1: The Arduous Task of Self-Analysis : 3.

The whole of man’s life happens to be, unfortunately, a series of inward adjustments that he makes for outward collaboration and coordination with people around for struggling to exist. And, as I mentioned to you a few minutes before, the winds of the world carry us in the direction they blow, not caring for our private fancies. To the extent we affirm our personalities and individualities and keep our eyes closed to the direction in which the winds of the world blow, we shall live a helpless life of subjection and slavery to circumstances.


Spiritual life, the so-called religious aspiration, is a gradual tending of one’s soul to the freedom of the spirit. Religion is freedom; spirituality is that. But we are not free in any sense of the term. We are not free either physically, physiologically or psychologically. Physiologically we are utter subjects to the workings of the heart, the brain, the nervous system, the circulatory organs, etc., over which functions we have absolutely no control. We have no power even over our own bodies. We also have no power over the social circumstances of life, though we apparently seem to be exerting some sort of an influence on our atmosphere. The world has a plan of its own, and to the extent we are unable to understand this plan or the purpose of the world, to the very same extent we shall also be failures in our life. Success is not a consequence of self-affirmation, but a result of participation in the purposes of the world, the intentions of nature as a whole.


The more you affirm yourself individually and throw your opinions on others, compelling others to accept your opinions, the more is the setback and the retaliation that will bounce back upon you on account of a larger power which has its say in every matter of life in the world. Lastly, we leave this world in utter humiliation, defeated root and branch, and seeing that not one of our personal intentions has succeeded in life. Everything has been a frustration. Everyone has to leave this world with a yawning mouth, with a blank look and with a hopeless sense of utter defeatism.


But the arguments of religions and the requirements of spiritual life have been admonishing us that we are not destined to go from this world with such a sort of defeat inflicted upon us, but with a little bit of satisfaction that we have contributed a modicum of might to the progress of the purpose of the world, the intentions of nature, the law of the universe. An awakening into the status of spirituality or religion is a degree of participation that we effect in the purposes of the world because we belong to the world. The world does not belong to us to such an extent. It is a larger whole to which we organically belong as parts, and it is unwise on the part of a fraction to expect the cooperation of the whole to which we belong, as a limb of our body should not expect a complete transformation of the purposes of the entire body to accede to the requests or demands of a particular limb. The part always obeys the whole in every level of life.

To  be  continued   ....