The Secret Of Work - Swami Vivekanand

There is one central theme in the Bhagvad Gita regarding work and that is we must work incessantly. All work is by nature composed of good and evil. We cannot do any work which will not do some good somewhere; there cannot be any work which will not cause some harm somewhere. Every work must necessarily be a mixture of good and evil; yet we are commanded to work incessantly. Good and evil will both have their results, will produce their Karma. Good action will entail upon us good effect; bad action, bad. But good and bad are both bondages of the soul. The solution reached in the Gita, in regard to this bondage-producing nature of work is, that if we do not attach ourselves to the work we do, it will not have any binding effect on your soul. We will try to understand what is meant by this “non-attachment” to work.

As the tortoise tucks its feet and head inside the shell, and you make kill it and break it in pieces, and yet it will not come out, even so the character of that man who has control over his motives and organs is unchangeably established. He controls his own inner forces, and nothing can draw them out against his will. By this continuous reflex of good thoughts, good impressions moving over the surface of the mind, the tendency for doing good becomes strong and as the result we feel able to control the Indriyas (the sense organs, the nerve centers). Thus alone will character be established, then alone a man gets to truth. Such a man is safe forever; he cannot do any evil. You may place him in any company; there will be no danger for him. There is a still higher state than having this good, tendency, and that is the desire for liberation. You must remember that freedom of the soul is the teaching of all Yogas, and each one equally leads to the same result. By work alone men may get to where Buddha got largely by meditation or Christ by prayer. The difficulty is here. Liberation means entire freedom – freedom from the bondage of good, evil as well as from the bondage of evil. A golden chain is as much a chain as an iron one. There is a thorn in my finger, if I use another to take the first one out; and when I have taken it out, I throw both of them aside; I have no necessity for keeping the second thorn, because both are thorns after all. So the bad tendencies are to be counteracted by the good ones, and the bad impressions to be on the mind should be removed by fresh waves of good ones, until all that is evil almost disappears, or is subdued and held in control in a corner of the mind; but after that the good tendencies have also to be conquered. Thus the “attached” becomes the “unattached”. Work, but let not the action or the thought produce a deep impression on the mind. Let the ripples come and go, let huge actions proceed from the muscles and the brain, but let them not make any deep impressions on the soul.

How can this be done? We see that the impression of any action to which we attach ourselves, remains. I may meet hundreds of persons during the day, and among them meet also one whom I love; and when I retire at night, I may try to think of all the faces I saw, but only that face comes before my mind – the face which I met perhaps only for one minute, and which I loved; all others have vanished. My attachment to this particular person caused a deep impression on my mind that all the other faces. Physiologically, the impressions have all been the same; every one of the faces that I saw pictured itself on the retina, and the brain took the pictures in, yet there was no similarity of effect on the mind. Most of the faces, perhaps, were entirely new faces, about which I had never thought before, but that one face of which I only got a glimpse found associations inside. Perhaps I had pictured him in my mind for years, knew hundreds of things about him, and this one new vision of him awakened hundreds of sleeping memories in my mind; and this one impression having been repeated perhaps a hundred times more than those of the different faces together, will produce a great effect on the mind.

Therefore, be “unattached”; let things work, let brain centers work; work incessantly, but let not a ripple conquer the mind. Work as if you were a stranger in this land, a sojourner; work incessantly but do not bind yourselves; bondage is terrible. The very reason of nature’s existence is for the education of the soul; it has no other meaning; it is there because the soul must have knowledge, and through knowledge free itself. If we remember this always, we shall never be attached to nature; we shall know that nature is a book which we are to read; and that when we have gained the required knowledge, the book is of no value to us. Instead of that, however, we are identifying ourselves with nature; we are thinking that the soul is for nature, that the spirit is for the flesh, and, as the common saying has it, we think that man “lives to eat” and not “eats to live”. We are continually making this mistake; we are regarding nature as ourselves and are becoming attached to it; and as soon as this attachment comes, there is the deep impression on the soul, which binds us down and makes us work not from freedom but like slaves.

The whole gist of this teaching is that you should work like a master and not as a slave; work incessantly, but do not do slave’s work. Do you not see how everybody works? Nobody can be altogether at rest; 99 % of mankind work like slaves, and the result is misery; it is all selfish work.

Work through Freedom! Work through Love!