"The Fruits of Our Labor" from "The War of Art"

The Fruits of Our Labor

"When Krishna instructed Arjuna that we have a right to our labor but not to the fruits of our labor, he was counseling the warrior to act territorially, not hierarchically. We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

But there's the third way offered by the Lord of Discipline, which is beyond both hierarchy and territory. That is to do the work and give it to Him. Do it as an offering to God.

Give the act to me.
Purged of hope and ego,
Fix your attention on the soul.
Act and do for me.

The work comes from heaven anyway. Why not give it back?

To labor in this way, the Bhagavad-Gita tells us, is a form of meditation and a supreme species of spiritual devotion. It also, I believe, conforms most closely to Higher Reality. In fact, we are servants of the Mystery. We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but will be, through us."

"We all become what we pretend to be."

From Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind: The Kingkiller Chronicle, Day One:

     "It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story." ~ Bast

"The Supreme Virtue" (from "The War of Art")

From Steven Pressfield's The War of Art:

"Someone once asked the Spartan king Leonidas to identify the supreme warrior virtue from which all others flowed. He replied: 'Contempt for death.'

For us as artists, read 'failure.' Contempt for failure is our cardinal virtue. By confining our attention territorially to our own thoughts and actions - in other words, to the work and its demands - we cut the earth from beneath the blue-painted, shield-banging, spear-brandishing foe."