WORK AND Resistance - A PATH TO Freedom

By Paul Hourihan/ed. Anna Hourihan

Our theme is the conversion of resistance into spiritual energy ... inertia into active energy ... one kind of power into another, as water is converted into electric power.

Resistance is everywhere in the universe and in the nature of things—within and without. It exists for our liberation, our enlightenment. By wrestling with it as a desired challenge in the spirit of nonattachment and service, we give a succession of powerful blows to the sluggish, ego-powered mentality that all these years (and lifetimes, as some believe) has made us forget our true nature and destiny. By the practice of concentration on the work alone, we can stop identifying with time, with fear, with limitation, with mortality, with all of the intimations of our ignorance—taking these for reality and taking work to be a burden instead of a passport to liberation and self-knowledge.    

All resistance—every problem to be solved, every negative force to be overcome, every low desire to be checked—is good. Anger checked produces tolerance and kindliness. Greed checked produces generosity. Hatred checked produces compassion. Selfishness checked produces unselfishness. Attachment to work checked—produces nonattachment, power, and freedom.

When we work without attachment or thought of self, the resistance involved in all things to be done is transformed into higher energy. Furthermore, if the work is offered to the Divine or done with complete concentration and absence of self-consciousness in the doing of it, the energy will become truly spiritual.

Thus work offers us an opportunity to gain spirituality if we understand how it is to be done. Remember, in all things, man is a hidden spiritual dynamo, a saint in embryo, a divine personality, though he knows it not. When he works he should use the work as a wedge into the thick density of his ignorance—the fire of work then becomes like a torch burning away the heavy layers of his delusion that make him forget his True Nature.

Let us work, then—not reluctantly, not out of a sense of duty alone, but rather with the knowledge that work can free us and make us what we truly are. It can rouse up the sleeping spiritual giant in the depths of our psyches ... if performed in the right spirit of karma yoga—working for the sake of the work itself, and not with the thought of any reward.

See also Words of Wisdom: Karma Yoga and Spiritual Life and the article: KARMA YOGA – Enlightenment on the Installment Plan.