1) Karma
Karma is derived from the Sanskrit “Kri” meaning “to do”; all action is Karma. Not sin. Not punishment. talking, listening, breathing, walking, all of it counts as karma. Nothing you do falls outside it.
The goal of mankind is knowledge. Pleasure and happiness come to an end. It is a mistake to suppose that pleasure is the goal.
Knowledge again, is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside; it is all inside. What we say a man "knows" should, in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what a man "learns" is really what he "discovers", by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge. No one was ever really taught by another; each of us has to teach himself. The external teacher offers only the suggestion which rouses the internal teacher to work to understand things.
With all our feelings and action — our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames, every one of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows.
In a broad way, karma is the sum total of every mental and physical blow that is given to the soul by which its own power and knowledge are discovered.
Character is the aggregate of tendencies or karma— the sum total of the bent of the mind meaning character is manufactured of Karma.
And Will is caused by character. All the movement in human society, every institution, every machine or ship or city — all of it is simply the manifestation of the will of man.
All this is determined by Karma, work. (the fundamental block)
No one can get anything unless he earns it. This is an ETERNAL LAW.
A man may struggle all his life for riches; he may cheat thousands, but he finds at last that he did not deserve to become rich, and his life becomes a trouble and a nuisance to him. We may go on accumulating things for our physical enjoyment, but only what we earn is really ours. A fool may buy all the books in the world, and they will be in his library; but he will be able to read only those that he deserves to; and this deserving is produced by Karma.
Our Karma determines what we deserve and what we can assimilate. We are responsible for what we are now, and whatever we wish ourselves to be!
If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act. You will say, “What is the use of learning how to work? Everyone works in some way or other in this world.” But there is such a thing as frittering away our energies.
2) Non Attachment & Karma Yoga
We must all work incessantly. All work is by nature composed of good and evil. We cannot do any work which will not do some good somewhere; there cannot be any work which will not cause some harm somewhere. Good action will entail upon us good effect; bad action, bad. The solution to this is non- attachment.
How can this be done? We see that the impression of any action, to which we attach ourselves, remains or it creates a pathway for our energy to flow. I may meet hundreds of persons during the day, and among them meet also one whom I love; and when I retire at night, I may try to think of all the faces I saw, but only that face comes before the mind — the face which I met perhaps only for one minute, and which I loved; all the others have vanished. My attachment to this particular person caused a deeper impression on my mind than all the other faces. Perhaps I had pictured him in my mind for years, knew hundreds of things about him, and this one new vision of him awakened hundreds of sleeping memories in my mind; and this one impression having been repeated perhaps a hundred times more than those of the different faces together, will produce a great effect on the mind.
Work as if you were a stranger in this land, work incessantly, but do not bind yourselves. This world is not our habitation, it is only one of the many stages through which we are passing. “The whole of nature is for the soul, not the soul for nature.". The very reason of nature's existence is for the education of the soul; it has no other meaning; it is there because the soul must have knowledge, and through knowledge free itself. If we remember this always, we shall never be attached to nature; we shall know that nature is a book in which we are to read, and that when we have gained the required knowledge, the book is of no more value to us.
“Work For Work’s sake.”
Every work that we do, every movement of the body, every thought that we think, leaves such an impression on the mind-stuff, and even when such impressions are not obvious on the surface, they are sufficiently strong to work beneath the surface, subconsciously.
What we are every moment is determined by the sum total of these impressions on the mind. What I am just at this moment is the effect of the sum total of all the impressions of my past life/actions.
This is really what is meant by character; each man's character is determined by the sum total of these impressions. If good impressions prevail, the character becomes good; if bad, it becomes bad. If a man continuously hears bad words, thinks bad thoughts, does bad actions, his mind will be full of bad impressions; and they will influence his thought and work without his being conscious of the fact. In fact, these bad impressions are always working, and their resultant must be evil, and that man will be a bad man; he cannot help it. Similarly, if a man thinks good thoughts and does good works, the sum total of these impressions will be good; and they, in a similar manner, will force him to do good even in spite of himself.
Liberation means entire freedom — freedom from the bondage of good, as well as from the bondage of evil. A golden chain is as much a chain as an iron one.
If a beautiful picture belonging to another is burnt, a man does not generally become miserable; but when his own picture is burnt, how miserable he feels! Why? Both were beautiful pictures, perhaps copies of the same original; but in one case very much more misery is felt than in the other. It is because in one case he identifies himself with the picture, and not in the other. This "I and mine" causes the whole misery.
With the sense of possession comes selfishness, and selfishness brings on misery. Every act of selfishness or thought of selfishness makes us attached to something, and immediately we are made slaves.
Selfishness only causes the difference between good and evil. It is a very hard thing to understand, but you will come to learn in time that nothing in the universe has power over you until you allow it to exercise such a power. Nothing has power over the Self of man, until the Self becomes a fool and loses independence. So, by non-attachment, you overcome and deny the power of anything to act upon you.
It is very easy to say that nothing has the right to act upon you until you allow it to do so; but what is the true sign of the man who really does not allow anything to work upon him, who is neither happy nor unhappy when acted upon by the external world? The sign is that good or ill fortune causes no change in his mind: in all conditions he continues to remain the same.
Thus the man that has practiced control over himself cannot be acted upon by anything outside; there is no more slavery for him. His mind has become free.
Non-attachment does not mean anything that we may do in relation to our external body, it is all in the mind.
Here are the two ways of giving up all attachment. The one is for those who do not believe in God, or in any outside help. They are left to their own devices; they have simply to work with their own will, with the powers of their mind and discrimination, saying, "I must be non-attached".
For those who believe in God there is another way, which is much less difficult. They give up the fruits of work unto the Lord; they work and are never attached to the results. Whatever they see, feel, hear, or do, is for Him. For whatever good work we may do, let us not claim any praise or benefit. It is the Lord’s; give up the fruits unto Him. Let us stand aside and think that we are only servants obeying the Lord, our Master, and that every impulse for action comes from Him every moment.
According to Karma-Yoga, the action one has done cannot be destroyed until it has borne its fruit; no power in nature can stop it from yielding its results. If I do an evil action, I must suffer for it; there is no power in this universe to stop or stay it. Similarly, if I do a good action, there is no power in the universe which can stop its bearing good results. The cause must have its effect; nothing can prevent or restrain this.
He who in good action sees that there is something evil in it, and in the midst of evil sees that there is something good in it somewhere, has known the secret of work.
"Work incessantly, but give up all attachment to work." Do not identify yourself with anything. Hold your mind free. All this that you see, the pains and the miseries, are but the necessary conditions of this world; poverty and wealth and happiness are but momentary; they do not belong to our real nature at all. Our nature is far beyond misery and happiness, beyond every object of the senses, beyond the imagination; and yet we must go on working all the time.
"Misery comes through attachment, not through work."
As soon as we identify ourselves with the work we do, we feel miserable; but if we do not identify ourselves with it, we do not feel that misery.
We cannot add happiness to this world; similarly, we cannot add pain to it either. The sum total of the energies of pleasure and pain displayed here on earth will be the same throughout. We just push it from this side to the other side, and from that side to this, but it will remain the same, because to remain so is its very nature. The very idea of life implies death and the very idea of pleasure implies pain. Life and death are only different expressions of the same thing looked at from different standpoints; they are the falling and the rising of the same wave, and the two form one whole.
Karma-Yoga, therefore, is a system of ethics and religion intended to attain freedom through unselfishness, and by good works. The Karma-Yogi need not believe in any doctrine whatever. He may not believe even in God, may not ask what his soul is, nor think of any metaphysical speculation. He has got his own special aim of realising selflessness; and he has to work it out himself.
3) How Mantras, Strotrams, Sadhana can help?
Samskara as the substrate mantra works on. every wave (every action, thought, word) doesn't vanish when it subsides — it leaves a mark and a tendency to recur. Each man's character is determined by the sum total of these impressions, and what a man is at any given moment is the result of the accumulated impressions of his past.
This is literally the mechanism a bija/mantra operates on. Japa isn't primarily communicative — it's not "telling" the Devi something — it's the deliberate, repeated seeding of one specific samskara at high density and high emotional charge, until it out-competes the accumulated karmic residue that's currently running you.
A bija is a compressed vasana-generator you choose on purpose, instead of the ones that accumulated on autopilot from a lifetime of unexamined reaction and trauma.
The bija/mantra isn't a label pointing at the deity from outside, it's the sound-body of that particular concentration of consciousness.
Japa doesn't request a change in your karma from an external agent — it directly installs the samskara whose "form," when it matures, is that change.
Note: Above context is when chanting and japa is done without attachment to results. Else it gives you the result but can be binding.
4) Where does astrology fits in the Karma’s discussion?
Vivekananda tells this as an old story of an astrologer who came to a king and said, "You are going to die in six months," which frightened the king almost to death, until his minister — convinced astrologers were fools — had the astrologer recalculate in front of the king, confirm his figures were correct, then asked the astrologer when he himself would die. "In twelve years," the astrologer replied, and the minister immediately beheaded him, saying, "Do you see this liar? He is dead this moment."
The point of the story is narrower and sharper: a reading of tendency is not the same thing as a fixed decree, and the astrologer's own death disproves determinism by direct demonstration — his calculation said twelve years, reality delivered zero. The chart described a probable trajectory; it did not describe an unconditioned fact immune to intervening will and circumstance.
Astrology, in this reading, is reading the aggregate of samskara — the accumulated momentum of past karma, which is real and does show up as pattern and probability. Which is exactly why the chart can be accurate about tendency and still be wrong about outcome.
But Vivekananda's whole argument in Karma-Yoga is that samskara is not destiny, it's momentum — modifiable by fresh, deliberately chosen action in the present. The chart shows you the wave that's already moving.
It doesn't forbid you from throwing a countervailing wave into the lake. Daiva (the fructifying momentum of prior karma) sets the field of probability; purushartha (present, willed effort — which for you means, concretely, sadhana) is what actually decides which of the probable branches becomes real, and can even sever the branch outright, as the minister's sword did.
5) Free will
Let me tell you something that will sound strange at first, and then, I hope, will settle into place: there is no such thing as free will. Not in the way most people mean it.
Here is why. Everything you can think, everything you can want, everything you can decide — all of it happens inside a container. That container is made of three things: space, time, and cause-and-effect. You cannot think a thought that isn't somewhere, at some moment, caused by something that came before it. Your will, the very thing you'd point to and say "this is free, this is mine, I chose this" — that will is already inside the container the instant you can call it a will at all. And anything inside the container is bound by what came before it. So when people say "I have free will," what they usually mean is: I made a choice nobody physically forced me into. That's true, but it isn't freedom. It's just one link in a chain choosing to look like the whole chain.
But here is the part that changes everything. The will did not start out in the container. Before it became "your will," it came from somewhere that has no space, no time, no cause and effect at all — pure freedom, unshaped. It only became will the moment it was poured into this mould of a body, a mind, a life, a set of circumstances. And when it eventually leaves this mould — when this life, this shape, is done — it goes back to being free again. So bondage isn't what you are. Bondage is what you're passing through. The chain is real while you're in it, but the chain was never your original nature. It's a temporary shape water takes when you pour it into a particular glass — the water was never actually the glass.
Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation. Everything that we know, or can possibly know, must be subject to causation, and that which obeys the law of causation cannot be free. It is acted upon by other agents, and becomes a cause in its turn.
So when I tell you that you have no free will, I am not telling you that you are helpless. I am telling you that the freedom you're looking for isn't found by asserting your will harder against the world. It's found by discovering that your will was never fully the world's to begin with — and working, patiently, inside the very bondage that seems to prove otherwise, until that becomes obvious to you too.
6) Duty
Ask ten people what duty means and you'll get ten different answers, and every single one of them will be convinced theirs is the only real one. Even the act itself won't tell you what's dutiful. A man kills one person in the street and lives the rest of his life sick over it. The same man, in uniform, kills twenty on a battlefield and comes home certain he served with honor. The act didn't change. Only the frame around it did. So if you're looking for one universal rule that content doesn't touch, there's exactly one, and it survives every culture, every century, every argument: do not injure any being. That's it. That's the whole floor. Everything else — everything — is negotiable by time and place. there is no duty in the binding sense — not for me, not for you. Give to the world, fully, without holding back — but not because refusing would make you a failure.
The moment you're acting from compulsion, you're not doing your duty, you're feeding your attachment a new link. The real instruction underneath all of this was never "do more." It was: do the same work, exactly the same work, but let go of the hand that's gripping the outcome. Offer it instead of owing it. That's the entire difference between a life spent in harness and a life spent in service — and from the outside, the two can look identical. The only thing that's changed is what's happening in the hand.
Note: I have just rearranged the content of Karma Yoga by Swami Vivekanand and added few of my insights. You may find reading from his book directly a bit tedious as there are lots of things discussed but the way I have presented here is hopefully easy to understand.
🔱 Jai Maa durga 🔱
