Book Title: Karmayogi
Author(s): 
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown

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Page 657
________________ doubt as to which does which. Conquest in an essential antecedant of renunciation. True renunciation of any thing is a step to mukti. A man struggles for freedom, which is mastery, all his life. If he does not do so, he is not a man. He may be a clod or an idiot, a drunkard or a parasite. A man struggles and struggles to be free. Some strive for freedom for themselves alone setting up self-will or appetite in the place of their God. These are the criminals, the mad men, the failures of society. We find sometimes amongst such the nature of a child. To a child there. is little difference between good and evil. He will as readily pursue the sense-gratification of robbing a pantry, as that of plucking a flower or catching a butterfly. He throws his whole heart into the effort of the moment and is, withal, full of love and lovableness. This class of child souls furnishes the Jagais and Madhais of the annals of religion, the criminals who become saints. The true criminal is steeped in tamas and egotism. He miscalls license by the name of liberty. License is pot liberty for the simple reason that true liberty presupposes mas tery. The profligate is the victim of his own vices. He lies helpless KARMAYOGIN. cur to our forefathers by the very fact of birth. A man must strive, strive to the uttermost. And since without possible suceess there can be no intensity of effort he must often succeed. A man's striving must begin morcover as soon after the moment when visions come to him as he judges fit. There can be no ruling, no dating, no circumscribing of his effort from outside. Human beings are born, by incessant work to increase their own faculty, by ceaseless striving to add to their inheritance. They are born to disdain limitation. It is decreed in the Couusels of God that man shall be confronted by destiny only to defy and master it; that the impossible shall to him become the possible, the one inexorable law of human life is effort to the utmost. at their feet. He does not even enjoy his appetites. His life is spent like that of wild animal between ungovernable desire and ungovernable fear. He who would be free must first learn to govern. One who is uncontrolled is anything but free. There is such a thing as the bodypolitic. Even the body-politic, however has to conform to the spiritual claim of individual man, his right, by hopeful struggle to find mukti. The political unit furnishes new and more complex objects of attainment to the parts of which it is made up. New rights, new tasks, new ambition dawn upon us in relation to our political position. Again, nothing must defent the The free man is that man whose will is efficient. The first onemy that the will has to encounter is ignorance, the second is unbridled impulse. That these may be overcome, submit ourselves, while the body is yet weak, to intellectual education and are initiated, at physical maturity, into the world of the ideals of our race. Such is the provision made by humanity in onder that we may live stre nuously, keeping the body beneath on feet; see the ideals unclouded by our own feebleness or by any grossness; and will efficiently for the triumphant achievement of the highest that we perceive. To toil, to see, to will, and to attain, this is the four-fold debt that wé in right of the soul to the utmost of activity, the utmost of sacrifice, my right to serve, my right to suffer, my right to love, on the highest and widest area of which I am capable, must be defeated by nothing in the world save the greater power of my brother to do these things with equal and added nobility. And if I find this in him, since it is the ideal that I worship and not myself as the embodiment of that ideal, I shall place his feet upon my head and follow him. For in him I find the ideal, more clearly than in myself. Nothing in the world has a right to interfere with knowledge working thus hand in hand with love. Brothers standing side by side as citizens and loyal children of a common mother must be impeded by nothing in working out their duty and offering their lives to her. If a man direct his political activities towards the interests of himself or a section of his people against the welfare of his country as a whole, he is a traitor and the whole weight of the USE CHATARJI RAZOR AND SURGICAL INSTRUMENTS THE BEST & 3 body-politic has a right to oppose and thwart him. But if his work for a class be dominated by the love of his country, then it is harmonia with the national well-being and is service and not treachery. A nation has the right to serve its country to the utmost. A nation, moreofer has this one duty alone. In serving its land, it raises itself. It fulfils its debt to humanity and to the world. It recreates its own tuother. A child has a right to spurn and defeat anything that could come between him and his mother, anything that would prevent his serving her to the farthest limit of his own Capacity, anything that would make him into servant or slave, in one house where he was born a son. But we must study the position of the individual in relation to this tusk of the body-politic. The land must be served by the nation and by the individual as a part of the nation; not as divided from it and out of relation to it. This is the truth 80 clearly seen by our fore fathers. This is the perception to which caste witnesses so strongly. It is true that we have forgotten the meaning of caste. We see it as the limitation or assertion of our rights instead of regarding it as the regimentation of our duties. It is always thus, in an age of degrada. tion when a people become passive and fall into static decay. We ought to be thankful for any blow that might rose us up from so siggish a condition. If we translate rights into duties and apply the new word as the key, many a problem will be unlocked. By our organisation into castes, we the children of India, were at one time able to divide up our labours and responsibilties amongst ourselves, giving to each group the task best suited to its capacity more or less successfully but denying the right of none to his share of the household fire, to his own form of happiness and to his own mode of self-expression. Caste was also nur school of self-government and gives us to this day a sense of the value to the community of our personal opinion and a measure of the decorum which is obligatory. its expression. But all the castes put together will in this age constitute only the social expression of Hinduism and Hinduism is no longer conterminou RELIABLE IN THE MARKET

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