THE SECRET OF WORK - 3

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 the mind — the face
which I met perhaps only for one minute, and which I loved; all the others have
vanished. My attachment to this particular person caused a deeper impression
on my mind than 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, and yet there was no similarity of effect upon 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 got only 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 centres 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. This world is not our habitation, it is only one of the many
stages through which we are passing. Remember that great saying of the
Sânkhya, "The whole of nature is for the soul, not the soul for nature." 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 in which we are to read, and that
when we have gained the required knowledge, the book is of no more 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; ninety-nine per cent of
mankind work like slaves, and the result is misery; it is all selfish work. Work
through freedom! Work through love! The word "love" is very difficult to
understand; love never comes until there is freedom. There is no true love
possible in the slave. If you buy a slave and tie him down in chains and make
him work for you, he will work like a drudge, but there will be no love in him.
So when we ourselves work for the things of the world as slaves, there can be
no love in us, and our work is not true work. This is true of work done for
relatives and friends, and is true of work done for our own selves. Selfish work
is slave's work; and here is a test. Every act of love brings happiness; there is no
act of love which does not bring peace and blessedness as its reaction. Real
existence, real knowledge, and real love are eternally connected with one
another, the three in one: where one of them is, the others also must be; they are
the three aspects of the One without a second — the Existence - Knowledge -
Bliss. When that existence becomes relative, we see it as the world; that
knowledge becomes in its turn modified into the knowledge of the things of the
world; and that bliss forms the foundation of all true love known to the heart of
man. Therefore true love can never react so as to cause pain either to the lover
or to the beloved. Suppose a man loves a woman; he wishes to have her all to
himself and feels extremely jealous about her every movement; he wants her to
sit near him, to stand near him, and to eat and move at his bidding. He is a slave
to her and wishes to have her as his slave. That is not love; it is a kind of
morbid affection of the slave, insinuating itself as love. It cannot be love,
because it is painful; if she does not do what he wants, it brings him pain. With
love there is no painful reaction; love only brings a reaction of bliss; if it does
not, it is not love; it is mistaking something else for love. When you have
succeeded in loving your husband, your wife, your children, the whole world,
the universe, in such a manner that there is no reaction of pain or jealousy, no
selfish feeling, then you are in a fit state to be unattached.