Vivekananda Mailing List-9/21/02

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We are always struggling to raise ourselves up to that ideal. Every

human being, whosoever and wheresoever he may be, has an ideal of

infinite power. Every human being has an ideal of infinite pleasure.

Most of the works that we find around us, the activities displayed

everywhere, are due to the struggle for this infinite power or this

infinite pleasure. But a few quickly discover that although they are

struggling for infinite power, it is not through the senses that it

can be reached. They find out very soon that that infinite pleasure

is not to be got through the senses, or, in other words, the senses

are too limited, and the body is too limited, to express the

Infinite. To manifest the Infinite through the finite is impossible,

and sooner or later, man learns to give up the attempt to express the

Infinite through the finite. This giving up, this renunciation of the

attempt, is the background of ethics. Renunciation is the very basis

upon which ethics stands. There never was an ethical code preached

which had not renunciation for its basis.