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this primary lesson in the nursery of spirituality, Nature drives home its teaching the hard way. Uprisings, wars and nuclear explosions - all handiworks of the destructive genius of man - or natural disasters like floods, earthquakes and droughts can deprive many a man of their homes, families and valuables the very basis of their mundane existence in a flash of fury unleashed in an instant. The hardheaded men who refuse to accept the verdict of the enlightened on the ephemeral nature and illusory quality of one's earthly existence or material possessions are taught punitive lesson and are made to revise their stand by way of such natural chastisement. This offers them one more chance to change their extrovert outlook and begin an introspective reflection.
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Of the two alternative ways to gain this insight, one is to learn at the feet of the enlightened masters the spiritual truth about life with eventual disenchantment with materialism and the other to arrive at the same conclusion after undergoing prolonged torture and chastisement through deprivation, desolation and defeat at the hands of the Elements. Nature in her inscrutable style, has left this tricky choice to us.
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