Life progresses by continual affirmation and
negation. If we are to understand the proper value and
significance of a thing, we have to observe it with a
detached vision. By renouncing we gain. Our day's
work would have lost all charm and ground down our
soul if we had not the oblivion of nightly sleep. This is
a truth, the profundity of which often escapes us. We
think that to do the best in anything we must be
ațtached to it. We forget that attachment binds and to
that extent limits our powers and capacity to
accomplish. It is in inner detachment that we go
beyond limitations and that our being flows in unim-
peded streams.
This is more true of the wider phases of life. Hence
the ideal of rथaprastfua. After life's long work a weari
ness seizes the soul, a weariness which is really a
re-creation. We no longer feel attracted by the hurry
valueless.
and bustle of action. It all seems empty and
What is there in earning money and bringing up
children? So the soul turns back. It withdraws itself
from the external world into the silence of meditation on the Eternal, and there it finds its solace. We do not
like the society of men. It seems so superficial! We want
to find the deeper companionship of the Soul of Our
soul. A new being emerges within our owWn self. We are
enthralled by its peace and beauty, and its gleams cast
a healing influernce on our lacerated heart. We deny the
world, the external, and find the greater truth and
reality of the inner self and the peace and richness
thereof. Henceforth we turn our back on the world anत
its multifarious duties, and finding the soul is our only
quest.
A step further and there is the ideal of sannyāsa
Why should one spend the best part of life and energy
to learn the truth that after all life is an empty dream
and that the reality is elsewhere? There are somne who
are born with the instinctive consciousness of the truth.
They do not require to pass through the grinding mill
of the world to reach the gate of truth. They stand
before the gate itself and they enter it as early as pos-
sible. The world is false, they know. And they have
nothing to do with it. The only reality is God. To find
Him, to know Him, to be absorbed in Him, that is their
only quest.
Thus there is a deep feeling in every Hindu's mind
that the life that the average man is living is not a
natural one. Action is not the natural condition of man.
Inaction, a state beyond all change and necessity of
change, is his true and permanent condition. Com-
pared with that eternal state, the millions of lives
through which the soul passes to reach the state of
eternal beatitude are nothing but a moment. Eternity
looms so vast and substantial before the Hindu that he
Cannot but consider it to be the reality and relative life
unreal. All his efforts, therefore, are directed to
transcending all limitation, and losing himself in the
Infinite. He looks upon the world and its concerns with
an amused eye. He cannot take them too seriously. It is
more or less a game, he tैhinks. T० act is not our voca=
tion. To think or feel also is not our nature. To be, that is
our true nature. To be, to become the Eternal, beyond
all change and necessity of change, that is the goal.
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