Nachiketa--Part-4

Nachiketa

Part- 4 Feb—12-2011 Saturday
“Those who are dwelling in the darkness of ignorance and are deluded by wealth and possessions are like children playing with toys,” says Yama to Nachiketa. “Such foolish children are caught in the snares of death and come again and again under my sway. They remain in the snares of death. They cannot get beyond the limits of the dark realm. They travel back and forth.”
Fortunately, this condition is not permanent. Eventually a time comes when the desire for all of those objects—what the nineteenth century Bengali saint Ramakrishna Paramahamsa repeatedly referred to as lust and greed—begins to appear as empty and pointless.
Growth and expansion are the nature of the soul, so inevitably what happens is: a person comes to recognize the pattern that behind every pleasure is pain, behind every expectation is disappointment, and following every fulfilled desire is yet another desire. For all the world’s charms, the bottom line and the sum of it all adds up to an inordinate amount of suffering, loneliness, and emptiness.
That arithmetic is instructive. The bottom line awakens the human soul. Suffering teaches and trains a person in the necessary art of discrimination. --------------------------------------------