WHAT IS DUTY? - 3

Later on we shall find that even this idea of duty undergoes change, and that
the greatest work is done only when there is no selfish motive to prompt it. Yet
it is work through the sense of duty that leads us to work without any idea of
duty; when work will become worship — nay, something higher — then will
work be done for its own sake. We shall find that the philosophy of duty,
whether it be in the form of ethics or of love, is the same as in every other
Yoga — the object being the attenuating of the lower self, so that the real
higher Self may shine forth — the lessening of the frittering away of energies
on the lower plane of existence, so that the soul may manifest itself on the
higher ones. This is accomplished by the continuous denial of low desires,
which duty rigorously requires. The whole organisation of society has thus
been developed, consciously or unconsciously, in the realms of action and
experience, where, by limiting selfishness, we open the way to an unlimited
expansion of the real nature of man.
Duty is seldom sweet. It is only when love greases its wheels that it runs
smoothly; it is a continuous friction otherwise. How else could parents do their
duties to their children, husbands to their wives, and vice versa? Do we not
meet with cases of friction every day in our lives? Duty is sweet only through
love, and love shines in freedom alone. Yet is it freedom to be a slave to the
senses, to anger, to jealousies and a hundred other petty things that must occur
every day in human life? In all these little roughnesses that we meet with in
life, the highest expression of freedom is to forbear. Women, slaves to their
own irritable, jealous tempers, are apt to blame their husbands, and assert their
own "freedom", as they think, not knowing that thereby they only prove that
they are slaves. So it is with husbands who eternally find fault with their wives.
Chastity is the first virtue in man or woman, and the man who, however he may
have strayed away, cannot be brought to the right path by a gentle and loving
and chaste wife is indeed very rare. The world is not yet as bad as that. We hear
much about brutal husbands all over the world and about the impurity of men,
but is it not true that there are quite as many brutal and impure women as men?
If all women were as good and pure as their own constant assertions would lead
one to believe, I am perfectly satisfied that there would not be one impure man
in the world. What brutality is there which purity and chastity cannot conquer?
A good, chaste wife, who thinks of every other man except her own husband as
her child and has the attitude of a mother towards all men, will grow so great in
the power of her purity that there cannot be a single man, however brutal, who
will not breathe an atmosphere of holiness in her presence. Similarly, every
husband must look upon all women, except his own wife, in the light of his
own mother or daughter or sister. That man, again, who wants to be a teacher
of religion must look upon every woman as his mother, and always behave
towards her as such.
The position of the mother is the highest in the world, as it is the one place in
which to learn and exercise the greatest unselfishness. The love of God is the
only love that is higher than a mother's love; all others are lower. It is the duty
of the mother to think of her children first and then of herself. But, instead of
that, if the parents are always thinking of themselves first, the result is that the
relation between parents and children becomes the same as that between birds
and their offspring which, as soon as they are fledged, do not recognise any
parents. Blessed, indeed, is the man who is able to look upon woman as the
representative of the motherhood of God. Blessed, indeed, is the woman to
whom man represents the fatherhood of God. Blessed are the children who
look upon their parents as Divinity manifested on earth.