KARMA YOGA 9

So long as we remain egocentric individuals, we feel we are the doers of work. And so long as this perception prevails, we remain inextricably bound to Karma and its consequences. We feel duty-bound in life and bear a certain sense of responsibility towards our near and dear ones, our community, our country and towards the whole world, our sense of duty extending in proportion to our breadth of consciousness. However, we all feel obligated, so to say, to work for the people around us and not just for our own petty selves. This sense of duty impels us to work with the motive of self-preservation and the preservation of our kith and kin with whom we can identify. This is action with a motive, attached work with the expectation of a desired result and is fraught with the sense of the false ego which masquerades as the doer of action and so envelopes the soul in karmic bondage. And yet through it all, the world-order is maintained, such is the plan of Nature.

But bondage brings in its wake misery and we feel restless to escape from the crushing Wheel of Karma to blissful freedom where all is sunshine and there is no duty, no responsibility, no worrisome work to perform, just no load to bear. There where we are free souls, such a clime haunts us through the darkening despair of Karma, holding out the promise of an infinitude of bliss and an eternity of existence. We call it 'hope' but, in point of fact, it is the harbinger of our 'Second Coming', so to say, a precognition of our impending freedom, of our returning home whence we have sprung.

But hope merely beckons us on, it cannot free us. Between the vain imagining and the actuality of freedom is a vast expanse of desert terrain we must traverse before we may tread on the hallowed ground, the Promised Land. And this path we must traverse along karmic lines ever tending to drag us deeper into the mire of materialism that we may not pass through the clutches of Maya and escape into the realm of the Infinite. Each step is then a wary one, each action a veneration of the Divine, each breath a longing for universal good and each soul a Temple of the Most High. Thus we proceed from bondage to bond, and, from bond to transcendence of all that is till the vast panorama is cast aside as a poor shadow of the Ever-effulgent One.