Introduction to the Upanishads - 4. Swami Krishnananda.

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Chinmaya Mission:

Sevaks and students from Chinmaya Ramdoot, New Jersey actively participated in planting several shrubs at the ashram. 

This initiative aimed to enhance the ashram's natural beauty and promote environmental stewardship. 

Additionally, sponsors have committed to the ongoing care and maintenance of these plants, ensuring their healthy growth and sustainability. 

This collective effort not only fosters a sense of community and responsibility among the participants but also contributes to the ashram's serene and welcoming atmosphere.

Through this project, Chinmaya Ramdoot underscores the importance of nature conservation and the nurturing of green spaces.

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Saturday 25, May 2024 06:35.
Article
Scriptures
Post-4.

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Usually, you must have heard, there are techniques of yoga practice known as Karma, Bhakti and Jnana; or Karma, Upasana and Jnana. Karma is activity, work, performance of any kind, discharge of one's duty, you may say. This impulsion of the mind to move always in the direction of objects outside is due to a desire that is present in the mind to grab something from outside and make good a particular lacunae that it feels in one's own self. This tragic movement of the mind in the direction of objects for the purpose of fulfillment of selfish desires can be obviated only by a certain type of activity called Karma. Karma does not mean any kind of work, but a specific kind of work. Everybody is doing some work, everybody is busy in this world – but it does not mean that they are doing Yoga in the form of work. Work becomes Yoga only when it is free from the impulse of selfishness behind the performance of work.

When you do a work, you must put a question to yourself – what is the reason behind your engaging yourself in that work? Is it because some extraneous or ulterior motive is there behind that work? Or is it done for mere self-purification? You must distinguish between work done as a job and work done as a duty. A duty may not apparently bring you a material benefit at the very outset, but it will bring you an invisible benefit. That is why duty is adored so much everywhere and people say you must do your duty. If duty is not so very important, but only remunerative job is the only thing that is important, then insistence on duty would be out of point.

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.

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.

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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Continued

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