Life is too short to be spent in namby-pambyness about little loves and little gains, shedding tears over selfish dreams, worldliness cloaked in a spiritual garb fooling the populace with tinsel stuff and hiding from them the message of the Self within. Oh, life is too brief a while to be so idled away chasing futile dreams that end in death! Poetry need not be of the senses hither, the rhythms can be transcendent too. What glory is in glorifying bondage, this terrible state of servility? He who has tasted the elixir of freedom will never rest content with rambling within bounds. This body is despicable when it caters to sensuality and this body becomes one's greatest helpmate when it serves to raise the spiritual consciousness of man. But again and again may I forewarn readers not to confuse spirituality with worldliness for the latter wears many a garb to entice man into error and man learns not from his follies such is the web it weaves about the entrapped soul. Swami Vivekananda had warned humanity against false prophets who try to harmonise worldliness with spirituality. He had repeatedly said that the flesh had nothing to do with the Spirit and that body-consciousness was the fundamental impediment to attainment of freedom. This cage of flesh and bones must not be given so much credence that it gains ascendancy over the discriminating faculty and covers up our perception of the Divine. The body is necessary for Self-realisation for it strangely offers the channel of liberation along the spinal column before the rising tide of consciousness dispels the very notion of the body itself. Paradoxical it may seem to the rationalist but then who ever said that Truth was in any way obligated to satisfy his little reasoning? I came as a body, so they say and so I faintly remember, but I pass out as the Spirit. Free am I of any bondage, no fetter binds me, no love, no hate attaches me to aught of earth. I am the radiant Self whose ends there are none. Limitless, boundless, infinite am I, nor small nor large but a wholesomeness envelopes me, a solidity of existence, a concentrated, integrated sense that eludes expression in words or images but enfolds within its being a density of unitary consciousness. It is not oneness or twoness or manifoldness that is perceived but a transcendence of the alphabet, a surpassing of numerals, a passage to the beyond where thoughts and words reach not yet coalesce to resolve into the deeper entity that is the core consciousness. To reach this state and be free is the goal of religion, nay, the very end of life itself, and any attempt made by any that stands in the way of such realisation is perfidious to humanity. So, false prophets, beware! Your hour is up. Do not seek to pose to be the liberators of men when in heavy chains you lie in bondage yourselves. Likewise, men of letters, do not play the truant's role to spoil the one chance of men to seek the bliss of freedom by holding out promises of primrose dreams before them that will vaporise in the first rays of the morning sun. Better the hard knocks of life's experience than the soft dewy drops of lilting love doled out by poets and musicians for the sunlit moment of life followed by the decadence and decay of a festering death. Better far is manliness as the guide in life, virility and virtue as the ridgepoles of life than soft and sensitive stuff that go to paralyse the system and render life spiritually sterile. The essence of existence is the Spirit. As such spirituality ought to be the guiding principle in life, its attainment the great end of evolution and impediments in the way of its free flow the great bane of earthly living. May the Mother guard us against Her ceaseless charms! May the Mother lead us on to Her abode of beatitude where all is pure, all is holy and all is free of the taint of worldliness!
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