Karma Yoga Bhakti Yoga

Author(s): Swami Vivekanand
Publisher: Ramkrishna Vivekananda Center of New York INC

Page 71

CHAPTER V
WE HELP OURSELVES, NOT THE WORLD
Before considering further how devotion to duty helps us in our spiritual progress, let me place before in a brief compass you another aspect of what we in India mean by Karma. In every religion there are three parts; philosophy, mythology and ritual. Philosophy of course is the essence of every religion; mythology explains and illustrates it by means of the more or less legendary lives of great men, stories and fables of wonderful things and so on; ritual gives to that philosophy a still more concrete form, so that every one may grasp it-ritual is in fact concretised philosophy. This ritual is Karma; it is necessary in every religion, because most of us cannot understand abstract spiritual things until we grow much spiritually. It is easy for men to think that they can understand anything, but when it comes to practical experience they find that abstract ideas are often very hard to comprehend. Therefore symbols are of great help and we cannot dispense with the symbolical method of putting things before us. From time immemorial symbols have been used by all kinds of religions. In one sense we cannot think but in symbols; words themselves