98. Choicelessness is the key🔗

Just yesterday, during a press meet a journalist asked me, 'Swamiji, when I see your discourses, when I read your books, you make the whole thing so simple, so straight, that I feel enlightenment is here and now. Then why are people not getting enlightened?'

It is a very significant question.

Understand: millions of people are dedicating their lives to spirituality. In India, we have ten million people who have dedicated their lives only to practicing and spreading spirituality. You will be shocked! Our population is only 120 crores, just 1.2 billion, but one crore or ten million people, almost one percent of the population, has dedicated its life to practicing and spreading spirituality. We have registered fulltime sannyasis, sadhus and acharyas, monks, saints, Brahmin priests and preachers who have dedicated their lives to this. And this is only the known number. A very large population of the Himalayan yogis and sadhus who live in the forests and mountain of India are still unknown; they have not been registered anywhere.

The question is right, why then are people not becoming enlightened?

The misunderstanding of this one word has changed the whole direction of the energy. I have seen how inspired people are when they take up sannyas life. I have seen so many youngsters who are highly intelligent, educated; when they study about brahmacharya, sannyas and all the truth of enlightenment, they are simply inspired, thoroughly inspired. They take up this life and start living it.

But suddenly, somehow, the direction gets changed due to some misunderstanding or lack of understanding or unawareness. The goal slowly turns away from becoming enlightened to becoming unattached.

Please understand, this word vairagya needs to be understood. All the problems you go through in the outer world – fear, greed, the constant irritation, the constant suffering, the internal torture - is just because you do not understand this word. In the same way, all the problems which these so-called 'spiritual seekers' go through are also because this word is not properly understood! I have seen these people; they take up sanyas life for the sake of enlightenment. But by and by, they forget that enlightenment is the goal and put all their energies only into vairagya, or I can say, their misunderstood

idea of vairagya. They spend their whole life in detachment, detachment, detachment, instead of understanding the right meaning of vairagya. They start using this idea to postpone even enlightenment.

Please understand, 'raga' means attachment, 'araga' means detachment and 'viraga' means, beyond attachment or detachment. But unfortunately, 'viraga' or 'vairagya' is always understood as a detachment. The moment people hear the word detachment, they say, 'Oh! Then we should throw away all our wealth.' Please understand, just like how choosing wealth is wrong, when you give up the wealth you are choosing poverty, which is also wrong. Vairagya means choicelessness; being in the choiceless state. We always miss this understanding.

Vairagya is the conscious withdrawal from the objects of the senses, of the body, mind and spirit.