Pravrajika Vivekaprana of Sri Sarada Math, New Delhi, responded to these questions about karma yoga, conscious, selfless action, while in San Juan, Puerto Rico, June 1999. (Transcribed by Shraddha)
Q: Does karma yoga challenge you?
Pravrijika Vivekaprana (PV): But of course. All my daily experiences have to become my teachers. If I am to rise to any level of inner control, my whole experience has to become conscious experience. In today’s world,we don’t have superfluous time and energy after we have done the day’s battle. Actually this is a war, a daily battle, so I must use the energy very consciously, controlled.
Q: How is it that one should be conscious?
PV: I should know that I am aware, and my mind should not wander. Wandering of the mind is a waste of energy—because it is not conscious. A wandering mind wastes almost all energy.
Q: How do you keep sense organs from running after sense objects?
PV: There is a noise there. I can run and forget this completely—or I can keep it outside and pay attention to it. Use this idea for everything. Do not be a compulsive slave to your sense organs. There is noise—but I have the capacity to keep it in the background and pay attention to something else. One should not run away with the senses. One has to understand these principles, and then apply them. One may fail twenty times, but the twenty-first time will give some result.
Q: Can we anticipate fear?
PV: No, you cannot anticipate fear. We are supposed to become conscious of the fact that fear is a very deep part of us. We must not forget it. If I know that fear is there, it may not manifest itself just now, but it is there. Anger is there, obsession is there. But what we do is think, “It wasn’t there, I don’t know how it happened.” We think, “Something outside made me afraid or made me angry”—as if it weren’t there to begin with. The outer stimulus merely brings it up. What we are supposed to do is to know that these things are there all the time, and at any time they can erupt. Therefore we have to learn to be watchful about ourselves, how we behave, how the ideas build up—and how they lead me to fear or anger or obsession. Everything takes place through feelings, through ideas, through images, thoughts, sensations, that’s all. There is nothing else.
And all these—sensations, feelings, thoughts, images—take place at the conscious level. We have to learn how to see through their rising. It’s like measuring the temperature and the speed of the wind, and seeing in which direction it is blowing, and then forecasting the weather tomorrow.
The strategy is left to each person, it is a personal war, but what we need to understand is preparedness. We must be prepared. Something that is within we need to be prepared for, we need to know that these enemies are there.
