice of genuine authority. I am okay with not knowing if I am on the perfect road or even perfectly on the road. But I do know that whatever desert I find myself driving through, I have the opportunity to act in alignment with what I cannot betray.