Is my self my friend or my enemy?

There is a line in the Bhagavad Gita I read differently every year. Chapter six, verses five and six:

"Let a man lift himself by his own Self alone; let him not lower himself; for this self alone is the friend of oneself, and this self alone is the enemy of oneself. The Self is the friend of the self for him who has conquered himself by the Self; but to the unconquered self, this Self stands in the position of an enemy, like an external foe." (Swami Sivananda's translation)

The assumption most of us carry is that there is a weak self in us, and that the strong one must defeat it. That reading makes every missed morning a lost battle. It also makes you your own opponent, which is a tiring way to live.

There is no weak self to defeat.

The Gita says something else. There is one self, and it is a friend or an enemy depending on one thing: whether it has been "conquered", which Sivananda explains as the lower self brought under the care of the higher. The person who won't get up tomorrow is not a different person from you. He is you, unsupervised.

The second thing in the verse is the verb. "Lift." It's physical. You lift something by getting under it, taking the weight and standing up. Nobody lifts a bag by deciding harder. The Gita is asking for work of a particular shape, and the shape is: get under it.

Studies show what "getting under it" looks like in a lab. People who wrote a plan with a cue, "when I come home, I will...", were about three times as likely to complete a task over the Christmas break as people who only had the goal [1]. The friend-self is the one who wrote the cue down. The enemy-self is the one who was relying on being in the mood.

Who was on duty this morning?

I have found that reading 6.5 as a verse about supervision, rather than about strength, changes the morning. When I wake and the sit doesn't happen, I don't ask whether I'm weak. I ask which of the two selves was on duty. Usually the answer is that nobody was: I had a wish and no cue. The cue I run is small: when the third round of breathing ends, I sit. The breathing is already a habit, so the sit borrows its reliability.

The verse, in practice, is a question you ask before the day starts: who's on duty this morning?

If you'd like to write yours down, open the one-page sheet, Where am I starting from? Today's job is section 2: one cue for each line.

The self that lets you down is the one nobody put on duty.

Sources

1. Gollwitzer and Brandstätter (1997), cited in the Goals and Progress summary of implementation-intentions research.

Back: Day 18, Why do my plans die in week two? Tomorrow, Day 20, What is Clean up?

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