Talks Excerpt 586. Swamiji quotes Sri Krishna: ‘Your dharma, though done imperfectly, is better than doing the dharma of other people.’

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Somebody came to the Ashram and heard me scolding a person. He said to me, ‘So this is how a Swami behaves?’ I said, ‘Yes, this Swami behaves like this. Go next-door otherwise, he will behave otherwise.’ [laughter] It is obvious that what I can see he cannot see; and he will behave from where he is.

Karma is a very complicated matter. It is so intermingled. You are creating new karmas and yet you are paying for old karmas. Only if you are prepared to give up your life will you stick to dharma. If you are not prepared to give up your life, then you will behave from a relative point of view.

Let us say a holy man is uplifting somebody and that person kills him. The holy man was behaving from a dharmic point of view and he would say, ‘Regardless of what he does, my duty is to give him the help I was giving him.’ He will not blame God.

But you, as a neighbour, will blame God. You may say, ‘What kind of God is this? He was doing a good thing and that man killed him.’ You have to behave from where you are.

Devotee: If one does not know if one is a karma yogi, a bhakti yogi or a jnana yogi, what is one to do?

Swamiji: Serve your mother and father to the best of your ability. From there it will manifest.

Devotee: Is there anything wrong with being a jnana yogi?

Swamiji: No. There is nothing wrong with that. The only thing is you may not do it to the perfection that is needed. Sri Krishna said, ‘Your dharma, though done imperfectly, is better than doing the dharma of other people.’ Why? Because if you do other people’s dharma it will cloud your brains and it will throw you into more confusion. Whereas if you are doing your dharma, even if you did not do it perfectly, there will be less confusion.

Devotee: How is one to know what one’s own dharma is if one does not really have an affinity for any one of the yogas? Swamiji: This is what I said: Your first dharma is to your mother and father and from there onwards it will unfold. Therefore, wherever you are, serve them to the best of your ability.

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These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.