The Duty of Karma Yoga: Cooperating with Our Higher Self- 8: Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday 14, September 2024, 05:45.
Article
Scripture
The Duty of Karma Yoga: Cooperating with Our Higher Self: 8.
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on October 14, 1984)

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But then Sri Krishna gives a masterly stroke, appearing to tell us the easiest thing while he is actually telling us the most difficult thing. And what is that? 

Athaitad apy asaktosi kartum madyogam asritah, 

sarvakarmaphalatyagam tatah kuru yatatmavan (BG 12.11): 

“Even this you find difficult. All right, do what you like, but expect not the fruit of what you do.” Now, we may think that this way is very easy, but no one does anything without some purpose, and that purpose becomes the fruit which we are desiring. There is no action without a fruit that is tagged onto it as a future possibility. So karma yoga may sometimes look like the easiest of yogas and the last thing that one can resort to, but it is the hardest of things because it cuts at the very root of human predilection, our usual habit of expecting things. And who will pass one moment without expecting something to happen or expecting something to become one's own possession? We always expect some event to take place or expect something to become our property. Without this expectation, can one pass a moment in life? And it is said that we should not expect anything. Duty for duty's sake is well said, but man has never understood the meaning of duty even today.

In a way we may say the performance of duty is what is called karma yoga. What is duty? It has never been understood properly because it is mixed up with rights or expectations. Wherever there is the necessity to perform duty, there is always a psychological connection with the result that has to follow from the performance of that duty, and this is exactly what is forbidden by this practice. We should not expect any result to follow because when there is an axe to grind even in the performance of our duty, this act becomes our motive, and then the duty is not our intention. How could we perform our duty wholeheartedly when our heart is not in the duty but in that which the duty will bring to us? Duty becomes a sort of instrument that we are employing, a modus operandi that we are somehow or other bringing forth into action – a machine, as they say. Our heart is somewhere while our limbs are mechanically performing some action, as a vehicle carries a load which is other than its own self. It is hard for the prejudiced human mind educated in this manner to understand what duty is. If duty means the performance of an act without connecting it with any result that may follow from it, it would be hard to find a person in this world who performs duty.

But it should not be as difficult as it appears because the expectations, the rewards, the fruits, the salaries or the rights, as people say nowadays, spontaneously follow without our asking for them when the duties are performed effectively. Duty is not a dry, essenceless performance. It is filled with the potentiality of the fulfilment of our life. Who would ask us to do a duty if it is a meaningless performance? If we feel that the meaning in a duty lies only in the fruit that it brings, and if we are told that duty should not be connected to a fruit, we may think that duty is an absurd performance – a kind of doing without any significance, like an arid desert. This is how we may think. What is intended here is that the performance of duty is the ringing tone of the whole of the Bhagavadgita, and if this becomes a hard nut to crack and we cannot even know what it actually means if it is unconnected with the fruit, we are not fit even to do karma yoga.

When we are organically associated with the body of an ideal and we cooperate with the purpose of this ideal in the fulfilment of the maturity or the fructification of the ideal, the ideal will take care of us. When we do physical exercise, the limbs of the body, such as the hands and feet, move. Now, what is the result that follows from these types of performance? It is the result that is nothing but the well-being of the whole physical organism, which is incidentally the well-being of the performer also. It is not that the legs move or the hands work for the sake of the other parts of the body. The satisfaction that may be brought to the other parts of the body by these operations will also be the satisfaction of the practitioner. If the stomach digests food, the stomach is not the only beneficiary of this act of digesting. It is the whole body, the entire system that is the beneficiary, which includes every other part including the stomach.

The performance of duty, therefore, is to be freed from the morbid notion of something following from it. Nothing need follow from it because it is just that attitude of ours which can be called cooperation with the whole. The part cooperating with the whole is called duty. And why should we cooperate with the whole, sir? What will it bring to us? If we put this question, we are totally untutored in the art of living in the world. If we cooperate with the whole of which we are a part, to which we belong, without which we cannot even exist, why should we expect another, extraneous result to follow? It is because our cooperation with the whole of which we are a part is cooperation with our own larger self, which is the whole to which we belong, of which we are a part. This is signified by the Bhagavadgita doctrine of the cosmical evaluation of values delineated in the Eleventh Chapter. It is most difficult to understand, and subtle thinking is necessary here. The mind has to be purified of all emotional dross, of any kind of material and social prejudice, and then we will find that duty is the same as fulfilment. This is karma yoga. “Resort to that,” says Bhagavan Sri Krishna in these slogas of the Bhagavadgita.

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End

Next

Stabilising the Mind in God: The Twelfth Chapter of the Bhagavadgita: Swami Krishnananda

Continued

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