Kindle Notes & Highlights
The Law of Nature is that you should not stand still in any position: you should go on: march on and on. Be not subject to inertia or averse to change and progress.
Here is selfishness marvellously increased, here is a strange kind of selfishness. The wide world is my Self: the universe is the Self of this man: the wide world, the lowest creature, minerals, vegetable, the Self of all these becomes the Self of this man.
These people look down upon and pity the begging spirit of the so-called wealthy, who go abegging at the door of the flesh, at the door of carnal pleasures. Pleasure is within you. There you can get it. The whole treasure is within you. Then why play the part of the beggar and go about in a miserable plight, in a sad state, and behave like a pitiable atom?
You know before bringing out logic to bear upon a theme, we ought to understand what the proposition is.
the very capability of changing implies that it is not real.
Of what elements is your wakeful experience composed? Your wakeful experience rests upon time, space, and causality.
the subject and object make their appearance simultaneously.
These very words of yours show that you are the master of the intellect, the owner of the brain and the ruler of the mind.
the glory of the real Self are, by mistake, attributed to the mortal body. There is ignorance at the root.
Here we see that ignorance is in man, and that divine spirit is in man, and the body is also in man. These things are internal; none of them is external, none of them is outside your range.
Tf you want to realize Vedanta, realize it even in the midst of all sorts of noise, even in the heat of all sorts of troubles. In this world you can never, never get yourself in a state where there will be no noise or no botherations from without.
You are driving out time by your desires, you are killing time, and yet you say you have no time. How is that?
If you could prevent those peculiar oscillations, if you could overcome that inner disturbance, if you resist or bring under control that meditation or that continuous vibration of the mind, that palpitation; if you could overcome it, your life would be the life of millions of men.
The great cause of suffering in the world is that"we do not look within, we do not form our own opinions, we take matters too much on trust, we rely on outside forces to do our thinking". What other people say we take for granted, and we do not look within; we do not rely on our own stamina. In addition to belief in Mohammed, Buddha or Krishna, we have created all sorts of fetishes before which we bow. Any child can criticize our conduct and that is sufficient to throw us off our balance, and cause us suffering. We care too much for the criticisms and opinions of others; we spend too much time
...more
Why should you consider yourself dependent on God, Christ, Mohammad, Buddha, Krishna, or any of the saints of this world? Free you are, each and all. The idea of freedom brought home makes you happy.
Why do people suffer? They suffer through the ignorance of their own self, which makes them forget their own self, and which leads them to think themselves to be what others call them. So long as this ignorance is here, so long as man does not realize his own Divinity, there will be suffering always.
Rama says, if you have desires and want them fulfilled, you must leave those desires, you must rise above them.
Thus in your everyday life there is day and night. Every day of suffering is followed by a night of pleasure, and every night of pleasure is followed by a day of suffering. So long as you keep clinging to forms, this rise and fall will continue, it will go on, one succeeding the other. Now, what is the object of this inner rise and fall? The object of this inner rise and fall is to make you realize the Sun within.
The phenomena of pain tell us that it always succeeds or follows the clinging or attachment to the material, the illusory, the mayavic objects. These pains tell us our clinging to the material and looking upon those material objects as real, brings us pain, anxiety and suffering. Therefore pain tells us that material objects are not real and we need not waste our time and energies on outside worldly forms. All pains teach us that lesson.
Here is the Divine Law. If you begin to depend or rely upon a material object for its own sake, the Law and the Vedas say that you must be foiled. You must be above all the objects of your desire. This is the Law. When you appear before a great person, a mighty ruler, and you begin to depend and rely upon his body or his personality, the Veda says that you are then leaning against a very frail reed and you will fall.
This is the way to Realization; this strong feeling, this living knowledge on the part of the mind laying hold of you, and de-hypnotizing your false self, is the way to gain Truth, to free yourself.
Rama comes now to the question which concerns all of you. It is the question/'How shall a married pair live in order that their marriage may not result in misery, anxiety, pain and sorrow?"They say, 'Take away our suffering, O God. Christ, take away my sufferings. Krishna and Buddha, take away my sufferings!' But Rama tells you they may or may not take away your sufferings after death. But in this life, who is to take away your sufferings? In this life, the husband should be the Christ of his wife, and the wife the Christ of her husband; but as it is going on, every wife is the Judas Iscariot
...more
Marriage
A wife should not try to enslave her husband, and her husband should not make her a dependent. This is the next step now. If this is effected, there is every hope; otherwise none.
O Christians, O Hindus, O Mohammedans, if you really want that the misery of the world should be eradicated, if you want that the suffering of man-kind should be removed, you ought to attend to this, you ought to establish the matrimonial relations on fair terms, you ought to instill into the heart of every lady and gentleman that it is a duty to prove the Christ to his wife or to her husband. It is incumbent on us to do that; it is our bounden duty to prove the Christ.
By making the companion "free" it is meant that you should make him or her believe and trust not in your body but in the God within you.
When you are writing, the writing is being performed impersonally. At that time your egotism, your little self, false ego, is altogether absent; automatically, mechanically is the work being done, It is a kind of reflex action, the hand goes on writing by itself. Why? Because you do not thrust your little self, your selfish ego, into the matter. The very moment you begin to reflect in your mind, "Oh, I have written splendidly, I have done wonderfully", you will make a slip.
