Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spirituality (Wisdom of India)
Eknath Easwaran
Language: English
Pages: 252
ISBN: 1586380362
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
and feels “a sense of personal control over one’s life” because he or she has a reason to live. This is the mind’s contribution, not the body’s. The human being needs meaning in order to live, and meaning cannot come from events outside us. It can only come from within: from the way we see the world, informed by wisdom, compassion, understanding, love, and trust. This deep-seated human need for meaning and purpose may go unnoticed in our earlier years, when the body is young and life’s
with Death CHAPTER 1 An Inward Journey Let me start with a story – one that has been handed down for thousands of years. Its hero is a teenager in ancient India named Nachiketa, who goes to the King of Death to learn the meaning of life. The place is not essential to the narrative, but Nachiketa’s age is not incidental. Teenagers can show tremendous spiritual potential, for they have the passion, the desire, the idealism, and the reckless daring to stake everything they have on an almost
put it more vigorously: “Do you want to become a zombie?” This sort of question arises only because we think we are the mind. The mind-process is as compelling as a suspenseful film; while it is going at full speed, we can be aware of nothing else. But when this process is stopped, we discover with surprise that there is not just one self in us; there are two. In Sanskrit, these two selves are called jiva and Purusha. Jiva is the individual ego, the whole bundle of samskaras that we call our
grown tired of the hollowness of our lives, we would still have time and energy enough to change our way of living. But the tragedy is that there is very little time for experimentation. Outside my window there is a lilac bush, which I see every morning at breakfast. I don’t think I ever saw a lilac until I came to this country. I used to ask my English teacher, who happened to be my uncle, “What is this ‘lilac’?” He would just shrug and say, “How should I know?” Now the lilac has become one of
petty, how quickly ended, we would concentrate all our effort on escaping from it once and for all. During the second part of life we learn to defy all the selfish desires that human existence is prey to, hundreds of them, through the practice of meditation and the allied disciplines. This is not negating desires; it is unifying them – transforming them from selfish to selfless, from individual to universal. This unification of desires leads to the integration of personality in its full glory.