The Fetters That Bind You

By His Divinity Shri Paramahamsa Omkarananda Saraswati

Immured in ignorance man mistakes the wrong for the right, the unreal for the real; he harbours belief in changing perishable mind-made objects. Leaving the Reality of Bliss, he clings to the false nightmare of misery, for his faculty of understanding and discrimination, without which he does not become better than an inhabitant of the bestial kingdom, is obscured by the sordid self, saturated with selfish desires. This submission of man to the dark impulses of attraction for the sense-objects of the world has fettered him. Nothing has really bound man save his attention to and attraction for the dance of phenomena.

Man's will to live and to reproduce has ensnared him in the phantasmal play of life. He has sown the terrible seeds of craving for lurid unrealities which appear to appease the passionate hunger and thirst of the soul for the Plenum of Truth by the bread of vanity and delusive pleasures arising from contact with finite objects.

Man's chase after the unreal things of momentary sense-pleasure of this transitory world, clutters his life and distracts the soul in its journey towards the infinite Spirit of Light, the Centre of Power and Wisdom. His plannings and schemings, fruitless speculations and cherished hopes in life, worldly ambitions and anticipations, have landed him in the kingdom of suffering. The self-centred life of limitations is the cause for all terror and forlornness, poverty and gloom, and all other woes.

The Supreme Self is the Infinite Spirit, the Absolute Being. This Self is called God, Brahman and by various other names. The Jiva or the lower self, the individualised personality, the localised being, which man in ignorance is, is the hub with its strong supporting spokes of pride, vanity, delusion, foolish imagination, petty interests, sense-indulgences and similar other diverse evils, and these together throw him into a perpetual rotation of mundane existence. If you cling to this mean self, you will paint everything with the dark colour of error and build a purgatory for yourself.

As long as you are blinded by the dreams of the lower self, the inward vision of Truth is withheld from you, the treasure of divine life is hidden from your sight. So long as you are a victim to the nightmare of the hopeless vision of this self, you will certainly suffer from the acute pains, the inevitable difficulties, the destructive desires and the terrific blows of its lusts and passions, and roll up and down on the wheel of recuring births and deaths.