ALL action except that which is intelligently designed to attain God-realisation, creates a binding for consciousness. Action might add to accumulated ignoranceIt is not only an expression of accumulated ignorance, but a further addition to that accumulated ignorance
Religious forms and ceremonies as well as rituals and injunctions of different creeds and spiritual institutions have a tendency to encourage the spirit of love and worship. Ceremonies a side-tracking on path As such they are helpful to a limited extent in wearing out the ego-shell in which human consciousness is caught. But if they are unintelligently and mechanically followed, the inner spirit of love and worship gets dried up. Then they only result in hardening the ego-shell rather than wearing it out. Therefore, rituals and ceremonies cannot carry a man very far on the Path, and if they are unintelligently followed they create as much binding as any other unintelligent action. Deprived of all inner life and meaning, they might be said to be even more dangerous than other forms of unintelligent action, because man pursues them with the belief that they are helpful for God-realisation, whereas in fact they are far from being helpful. Owing to this element of self-delusion, lifeless
forms and ceremonies become a side-tracking on the Path. Often, through mere force of habit, man becomes so attached to these external forms that he cannot be disillusioned about their imaginary value except through intense suffering.
In many ways inaction is preferable to unintelligent action, for it has at least the merit of not creating further sanskaras and complication. Life seeks to free itself from self-created entanglement Even good and righteous action creates sanskaras and means one more addition to the complications created by past actions and experiences. All life is an effort to attain freedom from self-created entanglement. It is a desperate struggle to undo what has been done under ignorance, to throw away the accumulated burden of the past, to find rescue from the debris left by a series of temporary achievements and failures. Life seeks to unwind the limiting sanskaras of the past and to obtain release from the mazes of its own making, so that its further creations may spring directly from the heart of eternity and bear the stamp of unhampered freedom and intrinsic richness of being which knows no limitation.
Action which helps in attaining God is truly intelligent and spiritually fruitful because it brings release from bondage. It is second only to that action which springs spontaneously from the Inaction often necessary stage state of God-realisation itself. All other forms of action (howsoever good or bad and howsoever effective or ineffective from a worldly point of view) contribute towards bondage and are inferior to inaction. Inaction is less helpful than intelligent action, but it is better than unintelligent action, for it amounts to the non-doing of that which would have created a binding. The movement from unintelligent action to intelligent action (i.e., from binding karma to
