Talk On Vivek Chudamani

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

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the fruits of actions here and hereafter; (next is) the team of six great qualifications like calmness, etc., and (lastly) a burning desire for self-liberation.
In the sequence here Sankara is repeating the various qualifications that are necessary for a student who is to be assured of success in the spiritual path. We have here a rough estimate of the four great qualifications and while enumerating them, the Acharya is givin for both Viveka and Vairāgya.
Viveka-discriminating capacity. This faculty in us to distinguish between the real and the unreal is not generally available to all men of intelligence. However acutely intelligent the generations may be, it is left to the special blessing of the few to have the right "taste" in life : meaning, this subtle power of the intellect to delve deep into things and happenings, and discriminate therein the true from the false. Those who have evolved sufficiently exhibit a large share of this faculty, but those who have not got it now should not necessarily despair at its absence, because this faculty is not a God-given instinct which has to come into us from the heavens, but it is the aroma of the bosom wherein one's mind and intellect are fully developed and have, to a degree, integrated. Where there is a large amount of this Viveka, we can immediately presume that the individual has a fairly well-integrated inner personality.
Vairāgya -Detachment: Running away from life in cowardice, retiring to a jungle in a languor of the intellect, not to appreciate anything around and about us, to deny all physical things-of-necessity for the body—these are falsely considered to be the signs of detachment by the ordinary Hindu. Why? Even many of the educated Pundits would, in their discourses, give us the idea that detachment, means a life of complete mourning and bereavement, an unnatural existence which has nothing to do with the life that is lived by others in the society !! This idea is false and the interpretation is more mischievous than healthy.
As a result of one's discriminative capacity when one comes to differentiate between the real and the unreal in the