Selected 100 Letters by Shrimad Rajchandraji

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

Page 63

SELECTED 100 LETTERS
that his enemies in the form of attachment and hatred etc. will be powerless and will leave him when he surrenders to the dictates of his spiritually enlightened master.
102
Extreme renounciation is possible in the presence of extreme self-knowledge. Shri Tirthankara has admitted that highest spiritual knowledge cannot be there where there is no extreme nonattachment or renunciation.
To return the wrong imposition of the self on the not self is called by Shri Jain renunciation. For this purpose even leaving external objects or removing a false sense of I and mine in them is also spiritually helpful. He does not say that internal renunciation is for external renunciation.But keeping away from external contacts with the not self should be regarded as helpful to internal renunciation.
Every day I have been thinking of getting release from all internal and external occasions of contact with the not-self, and feel that this should be over as early as possible; yet it appears that such thought and aspiration do not occur as I wish they are slow or weak and I therefore feel that I should put in more powerful effort in that direction.
I have written in this letter some statements showing mutual relations and they are written to help you strengthen your efforts for final release, for your repeated reading and thinking.
It would be proper for you to gradually understand the nature of a living being, area of existence, modifications of a substance, numbering of substance and their innumerability, infinity etc and the extensive pervasion of interest.
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SELECTED 100 LETTERS
Mumbai
Falgun Vad Fifth, Saturday, V-S-1951
To a wise brother Shri Mohanlal (Mahatma Gandhi) at Durban.
I have received one letter from you. As one abandons his troubling adjuncts to that extent, one enjoys the happiness and ease of Samadhi or steadiness of self-experience. As you accept the adjuncts, to that extent, your experience of happiness and ease of the pure self goes on decreasing. By thinking on this matter it becomes directly understandable. If one thinks of worldly life and its objects he can not but think of renouncing them because only by wrong understanding, attraction to them is possible.
Shri Jin has described six stages of self realization knowing which stages, is called discriminative knowledge by him-these six stages can be established as indubitably true by reflective thinking and they are as under (1) self exists. (2) self is eternal (3) self performs actions (4) Therefore the self enjoys or suffers the fruits there of. (5) Therefore returing from such performance is called release and it is possible. (6) There are specific means of such release. Every spiritual aspirant should specially pay attention to these six stages of self realization and study them well.
By some good deeds of one's past, a man is able to know these stages well and clearly or it happens as a result of spiritual contact with enlightened saints.
By attachment to the transitory objects of the world one does not become conscious of these six stages of release. Only infatuated living beings do not realize the existence, permanence, and unobstructed happiness and ease of their real self. The living being under the influence of ignorance of these six stages of release has been migrating from one world to another undergoing births and