Burst Thirty Nine (For Youth):
Love Of Truth
False values cover the face of truth. Right from childhood, we come under the influence of some fancy or the other, which hold sway over all our activities. Teenage fancies leave us when we enter our twenties, but other rosy ideas take their place. Adi Shankara laments in his famous work Bhaja Govindam, “Games and sports catch our fancy during childhood; the opposite sex occupies our mind when we are youthful; all kinds of worries disturb us as we get old; alas, when shall we turn to Truth?”
We are with truth when we perceive situations without selfishness. When the light of our perception is marred by the shadows of our self and its designs, we are out of contact with truth. Is there a way of life where we see things as they are, without the interference of pressing thoughts about how they should be? Preconceived ideas of how things should be, how people should behave or how institutions should run can come in the way of right perception.
The main problem is selfishness, which enters into the picture very quietly without our noticing it many times. We are attached to ‘our’ ideas and fondly believe that those ideas alone are the right ones. We may not be open for considering other possibilities. While we think we are pursuing what is right, the fact may be that we are fighting for the cause of the self.
Popular religions have declared that devotion to God washes away all selfishness. Shri Shankara declares in his Shivananda-lahari, “Hail these devotional verses which are like a river that washes away the dirt of all impurities in the readers and leads them to a state of utter cessation of all worldly suffering.” (Verse 2) Saints indeed have all along set examples of selfless living and, while the external marks of their religions were different, they lived in love of truth. People who came in close touch with them felt a great difference about their conduct. There was no trace of self-centeredness in them.
Abandoning self-centeredness is certainly the hallmark of love of truth and living with truth.
Shivananda-lahari is a poem of one hundred verses by Adi Shankaracharya in praise of and devotion to Lord Shiva.
Swami Chidananda
Monday, August 15, 2005