by Swami Yatiswarananda (from "Meditation and Spiritual Life")

How pointedly does Swami Vivekananada tell us that our so-called sense of duty often becomes a disease! It catches hold of us and makes our whole life miserable. It is the bane of human life.

This duty, this idea of duty, is the midday summer sun which scorches the innermost soul of mankind. Look at those poor slaves to duty! Duty leaves them no time to say prayers, no time to bathe. Duty is ever on them. When they go out and work Duty is on them! They come home and think of the work for the next day. Duty is on them! It is living a slave's life, at last dropping down in the street and dying in harness, like a horse. This is duty as it is understood. The only true duty is to be unattached and to work as free beings, to give up all work unto God.

We become slaves of duty and make our whole life miserable. We must gain a better understanding of where our duty lies and how to perform it. How often we find that before we have learned to solve our own problems, we work to help others, not out of love but for the sake of self-gratification! There certainly are selfless souls eager to serve others, but in this strange world, which one of our older Swamis once named "God's great lunatic asylum," there are many busybodies who, because they are frustrated in life, or do not care to take up the humdrum tasks close at hand, go about inflicting themselves on others to satisfy their own vanity.

"They need my loving service," the egocentric ones declare. We human beings are so full of self-love that we cannot imagine that others may dislike us just as much as we dislike them. A psychologist once said this to a group of girls who were very much surprised by what they heard, for self-love does not easily admit the thought that one may heartily be disliked.There is another type of self-centered person who seems to be over-anxious to make others happy and have no time for prayer and meditation. They are bent on saving the world by joining clubs or bridge parties, societies, dinners, or political committees that give them some self-importance for a while, but when the novelty wears off or there is a lull in chatter or activity, they at once feel miserable and dissatisfied.

Without mincing words Swami Vivekananada says,

"How easy it is to interpret slavery as duty -- the morbid attachment of flesh for flesh as duty! Men go out into the world and struggle and fight for money or for any other thing to which they get attached. Ask them why they do it. They say, 'It is a Duty.'"