Introduction to the Upanishads : 4. Swami Krishnananda.

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Sunday, May 01, 2022. 19:00.

Post-4.

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Everybody says duty must be done, but what is duty? 

Work done as duty can alone purify, no other work can purify the self. It is not any kind of labour that can be regarded as Karma yoga. Now, what is this duty that you are talking of which is going to chasten the personality of the individual, purify it? Briefly it can be called unselfish action. It is a work that you do for the benefit that may accrue to a larger dimension of reality and not merely to the localized entity called your own individual self.

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When you serve people, you are to bear in mind always the reason why this service is done at all. Mostly, the reason is buried underneath. We have social reasons, political reasons, economic reasons, and family considerations when we do any work in the form of service of people. But service which is spiritually oriented is not a social work or a political activity, or it is not connected even with a family maintenance. 

It is actually a service done to your own self.

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How is it? You may put a question. In what way is service of people, for instance, a service to my own self? 

Because you have to remember the few words that I spoke to you a little before – your essential being is also the essential being of everybody else. So the people that you see outside, the world of space-time even, is a wider dimension of the selfhood which is your own pure subjectivity. This is a subject which is a little difficult to understand, to be listened to with great caution and care. The service that you render to others, even to a dog let alone human beings, even manuring a tree for its sustenance, taking care of anything whatsoever, is not done with any kind of ulterior motive, much less even the consideration that it is something outside you.

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Work becomes purely a spiritual form of worship – only the character of selfhood is introduced into the area of this performance of work, and into the location of the direction towards which your work is motivated. You are serving your own self when you serve humanity. People gibly sometimes say, "Worship of man is worship of God." It is just a way of saying without understanding what they mean. How does man become God? You know very well no man can be equal to God. 

So how to you say that service of man is equal to service of God?

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So merely talking in a social sense does not bring much meaning. It has a significance that is deeper than the social cloak that it bears, namely, the essential being of each person is present in each other person also. So when you love your neighbor as yourself, you are loving that person not because that person is your neighbor in the sense of a nearby person, but because there is a nearness which is spiritual and not merely social. 

The person is near to me as a spiritual entity, as part of the same self that is me, rather than a nearness that is measurable by distance of yards or kilometers etc.

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To be continued ....

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