Religion and Social Values - 1-1. Swami Krishnananda

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Thursday, August 27, 2020.
Chapter 1: The Circumstances in Which We Have to Live in the World -1.
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1.
During this period of Sadhana Week, it is obviously your intention to gather a new strength into your own selves and return home as a rejuvenated personality, and not as a person who has attended a festival, a mela or a rejoicing—after which, generally, your energies are depleted. You go as a weakened person after a dramatic performance or a presentation which stimulates your vitals, stirs up your emotions, and agitates the cells of your body. Sadhana Week is not a dramatic performance. It is not an enactment by performers on a stage, and it is not your function to witness the presentations as if they are performances in a theatre.

2.
You have come with a different purpose, with personal difficulties which are eagerly waiting to come to the surface of your consciousness when the door opens and when you are left to your own selves. The din and bustle of life—the activities, the responsibilities, and the types of relationships you maintain in human society—manage to keep you out of yourself. They so dexterously operate that you feel you are leading a normal life.

3.
That which is normal does not present any difficulties before us. Anything that pinches us, like a nail in the bottom of the shoe—that which irks us and keeps us out of alignment, whether outwardly in our social relationships or inwardly within our own selves—these symptoms which keep us restless in any measure, and anxious to some extent, may be considered as symptoms of certain behaviours and operations within our own selves which cannot be regarded as normal.

4.
The normalcy of the physical body, which we call health, is also a state where we are buoyant with a new type of freedom. The greatest freedom is health, in which condition of freedom from every shackle we feel buoyant and often forget our own selves. The healthier we are, the less we think of ourselves. When an illness of any kind enters our body, we become conscious that we are. We begin to be aware of each limb of the body. An eye, an ear, a tooth, a finger, a toe, or any blessed part of our body attracts our attention when it is set out of tune with the normal function of the body.

To be continued ...

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