Swami Vivekananda on Karma Yoga (excerpt)

[Guest guest]

Jai Ma!!!

 

Dear Sisters and Brothers:

 

September 11 is a an important day in Vedanta. This was the day Swami

Vivekananda gave his historic speech at the Parliament of Religions.

 

Some feel that this event ushered Hinduism into the West.

 

Amma occasionally quotes from Vivekananda. Big Swami quotes him as well. In

fact Amma visited the Vivekananda Memorial Statue in India.

 

Here is an excerpt from Swami Vivekananda on Karma Yoga (Please note this is not

from his Parliament speech):

 

"Karma-Yoga, therefore, is a system of ethics and religion intended to attain

freedom through unselfishness and by good works. The Karma-yogi need not believe

in any doctrine whatever. He may not believe even in God, may not ask what his

soul is, nor think of any metaphysical speculation. He has got his own special

aim of realizing selflessness; and he has to work it out himself. Every moment

of his life must be realization, because he has to solve by mere work, without

the help of doctrine or theory, the very same problem to which the Jnâni applies

his reason and inspiration and the Bhakta his love.

 

Now comes the next question: What is this work? What is this doing good to the

world? Can we do good to the world? In an absolute sense, no; in a relative

sense, yes. No permanent or everlasting good can be done to the world; if it

could be done, the world would not be this world. We may satisfy the hunger of a

man for five minutes, but he will be hungry again. Every pleasure with which we

supply a man may be seen to be momentary. No one can permanently cure this

ever-recurring fever of pleasure and pain. Can any permanent happiness be given

to the world? In the ocean we cannot raise a wave without causing a hollow

somewhere else. The sum total of the good things in the world has been the same

throughout in its relation to man's need and greed. It cannot be increased or

decreased. Take the history of the human race as we know today. Do we not find

the same miseries and the same happiness, the same pleasures and pains, the same

differences in position? Are not some rich, some poor,

some high, some low, some healthy, some unhealthy? All this was just the same

with the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans in ancient times as it is with

the Americans today. So far as history is known, it has always been the same;

yet at the same time we find that running along with all these incurable

differences of pleasure and pain, there has ever been the struggle to alleviate

them. Every period of history has given birth to thousands of men and women who

have worked hard to smooth the passage of life for others. And how far have they

succeeded? We can only play at driving the ball from one place to another. We

take away pain from the physical plane, and it goes to the mental one. It is

like that picture in Dante's hell where the misers were given a mass of gold to

roll up a hill. Every time they rolled it up a little, it again rolled down. All

our talks about the millennium are very nice as schoolboy's stories, but they

are no better than that. All nations that dream of the

millennium also think that, of all peoples in the world, they will have the

best of it then for themselves. This is the wonderfully unselfish idea of the

millennium!

We cannot add happiness to this world; similarly we cannot add pain to it

either. The sum total of the energies of pleasure and pain displayed here on

earth will be the same throughout. We just push it from this side to the other

side, and from that side to this; but it will remain the same, because to remain

so is its very nature. This ebb and flow, this rising and falling is in the

world's very nature; it would be as logical to hold otherwise as to say that we

may have life without death. This is complete nonsense, because the very idea of

life implies death, and the very idea of pleasure implies pain. The lamp is

constantly burning out, and that is its life. If you want to have life, you have

to die every moment for it. Life and death are only different expressions of the

same thing looked at from different standpoints; they are the falling and rising

of the same wave, and the two form one whole. One looks at the "fall" side and

becomes a pessimist, another looks at the "rise"

side and becomes an optimist. When a boy is going to school and his father and

mother are taking care of him, everything seems blessed to him; his wants are

simple, he is a great optimist. But the old man, with his varied experience,

becomes calmer and is sure to have his warmth considerably cooled down. So old

nations, with signs of decay all around them, are apt to be less hopeful than

new nations. There is a proverb in India, "A thousand years a city, and a

thousand years a forest." This change of city into forest and vice versa is

going on everywhere, and it makes people optimists or pessimists according to

the side they see of it. "

 

Namah Shivaya,

 

GeorgeSon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

for Good

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[Guest guest]

Ammachi, GeorgeSon <leokomor> wrote:

>

> Jai Ma!!!

>

> Dear Sisters and Brothers:

>

> September 11 is a an important day in Vedanta. This was the day

Swami Vivekananda gave his historic speech at the Parliament of

Religions.

 

My original hero! It was He who first showed me spirituality in a way

I never saw it before.

 

Thanks for posting this.