Talk On Vivek Chudamani

Author(s): Chinmayanand Swami
Publisher: Chinmay Publications Trust

Page 10

In the very opening stanza of the text-book, Sankara is trying to emphasize upon the difficulty of awakening ourselves to the real communion of the Divine in us. In fact, there are numberless specimens of living creatures in the universe. Truth is the substratum of all and, therefore, the real nature of all living creatures—even of the insentient and the inert.
In stone life, too, Truth exhibits Itself as 'existence'; but, unfortunately, the stone is not aware of its own thoughts in the outer world of changing circumstances. A little more evolved is the plant life where it seems to be more and more aware of the world outside and therefore we consider the plant, compared with the stone, as a higher 'evolved specimen belonging to the world of beings. When we come to the animal life, we find that different species exhibit different degrees, of awareness not only of their external worlds of 'stimuli' but of the world of their inner emotions and ideas.
Of them all, man seems to be the only living creature in the universe who is independent for its rational conquests and he is the sacred being that can through intellectual conviction come to gain a firm control over the mad emotions of the mind, and apply this regulated and controlled energy for purposes of transcending the very psychological existence and thereby peep over into the Boundless Realms of bliss and beauty, love and perfection. It is in this sense that the Hindu Rishis considered man as the supreme being; while the European idea is that man is great since man alone can perhaps write and declare that he is great! If one were to follow the European argument, one should feel that the monkey-world must be taking it as a great insult to them, when they overhear the modern man declaring that he is a descendant of the ape!
Here Sankara wanted to emphasize that this text book is meant only for the human beings since the Viveka Chūdāmani will be explaining and expounding a theory of spiritual perfection which can be understood, practised, pursued and perfected only by man of a certain mental calibre and moral character. Such perfect ones, who are ripe for