Realize your true self and make human life fruitful
You are in no way better than a goat engaged in feeding
on green grass and mating with a she-goat and shortly going to fall a victim to the butcher’s knife. Employed as
you are at the present moment in various activities like eating and drinking,
enjoyment and merrymaking, looking after your children, maintaining your family
and attending to the interests of your kith and kin, preserving and promoting
your wealth and domination, elevating your position and authority, securing
your advancement and exaltation, development and publicity, you are not finding
time to examine your own self even for a moment. But know it for certain that
without giving any notice to you and paying not the less consideration to your
most urgent and momentous activity Death will overtake you all of a sudden and
put a dead stop all your activities.
The goat in butcher’s shambles is an animal. It does not
understand that only a few moments back another goat, young and robust like
it, has yielded to the butcher’s sharp-edged knife and that it is going to
meet the same fate. While the goat is an ignorant brute, you are a human being.
You at any rate ought to know that a
relation of your own has just to meet the same fate and then all your relationships
with all that is spoken of or recognized as yourself or your own will be
dissolved.
A
wise man is he knows that along with his birth his death has to come into being
and that he is continuing to die every moment, that the final touch
of death will surely put an end to him, so that he has to get ready for his next
birth or take effective steps to secure riddance from the cycle of birth and
death for all time to come.
Your present birth is the only chapter of the book of long and
dateless life. Your body is but a bead of the rosary of deaths. It is not self.
Your real self is eternally distinct from it. This material body alone, not the
conscious spirit, an eternal spark of the supreme spirit, who is all truth,
Consciousness and Bliss. It is because you have forgotten your essential nature
as a spark of God or as a spiritual being that you have identified yourself
with a body which is subject to birth and death and have got involved in the
inevitable yet the false cycle of birth and death.
A human body is vouchsafed to you only in order that you
may recognize that real spiritual self of yours—attain your eternal and true
life, which constitutes your very nature. You are however, so steeped in self-oblivion—so
identified with and rooted in the objective Nature—that do it even the
question of knowing and recognizing yourself never arises in your mind. You never
pause to inquire as to who you are, where you have come from, in what relation
you stand with the body and name, what connection there exists and how between
you and living beings and objects which you call your own and to which you are
attached and the place to which you are destined to go after leaving the body
and so on. How great is your infatuation! Under the spell of this very
infatuation you are employing all your reason and critical acumen—which distinguish
a human being from the brute – not only in attaining to the level of beasts but
in developing the tendency to get transformed into a fiend and ogre, and
consider the object of your life accomplished thereby.
This deplorable state of yours is forging for your
destiny which is terribly gloomy, bristling with endless infernal tortures,
full of suffering and disquietude, and consisting of a series of deaths. Therefore
wake up betimes. Employ your judgement in working your true evolution rather
than in bringing about your ruin. Realize your true self, which is a spark of
God, spiritual in essence, and make your human life fruitful.