Authenticity and Skillfulness

"Yoga is skill in action." Swami Gitananda

A friend sent me a quote by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar to which I reacted. As it is about things I have kept on discussing with people, I am sharing the quote and the reaction to it with you here. What do you think?

"Authenticity and skillfulness appear to be contradictory, but in fact they are complementary. Your intentions need to be authentic and your actions need to be skillful. Skill is required only when authenticity cannot have its way. Yet skill without authenticity makes you shallow. If you try to be authentic in your action but manipulative in your mind, that is when mistakes happen. Actions can never be perfect but our intentions can be perfect." Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

I get the general idea but I also do disagree.

“Skill is required only when authenticity cannot have its way... Actions can never be perfect but our intentions can be perfect.” Let’s have a thought experiment. 1) Someone had an accident and is lying on the floor. Your compassion is activated. You want to help and move the person to a more comfortable spot while waiting for help. You do it. By displacing the person you aggravate his state. As a consequence the person remains paralyzed for life. 2) The person who needs major surgery is brought to hospital. The surgeon there has great skill. He is a surgeon because of family tradition, the social status, the money. He also enjoys the technicity of his job and is good at it. The patient is delivered to him. He does not feel particular compassion for the person. He just does his job, applies his learned skills skillfully. The patient recovers. What about these two situations? I often see memes circulated on the internet like: “Success is 10% skill and 90% personality”. I would not want pilots, doctors, firefighters, and many others to be selected for their jobs primordially because of personality. You have to have the skills to deliver. If you don’t have them you are a potential danger to others. If your focus on your great personality even blinds you to your lack of skill, you become even more dangerous. Imagine a mountain guide who does not have skills but just this compassionate intention to bring you closer to nature. If you trust him and follow him because you think he is skilled and knows what he does when he doesn’t you are potentially in big danger. Potentially even more than if you went to the mountain alone. Because you eclipse your own critical thinking and assessments by misplaced trust into someone else.

“Actions can never be perfect but our intentions can be perfect.” Is that so? If I have to solve a math problem, I can solve it. If I do, the action in that framework is perfect. It achieved what it needed to achieve. If I want to bake a cake and do so, the completion of baking it again shows the perfection of my action. If I want to comfort a friend who is down and manage to do so, again my action is perfect. The actions that do accomplish what they are supposed to accomplish are perfect in relation to their purpose and framework. Now if I shift the framework, then the same action may appear differently. In comparison to someone else I took maybe longer to resolve my maths question, maybe my cake is slightly not flat on top, or slightly burned. So in that new comparative framework what may have appeared perfect in one context does not appear perfect anymore in the new context. But perfection can always only be assessed in relationship to context.

“Our intentions can be perfect.” What does a “perfect intention” mean? Isn’t an intention an action of the mind? If actions cannot be perfect, how can intentions be perfect? If an aspiration is very vague does that make it perfect? “I want to be good.” “I want to be authentic.” “I want to be helpful.” Is this perfect or just vague? The perfection of your intention will only be revealed in your actions and the interaction with the world. Over your lifetime you may find that the same words “I want to be good”, “I want to be authentic”, “I want to help” may take on very different meanings. The words may not change. But their content, what they point to may drastically change. Our understanding of these intents may become much broader. In the process we may even uncover very non-perfect aspects of our initial understanding. And we may discover non-action beyond skills and authenticity.