Talk On Vivek Chudamani

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

Page 18

11
man, the creatures have to implicitly wait for millions and trillions of years until nature takes them up one by one in her sweet will to mould them to a greater equipment. In all the lower strata of existence, evolution is not a conscious development on the part of the individual but an involuntary thrust received by them from the fickle-minded nature.
Millennia must a tree wait as a tree before a particle in it can get a chance to become a fruit and having become the fruit, it is one in a million chances that it happens to be eaten up by a human being. Again, it is a rare chance, indeed, when that fruit becomes the sperm. This sperm has to make a great adventure to enter the womb and get its birth therein. Having thus got a human form, because of man's mind and intellect equipments, he is, to an extent, free from nature in evolving himself. Man alone, of all the species of the living kingdoms, can hasten his own evolution by co-operating himself with the great eternal scheme of things around him. Physically, he has evolved and nature has nothing more to do with him. His next lap of evolution awaits at the level of his mind and intellect and this is a process in which nature has no share at all. Later on, in this very book we will hear a declaration in which we are told that we shall have to evolve ourselves.
With this Sāstric conclusion in mind when the Acharya takes his pen to guide the generation, he must necessarily exclaim, as he has done in this stanza, and exclude that there can never be a greater fool than the one who, having gained this rare chance of a human embodiment and the required mental and intellectual capacities, does not intelligently invest them for the higher purpose of self-redemption and Selfrediscovery
वदन्तु शास्त्राणि यजन्तु देवान् कुर्वन्तु कर्माणि भजन्तु देवताः।
आत्मैक्यबोधन विना विमुक्तिर्न सिध्यति ब्रह्मशतान्तरपि ॥६॥ vadantu śāstrāni yajantu devān kurvantu karmāni bhajantu devatāh ātmaikyabodhena vinā vimuktih na sidhyati brahmaśatāntarepi 6.
वदन्तु • Let people recite or quote, शास्त्राणि - the scriptures, यजन्तु • let (them) perform sacrifices, car. to Gods, geng - let them