I have told you everything connected with this series of lessons on the Upanishads. There is practically nothing left now. Yesterday I touched upon certain practical aspects and personal issues involved in living your daily life, not merely as a student of yoga and spiritual life, but as a person aspiring to live a good life, a comfortable and happy life, a perfect life, a satisfied life and an integrated life.

Our relationship to things, to this world, as I mentioned in the previous session, is to a large extent conditioned by the structure of our own personality. We see outside what we actually are inside. I told you that degrees of Reality do not really exist. Reality has no degrees; it is ever perfect, but it appears as if there is an evolutionary process taking place with gradations of descent and ascent - which is what is meant by degrees. This perception is engendered by our involvement in certain degrees of perception through the coverings of consciousness in ourselves.

To repeat briefly what I told you yesterday, our involvements are external as well as personal, social, political, physical, material, sensory, vital, psychological, intellectual and spiritual. These gradations of apperception of the nature of things reflect upon the way in which we approach things in general in the world, even God Himself, and it appears as if we can approach Reality only through certain stages of graduated ascent.

We cannot run out of our own skin; we are included within our own selves. We cannot escape noticing the kind of involvements of our own selves in this psycho-physical individuality, and this is a hard nut indeed before us - a kind of Gordian knot, as they call it, traditionally known as a granthi. Granthi is a knot. The way in which consciousness gets tied up to certain locations of perception and experience is known as granthis, or knots. There are supposed to be three types of knots, known as Brahma-granthi, Vishnu-granthi and Rudra-granthi. The manner in which consciousness is tied to psycho-physical individuality is the way of the knot, actually. Either you untie the Gordian knot, or you cut it. But, you cannot cut the knot; you have to untie it gradually. Nothing can be cut asunder; everything has to be opened gradually, like the blossoming of a flower. You cannot give a blow to the bud and expect it to blossom into a rose! It has to organically develop into blossoming in a spontaneous, healthy and happy manner. Actually, life has to be a happy process; it is not intended to be a torture.

Life is a movement from one degree of reality to another degree of reality; one stage of perfection to another stage of perfection; one level of wholeness to another level of wholeness. You are not moving from fraction to whole; you are living a life of wholeness even now, in this so-called fragmentary existence. You may be an isolated individual in human society, maybe an unwanted person; nevertheless, you are a whole person. Socially you may look like a fraction of human society, a part of the large mass of humanity; that is one way of looking at things. But each individual, even to the level of the minute cell or atom - everything - is a whole in itself. You are not a half human being, even if you are totally isolated from all other things. You are not a one-fourth human being at any time. You may have nothing; you may be a poor man with no relations of any kind, owning nothing, completely discarded, as it were, for all practical purposes. Nevertheless, you are not a part. You never feel that you are a chip cut off some larger whole. You are a complete person in yourself, under every circumstance. Inasmuch as life appears to be a movement from one level of wholeness of perfection to another level, it should not really be a source of suffering to anybody.

Anandena jatani jivanti, anandam prayanty abhisamvisanti (Tait. 3.6.1), says a great passage in the Taittiriya Upanishad: "From bliss this world has come." The world has not come from a grief-stricken gestation. From the joy of God this world of joy has come, it is sustained by the joy which is the nature of perfection, and it shall return to the Ultimate Joy, finally. "From joy it has come, by joy it is sustained and to joy it shall return." The Upanishads never say that life is a curse, that it is a hell. Nothing of the kind is the message of the Upanishads. The perfection of God can create only a perfection that is the world. Every part of your body is a perfection by itself. The littlest unknown limb of your personality is a perfection in its own way, which is why it is working in a harmonious manner. An imperfect limb cannot give you a perfect orderliness and a harmony of feeling. There are millions of little cells in the body - so many limbs and organs. Do you feel any kind of awkwardness because there are so many parts to your body? The manyness does not affect the unitariness of your individuality. Therefore, the way in which you have to live in this world and conduct yourselves as seekers of Truth has to be in terms of the involvement of your consciousness in the stages of ascent and descent. Ascent is the progressive march of the soul to the Supreme Being; descent is the evolution of the world from God down to the earth, down to the lowest atom.

We are physically involved, from the outermost part of our personality. Nobody can forget that there is a body. You may be essentially pure, unadulterated consciousness, but the physical body hangs very heavily upon this consciousness; therefore it is that you have a weight. Consciousness has no weight, and the mind also cannot be measured on a weighing scale. It is the body that is heavy; it is a concentrated mass of location, involving a pattern of material forces in which the consciousness, which is your real nature, is involved. It has to be counted, taken care of. Even a naughty child in a family is not to be totally ignored as if it is non-existent. An intractable, disobedient and naughty boy in the house is not an irrelevant item in the house; he has to be taken care of and put to the pattern of the wholeness of the family structure. If some part of the body is sick, we do not cut it off; we see that it is healed and made part and parcel of the wholeness of our personality.

Likewise, the involvement of your consciousness in your physicality is to be taken care of by an adjustment which is in a state of harmony with the physical structure. The body is very active; the senses are active. The senses and the body work together. Actually, the body moves on account of the vibrations set up by the sense organs. This activity is perpetual. Nobody can keep quiet without doing something. This is what the Gita has said: na hi kascit ksanam api jatu tisthaty akarmakrt (Gita 3.5). You cannot sit quiet without doing something. A little bit of action, a little bit of your movement is unavoidable. This is so because there is an agitation created in ourselves by the preponderance of what is called rajas - the distracting and active part of prakriti, the matrix of all things. There are three qualities, or properties, of prakriti: sattva, rajas and tamas. We are not always in a state of sattva; clarity of perception and the feeling of satisfaction and happiness within are not always given to us. We are mostly turbulent in our personality, agitated and distracted. To put down this agitating medium in ourselves we have to employ certain means which are commensurate with this agitation. This is the work that we perform in a harmonious manner. The agitation, which is also a kind of activity, can be subdued only by another kind of activity, as a disease is cured by homeopathic medicines of a character similar to the disease already prevailing in the body. Similia similibus curantur: Like cures like. Action can be controlled only by action; diamond can be cut by diamond. This is a psychological secret in the approach to things, generally.

But what kind of action is it that can subdue agitated activity? A wholesome action. While it is true that karma, or action, binds, it is also true that certain karmas liberate. Na karma lipyate nare (Isa 2), says the Isavasya Upanishad. Action cannot bind the human being, provided it is oriented in the light of the omnipresence of God. Isavasyam idam sarvam (Isa 1). Otherwise, every action will produce a reaction. The fruit of action, the binding power of action, is nothing but the reaction set up by action which is motivated by externality and conditioned by space and time and objectivity.

So it should be wholesome, God-oriented work. It is work, of course - underline it. It is nevertheless work; God-oriented work is the means of putting down work that causes agitation. Binding action can be subdued by liberating action. This is known as karma yoga. Karma yoga is the art of uniting oneself with God Himself through action. You may be wondering how action can contact God, inasmuch as every activity is directed towards some objective that is ulterior. This is not the kind of action that we are referring to here, when we talk of God-oriented activity. The Bhagavadgita is difficult to understand. It is not easy to make out its meaning when we are asked to do work in a liberating manner. A wholesome work - spiritually conditioned work, God-oriented work, unselfish work, perfected alignment of oneself in work - will liberate you from the disadvantages of ordinary work.

You are also very busy every day. Everybody is doing work of some kind or the other, but they are binding works. The consequence of an action will tell upon you so heavily that afterwards you may repent for having done it. As the Gita tells us, the result of an action is not entirely in our hands. Even if the farmer takes all precaution to plough the field and sow the seed and pour water and manure it, it does not follow that it will yield the harvest. Other factors must also cooperate, such as rain, climate, sunlight and many other things which are of a natural character. Inasmuch as the fruit of an action is not in our hands - it is determined by forces which are cosmic in their nature - it is unwise on the part of any person to expect a particular result from a particular action. This is what the Bhagavadgita is telling us.

Therefore, by very carefully manoeuvring your life in this world through well-ordered activity, dissociating it from the idea of any fruit accruing therefrom, you will find yourself in harmony with two things at the same time. You are in harmony with Reality because of the wholesome character of your work. You are also in harmony with the agitations which are caused by rajo-guna prakriti in your personality so that you oppose neither the prevailing conditions at the present moment by way of rajasic work, nor do you oppose the conditions imposed upon you by the nature of Reality. You are a friend of this world, and also a friend of the other world.

This is the preliminary step that one can take in the practice of spiritual life: karma yoga. By karma alone is karma controlled and overcome. When your mind is active, the physical body craves for work of some kind or the other. Keeping quiet without doing anything physically, but mentally brooding, is not supposed to be action which is liberating. This is what the Gita has told us.

After having attained some kind of mastery over this technique of conducting yourself in the world of action, you may take to concentration, which is called upasana. You cannot take to meditation, worship - upasana or devotion, as it is called - directly, when your mind is distracted or agitated. Agitations are caused by disharmony with nature, disharmony with human society, disharmony with one's own psycho-physical individuality. You can bring to your memory what I told you yesterday. Alignment of the psycho-physical individuality within, harmony with society and a kind of concordance with nature as a whole is expected. Until this is achieved, direct meditational work may not be of much success. There are varieties of prejudices in the minds of people; everybody has a prejudice. You prejudge things from your own point of view and foist your ideas upon things outside. This is the dirt that is in the mind; it is called mala.

It is believed that the mind has three defects, known in Sanskrit as mala, vikshepa and avarana. Mala is the dirt which covers the mind - like dust covering a clean mirror; thereby, the mirror cannot reflect light. And even if the dust is removed, the glass may be broken and it may not give you a wholesome reflection. The craving for things, the impulses of like and dislike, love and hatred, create impressions in the mind every day. They are piled up, one over the other, like thick clouds - which is what is meant by the dirt of the mind - and these impressions cannot be removed except by hard work. Why should you work? Why should you not keep quiet? Because it is not possible for you to keep quiet. Prakriti, nature, will not permit you to keep quiet; you have to do something. If you don't do a right thing, you do a wrong thing. Instead of doing something wrong, why not do something right, when it is found that doing something is unavoidable? The scriptures give a long list of the nature of this dirt that is covering the mind: raga, dvesha, kama, krodha, lobha, moha, mada, matsarya, irsya, asuya, dambha, darpa, ahamkara. There are thirteen types of dirt. I am not going into the details of all these things. It is not necessary for you to know all the details; it is enough to understand the meaning of it.

There is a kind of cloud hovering around our consciousness which is our heritage from various births that we have passed through earlier. It has to be scrubbed by karma yoga, which includes not merely the highly elevated cosmic work of the Bhagavadgita type - which, of course, is the highest thing that we have to aspire for. But karma yoga also implies and includes holy worship - rituals that you perform in altars, in temples, in places of pilgrimage, on special occasions, etc. They are also part of karma yoga. Anything that you do is a kind of work. All performance of every kind is a kind of doing. This doing of yours, which is the work, has to be an emanation of your being and it should not be an extraneous foisting of yours. If the doing is totally unconnected with your being, it ceases to produce any result which is worthwhile. What you are doing is nothing but the projection of what you are; then it is that your work will have a productive effect. If you speak and think what you are really inside, it will have a tremendous force; it will have a power of conviction. But if you think and speak what is not what you are, then it will be like an empty gale that is blowing for nobody's good. So the first step in yoga, in the art of spiritual living, is karma yoga, an outline of which I have mentioned just now. Only when you have attained palpable, tangible success in the control of your mind, bringing about a cessation of its extreme agitation caused by unnecessary likes and dislikes, will you be able to sit quiet and concentrate your mind. This is upasana, the next stage.

Karma scrubs the dirt of the mind, which is mala; upasana subdues the distractions of the mind, which is vikshepa. Even if you are a good person, unselfish in your behaviour, and for all practical purposes you are a well-behaved individual, the mind may not be under control. It will have its own distractions of a different nature. The agitations are not merely in the physical body; they are also in the mind. The mind is also constituted of the three gunas, which are sattva, rajas and tamas. The distractions of the mind can be subdued by upasanas - attempted concentration. What kind of concentration? On what are you going to concentrate? Doubts of this kind also may arise in the mind. For all practical purposes we may say the concentration is to be directed only on that which is your aim. An aimless life is no life. Many people live a desultory life, doing everything in a perfunctory manner, with nothing positive in their approach. Life is short. We cannot go on wasting our time in experimenting with things and achieving nothing, finally. Even a little good that we do, in the smallest measure, is a great achievement. Nehabhikrama-naso'sti (Gita 2.40): "Good deeds cannot perish; they will produce good results, always."

Do not try to do too many things in a day. Do small things. These small things will become big later on. The seed will become a large banyan tree later. The concentration has to be directed on what you consider as your great aim. The aim is also of a gradational character, and you cannot immediately pitch upon what kind of aim it is on which you have to concentrate. That which is immediately above your present condition may look like an aim for the present purpose. There is something just above you, and that is your aim at the present moment. If you are sick, the gaining of health is your aim; there is no use of thinking of anything else at that time. If the body is ill, what is the thing that you do at that time? Do everything; move earth and heaven to see that health is restored and you are robust in your personality. If you are hungry, or you have starved for days together, or you have not slept for days together for some reason or the other, what do you do at that time? You take rest and do whatever is necessary to appease your hunger and thirst. These are the little things of life, but they are not in any way unimportant things. A little toothache can kill you, and you know how painful an earache is. These are not unimportant things.