Selected 100 Letters by Shrimad Rajchandraji

Author(s): Shrimad Rajchandra,
Publisher: Shrimad Rajchandra Prabhavak Trust Hubli

Page 44

SELECTED 100 LETTERS
SELECTED 100 LETTERS
39 (437)
OM
Only a human being is more fit to think about his welfare or good as he is capable of thinking and speaking. Even then, this man getting human birth many a time in the past, has not been able to secure his ultimate good and so till date, he has been wandering in the path of cyclic birth and death. In this infinite world, there are innumerable kinds of living beings. Every moment, good many of them fall prey to death and get reborn leading worldly life. In proportion to the number of living beings only a few of them have sought for self realization or have secured their real self. This is the sorry state of affairs to-day and it is likely to continue in future too.
This means that acquisition of human good or welfare has been difficult to attain in all the three phases of time, past, present and future. This teaching of the enlightened souls such as Tirthankaras is perfectly true. The delusion of the mass of living beings in this matter is of two kinds (1) regarding the highest good and (2) regarding the ordinary worldly life and these two types of delusion are agreed in holding that the living being has not attained the stage of a spiritual aspirant. Not even one iota of truth has resulted in a man's life. He has not any appetite for seeing a spiritual guide and in the contact with such a guide his vision has been obstructed by one powerful defect or another and the most important cause of this plight is his own worldly desires born of his longing for wrong contacts and his delusion that his wrong path is the true path for his spiritual advantage. Such delusion is expressed in many ways as under-There is no substance like self (Charvakas):what is known as self is only an adventitious substance born of the contact of many elements; the self is no other than one's own body (Chanvakas) and it will be
destroyed at death of the body (Charvakas), the self is only atomic (Vaisesikas); the self is spread every where(Vedanta) the self is only a big cypher or zero (Boudhas) the self is having a form; the self is only luminosity; the self is not free at all: the self is not a doer, the self does actions but does not suffer their results, the self does not do anything, but suffers the fruits of actions done by some one else: the self neither performs any action nor suffers any results there of; the self is only lifeless material substance; the self is only a make belief of some persons - it is only a figment of a man's fertile imagination etc etc., such many opinions on the nature of self prevail at various times in this world. Only wrong understanding of the real truth is the cause of the varying opinions on the nature of self listed above By following this delusion the soul has not been on the path of self-realization. Led away by this delusion people have strongly believed in the wrong understanding of the self and sometimes called the self as Ishwara or Lord of everything capable of doing everything both consistent and inconsistent. Under this wrong position of one denomination or the other as a result of wrong contact, his own wrong desires and beliefs, and under illusion of right perception, many men are found to suffer. Till a man gets free from the above mentioned wrong beliefs, he cannot be on the right path to liberation; he cannot be free from worldly affliction and he cannot realize that he can expand to any length he wants and contract to any size he wants. And only for setting aside this delusion and wrong contacts one is advised to search for right contact with a spiritually enlightened saint, to accept whole heartedly his advice or guidance and know thereby the philosophical nature of his own real self.
In the past the great non-attached Tirthankars, the enlightened great men, thought about this delusion and meditated on the nature of pure self by introspection and intuition and by singleminded