Karmayoga: the Yoga of Spiritual Work

There are several discernible threads in current thinking about spirituality in mainstream Western culture. The most prominent views spirituality as a set of tools to provide peace, healing, and relief in a stressful world. This line of thinking is able to bridge the sacred and the secular by allowing individuals to participate in a variety of practices to access their beneficial effects without necessarily needing to affirm (or deny) any particular contentious metaphysical or religious doctrine. Another trend that is more submerged, though correspondingly more passionate, views spirituality as a gateway to beautiful and ecstatic possibilities, whether situated in a transformed utopian future or in an occult inner world. In addition to these two currents, the idea of devotion still persists, though it is viewed with skepticism by a scientific and secular mainstream culture for its associations with fanaticism and irrationality. Love is, of course, regarded as the noblest motive in human life, but only as long as it refers to the love of man for his fellow man in the institutions of the family, community, and society; the love for God seems less reasonable, though still persists in private, if nowhere else.

But somehow, despite the large swath of human possibilities these approaches cover, none of them truly seem able to deal with life. And since spirituality must deal with life if we are to take it seriously in our practical civilization, we half suspect that spirituality is not really meant to deal with life, and is restricted to the realm of the ideal along with art and philosophy: something that is fit for idealists and dreamers, but is not really suited for those who are serious, rational, and pragmatic. Inner peace is perhaps an appealing dream, but how many of us are really able to feel it in the midst of the stresses of our lives? “Healing” may be necessary as well, but it does not provide a guide to constructing life. Ecstatic visions may enthrall, but so far they seem to have had no substantial effect on the outside world. And love for God, too, might be felt in the privacy of one’s room, but is it really reconcilable with the skyscraper, the long commute, and the subway?

For most of us, the bulk of experience of life remains impermeable to the spiritual touch. And, perhaps not coincidentally, that substantial portion of experience consists largely of work. The ideas of peace, vision, and love have very little to say about this part of our lives, except gesturing vaguely at the fact that they need to be brought to the bustle of the work world somehow. Still, even that much is an admission that the principles themselves are not the *essence* of work, but foreign principles that somehow need to be added to the realm of work. In other words, if the main principles of spirituality are limited to peace, vision, and love, then there is nothing spiritual about the sales receipt, the shovel, or the medivac helicopter staffed by EMTs. But these things comprise the majority of our familiar world.

In the world of business, political affairs, labor, medicine, there there’s no peace, there is no love, there is no ecstasy—so there is no spirit. But if we believe this then we have already ceded the world away to the mundane, and so spirituality really must be incompatible with the totality of life. To those of us who believe in a world-affirming spirituality, this can only mean that there must be an error somewhere in our views. In fact, there is another venerable spiritual practice known as karmayoga that can easily incorporate all the activities listed above, and many more—all of the activities of the world—in a practice that affirms and redeems the seemingly mundane realm that we spend so much time in.

What is Karmayoga?

Stated simply, karmayoga is the practice of offering one’s work to the Divine, with no demand, desire, or claim of the ego. Karmayoga can consist of the offering of any work at all, whether streetsweeping, giving metaphysical discourses, exploring the nature of the stars, or teaching school; the only requirement is that the work done should correspond to one’s individual nature, with no type of work or psychological nature being regarded as greater or less than another. The work done for karmayoga may even be work that is not remunerative because of the current standards and practices of society, such as parenting, art, or volunteer work. Through the practice of karmayoga, our personality (or “outer nature”) becomes purified of egoic blocks, or samskaras, that prevent the union of the soul with the Divine. The outer nature also becomes able to express more intense and more refined energies of the Divine. In short, one increasingly becomes an instrument of God.

To those with the right opening or receptivity—perhaps because they grew up with cultural influence like the Bhagavad Gita’s gospel of karmayoga or the Western Protestant work-ethic, or simply because they have an intuitive understanding of the workings of the Divine—this suggestion alone is able to open the gates to a lifetime of practice. Those individuals will be able to take this simple, straightforward advice and use it to take their daily work and consecrate it to God based on this simple formulation, and have no need of further explanation.

On the other hand, the description above may not seem so straightforward to others. To some, it may appear that the description makes sense as a theory, but not as a concrete path of spiritual practice. To others, the description of karmayoga may seem pointless and unappealing. Then there are those with a tendency towards philosophy or metaphysics to whom the process described above will perhaps not seem straightforward at all, leaving open many questions and the possibility of subtleties and complications. This article is aimed at any of these groups of people, and more generally at anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of karmayoga. We will ask a set of practical questions: how does one do karmayoga? And why should it be chosen over the other practices of peace and prayer that are more familiar as routes to God? We will also ask deeper questions that will require a dive into the metaphysics and psychology of yoga: what exactly is work, and why would God care if I do it? And what exactly is the mechanism of karmayoga? But before going into the main discussion, I will briefly explain where these ideas come from.

A Note About Intellectual Lineage

Karmayoga is a spiritual practice originating in the Indian subcontinent. In India, practices which aim at the union of the soul with the divine are known as yogas, and karmayoga is the branch of yoga that deals with karma, the concept of action and consequence. While similar spiritual, religious, and philosophical doctrines pertaining to work and action may have arisen in other traditions, I will be discussing this one that I am familiar with, without discounting the possibility of truth or value in any other philosophies of work and action. I am most influenced by the presentation of karmayoga in the work of Anglo-Indian philosopher and yogi Sri Aurobindo. He was influenced in turn by the great Indian scripture which many regard as the chief gospel of karmayoga, the Bhagavad Gita. However, Sri Aurobindo’s ideas are not the same as the Gita’s, not least because, as he notes in his treatise Essays on the Gita, there is no way for anyone to know if their interpretation agrees with the “truth” of a text that is many centuries old.

Following the same principle, my own interpretation of karmayoga is influenced by my own personal experiences and eclectic intellectual background. In particular, this work is not meant to be an interpretation or exegesis of either the Gita or of Sri Aurobindo; there is every reason to consult these great authorities firsthand, and I would even defer to their understanding and presentation over my own in the case of any discrepancy. I will use general terms from the Indian philosophical tradition and define them as I go. However, throughout the long history of the Indian philosophical tradition, these terms have been used with varying degrees of consistency, and the reader may find varying degrees of consistency between my use and that of others.

I have tried to explain the theory of karmayoga in a way that may be compatible with spiritual systems beyond the one that I myself practice, the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Indeed, karmayoga has been practiced in India for millennia, long before the work of Sri Aurobindo, and it doesn’t require his specific spiritual system to explain it. Still, it is difficult to make statements that apply to all possible metaphysical systems that the reader may hold without actually doing metaphysical inquiry, and this is not primarily a work of metaphysics. If this exposition conflicts with the reader’s metaphysics in a way that renders the article unusable, then I would encourage him or her to seek other sources or other practices. Still, I hope there may be something here that is useful. I add all this to acknowledge my debts and to make my perspective clear.

Karmayoga as a Path for Modern Life

Earlier in this article, I introduced karmayoga as an approach to spirituality that can deal with more parts of life than other currently prominent paths and practices. What is it, specifically about the structure and values of contemporary life that make karmayoga especially well suited to them? First, let’s consider a traditional view on selecting a spiritual path. Aspirants to yoga, or spiritual practice, are encouraged to find a yogic practice that corresponds to their fundamental nature. Just as life works best when we choose our friends, occupation, living situation, and forms of entertainment like music so that they correspond to our inmost preferences and tendencies, so it is with spiritual practice: spiritual practice proceeds best when people choose practices that comport well with their own nature rather than causing deep-seated conflicts. Three major paths of yoga presented in the spiritual synthesis of the Bhagavad Gita are karmayoga, the yoga of work, bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, and jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge. An approximate personality typology could be used to divide people into three general types: those with an active, willful nature, such as businessmen, athletes, and artisans; those with great emotional sensitivity, such as artists, teachers who work with young children, and therapists; and those with a sagely, serene nature as found in seekers of philosophical wisdom. This very approximate personality typology applied in a naive way might advise the active-natured people to undertake karmayoga, the emotional people to undertake bhaktiyoga, and the sagely ones to undertake jnanayoga.

But there is another factor that is neglected in this traditional analysis: the overall aim of the spiritual path. The word yoga applies to all practices which aim towards union with the Divine. But there is a further distinction to make between yogic paths: some yogic paths are world-affirming while others are ascetic, or world-denying. By “world-affirming yoga”, I refer to spiritual paths which affirm a divine purpose in human life and aim towards harmonizing spiritual realization with continued life in the world. Ascetic paths, on the other hand, seek release from worldly life in some principle such as pure Divine realization, an otherworldly plane of heaven, or negation of Nirvana. This description of ascetic paths may seem pejorative given the strongly world-affirming character of Western civilization, but suffice it to say that there are compelling philosophical and spiritual justifications for the ascetic path. That said, the practice of the author and thus the perspective of this article are world-affirming.

The practice of karmayoga is valuable in both world-affirming and ascetic paths. However, there is another layer of justification for karmayoga in the world-affirming path, which is relevant because it is likely that most readers will have a world-affirming attitude. Karmayoga is still a valid spiritual practice in the context of an ascetic spiritual path because it can assist the practitioner in reaching the goal of union with God. For the ascetic, after achieving this union, for the duration of the life of the body, the individual may retire from action, and there is no further need or justification for karmayoga or any action whatsoever. The role of karmayoga in this system is simply as a method for achieving that liberation, and has no further or greater purpose. In other words, the reason to pursue the karmayoga on an ascetic path is mainly if it is the trend of your nature; and for those who are on the ascetic path, it is also perfectly fine NOT to practice karmayoga if you do not have an active nature.

But karmayoga becomes almost necessary in an world-affirming path because here the ultimate aim is to perfect the outer side of life in line with the Divine Will and not just to secure release of the inner spirit. A world-affirming spirituality holds that outward human life—which consists of actions taken within the world—has a purpose and meaning of its own. This means that firstly, in the world-affirming path one will still act in the world both before and after any given spiritual realization. Further, the actions taken in the world-affirming spiritual path would ideally be actions that reflect God, or the Divine spirit, and not actions that reflect only the desires of the lower ego. But the state of acting from a perfect spiritual basis is, in fact, the end state of the practice of karmayoga: the practitioner of karmayoga eventually reaches a perfection where the force of the divine moves through the purified being which is not obstructed by egoic samskaras. In other words, karmayoga is the exactly the spiritual path that aims at increasing the ability of the individual to take actions that reflect the divine spirit and not the desires of the ego. So karmayoga is, in a sense, essential to the world-affirming spiritual path, in contrast to the ascetic spiritual path, where karmayoga is just one optional means to an end.

A question arises: would it not be possible to secure an inner spiritual liberation and perfection, perhaps through devotion or meditation, before taking up karmayoga in the outer being? For perhaps even in the world-affirming path it would be better to concentrate one’s full energy on achieving inner spiritual perfection first, given the difficulty of even securing this level of realization, without throwing too much energy out in worldly activity in a stumbling attempt towards karmayoga; perhaps one could learn to take divinely inspired actions after first achieving an inward spiritual perfection. The issue with this approach is that the inner spiritual realizations themselves do not confer any special ability for karmayoga on the outer nature. The outer nature has many difficulties of its own which inwardly directed spiritual practices do not affect, such as the difficulties inherent in building skill in any particular craft or discipline, the ability to continue acting in stressful situations, the ability to deal with other people in work, and so on—in short, the entire dynamic nature of outer human life. If one plans to have a world-affirming spiritual practice at all, the difficulties of karmayoga will need to be faced anyway as the outer being needs to be prepared to act in ways that reflect the Divine. Further, it may be difficult to return to action or outer development after a period of total or relative cessation of activity. Therefore it’s best to pursue a parallel approach, keeping a balance between the inner and outer development, though admitting the possibility of the need for periods of exclusive spiritual absorption and attempting to create a life that is flexible in response to the needs of the spirit.

The practicalities of modern life present another consideration. In today’s world, it is generally necessity to do some form of work to survive in society. The debate over the value of ascetic withdrawal from the world still poses a crucial philosophical question, but it had a special salience when actual complete withdrawal was more possible. In ancient India, there was a tradition of sanyassi, or renunciation, in which an individual could abandon all responsibilities to family and society and wander the land, satisfying basic needs by begging, thus creating a life that expressed the philosophical principle of ascetic withdrawal. This is significantly more difficult, if not actually impossible, in the current more regulated state of the modern world. At that earlier societal stage, the tradition of sanyassi found a basis of support in the cultural tradition of donating to the sanyassi, whereas today begging as a means of subsistence is restricted to a homeless underclass with an extremely dangerous dangerous life. As a society, we should of course figure out the political accommodations needed to address the unnecessary human suffering due to homelessness. But the point with regard to the possibility of spiritual seeking is that there is simply no “reasonable” mechanism for withdrawing from the world as there used to be. So for most people, work of some kind is needed to persist in society, and debates about withdrawal from the world have mostly theoretical significance. The need for work to survive means that there are many hours every week which cannot be used for solitary meditation or contemplation. The practice of karmayoga then becomes a way to take the substantial amount of energy devoted to the maintenance of life in modern society and transmute it so that it may support, rather than detract from, our spiritual progress.

We see that there is a strong case for karmayoga for contemporary spiritual practitioners because of its compatibility with world-affirming values, or at the very least because it makes the best spiritual use of the present conditions. But no matter how much work is done in the bustle of the post-industrial economy, the home, or the halls of power, it will not yield spiritual benefits if is done with merely conventional motives, no matter how much benefit it gives to the rest of the world. For a spiritual seeker to make the most of the energies they use in the world, therefore, it would be best for them to understand how to do karmayoga so that they can do their work in a spiritual way. But this spiritual conception of work that does not weigh its utilitarian value seems at odds with the conventional understanding of work where concrete benefits and results are the only thing that counts. Are we really talking about the same thing when we talk about “work” in the spiritual and conventional contexts? What exactly is “work” in this spiritual conception, and how does it square with the conventional idea of work?

What is Work?

To understand what work is in its deepest spiritual significance, we need to go back to our fundamental understanding of the world; we need to understand what the world is if we are to understand the function and nature of work in its proper context. One view of the universe that has long been present in Indian thought, and is echoed by contemporary spiritual thought, is the view of the created universe as made up of “energy”, which means that the world is not made up of a fundamentally inert and value-neutral substance, as in the scientific conception of matter, but rather is made of a flux and interchange of forces with various degrees of consciousness and quality. When we look at the physical world, we see a constant collision of physical energies—tides, volcanoes, gases, and the formation of stars. When we look at the living world, too, we see systems of energetic interchange. All forms of life require energy (again, in the physical, scientific sense) to survive and carry out their activities. Plants convert electromagnetic energy from the sun into storable chemical energy, then use that to grow their bodies and reproduce. Animals ingest energy from eating plant or other animal life and use the energy for locomotion, predation, self-defense, and reproduction. The science of ecology shows us a circle of life where the activities of each organism produce, in addition to securing the energy resources and nutrient needed for that organism, produce byproducts that are used as inputs for other organisms in the system.

In the language of Indian philosophy, we can say that each organism acts according to its svadharma, its own law of being, or way of acting according to its own nature. Because the actions of plants and animals are fixed within a delimited range, it’s apparent that each one has its own svadharma. We may not be able to predict its exact movements or destinations, we may not be able to fully understand the meanings or purposes of the actions, and there are countless organisms and ways of behaving that are still unknown to the human mind, but we have enough knowledge to know that the activities of, say, the chimpanzee generally consist of foraging for fruits and leaves, fighting other chimpanzees, and so on. It would not be within the svadharma of a chimpanzee to build an anthill, ride a motorcycle, or change colors like an octopus.

Notice that just because a plant or animal has a certain nature or way of being does not necessarily mean that it is effortless to carry out. While the nature of plant consciousness may be beyond the imagination of most humans, we can imagine some aspects of animal consciousness through analogy with our own experience. Though an act of imagination, we can see that the process of hunting for prey, evading predators, or foraging for fruit and leaves might be difficult for an animal, leading eventually to a feeling of fatigue. The animal’s activity can be seen as having a structure that resembles some aspects of the structure of human work: there is an expenditure of energy structured according to the animal’s own nature, or svadharma, directed towards the purpose of its continued existence. Though the animal of course does not have the conceptual structures in place to recognize it as “work”, an imaginative experiment could show similarities between the human and animal experience.

Humans are also part of this energetic universe—they, too, can be seen as structures that seek, consume, and transform energy. Like other animals, they ingest energy from eating plant or animal life, which is broken down and absorbed by the digestive system, then used for locomotion, predation, self-defense, and reproduction. However, human activity is much broader in scope than the activities of other animals. The characteristic difference between humans and animals is the ability to use rational intelligence to decide upon and execute its actions and activities. The Western philosophical tradition which descended from Aristotle identified man as the animal rationale, while the Indian philosophical tradition identified the buddhi, the principle of intelligent will, as an important faculty of mind that was not present in the animal nature.

The rational intelligence can be seen as the critical factor that differentiates the human from the animal nature. Beyond identifying that man *has* a rational intelligence, however, it is very difficult to identify a positive definition for the essential nature or svadharma of the human being. Inquiries into what is a “natural” way, a “right” way, or a “good” way—or even a *possible* way for a human to act have been conducted for millennia, and we are still disputing the answers. Is it good for a human to grow hair down to their waist? Is it natural for a human to consume food that was mass-produced in a factory rather than being prepared from farm-fresh ingredients? Is it possible for human society to subsist on Mars, or is it the essential nature man to dwell on his home planet, Earth?

Luckily, we don’t need to circumscribe the scope of human action at all, or prescribe any correct actions, for this inquiry into the discipline of spiritual work. It’s enough to simply look at the human condition, the range of activities that humans generally engage in, as the scope of human nature. Rather than focusing on exotic or perverse extremes of human nature, since our view is to understand the nature of work in general, it suffices to consider the main stream of human activity. Human activity includes, but is not limited to, scientific inquiry, development of various kinds of technology, from metallurgy to navigation to computer and information technology, creation of artworks in various media like painting, carving, and music, teaching, parenting, farming, architecting and constructing buildings, and so on.

Each of these tasks is performed with a particular goal in mind. The teacher teaches with the goal of instructing the students; the parent sets limits, instructs, and punishes when necessary with the goal of raising the child into a responsible and fulfilled adult; the information technology worker constructs an application to enable the government or corporation to access its records in an automated way. That is, the activities of a human are directed towards specific ends just as the activities of the animal are directed towards specific ends. One key difference between human and animal work, however, is that human work is more complex in the structure of its purpose: animal activity generally procures energy or self-defense directly, or at most through a small number of layers of social organization, while humans work is generally removed by several layers of social organization from the larger ends, and the larger ends may be goals that are morally higher than the simple furnishing and maintenance of bodily necessities. For example, a teacher teaching history to a class of students is not doing work that will directly procure food for himself or herself or for the students. It could be argued that learning history will lead to increased respect for the nation’s political system, bolstering the capacity for national defense, but, firstly, this is not a guaranteed consequence, and secondly, there would still be many intermediate consequential steps and several layers of complex organization separating the work of teaching from the actual act of national defense.

With these observations, we have in view a general conception of human work and its relation to the forces at work in the universe—or, for those who are more metaphysically skeptical, the above discussion hopefully at least provides a fruitful analogy. That said, it is still difficult to give a positive definition of human work that covers all cases. One general principle that we can give is that work is the application of psychological energy towards a task. If we consider the fact that there is no abstract or general work, but that work always occurs within a specific context or situation, we can clarify that general principle further to the idea that work is energy applied towards a task with a particular purpose, the nature of which is made clear from the context. Consider the concrete situation of a community grade school. In this school, the work of the teacher is to give the lectures and give feedback on the students’ work, the work of the janitor is to clean the buildings so that the building is sanitary and clean, and the work of the principal is to see to organizational matters in the school and to dialogue with the broader community. In the conventional definition of work, the list would end here with the remunerative jobs held by adults with formally defined adult responsibilities. However, in the broader definition of “work” that we have been developing, we see that there are further relevant contributions to the school considered as a system of energetic interchange from the children, who concentrate on their studies and do exercises in and out of the classroom to solidify their knowledge, and parents, who provide a safe environment for the children, assist them with their studies, and help them get to and from the school.

Another general characteristic of human work is that it causes some sort of constructive transformation in the world. The work of a person cleaning their room or house transforms a state of dirtiness and disorder into a state of cleanliness and order; the work of the scholar producing a research report transforms a state of human ignorance and disorganized data and source material to a state of knowledge in a form that can be communicated to the relevant audience. In the Indian conception of the universe, even destruction can serve a purpose in a larger construction—there are cases where the breakdown of an old societal order, or even war, may be necessary to bring about a new or more just state of order. This example is not given to glorify or advocate for war in general or any particular war, but simply to recognize that that certain forms of destruction are part of the cosmic process, and that the line between “construction” and “destruction” may not always be clear. By the guideline of “constructive transformation”, I mean to highlight that the transformations performed by work are not arbitrary, chaotic, or random, otherwise there would be no point in deliberately applying psychological energy to bring them about.

Spiritual Energy

We have developed a vision that sees all of the activities of the universe, including human activities, as transformations of energy brought about by other forms of energy. But we have not yet explain the connection between work and finding God. Indeed, the conception of the universe as a system of energetic transformations is completely compatible with modern science—and the depiction of the universe given above would not have been possible without the sensibility and specific findings of modern science. In particular, the description given above is consistent with the worldview of scientific materialism, which sees all phenomena in the universe as reducible to the workings of matter, with considerations of human value being subjective and relative—that is, having no essential significance, but rather things that we consider as matters of practical reality, or perhaps are compelled to consider due to the self-interested nature of our psychology, which is still conditioned by matter through the processes of biology.

Scientists view all types of energy as material energy, meaning the kind of energy that can move physical objects or heat water. And they view all other phenomena described with the word “energy” as things that can either be reduced to material energy or are otherwise illusory or unreal. For example, to the scientific materialist, the phenomenon of “psychological energy” discussed earlier would likely be seen as reducible to the physiological energy used by the body for perception, movement, and emotional experience; any further significance we attribute to the idea of consciousness that transcends physical reality would be seen as purely illusory. Spiritual seekers, however, generally recognize more forms of energy than the purely material, like life energy, psychological energy, mind energy, and the energies of personality, place, form, and spirit. The scientist would understand the power of the waterfall in terms of such factors as the velocity of the stream before the fall and the difference in potential energy before and after the fall. The spiritual seeker would in addition recognize an additional level of “vibrational” energy produced by the life-force of the waterfall. The use of the term “spiritual energy” is viewed as less than rigorous by the scientific materialist, but to the spiritual seeker, it is clear that the concept of spiritual energy is a real phenomenon that is not separate from the concept of material energy; material energy one subtype of spiritual energy, and there are more kinds of spiritual energy. In terms of the phrase used by transpersonal theorists such as Ken Wilber, we could say that the concept of spiritual energy “transcends and includes” the concept of material energy.

Let us consider how this applies to the human work involved in building a house. The scientific materialist might view the work of constructing a house as being made up of the energy of the human labor needed to gather the raw materials, the energy used to transport the materials to the job site, the energy expended by the workers laboring to build the house, plus whatever physiological energy was used by the architect, all measurable in units of physical energy. To the spiritual seeker, it is clear that the material layer of energy is real, but that there are additional significant energies involved, like the emotional energy used by the architect and builders, the mind energy used to organize the architecture and craftwork of each beam, door, and arch, the life energy of the land shaped by the previous geological and biological phenomena present at the site, and even the vibrational energy of the people who will eventually dwell in the house shaping and structuring the process as the Aristotelian “final cause”.

The question of how to reconcile the stupendous variety of expressions of energy, whether physical, material, or spiritual, with the nature of God has been a persistent question throughout the history of religion and philosophy. For one prominent idea of the highest nature of God is that God a being of perfect perfection, beauty, and love who would seem to have no need or use for such an imperfect created world as we see in front of us. Still, as spiritual seekers, we are confronted with both the reality of the imperfect world and the reality of God, and the need to make sense of them somehow. For the theist or spiritual seeker, this means seeing that these forms and energies we see in the universe are not separate from the spiritual nature of God, that there presence was brought about purposefully by God, or they exist harmoniously with God, or are at least not contradictory with the existence of God. There are different ways of explaining the details—the idea of “nonduality”, the idea of pantheism, the idea that God and the world are separate but that God still keeps a significant “record” of the activities and results of the world—but the specific metaphysical answer accepted by the reader does not actually affect the ability to do karmayoga; karmayoga can be practiced within a variety of metaphysical systems. The important idea that is needed for karmayoga is the idea that the energy that makes up the universe, which is the same energy expended in work, is somehow connected to God, whether that means it is separate from God but can be “given” to him, or that the energy somehow “is” God, or some other such compatible idea.

The Possibility of Spiritual Work

The essence of karmayoga, given at the beginning of the article, is offering one’s work to the Divine without ego or desire. In the past two sections, we have seen that there is a nontrivial amount of philosophical and metaphysical subtlety that can go into understanding what “work” really is from a spiritual perspective. But simply doing the work, acting according to one’s nature or svadharma, is still not karmayoga; a yoga is a spiritual discipline, and the act of going about one’s natural activities according to one’s nature with no modification is not yet yoga. The crux of the karmayoga is not just doing the work; for if we interpret the previous two sections in the most general way, we see that work is always happening—man is always expending energy according to his nature at some activity or another—for even idleness is part of man’s nature and consumes energy. The crux of karmayoga is rather in offering the work to God, and not simply the act of living and expending spiritual energy by itself. To understand how this works, we will need to understand more about spiritual psychology and the nature of spiritual work.

We come to spiritual psychology by posing a question that is still left over from the discussion of metaphysics: why would God need this energy to be “offered” to him at all? Does he not possess all the energy in the universe, and already have everything that he would need? We stipulated earlier that the energy in any metaphysical concept of karmayoga is related to God somehow—it is either God’s energy, or energy that God controls, or perhaps is God himself. Why would there be any need to offer it further to God?

To address this issue, we must go back to the entire purpose and aim of karmayoga. Karmayoga is a form of yoga—it is a spiritual discipline meant to lead to union with God. The discipline must be done because before doing the discipline, we are somehow not in union with God. That is, we are separated from God. Any theory of spiritual seeking must reconcile two contradictory facts: on the one hand, we have a loving relationship with God even without doing any sort of spiritual work; and yet on the other hand, we are still not ourselves in complete union with God. Rather than try to resolve this metaphysical puzzle, I will simply appeal to the empirical reality that in our normal human state we are not in God-consciousness, we are not completely filled with his knowledge and love and in union with him. A spiritual seeker is someone who realizes this fact and understands that some sort of action, practice, or discipline is needed to address it. (I would recommend that readers who wish to resolve metaphysical paradox seek out a work on metaphysics from their spiritual tradition.)

The separation from God manifests itself in each part of our psychology. The mind breaks the undifferentiated consciousness of God into the finite consciousness of our human experience made up of our own personal thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations. The heart is dominated by suffering and self-regard rather than the love for all God and all created existences. And our work, too, is affected. Normally when undertaking actions, we are concerned mostly with our own benefit. Sometimes we may also have the benefit of our family in mind; rarer elevations lead us to acts of patriotic service, the pursuit of beauty, or even the service of humanity. But work undertaken for any of these purposes or entities is still not work yet undertaken for the sake of God or offered to him directly. Actions such as these, which are intended to benefit our own human ego—or some larger form of collective ego which we are a part of—maintain the reality of separation between our own consciousness and that of God. The work done with a consciousness that upholds the state of separation serves to maintain the state of separation; karmayoga, work that is offered to God, is work that is gradually able to bring our consciousness in greater contact with God.

The fact that the essence of karmayoga lies in the offering of the work rather than the content of the work itself has implications for the nature of spiritual work. Take the examples just discussed: is it bad, then, to do patriotic or humanitarian service—or simply to undertake remunerative work for the benefits of one’s family? These things no doubt are good by the standards of the world, and should by no means be abolished. (As the Gita says, the spiritual seeker’s knowledge of the relative value of these forms of work should certainly not lead them to discourage people who are living regular lives that are not consecrated to God from discharging the work of their usual nature.) But unless the action is offered to God as spiritual service, it is still not karmayoga. This leads to a sort of paradox: any act that is offered to God is karmayoga, regardless of the size of its worldly effects. Doing the dishes or preparing taxes for a client, if it is done with the attitude of offering the energy of the work to God, is karmayoga; a patriotic speech, humanitarian rescue, or virtuosic artwork, if the energy is not offered to God, is not karmayoga.

This can be confusing because it conflicts with our usual human conception of selfishness versus selflessness. Human society evolved to encourage an attitude of altruism, acting for the benefit of other humans, without concern for one’s own needs, because it provides benefits for society. So actions are evaluated by society as “good” if they benefit other people and “bad” if they do not. But that is not the standard by which God evaluates actions: on one hand, God transcends every person, group of people, and humanity altogether, so service to him may benefit no human beings at all; on the other hand, a portion of God is present in each person, group of people, living thing, or inanimate object, so service to any one could also be service to God—even if that service is inefficient by a utilitarian standard. This means that acts that are inspired as part of one’s karmayoga may not necessarily be actions that society traditionally praises as “selfless”, because a broader range of actions could be considered desirable from the perspective of God. Of course, traditionally “selfless” acts are perfectly worthy of being consecrated as karmayoga as well. And the opposite quality of “selfishness”, where someone acts with regard for nothing but themselves is not compatible with karmayoga either, as the aspiring practitioner of karmayoga has to be mindful of what is asked by God.

Similarly, the spiritual value of karmayoga is not related to the economic productivity of the work at hand. Karmayoga may be very lucrative, and there is no inherent contradiction between doing karmayoga and receiving money for work. But karmayoga may also consist of work that does not generate income at all. Some of the most worthy tasks do not generate income in our current societal arrangement, such as parenting, creating fine art, or political organizing, but these are still essential to human life and culture.

Offering Work to God

One point still remains obscure: what exactly does it mean to “offer” something as abstract as work, or the energy of work, to God? Such an offering seems hard to wrap the mind around, as it would seem be an abstract offering to an abstract being. The concept of offering becomes easier to understand if we approach it in stages. First, let us consider the simple human act of giving. When we give, we start out in possession of something, and there is a specific human whom we love or care for who has need or a use for what we have to give. We give the other person the gift as an expression of love or caring, and they receive it with gratitude. We see this when a mother gives food to a child, when a child gives a toy to a friend, or when an adult gives a gift to a romantic partner.

There are several religious or spiritual ritual practices that elevate this human act of giving to a spiritual level of giving to a deity or being that is not physically present. First, the ritual practice of leaving food as an offering to the deity, and second, the practice of donating to a church or place of worship that serves as the symbol of the community of God. These now seem to be familiar, almost mundane actions, which can obscure the fact that they grow out of a much more concrete, embodied practice. In the offering of fruit to the deity, we leave a physical object for a non-physical being, though the being is represented in the physical construction of the idol. Here, the deity is not physically present in a concrete way, but they are represented by the idol, and the gift is at least tangible and recognized as having value in the human world.

To more closely approach the the “abstract” nature of the offering of work, let us consider the case of the electronic money transaction, which is more and more common in the modern world. While cash transactions still take place, the intangibility of the electronic transaction, when contrasted to the tangible case of cash or fruit, actually serves to clarify the “energetic character” of money. When exchanging money electronically, a low-dollar-value transaction like buying a sandwich may not provoke much of a reaction, but considering a larger purchase like an appliance can feel weighty and dramatic; one can almost “feel” the larger quantity of money involved. From this example we can see that, in a sense, spending money means “spending” some of your own force or energy. The analogy remains valid whether we whether we view money as an ontologically “real” force, or if we simply see the phenomenon in the psychological terms of projecting psychological energy onto the conventional symbol of money.

In this framing, the donation of money to a temple can be seen as a donation of our own personal energy or force to the community of God. And this is exactly how we must consider the energy we spend in work to do karmayoga: karmayoga is the act of offering of our will, our psychological energy, our force to God. Just as in the electronic donation of money to a temple, we cannot directly see object or the recipient but still feel our energy leaving and reaching the intended recipient, so is it that when when we lift a box, write a song, or give a speech as an offering of karmayoga, we trust that the energy of the effort is received, even though we cannot directly see the energy itself or the recipient. When a work is done as karmayoga, one applies oneself to the task with the same energy and concentration as before—the difference is that there is the consciousness that the energy of the effort is offered or donated to God. And this offering must be done without the feeling of bargaining or expectation; the offering must be with one’s whole mind and heart, and devoid of claim for any benefit.

Still, even if the above analogy is helpful, the idea of “offering work to God” may still appear as a somewhat abstract concept that is less tangible than the human act of giving. When we work, we are not face-to-face with God doing the task directly for him, so the notion of “doing work for God” cannot be a literal interpretation. We are embedded in a physical world of objects like desks, computers, buildings, chairs, cars, streetlights, and so on—God himself is nowhere to be found. We use tools for our work, and the direct recipients of the work appear to be the clients, managers, and third parties of all kinds that the work is done for; the “offering” of the work to God is not as obvious as the act of sending a postal package to a client.

There are two implications for karmayoga. First, karmayoga requires practice. It is a challenging spiritual discipline that is capable of leading to the highest levels of spiritual realization, and we cannot demand that the deepest secret of the understanding of service to God is apparent immediately. And on the way to realizing that secret, we come face to face with the recalcitrance of the physical world that is being worked on and the limitations of one’s human nature. Maintaining concentration on a task, performing it to the highest attainable standard of of perfection, and are dealing with the stresses of performance, which are difficult enough in the normal practice of work, need to be reconciled with an additional level of spiritual concentration. However, like other spiritual disciplines, it gets easier with practice and bears the fruit of spiritual result, and the very meaning of karmayoga itself, which may have once seemed obscure, becomes clearer.

The second lesson we see, though, is that the very difficulty of reconciling the mundaneness and physicality of the world of work with an unseen God is exactly what makes karmayoga such a powerful practice—especially for a world-affirming spiritual practice. After all, if the world is to be reconciled with God, it must include the efforts and strains of the world that an exclusively visionary or exclusively peaceful idea of spirituality is not truly able to accommodate.

In summary, karmayoga proceeds by taking up the work that we do in the mundane world and offering the effort that goes into that work to God. And we have seen that the important thing about work done for karmayoga is not the specific task that is done but the fact that the effort is offered to God. But that still leaves a major question which vexes modern man: the question of what specifically is to be done. The pure theory of karmayoga has nothing in particular to say about this subject: the work done simply has to be according to one’s svadharma, or one’s own nature; the question of what that nature is that should be lies in other forms of inquiry, like perhaps psychology or social theory. In this article, we have already admitted the philosophical difficulties of fixing the nature or limits of human work, simply pointing to the broad stream of human activity and saying “that is the work of man”, and noting that that is the effort which karmayoga would take up. Still, we must ask: can anything else be said about this “svadharma” and its role in karmayoga?

Svadharma

One of the deepest questions facing man has to do with understanding his own nature and the way he should act. After millennia of inquiry from every major religious and philosophical tradition, and now from empirical psychology and social science, there are no firm answers. What we can say as a generalization is that the discussion about man’s nature runs between two poles: one pole says that man is free to choose his actions and the other pole that says that man is constrained by various factors, and his freedom is compromised by these constraints. Every reasonable answer gives some sort of balance between these two poles, however: even the pole of freedom, for example, recognizes that the laws of physics constrain human action; and on the other hand even the the extreme pole of constraint, which might argue that we do not even have free will, recognizes that it at least feels like we have free will some of the time, and that this feeling of free will has moral relevance.

For the individual who wants to find their own nature or svadharma, each pole has its drawbacks. If we believe that we are constrained by unchangeable factors like our biology, socioeconomic status, or position dictated by an inflexible religious-philosophical system, we may not be open to the new potentialities and energies that God wishes to guide us towards. On the other hand, if we are too insistent on the possibility of our own freedom and neglect to take note of the patterns in our psychology, and the patterns in the specific ways that we relate to society and society relates to us, and other facts of circumstance, we may be unable to recognize the real limitations of the world, and might blame ourselves for not being able to exceed them with our sheer force of will.

We come back once again to the view that the pure theory of karmayoga itself does not point to an answer to the question of what should be done. Guidance can be sought in the field of career counseling or personal development; it can be pursued by trying new things; we can gain clarity by talking with people, whether domain experts or friends and family; or we can even interrogate the fundamental limits of reality or human nature through philosophy. The only general guideline I can give, that I have found valid in my own experience, is that the process of living, experiencing, and questioning refines our judgment about what is the best course of action, and we should act from our best synthesis of our experience, knowledge, heart, and divine guidance. But this advice cannot be of any specific help to anyone in any specific situation.

In short, the entire set of analytical methods and behaviors pertaining to the question “what should I do?” should remain valid for the reader even after reading this article. From the point of view of karmayoga, what is truly important is that whatever occupations or activities we do adopt, we offer the energy to God. This is not to downplay the difficulty and importance of finding the right activities and right balance of life in the complexity of today’s world. But one thing the seeker finds that as they progress along the path of karmayoga is that the question of what one’s svadharma is resolves itself, slowly or quickly. When the energy of work is offered to God, it has a purifying effect as it moves through your system, so you become more and more able to discern God’s guidance, which helps to answer the questions of what you should do and be.

Results of Karmayoga

Ultimately, the true reason to take up a demanding practice like karmayoga is for its effects. (That is, at least until the final stage of karmayoga when one feels that one is doing the work only for God, without even any need of individual spiritual benefit.) What then are the specific effects of karmayoga? First, karmayoga leads to greater perfection in work: when doing work offered to God, the capacity of executing work with perfection inevitably increases. This is because when one offers work to God, one will feel compelled not to offer mediocre effort but rather one’s best effort; this is similar to how an inspiring teacher or manager will draw the best efforts out of the students or employees, even though it makes greater demands on them. This quality effort will result in a greater and greater perfection in the results. Of course, this does not happen in a vacuum: mechanisms like external feedback, theoretical insight into problems and defects, and skill and knowledge of the craft of the task all remain relevant. But if the aim of the work and its offering to God are kept sincerely in view, inadequate results will feel like an inadequate offering, and the practitioner will be guided towards the right resources for improvement.

A second beneficial effect of karmayoga is developing the virtues of work. To execute work well, the practitioner will need to develop perseverance, skill, judgment, the ability to work well with people, and so on; in fact, it offers a nearly endless field of practice and realization. Of course, these benefits may come from doing any sort of work regardless of whether it is specially offered as karmayoga. One difference is that karmayoga can mitigate against the negative effects that can attend progress in work done simply with a secular motive, such as arrogance and superiority. That said, there are obviously many secular workers who are able to avoid these pitfalls as well. From a spiritual perspective, though, these virtues are beneficial because they allow us to be more perfect instruments of God.

A third benefit of karmayoga is that it is able to bring spiritual results that are conventionally thought to be the result of other spiritual paths into the outer part of the being. For example, karmayoga can assist in growing one’s inner peace and solidity in all outer situations, as one confronts greater real world challenges and stresses that come with work and meets them with a spiritual attitude. Karmayoga can even result in developing the quality of love: all work is a form of service, whether one is serving human clients, or abstract ideals; through karmayoga, one grows into a deeper and deeper caring for the end that is served, which goes with a deeper and deeper love for God in the form of the client or end, which fuses with the love for God himself. And karmayoga can make these virtues stable in a more robust way than other spiritual disciplines because it must bring these virtues into the difficult situations that come up in the “real world”.

But the most characteristic perfection of karmayoga is becoming an agent of the Divine Will. As we give up our energy to God without seeking for our own personal gain, our being is purified. We become more and more open to the inspirations that God gives us, more capable of discerning and refusing the demands of our ego, and the capacity of the outer nature to execute the inspiration increases as well. In earlier sections, we discussed the vision of the manifested universe as a system of energetic exchange. The Divine Will works through all these energies to bring about his Will by influencing the entities incarnated in the universe in a variety of ways. But the beings who are most able to bring about the Divine Will are those who have perfected their outer instruments and surrendered them to God. Karmayoga is the most direct way of training oneself to participate fully in this Divine Plan.