Karma Yoga in a Seeker's Journey

When a person has made ultimate reality the goal in his life, action becomes meaningless. Once action is meaningless, any kind of self-image is of no great significance. In the state you are in right now, there is still a need for action.

You have not yet reached a point where you have transcended action and you can be without it. So, perform the kind of action you think is best right now and do what is needed for the situation.

A man who does not know real, intense action can never move into inaction. If you try, inaction will just become lethargy. People who always rest in their life must be experts about rest, but that is not the truth. People who have never been on fire will not know the coolness of water. People who have just lived their life half-heartedly or sedately can never know the other way. Intense activity can be useful for your energies to reach a boiling point and get moving. Then, to transform them into something else is very easy. That's the whole purpose of karma or action. We are performing action anyway, but we have the choice to perform Adolf Hitler's or Mahatma Gandhi's type of action. Anyway we have to perform action, so let us do it whole-heartedly and choose the form of action.

Do you want to rule the world or serve the world? Ultimately, that's the choice. Choose whichever kind of action you think is most harmonious and closest to divinity and realization. Every moment, do it with tremendous intensity, without giving it a single moment's break. Then, a day will come when action is not needed anymore. If you really want to know this "non-doing" business, first you must discover what doing is. You have not done that yet. Every waking moment, unceasingly I pursue this work of offering myself, physically and mentally. All of this has happened in my life only out of that. It has become so powerful simply because it does not mean anything to me, but I am at it twenty-four hours. This has a different kind of power.

This is the science of creating a truly powerful being. This is not power to rule. This is not a power that can be taken away at any moment. No one can take it away, because wherever you are put, that is what you do. Wherever you are put - heaven or hell - you just do your work. This releases you from the fruit of action. Once you are released from the fruit of action, action will happen by itself. You don't have to stop working to be released from action. It will simply dissolve, melt and disappear. Once the expectation of the fruit of action is completely removed from your life, the action occurs by itself. You don't have to do anything about it.

Courtesy: www.isha.sadhguru.org/