Vijaydharmasuri

Author(s): A J Sunavala
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Page 59

CONSECRATION OF MONKS
53
objects of worldly enjoyment, however much they might gratify the senses for the time being, do not and will not satisfy the soul. This earthly pleasure, this pleasure of the senses, is essentially transient, imperfect, and impermanent, depending on contact with other things and bodies, involving pain and struggle for its attainment, creating worry and uneasiness after its experience, and oftentimes ending in altercation and strife with those who happen to be engaged in the pursuit of the same objects of the senses. What the soul wants is the real happiness, perfect, undying, unabating, and eternal happiness. This perfect happiness, this everlasting happiness, this ecstatic delight or bliss, which is neither the source of sorrow nor the source of pain, is really the nature of the soul, though man is through ignorance unaware of the fact. What prevents the soul from the enjoyment of its natural joy and its natural peace is ignorance, Remove this ignorance then, the ignorance which is the obstacle between the soul and its happiness, and learn to distinguish the real happiness from the unreal, the perfect from the imperfect, the undying and the eternal from the fleeting and the transitory.
BEHOLD THE GLORY OF THE SELF Cast aside everything that is changing, everything that is unreal, false and fleeting. Through the outer form look to the life within; through the outer vehicle look to the true Self within. In friends and in foes, in each and every thing around, in all circumstances