When the soul yearns for the peace and calmness of God’s presence, and begins to feel that peace in meditation, work, and daily commitments can feel like a painful distraction, yet few of us are free of the karmas that cause us to need to participate in outer activities. The following excerpt from The New Path gives a fresh perspective on how to get our need for activity in balance so that it feeds our efforts in meditation…enjoy!
“Master (Yogananda) once taught me a good lesson on the attitude we should hold toward our work.” Mrs. Vera Brown (now Meera Mata), an advanced older disciple whom Master had made responsible for training some of the newer ones, was sharing with me a few of her experiences with our guru.
“‘You work too hard,’ Master told me one day. ‘You must work less. If you don’t, you will ruin your health.’
“‘Very well,’ I thought, ‘I’ll try not doing so much.’
“Two or three days later, much to my surprise, Master gave me more work to do!”
Mrs. Brown’s eyes twinkled. “‘Okay, Master,’ I thought, ‘you must know what you’re doing.’ I took on my new duties. But all the time I kept wondering, ‘How am I going to reconcile all this extra work with his instructions to me to work less?’
“Well, a couple of days after that Master again told me, sternly this time, ‘You must not work so hard. In this lifetime you’ve done enough work for several incarnations.’
“What was I to do? Again I tried cutting down my activities, only to find Master, after two or three days, giving me more work than ever!
“We repeated this little act several times. Every time that Master told me to work less, he soon added duties that forced me to work more. I figured he must know what he was doing, and that it was up to me to try and understand what that was.
“Well, finally one day I looked at Master. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘instead of our using the word work in our life here, why don’t we substitute the word service?’
“Master laughed. ‘It has been a good show,’ he said. ‘All your life you’ve been thinking, work! work! work! That very thought was exhausting you. But just see how differently you feel when you think of work as a divine service! When you act to please God you can do twice as much, and never feel tired!’”
Mrs. Brown, whose frail body never seemed to run out of energy no matter how much she did, laughed merrily. “You see, the very thought of pleasing God fills us with His energy. Master tells us it’s our unwillingness that cuts off that flow of energy.”
“True,” I replied thoughtfully, “as often as I’ve put that principle to practice, I’ve found it works marvelously. But,” I continued, “there’s another obstacle I run into: that of being too willing. What can one do about that?”
“How can one be too willing!”
“Well, what I mean is, I become over-enthusiastic about what I’m doing. As a result, I lose my inner peace, and fall into the old consciousness of hard work, which ends in exhaustion.”
“I see.” Mrs. Brown nodded sympathetically. “That’s right. Without inner peace we lose the consciousness of God’s presence. And if we can’t feel Him within us, we can’t really feel His energy.” Again she laughed happily. “Master taught me a good lesson on that subject, too.
“He was cooking one day in his kitchen. I was there in the room with him. For lack of anything better to do, I decided I’d clean up after him. The moment he emptied one pan, I washed it. Whenever he spilled anything, I cleaned up the mess.
“Well, he started dirtying pans and more pans, spilling food and more food. I was working faster and faster to keep up with him. In my whole life I’d never seen such sloppy cooking! At last I just gave up. It occurred to me that I might as well wait till he was finished before I did any more.
“As I sat down to watch him, I noticed him smile; but he said nothing. Presently, I saw he wasn’t messing things up any more. Finally it dawned on me that he’d only been teaching me the difference between calm, God-reminding activity, and the sort of restlessness that one indulges in just for activity’s sake. I’d been working in a spirit of busy-ness. Master’s way of showing me my mistake was to lead me to its own logical conclusion!”
The spiritual path would, one suspects, be relatively easy to understand if it involved only meditation, ecstatic visions, and blissful expansions of consciousness. Why, one asks, must it be complicated by mundane activities like ditch digging and letter writing and cleaning up kitchens? One may sympathize, on one level at least, with that reluctant disciple the day we completed the swimming pool at Twenty-Nine Palms who grumbled, “I didn’t come here to pour cement!” Many a sincere devotee, too, has probably wondered what pouring cement (or digging ditches, or writing letters, or cleaning up kitchens) has to do with finding God.
The answer is, quite simply: nothing! Not in itself, anyway. Master once told the story of a man who placed a hundred-dollar bill in the collection plate at church, then was upset because God didn’t answer his prayer. Laughingly Master commented, “God already was that hundred-dollar bill—whether in or out of the collection plate! Why should He care where it was placed?” The realm of maya (cosmic delusion) resembles the surface of an ocean: However high the waves get whipped up by the storm, the over-all ocean level remains the same. God doesn’t need anything that we can give Him. He already is everything! The one thing He wants from us, Master said, is our love.[1]
So, what we can do is offer our love for God into our activities, and perform them with an inner freedom and deep willingness and self-offering. In these ways, we find that our outer activities and “work” become precious aspects of our spiritual awakening – for, if God is omnipresent, He must also be in the activity.
[1] The Path (Second Edition), Copyright 1996 J. Donald Walters
