The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

272 The Yoga of Divine Works
desire or aim, but will be a part of a conscious and eventually a
well-ordered because self-ordered divine working in the world.
The Gita declares that the action of the liberated man must be
directed not by desire, but towards the keeping together of the
world, its government, guidance, impulsion, maintenance in the
path appointed to it. This injunction has been interpreted in the
sense that the world being an illusion in which most men must be
kept, since they are unfit for liberation, he must so act outwardly
as to cherish in them an attachment to their customary works
laid down for them by the social law. If so, it would be a poor
and petty rule and every noble heart would reject it to follow
rather the divine vow of Amitabha Buddha, the sublime prayer
of the Bhagavata, the passionate aspiration of Vivekananda. But
if we accept rather the view that the world is a divinely guided
movement of Nature emerging in man towards God and that this
is the work in which the Lord of the Gita declares that he is ever
occupied although he himself has nothing ungained that he has
yet to win, then a deep and true sense will appear for this great injunction.
To participate in that divine work, to live for God in the
world will be the rule of the Karmayogin; to live for God in the
world and therefore so to act that the Divine may more and more
manifest himself and the world go forward by whatever way of
its obscure pilgrimage and move nearer to the divine ideal.
How he shall do this, in what particular way, can be decided
by no general rule. It must develop or define itself from within;
the decision lies between God and our self, the Supreme Self
and the individual self that is the instrument of the work; even
before liberation, it is from the inner self, as soon as we become
conscious of it, that there rises the sanction, the spiritually determined
choice. It is altogether from within that must come the
knowledge of the work that has to be done. There is no particular
work, no law or form or outwardly fixed or invariable way of
works which can be said to be that of the liberated being. The
phrase used in the Gita to express this work that has to be done
has indeed been interpreted in the sense that we must do our
duty without regard to the fruit. But this is a conception born
of European culture which is ethical rather than spiritual and