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It is certain that the idea of this supreme judge, who is our consciousness uninterrupted throughout the centuries and the millenaries, who is each one of us grown more and more enlightened, more and more incorruptible and infallible, leads to the highest, sincerest and purest system of morals that it is possible to conceive or to justify here below. The judge and the defendant are no longer face to face; they are one within the other and form but one and the same person. They can hide nothing from each other; and both have the same urgent interest in discovering the least fault, the slightest shadow and in purifying themselves as quickly and as completely as possible, in order to put an end to the reincarnations and to live at last in the One Being. The best, the saintliest are near doing so from the moment when they quit this life; but, detached from all things, they do not cease to act for the good of all men, for already they know all things. They go farther than the mystic Christian who expects a reward from without: they are their own reward. They go farther than Marcus Aurelius, the great type of the man without illusions, who continues to act without hoping that his action can profit others: they know that nothing is useless, that nothing can be wasted; it is when they no longer need anything whatever that they work with the greatest ardour.
Contrary to what is too generally believed, this system of morals which leads to absolute repose extols activity. Hear, in this connection, the great teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Lord’s Song, which is perhaps, as its translators, not without good reason, think, the most beautiful, that is to say, the most exalted book known up to the present time:
“Thy business is with the action only, never with its fruits; so let not the fruit of action be thy motive.... Perform action ... dwelling in union with the divine, renouncing attachments and balanced evenly in success and failure.... Pitiable are they who work for fruit.... Man winneth not freedom from action by abstaining from activity, nor by mere renunciation doth he rise to perfection.... Perform thou right action, for action is superior to inaction; and, inactive, even the maintenance of thy body would not be possible. The world is bound by action, unless performed for the sake of sacrifice....
“He who seeth inaction in action and action in inaction, he is wise among men, he is harmonious, even while performing all action. Whose works are all free from the moulding of desire, whose actions are burned up by the fire of wisdom, him the wise have called a sage. Having abandoned attachment to the fruit of action, always content, nowhere seeking refuge, he is not doing anything, although doing actions.... He should be known as a perpetual ascetic, who neither hateth nor desireth; free from the pairs of opposites ... he is easily set free from bondage....”
And remember that this, which forms part of the Mahabharata, the greatest epic on earth, was written four or five thousand years ago.