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Lesson V: Karma Yoga.329
“Seek not the end of love in this act or in that act—lest indeed it become the end;
“But seek this act and that act and thousands of acts whose end is love—
“So shalt thou at last create that which thou now desirest;
“And when these are all past and gone there shall remain to thee a great and
immortal possession, which no man can take away.”
In Lesson i of this course we refer to the first precept of the first part
of the manual: “Kill out ambition.” And to the fourth precept of the same
part: “Work as those work who are ambitious.”’ This apparently paradoxical
statement of truth, gives the keynote of work without attachment. In the
lesson named we have endeavored to give the student a view of the two
sides of the shield, and to show him how one may kill out ambition and yet
work as those work who are ambitious. We advise the student to re-read
that part of the lesson, when he finishes the present one.
The fundamental idea of non-attachment—the secret of work—is to
avoid becoming entangled in the unreal things of life—the delusions which
fool so many people. Men are so apt to tie themselves to the things they
create, or to the things for which they are working. They make themselves
slaves instead of masters. They attach themselves to certain desires, and the
desires lead them this way and that way, through swamp and over rocky
roads, only to leave them worn and weary at the end. These desires come
from the undeveloped part of the mind, and while they are perfectly right
in their place, they belong to the past of the developed man who has
outlived them. He does not fear them, for he sees them as part of himself—
he knows their origin and history and recognizes the part they have played
in his development, and the development of the race, but he has outgrown
them, and allows them to bind him no longer. He refuses to be entangled
with them. As Carpenter says:
“Slowly and resolutely—as a fly cleans its legs of the honey in which it has been
caught—