Awake! Arise!

You must tread the spiritual path with an uncontrollable urge to reach the Goal; you must cultivate the yearning for liberation from all this encumberance. Remember that you have to dwell in a house built on four stout pillars: dharma, artha, kaama, and moksha (righteousness, wealth, desire and liberation); Dharma supporting artha, and moksha being the only kaama or desire. However much you may earn either wealth or strength, unless you tap the springs of aananda (bliss) within you, you cannot have peace and lasting content. There is Sathyathwa, Nithyathwa (reality of truth and eternity) in you; you need not earn them from anyone else. The four pillars of Purushaartha (goals of human effort) are made firm and stable by fixing them on the bedrock of the Nithya Sathya Thathwa (reality of eternal truth) in every man, the Divine in fact, on which the human is superimposed.

Maanava (man) means a person who has no trace of ignorance! And so, if you seek to deserve that name, you must remove it by incessant activity, moved by good impulses. But, while your efforts are little, your expectations are great. Your achievement is little, your boast is great. When some one asked a water carrier whether his leather bag was clean, he replied, “It is cleaner than the bag into which you pour the water.” Look to the inner purity rather than the outer one. Examine yourself, do not venture to judge others. Search for the pearl, not the shell; the gem, not the tinsel.

Everyone can achieve Moksha

You must have heard of people seeking moksha (liberation) and getting moksha; many may be under the impression that it is some rare honour that only a few secure or that it is some area like Paradise or a Colony of the Elect or a Height that some heroic souls alone can climb up to. No; moksha is something which all must achieve, whether they are heroic or not; even those who deny it have to end by realising it. For, everyone is even now seeking it when he seeks joy and peace; and, who does not seek joy and peace? Moksha is when you have lasting joy and lasting peace. Tired with temporary joys and transient peace, man will at last endeavour to know the secret of permanent joy and peace, that is to say, of Moksha, Liberation from the cycle of birth and death.

If only men knew the path to permanent joy and peace, they will not wander distracted among the bye-lanes of sensual pleasure. Just as the joy felt in dreams disappears when you wake, the joy felt in the waking stage disappears when you wake into the higher awareness, called Jnaana. So, the Upanishads say, “Get up, arise, awake”; time is fleeing fast. Use the moment while it is available, for the best of uses, the awareness of the Divine in all. When you die, you must die not like a tree or a beast or a worm, but, like a Man who has realised that he is Maadhava (God). That is the consummation of all the years you spend in the human frame.

This essential teaching is absent in modern curricula; men and women live many years without knowing the secret of joyful, peaceful living. The educated are today more discontented than the uneducated, whereas they ought really to be calmer and less subject to agitations of the mind. Education today is a thin veneer that heightens egoism and hypocrisy.

All are travellers to God

Someone was found writing “pepper” on a tin of sugar and when asked the reason, he said, “It is only to cheat the ants”! The label “education” on the present system of teaching and training the young cannot cheat any thinking person, who looks for the real purpose of education: the unfolding of the Divine in human personality. Humility and an attitude of reverence are essential for man. They are not promoted by the educational process of today; the processes recommended in the Upanishads ensured these two.

“Revere the mother as Divine; revere the father as Divine; revere the teacher as Divine; revere the guest as Divine”, they exhorted. Every one has the Divine in him; so no one should be slighted or neglected. The parents who gave you this wonderful chance to realise the reality and the teacher who opened your eyes to the treasure within you, the guest who gave you the splendid chance to render service to the living embodiment of God right in your very home, all have to be revered, and served with humility. The educated man is like the man who asks for a ticket at the booking office of a railway station, but does not know to which place he is going! But all men are travellers, pilgrims rather, to God, who is drawing them to Him.