Been seeing more and more of these “Pray For America” signs popping up on lawns here in the Southland. Must be a lot of folks around here are worried about our nation and the condition she is in. In fact, I’m worried about our whole world. In one corner of the globe there are wars, in another corner, starvation, in another, rampant crime, in yet another, economic crises. If things get much worse, Lord Shiva- the Destroyer – will be ready to shut this place down.
Actually, the world wasn’t much better off more than fifty years ago when Swami Chinmayananda began giving discourses on the Bhagavad Gita in India to anyone who would listen. That great saint eventually turned his commentary on the Gita into a book, The Holy Gita. His comments on the “demonically fallen” in Chapter 16 of the Gita apply to many of our world leaders today who are blatant materialists. Materialism with its vast ocean of desires isn’t limited to one particular economic or political system. Liberal or conservative, republican or democrat, communist or libertarian, dictator or monarchist, any leader anywhere can be a staunch materialist.
Swami Chinmayananda writes: “Full of hypocrisy, pride (conceit) and arrogance – Desire is but an expression of the ego when the seeker seeks a permanent satisfaction and infinite fulfillment through sense enjoyments. When he is thus deluded in the misconception of his ego-vanity, negative tendencies such as hypocrisy, pride and arrogance will naturally rise up, and smothered by them he ceaselessly strives to satisfy the unending demands of his own unbridled desires…
“They work with impure resolve – The mental biography of the diabolically fallen is complete in its sequence when the ego desperately struggling to gain inner peace, must necessarily forsake all consideration for others, ignore all noble values of life, and enter into the fields of activity shamelessly intolerant, inconsiderate and even brutal…
“The picture viewed microcosmically, shows a materialist building his life upon the restless waves of his desire-tossed mind. The same word-painting, when looked at macrocosmically portrays vividly the ugliness of materialistic communities and nations…
“Satisfaction of lust as the highest – Consistent effort either in the field of the good or in the field of the vicious put forth without a philosophy of life that sustains the continuity of an individual’s activities, is a haphazard endeavour, ignoble and futile..
“The philosophy of life that is accepted by the diabolically fallen is invariably the same wherever they are…To them, satisfaction of their lusty nature is their goal of life, and there is nothing beyond it…
“Entangled by hundreds of desires his mental and intellectual energies get dissipated. Such an individual becomes restless and impatient with things that happen around him and soon loses his balance of mind – his sense of judgement. Irritated and constantly unhappy with himself and his environments, such a man is seen in life given to yearnings and anger. Wherever desire is throttled, anger is natural. Since he is devoted to desires, he pursues sense-fulfilments and since in the world of competition, desire-fulfilments often get throttled, his lusty urges get transformed into wild and passionate anger.
“They do strive, no doubt, tirelessly and diligently to satisfy their ever-increasing urges. To secure their quota of sensual enjoyments they must necessarily acquire and procure objects of sense-satisfaction from the world without. They are not seeking happiness as such or peace as such; theirs is the anxiety to quench a nameless thirst which they are constantly feeling; a strange hunger they are chronically suffering from. They have not the mental equipoise to investigate into their urges and analyse and judge them properly. Madly they strive on to acquire and possess and in their desperate anxiety to indulge and to enjoy, they lose sight of the divine principles of existence and the noble dictates of their conscience. They do strive, day and night to satisfy their inexhaustible passion with wealth acquired and hoarded by all known unjust means…
“The most successful man in a competitive world is the one who lives in constant consciousness of what he has already acquired and remembers and sweats for his day-to-day ambitions to acquire and possess more and more of the wealth of the world. And the laughable paradox in the philosophy of possession is that the more one has, the more one craves…
“The game of desires is an endless gamble…Each time a man strives to acquire something, his desire is to feel his full share of satisfaction. But, invariably, his experience is that he is not fully satisfied, and in his disappointment, he thirsts for more and more possessions…
“Deluded by misconceptions of himself such a man of sickly, bloated conceit looks at the world through a mind distorted by vanity and wrongly judges the world and his own relationship with it. He feels happy and congratulates himself on his high birth and breed, on his belongings and wealth, and fails to find anyone equal to him. Self-exiled from society he lives in a false castle of vanity, suffering innumerable psychological privations. He gloats that he will, by his ritualism, even order the gods to serve him – that he shall with his gifts, purchase the whole world…
“Bewildered by many a fancy – When an egocentric individual, who has thus sold himself to sense-indulgence, spends his time seeking gratification from the world of objects, his mind becomes ever unsteady. The mind of an indulgent sensualist soon learns to empty its powers of concentration and exhausts itself in its own hallucinations, fancies and imaginations.
“Entangled in the snare of delusion – If the individual’s intellect is clouded, his mind gets agitated and his sense organs, which are the vehicles through which the mind-intellect has to express itself, certainly behave erratically. When a driver is drunk the car cannot move properly. Naturally, therefore, such an individual becomes a victim of lust and sens-gratifications…
“A subjectively shattered personality cannot find peace or fulfilment in any situation. Even if the environments are conducive, he discovers, in himself, methods of unsettling them by his own inner sufferings…
“When a man of the ‘diabolically fallen’ type reaches any field of activity, in spite of his vociferous claims of selfless service, he is incapable of it because of the very nature of his personality and character…Unconsciously, their actions will be poisoned by their vanity, coloured by their sensuality, distorted by their arrogance, and generally polluted by their false philosophy…
“Unethical values and immoral intentions choke the great melody of life and reduce it to a discordant purposeless noise, shattering peace and contentment within one’s own and in another’s bosom…They are malicious and cruel – malicious against the dignity of themselves and cruel to the living beings around (them).”
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