Sivananda Daily Readings Sunay, Nov12 '06

FREEDOM FROM ATTACHMENT

Attachment produces infatuation and causes entanglement. Fear exists on account of attachment and desire. Infatuation or delusion is a stigma on pure love. Attachment to the objects of the world is due to ignorance of their true nature. Nothing but the atman (self) really exists. Objects are illusion. Attachment is indicative of the feeling that the objective possession brings happiness. This idea has to be removed from the mind.

Happiness is not in the objects but in one's own atman. Attachment is the impure vasana (feeling) of love or hate that is entertained by the mind for the diverse objects of this world. If you remain unaffected by joy, envy and sorrow, you have relinquished all attachments. If, without rejoicing in joy, or pining under pain, you do not subject yourself to the trammels of desire, then you can be said to have rid yourself of attachment.

If you can be content with whatever you get, then you have cast off attachment. Through attachment, desire for material objects arises. Renunciation of attachment is said to be moksa (release). Through its destruction all rebirth ceases. Destroy the association of the mind with the objects and attain the state of the jivanmukta (liberated soul).

Pleasure does not lie in the objects but in the condition of the mind. The mind goes out in search of pleasure. At the same time there is pain as the mind is straying away from the truth. When the object is attained, the mind ceases to function and rests on the atman, the substratum. Then it unconsciously tastes the bliss of the Atman.

Sublimate your inward longings through discrimination, dispassion, enquiry and meditation. You will attain supreme bliss.

Develop vairagya (dispassion). Sharpen the intellect. Give up kutarka and viparita bhavana (distorted and perverted thinking). Identify yourself with the pure atman. You will soon attain knowledge of the self.

If you are careless and non-vigilant, if you are irregular in meditation, if your dispassion wanes, if you yield even a bit to sense pleasures, the mind will continue to go downward. Maya (illusion) closes in even upon a wise man if he stops his sadhana (practice) and meditation even for a short time.


Be careful. Be alert. Be regular in your meditation.......



Swami Sivananda

Thought For The Day

Philosophy and Vedanta ate both for knowing and for living. If a good thing happens and we rejoice, and its opposite happens and we are shocked, then we are not true philosophers. We have not gained any thing from knowledge. It is only when this knowledge can bring us firm unshaken equanimity, then you are more than a philosopher, you are a sthitaprajna.

Swami Chidananda.