On Mind-Control :5.

21. The mind is a great mystery. It can deceive you every moment and tell you everything is wrong – nothing is good anywhere, everybody is foolish, the world is a devil's abode and it is better to be rid of it. It will go on telling all kinds of things; yet, till the last moment of your breath, the desire to live long will not leave you. You may be a patient with incurable disease, utterly poverty stricken, but you would like to continue the existence in this body as much as possible. Nobody would like to abolish the personality, destroy one's individuality, negate one's existence.

22. What is it that you are longing for? Stories of this kind, analyses of this nature, will tell you that again here is a contradiction in your life. Your opinion about people and the world, and sometimes about your own predicament, contradicts the endless longing that you maintain within yourself for anything and everything. Death is a terror. Nothing can be worse than that, because it is the end of your existence. You will tolerate the end of anything that you possess, but you cannot tolerate the end of your being.

23. So, your affection centralises itself later on into a pin-pointed existence of your own location: "I must be; I do not want anything else. Let the world go, let all things leave me, but may I live long, may I persist, may I exist for ever and ever."

24. Who generates this feeling of endless longing, if not that which is your real nature? What kind of longing is this? In the beginning it is very nebulous and not clear to your mind. That is why you cannot answer the question of why you want to live long. There is no why for it; it is there, and it has to be accepted. For the final issue, there is no why. Whatever be your situation in this world, you would like to live for any number of years. Even if you are granted a blessing of ten thousand years of living, that cannot satisfy you because when you are completing the tenure of 9,999 years, the fear will strike you that only one year is left – as powerful as the fear of death would be if you were to pass away earlier. So, length in life is not the solution, because how long will that length of life continue? It will end one day.

25. When the great seeker Nachiketas was offered longest life and all the glories of the world by the great master Yama, Nachiketas' reply was: api sarvam jivitam alpameva, tavaiva vahas tava nrityagite: "The longest life is short when it comes to an end." There is no such thing as long life because when it ends, it is short. So, what do you mean by saying that you want to live long?

26. Here again is a psychological contradiction before us. Actually, what insists on our continuing for a long time is not this body calling for a persistent existence, because the mind is clever enough to know that the body cannot last long. But, it wants to accumulate certain features that will give it the satisfaction of living long.

27. The central feature of this longing is the longing to have our own selves. "Know thyself and be free." Though we hear these admonitions a hundred times, we will make the common mistake of identifying the Self with this so-called person seated here: "Let me know my Atman." You will say "my Atman," as if you are going to possess it as a property. If the Atman is to be possessed by you, it stands outside you, like an object, like any other thing in the world. If you are going to possess the Atman, then who are you? Other than the Atman is the anatman. Anatman is non-existence. Is non-existence trying to possess existence? Here is again a contradiction in our thinking.

28. Great discrimination, vairagya, is called for. Easily do we mistake the principle of vairagya. So many sadhus are there, so many vairagis are there. They have all renounced everything. You may ask a vairagi: You have renounced everything; what are the things that you have renounced?

29. The immediate, quick reply may be: "I possess nothing. I have left everything that I had earlier. I have left the world; therefore, I have completed my renunciation."

30. If you have abandoned the world, where are you standing now? Are you sitting in the sky? Standing on the ground that is the earth, you are saying that you have renounced it. The world blows a breeze of various types on your personality every moment, saying that you cannot renounce the world, unless you renounce yourself first. The renouncer has to renounce himself, so that the renunciation may become complete.

Continues......