The Yoga of Work
All spiritual paths lead to a higher consciousness and union with the Divine and among the many paths one of the greatest is the Way of Works: it is sure as the Way of Bhakti or the Way of knowledge.
Do not imagine that works are in their nature nothing but a bondage, they can be powerful means towards liberation and divine perfection. All depends on the sprit in our works and their orientation towards the inner and higher Light away from desire and ego.
Works are a bondage when they are done out of desire or for the sake of the ego, by a mind tuned outwards, involved in the act and not detached and free, bound to ignorance of this lower nature.
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A peace and bliss inconceivable to the pleasure-bound and painracked mind, and immeasurable by the limited capacities of our present bodily sense, is the reward of the seeker’s insistent self-discipline, his painful struggle, his untiring endeavour.
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At first a consecration, then a surrender and subordination of our human personal will, then its merger in a greater divine or greatest supreme Will is central is the central and core of intention of the Karmayoga. But this cannot be entirely by our mental consciousness in its little human boundaries. Our Yoga must help us to leave it and enter into a greater consciousness enlightened by a truer radiance of knowledge, armed with a mightier unerring strength, open to that vaster delight in which are drowned for ever our petty humanpain and pleasure.Still even what can be done within the limits of our human consciousness brings a great liberation.
But even to do that little is not easy to the physical mind of man, even when his higher mind and will consent and demand it.There is something in us wedded to ignorance,eternally in revolt against all surrender, attached to its own bkind activity, its own freedom of will, a “freedom” that rattles its hundred chains at every step;- ut to that element in us even that seems a divine music. And our humanmind will invent a hundred good reasons against any such surrender to something not ourselves or even to our highest Self,-- unless that be nothing more than a magnified reflection of our ego; for then it will be willing enough to surrender. And even our highest spiritualachievement on the mental plane is tainted and limited, when it is not distorted, by this ever unredeemed element in our Nature.
Our only safety is to push on beyond the mind to a Truth-consciousness with a larger dynamic light in it that is ever free by its inherent knowledge and illuminated power from these pettinesses and this egostic darkness.For in this supramental consciousness is the Truth and there we find it and its Master. The supermind is the primal creation and organic instrument of the Supreme Will, the Will that is free from error because eternal , one and infinite.
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