Vivekananda Mailing List-12/9/03

[Guest guest]

The highest direction is that which takes us to God; every other

direction is lower. We find that pleasures and pains are very common

and oft-recurring feelings in our lives. When a man feels pain because

he has not wealth or some such worldly thing, he is giving a wrong

direction to the feeling. Still pain has its uses. Let a man feel pain

that he has not reached the Highest, that he has not reached God, and

that pain will be to his salvation When you become glad that you have a

handful of coins, it is a wrong direction given to the faculty of joy;

it should be given a higher direction, it must be made to serve the

Highest Ideal. Pleasure in that kind of ideal must surely be our

highest joy. This same thing is true of all our other feelings. The

Bhakta says that not one of them is wrong, he gets hold of them all and

points them unfailingly towards God.