The more you exert yourself, the more you take the pain in life, the more will be the output in terms of tangible results. There will be a lot of constraints, opposite forces which will jeopardize your efforts and barriers. At times all these negative forces will make you flustered and you will under frustration withdraw from the jigsaw puzzles of the life. Maximum people do so and get defeated in the race of life. They fail to kindle the flame of the life to the fullest extent. Precisely that is the reason, many of us lead lives as if it is a burden. The same routine, tedious work, family responsibilities, conflict of opinions, criticisms, are the part and parcel of everybody’s lives. Our precious lives which are the blessings of God, no one knows when will be finished. If you decide to live with a purpose, use your intellect and then carry out all that things you need to do, your life will be like an asset which you can enjoy fully. But sad enough, most of us do not use our intellect, and so the whole lives revolve around murmuring conflicts and grumbling. When you live to seek enjoyment without using the power of intellect, Vedanta terms this sequence as ‘Sukha Prapti.’ Such types of persons are not able to conceive anything of vital importance. They are busy only in the acquisition and to ensure their material comforts. One should not mislead that acquisition and enjoyment are the wrong things. Life will be dull with unhappiness and grievances if you are not in a position to acquire material things and enjoy the usefulness of the same. This world is full of grandeur, and your mind will be wallowing in the absence of various comforts. Acquiring things are a mandatory requirement for your existence. We will be treated as fools if we don’t know the use of modern gadgets and have no inclination to learn also. The acquisition and enjoyment are the part of our lives. But the problem lies in the thinking how to lead a meaningful life. We often behave that the purchase and consumption are the whole purposes of life. For example, after a meal, we relish dessert or sweet dish. It is a common phenomenon for any person except the one who has some health problem. But what would happen if we substitute the meal with fruits on a daily basis? We will be just fed up. We will lose nutrition value. Similarly, eating sweets after the meal on a regular basis will not be enjoyable, but also will create distasteful and even harmful.
People murmur that they are simply fed up and tired of their lives due to work, parties, clothes, and holiday. Then the desire of acquiring any more will not bring enjoyment. The real happiness eludes them. So, the attitude of more and more acquisition and to enjoy the same will ruin the character of the persons in the long term. The more they will acquire, the more they will like to enjoy and ultimately, it will harm the progress of life. The philosophical aspect of life has proven this fact that once you habit of yours becomes chronic, you will downgrade your intellect and with less understanding, you will feel your life as a dry and infertile land although you have many material comforts, physical possessions, and other luxuries.
It is important to possess goods and wealth, but it is advisable to assess what you do with that acquisition. An acquisition is not a permanent state of affairs, but one’s character is an asset. If you run behind acquisition for the sake of your benefits plundering the wealth and necessities of others, that is greed, and awesome. This obsessive desire ultimately leads you to perdition, destroys your peace and mind’s balancing power. You will not be in a position to use your intellect for advancement in life from all angles professionally, socially and spiritually. Further, the possession snatches your sleep at night, but a good character and its value keep you in bliss. The character has an intellect. Intellect is the power of discrimination. Every human being has this trait to some varying degrees. If you try, you can develop and utilize this factor in every facet of life. While using intellect, you increase the power of understanding so as to identify the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, integrity and dishonesty, love and hate and appropriate and inappropriate. We use this power of discrimination, and utilize our intellect to guide our minds. The mind is restless almost like a child, resides in us and dictates us all the time to do this or do that or to procrastinate or pass the time idly under some excuses. Mind always wants instant gratification. As a child, we all resort to said types of activities. When a child does not get anything he desires, he starts crying, yelling, throwing anything he finds nearby and showing anger, and in the same way, our minds provoke us to perform various activities whether the same is productive or not. It is the role of intellect to discriminate and to analyze the reason behind the performance of a particular activity and finally choose actions with enough judgment. The mind tends to get one dimensional. If it gets something accomplished by you, it wants more ignoring all else. It is the biggest catch in mind and we fail to use our intellect
We bypass all other good deeds and become enthusiastic to get engaged in more acquisition for the purpose of enjoyment. But there is a lot more to life. And in that ‘more’ only, the true happiness lies. If you increase your visionary power even a bit, you will be able to observe many more things. These things will not only bring more happiness but also make you refrain from a desire for more acquisition. Human life is designed to get the higher vision. To observe all other people as your entity apart from your family members, friends, and close relatives, you have to have noble thoughts, good character, and affable quality to lead life. You must inculcate the habit to think that the whole world is your family. Even an animal survives by the route of acquisition and enjoyment. We human beings are also like that. But people must go beyond this activity. To bring much more satisfaction, you have to grow your spiritual thoughts with mindfulness. To avoid the instinct for more material comforts, which causes lives to suffer from despondency, despair, irritation, and anxieties, you must focus on the part of ideal living. Then you need not ponder why I am not successful? Why am I not healthy? Why am I not being recognized in society? All these prove that you are living, but treating your life not as an asset, but a liability. You are living without any purpose, and you are not able to extract the maximum out of your life
