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Veda. God or Paramatma has produced the Veda through the mouths of rishis and ascetics and no change has been made in it, not in any tract, in any couplet, sentence, in any word or in its punctuation. This is my firm conviction, that the Veda has descended from God and has been reproduced in this kalpa without missing even a comma or a full stop.
The Veda has three parts: (i) karma, (ii) upaasanaa, (iii) jnaana, knowledge. The chapter on knowledge is called the Upan- ishads. The spirit of sannyaasa (the fourth ashrama or stage of life) is the vedantic Upanishad, and the way to the vedantic knowledge is yoga.
Dharma te virati yogate gyana, gyana te mokshprad ved bakhaana.
We prescribe vedic karma, upasana and knowledge. Here, in this ashram, after the practice of yoga in the early morning, the sadhak must do karma yoga. I have seen with my own eyes these sannyasins from foreign countries cleaning roads with brooms, picking up cowdung, chopping wood. They have no desire except to serve the guru. Their only desire is to obey the command of the guru which is like a vedic mantra.
Kurvanneveh karmaani jijeevishachhatam samaa,
Evam twayi nanyathe tosti na karmo lipyate nare.
So long as you are aware of the ego, the human body will go on doing karma. Those karmas will stick to your inner soul in the shape of good or bad samskaras which will spring into vaasanaa (desire).
Your works thus become the maker of your nature, you get the results according to your deeds. Thus you are the maker of your fortune. Do not blame others. Even God has no option. He too has to reward or punish men according to their deeds. We cannot say that God acts according to His wishes. There is no random distribution of pleasure or pain, of heaven or hell. The criteria of this distribution are the actions of the human being himself. As the action is, so is the fruit or result. You want to be free from the restraints of bad actions.
This is our fortune, that God has given us a beautiful body armed with sense organs, prana, mind, intellect, heart and other divine mechanisms. We should make good use of these tools as Tulsi Das suggests to us in his prayer. He says, "Oh God! You have put me greatly in your debt by giving me a good human body which is the storehouse of means. You have given me a mind to think with, eyes to see with, hands to work
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