Our Values ☯

Values guide our goals and aspiration, they provide a code to operate in the world in order to co-ordinate and collaborate with the people we live and work with.

Karma Yoga

The true essence of Karma Yoga is performing actions without attachment to the results. Working for work’s sake. The only duty is to be unattached and to work as free beings.

If you can incessantly take that position that you are a giver, that everything given by you is a free offering to the world, without any thought of return, that will be work which will not bring attachment. Attachment only comes when we expect something.

— Swami Vivekananda

Devotion

When we work without attachment, the work itself brings us joy and satisfaction. For that we dedicate and devote the work to a higher energy and higher force.

The object is transformation, and the transformation can only be done by a force infinitely greater than your own; it can only be done by being truly like a child in the hands of the Divine Mother.

— Sri Aurobindo

Higher purpose

Our motives and desires are not for power and everything else, it is for calmness and serenity and to bring that experience to everyone for our collective welfare.

Dharma

Dharma/Tao refers not just to external, material and factual truths but also a sense of inner truth and authenticity. Knowing everyone has their own role, duty and skills they excel at. We do not value or judge anyone’s work as higher or lower as far as it is in alignment with the dharma.

If you want to be a householder hold your life a sacrifice for the welfare of others, and if you choose the life of renunciation do not even see beauty, and money, and power. Each is great in his own place, but the duty of the one is not the duty of the other.

— Swami Vivekananda

Good and Evil

Good and Evil are but the two sides of the same coin. We do not impose any sense of an external morality, but know good and evil are just different perspectives. We rely on everyone’s own sense of dharma to guide them, not in isolation, but together as one community, society and eventually one being.

We read in the Gîtâ again and again that we must all work incessantly, but all work must be composed of good and evil; we cannot do any work which has not some part of good somewhere; there cannot be any work which will not injure someone somewhere.

Yet we must do good. It is the highest motive power we have, knowing all the time it is a privilege to help. Do not stand on a pedestal and take five cents and say, “Here, my poor man,” but be grateful that the poor man is there, so that by giving to him you are able to help yourself. It is not the receiver that is blessed, but the giver.
— Swami Vivekananda