Bhagavagd Gita - Session 6- Track 613

All this is a play of the Supreme Purusha and the Supreme Prakriti: the Lord and the divine Mother. Therefore whatever you have you offer it to the Divine. And yajña, the ritualistic yajña actually is nothing but this: it is only a ritualistic symbol; yajña kuṇḍa is nothing but a field of offering. Agni in which you offer everything is a messenger of your wish, your saṅkalpa to offer, and as a result of which it will become a kind of a ‘knot’ from which everything comes back again. It is said that when you do yajña, your are entitled only to eat what is left, that is what is in ritualism; you will know the rule that in a sacrifice, you sacrifice everything, and you are entitled to eat only what is left, ‘uciśta’. But in reality, when you sacrifice everything, what is left? What is left is the delight. Therefore soma is what is left, and what is given to you is ultimately soma. If you go on sacrificing, what is left will be always soma, this is always ‘remainder’, because that is the origin of sacrifice, the end of sacrifice, the middle of sacrifice: this is all delight. This is all that is left ultimately and all that you act is…what for? It is only delight. For delight of action you do the action and that all that you enjoy; you are entitled to it. What Sri Krishna says that you are entitled to one thing and that is delight.

After sacrificing everything that you have to the Lord, offered everything to the Lord, there is be a return of it, even that you go on returning. This is all that is action, action is nothing but this. Therefore it is said: “Action which is not done as a sacrifice is that which binds you”. But action that all the time is done as sacrifice does not bind you, and that is the secret of the Karmayoga.

We have now covered two steps of Karmayoga, first:

karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana | (II, 47) “You have right only to the action, and not to the fruits of action”.

And second step is: “To do all actions as a sacrifice”: sacrifice to the Supreme Lord and the Supreme divine Mother. When you do sacrifice to other forces they will work, they will give you benefits, but it will be all limited, you will be ‘bound’. Why do you aim at something limited? Plunge yourself completely, offer everything to the Divine. You must know ‘the object’ of sacrifice. This knowledge of the object of sacrifice, the one who receive the sacrifice and one who returns to you, is the knowledge contained in the entire process of yajña. This is the central part of Karmayoga.

It is very easy to say: offer everything to the Lord, but it takes…normally we are all the time offering ourselves to small deities, all the time, either to this minister or that minister or this clerk or that clerk: these are our deities and we go on giving to this or to that. But to arrive at knowledge that all that is to be offered to the supreme Lord, is a long process, but this is the real process. Realise that you have to offer to the Supreme Lord, and when you do it, you are entitled only to the remainder, that remainder is soma, is the delight. This is the second step of the Karmayoga.

We shall do the third step next time.