Eppavō muḍinda kāriyam. The work was finished long ago.
Notice where Yogaswami places the completion — not ahead of you, but behind you, before time. That is the whole force of it. The seeking mind lives bent toward the future: one day I will be free, one day the practice will ripen, one day I will reach Śiva. Lack now, fullness later. That bent posture is itself the suffering. And Yogaswami, who could be thunderous, takes that posture and breaks it over his knee. The fullness is not later. It was never later.
"Long ago" is almost a tenderness, almost a joke. He points you to the past to pry your fingers off the future — but he does not mean some moment in history when the thing got done. He means the timeless, the now in which nothing is pending, nothing is owed, nothing is on its way. There is no deadline in eternity. The work is not going to be finished. It is finished, and the "when" of it dissolves the instant you look straight at it.
And what is this work? In the ordinary telling it is the soul's long labor — lifetimes of effort, the slow climb back to God. But the deeper word the lineage carries, where Siddhanta touches Pratyabhijñā, is that the soul was never truly cast out. The separation was a forgetting, a dream of distance. You did not fall away from Śiva and must now scale your way back; you only seemed to. So there is no real labor of liberation — there is the recognition that the labor was never needed. It is finished because it was never unfinished. Śiva did nothing to become free. Śiva is freedom, and you are That, and That cannot be earned because it was never lost.
Think of Siva's dance. Creation, preservation, dissolution, the veiling and the grace — to us it unrolls as a story in time, scene after scene, and we feel ourselves stranded somewhere in the middle, still waiting for the end. But the dance is whole in every instant. The whole arc, first gesture to last, is held in a single timeless motion. From inside the dance it looks as though we are going somewhere. From the still center of it, it is already entire.
This is why he could say summa iru — be still. Not the stillness of giving up, but the stillness of one who has no more distance to cross. You can rest because the ground you are straining toward is the ground already under your feet. It is why there is not even one thing wrong: this moment, even unfinished, even aching, even uncertain — especially that — is already resting inside the completion. The outcome you are reaching for is not a prize at the end of the road. It is the road, and the reaching, and the one who reaches.
So when life feels most unfinished — most in the middle, most unresolved — that is exactly the moment the saying is for. Not to make you stop walking, but to take the dread out of the walk. It is all finished long ago. You were never building your way toward the whole. You were always inside it.