Karma Yoga In My Daily Life

If you do ask for my personal opinion, I’d say that I’d value Gyana Yoga or the path of knowledge to be superior to Karma or work, but the spiritual guides hold the opinion that working for the sake of the others and having this attitude that my life should be service to people invokes the deepest spirit of unselfishness and a growing concern for the well being of the others. 

Swami Ranganathananda Ji Maharaj of the Ramakrishna Mission had defined spirituality as “When I close my eyes, I find peace within, and when I open my eyes, my attitude is what can I do for you.” Now, that’s such a pure, simple and unadulterated definition, one that gets you to question your ethics.

So, in my personal life, when I do encounter such situations, I can very well say that more often than not, I find myself in such situations where I tend to act selfishly. For instance, in my professional capacity, there are many times when I visualise myself taking a selfish stand, not perhaps making excuses but sometimes forgetting this aspect of Who I Really Am. 

Even though I have been blessed with the privilege of working from home, I do encounter such situations in my daily roster where I identify myself with this body and mind, and not with the real Self, and sometimes Karma Yoga really does get adulterated, not that I work for my selfish desires, but I sometimes tend to feel that my efforts are not being realised fully. 

Thinking from an enlightened person’s perspective and the one that Swami Vivekananda even highlighted, the seeds of spirituality get so deep into a person that he no longer craves happiness and sorrow. To him, the happiness of others is his own, and so are his sorrows. 

What a profound thought! It’s here that I wouldn’t shy away from saying that sometimes it really does get me thinking whether I am being a fool in real life by observing such practices. A common person would perhaps say yes, but the ones that understand the truth deeply would be of the opinion that nothing in this world could be so good or so bad as to affect your inner reality - your real Self, which is Existence, Consciousness and Bliss - The Satchidananda. 

But in these days of my spiritual quest, there’s been one thing that has been affecting me deeply, which is this constant nagging from the interior part of the brain that asks if I am walking into the right path, and whether or not my feelings are being bestowed. Sometimes, it doesn’t really happen, as I expect, like repeating the Mantra and reading the Bhagavad Gita or meditating. 

I feel hurt when I cannot complete these rituals of mine and only then I get to think if this path of walking is justified or not. Swami Vivekananda in his Complete Works had said that the Upanishads and the Vedanta state that all of the power that you seek outside lies inside of you. You just need to recognise it and manifest it in your life. 

Perhaps then I’d need to add this belief to my Karma Yoga too. Love and light to everyone!

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