Purpose of Life - 3. Swami Sivananda

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13/03/2020.
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1.

#The tangle of sense-experience in which man is caught is most vexing, and hard it is to free oneself from it. Man is deluded by the notion of the reality of the so-called external relations of things and thus he comes to grief.

##The Mahabharata says that the contact of beings in this universe is like the contact of logs of wood in a flowing river, temporary. Yet the attachment to sense-percepts is so strong that phantoms are mistaken for facts, the impure is mistaken for the pure, the painful for the pleasant, and the not-self for the Self.

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2.

#The message of the ancient sages is that the life one lives in the sense-world is deceptive, for it hides the Existence underlying all things and makes one feel that the particular presentation of forms before the senses alone is real. "Children run after external pleasures and fall into the net of wide-spread death. 

##The heroes, however, knowing the Immortal, seek not the Eternal among things unstable here," says the Upanishad. The call of the ancient sages to man is: "O son of the Immortal! Know yourself as the Infinite! become the All. This is the supreme blessing. This is the supreme bliss." This is the undying message to man.

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3.

#The sages have again and again stressed: "If one knows It (i.e., the Immortal Being) here, then there is the true end of all aspirations! If one does not know It here, great is the loss for him." (Kenopanishad). 

##And sage Yajnavalkya says that all great deeds done in this world, without the knowledge of the One Imperishable Being, are not worth anything. Humanitarian services; fasts and charity; one's political, national, social and individual life; should all be based on the feeling of universal brotherhood which is the eternal expression of the Reality of universal Selfhood.

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To be continued ...

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