September 2019
Topical Musings
The Vedanta Kesari
50
S
Our Sadhana
wami Vivekananda proposes a new philosophy of work, which has tremendous relevance for the modern man. He says that all aspects of our work cannot be monetized. There will always be some aspects of the work we do that can never be converted into money. In the present day mercenary work environment, aspects of our work, such as loyalty, sincerity, integrity, punctuality, are progressively ignored since they do not translate into money at all. Swamiji says that these aspects of our work can be converted into something amazing in our personality, if we only know the technique of converting it. It converts into character. And what is that technique?
Swami Vivekananda tells the story of the monk and the chaste housewife in his seminal book Karma-Yoga1. A monk registers some progress after years of strict discipline and meditation, while he meets a lady who is far ahead of him in spiritual life, leading the humdrum life of a housewife. When he asks her about the Yoga (spiritual path) she has followed, she says, ‘I know of no Yoga. I am an ordinary housewife. This much however is true; I have always struggled to perform the duties of my station in life, with a sense of purity2, and in an un-attached manner.’
Work done with these two conditions – a sense of purity, and non-attachment – transforms into Yoga; karma becomes Karma-Yoga. Work becomes worship only when these two conditions are fulfilled. Who amongst us doesn’t work? Yet, how many of us have become illumined? Where lies the fault? These two conditions have not been fulfilled. Therefore, it is important to understand these two conditions clearly.
Sense of Purity If the advent of science and technology has done any harm to human society, it is undoubtedly this – it has done away with this sense of holiness, this sense of purity, from our lives. Nothing is sacred anymore. It is fashionable to be hedonistic, bohemian, atheistic, even immoral. Therefore, all the finer qualities of human life such as marital fidelity, loyalty to employer, and personal integrity are vanishing from our personality. In other words, all idealism is washed away from our lives as unnecessary and it is usurped by crass utilitarianism and gross materialism. Our education system fosters this perverse attitude in us. Our nuclear family structure engenders it all the more forcefully in us. The knowing ones are at their wits end as to how to bring back this one vital sense into peoples’ lives. Swami Vivekananda says: ‘The life of the practical is in the ideal. It is the ideal that has penetrated the whole of our lives, whether we philosophize, or perform the hard, everyday duties of life. The rays of the ideal, reflected and refracted in various straight or tortuous lines, are pouring in through every aperture and wind-hole, and consciously or unconsciously, every function has to be performed in its light, every object has to be seen transformed, heightened, or deformed by it. It is the ideal that has made us what we are, and will make us what we are going to be. It is the power of the ideal that has enshrouded us, and is felt in our joys or sorrows, in our great acts or mean doings, in our virtues and vices. ‘… truth of the ideal is in the practical. … That the ideal is there is a proof of the existence of the practical somehow, somewhere. … The power of the ideal is in the practical. Its work on us is in and through the practical. Through the
