How is it that everybody knows that whoever is born in this world is destined to die? Every tree that is seen on the earth must perish one day; every animal that is seen on this earth must perish, every man must die. Everybody knows it.
Those who were the cause of millions of people’s deaths, those greatest warriors, Alexander, Napoleon, Washington, Wellington, all died; all those, through whose hands bloodshed and slaughter were perpetrated to a degree beyond description, also died; and so also died those who brought the dead to life.
Bodies, we know, are perishable; every man knows it, but then nobody believes in it in practice. Intellectually everybody subscribes to the fact that in this world the bodies of each and all must perish, but nobody in practice believes in it.
The oldest man who has passed his three scores and ten, go to him and you will see that he wants to continue spreading his connections; he wants to live in this world for ever and ever; wants to shun death and he never thinks of his death in practical life.
How is it that man cannot bear the idea of death, cannot bear the name of death and at the same time knows that death is certain? Here is an anomaly, a kind of paradox. Explain it. Why should not people have any practical faith in death, although they have intellectual knowledge of it? Vedanta explains it this way:
"In man there is the real Self, which is immortal, there is the real Self which is everlasting, unchanging, the same yesterday, today and for ever; in man there is something which knows no death, which knows no change.
The practical nonbelief in death is due to the existence of this real Self in man, and it is this real, eternal, immortal Self that asserts its existence in the practical nonbelief in death." We come to another curious phenomenon, the phenomenon of the desire to be free. Everybody in this world wants to be free; dogs, lions, tigers, birds, men love freedom.
The thought of freedom is universal; nations shed blood and wet the earth with it, with that red gore of mankind; the fairy face of the earth is made to blush with slaughter, with red blood in the name of freedom. Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, all religions have set up before them one goal. What is that? Salvation, the literal meaning of which is freedom.
If you touch the feathers or the body of the water-fowl which lives in a dirty pond, you will see that it is dry; it is not affected in the least by the dirt or mud of the water. It does not get wet. Similarly, Vedanta says, "In you, O man, there is something which is pure, which is not contaminated by faults, sins and weaknesses of the body; in this world of sinfulness and sloth, it remains pure."
Where is the mistake made? Sinlessness belongs in reality to the real Self, the Atman, but by mistake it is attributed to the body in practice. Whence did this idea of regarding the body and the mind pure, whence did it originate? Who planted it in the hearts of people? Nobody else, nobody; no Satan came to plant it in your hearts; no outside demon came.
It is within you; the cause must be in the phenomenon itself. Those days are past when people sought the causes of phenomena outside themselves. If a man fell down, the fall was attributed to some cause outside the person. Science and philosophy do not allow such explanations. We should seek the explanation in the phenomenon itself.
We know the body to be full of sins, always at fault, and yet we look upon ourselves as sinless. How do they explain this phenomenon? Vedanta says, "Explain it not by resorting to some outside Satan, explain it not by attributing it to outside devils; no, no. The cause is within you. Within you is the Holy of holies.
Within you is the purest of the pure, within you is the sinless One, the Atman which makes its existence felt, which cannot be destroyed, cannot be dispensed with, cannot be done away with. It is there; however faulty, however sinful the body may be, the real Self, the sinlessness of the real Self must be there; it must make itself felt; it is there, it cannot be destroyed."
We see in this world another very strange phenomenon. Everybody in this world from the point of view of his little self is a sinner. Everybody is somehow or other responsible for some defect or some deficiency or the other and yet nobody in his heart of hearts thinks that he is a sinner.
Nobody on the face of the earth-in the wide world-not a single individual believes in his sinful nature.
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