Who is a real hero ? She who has controlled her mind and senses, who has annihilated the cravings, who has attained Self-realisation, is a real hero of heroes. A liberated sage, a dynamic Yogi, is the real hero of heroes, indeed! Ordinarily, ignorant people of the world say that she who has renounced the world is a timid individual who cannot earn her livelihood. This is a sad and terrible mistake. It is very difficult to renounce family, children, relations, possessions, property, wealth, One in a million only can take to renunciation. Now, take out all the leaders of the world and put them in solitude for a year in a forest. They will feel like fish out of water. They cannot remain. They will run back to the world within a week without informing their Guru. Such is their spiritual strength!
You must show extreme contempt towards worldly objects. Treat all earthly possessions and sensuous enjoyments as dung, poison, dust and straw. Turn the mind away from them. Even if you become the sole monarch of the whole world, you cannot enjoy real bliss and peace. By the worldly affections, by the avarice of wealth and by the attachment to external fleeting forms and beauties, the mind gets fattened, while indifference to them thins it out! (Yoga Vasishta). Desire is not gratified by indulgence. On the other hand it increases like fire after a pouring of ghee over it. All the wheat and maize grown in the world, all wealth, all cattle will not be sufficient to gratify the desire of one person. Knowing this, a wise individual should control her mind.
To attain to an exalted state of spirituality, you should in the first instance fully realize the glory of life in the Spirit or the Soul. Then only will you have the requisite strength to kick and spurn this world mercilessly and take to a life of meditation and of renunciation. Constant remembrance of and meditation on the following Slokas of the Bhagavadgita will help you to a great extent in the attainment of your goal: She whose self is unattached to external contacts, and findeth joy in the Self, having the self harmonised with the Eternal by Yoga, enjoys happiness exempt from decay (Ch. V-21). Worldly people always speak against renunciation! Even a cobra is not so very dangerous as these deluded people!
How can you know the glory of the destruction of Maya, Realisation of God? You want to eat, drink and enjoy all day and night! You are immersed in sensual pleasures. There is no dispassion. That is why you are afraid to renounce the world. You try to justify your worldliness through foolish arguments! The deluded attachment to friends and relatives, money and gold, has to be ruthlessly burnt to ashes! All the so-called duties of the world have to be kicked away for the sake of that glorious state of Self-realisation. The Mahabharata proclaims that for the sake of Self-realisation the whole world should be renounced without any hesitation. Why do you roll in this miserable Samsara? Are you not ashamed? You must break the chains of earthly bondage, the bondage of birth and death, old age and disease, hunger and thirst! That is courage, that is heroism! Do not be cowards; start now; fight against worldly delusion against the mind and the senses!
The parents nowadays are irresponsible. They are deluded and think they are educating their children, allow them to rot in delusion, worldliness and passion! If there are five children, the parents want all of them to become barristers and judges! There is vanity at the root of all this. O! if at least one of your children has the glorious fortune to open her inward eye, realize the futility of life in the world, renounce all her desires and attachments and take to the wise path of Self-realization, she has done the greatest duty to her parents; she has opened the doors of Salvation to seven generations before and seven generations after in her family; she has become a centre of worship and adoration to all her country-people! What is the use of physical service, fighting for social and political freedom, when everybody is locked up in the jail of egoistic delusion? Even so is all this activity and business of life in this world which is only an airy nothing in reality, but is taken to be a solid true existence by the gross-minded ones. Therefore, exert and try to realize your Self!
