Family and Nation

Author(s): Mahapragna Acharya, A P J Abdulkalam
Publisher: Harper Publications India

Page 74

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THE FAMILY AND THE NATION
money and possessions, and it can create circumstances of employment and success. Such is the power of thinking. Many people use this power. They force themselves to think that their pain, disease, age, discomfort and poverty do not exist, are not realities, but are illusions. However, they want to get rid of them not because they are illusions, but because they are unpleasant; and they want to put in their place other, more pleasant illusions.
The result of such practices is self-deception and an increasing inability to distinguish illusions from realities, and the true from the false. While such people may intend to be honest, they blind themselves to the facts owing to prejudice and preference.
Man is beset, surrounded, submerged by illusions. All outside things are illusions. So are his appetites, pains and pleasures, dislikes and hatreds. They are elementals. He does not know his own feelings and desires, aside from their illusions. He does not see the people he thinks he sees; he sees only the thoughts which he creates of them. Therefore, if a thousand people see a man, no two would see him alike, because no two out of the thousand thoughts would be alike.
The doer in the human is limited in the exercise of its powers by slavery to Nature. The doer has made itself dependent upon the four senses of thinking, feeling, desiring and acting. It is unable to think of anything as apart from the senses or as different from what is reported by the senses. Its feeling is guided and ruled by sensations, which are Nature elementals that play upon the nerves. The human is thus shut off from the realms beyond the senses and is bound to the lowest states of matter on the physical plane.
Our civilization is indeed a study of the dire results of the loss of connectivity with the eternal. As mankind evolves, there are some, nevertheless, who lag behind, blinded by the desire of personal gain, by ambition and lust for power,