Fragrance of Right Living - Swami Chidananda

I wish to begin with the saying of the great movie maker of yesteryears, Cecil B Demille, who said, ‘You can never break the laws of life, you can only break yourself against the law of life.’ I may as well say that it is a perfect echo of a well-known statement of Manu Smriti: Dharmo rakshati rakshitah, dharmo hanti hatah, if we protect dharma it protects us, if we violate dharma it destroys us. Just as in science or technology there are certain laws (e.g. in Physics there is a law governing the movement of objects), there are also laws governing human happiness, human virtue, human flowering of the personality. Adhyatma vidya or spiritual science is an attempt at discovering these laws, so that we can enjoy true fulfilment in our lives.

Let us look at ourselves

Everyday we face many situations and we have to make many choices. Today, as we have moved into the 21st Century, the new millennium, we find that the whole globe has shrunk, thanks to the amazing developments in communication technology, and we face unique and new challenges. On the one hand we have access to more knowledge than ever before and, on the other hand many new forms of stress have come about. Everyone today looks at what the neighbor has got and wishes to have it too. The dividing line between necessity and luxury has become very vague. Pujya Swami Chinmayanandaji remarked many years ago that the tragedy of today’s society is ‘decreasing happiness amidst increasing comforts.’ He added, ‘The rich are comfortably unhappy, the poor are uncomfortably unhappy.’ Our attempt here is to discover happiness, who cares about comforts without happiness? But in pursuit of happiness we have complicated our lives. Therefore it is time again for everyone of us, every thinking individual, to look deeply into our hearts to take a fresh look at the way we are living, and find out where we have gone wrong, where we can improve the quality of our living.

© `Tapovan Prasad’ (January 2002) published by Chinmaya Mission, No.2, 13th Avenue, Harrington road, Chetput, Chennai 600 031. Reprinted with permission.

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