You spend a great deal of time in SciMonk, thinking about consciousness. It’s a necessary journey, perhaps the ultimate one: this inward quest to understand the “I” that perceives.
And yet…
Does this focus, as vital as it is, sometimes feel like a luxury? Most of your lived, waking existence isn’t spent in pristine meditation. It’s spent out there. It is a messy, visceral entanglement with two overwhelming forces: nature and society.
This is where a profound sense of unease might begin for you. You’ve likely been taught to draw a sharp, violent line between them. This is the infamous nature-culture dualism, a philosophy that has given you so much progress and so much destruction. It’s the idea that humanity is here, and nature is out there, a wild, separate “other” to be tamed, controlled, and ultimately, exploited for the good of man.
It is a philosophy of profound separation. And you have to wonder if this original, intellectual viyoga, this “dis-union,” is the first crack from which all your other anxieties flow.
They gave an origin story for this.
Think of Adam and Eve in the garden. When God said not to eat the fruit of the tree, it was a simple instruction. But along came the serpent. Eve, influenced, ate. You are taught this is the fall, the original sin.
But what if this isn’t ancient history? What if it’s your story, a perfect, repeating allegory for your own mind? What if Satan is not some external, horned creature, but the internal, insistent voice of your own uncontrolled desire? It is the part of you that hears “no” and immediately, magnetically, is attracted to the “yes.”
And what is it attracted to? The “Phala.”
The fruit.
This is where you can trace a different map.
Long before biblical stories, Indian philosophy takes this exact same word, Phala (fruit), and clubs it inseparably with Karma (action). It becomes Karmaphala, the fruit of action.
This isn’t a simple parallel to Christian thought. The logic is different. It’s not about sin and divine judgment. In Indian darshanas, this is a non-religious, almost mechanical law of the universe. It is as inevitable as gravity. If you perform an action, there will be a result. The Phala is bound to the Karma.
Here, your predicament is laid bare. Karma is an essential right. To be alive is to act. As Krishna says to a collapsing Arjuna on the battlefield, “Karmanyadhikaaraste”: in Karma, in action, is your right. It is the one thing nature has given you.
But then comes the sentence that has confounded seekers for millennia.
Your right is only to the action. The Phala, the fruit, is something not in your hand.
And then, the almost impossible instruction for an ordinary guy: Let not your being turn into one that seeks results, nor let yourself fuse with the comfort of inaction.
This is the very essence of Karma Yoga: the path of “union through action.” It is a call to act with complete, focused, 100% commitment, while simultaneously renouncing all internal claim to the outcome. You unite your thought and your action, and you find your freedom in the doing, not in the getting.
It’s a beautiful idea, isn’t it? Perfect.
And it is the absolute, polar opposite of the world you live in.
Your society, your very sense of self, does not begin with Yoga (union). It begins, and is powered by, Viyoga (separation).
What if the whole process of creation itself is Viyoga? For anything to exist, for you and I to be “us,” we must first be separated from the whole. Existence, by its very nature, is a “dis-union” from the source.
If you are born from Viyoga, you are born into it. You experience this separation not as a high-level metaphysical concept, but as a constant, low-grade ache in the core of your being. You call it loneliness, anxiety, insecurity, or longing. The Buddhists have the most precise word for it: Dukkha.
Dukkha is not directly about “suffering.” It is a deeper “dissatisfaction,” the friction of being dislocated, the feeling of being separate from a desired object.
And this… this Dukkha… is the fuel that runs your world.
This, then, could be called Karma Viyoga. It is the path of action, yes, but it is action driven entirely by separation.
In this model, your Karma is not a free expression of duty. It is your frantic, desperate attempt to build a bridge across the chasm of your Viyoga so you can seize the Phala on the other side. You are haunted by the belief that if you can just get that fruit (that promotion, that partner, that validation, that revolution), your Dukkha will finally cease. The separation will end. You will be made whole.
You are, of course, perpetually disappointed. The Phala is never as sweet as you imagined, or it rots, or you immediately see a new, better Phala on a more distant tree. And the Viyoga remains.
This is your individual experience. But how does this scale up from your personal anxiety to… say, a revolution?
The whole Viyoga process appears to happen and complete through a leader in a society.
A truly effective leader isn’t just someone with a good idea. A true leader is a kind of high-level psychic, someone who intuitively understands the deep, collective Viyoga of the people. They don’t just see the problem; they feel the Dukkha. They feel the shared dissatisfaction.
And then, they articulate a Phala. They paint a picture of a fruit so bright, so perfect, that it promises to end the Dukkha for everyone, all at once.
When a leader stands up and says, “We will create a society where everyone is equal,” this promise acts like a black hole, a massive gravitational force pulling on the Viyoga of millions.
Why do people get so attracted? Why are they willing to dedicate their lives, and often their deaths, to this idea? It is because they have the intimate, daily, painful experience of the Dukkha of in-equality. They have been dominated. They have felt the sting of the upper class, the shame of injustice. They are in a profound state of Viyoga: separation from the justice they long for.
This is precisely how the great, world-changing ideologies were born. Societies built on socialism or communism are textbook examples of Karma Viyoga.
But all the before and after stories would be based on this principle only.
Here is an interesting story, starting with Karl Marx.
Marx lived during the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, a time of massive social upheaval. He spent years in London, not just as an abstract philosopher, but as a journalist and economist, factually documenting the brutal conditions of the new factory system.
What he observed and recorded was a new kind of human misery. He described how a factory worker, unlike an artisan of the past, was completely separated from the product he created. The worker might spend 14 hours a day simply pulling a lever, making one tiny part of a whole he would never own and couldn’t afford.
Marx used the technical term “alienation” for this, a concept that is a precise fit for what this article calls Viyoga.
He factually documented this separation on multiple levels. He described the Viyoga from the product, where the worker’s labor was a commodity and the “fruit” of that labor (Phala) belonged entirely to the factory owner. He also detailed the Viyoga from the self, as the worker sold his time and creative energy, becoming a “cog in the machine” and separated from his own human agency. Finally, he identified the Viyoga from others, showing how the economic system itself pitted worker against owner in what he termed a “class struggle,” creating a fundamental separation between human beings.
This widespread social condition was a massive, collective Dukkha. Marx’s historical contribution was to analyze this condition and then propose a solution. The Phala (fruit) he offered was a “classless society,” a world where workers would collectively own the “means of production.” The Karma (action) he famously advocated for in The Communist Manifesto was revolution. This idea became a powerful “attraction towards action” that, as history clearly shows, fundamentally reshaped the 20th century.
But Marx’s was not the only response to this Dukkha. Consider the story of Robert Owen, a contemporary and one of the founders of utopian socialism. Owen was a factory owner himself in New Lanark, Scotland. He saw the exact same squalor, child labor, and misery as Marx. He saw the same Viyoga.
His historical response, however, prescribed a different Karma. He didn’t call for revolution. He believed the Phala of a better society could be achieved through reason and reform. Factually, Owen transformed his own factory town: he stopped employing young children, opened the first infant school in Britain, paid fair wages, and built decent housing. He used his own life and resources to demonstrate that the Dukkha of industrial capitalism was not inevitable. His Karma was “cooperation” and “education,” an attempt to build the Phala directly.
Now, let’s turn this lens to India’s story.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, faced a different historical reality. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, heavily influenced by British Fabian socialism. But he was also the political heir to Mahatma Gandhi, who spoke in the language of dharma.
When Nehru surveyed India in 1947, he was confronted with a staggering, twofold Dukkha. First was the obvious Viyoga of colonization: an entire nation separated from its right to self-rule, its economy structured to benefit a foreign empire. Second was the deep internal Viyoga: a society fractured by the caste system, immense poverty, and illiteracy, a land of profound inequality.
As the leader of the new nation, Nehru harnessed this collective Viyoga. The Phala he offered was twofold: First, “Purna Swaraj” (Complete Independence), which was the goal of the freedom struggle. Second, he offered the Phala of a “socialistic pattern of society,” to be achieved through the Karma of state-led industrialization, five-year plans, and secular state-building. Millions were attracted to this promise of a modern, equal, independent India.
Decades passed. Nehru’s vision was partially built, but like all Phalas, it did not end the national Dukkha. Poverty and inequality remained. And a different, deeper Viyoga began to gain political force.
This was a feeling of separation not just from wealth, but from identity. A sense that in the post-colonial rush to build a “modern” (and Western-style) state, something essential to India’s civilizational identity had been dismissed or lost.
This brings us to the historical rise of Narendra Modi. His political journey succeeded by articulating this specific Dukkha. He and his former counterparts spoke to a large population that felt separated from its pre-colonial past and religious-cultural roots.
A key part of this narrative is that in the Indian context, many core philosophical concepts were hidden or distorted during the British colonial era through mistranslations. This is a historical fact. The colonial project required an intellectual justification. British administrators and scholars, such as Thomas Macaulay, actively argued for an education system that would create a class of Indians “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
This policy meant that profound concepts like Dharma (one’s righteous path and duty) were often reduced to the English word “religion” (a box to be ticked). Karma Yoga (liberated action) was often portrayed as “fatalism” or “passivity,” an argument used to claim Indians were unfit to rule themselves. This colonial-era education system created a Viyoga between the Indians and their own intellectual traditions.
Modi’s political movement tapped directly into this wound. Idealistically he aimed at Phalas aimed at healing this Viyoga of cultural identity.
The Karma is this powerful wave of cultural nationalism. And so, today, you see this massive “happening of work.” Actions are happening in people everywhere. But because this, too, is born from Viyoga, a separation from a lost past, it has uncertainty.
This is the way of the world. The happening of work is Viyoga. History is collective dissatisfaction, a lurching, chaotic dance from one Phala to the next.
All above examples are of Dharmic or rightful ways thinkers and leaders used to understand Dukkha and try to end it. However, there is an another side of the story which we will discuss in upcoming articles.
Remember Hitler, Mao, etc. ? We will discuss them in our upcoming articles. So don’t go anywhere and keep reading Environment and Society and SciMonk.
So, where does that leave you? Is this it? Are you doomed to live in this frantic state of Karma Viyoga, forever chasing fruits to soothe an unsoothable ache? Is all societal progress just a side effect of your own incompleteness?
This brings us back to that impossible directive. Back to Krishna on the battlefield.
The control of this attraction process towards action is Karma Yoga.
This, it seems, is the entire key. It’s the synthesis. You cannot wish away your Viyoga. You are born and raised into it. The Dukkha of injustice is not an illusion; it is a real, felt experience. The attraction to the Phala of a better, more just world is a natural, human, and perhaps even noble impulse.
Karma Viyoga is when this attraction controls you. You become a slave to the Phala. Your peace, your identity, your very soul are mortgaged against that future result. And if you fail, or if the Phala is achieved and it still doesn’t heal you… you are broken. This is the revolutionary who becomes a tyrant, the nationalist who becomes a zealot. They are prisoners of their own Viyoga.
Karma Yoga is the act of mastering this process, even while you are in the thick of it.
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