Vedanta

At one period of my life I used to live continually in an ecstatic state. Then the Lord suppressed this mood.

The ego and the Self stand at two opposite ends of our spiritual journey. Our inquiry begins with the ego and culminates in the realization of the Self.

We are now living an age of slogans. One of the much-repeated slogans is that religion is the opiate of the people and is therefore to be avoided as poison. As a result of hearing this constantly, some of us, who are not prepared to use our God-given power of reasoning, come to believe in it and lose our faith even in the true religion, which in the words of Swami Vivekananda, is really “the manifestation of the divinity already in man.” There is religion and religion.

In spiritual life, we use the word “obstacles” with reference to both the inner and the outer world, to physical and subtle objects, and to conditions and situations which stand in the way of our spiritual progress.

Busy people have no time to think of either death or their mortality. They are preoccupied with life—the life which they possess and enjoy as something vividly present and which ramifies in different directions through their various interests, physical, intellectual, and emotional. But then death is a certainty for every one of us, and when that certainty draws nearer even the busiest people discover that they were callous to this vitally important subject.