And our own people must be taught to engage in honest employment to produce the necessities of life; they must not be unproductive.

—Titus, III, 14

Employment is the act of using. It is the occupying of oneself in turning energy to desired uses. When a person engages himself in any occupation, he is said to employ himself. His use of time, force and matter constitutes that employment. He may think he can laze away the time, yet is he mistaken, for even whilst lazing he does consume time and his consciousness continues to live and function in each of its moments. He may refuse to act, and think that he thereby does not use force. He forgets that his very effort to restrain and cease action constitutes the use and expenditure of force. He may exercise the force of his will not to use or affect matter. His willing is in vain. The matter which goes to make up his body and the various other sheaths of his make-up is instantly affected by his slightest thought and feeling. The exercise of his will is but the play of energy upon matter. Granted, then, that he is constantly employed, it follows that he colours his employment by the bright or dark colouring that his motives give to his actions.

At the very commencement of a study of the subject, it becomes necessary to specify what types of effort become unproductive when assessed according to norms that the Soul of man provides. Time is a concretized aspect of the limitless duration. How does the student propose to keep it punctual and pure and therefore productive of beneficial results? Energy is an aspect of the great infinite motion which never ceases. How does the student qualify himself to use it so that it will follow the divine pattern—the programme and the plan for the fulfilling of which the present Universe was brought into manifestation? Weighty questions these, and yet they cannot be ignored lest the Soul find its incarnation misspent, its life's span frittered away in pursuits which hinder and obstruct the divine purpose.

That act alone is productive which augments the Soul's treasures or helps another soul upon its upward way. Any lesser employment will be found to cater to the perishable part of the person and must for that reason be given an ever diminishing value depending on the degree of selfishness that it generates. Where the validity of these truths is questioned, where one has doubts that one is soul, there arises such a mental fog that one fails to see the logic and the sanctions that give to ethics and religion their force. In seeking his own felicity, he but cheats himself and has finally to yield himself up to the sway of such laws as govern in these matters.

To such class also belong those who see in themselves nothing higher than the intellect, who put great store by it and who therefore remain immersed in the study of the ephemeral things with which the intellect deals. The scientist who uses force or energy to study matter in its variegated forms and who thereby unwittingly saturates himself with it through constant attachment will be unable to burst through the outer shells and crusts of things. Eyes that are fascinated by material things are unable to open upon the spiritual. Intuition is not the culmination of reason or intellect. It has nothing to do with the personal, nor with the tardy processes of ratiocinative thought. The rank materialist firmly believes that man is made up of various forms of matter, and that beyond these, there is nothing. His instruments have gone on reducing matter to its atomic structures. From there, matter eludes him and he perceives a blank negation, an unbridgeable void.

For such an one, life is without a goal. To him, productive effort and earning a livelihood can only mean such pursuits as enrich him in his material benefits. For him, the diverting of energies to plan for an after-life is futile because his reason tells him that there is nothing in him that will survive the ordeal of death. He does not believe in charity and sacrifice because these have a tendency to lessen and not heighten his ease during the all too short time of life that is his before oblivion descends and snuffs out his flame. Any wonder, then, that for the majority of people their efforts will remain unproductive and their contribution to the fund of human goodwill be negligible?

When the human child attains that age when duty lays its first claims on him, he mercifully has meaningful employment chalked out for him by duties to family and nation. Some of these comprise the actions to be performed daily (duties to oneself are some), while others have to be carried out on specific occasions. These duties are obligatory. In fact, just because the soul needs that experience, is the incarnation planned for birth in that particular environment of race, nation and family. Such duties when respected are productive of lasting good. It is when they come to be understood as avenues for growth that "honest employment" takes on a deeper meaning. Besides these and enriching the person are actions which he may perform to bring the world to duty and benefit humanity. To be employed in helping others to carry out such self-appointed tasks is meritorious and comes to him who through incarnations has earned the right to such service.

Besides the performance of duties, the person has to toil to earn his livelihood. He has to barter his labour or skill for another's use. In essence, it provides an avenue for the practice of brotherhood, a joining together in a co-operative effort to achieve the larger good. Right livelihood deals with the means of living—the employment, the fruits of which will sustain life; the utilization of energy for the providing of the necessities of life to the many. Where the occupation is such as feeds the urges and desires of the person or where it gets its remuneration by providing others with pleasures of dubious value, it becomes productive of evil. In such cases, the force of the life energy is being used to abuse the life of others, is in fact made to turn around and oppose the mighty evolutionary impulse.

Whichever way we look at it, we must admit that when we use energy for purposes other than the production of life's necessities, we, by that action, steal a larger or a smaller amount of force from nature's storehouse. By so doing we do not waste force and despoil nature, but pit the force so appropriated to fight the momentum of a planned evolution which embraces galaxies and universes. Few people, even if they understand it, remain consciously aware at all times of the fact that nature allows them to borrow from its storehouse the energies which they wield, and that such borrowings carry with them all the obligations of a trustee. Since we use energy every moment of our life through our thinking apparatus, the ideal position for any person would be the retainingt at all times of the awareness of this responsibility. Any action, even if it be in thought, which does not carry the soul forward on its evolutionary cycle is not a worthwhile employment and becomes a source for dissipation and conservation of energy. Following the same line of thought, right livelihood is not achieved by the following of those pursuits which retard the evolution of oneself or of others. If the lending of one's energy to any organization does not have as its end-result the production of a necessity of life, the effort is vain and any extra attempt at evolutionary progress has then to be relegated to hours outside those of employment.

In our times, when a person chooses his vocation his main concern is to see that it will earn him money. All else is incidental. The needs of the soul are not thought of and are, therefore, not planned for nor given adequate weightage. Later, he may change vocations and seek more congenial pursuits even as his mind develops and his soul approaches its awakening. For the one who awakens to the larger perception, the chief and only question which he has to answer is: Is he producing that which is a necessity of life? To the poet and the artist nature shows that aspect to which the ordinary person's sight and senses do not respond. The scientist and alchemist try to probe into the finer forms of matter and the essences of things. In time they do reach their flowering, yet are their efforts vain, the efflorescence a mere mirage on the sands of time.

Why should this be so? Why, when the scientist stands on the threshold of startling discoveries, does he find and feel a frustration and letting down, a feeling that the sweetness of his achievement has turned sour? A long unfamiliarity with the worlds of light has made such people forget that the touch of matter defiles, and that too great a familiarity with matter arouses the passions which bring in their wake the horrors of anger and greed. Matter has a tendency to generate attachments. The senses, when they come into contact with objects of sense, produce heat and cold, pleasure and pain, attachments and revulsions. It is thus that desires are aroused which attract or repel. When a whole civilization takes the downward trend, a decadent society results where morals are weak and ethics low, and where flippancy hobnobs with vice and calls it pleasure.

But, if there is degeneration, there also exists its opposite. In places least suspected by the ordinary person, there still exist oases of spirituality. In town and city, amidst the din of the market-place and the haunts of the rich and the poor, there labour the few who see in right livelihood the way open to all to reach up to the divine. Riches and affluence do not come their way; ease is not wished for, though it could be had; publicity and accolade of the many is shunned. They spin on the wheel of life. Their self-abnegating effort produces that which satisfies another's necessities of life. But, far surpassing the seen results is the example which they set. Their life preaches a twenty-four-hour sermon. Their sweat produces seeds that will yield a rich harvest in another's field. Nature recognizes the worth of such people, and though it cannot turn back the force and fury of results for causes planted in past lives, it still shelters and nurtures them, for they are its dear ones—precious for the work to be done in other centuries, valuable recruits for the carrying on of the fight for the re-establishment of righteousness.

A deep reverence for human life is worth more than a thousand executions in the prevention of murder; and is, in fact, the great security of human life. The law of capital punishment, whilst pretending to support this reverence, does in fact tend to destroy it.

—John Bright