KARMA YOGA 31

There is a thing called enjoyment of work and there is a thing called sufferance of work. These two opposite modes of work are the off-shoots of opposite mental frames in which the work is performed. When the mind is concentrated and peaceful, work is pleasant but when the mind is turbulent that very work is a source of misery. Here one will have to discern between the apparent and the real cause of pleasure or pain in relation to work and not fall into the pitfall of wrong reasoning whereby one blames work itself or the persons one associates with in work as responsible for the misery one suffers in work. Of course, it cannot be denied that certain types of work are conducive to producing a healthy state of mind and certain others a vicious state. Likewise, certain people one works for or with may not at all be harmonious and may be the cause of tension and a worrisome state of mind. Circumstances and situations do influence people profoundly and have their positive or negative impact on them. But essentially one is free to practise the spiritual disciplines prescribed in the Yogas to equip oneself to handle work-situations better and arrive at the right degree of detachment where work becomes bliss and not the perennial exercise of daily drudgery, the tiresome, strenuous, cheerless, monotonous mass of mundane misery. The science of concentration once mastered, one becomes an adept in work and the sheer skill one brings in to one's labour, releases inner springs of joy as one's success in work helps one to connect to one's comrades-in-arms, so to say, and also to the One located deep in the recesses of one's spiritual heart. Then work becomes a source of one's own well-being as well as that of others. Social good results and one's individual good as well. Such work is for world-maintenance and self-liberation and its simple formula is this:
'To work thou hast the right, not to the fruits thereof;
And in detachment in work be not attached to inaction either.'
And this is Karma Yoga.