Karma Yoga

The word comes from the Sanskrit "kri", to do. Everything that is done is karma. Vivekananda knows the word carries a heavier meaning too, the effects that past actions bring back to us, and for these lectures he deliberately sets it aside. In Karma Yoga, karma simply means work.

And work, in his sense, is nearly everything. He is talking to his audience: that is karma. They are listening: karma. Breathing, walking, talking, a thought picked up and dropped again: all of it karma.

So before any question of working well or badly, notice how large the claim is. You are not someone who works for eight hours and then stops. You are doing karma every waking minute, and every bit of it leaves its mark.

Most of us assume we are headed for happiness. Vivekananda thinks that assumption is behind most of the misery in the world. Pleasure comes to an end. What we are really moving towards is knowledge, and pleasure and pain are both teachers along the way.

As they pass before the soul, each leaves a picture on it. Your first real failure, a compliment you still remember, an ordinary evening spent washing up: impressions, laid one over another.

The result of all those combined impressions is what he calls character. Study anyone closely, he says, and character turns out to be nothing mysterious. It is the sum total of the bent of a mind, the direction a thousand impressions have tilted it.

A friend tells you karma is the universe paying you back for what you did. How does Vivekananda use the word in these lectures?

• As religious rites performed to earn merit
• As any action at all, and the mark it leaves✓Correct answer
• As cosmic reward and punishment for past deeds
• As the fate you were born with and cannot change

He names the metaphysical sense, the effects of past actions, and sets it aside: in Karma Yoga the word means work, and everything done is work. Rituals are only a sliver of that, and a fixed fate is the opposite of where the chapter goes.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Good and evil, Vivekananda says, have an equal share in moulding character, and often the harder share teaches more. Among the great characters of history, "it was poverty that taught more than wealth; it was blows that brought out the inner fire, more than praise."

He is not recommending suffering or telling you to go looking for it. He is describing how character actually gets made: both pleasure and pain are teachers, and a person learns as much from evil as from good.

Think of the year that went wrong: the job that ended, the plan that collapsed. It rarely feels like an education while it is happening. Looking back, it is often the stretch that made you recognisably yourself.

Then he makes a stranger claim. No knowledge comes from outside; it is all within. What we call learning is really discovering, and he takes that word literally. To dis-cover is to take the covering off your own soul, which he calls a mine of infinite knowledge.

His example is Newton. Was gravitation sitting in a corner somewhere, waiting for him? The falling apple was only the suggestion. Newton studied his own mind, rearranged the links already there, and found a new one.

So the outside world is the occasion for knowing, never its source. A teacher, a book, a bad day: each one sets you studying the only thing anyone ever studies, which is their own mind. Learning is taking the covering off, one layer at a time.

Vivekananda's picture for this is a piece of flint. The fire is already in the stone; friction only brings it out. Knowledge sits in the mind the same way, and every experience that strikes against it is friction.

Now put your own life into that picture. Your tears and your laughter, the praise and the blame, the curses and the blessings: studied calmly, each turns out to have been a blow that struck something out. What you are is the result.

This is the full meaning of karma in the book. Every mental and physical blow that lands on the soul, bringing out its own power and knowledge, is karma. Nothing you do is neutral. Each act is one more strike against the flint.