The Duty of Karma Yoga: Cooperating with Our Higher Self: 2. Swami Krishnananda.

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Wednesday 22, October 2025, 19:40.
Article
Spirituality
The Duty of Karma Yoga: Cooperating with Our Higher Self: 2.
Swami Krishnananda
(Spoken on October 14, 1984)
Post-2.

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The question of becoming another thing is certainly unimaginable to the ego. We have to cease to be in order that we may be another. Now, this is humanly impossible. No one can be another by being nothing in one's own self because that is the complete annihilation of one's own self, the total abolition of the ego and a nihil as far as one's own self is concerned. “I am not, and Thou alone art,” seems to be the instruction embedded in this initial verse. Fix yourself in Me: mayy eva mana ādhatsva. Let your mind and your intellect be in Me: mayi buddhiṃ niveśaya. And then what happens? You shall be in me: nivasiṣyasi mayy eva ata ūrdhvaṃ. There is no doubt about it: na saṃśayaḥ.

But the great Lord is a master psychologist, a person who is thoroughly acquainted with the structure of things and fully aware of the incapacity of the disciple or the student to be able to receive this kind of instruction. Human logic says A is A, B is B, and A can never be B. It is a law of contradiction. We are masters of logic, and this logic is our doom finally, because we think that one thing cannot be another thing. But here it is said that one thing has to be another thing. It defeats our logic. One person cannot be another person, one thing cannot be another thing, A cannot be B; but it has to be, if the meaning of this verse is to be clear to us.

But it cannot be clear to us, so the verse goes on further. Sri Krishna dilutes his advice with another instruction. Atha cittaṃ samādhātuṃ na śaknoṣi mayi sthiram, abhyāsayogena tato mām ichāptuṃ dhanaṃjaya (BG 12.9): If this kind of total dissolution of your understanding in universal understanding is not possible, at least habituate yourself to continuous practice by the force of your will. While the first verse may be said to correspond to what is called jnana yoga, the second verse bears some similarity to what is called the raja yoga system of volitional concentration: daily practice and a tenacious betaking of oneself to a centralised objective or an ideal, repeatedly and continuously hammering the same notion, the same idea and the same ideal into one's consciousness. 'Repeated practice' means many things because many things are connected with our daily life. It is a practice related to all the associations of our day-to-day existence.

We live in a place and in a time, and we have a method of work, but all these three facets of our daily life should be concentrated into a systematised abhyasa or practice, which means to say, the place where we are seated for meditation must be the same, the time for which we are sitting should be the same, and the methodology that we adopt in our concentration should not vary from day to day. It should be a continuous concentration on a single pointed ideal. We have very detailed instructions in this regard in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Abhyāsa vairāgyābhyām tan-nirodhaḥ (Y.S. 1.12) says a sutra of Patanjali, and we have a similar statement in the Bhagavadgita. Abhyāsena tu kaunteya vairāgyeṇa ca gṛhyate (BG 6.35): By practice and renunciation you shall attain success.

Abhyasa is the repeated accustoming of oneself to a single method of living. We should have a uniform way of living every day, and our moods, our ways, our occupations, as far as possible, should not vary from day to day. But unfortunately, our psychological moods change from moment to moment, distractions come in every moment of time, and a uniform behaviour is not seen. We do not know how a person will behave at any time because of one's life being mostly a reaction to action, a kind of answer that we give to the call from external nature and human society.

Most of us do not live. We only react. We have no independent, deliberately chosen way of living. We adjust ourselves to conditions prevalent outside so that our life is mostly a kind of accommodation with existing conditions and prevalent situations in life. But it is necessary to develop a stuff in one's own self. It is a very unfortunate way of living to be just a bundle of reactions to outer conditions. If somebody smiles, we smile. If somebody frowns, we frown. This is not a uniform and stabilised way of living. There should be what we may call our own stuff, and a very stern stuff, and a well-matured individuality. We have a logic of our own and have come to a conclusion, and that conclusion is in harmony with the law of things. Once this decision is arrived at, it should not be shaken by any other word of logic. No Guru, no book, no scripture and no instruction can shake us afterwards because we have come to a final conclusion, and no other advice can have any effect upon it.

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