A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

KARMA-YOGA*CCORDING to the Sankhya philosophy thereare inJ\ nature three kinds of forces, called in SanskritSattva, Rajas, and Tamos.These as manifested inthe physical world are what we may call attraction,repulsion, and the control of the two. Sattva is what exercisesthe control, Rajasis the repulsion, while Tamas is theattraction. Tamas is typified as darkness or inactivity ;Rajas is activity, where each particle is trying to fly offfrom the attracting centre ;and Sattva is the equilibriumof the two, giving a due balancing of both.Now in every man there are these three forces ;inweeach of us we find that sometimes the Tamas prevails ;become lazy ;we cannot move ;we are inactive, weigheddown by certain ideas or by mere dullness. At other timesactivity prevails ;we try as it were to fly off the centre ;then again, at other times that calm balancing of boththese temperaments, so to say, the Sattva prevails.Again in different men a different one of these forces is.generally predominant. The characteristic of one man isinactivity, dullness and laziness ;the characteristic ofanother man is activity, power, manifestation of energy ;and in a third man we may find the sweetness, the calmness and the gentleness which are due to thebalancing ofboth action and inaction. So in all creation in animals,in plants, and in men we find the more or less typicalmanifestation of all these different forces.* The Notes of a Class Lesson held in New York on the 13thof December 1895.