The Individual Nature : 1.
The location of the individual in the scheme of things makes it inadequate in every way.
Its reactions cannot eliminate some amount of error.
All individual experience is a form of error in some degree, though all error becomes an element of perfection in the Absolute.
The aim of life of the individual is to overcome the urge for organic reactions in relation to external perceptible objects and to transcend itself in the all-comprehensive Absolute, which is the essential reality of all individuals.
These reactions among individual natures are either unconscious or conscious.
The unconscious urges are termed instincts and the conscious ones are those which constitute the rational processes in the individuals.
Beyond these reactions of a twofold nature, there is the supreme integrating principle, viz., intuition and direct realisation of the highest essence of experience.
These instinctive urges are powerful, and being ingrained in the very constitution of the individual, refuse to be easily subdued.
The most powerful of these involuntary unconscious urges are those of self-preservation and self-reproduction.
The instinct of self-preservation is sometimes wrongly called 'food-seeking' instinct.
Food is not the end that is sought by the individual; food is only a means to the fulfilment of the will-to-live or the love of life which is inherent in everyone, and which is the end.
One does not desire to eat food as an end in itself; the purpose of food and drink is living as an individual personality, possessed of a body. This urge is not within the control of the rational intellect, and it overcomes the other urges by its intensity of expression.
Swami Krishnananda
To be continued ...
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