Talk On Vivek Chudamani

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

Page 27

love for the Guru. These are therefore, insisted in the Sastras, which may to the modern man seem as arrangements set up by a team of social criminals to loot and plunder the credulous public! Such an opinion reflects but the decadence into which the spiritual science has reached in our times.
Again, the stanza explains that with all qualifications if a seeker were to reach the feet of a perfect master, even then the transferred knowledge cannot take root in the student unless the student is ready to strive along the path. The instructions given here explaining how the student should employ himself in the presence of the master are very significant indeed, especially so in these days when we are all under terrible misunderstandings about this Guru-Shishya relationship.
After all a master can only explain truths and give sufficient logic to give the seeker some intellectual conviction. These ideas are at best but prescriptions for certain values of life which cannot yield any benefit unless they are taken up and made to become a part of the entire road. The major part of the work depends upon our own efforts in rehabilitating ourselves. Thus, it is said, that the individual should try to live the deep significances of the words uttered by the master.
More often than not, what we find around us, is that we try to follow what the master did and not what the master said. Here the stanza definitely indicates that you have nothing to do with what the master does. There are traders in Bhakti who conveniently declare that theirs is only the fifth marriage while their Lord had 16,008! There can be, indeed, very interesting varieties even in the methods of self-destruction !!
उद्धरेदात्मनात्मानं मग्नं संसारवारिधी।
योगारुढत्वामासाद्य सम्यद्गर्शननिष्ठया ॥९॥ uddharedātmanātinānam magnam samsāravāridhou yogāradhatvamāsādhya samyagdarśananistayā 9.