Life 49 (Nov 25 - Dec 27)

[winston]

What are the special gifts each human life is endowed with and what is the consummation these must be used for?

Most men spend the lifetime allotted to them or earned by them in the partaking of rich but harmful food and drink and indulge in glamorous but more harmful pastimes. What a pathetic waste of precious stuff!

Though belonging to the animal genus, man has much more than his fellow beings in physical, mental and moral equipment.

He has memory, language, conscience, reverence, awe, wonder and an inexplicable sense of discontent, the precursor of detachment.

He has the glorious chance of visualising his identity with the Mystery that is manifested as this universe. But he is so sunk in ignorance, that he behaves as though he is an animal like the rest and wallows in grief and vice.

It is as if fire has forgotten its capacity to burn or water its nature to wet; man has forgotten his nature to reach out into Divinehood, his capacity to seek and secure the truth of the universe of which he is a part, his capacity to train himself by virtue, justice, love and sympathy to escape from the particular to the universal.

Man can indeed attain the consummation and climax of merging with the unchanging that is behind all this change.

- Divine Discourse, Jul 02, 1966

Uncontrolled living habits, unrestrained social behaviour — these are extolled as signs of freedom. It is only freedom to slide into the animal from which man has risen.

Source: radiosai.org