KARMA IN ITS EFFECT ON CHARACTER - 3

Even the lowest forms of work are not to be despised. Let the man, who knows
no better, work for selfish ends, for name and fame; but everyone should
always try to get towards higher and higher motives and to understand them.
"To work we have the right, but not to the fruits thereof:" Leave the fruits
alone. Why care for results? If you wish to help a man, never think what that
man's attitude should be towards you. If you want to do a great or a good work,
do not trouble to think what the result will be.
There arises a difficult question in this ideal of work. Intense activity is
necessary; we must always work. We cannot live a minute without work. What
then becomes of rest? Here is one side of the life-struggle — work, in which we
are whirled rapidly round. And here is the other — that of calm, retiring
renunciation: everything is peaceful around, there is very little of noise and
show, only nature with her animals and flowers and mountains. Neither of them
is a perfect picture. A man used to solitude, if brought in contact with the
surging whirlpool of the world, will be crushed by it; just as the fish that lives
in the deep sea water, as soon as it is brought to the surface, breaks into pieces,
deprived of the weight of water on it that had kept it together. Can a man who
has been used to the turmoil and the rush of life live at ease if he comes to a
quiet place? He suffers and perchance may lose his mind. The ideal man is he
who, in the midst of the greatest silence and solitude, finds the intensest
activity, and in the midst of the intensest activity finds the silence and solitude
of the desert. He has learnt the secret of restraint, he has controlled himself. He
goes through the streets of a big city with all its traffic, and his mind is as calm
as if he were in a cave, where not a sound could reach him; and he is intensely
working all the time. That is the ideal of Karma-Yoga, and if you have attained
to that you have really learnt the secret of work.
But we have to begin from the beginning, to take up the works as they come to
us and slowly make ourselves more unselfish every day. We must do the work
and find out the motive power that prompts us; and, almost without exception,
in the first years, we shall find that our motives are always selfish; but
gradually this selfishness will melt by persistence, till at last will come the time
when we shall be able to do really unselfish work. We may all hope that some
day or other, as we struggle through the paths of life, there will come a time
when we shall become perfectly unselfish; and the moment we attain to that, all
our powers will be concentrated, and the knowledge which is ours will be
manifest.