A Summary of "Karma and Its Effect on Character"
A brief summary of the first chapter of Swami Vivekananda’s Karma-Yoga, “Karma and Its Effect on Character”:
The human experience of life is one of pleasure and pain. People take various actions in the world in response to these pleasurable and painful experiences. These actions cumulatively form a person’s character that conditions future experience. This is “karma”, both human action and its effects.
It is through karma that knowledge, the goal of human life, is realized as action in the world suggests lines of inquiry and discovery within the mind. With this knowledge uncovered by action, a person’s character is developed, and their action becomes more skillful resulting in a greater mastery of themselves and their environment.
Karma theory describes how people reap what they sow in human experience. Experiences of pleasure and pain resulting from actions of merit and demerit. Also, the strengthening or weakening of capacities and powers of action. In this present life and others future and past.
Karma-yoga is the practice of work without attachments to results. Work practiced without attachment to results is more effective in the world as it concentrates energy otherwise frittered away in anxiety about results. Such work is also more patiently and unselfishly preformed. Well-practiced karma-yoga is restful. It is performed without stress that originates from anxiety about results.
Karma-yoga practice begins in cultivating awareness of the motives of one’s actions. These will initially be primarily selfish. Through the regular intentional practice of work without attachment to results this will gradually shift. Motives for action will become increasingly unselfish as karma-yoga practice deepens.