Many aspirants begin their spiritual journey with great enthusiasm but somewhere along the way, they slow down or get confused. GURUDEVSHRI RAKESHBHAI says the pause helps you scrutinise your religious activities and understand your true intentions.
Pursuit of liberation begins with a desire for it.However, one wonders if man has the genuine desire for it.He is easily satisfied doing a few religious activities, and although he expects liberation, he lacks a genuine desire for it. Generally, one eats food when one feels hungry. But in our modern-day pseudo-lifestyle, meal times are fixed. You never ask the body whether it is hungry or not.You know it is time to eat, so you eat. Such ‘hunger’ can be false. Mere thinking about mealtimes can make you falsely believe that you are hungry. Try this experiment.Ask someone at home to turn the clock to make it an hour early so it shows 1 pm, your regular mealtime, when it is actually noon. Looking at the clock, you will spontaneously feel hungry! Now, try making it an hour late so it shows noon when it is actually 1 pm. On that day, you will feel hungry later! If looking at the clock determines your hunger,your hunger is artificial;it is not real.It is only a mental need,not physical.In the same way,religious activities without a yearning for liberation are only mental demands, not the need of the soul; they are emotional outbursts triggered by external circumstances.
You want both
Dig a little deeper into your desire for light and you will realise that you want both, the illumination of enlightenment and the darkness of worldliness. On the one hand, you say you don’t need the world, that you want only the bliss of the soul.Yet, for happiness, you run towards the world. In short, you don’t wish to become free from darkness, yet you wait for illumination to happen. Don’t you realise that without wanting to remove the darkness,you cannot light your lamp? First, realise that you actually want darkness alone.You have always hoped to acquire joy from darkness alone and fear that illumination will shatter your dream world.You love worldliness alone, yet you believe, and make others believe that you want liberation. You speak of liberation but to become happy, instead of bringing changes in yourself, you try changing the world.You speak of liberation only to comfortably live in the world. How will you light the lamp if you are so attached to darkness? Even if someone tries to light it for you, you soon blow it out.Even when someone shows compassion towards you, it does not make a difference.
(To be continued)
