Treating All Work As Karma Yoga

When the spiritual aspiration awakens in an individual, he often feels like he has to leave his employment and take up some work that is more ‘spiritual’. He tends to equate the type of work with some ill-defined spiritual nature. Thus, we frequently see spiritual people, and organizations, take up work to feed the hungry, heal the sick, etc. This of course is very positive and needed work and we honor those who make that commitment.

Such efforts, however, are not always immediately feasible for an individual, particularly if he is living and working in the society, managing the needs of a family and taking the employment that he is able to get. He may want up in restaurant service, or assembly line action or working in a warehouse moving products around, etc. From an external standpoint, there is nothing spiritual about these things.

What makes them spiritual, or not, is the attitude and effort put into any work. When one takes up a line of work, even if it is simply as a means to supporting the family, it can be turned into a practice of the yoga of works by giving the job full and careful attention, doing the best possible and making the situation one that enhances one’s own inner state of spiritual development through that dedicated action.

The story of the devotee at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram who was given the task of drying plates after they were washed is one that illustrates this concept. There is also the famous story from the ancient texts about the youth who came to a teacher and asked for becoming a disciiple to learn the science of spirituality. The teacher gave him two cattle and told him to take them into the forest and when they were a herd of 1000, he should return and would obtain the teachings. How many years of dedicated and focused effort went into succeeding at the task! When the youth eventually returned, the teacher vacated his own seat for the student and told him that he was now the teacher, as he glowed with the knowledge of the Divine! The mundane, everyday tasks of looking after cattle, nurturing, feeding and protecting them were turned, by the devoted young person, into the means of his realisation.

During the late 1960’s and early 1970’s a number of people went to the Auroville project in South India to help build the community. Many of them were engaged in hard manual labor, constructing the Matrimandir, or various other facilities, planting and tending trees, cooking food, etc. The work, in and of itself, was not inherently what would traditionally be called ‘spiritual’ but the dedication and consecrated action based on a deep aspiration is what transformed the hard work into a means of spiritual progress for many.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “… one must take it [work done in the world] as a training and do it in the spirit of Karmayoga — what matters there is not the nature of the work in itself, but the spirit in which it is done. It must be in the spirit of the Gita, without desire, with detachment, without repulsion, but doing it as perfectly as possible, not for the sake of the family or promotion or to please the superiors, but simply because it is the thing that has been given in the hand to do. It is a field of inner training, nothing else. One has to learn in it these things, equality, desirelessness, dedication. It is not the work as a thing for its own sake, but one’s doing of it and one’s way of doing it that one has to dedicate to the Divine. Done in that spirit, it does not matter what the work is.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 3, Action and Work, pp. 63-64