NO COMPROMISE WITH UNTRUTH, PLEASE

We must not compromise with untruth by just getting a bit of peace by observing certain spiritual practices but we must get to the root of our very existence which in common parlance is called God. God-realisation is the goal of life and nothing short of it we should aspire for or rest content with having achieved. To do this we have to reflect on the purport of the scriptures, meditate on the message of the great sages and saints down the ages and scrupulously observe their instructions unto us. Only then will knowledge dawn on us and perennial peace dwell in our entire being. we shall become illumined and deathless free. Time will cease to flow for us the way it does for the entrapped being. We shall live in the eternity of existence absolute rendered relative though by the enlightened down-gradation into space-time where our terrestrial habitat yet is owing to the play of the residual karma which is yet to be exhausted in us. But such a terrestrial location shall only be of the apparent body-mind complex and not of the Self which enfolds all of phenomena and which we now have come to identify with. Ours will be a residence in the fine line of transition between the relative and the absolute with the relative merely working out our unspent karma as the absolute waits on for our final total absorption. All this is abstruse philosophy and cannot adequately be described in figurative terms or in linguistic mode of expression. It is so subtle a truth, this Vedanta which is the most refined in human thought and veritably transcends reason and intellectual bounds, that realisation in one's very core of being is the only way to apprehend it, comprehend it in its wholeness. Any attempt to express it otherwise using the vehicle of language is doomed to failure for the subtleties involved do not admit of such crudeness of articulation as language entails.

This then is the goal of human life, humanity's highest aspiration, the realisation of who we are. As such, ordinary religiosity will fall desperately short of the ideal to be reached even in this human body even as the body falls short of the ultimate realisation when the elements are transcended and the universe is cast off as a shadow insubstantial under the stellar shine of Absolute Truth. No compromise with truth in the name of routine ritualism, mythological make-believe or philosophical sophistry will be entertained by our inner nature in finality, for our very essence is of the essence of absolute truth. Hence, life is serious business where we have an errand to run, that of Self-realisation, and the moment it is achieved, we shall pack bag and baggage to go home, not to some eternal abode of sensory comfort and pleasure called heaven nor to some place of terrible torment called hell but we shall sink within our own being which is beyond the reaches of space-time and is the dimensionless eternity of absolute existence and transcendent consciousness. We must give up our terrible attachment to this plaything called life and all its concomitant consequences if we are to transcend change and its final earthly resolution, death. To overcome death, we have to renounce life and its labour in ignorance. That does not mean we must commit suicide of the body but it does mean that we must kill our desires, uproot them quite from the very source whence they spring into being and sublimate our passions so that the fetters that bind us fall off releasing us unto the finality of freedom.

Life must be taken seriously, utilised for this grand mission of realisation of the truth within us which is also the truth within Nature, and not idly wasted in chasing delectable dreams, fleeting fancies and pleasurable pursuits which will consume the fire of youth and render life sterile. Rather, there must be earnestness of approach, sincerity of effort and the unshakeable conviction in one's capacity to grow unto the realisation of the truth within our very heart. Doubts will assail the mind and render it ineffective in its bid to advance rapidly to the goal but the focus on the great task must not be weakened. Truth will shine but in its own season, never at our bidding but in the fullness of time. Till then we must keep the task which shall be our labour of love, for the fruit of it will be the discovery of who we are and our self-possession at that. Let all mundane maladies attached to our spiritual striving thus far be shed and let us march ahead with self-dignity unto the conquest of the summit of spirituality, our very Self. This is the sum and substance of the spiritual quest and let us not settle for anything short of it. Let us not compromise with unruth. Om!