Take an ordinary postal envelope. Upon it, in golden ink, write the address of a person in artistic calligraphy. Insert a beautiful worded letter full of amazing sentiments, and drop it into a postbox. What happens to it? It will not move even a yard away! Now take a simple post card, scribble unimpressive things with no special care, affix a stamp, an address and drop it into the box. What happens? The artistically ornamental envelope is inert, while the inartistic cheap document travels a thousand miles towards the person indicated. Therefore, whatever may be the uniqueness or importance, the furore or attractiveness, the service that you do can yield no fruit if it is done without a pure chiththa (thought or intention).

-Divine Discourse, Mar 6, 1977

thought for the day

By saturating work with love, it can be transformed into worship. When such work is offered to God, it gets sanctified into puja (sacramental worship). This makes it free from ego. It is also freed from the earthly desire for success and the earthly fear of failure. When you can feel that when you have done the work as best as you can, your puja is complete. It is then for Him who has accepted the puja to confer on you what He considers best. This attitude will make the work unattached. Regular practice of this discipline will render the consciousness clear and pure. Without this practice, however prospective your career might be, however much you may accumulate the wherewithal of a comfortable life, to whatever heights of authority you may have climbed through the exercise of intelligence, your gains shall be nothing, unless your every activity is suffused with the Divine purity, that is inherent in consciousness.