I didn’t post yesterday, and I was feeling really horrible about it, like I was letting people down. Even when I’m a Hindu, I can’t seem to keep that old Catholic guilt from sneaking up and biting me in the ass.
The reason I didn’t post was because I was swamped with work—actual editing projects and some housework I needed to catch up on after being at a writers’ conference over the weekend. As I was beating myself up for missing a day posting, I realized that my reason for not posting—work—tied in nicely with what I wanted to write about next: the different paths that Hindus can follow to try to reach enlightenment.
Hinduism says there are four ways to find God. Each is referred to as a yoga, which actually just means a method of training (it’s not necessarily the kind of yoga most of us think about—that is, classes full of women in skimpy outfits stretching on mats and gossiping—although we will be talking about that kind of yoga down the line). The four paths are:
- Jnana yoga, the path to God through knowledge
- Bhakti yoga, the path to God through love
- Raja yoga, the path to God through psychophysical exercise
- Karma yoga, the path to God through work.
Today, because work has been consuming so much of my time over the last few days, I want to talk about karma yoga, the way to enlightenment through work.
Except for those lucky few people who inherit lots of money and get to spend their whole lives goofing off, all of us—in every society—have to work. And as much as we complain about it, we work for reasons besides just making money.
We work to give our lives structure and to keep ourselves busy. Without work, we’d probably get pissed off all the time and eventually go crazy (so think about that the next time the alarm clock goes off early on a Monday morning—work is actually keeping you sane).
Work is more than something we have to do to survive. According to Hinduism, it can provide us with a way to connect more closely with God. As religious scholar Huston Smith put it, “You don’t have to retire to a cloister to realize God. . . . Throw yourself into your work with everything you have; only do it wisely, in a way that will bring the highest rewards. . . .”
Hindus who follow the path of karma yoga perform their daily work not in the hope of any personal reward, but as a service to God. Doing all your work in dedication to God gets rid of the tendency to use your professional achievements to swell your ego—or, by contrast, to feel unfulfilled in life because you aren’t happy with your job.
I like that idea, especially since I’ve been pretty burned out by my work over the last couple of years. Most of my job entails editing dozens of boring manuscripts, most of them on the same handful of topics that repeat over and over (I mean, seriously, how many young adult biographies of George Washington does the world really need?).
But if I can look at what I do as a service to God rather than something to make me feel better about myself, then maybe I can hate my job a little less. It’s kind of liberating. Maybe it’s the kind of attitude we all need.
Now, I've got to get back to work.
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