SWAMI SWARUPANANDA PARAMHANSA

BABAMONI

The problem
Life is an enigma. There are as many theories about it as there are thinking minds. Can there be a single, consensual interpretation?

There must be a pathway out of here. God would not be so cruel to keep us in this suffering condition, the cycle of repeated birth, death, old age, and disease. If we sincerely desire to find that pathway, the Lord within our hearts will gladly reveal it to us. There is nothing that He wants more for us than that we return to our original identities as His servants in the spiritual world. Each one of us actually has an identity in the spiritual world in any one of five primary types of relationships. These are known in Sanskrit language as "rasas." 
One simply has to submissively hear the Vedic wisdom from the lips of the bona fide spiritual master. Everything will become revealed to such a person who gives aural reception to the supreme knowledge. And if that person will abide by the instructions given to him by the bona fide spiritual master, he will become delivered from all forms of temporality, illusion and misery. He will immediately begin to enter into his eternal, blissful, knowledge-full existence far, far beyond the madness, confusion, and delusion of this material prison.

The Precaution
The soul is real, god is imaginary. Any relationship between the two is bound to be imaginary. We know very little about the soul. A genuine case of rebirth provides a clue. The memory about previous life has a non-genetic source. That which retains the memory beyond the grave is named soul. And recollection of this memory is a temporary aberration of the general rule of amnesia.

The solution
After avoiding the pit-fall and taking the precautions, a scheme begins to emerge. The earth is the breeding and training ground for the souls. Microorganism with a micro-soul can not be ruled out easily. Life began in the sea (water with soluble air); it diversified on land (air with soluble water). It progressed from denser to lighter medium. Not only our bodies but our souls, too, have evolved in a couple of billion years through millions of lives in different life forms (species). When all desires for sensual pleasures are satisfied, the soul loses its inclination to be born again. It is, then, released to explore the universe. At present, we are at a particular epoch of evolution. After the biological evolution of the mind, we are suffering from the teething troubles of its intellectual evolution. Many a civilizations have vanished in the process.

I have found that after an initial burst of enthusiasm after entering the spiritual life, I have become discouraged by my failures and my lack of real progress. If I may be frank, I feel sometimes like giving up.

Ground Realities
To put it very simplistically, we have yet to learn to co-exist constructively. Those with deprived childhood or the pampered few; both have little chances of turning out to be normal adults. They go on acting out their child-hood fantasies. Our problem, therefore, lies in our child-hood. Nurture is steeped in ignorance (pride and prejudice) while the nature (genetics) is left to chance or stars. We are more careful about breeding animals. Lest we forget the most important ingredient of a meaningful human life, love enables us to experience life deeply. The nature appears to tell us to love and experience life leaving its understanding to the three P's.

Re-capitulation
Life is a merry relay race of gene-machines, governed by material and moral laws, for the evolution of the souls. Its beginning and end are shrouded in eternity. Total human misery is man-made. The shortness of one life ideally ensures millions of other lives each new and unique. One can not find faults in the scheme of nature where matter has a mind of its own – its property to discern other matters under various combinations of pressure and temperature.