Attitudes of work

Geet and I felt deeply energized and joyful this weekend. Here are some insights I had that I'd like to record, so when I'm confused, I can refer back to it.

We read Swami Vivekananda's Karma Yoga lectures, and in the group I was in, we read the essay, "Each is good in his own place," where Swamiji goes to great lengths to explain why he says that one's duty is not the other's and why "non-resistance" would be a dangerous ideal to adopt in society, although it is indispensable for our spiritual growth. Of course, Swamiji finally establishes the ultimate ideal of the householder as service with the stunning bird story at the end. I felt that the method being the destination must become a reality if we are to make any real progress.

We brought up a question to Swami Prabuddhananda, the head of the Vedanta Society in San Francisco, on reconciling working for one's personal benefit and the benefit of others. Swamiji's thoughts were deeply inspiring for the group. I am paraphrasing him loosely now: "Whenever you help yourself, even if you don't think of others, it affects others. If you are happy, it does affect others who interact with you and if you're not happy, then too it affects others who interact with you. So, even if you don't explicitly think of service and focus on doing well yourself, you cannot get away from contributing to society. In the beginning, we draw a narrow circle for I and then we expand the circle. The lowest level is doing a job, and we can be sloppy about it. Then, we develop notions of duty, which is a level higher. It binds us to the work and we hold ourselves to a higher ideal to do things we sometimes don't want to do. But duty is not the end. The next level is service with a spirit of love. Here, we enjoy what we do, and use love as the guiding principle for service. But even this is not the end. The ultimate level is when we move to worship - where, work becomes our way toward self-realization and we are in a mode of worship through our work." I think to go toward the highest, the others are stepping stones and not needed once you've jumped to a higher level. But before we go there, the stones are necessary or the jump can be impossible to make. On an individual affecting others, I noticed that by encouraging everyone at the retreat to work only on themselves and extract maximum benefit, we as a group felt so much happier that everyone was beaming and the love just enveloped us.