Make
work worship
You cannot alter the benign
dispensation of the Lord, the controller and disinterested friend of all, the
paramount ruler of all the worlds. May due to your short sightedness the benign
nature of that dispensation is not visible to you. Your duty lies only in
exerting to the best of your ability and intelligence to execute the work which
appears to you through God’s grace as worth accomplishing at a particular
juncture to your angle of vision.
In discharging you should
depend on the grace of God and should be guided by an unsullied intellect free
from likes and dislikes and wishing the ultimate good at all. If at any time
partiality and prejudice enter your mind, if it ever harbours the thought of
harming anyone, the aforesaid duty will not be discharged aright. A man’s
judgement gets lost the moment attraction and aversion and the thought of
harming another enter his mind. Then he begins to entertain a good notion about
every living being, object or situation which is liked by him, while his mind
gets prejudiced against every living being, object or situation repugnant to
him. Nay, his desire to harm another gets stimulated and diverts even his noble
undertakings to nefarious ends. In this way even virtuous acts get converted
into sins. Therefore remain on your guard.
Your duty should be to
undertake only righteous acts intended to win the pleasure of the Lord—acts of
worship to the Lord. You should have no attachment to the consummation of an
act nor to the agreeable consequences following from it. Actions which are
marked by attachment to them or by attachment to their fruit get positively
vitiated by attachment.
He alone who works with a
view to pleasing the Lord can discharge his duties alright; his intellect is
free from partiality and prejudice, unsullied, one-pointed—rather than
diffused—and established in God. Whatever he contemplates or does he does for
the pleasure of the Lord, as an act of worship to the Lord. Whether the works
gets completed or not and whether its result is favourable or unfavourable are
not his concerns him is his unalloyed devotion to duty. He is scrupulously
alert to see that his mind does not fall a victim to partiality or prejudice,
that it does not get swayed by narrow self-interest, that he has not become a
votary of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ and that worship of God has not slipped out of his
mind; for this alone constitutes his degradation.
Far from harming—doing an resident evil turn to anyone at any time, a man engaged in discharging his duties in the
form of his sacred obligations for pleasing the Lord and as an act of worship
to the Lord can never harbour even a thought of doing harm to anyone. This
indeed is the test of an act of unalloyed service to the Lord.
- Make work worship