Page 12 - All India Magazine Feb-2026

The True Skill in Works

Yoga, says the Gita, is skill in works, and by this phrase the
ancient Scripture meant that the transformation of mind and
being to which it gave the name of Yoga brought with it a per-
fect inner state and faculty out of which the right principle of
action and the right spiritual and divine result of works emerged
naturally like a tree out of its seed. Certainly, it did not mean
that the clever general or politician or lawyer or shoemaker
deserves the name of a Yogin; it did not mean that any kind
of skill in works was Yoga, but by Yoga it signified a spiritual
condition of universal equality and God-union and by the skill
of the Yogic worker it intended a perfect adaptation of the soul
and its instruments to the rhythm of the divine and universal
Spirit in a nature liberated from the shackles of egoism and the
limitations of the sense-mind. ...
... the greatest skill in works of Yoga is that which to the
animal man seems its greatest ineptitude. For all this difficult
attainment, the latter will say, may lead to anything you please,
but we have to lose our personal life, abandon our personal
objects, annul our personal will and pleasure and without these
life cannot be worth living. Now the object of all skill in works
must be evidently to secure the best welfare either of ourselves
or of others or of all. The ordinary man calls it welfare to secure
momentarily some transient object, to wade for it through a
sea of grief and suffering and painful labour and to fall from it
again still deeper into the same distressful element in search
of a new transient object. The greatest cunning of Yoga is to
have detected this cheat of the mind and its desires and du-
alities and to have found the way to an abiding peace, a uni-
versal delight and an all-embracing satisfaction, which can not
only be enjoyed for oneself but communicated to others. That
too arises out of the change of our being; for the pure truth of

12 All India Magazine, February 2026