Something comes back about a thing you did, and it is good. Krsna gives Arjuna a name for the state he wants him in, and when he defines that state he puts success and failure in the same breath. Let’s read the two lines where he does it.
“Being steadfast in Yoga, Dhananjaya, perform actions, abandoning attachment, remaining unconcerned as regards success and failure. This evenness of mind (in regard to success and failure) is known as Yoga.
Work (with desire) is verily far inferior to that performed with the mind undisturbed by thoughts of results. O Dhananjaya, seek refuge in this evenness of mind. Wretched are they who act for results.”
Krsna names two outcomes and then treats them as one case. The definition sentence carries the pair a second time rather than dropping it — evenness of mind in regard to success and failure. Endurance of the bad outcome would have needed only one of those two words. Both are there, which puts the good outcome on the list of things that move us.
Read the verse as protection against the bad outcome and you have a practice that only switches on when something has gone wrong. It is never tested on the other half. The lift that comes with good news goes unlooked at, because nothing feels like it needs attention while it is happening, and the day still has to go a particular way before it is all right.
Flatten both and refuse to be pleased, and you lose the use of the only instrument that tells a good piece of work from a poor one. Something is also still being run. The pleasure arrives and gets put down again, every time, by you — a second job on top of the work, and that job is about you.
Leave the good news alone on the grounds that it is pleasant and costs nobody anything, and you let go of the one reading that comes free. How far the lift carries is a measure of how much of the thing was resting on the verdict. That measurement is available for about a second, and only when the news is good.
So what are we aiming at. We want the news to find us in the same place whichever way it comes.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- A message you took some care over, and the reply comes back warmer than you expected.
- Something you cooked or mended at home, and the first person to see it says so straight away.
- A small thing you got wrong, and somebody else spots it before you do.
In all three the thing to watch is one second — the one right after the news lands and before you have said anything back. It has two answers. Did something just move, or am I where I was.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to stop the lift from coming. Watch whether something moved, and leave it as it is.