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Isavasya Upanisad QUOTES

Isavasya Upanisad QUOTES

1 " Joy Seekers Certainly, every one of you will admit that what we seek in life is peace and joy. The way of seeking and the field in which we are seeking may be different from man to man, from place to place, and from era to era. But all of us are demanding the same joy everywhere and at all times. Joy or peace, as generally understood, is that which we experience when, in the external circumstances, we come to live a pattern which we have demanded for ourselves at a given period of time and place. That which was, in our childhood, a great happiness and joy, may not again provide for us an equal happiness or peace in our youth. A blue glass marble or a tennis ball would have been a joyous present when one was in one’s childhood. But the same present would not bring any happiness to us if it is presented to us at our diamond jubilee; conversely, it may even be painful, inasmuch as it would remind us of our old age and the impending ‘calamitous day’! Examples can be multiplied to justify the working definition of joy or peace that we have made just now. In this, the difficulty or the failure of man is mainly because the demand of the physical man is not necessarily the demand of the emotional; in the same individual the intellectual personality would still have a third type of demand and, perhaps, the spiritual seeker in him would have yet another demand. Thus, four distinct sets of demands are made by each individual at the same period of time and space. Certainly, no two happenings can come to pass at one and the same time and place, the happenings being conditioned by both time and place. Therefore, however much we may try to bring about, through certain new changes, a perfect scheme of things in our life and a hope to gain out of it a perfect satisfaction for all the four personalities in us, we shall only end up with sheer disappointment. Our Hope But, if there be a technique by which we can train, discipline and integrate all these wild and madly revolting personalities in us together into one unit, certainly, we can thereafter order much more freedom and happiness for ourselves in the outer world. These techniques are together termed as ‘religion’ by the great seers. "

― Chinmayananda , Isavasya Upanisad