Harmony at Work

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(Excerpted from Swami Kriyananda’s Knowledge, Inspiration, and Energy, Lesson 3 of Success and Happiness through Yoga Principles)

For those who want to follow well-worn paths, familiarity with what has been done before is important. This is the path of tradition, which to a great extent means a path of imitation. To follow this path, one needs knowledge, but doesn’t particularly need inspiration or energy. For success in any tradition, one needs the necessary education taught by people competent to instruct others in the basic “rules of the game.”

I remember the organist at the church where my mother’s funeral was held. The purpose of the ceremony was to comfort the bereaved and to send blessings to the departed. The organist’s job was simply to play a piece of music for the event. What I asked her to play was a composition of my own. She was graceless enough to tell me that she wouldn’t play it because, as she pointed out firmly, “This melody doesn’t end on the tonic note.” In fact she was right according to the “rules of the game.” Had she played the piece first, however, and listened with her heart, she would have seen that, in this case, she was wrong.

In musical tradition, a melody must end on the tonic, which is the first note of the scale. There is a good reason for this tradition: If a piece doesn’t end on that note, the listener will wonder, “What statement is being made here?” Had that lady really listened to the piece, however, instead of merely looking at it printed out on a music sheet, she would have understood that the mood of this particular melody was not to make a statement, but to ask a question.

I should conclude that little story by saying that I did persuade her to play this music since it was my own mother’s death we were commemorating. Though she relented at last, it was grudgingly!

The difficulty with following any set of rules too rigidly is that one rarely if ever asks the simple question, “Why?” In Nazi Germany, many basically good people accepted Hitler’s hate-filled slogans; they even repeated them fervently, themselves. Such is the power of mass suggestion. People were not willing to oppose what was popular. Had they withdrawn into themselves even a little bit, and separated their understanding from the mass hypnosis around them, many would have been horrified at what they were endorsing. People tend to view discrimination as less important than acceptance by their contemporaries.

Tradition represents “the done thing”: the endorsement of long usage. Such endorsement is proffered unquestioningly. People who go that route often reject new ideas, even in anger, simply because “That just isn’t done.” The danger of this policy is that it gains an obsessive momentum of its own. It urges people not to question generally approved premises, nor ever to think for themselves.

Years ago, I served on the board of directors—and was also the vice president—of a large corporation. The president once said to me, “Our focus must be on centralizing the work.”

“I agree,” I answered. “Centralized authority is, in many cases, a necessity. It seems to me, however, that there is a need also for decentralization. People who live and work far from the center of things won’t feel encouraged to serve intelligently if they aren’t listened to. Besides, their understanding of the local scene may be clearer, sometimes, than anything that can be achieved at a distance. To be unresponsive to those needs might have a discouraging effect.”

The president replied peremptorily: “The Board feels differently. Don’t you think you should go along with the Board?” The fact that I, too, was on the Board, and was also the vice president, didn’t seem to count. She wanted rubber stamp approval from all of us. For this style of leadership, a board of directors is hardly necessary. It is one of the best ways to corporate paralysis.

Another Board member, much senior to me, told me after I’d been “elected” (in rubber stamp fashion) to high position, “In a corporation, no one has a right even to think except the members of the board of directors.” The way of tradition, of society, of the world and its leaders, and of people to whom success means glorious mediocrity, the rule—though rarely expressed so blatantly—is, “Don’t think at all.” Fortunately for me, that “Board” came to realize something I didn’t, which was that I simply didn’t “belong.”

Years ago, an interesting experiment was performed in psychology classes at various American universities. Two lines were drawn on a blackboard, the upper one being slightly longer than the lower one. Students were then separated into groups of five. In advance of the experiment itself, four members of each group were instructed to say that the lower line was the longer.

When all five were assembled for the test, the first four were asked, “Which of those lines is the longer?” and they responded dutifully, “The lower one.” In an astonishing eighty percent of the groups, the fifth member, when asked that question, gave the same verdict: “The lower one is the longer.” What emerged from that experiment was the discovery that most people, even among the educated, support more or less any opinion that is held by the majority. Rarely will they champion a different idea unless they feel confident that there exists somewhere another, and generally larger, body of opinion. They dare not say what they can see with their own eyes to be true!

A story is told, perhaps apocryphally, of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who (as you probably know) was for some years the president of the United States of America. The story is that one time, in his younger days, he attended a cocktail party. There, he moved among the guests, saying to each person he encountered, “I just killed my mother.”

No one really heard or listened to him. (Few do, on those occasions.) The responses he got were interesting. “Really!” said one. “How wonderful. You must tell me about it some time.” Another one cried, “How interesting! I wish I could say I’d done as much!” Another remarked with enthusiasm, “Well, I must say it’s high time someone did something about it!”

What I am saying here is that most people treat whatever they know as though it were information programmed on a computer. What many people gain from education is, essentially, only that: information. They learn the “rules of the game,” and any success they achieve in life comes largely from repeating what they’ve been taught. Success of this sort demands only the intelligent use of knowledge. For the sort of success, however, which serves real needs and brings satisfaction to oneself, one must enhance that knowledge with energy, which, if used intelligently, gives rise to inspiration.

I am writing these lessons for that small twenty percent who think for themselves. Such were the people who in that psychology experiment might have answered: “But that’s absurd! Can’t you see that the upper line is the longer?” Lacking the courage to think for oneself, one cannot achieve that kind of success which provides true satisfaction. To the student of this course I say, Don’t go along with the “norm” to the extent that you’ll never dare to stand up for what you really believe.

Success, to be really meaningful, means more than a stable income: It means inner happiness and satisfaction. There is nothing so ultimately dissatisfying as the lackluster quality of mediocrity. Yet mediocrity is all one will achieve if what he learns in school is not combined with inspiration and energy.

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