Talk On Vivek Chudamani

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

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japa, dhyana developing his devotion for a Personal God for a number of years, will not dare to drop at least for a time even an iota of his daily routine, even if he be asked to do so by the greatest living master of the world. Just as one gets addicted to a false living, similarly, one can easily become habituated to some accepted good way of living. To be in a routine is not the secret of living in inspiration. We must have freedom at every moment to change our pattern and seek new methods of keeping the mind and intellect occupied in a lively warmth of love and cheer. To get habituated with any method is to baulk progress.
In this sense Vedanta is heretic. It is revolutionary. The attitude with which one should do the 'hearing' (Sravanam) of the Scriptures is totally different from the attitude with which one is asked to do 'reflection' (manan) upon what he 'heard'; and again, in 'meditation' neither the Shraddha of Śravanam nor the intellectual freedom of manan is permitted to poison the deep serenity of the throught-less meditation hours. Thus, a vedantic student is taught from the very beginning to be original at every moment and to live ever in a white-heat of inspiration-at once thrilling, divine, ennobling.
Here as soon as the student reaches the master, he is swept clean of all his traditional beliefs; this is indeed in spiritualism a kind of shock-therapy by which the student is brutally shaken out of his deep ruts into new lines to follow the right and the straight path.
His wrong notions on religion, his confirmed belief in religious practices, his blind faith in hearsay information on Religion, the Science of Self-Perfection, are all denied here as having anything to do with the true and permanent liberation. Learning Sastras, invoking gods through sacrifices, self-less work and even devotion to a Personal God have been denied here as having any capacity to give us mukti "even in the life-time of a hundred Brahmas" which is, according to our mythology, equivalent to 311,040,000,000,000 years!! This is not a mere statement of despair that has been declared; a way of