Greetings from Russell's Remnant:

The Teacher tells us to do our duty. What is our duty? Duty is dependent upon your consciousness. It is relative to your esoteric understanding. "You cannot possibly do everything that you see needs to be done; therefore, do that which will bring about the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of seeking souls." DN2 448 "A tiny handful of you have responded, sacrificed, and worked hard. The rest have been interested intellectually, but could not make the needed sacrifices, or refuse to put first things first - secondary issues occupied their lives." DN2 329 "Disciples who put many things and people before their duty and spiritual responsibilities do not put 'first things first'." DNA 725

"Devotion is no longer regarded as adequate. The war was won, not through devotion or attachment to some ideal; it was won by the simple performance of duty, and the desire to safeguard human rights." DN2 172 "Everyone you meet has some need. Give them your fullness. You have been taught much and walk somewhat in the light. Hence yours is the responsibility to understand, not theirs." DNA 478

One of the finest definitions of "Duty" was written by Sri Aurobindo. It reads: "For the whole point of the teaching, that which compels the disciple to seek the Teacher, is an inextricable clash of the various related conceptions of duty ending in the collapse of the whole useful intellectual and moral edifice erected by the human mind. In human life some sort of a clash arises fairly often, as for instance between domestic duties and the call of the country or the cause, or between the claim of the country and the good of humanity or some larger religious or moral principle. An inner situation may even arise, as with Buddha, in which all duties have to be abandoned, trampled on, flung aside in order to follow the call of the Divine within. I cannot think that the Gita would solve such an inner situation by sending Buddha back to his wife and father and the government of the Sakya State, or would direct a Ramakrishna to become a Pundit in a vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys their lessons, or bind down a Vivekananda to support his family and for that to follow dispassionately the law or medicine or journalism. The Gita does not teach the disinterested performance of duties but the following of the divine life, the abandonment of all Dharmas to take refuge in the Supreme alone. Although the Gita prefers action to inaction, it does not rule out the renunciation of works, but accepts it as one of the ways to the Divine. If that can only be attained by renouncing works and life and all duties and the call is strong within us, then into the bonfire they must go, and there is no help for it. The call of God is imperative and cannot be weighed against any other considerations."

"Duty is a relative term and depends upon our relation to others. It is a father's duty, as a father, to nurture, and educate his children; a lawyer's to do his best for his client even if he knows him to be guilty and his defense to be a lie; a soldier's to fight and shoot to order even if he kills his own kin and countrymen; a judge's to send the guilty to prison and hang the murderer. And so long as these positions are accepted, the duty remains clear, a practical matter of course even when it is not a point of honor or affection, and overrides the absolute religious or moral law. But what if the inner view is changed, if the lawyer is awakened to the absolute sinfulness of falsehood, the judge becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against humanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more than to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral law which is above all relative duties must prevail; and that law depends on no social relation or conception of duty but on the awakened inner perception of man, the moral being."

"There are in the world two different laws of conduct, each valid on its own plane. The rule principally dependent on external status and the rule independent of status and entirely dependent on the thought and conscience. The Gita does not teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower, it does not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social status. It calls us higher and not lower; from the conflict of the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness. It replaces the conception of social duty by a divine obligation." Essays on the Gita by Sri Aurobindo, pp. 29-32 . "With increased esoteric teaching comes increased exoteric responsibility." TWM 3

In June 1977 Russell Whitesell stated that Sri Aurobindo was 100 years ahead of his time. In his The Life Divine, he was by-passing the astral worlds and felt that most men could do it also. Russ argued that man cannot do that yet.