Craving for sense-enjoyment engenders helpless life
The life that has been vouchsafed to you, the body and mind which you
have been blessed with in life as also the materials that have been supplied to
you have been given to you for being utilized in the service of the Lord. The
utility of all these lies in devoting them exclusively to the service of the
Lord and he alone who devotes them to His service is a truly wise man.
On your devoting them to the service of the Lord you will be rewarded
with uninterrupted, endless, imperishable, transcendent and spiritual divine
joy; whereas on devoting them to luxuries you will derive transient joy and
will eventually meet with a fall and undergo suffering, meet with ruination and
suffer tortures in hell without end or limit. Knowing this to be inevitable and
certain, a man should devote every moment of his life and every possession of
his exclusively to the service of the Lord.
Comfort of body and publicity of name—all these are comprised in
luxuries alone, altogether neither the body nor the name constitutes the self,
your own being. The body is brought into being in the mother’s womb through
fertilization of her own ovum by the father generative fluid, and name of one’s
fancy is given to the foetus after it is born. The body continues even after
death and the name of the body too persists; but you, the spirit, depart from
the body. Consciousness enters the body becomes unconsciousness and dead. But
through infatuation you come to look upon the body and the name given to it as
the self—your own being. Hence you remain ever worried, struggling and active
for ensuring comfort to the body and perpetuating its name. It is to this end
that you make new scientific discoveries, expand your activities, popularize
various arts and crafts, extend factories for manufacturing ever new luxuries
and put forth endeavours of various kinds and grow happy and unhappy day and
night on meeting with success and reverses—can never be rid of dualities and
suffering.
Obsessed as you are with a craving for sense—enjoyment, you remain
restless, worried and confused in mind all your life—in the midst of success as
well as of failure.
The craving for sense gratification is an inexhaustible mine of evil. It
is for the satisfaction of this craving that you pursue the objects of the five
senses, viz., sound, touch, colour, taste and smell, make a scramble for office
or power and continue to put forth unremitting efforts, both justifiable and
unjustifiable, for money, and resort to bickering, friction and destruction in
launching schemes of individual and collective development, putting forth
efforts for the construction of railways and roadways, installation of
telegraphs, erection of buildings and manufacturing conveyances. The craving
for sense-gratification leads to numberless sins. That is why for the
satisfaction of your craving for sensuous enjoyment you perpetrate with your
body evils deeds resulting in sins, harbour egotism, self conceit, the sense of
possession, likes and dislikes, concupiscence, anger, greed, animosity,
violence etc, in the mind, utter with your tongue untruthful, unpalatable,
unkind, indecent, arrogant and useless words and words which are harmful to
yourself as well as to others and indulge in violence, adultery and immoral
practices, partake of prohibited foods and drinks, behave arrogantly, practise
inequity and perpetrate impious acts with your body. The root of all these evil
practises lies in your false identification with the body its name and your
ever-growing desire to ensure comfort of body and publicity of its name.
You breathe your last while engaged in thus making plans and rejecting
them—in a woeful plight of mental unrest. Instead of getting an opportunity of
being devoted to the service of the Lord, your life is frittered away in
useless, nay, evil pursuits. Therefore, waking up this very day, this very
instant, fulfil your life and make it fruitful by devoting every moment of it
and every activity of your body, speech and mind to the service of the Lord
alone.
- Craving for sense enjoyment engenders helpless life