Knowing one’s true nature is bliss

‘You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself,’ said Swami Vivekananda, one of India’s greatest spiritual leaders.

In order to believe in ‘yourself,’ one must first understand the Self – the real You.  Most understand that ‘You’ is one’s own body-mind complex.  Don’t we know that this mortal body is a creation which took birth one day and will perish one day?  Don’t we know that this mind goes through various emotional states and changes course many times in a day?

Common sense guides us that in order to know and measure something that changes constantly we need to have a non-changing constant.  During our childhood we have experienced wonderful train journeys, where two trains moving in the same direction gives one the feeling of being static.  While a person sitting in a stationary coach gets this strange feeling of fast movement when a moving train speeds in a neighbouring track.

Everything is seen in a relative sense in this world.  Then where is the absolute?  What is that constant, that one unchanging thing against which everything comes to be becomes known, and gets measured?  Is there a constant at all in the first place? If there is one, is it outside in a faraway world unseen or is it inside, within oneself, unseen?

The answer is not known as it is not available in the pages of books and encyclopaedia. It is not known through rote learning or through native intelligence. But this same intelligence helps to decipher the true nature of the unreal from the real, so that the former can be excluded in order to retain and experience the latter.

The Sanskrit word Svatma essentially means one’s own self or real nature, realising that status can help one achieve emancipation from the samsara, a cycle (or is it recycle) of birth and death.  If one is carried away with the beauty of the changing world, then the world appears a better place in which one rejoices.  But if one is pursuing greater happiness due to (dire) circumstances in the changing world and inquires to evaluate workarounds and the nature of the unchanging, then the vichara marga, the Inquiry Path, reveals to the one to seek the ultimate goal.

Our scriptures lead us in the right path to realise that our own true nature is indeed bliss.