Self Effort to Elevate Yourself

Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha

(Delivered by Poojya Swamiji on 27 January 2016)

Volume 6  Number 11

Excerpt:

Questions are asked, “I want to improve, but I am not able to improve. I don’t want to get angry but I get angry. I don’t want to be this, I don’t want to be that but I am becoming like that.” See, everybody has a nature. We are not controlled, we are all born and each parent can only give rise to a child born of him. So the child will have some inherited tendencies. Just like you have a certain physical body with shape and features, you will also have an inner personality; mind intelligence and ego, with its characteristics, features, tendencies etc. So never say that “I am not what I want.” Nobody is perhaps what he or she wants. We are what we are.

Now the question is – Human life is meant for examining one’s own personality, find out what are the traits unacceptable or undesirable and then eliminate them, try to know about the acceptable and desirable ones and incorporate them. This is the only spiritual exercise everyone is supposed to and can possibly do. Will you understand it basically? We are all born with our own constrictions. These constrictions have to be identified properly and then by self-effort you have to remove them.

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