When one is unable to quench his
spiritual thirst from his guru or teaching he has to look elsewhere to clear
the cobwebs of his understanding and to move forward in his spiritual quest.
It is difficult for tradition-bound people to accept anything as truth
other than what they inherited from then parental grooming. Only intense urge
to know the truth and courage to accept the truth after verification with
better understanding one will be able to drop all his accumulated dross, which
is the main obstacle in self-realization.
As long as there is the sense of "I' and "mine' within us,
there can be no Self-knowledge. When one says "me' and "mine' you
automatically identify himself with his body or ego. This shows that he is
ignorant of the innermost Self, which is soul or consciousness and which is
also self of all.
An
ignorant person uses the words "I' and "mine'. He says: "I am so
and so. “I AM GOD”,' and so on.
An
ignorant person has many desires in his mind, and because of these desires he
remains in the realm of duality. He has to have a body; otherwise he cannot
satisfy his desires. But the more he tries to satisfy them, the more they grip
his ego. This goes on endlessly. But it is given to a human being to think,
reason, and discriminates. Thus he soon comes to realize that the path he has
been following cannot give him satisfaction. He understands that he has to
choose another path the path of wisdom or path of truth. As long as he does not
take the path of Gnana or wisdom, he gropes in the ignorance and experiences
the illusory waking experience (universe) as reality.
Common people and primitive minds fall into faulty thinking through
their inherited samskara or conditioning, such faulty thinking and reasoning makes
them accept the experience of birth, life and death as a reality ; taking what
one sees through the senses as real, taking what is apparent obvious
and superficial as true because it is less troublesome.
Many People adopt the attitude that what they know is truth.
And what others say id false. This attitude makes them not to verify
anything other than what they know. One needs to be rational, not
merely logical. Logic has its value only in the physical plane.
Sri , Sanakara said:-
Neither by the practice of yoga nor philosophy, nor by good
works nor by learning, does liberation come, but only through the realization
that Atman and Brahman are one in no other way.(1) VivekaChudamani v 56, pg 25
[VC]65. As a treasure
hidden underground requires (for its extraction) competent instruction, excavation,
the removal of stones and other such things lying above it and (finally)
grasping, but never comes out by being (merely) called out by name, so the
transparent Truth of the self, which is hidden by Maya and its effects, is to
be attained through the instructions of a knower of Brahman, followed by
reflection, meditation and so forth, but not through arguments.
One cannot expect mental spoon feeding for everything. The seeker has to do his own homework. One will not understand it through argument,
which leads nowhere but to perversity.
